Qing Ming's essays on returning to China

As long as I can remember, in my hometown-Shaoyang County, there is a established tradition that all children, no matter where they are, Tomb-Sweeping Day will go back to their hometown to pay homage to their ancestors. Tomb-Sweeping Day is a solemn and sacred day in the eyes of fellow villagers at home, which is more lively than Chinese New Year.

In the early 1990s, hometown people immigrated to big cities with the spring breeze, and worked hard, established themselves and settled down. Relatives left their homes and came to Zhuzhou to engage in clothing business, and the whole family immigrated. Zhuzhou became our second hometown. For more than 20 years, my father and brother went back to hang up every year, and I went back only a handful of times. Sometimes I always feel that part of my life is still in my hometown. With the growth of age, this feeling is more intense, like a rural song that presses the cycle key and sings endlessly in my heart.

This year, I took care of things around me early and planned to go back to my hometown with the "army".

At six o'clock in the morning, we ran to our long-lost hometown, with a large family and four cars. There are many cars on the expressway, and it is even more congested when you get off the expressway. A car stopped for several miles. It took more than five hours to drive for three hours.

My hometown is Wufengpu, which is a thousand-year-old town. It is located at the intersection of Shaoyang, Hengyang and Yongzhou Economic Corridor. It was once called "little shanghai". Wufengpu is known as "the hometown of blue calico". Blue calico was once sold to the whole country, and now it has been listed as a national intangible cultural heritage. My hometown belongs to hilly areas, with red soil hills, and a mild monsoon climate in the middle subtropical zone. There are often continuous rainy days and heavy rains. After the rain, the low-lying areas were filled with red water, so my hometown became a "red mountain" written by literati.

With the wheel of the times, the way home becomes convenient and strange.

Our village is one kilometer away from Wufengpu Street, called Qilitian. As the name implies, it is named after a large paddy field. When I was a child, I stood in front of my house and looked at the fields as far as the eye could see. Now, from the mouth of the town, I see rows of modern buildings standing on the paddy field, spreading out neatly, and a new street is formed, which will soon reach my door.

A group of people first came to the cemetery. I saw that the mountains were overgrown with weeds and thorns, and there was no room for waste. The men raised their hoes to dig and weed. Father placed three kinds of sacrifices and rice wine in front of the tomb, lit incense and paper money, and inserted paper flowers in front of the tomb. We knelt down in turn to worship and lit firecrackers after the ceremony.

The camellia trees on the mountain are shining with green light, and I was pleasantly surprised to find Abel, the camellia oleifera. , childhood delicious. I took it off and put it in my mouth, and it was still astringent, like the taste of childhood. Every time before and after Tomb-Sweeping Day, the children in our village, like birds, climb the tea mountain, climb the hill, open their eyes, climb the branches to look for it, and pick Abel, the camellia oleifera. And stuffed it directly into the entrance. Camellia oleifera I have fond memories of my childhood. I chose a piece for my nephew to eat. He chewed it, frowned and spit it out in a hurry.

Our yard is called Songshushan, and there are dozens of families. A road divides the yard in two, and my home is under the road. The houses under the road are all old houses built in the 1970s and 1980s, with red bricks and black tiles, closed doors and windows all the year round, and tottering. Mottled walls, broken eaves, old windows and old houses are incongruous in this era. Several mud embryo houses have completely collapsed, recording the length of time like ruins. Its final mission is to wait for the master's return, Tomb-Sweeping Day. Needless to say, the owner of the mud embryo house has already set up a mansion in the bustling city. This pile of yellow mud is just a sustenance, a sign of identity, and a stagnation point of a root.

I stood in front of my house, looking at all the familiar and unfamiliar things, and I said to myself, I'm back! I have thrown myself into the arms of my hometown, and my heart is full of uneasy joy. The yard is really quiet. There was no human voice, no barking of chickens and dogs, only firecrackers were heard from the hillside not far away. At noon, I remember when I was a child, when the pots and pans rang and the smoke was misty, I couldn't smell the fireworks, and the air was filled with the smell of grass and earth. In retrospect, as long as it didn't rain, people of all ages would sit on the stone road in front of my house with rice bowls, and everyone could eat several different flavors in each other's bowls.

My house was built in 1986, with three red brick houses and two floors. It was the best house in the yard at that time. Father paved the front and back of the house with cement, and built a square pool of bricks in Qianping to raise fish. Several concrete columns were built next to the kitchen and a grape trellis was set up. Grapes are soft when they are ripe, and will not turn purple. They are very sweet. When we were children, we waited under the shelf for the grapes to ripen like snails. During the summer vacation, we stand on tiptoe to catch grapes from time to time.

The stairs outside are covered with moss and weeds, and the first half of the second floor is an open platform for drying crops such as rice and beans. My father works outside all the year round. During the double robbing season, my mother took me to the fields to get food. My mother picked up the finished meal with the laundry list, stopped under the stairs for a while, and then went upstairs to pick it up. The stairs are steep, more than 60 degrees. Mother put a towel on her shoulder and kept wiping the sweat dripping into her eyes. She gritted her teeth, her face twitched and picked it up step by step.

Behind the house are three pigsty. I used to raise two piglets and a sow, and the sow was born twice a year. My sow became very delicate after giving birth and only ate wild boar grass. My mother said it was a barren month. That sow used to be an important source of income for my family, and my mother took special care of it. Early winter every year is the time when weeds harvest sweet potatoes weakly. The sow at the end of the month has made me miserable enough, and pulling pig grass has become my inevitable homework after school. I left my figure on dams, ponds, ridges and orange orchards. I am alone, carrying a basket, with my head down, looking for the rare bright green among the yellow weeds. Pulling pig grass has also become the most farm work I have done in this village.

Looking into the room through the window, my bed and desk are still in their original positions, covered with thick dust. Countless days and nights, I have been sitting on a cane chair reading and writing at my desk. When it is cold, I recite the text in bed. Every time I watch us study in the room, my mother's tired face will show a smile. Mother gets up early and works in the dark every day, and seldom lets us work. She wants us to have enough time to study and jump out of the farm. She often whispers in our ears that she doesn't study enough to travel by car. Mother seldom gets angry and curses. When she was a child, she was scolded by her grandfather and dropped out of school in a rage. She regretted it. She will never let her children make the same mistake again. Many years later, even though my sister and I were laid off, she was still happy and satisfied because her daughter had been admitted to school.

The back of the house is covered with shrubs, so it is inaccessible. Two cypress trees stand side by side, with overlapping branches and leaves, majestic and vigorous. Two people glances, but it seems within reach. Just like our sisters, my sister is married to Jiangsu, and we often use WeChat videos. Although it seems close at hand, it is actually far away. These two cypress trees were planted by my sister and I when we were children. My sister picked up some cypress saplings on the road that day, and we planted them in the open space behind the house. If we get the treasure, we snicker. We planted several rows closely, just like transplanting rice, planting several trees at a time, and the pit was very shallow. Later, the saplings died one after another. Fortunately, several trees survived. In my hometown, when the old man dies, it is necessary to decorate the mourning hall with cypress branches. Gradually, several cypress trees were cut down in turn, and finally two were kept.

There is a piece of private land next to my house. My father dug some bamboo from the mountain and planted it in the ground. When the warm spring breeze blows the earth, bamboo shoots emerge one after another from the soil. It has a beautiful name, called "Spring Girl Bamboo Shoots". Miss Chun's bamboo shoots are tender and delicious, and are deeply loved by people. Seeing them emerge from the ground means that spring has arrived.

Phyllostachys pubescens propagates very fast, and its vine roots spread endlessly in the soil. In a few years, a bamboo forest will be formed. Because nobody cares, bamboo grows in all directions at an alarming rate, and the roads around it are gone. There is a well behind my house, which provides domestic water for the whole yard. The clanging sound of buckets echoed behind the house from morning till night. Now tap water has been pumped to every household, and the lifeline connecting wells has also withdrawn from the historical stage. Phyllostachys pubescens crossed the road and got into the back hill next door, turning the glittering hillside into a continuous bamboo forest. This is the season when bamboo shoots grow rapidly. I saw some scattered buds scattered in the bamboo cracks. I'm surprised. My aunt came over and said, "There are no bamboo shoots at this time. They have been pinched off. Some people in the yard next door came before dawn. They can pinch twenty or thirty pounds in the morning and send them to the street to easily sell for a good price. "

The puddle around the house was full of sand and leaves, and my father cleaned it up with a hoe. I wandered in front of my house, walking gently and measuring every piece of land devoutly. Like a passer-by, I photographed my house, shaking well, pool and bamboo forest and put them in my mobile phone. There are also memories and homesickness. I believe that no matter where I am, they can soothe the lingering homesickness.

We haven't opened the door for many years, and the reasons for opening it are getting less and less. The lock on the door is rusty, the paint falls off, the wall is mottled, and the precipitation of time accumulates on the windowsill. The orchids planted as children are still there, the cactus is still there, and the sedge is still there. Peach trees flourish and the crown grows into a ball. Are peaches picked by stubborn children before they are mature, or are they delicious for birds to watch? The grape trellis beside the house has collapsed, and the vines have long since disappeared, leaving only some sweet and sour thoughts in my mind.

There is a big pond in the middle of the yard, which is pumped for irrigation when the weather is dry. There are several big stones beside the pond bank, where women hammer clothes. Summer is a paradise for children. We jumped into the water with a plastic washbasin, touched snails and mussels with our feet and played with each other in the water. I often forget the time when I play. At night, mothers stood on the dirt slope, dragging their voices and shouting their children's names. Some of them shouted and cursed, heard the curse, wiped their faces one by one, got up in a hurry, and ran home with their shoes, dripping with water.

My house is in the back. There are no houses on either side, only one side has a house, but no one lives there. Only Uncle Andrew lives in the front. Two of them are housekeepers, three daughters are married, and the son works in Shenzhen. When I pushed the door in, Aunt Ender was alone at home. She said that there are no crops in the field now, and all kinds of flue-cured tobacco are planted. Uncle Ender contracted 70 mu of land and worked in the field every day. At this time, I remembered that when the car drove into the village, I saw that the ground was full of plastic films, and I was very confused at that time. Aunt Ender said that there are only three families and three pairs of old people live under the road. Grandma Hou 'an's son opened a garment processing factory in Shaodong and lived with two old people for a week. The two old men came back from a quarrel. A few days ago, Grandma Houan fell down at home and was found lying on the ground for more than an hour. She called 120 to go to the hospital.

There is a school on the road. I finished primary school in this school for four years. As soon as I heard the bell in the morning, I grabbed my schoolbag and ran. When I got to the classroom, the bell didn't stop. When I was six years old, I took my hukou book to register for the first grade, but the teacher refused to accept it, so I went home and cried. My grandmother took me later, but it was no use begging. At that time, there were too many students, depending on their age, and then I took a kindergarten class for one year. This is my alma mater. I wandered outside and saw some rural primary schools, so I couldn't help thinking of her. As time goes by, my memory of reading as a child gradually fades, and only two teachers have always impressed me. One is a kindergarten teacher, a beautiful female teacher with long hair and slim figure. One day, the teacher taught me to write the word "five", but I couldn't write it well. She was very angry and shook my hand and said, "You are the only cadre in the family, so you should be a farmer in the future!" " The other is Mr. Li who teaches Chinese. He is a private teacher in our village. He wears thick glasses with many circles on the lenses. He is the earliest person to get to school every day. He has been teaching in rural primary schools for decades and has never been a formal teacher before he retired. On the first day, Miss Li changed my name. My father named me "Youliang", and Miss Li changed "You" to "You" in my exercise book. Later I heard that Mr. Li died of lung cancer in the county hospital. That afternoon, the car carrying the body suddenly stalled when passing by the school, and the driver couldn't do it. Some people say that Mr. Li may go back to school to see it. Call again in half an hour, and the car will start at once.

There are very few children in the countryside now, and they are all sent to the town for primary school. This village primary school immediately became the memory of our generation, and now it has been renovated and turned into a refrigeration plant.

The road is like a line of time and space, which divides a yard into two centuries. The original appearance of the last century is preserved under the road, and the scene of emerging countryside in 2 1 century is on the road.

There are many billboards along the road. There are several families living on the road, beautiful new houses are mushrooming, and all kinds of high-end cars are parked at the door. Planting flowers and plants in front of the house and pruning evergreen trees into circles or pagodas is a distinctive modern symbol, marking the prosperity and leisure of life. Over time, the hometown people who have been sticking to their homeland have captured countless business opportunities and entered the fast lane of development with hard-working hands. Our former vegetable field no longer exists, and it has been replaced by a large driving school, opposite to several mechanical processing factories. The former tile factory is already a large-scale brick factory. I heard that the government has granted a large piece of land, and the hillside near the road is almost leveled, and it is ready to build a high-end residential area. ...

Many old people in the yard have exhausted the light of life on the red land that they cherish each other and died one after another. My grandparents also live in the green hills of Zhuzhou. Wufengpu is now the hometown of our fathers and our generation. It attracts us like a huge magnet, but our next generation, the next generation, believes that in their eyes, this hometown is not another hometown, and the hometown is naturally Zhuzhou.

This time, Grandpa Two also went home together. He is 85 years old. He just came out of the hospital a few days ago and resolutely returned to his hometown despite his children's obstruction. Looking at the second grandpa's weak body, my father was very distressed. He said that the old man comes back every two years. Hearing this, grandpa two quickly waved his hand and said firmly, no, as long as I can move, I will go back every year! I can understand how grandpa two feels. Hometown is the source and root of human life. My hometown is here, but my life is still here.

At three o'clock in the afternoon, the whole family got on the bus and drove back. Looking at the familiar and unfamiliar scenery outside the window, I meditated in my heart, goodbye, Hongshan, goodbye, my dear hometown!