Hometown, wandering and broken prose

In recent years, a strange image has been tangled in my mind: my hometown has turned from a tree into a boat, disintegrating and breaking into pieces while wandering into the distance, and the scattered planks of the boat are floating around. . I fell into the water, holding a broken ship plank and drifting with the current, with nowhere to land.

When I was a child, I foolishly believed that my hometown, like my parents, was given innately, unchangeable, non-selectable and unchangeable. Later, I finally learned that although my hometown did not wander as frequently as the Gypsies, it was equally fluid and uncertain.

When I was just sensible, the adults in my family told me that my hometown was a village called Dongzhang in Lin County, Henan (now Linzhou). Towards the end of the reign of Emperor Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty, his hometown suffered a severe famine. His grandparents fled the famine and came to their current residence in Lingchuan County, Shanxi Province. But later the elders in the family told me that in addition to our hometown in Lin County, Henan, we also have an older hometown, under the old locust tree in Hongdong, Shanxi.

Grandpa said that in the early Ming Dynasty, my ancestors and tens of thousands of people from the Hongdong area were forcibly immigrated by the government to the Central Plains and other places where people were almost extinct due to long-lasting wars. It was a passive migration. My ancestors and thousands of local families were mobilized to immigrate at first. It's hard to leave a poor family, it's hard to leave the warm land, and the loess underfoot is buried with the ties between parents and generations of ancestors, making no family willing to leave their homeland. So the government adopted a cunning and deceptive method. They posted notices saying that anyone whose family ran under the big locust tree would not have to move out. People near and far believed it and rushed to the big locust tree. As a result, they were surrounded by government soldiers and forcibly sent to Henan and many other places.

When being escorted on the road with their hands tied, the immigrants, including my ancestors, frequently turned their heads and looked back while wailing loudly. They were driven farther and farther away, and their hometown retreated little by little. Slowly, only the old locust tree covered with old bird's nests and a symbol of their hometown was left in their eyes. As time passed, the descendants of immigrants could no longer remember the exact address of their hometown. They only remembered a folk song passed down from generation to generation: "Ask me where my ancestors came from, the big locust tree in Hongdong, Shanxi. What is the name of my ancestors' hometown? An old bird's nest in a locust tree."

But after being immigrated for more than five hundred years, I returned to my hometown from Henan to Shanxi. However, when I was fleeing famine, I was extremely hungry and tired from my hometown, and could not walk far. I was unable to return to my hometown of Hongdong in southern Shanxi, so I settled in my current residence on the southeastern edge of Shanxi.

So my family has three hometowns. The big locust tree in Hongdong is the hometown of my ancestors; Lin County in Henan is the hometown of my grandfather; and my current residence at the western foot of South Taihang is the hometown of my father, me and the younger generations of my family.

Mobility and migration are the normal conditions of human society. The so-called hometown is the resting place of our ancestors’ wanderings. It is the place where we were born and grew up in childhood, but it may not be the place where we die. This reality is a bit cruel to people like my grandfather who are "escapers". Leaving aside their ancestral hometown of Hongdong, they still have two hometowns. One is their hometown in Lin County, Henan, where their ancestors above their parents are buried, and the other is the current village they built with their own hands.

My grandfather once told me that there were one of his brothers and one of his uncles who fled with him. I call them Grandpa and Second Grandpa. Since the three old brothers settled here, they have been looking forward to one day returning to their roots and returning to their hometown in Henan. At least, after they pass away, their souls can return to their hometown and be buried at the feet of their parents in their ancestral graves. My grandfather's brother fulfilled this long-cherished wish after his death. After his cousins ??grew up and took care of him, they took his bones back to their hometown in Henan and buried them in their ancestral graves. But for the uncle and grandpa, this is no longer possible. Especially my grandfather, who lived to be eighty-six years old and had been away from home for a full sixty years. Time has changed many things, and it has also caused a person to take root and grow into a tree that cannot walk.

Grandpa expected that he would never be able to return to his hometown, whether alive or dead. He was very unwilling to face such an ending. When I was a child, I went to the mountains with him to clear wasteland, dig medicinal materials or herd donkeys. He repeatedly described to me the appearance of his hometown village in Henan and our house, as well as the land, ancestral graves and other things that worried him.

Many people's hometowns will be broken and disappeared in such wanderings. As a result, it is destined that most contemporary people will have no home to return to, and homesickness will be like a flood that bursts its embankments, breaking free and flooding into a surging ocean.