Chapter 22 endowed with eternal regret

The topic was written by Ms. Han Xiaohui, so it is called "Fude".But the article is written by me willingly, so it is not stereotyped. Why am I willing to write such an article? In a word, the title is well chosen, and it not only won my heart, but also won my heart first: I have wanted to write such an article for a long time. I have reached the ninth year of Wangwang.In the past 70 or 80 years, from the countryside to the city; from domestic to foreign countries; from primary schools, middle schools, universities to foreign research institutes; Bumpy Road.I have walked through Yangguan Avenue and a small single-plank bridge; I have passed through "mountains and rivers without doubts", and I have seen "another village with dark willows and bright flowers".Joy and sorrow go hand in hand, disappointment and hope fly together, and I have been through a lot.If you want to talk about regrets, you can find them everywhere.To choose the deepest, truest, and most unforgettable regret among them, the eternal regret, is also at hand, because it has not left my heart for a moment.

My eternal regret is: I should not have left my hometown and my mother. I was born in an extremely poor village in northwest Shandong.Our family is the poorest of the poor. It can be said that there is no place for the poor to stand.During the ten-year catastrophe, I myself jumped out to oppose the perverse but popular "Lafayette" of Peking University. She regarded it as a thorn in her side and wanted to get rid of it quickly.Her subordinates have rushed to my hometown twice, deliberately "beating" me into a landlord, and their teacher's airs, which are ruthless and vicious, have not been able to frighten my folks.A friend of mine when I was young pointed to their noses and said loudly: "If the whole Guanzhuang is to complain, Ji Xianlin's will be the first!"

This sentence is not exaggerating, he is telling the truth.My grandparents died early, leaving behind my father and three brothers, all alone and helpless.The youngest uncle gave it away.My father and Uncle Jiu were so hungry that they had no choice but to go to other people's jujube groves to pick up dried dates that fell on the ground to satisfy their hunger.This is of course not a long-term solution.In the end, the two brothers were forced to leave their hometowns and go to Jinan blindly to make a living.At this time, they were only in their teens or twenties.In a big city with no relatives, Uncle Jiu must have settled in Jinan after untold hardships.So my father returned to his hometown, saying he was a farmer, but he had no land to cultivate.It must have been through untold hardships, and Uncle Jiu sometimes sent some money home from Jinan, and my father lived on it.Somehow, I actually found (read Ruoxin) my daughter-in-law, and she is my mother.My mother's maiden name is Zhao, and her family is in the right family. Her family is as poor as ours, otherwise they would never get married.She can't even eat at home, so she doesn't have money and leisure to go to school.So my mother didn't know a single word, and lived her whole life without even a name.Her home is in another village, five miles away from our village.This five-mile journey is the longest distance my mother has traveled in her life.

The "Lafayette" at Peking University who wanted to be "beaten" into a "landlord", that is, me, was born in such a family with such a mother. Later I heard that our family was indeed "rich" for a while.Around the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, Uncle Jiu used the last fifty cents left in his pocket in the three eastern provinces to buy one-tenth of the Hubei flood lottery tickets and won the prize.The two brothers discussed that they wanted to "return to their hometown when they are rich", raising their eyebrows and exhaling their breath when they returned home.So the money was transported back home, Jiushu still stayed in the city, and the affairs of the village were handled by his father. He bought bricks and tiles and built a house at a ridiculous price.At a ridiculous price, he bought a field with a well.It will be dripping on a whim, and I am really proud.It's a pity that the good times didn't last long, and my father used ridiculous and bizarre ways, just like Song Jiang, open-minded and generous, entertaining friends from all over the world.In a blink of an eye, the tile-roofed houses were dismantled and sold for bricks and tiles.Fields with wells also changed owners.The whole family returned to the original situation.It was at this time and under such circumstances that I was born into the human world.

Mother, of course, experienced this dramatic change firsthand.Unfortunately, when I lived with my mother, I was only a few years old, tell me, I don't understand either.Therefore, the sudden rise and fall of our family this time is just like a flash in the pan, and I still don't fully understand it.This mystery may become an eternal mystery. In any case, our family has returned to its former poverty-stricken situation.Later, I heard people say that our family only had more than half an mu of land at that time.I don't know how this half an acre of land came about.A family of three lives on this half acre of land.Uncle Jiu in the city will of course give some money, but things like winning the Hubei flood award once in a lifetime are not uncommon.Uncle Jiu didn't have much money to help his brother.

I am too young to tell how life is at home.Anyway, I eat very badly, I know this.According to the standards at that time, eating "white" (referring to wheat noodles) was the highest, followed by millet noodles or stick noodle pancakes, and red sorghum pancakes, which were red in color, like pork liver. "White" has nothing to do with our family. "Yellow" (millet noodles or stick noodles are both yellow in color) and we have little fate.There are only "red" people who work together all day long.This "red" is bitter and astringent, which is really hard to swallow.But if I don’t eat and I’m hungry, I’m really talking about the “red” color change.

However, children also have children's ways.My grandfather's cousin is a Juren, his wife I call her grandma.They are rich and landed.Although Juren died, his family was still in good condition.My great grandmother is still alive.Her grandson died early, so she poured all her love on me.She is one of the few people in Guanzhuang who can eat "white food".She not only eats by herself, but also sets aside half or a quarter of the white flour buns for me every day.Every morning when I opened my eyes, I immediately jumped off the kang and ran to the village. Our family lives outside the village.I ran to the grandma, and yelled crisply and sweetly: "Grandma!" She immediately couldn't close her mouth with a smile, retracted her hands back into her fat sleeves, took out a small piece of steamed bun from her pocket, and handed it to me. This is the happiest moment of my day.

In addition, I can occasionally eat a little "white", which is exchanged for my own labor.When the summer wheat harvest season comes, our family has no wheat to harvest at all.The aunt and aunt of the Ning family who lived across the door—their family was also very poor—took me to “gather wheat” in the fields of rich people in this village or in other villages.The so-called "picking up wheat" means that after the long-term workers of other families have harvested the wheat, there will always be a few ears of wheat left over. These are not worth picking up, and we poor people come to "pick up".Because there will never be much left, we picked it up for a long time, but we only picked up half of the basket, but for us, this is already a treasure.It must be that my aunt and aunt took special care of me. A four-, five-, or six-year-old child can pick up ten or eight catties of wheat grains in one summer.These are all made by my mother.In order to reward me, after the wheat season, my mother would grind the wheat into flour, steam it into steamed buns, or paste it into white flour pancakes to satisfy my cravings.So I feasted on it.

I remember that one year, my performance in picking wheat may be a bit "supernormal".When it came to the Mid-Autumn Festival—the farmers called it "August 15th"—my mother got some mooncakes from somewhere, and broke a piece for me. I squatted next to a stone and ate it.At that time, for me, moon cakes were really magical things, and the dragon liver and phoenix marrow were incomparable, and it was rare for me to eat them once.I didn't pay attention to whether my mother was also eating.Looking back now, she didn't even eat a bite.Not only moon cakes, but even other "white ones", my mother never tasted them, and left them for me to eat.She probably spent her whole life with red sorghum pancakes.In the apocalyptic year, if you can't even eat this, you can only eat wild vegetables.

As for meat, the memory of eating seems to be a blank.Next door to my mother's house is a workshop that sells boiled beef.The old cattle that have worked hard for the farmers all their lives, when they are old and can no longer plow, a few farmers buy them at a very low price, kill them in a very brutal way, boil the meat, and then sell them.Old beef is difficult to cook, and there is really no way to do it. The farmers urinate in the meat pot, so that the meat will rot.Farmers are kind-hearted, and when this happens, they tell their neighbors: "Don't buy today's meat!" My mother's family is poor, and although I love my grandson very much, I can only use earthen jars, and spend a few dollars to make a jar. Beef soup is better than nothing.I remember one time, there was an extra piece of beef belly in the jar, which became my patent.I was reluctant to eat it all at once, so I used a small rusty iron knife to cut and eat piece by piece, eating slowly.This piece of tripe is really comparable to moon cakes.

"White", moon cakes and tripe are rare, but how about "yellow"? "Yellow" is also rare.But even though I'm only a few years old, I figured out a way.In the three seasons of spring, summer and autumn, the grass and crops outside the village grow up.I would go outside the village to mow grass, or go to other people's sorghum fields to chop sorghum leaves.Landlords not only do not forbid splitting sorghum leaves, but also welcome them; because once the leaves are split, ventilation can be improved, sorghum can grow better, and more grain can be harvested.Grass and sorghum leaves are used to feed cattle.Our family is poor and we have never raised cattle.My second uncle's family has land and often raises two big cows.My grass and sorghum leaves are for them.Whenever I, a child less than three pieces of tofu, walked into the gate of the second uncle with a large bundle of grass or sorghum leaves on my back, I felt confident and fearless. I put the grass in the cow pen and refused to leave. You can always have a "yellow" meal, and you won't be "rolled" by the second aunt (our local dialect means "swear").When it was Chinese New Year, I felt in my heart that in the past year, I had made great contributions in feeding the cows, and I had the courage to go to the second uncle's house to eat yellow noodle cakes.Yellow noodle cake is steamed with yellow rice flour and jujube.Although the color is yellow, it ranks above the "white", because it is only eaten once a year during the Chinese New Year, and rare things are more expensive, so yellow noodle cakes become more expensive. What I'm talking about above is all about food.Why did we talk about food when we talked about mother? The reason is not complicated.One, I as a child tended to care about what to eat.Second, almost all the delicious things I mentioned above have nothing to do with my mother.Except for "yellow", she has nothing to do with the rest.I stayed with her until I was six years old, and I went home for two funerals, and my stay was very short.Now that I recall it, even my mother's face is blurred, without a clear outline.There is one point in particular that makes me difficult to understand but easy to understand: I can't recall my mother's smile anyway, it seems that she has never smiled in her life.The family is poor, and her son is far away. She has suffered so much. Where does the smile come from? Once I went home and heard Aunt Ning from the opposite side tell me: "Your mother often said: 'I knew that I would not come back if I sent it out. No matter what, I will never let him go!'" There is so much bitterness and sadness in this short sentence! I don't know how many days and nights the mother has looked into the distance, hoping that her son will come back! Never went back, until the mother left this world. For this situation, I was ignorant at first, and I didn't understand it deeply.When I was in high school, I was a few years older and gradually understood.But I depended on others, I couldn’t be independent financially, and I had ambitions and ambitions, but I couldn’t realize them. I secretly made up my mind and made a vow: Once I graduated from university, I found a job and immediately adopted my mother. However, before I graduated from university, my mother Just leave me gone, gone forever and ever.The ancients said: "The tree wants to be quiet but the wind doesn't stop; the child wants to support but the relatives don't wait."I can't bear to imagine the situation when my mother misses her beloved son when she is dying; when I think about it, my heart will be broken and tears will fill my eyes.When I rushed back to Jinan from Beiping, and then back to Qingping from Jinan to attend the funeral, I saw my mother's coffin and saw the simple house. I really wanted to smash my head on the coffin and follow my mother to the ground.I regret, I really regret, I should never have left my mother.No matter what kind of reputation, status, happiness, or honor in the world, nothing compares to staying with mother, even if she doesn't know a word, even if she eats "red food" all day long. This is my "eternal regret". March 5, 1994