Chapter 4 2. Quasi-slums

As far back as I can remember, my family lived at No. 120 Houjia Road.However, that is not where I was born, I was born in a house in Hongkou District.My mother said that when she was pregnant with me, the War of Resistance was coming to an end, Japanese planes frequently bombed Shanghai, Hongkou was the key target, and the sirens and bombs outside the window kept ringing, which made her in extreme panic.Perhaps it is this special prenatal education that created my overly sensitive nature.My mother was in poor health when she was pregnant with me, and there was no milk after giving birth. I was raised on milk powder, so my physique was relatively weak.Not long after I gave birth, a neighbor named Mao accidentally caught fire and burned down the whole house.Later, this neighbor took refuge in his elder brother and introduced my family to him, so my family moved to Houjia Road and lived in the house where his elder brother was the second landlord.More than ten years after the incident, my mother often talked about the comfort of the Hongkou residence with nostalgia, but she was still worried about the troubles caused by the Mao family.I don't remember the situation of my birth house at all. Infected by my mother's emotions, I always imagine it as a bright and spacious building. In short, there is no more beautiful house in the world.

Houjia Road is located in the southeast corner of Shanghai and belongs to Yimiao District, which was later renamed Nanshi District.It is the old city of Shanghai, with criss-cross narrow streets paved with irregular wax-yellow or blue-gray cobblestones. On both sides of the street are low, old brick houses and wooden houses, tightly packed together.In Shanghai at that time, there were two districts that most resembled slums, one was Zhabei District, and the other was Yimiao District.Yimiao District is close to the Huangpu River. Due to poor drainage facilities, every year during the heavy rain season, when the Huangpu River swells, knee-deep water will accumulate on the streets in that area, which we call Fadashui.The water comes up from the gutter, of course it is very dirty, and there are water spiders jumping on the surface of the water.The adults naturally find it inconvenient, but we children, wearing clogs or barefoot, wading happily in the dirty water like a festival.For poor city kids, this is a rare opportunity to be close to the water.

The dawn scene in the old city of Shanghai is very distinctive.Every morning, when the sky is dim and bright, someone pushes the dung truck and shouts while walking. Every household walks out with the toilet and pours the excrement into the dung truck. the sound of.After a while, the garbage truck came, and the pusher rang his handbell ringingly, and every family came out to take out the garbage again.The street woke up to the sound of toilets being flushed and bells ringing.Then, the women carried bamboo baskets and bargained around the vegetable stalls on the street. There was a lot of noise, and a similar and lively day began.

Walk into a small door facing the street on Houjia Road, climb up the dark stairs, cross a small wooden bridge above the patio, and step onto a narrow wooden corridor. My house is at the top of the corridor.It was a very small square room, only a few square meters, and Shanghainese called it a pavilion.There is a concrete platform on the top, and the sun makes the room extremely hot.It was so small that there was no room for two beds and a dining table, so my father had to build a simple room next to it and use it as a kitchen.Now I can't imagine how seven people could live in such a small space, but at that time I didn't feel unbearable at all. The children's adaptability is really beyond imagination.

Seen from the street, No. 120 looks like a small door, but when you walk in, it has a different world. In fact, it is a rather deep two-story building with more than ten families living there.The main part of the second floor is basically used by the Mao family, while the small wooden corridors and the houses on the first floor are rented out to other tenants.Downstairs lived several families from Hubei, and they often got together to play mahjong and gamble. The residents upstairs reported to the police, so there was hostility between upstairs and downstairs.On summer nights, the residents on the second floor often enjoy the shade on the cement platform on the roof. Uncle Mao likes to tell ghost stories.He also told a story about Xu Weichang, who said that a widow was pregnant and was brought to the court. Giving birth to a boneless stillborn baby proved the verdict was correct.This is of course nonsense, but it was the first time I heard sex-related discussions at that time, and I half-understood it, feeling very mysterious.

The Mao family is from Pudong, and they speak with a strong Pudong accent.Da Mao was a fat man with a swollen face. He owned a hosiery factory. The workshop was in the large living room by the stairs. Seven or eight female workers were sitting beside the handlooms, and the clicking sound of the machines could be heard all over the building.Xiao Mao is tall and thin. He has been through labor reform, has no job, and has been in poverty all his life.His wife also worked in a hosiery factory, a poor, pale woman who was often beaten by her husband.If there was sudden crying and shouting in the building, it was likely that Uncle Mao was beating his wife, and the result was often that the wife was pushed down the long stairs, and her head was covered in blood.In the next few days, people will see Aunt Mao's head wrapped in a piece of cloth.Uncle Mao beat his wife the same way, just as hard, but less than Xiao Mao.After being beaten, the wives of the two families remained submissive and regarded beatings as a normal part of their lives.

In my impression, Uncle Mao was very strict with children, unsmiling, but Uncle Mao liked children, he smiled when he saw each other, and would take me to the streets to play when he was in a good mood.He was kind, but once he helped my father displeased him.That day, I stuck my head into the iron railing at the head of the bed to play, but couldn't get out. After hearing the news, the Mao family uncle rushed over and knocked off one of the railings with a hammer.When my father came home from get off work, he scolded Uncle Mao for being too stupid, saying that if he could get in, he would be able to get out. He didn't even understand this principle.Anyway, since then, the iron bed in my house has lost a railing.

Ermao's family has many children, and I still remember the names of each of them.The eldest son of Damao's family is Cai Ting, who is much older than us and married when I was in elementary school.He has a handsome appearance, and he took a photo of him disguised as Liang Shanbo, which made me admire him for a long time.His wedding was held in a hotel with ten or twenty tables, which was considered a grand occasion at the time.My mother gave my father a gift of five yuan behind her back, and took us to the wedding. The purpose of course was to let us have a good meal.There was a lot of red tape in the old-fashioned wedding, and the bride and groom were constantly being led to bow before every elder who had anything to do with them, and even though I was a child at the time, I had already noticed that they were growing impatient and sullen.The climax of the wedding ceremony is to worship heaven and earth. When the master of ceremonies announced loudly, something unexpected happened, and people found that the bride and groom had disappeared.There was a commotion in the hall, and finally they seemed to be found out from the toilet. The groom's face was ashen, and he reluctantly bowed three times.The grown-ups said the groom was new-fashioned and didn't like these old-fashioned etiquettes.However, not long after getting married, this new-style man also beat the wife who was the principal of the primary school as often as his fathers did.The second daughter of Damao’s family is Caihong, who is two years older than me. My father often joked that he would be engaged to us, which made us a little shy when we met.Later, her older sister Caixia died of encephalitis, and she inherited her older sister's marriage and became the wife of her brother-in-law. It is said that this is a custom in the Pudong countryside.

Xiao Mao's family was very poor, and there were two boys in the family who were similar in age to me, and they became my frequent playmates when I was young.Caiyun is two years older than me, and likes to steal things from home and sell them.Once, the family asked him to go to a place for business, and he invited me to go with him.When boarding the bus, he took out a five-yuan ticket to buy a bus ticket. I was surprised and asked him why he didn't use the change.He said that by changing the entire fare, he could lie about the fare and keep some money for himself.This approach is something I never thought of, and it surprised me for a long time.Caifei is two years younger than me, her body and face are always dirty, her nose is always dragging, and she licks her mouth with her tongue from time to time.He once seriously told me one of his important discoveries, that snot tastes delicious.

Many stories may have happened in this old building on Houjia Road, but I didn't know much when I was young.Among the other tenants, Li's mother left a deep impression on me.Passing through the living room of the Mao family as a workshop, there is a door in the corner, and the amiable mother of the Li family lives inside the door.She is a beautiful Cantonese woman with crooked eyes and thin lips. She often smiles brightly, revealing her white and neat teeth.She also loves to dress up, always draws her eyebrows and puts on lipstick, which is very taboo in the new society.Her husband was an old man much older than her, wearing a pair of gold-rimmed glasses and a mustache. It was said that he was a survivor of the Kuomintang, and died suddenly one night.The mother of the Li family has no children, and she likes me very much. Once, she invited me to her room, and she didn't know how to entertain me. Finally, she cooked me a bowl of sweet noodles.Perhaps out of suspicion of her life experience, my mother didn't approve of us interacting with her, but I couldn't help being attracted by her charming smile.Another particular tenant I remember was a single man who lived in a lightless cabin on the ground floor.He is not a local, and he does not associate with anyone, and no one pays attention to him.One day, he suddenly hanged himself, and the residents in the building talked about it for several days.A child saw the scene and described to me the protruding long tongue of the deceased.From then on, when I went up the stairs and passed the door of the hut, I felt a pang of terror.

When I was in the fifth grade of elementary school, my family moved, and the house on Houjia Road was continued by my third uncle and grandmother.After the relocation, because my sister and I were still studying in the original school, we continued to live in Houjia Road with my grandmother for the convenience of going to school, and only went to the new house to reunite with my parents on weekends.Grandma loves us very much, cooks chicken blood tofu soup for us every day, and asks us if it is good.At first I liked it, but then I got tired of it, but in order to make her happy, I always answered it was delicious.She was really happy and told her mother many times that chicken blood tofu soup was my favorite.As a result, I ate chicken blood tofu soup for a year.After graduating from elementary school, I also left Houjialu.A few years ago, during the upsurge of real estate development, all the old streets and old houses in the old city of Shanghai were demolished. There is no longer Houjia Road in the world, and there is no longer the pavilion that hides my childhood memories.