(The following text is based on my 2015 recorded interview with Lichan.) Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 infoIn order to facilitate the narrative, I will use the perspective of Li Chan, that is, Shijie's girlfriend, to reproduce their trip to Jinnan, and the place name has been modified to protect the privacy of the parties. ）

In 95, Shijie and I have been in love for five years, maybe because of my fellow countrymen, there are always endless topics, although not to the point of talking about marriage, but each other's parents and friends are very familiar with each other. But since moving into the courtyard of Chaowai Sweet Water Garden in Beijing, I have found that the world I am familiar with is slowly changing, becoming strange, elusive, and terrifying. The idea of going back to my hometown in Shanxi suddenly came to me after I saw Shijie's uncomfortable feeling of depression and forced laughter. Because of the lawsuit with the bookseller, and because we all know the indiscriminate methods of those so-called cultural people, it is always good to hide and change the mood. Along the way, watching Shijie's gradually relaxed and cheerful mood, I was also secretly glad for this choice.

Shanxi's hometown is in a place called Dahuaishu Village in Linhong County in the south of Jinzhong, with mountains on three sides, a river on one side, and hundreds of households facing the North Mountain, a small village formed by digging holes and cellars. More than ten years ago, there was a flood, and the village was brought from the riverside a mile away to the current place. Before that time, I was still young, and I only remember that the old people in the village said that weasels, hedgehogs, frogs, and rats all moved out of the village overnight and ran to Beishan. As soon as everyone summed up, something must have happened, and they all followed. Sure enough, in the evening, thunderstorms and hailstorms fell, and in two days, the water came down, and the village was washed away except for the big locust tree that was hugged by four people.

However, at that time, Beishan was an old cemetery that lasted for an unknown number of generations, and many people in the village felt unlucky and did not want to move to build houses, so a large part of them went to the other side of the river beach in the south and repaired the village of Huaishu. Our family believes in Catholicism, and my uncle is still a respected priest, who does not believe in feng shui and the like, plus the trees in the north mountain are shady, the spring water is unbroken, and the mountain is thick loess, which is convenient for digging cellars and houses, and it is close to the farmland in the village, so it stayed. The old village chief and his uncle were playmates since childhood, and they believed in him very much, and there was a lot of support from his parishioners, so they brought a group of villagers to rebuild Dahuaishu Village in Beishan.

Not long after the village was built, my parents took me to Taiyuan for work, and I haven't been back to the village for seven or eight years. The eldest uncle, perhaps because he was a priest, married for the rest of his life, and lived in the east end of the village, guarding his chapel. There is also my second uncle in the village, and his two sons are almost 20 years older than me, and when I was young, they started their own families, and they were two courtyards next to each other in the west of the village.

I don't know why, when I used to go back to my hometown, everyone went to live at my second cousin's house, and I never lived at my eldest cousin's house, maybe it was because my second cousin was hospitable and made good dishes, but after a long time, it became a habit, but I didn't ask. But this time I brought Shijie back, just entered the village, stepped on the familiar stone road, and a thought came to me, that is, I wanted to live in my eldest cousin's house. There was no reason at all, it wasn't a whim, if it hadn't happened, it might have been my curiosity, and two days later, I could only call it fate.