Chapter 2: The Past Is Like Smoke
For Wu Kai's move, I am very moved in my heart, for someone else, between the three-hour flight and the bus for one day and two nights, I think no one can choose the wrong one. But this guy who has been fighting with me for three years, and no one is convinced, has chosen such a scoring question wrong.
Looking at Wu Kai who vomited like a dog along the way, I always felt full of guilt in my heart. On the contrary, he comforted me all the way as if he was nothing, it may be a trivial matter to him, but it is enough to move me to a daze.
Sitting in the car, watching Wu's mother keep shouting at Wu Kai, and I just received a call from my parents before leaving. Remind me to pay attention to safety on the road, work hard when I get to Shenzhen, and save money.
I can't compare my parents with Wu Kai's parents, because they have different experiences and hardships. I just hope that they can give me a little attention once in a while struggling with life, so that I can feel a little warmth in the world. It's just a pity that my little expectation is too extravagant for them.
They have spent too much strength against the burden that fate has imposed on them, in the face of existential pressures. This simple and kind peasant couple obviously has no more energy to pay attention to whether their children need their care. Or they have long been numb by life, and they probably have no energy to care about others.
Unconsciously, I seem to have returned to the small mountain village where I grew up as a child, and to that carefree childhood. When I was a child, I was always able to laugh at my wanton behavior, but in that era of extreme material scarcity, I was always able to find my own happiness in the mountains, forests and rivers.
Stealing the east's chickens and touching the west's dogs are always commonplace, and it is common to be sued at home and beaten by your mother. But even if it's just that, it's enough to make childhood life as warm as July in the world.
Time is pulled back to the other side of history, in that barren mountain village surrounded by two mountains, a chubby little boy wearing a pair of unrecognizable flat boxers walked up the steps of the reservoir step by step from the shore.
The scorching sun was in the sky, and he knew that he was screaming hoarsely in the trees. I casually pulled out the water droplets on my head, took off the wet underwear on my body, found the pants hidden in the grass and put on the transparent plastic slippers that my mother had just bought for 2.5 yuan, and ran all the way home.
I had to get home before my mother woke up, so that I wouldn't suffer from love. When we are young, we are always accustomed to observing and interpreting the world from our own unique perspective, and connecting with the world with our own immature thoughts.
The scarcity of material life has not been able to restrain my imagination. In the mountains, in the forests, in all kinds of ditches and ridges, I can always see my swarthy figure.
After many years, I can still hear the determination and annoyance in the voices of my neighbors complaining to my mother that I had picked cucumbers from their vegetable patches. And my mother's constant apology can still make the slightest ripple in my heart. Family affection is always understood after you find out that you have gone away, and it is too late when you want to cherish it.
And I didn't escape this rule, and it was only now that I gradually understood the warmth in my mother's eyes. Though my stubbornness often bothered her, the club she raised aloft rarely really fell on me.
She often explained that her childhood had always been under the pressure of her grandmother, and the shadow of hitting three times a day and not repeating the same shadow has always lingered in her own heart. So even if I, as the big devil in the village, made her tired of apologizing and compensating, she only symbolically educated me.
My mother's life seems to me now to be full of desolation and pathos. When she was four years old, her mother lost the opportunity to study due to some special historical reasons. A four-year-old child, before she knew what fate was, fate had quietly cut her off from her peers.
Since then, she can only help her grandmother go up the mountain and down the field to farm and raise chickens. It is hard to imagine how in the long years that followed, the mother who could not read a word through what kind of compromise found her own inner peace.
Perhaps it is precisely because of the ruthless removal of her upward ladder of fate that her mother has always been very strict in her attitude towards learning. In her opinion, she has suffered the loss of not being able to study, and she doesn't want us to be uneducated like her. Therefore, my mother never hesitated or objected to my sister's schooling.
While most of my peers had begun to send money back to their parents from outside to support the family, my mother kept exchanging her hard-earned food for our school fees. She seems to be fighting against her fate in a different way than she is, or she herself has already accepted the arrangement of fate, and she hopes to fight against the injustice of fate through the hands of her children.
Of course, for a mother who hopes that her children can change their fate through studying, she also hates my misdeeds in the village all day long. Even if she was kind enough not to allow her to stick to me, she would have dealt with me in the harshest way she could.
For example, when I went to the ground, in order to prevent me from "sinning" again, they took me with them. This is undoubtedly capital punishment for me. The cucumbers of the east family can be picked today, and the ducks of the west family are released today...... In short, my mother's way of putting me under her sight was always very effective in intimidating me.
After a few days of being watched, I was honest for a few days. Honestly stay at home and be a good baby, no longer go out to trick or treat. My mother, on the other hand, would often let her guard down on me and let me move freely.
Of course, in addition to temporary controls such as surveillance, long-term measures are also essential. For example, every summer vacation, in order to worry about my swimming accident, I lock the door at noon and let me take a nap at home. This is a kind of merciless torture for me, who is full of energy and has an infinite yearning for the fish and shrimp in the reservoir in the village.
Fortunately, I am very "hands-on" and can always find a way to deal with it. Whenever my mother had fallen asleep, I would tiptoe out of bed, expertly get out of the gap between the threshold and the door, and then run out to the reservoir like a gust of wind to soak in the water. Then I slipped back before my mother woke up, lay down on the bed, and faked the illusion that I had been napping at home at noon.
But it seems that all mothers in the world have a superpower that can see through the lies of their naughty son, no matter how I disguise it, I am always ruthlessly exposed by my mother. For example, if you want to know if you have gone into the water to swim, as long as you scratch it lightly on your fingernail and arm, leaving a white mark, it means that you have been there. Otherwise, you will be praised for "doing well today and not going to play in the water".
Probably all mothers in the world are gentle and kind, especially my mother. Mistakes are rarely really punished, but they always reward me in a different way. This allowed me to continue my career as a demon king until I left that small mountain village and went to study in the town.
Compared with the warmth left to me by my mother, my father has always been a blank in my childhood. No matter how much I searched my stomach, it was difficult to find more imprints related to him from the depths of my memory. My father's woodenness and lack of words naturally became an insurmountable gap between my father and son.
In my impression, my father is always silent, and his dark face can still see a little bit of the heroism of his youth, and his slightly leaning back is full of the helplessness of life. Unfortunately, my father's face is still blurry in my mind, and no matter how hard I try, it is difficult for him to appear clearly in my mind.
The stories about him are almost all pieced together bit by bit from his drunken chatter. The well-being of his ancestors was not passed on to his father's generation, and under that special historical background, his father, as a descendant of landlords, had to give up his studies early and work in the fields, and since then he has written a life story that is very different from that of his peers.
For as long as I can remember, my impression of my father has always revolved around a black suitcase. Every year after the heavy snow in the north closes the city, my father, who works far away in the northeast, will come home with his black suitcase.
Because the image of my father is always very vague, I can only vaguely remember that my father always wore a gray suit that did not match his figure very well, and I am not sure that it was because I was reluctant to accompany him through the green years of the "comrade-in-arms". Or because I am tired from life and cannot afford to buy new clothes.
In short, that gray suit was the deepest impression I had of my father in my childhood until I was ten years old. His father's "close comrade-in-arms" finally fell, the comrade-in-arms who had witnessed the vigor of his youth, who accompanied him from a young boy to a father of two children. In the end, he was unable to accompany him to continue the fight, and replaced him with a brown nickname coat, which also accompanied his father for many, many years.
And the black suitcase has always been by my father's side, going south and north. It wasn't until we were all grown up and my father finally lifted the heavy burden from his shoulders that the black suitcase was able to retire.
Now that I think about it, I don't know how much loneliness and loneliness was hidden in my father's reticent words in those rare happy moments. Like most Chinese fathers, he never expressed his emotions in words, but just silently did what he thought a father should do ---- earn money to support his family.
And about the father's growth is also based on the narrative of the elders of the family little by little, when he was born, he caught up with three years of natural disasters, and in that year of changing children and eating, the infant father brushed shoulders with death countless times. relied on the relief of my grandmother's relatives and barely survived.
When I reached the age of going to school, I had not graduated from primary school and caught up with the catastrophe of ten years, so I could only hastily put down my schoolbag, picked up the basket, and picked up the hammer. finally survived to adulthood, thinking that he could finally achieve a career with his diligence and hard work, but he helplessly found that his barren knowledge reserves were no longer enough to support his great ideals.
Two people who were cruelly tricked by fate hurriedly ended their fantasy of life at the age when their youth was just blooming, and hastily combined together to fight against the injustice of fate.
At the end of the eighties, it was the time of the reform of the whole country with one heart and one mind. The spring breeze of reform also blew to the small mountain village where they lived, so the father had to leave behind his mother and sister, who was pregnant with Liujia, and left the country to leave. began his thirty-year wandering life in a foreign country for his hometown.
And the only bit of warmth is through a few days and nights of sleepless long-distance trains, back to our hometown for the New Year, when we reunited with our mother and son.
Brief reunions are always difficult to bridge the pain of separation, and in the reunion and separation again and again, the two young lives begin to become numb and even mean. For no one has ever told them what life should be, and no one has ever given them a helping hand to show them the way.
They had to bear the weight of life with their immature shoulders, and tell life with a resolute attitude that they had never admitted defeat. My mother took care of our sister and brother and a few acres of thin fields at home alone, while my proud father could only put down his pride and choose forbearance and restraint in exchange for a year's food and clothing for our family.
I used to naively think that there was no love in my father's married life at the age of the beginning of love, because I had never seen the sweetness of love between them. I saw more of the bent spine and the emaciated face of life, as well as the relative wordlessness and chatter of all kinds of quarrels. I don't know if two young people, thousands of miles apart, have ever thought of complaining to each other during the thousands of days and nights they have been apart.
And it was in the days when my parents were busy fighting against life that I began my own savage growth. When I was a child, I had the same yearning for my father as most boys. I longed for my father's company and wanted to ride on his broad shoulders.
I couldn't understand why my dad wasn't around to play games with me, not make me toys, or even let me call my dad at any time. In the boy's world, Dad's tall and majestic body is enough to resist all his fear and cowardice.
My dad, on the other hand, is more like a symbol, so that I can only look at him from a distance in the shortest days, and I dare not get close, or even call out the dad. was supposed to be the most important person in life, but became the most familiar stranger.
Watching my father drift away from me, I was powerless to resist and had to do my best to behave in front of my father to attract his attention. However, perhaps it was his nature, or perhaps he himself had never felt love, and his father was indifferent to love. It wasn't until I became a father of two children myself that I understood where my father's indifference in youth came from, and why my father seemed so arrogant and unapproachable at that time.
Although I don't know much about my father's experiences when he was young, it is not difficult to see from him and others that my father was a man with lofty ideals and revenge. It is not difficult to see from his career that his father in his youth had many different attempts, but most of them ended in failure.
In a career spanning forty years, he has been trying to find a way to make his mark on the world, but often unable to do so, and finally failed to break free from the shackles of fate.
While trying his best to fight against his fate, he has to take responsibility for two young lives. Although I can't turn back the time, I can fully feel my father's helplessness and loneliness during those years. All the burdens were on his own, and he was constantly trying to find a way to balance his world.
The hardships of carrying a heavy burden, crawling forward in the mire and the depression of not being able to communicate with outsiders crushed the young man. The turbulent times and lack of knowledge filled his youth with all kinds of uncertainties, and his mother's lack of spiritual support as a significant other became a major help for him. He can only face all kinds of hardships in life alone, and strive to explore the true face of this world.
So many years later, when I was young and rebellious, I always felt that my father was a very failed person, a failed career, a failed marriage, and a failed growth trajectory. Everything foreshadows that my father's life is difficult to associate with success. It wasn't until I had a child of my own and was responsible for a life that I realized what an unforgivable mistake I had made.
Unfortunately, I never apologized to my father once, because he kept telling me with his actions that he didn't need an apology from me. He just hopes that all his efforts can be exchanged for a stable life for his children, and he hopes that we can build our own destiny ladder to success on the foundation he has laid.