Unforgettable 1998

I returned to Huaying Joint School after eighteen years of absence. I can't tell you how many indescribable feelings this lonely and desolate place gave rise to in my later life, but the loss when I first came and the longing after I left were real, and my entire youth was also This may not be my dream, but this place has become my second home besides my hometown.

But in fact, I have only lived here for two years and four months.

On August 20, 1998, Huaying Joint School—a school name that sounded quite prestigious and a recruitment advertisement recruited six of us on the train to Xuejiawan , it was already evening when we arrived. Looking down from the platform of the railway bridge, I could see a small group of brightly lit houses, lying peacefully in a shallow bay at my feet. This strange town, because of its small size and warmth, gave me that It doesn't feel unfamiliar.

The recruitment was conducted at the home of the school founder Guo Yuliang, and the name of the community was "Xue Meili". Xuemeili - such an elegant name, with "Haoyueli" and "Langhuali" next to it. At that time, I was surprised how this mining town with the rumbling coal trucks could have such a name like spring and snow. At the same time, I was so impressed by that " "Huaying Joint School", I am full of expectations.

Recruitment was very simple. There was no formal assessment or interview. We only had lunch and the decision to stay or stay for the six of us was made during the conversation.

After lunch, Principal Guo Yuliang sent an old jeep to transport the four of us to the campus. When passing the Longwang Bridge, I was pleasantly surprised to see the players playing football on the playground of Zhunmei No. 2 Middle School. People, with a tall white birch reflected next to me, I thought we had arrived, but the driver had no intention of stopping.

The car gradually moved away from the lonely prosperity of Xue Town. I kept thinking about the distance it drove out of the town. The road we were walking on was an asphalt road, but it was circuitous and narrow. There was a long stretch of earthen walls on both sides of the road that blocked people's sight. It made me dizzy and suffocating because I couldn't see out. It was occasionally interrupted, and I could see the scattered high and low mountains not far away. The mounds are gray and yellow, like heads with bald patches, and occasionally there is a small patch of sterile crops. A few dilapidated earthen kilns or a dark courtyard suddenly appeared on the roadside. Clothes were draped in the courtyard, as if someone lived there...

When we finally shook off the dust from the journey, we got out of the car. At that time, the romantic expectations in my heart were finally completely driven away by the campus that looked like a stick figure in front of me. I vaguely felt that the car had traveled a long, long way in reverse, until it brought us back to the barrenness and desolation of the 1960s and 1970s.

The staff dormitory is close to the road, with a total of five rooms. The door of the one on the side is open, with an ancient curtain hanging. A young man is boiling water on the stove outside, wearing white cloth shoes. , which perfectly matches the simple background behind it. Later I learned that this was Teacher Han, who taught physics at the school. He already had a good wife and a daughter, Meng Ning, who grew up here and was as exquisite as a drop of clear dew.

Behind the dormitory is the campus. The so-called campus is just a square courtyard wall, enclosing four rows of simple classrooms and a row of student dormitories. The terrain is very wide, uneven and extremely irregular. The only exciting thing is that as soon as you enter the school gate, there are two large ponds with dazzling Gesang flowers in full bloom. The terrain here is relatively high, the sky in early autumn is vast and blue, and you can smell the hot atmosphere among the busy traffic. This scenery makes people feel a sense of purity and brightness above the colorful clouds.

A narrow doorway was opened on the east side of the courtyard wall, leading to a clearing dug out of the weeds. Two sloping basketball stands stood hunched over like two old men bent over from hunger. On the north and south sides. Later, I learned to shoot here, and I often organized hearty ball games with the students.

We left the car after putting down the car. At this point, I finally told myself with all my heart that the place you went to was a private school with extremely poor educational conditions, both in terms of location and hardware and software. Above all, they are the spiritual essence of education and culture in Jungar Banner.

My teaching career began reluctantly in this lonely and desolate place. My major was mathematics, but because the school was in dire need of Chinese teachers, I taught Chinese. Principal Liu Jidong is a gentle and gentle elder. He is also a foreigner hired like us. He is a Chinese teacher with more than 30 years of teaching experience. Therefore, from the beginning, we have been accustomed to calling him Teacher Liu instead of Mr. Liu. He is Principal Liu. To this day, I still clearly remember what he said when we first met: "You should treat this place as a training ground, practice hard, and you will have many opportunities in the future." These words very well verified my later Several turning points in life. Teacher Liu now lives in Xuemei where he used to live, and he is almost 10 years old. I once visited him and recalled with him what he said back then. His hearing was a little slow, and he just smiled and said nothing.

Teacher Liu arranged a dormitory for us and took us to the cafeteria to eat. The cafeteria was as simple as a warehouse. The cook was a skinny old bachelor who brought a large pot of stewed vegetables and fish. While eating, he cursed the damn rat for not being afraid of people, and climbed onto the counter in broad daylight. Teacher Liu asked us to chew the rice lightly, saying that there was occasionally sand in the rice, and parents of students always refused to hand over good rice. I remember the taste of the first meal given to me by the Chinese Yinglian School. I have long forgotten it. Maybe I didn’t taste the taste at all at that time. What I remember clearly is that I was concentrating on searching for the sand in the rice bowl, and subconsciously fantasized about the grains. Hairy rat shit soaked in rice water. In fact, the situation is not as terrible as imagined.

In the evening, we went to the well and clumsily fetched two buckets of water. There was a hole in the bottom of the bucket. Half of it was already leaking out as we hurried back to the dormitory. For the first time in my life, I experienced the turbidity of dry well water and its strong muddy smell. Teacher Liu also said that this water should not be eaten now, but should be clarified after it is brought back. It is quite clean. I don’t know who I heard from later that the fair skin of local women is caused by drinking dry well water and sour rice soup all year round. I recognized both the sour rice soup and dry well water, but I was a little skeptical about those who were washed into the dry wells by the rain. Whether the dung of pigs, cows and sheep really has the effect of beautifying the skin, my companions laughed and said that it may not really be true.

The first few days after arriving were lonely and long. The sourness of the rice and the fishy smell of the well water were far less tormenting than the spiritual emptiness. This place is far away from the town. The school is independent and closed. There are no markets or homes around. The shuttle bus to the town comes once a day. Our life has no books, no movies, no dinner parties, and no entertainment. This is like a house where youth is imprisoned. of prison. Every time I saw Liu Qingliang's shuttle bus passing by on the road opposite the dormitory, I felt the desire to escape more than once.

Fortunately, none of the original young teachers resigned. They all arrived one after another before the official start of classes on September 1. There were 11 teachers in total. They were all cheerful and easy-going. Finally, there were teachers inside and outside the dormitory. A hint of popularity. After school started, students started to arrive one after another. There were only over 120 people in primary school, junior high school and high school, which was not enough for the current capacity of the three classes. The students were of different sizes. Some were five or six years old and were in first grade, and some were 16 or 17 years old. Only in the first grade of junior high school. Parents carried rice and noodles when sending their children, and they could not write when registering. Their occupations were either farmers or miners.

The bitterness of reality finally extinguished the inappropriate passion. I put my lonely mood behind me and had no choice but to devote all my energy to teaching. There are not many reference materials for lesson preparation. Mobile phones and computers are of course unattainable luxuries, so every day I have to read the only teaching reference word by word, consider every sentence, write them all down, mark them in the book, and then He fills every class of a new teacher with what he sees, regardless of the importance, without making any choices. He often goes off topic but still forgets about it, leading the students to search and wander in the winding paths and secluded places. Now that I think about it, for a fledgling, high-spirited scholar, rather than preaching, it is better to say that he is learning.

I still remember the scene when I received wax paper and carved inscriptions on the steel plate with teacher Gao Wentao.

When I was a student, I never wrote stroke by stroke, horizontally and vertically. At that time, I controlled the strength of the pen and adjusted the symmetry of the font very carefully, for fear that any stroke would scratch the wax paper and miss the mark. The wax paper is comparable to the dense regular script. When printing, you have to be more careful. You have to take off your coat, roll up your sleeves, squeeze out the black and sticky ink, and as a choking smell fills the air, you hold your breath and roll the heavy rubber roller back and forth in the ink. Dip it evenly, control the direction of the roller, roll it evenly across the printing screen, lift it up gently, and the first test paper will come out black. At this time, your heart must be hanging, for fear that the first roller will not grind it evenly. All the previous efforts have been wasted. Teacher Gao once said that you must not dip in ink for the second time, otherwise it will remain dark. As long as you pass over it steadily one by one, it will gradually become clear. It is indeed magical. After three or five photos, it will gradually become clear. See Watching my handwriting turn into handsome black and white words in an instant, and being turned over piece by piece, I will think of those snow-like test papers issued by teachers when I was a student. That is the wisdom of teachers, how noble! How profound! Now, I That's right! The pride of becoming a teacher for the first time spreads all over the body along with the fragrance of ink.

Later, the school purchased a new type of wax paper that was like carbon paper. Instead of a steel plate and a pen, just a ballpoint pen could be used as usual, and the test papers could be printed with excellent results. What an amazing baby! I often falsely reported the dosage from Teacher Gao, got a few extra tickets back, occupied them and enjoyed them slowly. If it hadn't been for the perfection of that place at that time, how could I have experienced that kind of selfless enjoyment?

The days when I first arrived passed by so peacefully. Now that I think about it, life is not all monotonous. We used to practice shooting on the overgrown playground after dinner. Teacher Han’s good wife was breaking sticks in the cornfield nearby, urging us to finish the evening study and eat the corn and gourds she cooked; we also spent time together on weekends. Go to the big market in Xuezhen, spend 50 yuan to buy a pair of fashionable jeans, go to the gate of Galaxy to eat a bowl of donkey meat without donkey meat, and then go to the dance hall called "Yue Hazy" in Tengfei Community to dance an off-tempo song Cha Cha; the most interesting thing is that a group of people went together to match up two big teachers, and finally left a good story for this corner forgotten by love, and achieved a happy marriage...

……

Before the love that gradually grew took root in this land, a year later, some of their colleagues resigned and left school one after another, heading for a broader space. Two years later, I also resigned. At the same time, the dream I had in my heart finally faded away, and my youth also came to an end in a hurry. After us, several young people came and left like us. Teacher Liu left the school in May 2001. The school persisted until the spring of 2002, when it was finally shut down completely. At that time, I was hired to teach in a public school, and later moved to the Ninth Middle School to teach Chinese classes in key classes. The predecessor of the Ninth Middle School, I had taught in 1998. On the afternoon of August 21, 2019, I passed by the Longwang Bridge, the Zhunmei No. 2 Middle School I had longed for.

For the next eighteen years, I played the role of mother and teacher seriously. My children and my students became almost the whole life of me. The clock ticked so fast that I didn’t even care about it. Go back and have a look.

In April 2018, I drove back on the winding and smooth road. The places I passed through were filled with vicissitudes of life. Fortunately, my hometown of twenty years ago was still there, hidden alone in the mountains. Behind a majestic building lies the loneliness of the past.

This place has indeed become a training ground for our generation. Most of the teachers who came out of here were later recruited into the main force of Zhunqi teachers based on their skills. And this weak private school, after surviving alone and tenaciously in the waves for eight years, was finally washed away by the rolling waves of compulsory education in an unknown corner of history. Even I am attached to it. It also came later.

As I get older, every time I roll out the scroll of my life and look back carefully, in 1998, at that little-known Huaying Joint School in a remote corner, I once buried the memory of my life. The most precious seed in the world, nourished by the spring breeze and rain at the turn of the century, finally dyed a simple and bright color, with the fragrance of peaches and plums, lasting forever.