Chapter 9 Feng Shui

Our generation received materialistic education, and I never knew what "Feng Shui" was. The first time I heard the word Fengshui was from Huichun.At that time Huichun had already married and had a child in Guangdong, and it was rare to return to Shanghai, so it was a surprise to see her in the alley.She was very enthusiastic about my little friend from back then, and she spoke a lot of her heart. Apart from scolding her revolutionary brother, she also told me that the reason why her father and I were unlucky was that the first child was not good at Fengshui!After she was assigned to Guangdong, one of her major gains was knowing Fengshui. Even in the "Cultural Revolution", people in her place still believed in Fengshui.

The gates of Shikumen houses in Shanghai are all facing south, and all the houses in Yuqingfang are like this, except for the first small alley from No. 1 to No. 11, the front door (gate) faces north, and the back door faces south, only two steps wide The fourth hospital wall.Probably when the architect of Yuqingfang was building No. 1 alley, he felt that it was not good for the gate to face too close to the wall, so he toppled the whole building in No. 1 alley. Although I had been excluded from the revolutionary masses at that time, the influence of revolutionary education was still stubborn in my mind. I did not believe in the theory of Feng Shui, and I raised an objection: There is also a developed house in the first small alley! Because the Rong family on the 7th floor is an industrial worker's family, Mrs. Rong is a cadre in the house, and she is extremely ruthless.The eldest brother of the Rong family went to Tsinghua University, and the younger brother went to Jiaotong University.How beautiful their home is.Even the little sister of the Rong family didn't go to the queue to settle down for some reason, and she was recruited as a middle school teacher after only one year of going to the farm.But Huichun thinks this is temporary, isn't Master Rong sick? No. 7 Feng Shui will not be good either.She asked me if I remembered the weird house downstairs in number 7.

In the 1950s, a "family" composed of two women lived downstairs in No. 7.One is completely masculine attire: short hair, blown "airplane hair", sometimes wearing a suit and tie, sometimes wearing a Chinese tunic suit, working in some factory; the other is normal women's attire, not working.At dusk in summer, they set up a small table at the back door with a few bowls of side dishes. Men and women sit and drink and smoke, while housewives serve "him" with vegetables, and sometimes take a sip of wine in "his" glass, completely like a loving couple young couple.But it was such a harmless and special family that was violently interfered: the neighborhood committee, the police station, and the men's and women's factories kept making trouble for them, but they cried and refused to leave. Disappeared, and later a fat man who worked on the railway stayed.

Huichun said that the woman dressed in men's clothing was also sent to reeducation through labor. She committed the crime of "hooliganism" - homosexuals in those days were equal to hooligans.The strange thing is that the housewife is not considered a hooligan, even though she is crying and clamoring to go to the labor camp with her "husband". After the "husband" left, the "wife" moved out of the sad place of No. 7. "Speaking of which, the feng shui in the alley of Lala is not good!" Huichun finally said. Thinking about what Huichun said, it seems to make sense: Master Rong, the head of the most developed family, died not long ago, not yet 60 years old.