In my hometown, there is a wild vegetable called bitter cauliflower, which blooms all year round.

Flowers bloom all over the mountains, brilliant and sad...... can't help but make people feel a lot of inexplicable sorrow.

"Bitter cauliflower blossoms,

Bitter cauliflower blooms one by one.

Open every year,

Year after year,

Flowers bloom and fall! ”

The people living on that land weave the village, the ethnic group and the life with difficulty and happiness among the bitter cauliflowers.

Father, mother, elder brother, Jiang Jinhan, Ji Sheng, uncle Kunfa, five sisters-in-law...... Recalling some people in that village, some details, some bits and pieces, I want to cry......

I'm also a bitter cauliflower!

(a)

My village is located on the bank of the Qingshui River.

A small village, whose name cannot even be found on the map of China, has been at the nerve endings of all dynasties.

At the end of the Song Dynasty and the beginning of the Yuan Dynasty, perhaps earlier, a group of Miao people who were burdened with historical hardships fled here, breaking wood to build houses in the deep mountains and old forests, and multiplying and continuing the dream of an ethnic group. In my generation, I can't remember how many generations.

Listening to the old man in his 50s and 60s in the village, his mother was carried into the village in a sedan chair, and there were a few bitter cauliflower flowers on the sedan chair, which was very beautiful.

The mother was the last one in the village to marry in a sedan chair. Since the mother, the sedan chair in the village that was specially used for marriage has been dismantled and burned. Since then, the daughters-in-law in the village have all come in on their backs or by themselves. No one can enjoy the "honor" of motherhood.

In the spring of 1978, when the bitter cauliflower in March was all over the mountains, a prank played by heaven and forgot my sinful life to the world.

On that day, the bitter cauliflower in front of and behind the farmhouse's wooden building bloomed very happily.

When I was a child, I was sick, often falling ill in three days, and it was my mother who snatched me back from the clutches of death with love. I remember one time, I had a high fever for three days in a row, I cried when I stood up, cried when I sit, cried when I slept, and my mother put down the work in her hand and held me in her arms, and I hugged me for three days, and then she couldn't stand it, and fell asleep, and inadvertently threw me to the ground, and I cried. The cry was so faint that I heard my mother muttering softly, "I'm afraid this cub can't be saved, oh my God! Why is my life so miserable! She quietly turned to wipe away her tears, her eyes filled with helplessness, despair, and sadness.

At that time, there were no doctors in the countryside, let alone medicine, so my mother boiled ginger to give me a drink to reduce fever, and rubbed bitter cauliflower leaves on my forehead to cool down,...... The people in the village said that I was not saved, and my father even prepared a small wooden box for me, and when I died, I was buried in the earth. But my mother stubbornly believed that I would survive. The villagers advised her not to put her hope in this sick child. She always said that this baby had many disasters when she was a child, and if she didn't die, there would be blessings. In the dead of night, my mother hugged me and said in a voice that sounded to me the most beautiful in the world: "Cub! Come on, stop tossing Mom! ”

In a near-miraculous way, I survived.

My childhood, without exception, was a naughty mountain child.

Because I heard the fortune teller say that I was short of water, my father named me Jiang Xiuqing at the beginning. Later, because of the same name as a cousin of the same clan, he changed his name to Xiubo. But I am destined to become a beautiful or colorful wave on the Qingshui River, but a drop of bitter water from home.