Shanghai Daughter Prose

80 years after leaving Shanghai, my grandmother still speaks with a Shanghainese accent.

It’s hard to imagine how she stubbornly retained the memories of her hometown when she was young in the harsh context of Southwest, without the gentleness of Wu Nong’s soft words used by Shanghainese. Are you reluctant to leave that context?

She has been living in Chongqing for 80 years, cramped and lonely like an outsider. Until the moment she leaves this world, she is always ready to return to her hometown to see her parents. When she was a child, her parents bought cakes for her at the Chenghuang Temple. It was a snack called peach cake. “Shanghai City God’s Temple was really lively.” I later bought her cakes from the “Palace Pastry Shop” in Chengdu. She finally felt that it was right, like the peach cake she had eaten when she was a child. Breaking it apart, she watched her happily put it into her mouth, but for some reason tears rolled down her nose.

I have been to and from Shanghai countless times for meetings. The place I am most familiar with is Pudong Airport. This time I finally asked for leave. No matter what, I stayed for a day and a half to walk the streets of Shanghai for my grandma. . Her hometown of Wusongkou is now an internationally renowned cruise port, with wide and straight roads and magnificent buildings. The rural scenery she was familiar with when she was a child is nowhere to be seen. The Wusong River is surrounded by fertile soil, and there should be a huge water tank there. The car was rolling every day. She was the eldest daughter from a wealthy farm family. She held the hands of her eldest brother, second brother and younger brother and sent them to a simple elementary school every day. She can do needlework herself and inherited her mother's tailoring skills.

Later, her father recruited workers to the Shanghai Railway Bureau. Because he knew a few words, he grew from a worker to a dispatcher in the railway bureau. Seeing that the sky was full of rain and the storm was coming, he turned to his wife and children in the alley and said, "I'm afraid we have to leave Shanghai." No matter how reluctant he was to leave, the whole family had to give up what they had just experienced in Baoshan. A small home to settle down.

On the night of leaving Shanghai on the last day, grandma turned her head and took a look at Shanghai. Shanghai was still bright under the bright moon. She could faintly hear the rumble of guns in the distance, and couldn't tell whether it was light or fire in the far distance. Later, I read in history books that the Battle of Songhu, which shocked China and foreign countries, was the largest and most brutal battle in the entire Anti-Japanese War.

Small families and individuals are like ants on autumn leaves, they can only use all their wisdom to survive.

They originally thought that Nanjing would be the place to settle down. After settling in Nanjing, their father once again visited his colleagues who worked in the Nanjing Railway Bureau system, and now they discovered something even worse: they were also controlled by the Japanese. More and more soldiers are being transported to the railway line, and at the same time, all trains are only allowed to enter and are not allowed to leave the city! He panicked and ran home with just one word: escape! Run away without wanting anything. Within a few days, he fled to Jiujiang and looked behind him in shock. The city gates of Nanjing were closed and the Nanjing Massacre began.

Grandma’s father took the whole family up the Yangtze River, coughing up blood while running all the way to the hinterland of the southwest. Grandma was carrying her youngest brother on her back, who was still suffering from smallpox. She couldn't bear to leave him, "As long as my eldest sister is here, you are here, and you are here!"

Cannonballs exploded behind her. Open, someone was screaming, and the huge air flow knocked her to the ground. She got up and ran again with her brother on her back, until it got dark. Her family members gathered together, and her trembling heart got a moment of peace, "Brother, We are fine, brother, brother..."

When they arrived in Zunyi, the father sent his eldest son into the coal mine. When a cotton spinning factory in Chongqing came to recruit female workers, he asked his eldest daughter with tears in his eyes: "Shuying, are you willing to go?"

The terminally ill father had his own thoughts: "Since it is not safe everywhere, , then you must not place all the children in one place. The more dispersed they are, the safer they will be." With tears in her eyes, grandma's mother put the only one the whole family brought on her finger. He wore a gold ring and said: "One day, my parents will come to look for you, eldest sister, let's go back to Shanghai together!"

Soon after, news of the Chongqing bombing came, and my grandmother's mother fell seriously ill. At the scene, she was awake and crying, calling her eldest sister. At this time, her eldest sister was working as a textile worker in a small place called "Changshou" below Chongqing. She refused to get married until she was 30 years old. "I am here." Wait until my parents come to find me and go back to Shanghai." At this time, someone introduced her to Dr. Shu, a native of Hangzhou. When he met, she heard the other person say the familiar "Su Bai". She hesitantly touched the gold ring that her mother had put on her back then and said, "Abba, is this the person?"

For many years after that, the small family she formed with this man was the place closest to Shanghai in her heart.