This is a small empty plateau between my village and the neighboring villages. Only a foot wide of the south end of the platform began to slope, which is the foundation of the root of the north slope of Bailuyuan. A shallow slope to the north of the platform is the beach of the Bahe River. The gravel road on the platform under my feet passed through villages of all sizes and led to Xi'an.

The rain stopped at dawn. The sky is overcast, the clouds are not thick, and the color of light gray is estimated to be squeezed for a while and a half, and the rain will not be wrung out. The air was fresh and moist. The wheat on the hillside was green. The wheat in the river is also bright green. The withered grass in the ditch on the original slope was turned brown and black by the rain, but there was a moist softness. On the north bank of the river is the southern foot of Lishan Mountain, where a tree can be clearly distinguished, a slope and a ditch, and the extreme point where the mountains overlap. The four fields are so quiet that the ears are spontaneously born with a delicate sound.

Before sunset it rained. Light rain. It is usually the kind of spring rain that only comes in March, "sneaking into the night with the wind, moisturizing things silently". From the second day of the lunar month (January 14, 2002), intermittently sparsely pulled down to today's dawn, so that the men and women in the whole village were surprised. The abnormal weather and weather gave the farmers an ominous and evil atmosphere in their hearts. This is the only time I have seen the rain of "39" in half my life, and the land is not only not frozen but soft as a crisp.

The gravel road beneath my feet was widened in the winter of 1977. At the same time as the construction of this main road was the Bahe River embankment water conservancy project, which was implemented by me as the deputy commander-in-chief. At that time, my mentality of completing this water conservancy project in my hometown was basically the same as the state of mind when I later wrote my novel "White Deer Plain", which was to try my best to accomplish one thing.

The first time I walked out of the village with a bun bag on my back and walked into a middle school in Xi'an, the road was about one step wide, and it was impassable for frame cars. When I walked out of the village with a week's worth of dry food, my mood was enthusiastic and high, but it was completely vague. I just wanted to go to school, I wanted to go to a middle school in the city, I had no ambitions to go to school, I didn't have anything at all. I have repeatedly pursued my memories, at best, with the ambition of being a worker and the like, and mainly the original motivation of parents to send their children to school. In the eyes of the rural people, the workers who earn wages and eat commercial grain are the happiest people in the world. When I was in the second year of junior high school, I became fond of literature, which was not only a surprise to my parents, but also strange to myself. Normally, the love of literature is regarded as a romantic and poetic thing, but how could it happen to a person who wears coarse cloth clothes and eats boiled steamed buns? Many years later, I attributed this phenomenon to a nerves sensitive to words, and my interest in literature began from this. The edification of the scholarly family and the grandmothers who can tell stories and sing ballads can only make the children and grandchildren who have nerves sensitive to words react and work, and vice versa, it is also a white singing and singing.

After 12 years of walking on this path, I completed my high school education. What I remember most vividly is when I was sixteen years old when I encountered a wolf. At dawn, I had walked out of the top of a deep ditch in the village, when my father, who had been a brave companion, suddenly called out "wolf!" There was a wolf on the edge of the field with ears of grain just twenty paces away. A little further away, there's another one. I didn't feel the slightest fear, even though it was the first time I had seen such a scary animal. It's not that I'm bold, it's that I'm following my father. The first time I felt the power of my father and the meaning of my father, was that when I faced two adult wolves, I didn't feel fear. When I became a father, I picked up and dropped off my three schooling children on this widened country road. I had a bicycle and a child who was better off than my father, and it was much faster than my father who would send me on foot. My children and I never had a thrilling story of a wolf again. The wolf has become a rare treasure that everyone misses.

My whole life has actually been stuck on this gravel road, which has become wider. I did not leave this road in the 20 years of grassroots rural work before my professional creation, and my first decision after obtaining the conditions for professional creation was to simply return to my hometown, the village where this road began. My instinctive psychological need here is to seriously fulfill my dream of being a writer that has occurred since I was a teenager. From the winter of 1982, when I was in the best state of professional writing, to the spring of 1992, when I finished writing the book "White", I wrote and read in the old house under my ancestral home for ten years. This should be the quietest and most comfortable decade for me.

I'm now back in my ancestral home. The old house is a kind of psychological storage. The fact that the new house is built on the basis of the old house is also a psychological factor. I am the only one living in the courtyard of this ancestral house. The days when my father and his two cousins lived together are long gone. The men of my father's generation have all left the village and have been resting in peace on the slopes of the northern slope of Bailuyuan behind the village. I live in this house, which used to be shared by three families, and I can imagine that it is spacious and refreshing. When I read the pages of European and American writers, I occasionally see the faces of my grandfather or father or uncle, and more than once. I sat in the courtyard in the dead of night and watched the moon move from the east to the west in the boundless silence, and there would be two heavy and comfortable ** in my ears. It is the moan of life that only those who have rested after working like oxen and horses pulling ploughs and carts, and I have been exposed to this music of life since I was a child, with my father, my uncle, and my grandfather. They had long since turned to dirt on the original slopes. The ** when they slept soundly in the middle of the night lingered in this courtyard, still edifying me.

It's been an incredible winter. I stood in the wilderness between my village and my neighboring villages.

From the first time I left the village to study in the city, the light in my father and mother's eyes when they sent me out of the house gave me a constant warning: how to go out and how to come back, and not to bring the filth back to the village and to the house. In the decades that I have changed my social roles, every Sunday when I come home, my father still has the same look in his eyes, and he doesn't care what I have done, what I have done wrong, whether I have risen or fallen, and I don't care that I have much more social experience than he actually has and that I am completely beyond his cultural level. It was the unique endowment of a father, the intrusive gaze of the ruler of this ancient house, that still warned me: don't bring the filth back to this house.

Fengtai, Beijing. I walked out of the auditorium. Reporter Wang Yatian was the first to call. The elections have just ended. He asked me what my first thought was after I was elected vice chairman of the Chinese Writers Association. I blurted out: As a writer, you should always put your wisdom into writing.

And he asked, "What else?"

I will answer again: Nature also has responsibilities and obligations.

I stood on the empty terrace between my village and the neighboring villages, looking at the rain-soaked slopes and rivers of "Sanjiu", the green wheat seedlings and the brownish-black soft wild grass, the farm tractors rushing past me, and the dolls coming home from school. Sticking to this road, leaning on the original slope, I gained calmness. Naturally, I don't care about the auspicious and ominous suspicions of the rain in "Sanjiu".

January 17, 2002