Same-Lovers (Novella) Zhang Baotong 2017.8.6

My dad died, and the only way left for our family was to follow my mom back to their hometown. Although we have never been back to our hometown, we often hear my mother talk about it, so in our minds, our hometown is a very scary place. However, my mother's words sometimes make us feel very confused, because our hometown has so many houses and land, how can we be poor? But from my mother's determined look, we are still full of inexplicable fear of our hometown. Whenever we did something disobedient, my mother threatened us with the words "go home and be a farmer". However, she didn't know that we had always ignored this sentence, just like my son was listening to me talk about our family's "history of revolutionaries".

My mom really didn't want to live anymore and didn't know how to live anymore. She sat by the river of the Luo River and kept crying loudly. We cried so much that the sun was frightened, and we were terrified that we wanted to go down the mountain, and we cried so much that the sky suddenly became gloomy. The workers on the construction site had gone home from work, and the banks of the river were empty and quiet, and my mother's cries echoed on both sides of the quiet valley.

My sister and I stood beside my mother, crying and shouting that my mother was hungry. Because we haven't eaten all day. However, my mother just cried and cried to death, and didn't care about us at all. My brother has returned from school in the market town of Pinglongmiao, more than ten miles away, and he is already a third-grade student. When she saw my mother crying while we were shouting for dinner, she yelled at my sister and me to keep our mouths shut. Seeing him gritting his teeth and punching us, my sister and I were too scared to say anything more. So, the three of us stood beside my mother and cried with her.

It was about to get dark, and the old man, who was looking at materials at the construction site, probably had taken over, heard my mother's cry, and came out of the barbed wire fence with piles of cement, wood, and steel bars, and walked towards us. Lao Yantou is actually not old, that is, he is thirty-five or sixteen years old, but he is silent, does not smile, and keeps a straight face all day long, which makes people feel fierce. Most of the Agency's employees were volunteers who had come down from the Korean battlefield, but he was the Eighth Route who escaped from the ironclad siege of Okamura Ninji. In terms of age, he was naturally the boss of the entire Agency. Therefore, everyone calls him Lao Yantou behind his back.

He wore a blue single-cloth hat, wore a very old and thick overalls, and held a steel bar more than a meter long as a finger, the side of which was sharpened and bent into a handle, like a stove stabbing a coal stove. It was the weapon he used to protect the construction materials on the site.

He walked in front of us, looked at my mother crying like that, seemed a little helpless, and said to my mother for a long time, sister-in-law don't cry, people are gone, no more crying can not come back, it's dark, take the child back. As he spoke, he didn't dare to pull my mother up from the ground, but led the three of us children to the cave. My mother saw that the children had returned home, so she had to get up from the ground and go home with tears in her eyes.

Mom was crying all night, and in order not to disturb our sleep, she was just sobbing silently. We didn't hear her crying, but the next morning we saw that her eye bubbles were red and swollen. The more mom kept crying, the more panicked and upset we felt. Actually, for me, when I suddenly woke up in my life and began to have a conscious impression of the world in front of me, my father had already gone to Xi'an, so my impression of my father came completely from the family photo in the frame. There is no dead sister in the family photo. And I'm still in my mother's arms. So, I didn't understand my mother's endless crying, and I didn't have any intuitive understanding of the crisis our family was facing. Therefore, let me recount this painful tragedy of our family, and I will inevitably have a sense of shallowness and ambiguity.

Perhaps it was Lao Yantou who informed the UNRWA leadership of our family's affairs, and the next morning, the UNRWA leaders and the chairman of the trade union came to our home and sent some condolences to us. Because my dad was gone, and all the money for the pension and relief was swept away by my damn grandpa, our family couldn't open the pot at once. In fact, my mother was already tired of crying at this time, and she couldn't cry anymore, so she just sat on the edge of the bed and was stunned. However, after being persuaded by the Agency's leaders, my mother began to cry again. When the leaders saw that my mother was crying more and more persuasively, they stopped persuading, said a few words of comfort, and left.

In the evening, someone from the union called my mother to an office on the construction site. The office is not large, with a desk and a lantern on the table, which illuminates the room as if it were bright and dark. There were four or five people sitting in the room, and Lao Yantou and the chairman of the trade union Wang were sitting at the table. Chairman Wang asked my mother to sit across from Lao Yantou, who was sitting on a bench, smoking a cigarette with his head down, not daring to raise his head to look at my mother.

It was so dark, not only did they not come home from work, but they also called my mother over, which made my mother feel very inexplicable, and looked at Chairman Wang with a puzzled expression. Everyone else in the room was looking at my mom. Because of the series of tragic encounters recently, my mother washed her face with tears every day, her eyes were bloodshot, her eye bubbles were swollen, her face was much thinner, and she looked extremely haggard, as if she would completely collapse at the slightest blow. She sat at the table with her head down, a dead man would make a woman feel extremely humiliated and inferior, and she didn't want others to see such a pitiful expression.

Chairman Wang was silent for a while, and said to my mother, Lao Gao and we are both very good brothers, he is dead, and there is no way to do it, but you and the child still have to live. Hearing what Chairman Wang said, my mother raised her head and stared straight at Chairman Wang, expecting him to show our family a way out. Chairman Wang paused, and said that Lao Yan had never been married in his life, he and Lao Gao used to be the head and deputy head of the same class, and now that Lao Gao is dead, your family is in a desperate situation, and he can't bear to look at your family pitifully, so we decided to let you marry Lao Yan and form a new family. In this way, you and your children will have a life to rely on, and Lao Yan will also have a home.

Chairman Wang, a native of Lao Yantou County, used to drink with my father, and what he said was not only representative of the organization, but also had some brotherly affection. However, his words are not to discuss with my mother, but to make decisions on behalf of the organization. My mother looked at Lao Yantou with a very surprised gaze. Lao Yantou still lowered his head and took a big gulp of his cigarette, while Chairman Wang and the others next to him were looking at my mother with a quirky gaze. Although it was an organizational decision, my mother had to speak up.