Text: Wang Xinhua
The old site of the hometown. Hometown, an eternal topic.
Where is my hometown? I often ask myself this. Sometimes, I feel like a small duckweed, drifting with the wind and water, and there is no place to take root, because I don't have a hometown.
My ancestral home is Huangkou Town, Xiao County, Anhui Province, a small station on the Longhai Railway, located at the junction of Anhui, Henan, Lusu and Suzhou provinces.
But it was the hometown of my parents and their grandparents, and I only went back once when I was four years old with my parents to give my grandmother's funeral, and now my memory is very vague.
My father was transferred from the Zaozhuang Coal Mine in Shandong Province to Ningxia in 1958. That winter, my parents left their hometown and took my grandfather and a few of my older siblings to Ningxia by train.
According to them, Ningxia at that time was simply not a good place, it was too desolate. They didn't even have housing, so they built their own "kilns," that is, they first dug a one-meter-deep pit in the ground, and then built a one-meter-high wall with adobe around the pit, and casually covered it with some wheat straw.
Ningxia is arid, and the kiln is not afraid of moisture, but the wind and sand are too big, and often a bowl of rice has not moved the chopsticks before a layer of sand falls.
At that time, no one was willing to support the construction of the frontier in such an environment, and many villagers returned to their hometowns when they saw this.
As a result, the workers were adopted by the unit as a kind of paramilitary management, working intensively during the day and locking themselves in dormitories at night (after about a short period of living in the kiln, new dormitories were built) to prevent the workers from escaping. A month or two after my grandfather came to Ningxia, he died of cold because he went out to drink.
I don't know what kind of motivation my parents relied on to take root in Ningxia and gave birth to four more children one after another. One of the girls, because the medical conditions were too poor, just a cold could not be effectively treated and died, the mother and the third sister said that she was "able to laugh out loud" at that time, it should be a few months old, and her parents also gave her a name: beautiful.
By the time I was born, the conditions in the mines were already good, they had begun to take shape, and the changes since then have not been very great, when railways and roads have been built on the land, many houses have been built, the population has increased to nearly 100,000, and the 1234 mines are all in full swing producing coal.
Trains come and go carrying mountains of coal, and as far as the eye can see, there are long mountains on the northern side of Helan Mountain, on which only sparse grass grows, and there are basically no trees, but many grasshoppers can be caught in the summer to feed the chickens. I grew up in such an environment.
Due to the continuous improvement of housing conditions, my family has moved four times since I was born. I don't remember what the house I was born in, but when I was about two or three years old, my family moved to a second house, and we called it the "big house" because it was much larger than the average house, it was a garage remodel, and the whole house was made of blocks of stone, and it was very strong.
When I was in Tangshan**, it only shook and loosened one of the partition walls of the big house, and my brother and sister and I always carefully pushed the shaky but not collapsed wall to play.
* After the wave, everyone had already run outside, and at this time, a stupid neighbor ran out and knocked on the basin and shouted: **It's over, **! It was a joke for a while.
The linoleum shockproof shelter built for ** protection is more attractive than the room, and I really enjoyed living there.
My grandmother also came to Ningxia to take me with me during this period. Now my old mother looks a lot like the grandma I remember, but my grandma seems to be thinner.
Grandma loves me very much, and she carries me on her back all day long. Every day on time, I bought a five-cent popsicle in the morning and afternoon.
Later, my grandmother started to buy me only a popsicle, and quietly saved the remaining five cents and exchanged them for a wool ticket and sewed it in a cotton coat. After my sister and a neighbor's daughter-in-law discovered this secret, they deliberately touched my grandmother's cotton clothes, and my grandmother was very nervous to cover the place where the money was sewn.
When my father found out, he told my mother that my grandmother was old. Sure enough, it didn't take long for grandma's brain to start getting confused, and she couldn't stand up once she squatted down in the toilet. After communicating with the two uncles in my hometown, my parents sent my grandmother back to Anhui, and she seemed to be very nostalgic for Ningxia when she left, and maybe she was nostalgic for me. Not long after I went back, my grandmother died.
We only lived in the big house for three or four years, but there are so many memories of my childhood. My eldest nephew, who was one year older than me, played golden hook fishing (a simple poker game) on the big box on the kang head in the afternoon, set off firecrackers with my fourth brother during the Chinese New Year, threw the firecrackers into the bucket and blew the bucket full of holes because I was afraid, and the laughter of the eldest sister's family when the Chinese New Year arrived, all of which were deeply engraved in my childhood memories.
Later, because the unit was going to be renovated and a new house was built, the big house was demolished, and my family was forced to move, and that home was two simple houses that my father and second brother quickly built, which did not leave me with too many deep memories.
I only remember that there was a small round hole formed by a boil falling off the door panel, and I found that people were moving outside the door during the day, and through the small hole, a small image could be formed on the ground in the house, so I often invited children to enjoy it together, and everyone took turns to perform outside, and others squatted in the house to watch.
Only lived in this transitional house for about a year. The energetic father used his spare time to build three new houses and a large yard of more than 200 square meters, of course, the credit of the second brother who was a bricklayer was indispensable, although he was not very skilled.
When I moved into my new home, I was so excited that I didn't know which room to sleep in. Since then, my fourth brother, who is five years older than me, has shared our own room. A month or two later, I went to school. This home is the longest we have lived in, from 1978 to the winter of 206, nearly 30 years.
My school career has been based on this home, and when we say "home", we basically refer to it. Later, when I came home from Guangdong, I always went back to this place.
My father, who was in his 60s at the time, built it on a piece of land carved out of the hill, and in the 30 years since, my very strong parents have continued to lead us in a large number of infrastructure projects, three halls have been renovated, and five rooms of various sizes have been built one after another, including three westinghouses, which have been used as new houses for the third and fourth brothers and me.
My wife and I spent a few months of our newlywed there, and then we left for Guangdong.
My father, who was in his 80s at the time, and my eldest brother, who was in his 60s, loved to come to our room to play mahjong, and the wall of fire released the heat of the burning coals, and we often wore only a shirt to play mahjong in the cold winter.
It was in this family that I grew up** and my parents grew old. During this period, my family was broken up from one large family to one small family, and my parents married daughters-in-law for four sons and two daughters in this family.
My parents used this family as a base and opened a restaurant for five years, which became a wealthy family at that time.
In this family, my family was blackmailed and lost by the judicial officers who ate the plaintiff and the defendant because of a real estate lawsuit with my uncle. In this home, I have received my good friends, stayed up all night around the fire on Chinese New Year's Eve, and played Go together.
My daughter was conceived in Guangdong, but she was also born in this family, she has an unusual love for Ningxia, in her eyes everything in Ningxia is better than Guangdong, I often laugh at her and say: Even the moon in Ningxia is rounder than Guangdong, isn't it?
In the early winter of 2oo6, my parents, who had no one to take care of them, were forced to move to live with my little sister. The whole family was sold to someone else for 1,500 yuan, because in recent years people from the coal mines have been moving to the urban areas of the plains, and there are fewer and fewer people in the mountains (as we call the mining area), and the houses are no longer worth anything, and two or three out of ten households are empty houses that no one lives in.
Eight large and small houses, a large wall made of more than a dozen automobile stones, changed hands for 1,500 yuan. Last year, when I returned to Ningxia, at my young lady's house, my mother talked about the scene when she moved, and her tone was full of sadness and regret, she lamented that so many good house beams and stones were bought and dismantled and sold for money.
But I think she may be more lamented that the huge family home she and her father had built has disappeared. Less than a year after the move, my father died. My mother always complained that she shouldn't move.
Later, I searched for my home through Google Earth and saw a blurry pile of ruins on the screen - the home I had lived in for more than 20 years had really been demolished! This year, when I returned to Ningxia, I really wanted to see it, but I didn't have the courage to face the ruins.
Guangdong is not my hometown, I am a new Hakka. Despite my constant efforts, I always felt like a hard stone that could not be dissolved in the water of the Pearl River, which at best could grind me smoother.
Ningxia's home is gone, we have been living in my sister's house for the past two years, I never feel that it is my home, only a feeling of visiting relatives.
The year before last, she went back to Shangqiu, Henan with his wife, which was her hometown that she had not returned to for 20 years. Later, she said that as soon as the car drove onto the land, a strange feeling was rushing in her heart. She said that she understood very well the son born to the sister of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty who married the Xiongnu in the TV series "Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty", and when he invaded the Central Plains with the Xiongnu army, he inexplicably felt like his hometown.
Is Anhui's hometown my hometown? I often ask myself this question. I used to have no affection for that land, and even hated it for a while, because almost none of the relatives who came out of that land to join my family were my favorite.
However, a few days ago, I suddenly said to my mother: I will drive you back to your hometown next year!
Written on 2008-09-02
About author:Wang Xinhua, born in the 70s in Shitanjing, graduated from Bureau No. 2 Middle School in 90, and taught in Bureau No. 1 Middle School for a short time after graduating from university, and now works in Dongguan City, Guangdong Province.