Chapter 67 Afterword to "Qin Opera" (1)

In the southeast of Shaanxi, along the Danjiang River, there is a village called Dihua Street at the junction of Danfeng County and Shang County (now the Shangluo Special District is restructured into Shangluo City, and Shang County is Shangzhou District). That is my village. home.I was born there and grew up there until I was nineteen.The Danjiang River originated from the Qinling Mountains, and the Hanjiang River, which broke through the high mountains, formed six or seven basins along the way. Dihua Street is a relatively small basin, but it is the most complete. The characteristics of the basin are: surrounded by four mountains, vertical and horizontal paddy fields, and produce whole grains , growing reeds and lotus roots.In front of the village and town is Bijia Mountain. In the village and town, there are wooden gates and stone old streets, high steps, large venues, pagodas, temples, bell towers, Kuixing Pavilion and theater buildings.People in the villages and towns have always called the street Guan Road. Guan Road used to be the only main road leading to the southeast in ancient Chang'an. Li Zicheng's Chuangwang boxing technique.If you look at the cliffs on the south bank of the river, you can see the grottoes where deserters and bandits used to flee. It is said that there are still mummified corpses in the grottoes. At dusk, swarms of bats fly out, and Dihua Street is completely dark.What makes the villagers talk about it is that the ancestors received Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, Han Yu and other figures, they stayed on the street and wrote many poems.Before I was nineteen years old, I never walked out of Dihua Street for a radius of 30 miles. I wore straw sandals and wore a hijab. Except for school, I often carried ground rice to the North and South Mountains to exchange more corn and potatoes. They asked "Where is it from?" I said, "It's from Dihua Street!" They didn't dare to make trouble on the scale.At that time, the natural scenery and cultural landscape here were still famous in the Shangluo area, and city people wearing leather shoes often came down from National Highway 312 to visit and take pictures on the old street.But tigers are notorious for not eating people. Dihua Street is crowded with people and land is scarce, and life is extremely poor.In that spring, the willow and locust trees on the embankment would be wiped out as soon as they sprouted, and there were baskets and baskets in the spring pool, with stones pressing the boiled leaves and soaking them in the water.My younger brother and I helped my mother smash the dried vines that had been fried on the roller. When Luo came out, he couldn't wait to stuff it into his mouth. At night, the thin feces flowed down the legs of his trousers.In the building next door to my house, there lived an old man surnamed Li. He had been weaving straw sandals all his life, and a pair of straw sandals cost three cents. His greatest wish before death was to have a bowl of glutinous rice flour soup, but he didn’t eat it. The captain paid for him. He closed the coffin and said, "Don't become a starving ghost." What was stuffed in his arms was still a ripe sweet potato.There is no fat man in the whole village, and everyone has a slender neck. When a meeting is held, the big place is completely dark, and all are all soiled clothes and pants.In this group of people, who would have thought that there are so many capable people: Kuan Ren Shan makes wood.Benwangneng clay sculpture.The brothers of the Li family on the East Street are proficient in the huqin, playing under the elm tree in front of the door every night.Dongsheng in Zhongjie loves to sing Qin opera, and after eating his last meal, he has no next meal. His wife has gone to beg with others, but he is still singing in the house, singing Danjiao.When it rained, Uncle Wulin asked a group of us children to peel corn cobs or push stone mills for him. He then sat there cross-legged and said that someone checked the book and found that it was exactly the same as the book.He was secretly reading his life, and he finally became Mr. Yin Yang.Baiqing learned painting, using pot black as ink, he can draw twenty-four filial piety pictures on the wall.Liu Xinchun sorted out the drum scores.Liu Lie was skilled in civil engineering and led eight disciples to build almost all the important buildings in the county.The surname Han on West Street and the family Jia on East Street belong to the rich families on Dihua Street. Han Shuji and Jia Maoshun have the deepest writing and calligraphy, and their calligraphy is broad and gentle, and they have swept the inscriptions on the gate towers of the whole village.Every year from the 30th day of the twelfth lunar month to the 15th day of the first lunar month, Dihua Street is full of big plays and social fires. The actor's subsidy is three catties of hot sweet potatoes per person each time. The opera and social fires go to the county for performances, and they always win the first prize medal. .As a result, cadres who came to work in the town from other places were reminded when they came: Do not speak or write casually when you arrive at Dihua Street.Furthermore, I left my hometown and lived in Xi’an, where I became famous for my writing. People in my hometown didn’t take it seriously. Someone even mentioned me on Dihua Street, and the response was: like him, this place can pull a cart!

I have lived in this hometown for nineteen years.I could read characters in the classroom converted from the ancestral hall.I have always been sick, but I have never been to the hospital. I either drink ginger soup to cover my sweat, or use cupping cups or use ceramic tiles to cut the center of my eyebrows and let blood out. The diseases that cannot be cured for a long time are all "hit by a ghost", so I ask God to do it.I learned all kinds of farm work, learned Qin Opera and wrote couplets and brocade.I am a farmer, kind and responsible, selfish and strong, capable of exerting great efforts, and not telling others when I have suffering.I am grateful for the water and soil in my hometown, which makes me like a firefly in the reeds, with a small lamp at night, like Tangdi flowers all over the mountains and plains, the bright colors are self-dyed.However, I also hated my hometown. The poverty of my hometown kept my body from growing, and eating red sweet potatoes ruined my stomach.I finally left my hometown by chance. It used to be an earth-shattering event on Dihua Street. I remember sitting on the car going to the provincial capital with a bedding on my back. When I passed the Qinling Mountains, I stopped to urinate. I said: I skinned the peasants. up!But later, as a city dweller, I discovered that my nature is still a farmer, like a black-bone chicken, which is black on the bone.I have to go back to my hometown every year and festival, to attend birthdays, weddings, and funerals of my old relatives, visit the door, and eat banquets. As soon as I enter the streets of the village and town, the villagers don’t think that I am a writer. The son is back!I have to hurry up and pass the cigarettes.My hut in the city has been the office of my hometown in the provincial capital for quite a long time. I have prepared a large stack of thick porcelain sea bowls and a few steel wire beds. Spicy peppers, big lumps of garlic, and fists when drinking, making people in the same corridor glaring.So, anything happened on Dihua Street, such as who got a grandson, whether he was born in a smooth way or a wild life, who died again, whether the meal after the burial was served with one piece of meat or two pieces of meat, whose daughter-in-law couldn’t live a life, I know all about which brothers split into one basket and became enemies.In the ten years from 1979 to 1989, the news of my hometown always cheered me up. The land was contracted, the weather was good, the food was enough, and people always brought me freshly milled rice. All kinds of boiled beans, even half a fan of pork, they want to comment that the flowers and trees in the park are better than the flowers and trees in their yard, and they want to enter the theater garden, and they want me to write couplets for them. Also noble!Those years were the happiest years for the folks. They worked meticulously on the redistributed land. Under the moonlit night in winter, there were often people working in the fields. There were tobacco boxes and radios on the field weirs, and the radio was roaring at the top of its lungs. Qin opera.As soon as I went back, either this family started to build a new house, or another family made furniture for their son’s wedding, or the old people were drying the shrouds and shoes they had made for the future.The three major events in a farmer's life are to marry their children, pay their respects to the elderly, and build a new house. They are doing all of these decently, and they are very comfortable. They all stick Deng Xiaoping's portrait on the wall, burn incense and kowtow to him.My friends who used to harness cattle, chop firewood, and steal carrots and peas would fill up the old yard of my house. We smoked cigarettes, drank soju, and sang Qin opera. We were all dizzy and called each other "brother", Di People in Huajie pronounce "ge" as "guo", and it is as lively as a nest of birds.