Chapter 14 Section five

Zijing returned to her father's house, to the world of opium incense.He has nowhere else to go. There were traces of his sister everywhere in the house, but he could no longer live with her.He can only wander in this house, living on the memories of the past—he is prematurely old, and has begun to remember at the age of seventeen or eighteen; he has never grown up, and has always been the silent little boy playing football— —The growth period is over long ago, but the trauma keeps growing. Hearing music playing on the radio, he remembered that in June 1934, "Yu Guang Song" starring Wang Renmei was hit in Shanghai, and its theme song was played on the radio every day, and everyone could sing it, but the stepmother A little girl hired by Xiaopang couldn't learn it no matter what.During the summer vacation, my sister got up early every morning to practice the piano. Probably because she was tired of practicing the basic skills, she remembered to play the piano and teach Xiaopang to sing. This is the theme song.But I can't teach after teaching, just the first two sentences "clouds float in the sky, fish hide in the water" and I taught the whole morning, woke up my father and stepmother, got scolded, and from then on my sister was not allowed to speak in the morning. Practicing the piano——Thinking about it now, the melody of "Yuguang" seems to still ring in my ears.And the appearance of my sister sitting at the piano and teaching Xiaopang to sing is also so clear, as if in front of my eyes.

My elder sister has always been fond of music, and is also very good at singing. When she was very young, she would pester the nanny to tell stories and sing their nursery rhymes from the countryside in northern Anhui, but he couldn't learn a single word; Bai, Mr. Zhu is in his sixties, he is very kind to others, and he also likes his sister very much. According to her request, he read a passage written in Wu dialect in Suzhou dialect. My sister is not addicted, so she specially picks out the wife who is a prostitute who comes to find her husband. Mr. Zhu had no choice but to read the part of the quarrel, so he had to hold his voice and read to her in a female accent, which made the siblings laugh so hard that they almost rolled to the ground.My sister was really willful at that time.

My sister's waywardness is especially manifested in watching movies.Watching movies is one of her great hobbies, second only to reading novels, and she subscribes to many movie publications.She likes Greta Garbo, like a general gossip movie fan, not only appreciating her acting skills, but also curious about her mysterious life experience, also likes Gary Cooper, Shirley Temple, Vivien Leigh; Chinese like Ruan Lingyu, Tan Ying, Chen Yanyan, Gu Lanjun, Shangguan Yunzhu, Shi Hui... At that time, sound films had just started. In 1930, Ruan Lingyu sang for the first time in "Wild Grass and Idle Flowers", and her sister immediately learned to sing; in 1931, Hu Die sang in "The Song Girl Red Peony". After talking a long dialogue, my sister can also recite it verbatim; once the siblings went to Hangzhou to play, and they lived in the old house of the stepmother’s natal family, with many relatives and friends.The next day, the newspaper said that the movie "Wind" starring Tan Ying was being screened in a Shanghai cinema, and my sister was about to rush back to Shanghai to watch it. No matter how much I tried to persuade her, he had no choice but to accompany her by train to Shanghai, and went straight to Shanghai. In that movie theater, watch two shows in a row.His headache was terrible, but his sister proudly said: "It's a good thing I came back to watch it today, otherwise I don't know how sad I am!" Now that his sister is not around, he doesn't even feel like watching a movie, because he can't stop thinking about her. .

I also think about it when I eat—my sister likes to eat sweets, purple ice cream, popcorn, sweet potato candy, palm eggs, wisteria flower cake, Hefei meatballs, all of which are cheap and ordinary foods, but Hefei meatballs are more wordy , only my sister’s nanny, Hegan, can do it—first cook a pot of glutinous rice, and after it cools down, knead it into small millet balls, put the prepared minced meat into the rice balls and knead them together, about the size of glutinous rice balls, and then put The glutinous rice balls are rolled in egg yolk, and then fried in an oil pan.My sister likes to eat it so much, and eats it so happily that the whole family, including my father and servants, also fell in love with this dish later.Now that my sister has escaped, even the old nanny He Gan has been implicated by this incident, and has gone back to northern Anhui to take care of her elderly, so naturally she can't eat Hefei meatballs.

He still remembers many writing methods taught by his sister: the best way to accumulate beautiful vocabulary and vivid language is to pay attention to people's conversations anytime and anywhere, try to remember them as soon as they hear them, and write them in a notebook, which will become a time for writing in the future. The best raw material; there is a good way to improve your Chinese and English writing skills, which is to translate one of your own exercises from Chinese to English, and then from English to Chinese.Repeating this many times and avoiding repeated words and sentences will definitely make great progress in both Chinese and English.

My sister is a natural writer, and she is good at both Chinese and English. Not long after she escaped from her father’s house, she wrote an article in English and published it in the “Damei Evening News”, disclosing the process of being under house arrest by her father. The editor gave the article a very provocative title: "What a life! What a girl's life!" The family has always subscribed to the "Damei Evening News". When my father saw the article, he was furious, but he had already taken his sister's life. There is no way - he can no longer beat her, and he can no longer lock her up, she has gone far away, and she no longer has to be afraid of him.

She will fly higher and farther in the future, higher and farther than her father and ancestors, even higher than him, until it is unattainable. He remembered that when he was a child, his elder sister liked to swing very high, and he watched from the side, envious, but he dared not sit on it. The world that his elder sister saw was always higher and farther than him.In 1934, when his older sister was promoted to grade one, he was only in the fifth grade of elementary school; after graduating from elementary school in 1936, his father asked him to suspend school at home for another year; In 1938, his sister ran away from home, and his father was stimulated, so he decided to send him to Zhengshi Middle School for the first grade of junior high school. The headmaster has changed, so his father asked him to drop out of school again...

At this time, I heard that my sister has been admitted to the University of London, and she is still the number one in the Far East, which shows that she is really working hard.Unfortunately, because of the war, I could no longer go to England, so I had to change to the University of Hong Kong. His sister's success made him even more humble and helpless, and Zhang Zijing became more silent and shy.Zhang Ailing left Shanghai in the summer of 1939 and went to Hong Kong by boat alone. He didn't send it. Seventy years later, Eileen Chang's "Trilogy of Autobiography" in Chinese and English was published successively, writing this true feeling into the novel, and sadly depicting the death of her younger brother, Master Ling, and letting Master Ling die at the age of seventeen.

That's because Zhang Ailing ran away from home to join her mother, and her younger brother Zijing followed suit but was rejected by her mother. Zijing was just seventeen years old that year. When Zhang Ailing looked at the back of her brother crying and leaving, the sadness in her heart was indescribable, and she didn't know how to face this parting of life and death.She didn't even regard it as a divorce, because the feeling of helplessness and despair in her heart was far from being comparable to an ordinary divorce. The departure of her brother was almost a farewell to her heart.

In the book, she described her childhood brother as an angel, such a cute and beautiful little thing, who would hug her and give him a strong kiss from time to time: "He has grown up beautifully, with a snow-white cat face, thick and abundant black hair. His thin mouth is bright red, and his lips are delicately shaped. The blue cocoon cotton robe is covered with milky white butterflies, and the outer cover is golden-spotted brown. Vest, a row of small brass beads. 'Your brother is so beautiful. 'Pipa shouted, hugged him, and kissed his face many times, his skin was as tender as a flower petal, not as thick as her own.Because I was thin, I felt a cage under the clothes when I hugged her tightly.He pretended not to hear his sister's compliment, and let her hug and kiss, as if it happened too fast and he couldn't react in time.Pipa Ding likes to do this, partly to make the mothers laugh, they appreciate this scene very much. "

She did not hesitate to use various words of praise to describe the beauty and loveliness of her younger brother, and she took pains to write about him as a poor little boy who was gluttonous and chomped on food because of illness. The silly look when the strap got caught and the end of the strap was held by the old lady, the smart look where he memorized the book sadly, and actually recited it faster than her, the scene where he picked out the paint in the bedroom and the study with her head to head, and A game of pretending to be a hero to fight with her, she wields double swords, he wields a pair of octagonal copper hammers...he is always so weak, so small, so uninhibited, follows her silently, and sometimes plays pranks , peeping or teasing her with jealous eyes, draw a black line on her picture, but he is always her dearest brother, the two of them slept in the same room since childhood, worshiped a husband as a teacher, and even took a bath Together.She couldn't help loving him. However, when he grew up day by day, she could no longer love him because she couldn't help him. In it, she wrote that after her father remarried, she was instigated by her stepmother to beat her son, "every day like beating a girl", and once taught him to kneel with a brick on his head for three incense sticks.She was heartbroken, but she didn't dare to ask him, she didn't even dare to look at him, for fear of causing him more insults, so she just sat by the window and sulked silently—— "Pipa knows that her father won't trouble Ling every day if he doesn't have someone to provoke him. He doesn't have the perseverance. Besides, as he grows old, he won't look at his only son any less." "She didn't want to think about the mausoleum kneeling in the wasteland below. Kneeling there, the gravel and the grass of Susu looked unnatural. The sun covered his head, like a foggy white turban. But he couldn't sleep, the head The bricks will fall, and my father can see it from the window. A small stick of brown incense, with a red head and one eye, slowly counting the time of another century. Does he feel the same way? Maybe not. My younger brother compares At other times, she has to be rusty and closed. Maybe she wants to think this way herself, and wants to save him from the shame of being punished, and also save herself, because she is ashamed that she can only do nothing." There was nothing she could do, she couldn't save him, she couldn't help him.Write endless pain and helplessness, sorrow and desolation.When love reaches the point where it can no longer be given, the only option is to cut it off. So she wrote that he died.She only when he is dead.She lost her brother, he lost her sister, and they no longer had the fate of siblings.