Chapter 33 Chapter 32: The Soul of the Golden Triangle

1 Golden Triangle, beautiful Golden Triangle! If it weren't for poverty, disease, war, drugs, violence and crime that plagued this picturesque and pristine land, it would definitely become the most developmentable tourist attraction in the world.The lush tropical rainforest, dazzling rare birds and animals, majestic and strange mountains and valleys, as well as mysterious and moving customs, ethnic tribes, history and culture, natural resources, are all rare and final heritages of the human world... On my way from Mesle to Mengsa for an interview, I passed a place called Zhongzhai. It was afternoon, the sun was already westward, and suddenly a cloud came to block the sun.I looked up, where is the white cloud in the sky?It is clear that thousands of egrets and white cranes are soaring happily in the sky.I am a city person, and I have never seen such a large number of white birds since I can remember. They are like holy snowflakes, like the angels of God in legends, like the masterpiece "Swan Lake", like in the fairy tales I read when I was a child. The beautiful elves are dancing in the sky, and they keep pouring out their fine and happy calls to fill my heart.The sun slanted down, and the sky became extremely vivid and beautiful because of them. It was like walking into a pure dream, into a fairy tale world full of noble imagination and flawless.I shed tears, not because of grief but because of beauty. I was moved to tears because of the beautiful holy land that our world still retains, a holy land where our hearts can rest peacefully.

My friend said that this is the famous bird country in the Golden Triangle, and there are several natural bird countries of this size. Oh birds, beautiful birds!Fly merrily, and may the sins of man not interfere with your last dance.I wish silently in my heart. But more than a year later, I received a letter from a friend, who said that due to the road construction and the wildfire, the bird country we visited no longer exists.For several days in a row, I was sad and sleepless. In the Golden Triangle, I was lucky enough to see a herd of wild elephants. It was the day of the interview in Malutang. One morning, I occasionally found many moving huge black shadows on the hillside opposite the village. I suspected that I was wrong, so I quickly took out the binoculars Come.Oh my God!It was a group of large and small Asian wild elephants, about a dozen of them, wagging their noses and tails, walking out of the woods leisurely, around the edge of the village, and slowly walked into the opposite mountain, disappearing in the dark in the woods world.

I couldn't be more moved.Who broke the promise, broke the ancient agreement, crazily invaded the animals' homes, and killed rare birds and animals indiscriminately?It's us humans!It's evil humans!In the Golden Triangle, there is still about 100,000 square kilometers of uninhabited tropical rainforest, which is one of the few treasure houses of animal and plant genes left on earth. The local ethnic "poppy tribe" who live on poppy cultivation all migrated to the depths of no-man's land. They deforested and opened up wasteland, burned mountains and forests, and increasingly destroyed the tropical rainforest ecosystem.Moreover, due to the international community's efforts to crack down on drug crimes, some drug dealers have turned their greedy eyes on smuggling and crimes to wild animals, so the rare Asian tigers, Asian wild elephants, golden monkeys, sun bears, chimpanzees, white peacocks, etc. have become A victim of the muzzle of evil.Only in 1999, the Yunnan Customs of China seized thousands of precious animal skins smuggled into the Golden Triangle...

Thrilling!Heinous! 2 Golden Triangle, Golden Triangle of Suffering! Since the Kuomintang army broke into this primitive and lonely land in 1950, it was like an ancient magic box opened by the hand of God. There were no flying doves of peace symbolizing auspiciousness and happiness, nor golden wool and golden scissors symbolizing wealth. A ferocious black demon-the kingdom of drugs. Since then, the Golden Triangle has suffered many wars and sufferings every year. The smog of war and drugs has shrouded this beautiful land and never dissipated.The traces of sin are like ugly scars smeared on the land of the Golden Triangle, just like those originally pure hearts have been marked with countless ugly marks.I can't help but ask: Golden Triangle, the nightmare of the human century, how long will you continue?

A Shan State headman said to me: If we don’t grow opium, what can we exchange for the salt, alcohol, cloth, kerosene, gunpowder, bullets, agricultural tools, general merchandise and daily necessities we need?Even caravans would not come into the mountains at that time, because they would just return empty-handed. In another village that is closer to the road, the local government and the international community invested funds to help local people develop and grow cash crops to replace opium poppies.In the first year, strawberries were planted and plastic greenhouses were built. The experimental results were far from satisfactory, mainly due to the harsh natural conditions.The hillside is too steep, the temperature is too high, the dry season is too dry, and the rainy season has too much rain. Large-scale promotion is doomed to fail.

In the second year, Chinese cabbage was replanted, and there were two seasons a year, and a bumper harvest was obtained.The problem is that the harvested Chinese cabbage is piled up like a mountain, and there is no road, so how can it be transported?How much does a catty of Chinese cabbage cost if it is carried by people on horseback and then transported into the city by road, railway and waterway?How much is it worth?So all the Chinese cabbage rotted in the mountains, becoming a source of ecological pollution for mosquitoes. Later attempts were made to grow sugar cane.Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar have successively signed contracts with China and other countries to build several sugar factories in the Golden Triangle and its surrounding areas, in order to guide local residents to engage in alternative planting and increase economic benefits.In many dams where opium was originally grown and in places with convenient transportation, the green sugarcane forests replaced the colorful poppies, and the rolling sugar, sugarcane by-product alcohol, chemical fertilizers, etc. replaced the dark opium and heroin.Relevant organizations of the United Nations issued a notice in 1998 stating that the area of ​​opium poppy cultivation in the Golden Triangle has shrunk by about one-fifth, which is the year in which the area of ​​drug cultivation has dropped to the lowest in the past ten years.

After all, planting sugarcane is only one of the effective efforts. A difficult premise is that the transportation of heavy sugarcane requires roads and traffic conditions. Therefore, it will be difficult for this reform measure to be promoted in the more extensive mountainous hinterland of the Golden Triangle for a long time. A government anti-narcotics official who did not want to be named said: Due to the introduction of high technology, drug crimes have become more hidden, and various new types of drugs have emerged in an endless stream.Compared with the huge opium smuggling in the 1950s and 1960s, it has changed drastically. Even compared with the powdered heroin in the 1970s and 1980s, it is not what it used to be.Drug dealers refined drugs into various finished products with small size and light weight. The heavy opium that used to require a huge caravan to be carried has now become small and light weight pills that can be easily carried away by a horse.At the end of 1998 alone, the Thai government issued an anti-drug notice, and seized as many as 2.3 million drugs (pills) at the Thai-Myanmar border in the southern part of the Golden Triangle!

At the turn of the century, in 2000 AD, an encouraging news came. According to figures released by the US State Department, opium production in the Golden Triangle in 1999 decreased by 62% compared with the previous year, showing a decreasing trend.However, Afghanistan, a country that did not produce much opium in the past, has suddenly emerged, surpassing the Golden Triangle for the first time to become the new opium kingdom in the world. The specter of drugs has not gone away, and it is still threatening the entire human race, but after all, human society is moving towards a future without drugs, towards a civilized world of great harmony.I believe that the Golden Triangle will also slowly and arduously walk out of the shadow of history and drugs, but this process is full of hardships, bloody conflicts and unavoidable sacrifices...

3 In 1992, a piece of news spread all over the world: the Golden Triangle Han Self-Defense Force, the former Kuomintang remnant army, finally handed over all combat weapons to the government.So far, starting from Li Guohui’s defeat of the mainland in 1950, the Han army that created the myth of the Golden Triangle finally officially disintegrated and became real peaceful residents. As many as nearly a hundred Han refugee villages in Thailand in the Golden Triangle no longer have legal arms and have become A veritable peaceful village. Today's Maesle is such a beautiful and peaceful refugee village.

Looking from a distance, surrounded by mountains, black forests are undulating like waves, and under the blue sky, a resplendent and resplendent Buddhist temple stands tall like the Paradise of Paradise.This Buddhist temple is the mother of the current Thai King IX, that is, the empress dowager, who personally donated the residents of Mesle to show the mighty grace of the emperor, like a spring breeze.Buddhism is the state religion of Thailand, so this move can also be seen as a special kind of grace from the benevolent royal family to these Han refugees who surrendered to the government.Since you submit to the government, you can no longer believe in the Three People's Principles, you must convert to Buddhism.To surrender is not only to return to the body, but also to return to the heart.So now this Buddhist temple has become the spiritual and political symbol of the refugee village. During the religious festivals stipulated by the government, the Buddhist temple is full of people, a gratifying scene of exuberant incense.

After 1992, Maesle gradually opened up to the outside world, to be precise, to invigorate the tourism economy and use the reputation of the Golden Triangle to make money.So, under the overlook of the huge arc-shaped golden pagoda, the Maesleli where I once stayed alone, the former site of the anti-communist and anti-Russian training class turned into a mountain forest park full of flowers, surrounded by spacious corridors , there are many stalls selling tourist souvenirs and local products.Sometimes I like to wander in the park, because it is the rainy season and there are few tourists, so I, an outsider, quickly got acquainted with the stall owner.The stall owners are all women without exception. There are old ladies, sister-in-laws with children, and young girls in their primes. In short, there is absolutely no man, not even an old man with white hair or bald head.When I pass by here, they greet me, pull me to look at this and that, in short, they are very enthusiastic and persistent in persuading me to buy their things. Their goods are quite monotonous, basically the same, and there are no special products, which shows that the tourism economy here has just started.I saw that except for tea, dried mushrooms and fungus which are local products, some stones marked with jade but God knows what (jade is not produced in the local area), the rest of the goods are mostly imported from mainland China, including medicines, food, department stores, etc., such as safflower Oil, Fengyoujing, Wahaha, male treasure and female treasure, and so on, there is actually a dried Ganoderma lucidum from Mount Emei!I pointed to the Ganoderma lucidum and asked them, did it come from Mount Emei?The owner of the stall is a sister-in-law with a child in her thirties. She assured me that she bought the goods from Mount Emei.I laughed and said, have you ever been to Mount Emei?Let me tell you, there is no Ganoderma lucidum in Mount Emei.The sister-in-law pretended to be angry and scolded: You Taiwanese ghost!I will sell this ganoderma to your family, and if your family does not buy it, you will not be let go! The atmosphere of the Golden Triangle is simple and honest, one person does business, and others don't take the lead, they all gather together to be lobbyists.They call Taiwanese "Taiwanese", Hong Kong people "Aberdeen", and Japanese "little devils", but they don't call mainlanders, because mainland tourists are basically blank.I said how do you know that I am a Taiwanese guy?A group of women from them laughed and said that your family is not from Taiwan?Hey, looking at your clothes, you still want to lie!That day I was wearing a T-shirt I bought at Taiwan Taoyuan Airport, which had the words Taiwan Airport printed on it, so they decided that I was definitely a Taiwanese guy.Their affection for the Taiwanese is obvious, because in the Golden Triangle, many refugee villages can see various plaques everywhere, writing to a certain school, a certain road, a certain building or a certain public place, donating to a certain Taiwan.Even the mountain road from Chiang Rai to Mae Sile was donated by the Taiwan Charity Association.In addition, Taiwan allocates a certain number of places to refugee villages every year, and selects middle school students with excellent academic performance to go to Taiwan for free to study in universities. I said you are wrong, I am really not a Taiwanese guy, I am from the mainland.They stopped talking and laughing, all of them were surprised and looked at each other with doubts written all over their faces.I took out my passport and showed it to them, and they chirped and passed it on, but most of them didn't know Chinese characters at all.A 18-year-old girl probably knows a little Chinese characters, but she doesn't seem to know much simplified Chinese characters. She tilted her head and looked at it for a long time, and then said unconvinced, your family is from the mainland?Which mainland province, which county?I knew that more than 90% of their ancestral ancestry were from Yunnan, so I deliberately joked with them that I came from Yunnan.Chengdu, Yunnan Province. All of them let out a scream of "Ah-ga--", and then the surprise and excitement stayed on their faces for a long time.Several people rushed to tell me at the same time that they are also mainlanders, and their hometowns are all in Yunnan.I found that they were unaware of the mistakes of "Chengdu, Yunnan", so I pretended to know nothing about their origins, and deliberately asked them where they were from in Yunnan?Which region, which county?Have you ever been back?They looked at a loss, but none of them could answer exactly what region, county, and village they should be from in Yunnan.Of course, no one has ever returned home. I pretended not to believe it, and said that you are all fake Yunnanese, that you don't even know where Yunnan is, and that your accent is wrong.The young girl argued aggrievedly that it was my grandfather's hometown, and even my father had never been back.But listen to your family, we all speak the real Yunnan dialect.I corrected me with a smile, what do you speak is Yunnan dialect, but Golden Triangle dialect.They were all unconvinced, and said in unison that your family speaks to us, which one is the real Yunnan dialect? To be precise, Golden Triangle Chinese is closer to Dianxi dialect. It is really a nice-sounding, soft-pronounced (Yunnan dialect has a harder tone) and obviously mixed-accented overseas Chinese language.I remember that I was an educated youth in the frontier, and the farm people came from all over the world, so the next generation born on the farm spoke a "farm dialect" different from any local dialect in Yunnan.I think Golden Triangle Chinese is a bit like farm dialect, and also similar to Singaporean or Malaysian Chinese. It does not have a Yunnan dialect, but has a Yunnan dialect, so it is more like a kind of Yunnan Mandarin.Because I usually speak Mandarin with them, they haven't really heard my accent. Now they all fell silent and looked at me eagerly. The eager expression was very similar to a group of children waiting quietly for an adult to tell a story. I cleared my throat, read a section of Daguanlou long couplet in standard Sichuan dialect (I can't speak Yunnan dialect), and told them a beautiful legend about Huanhuaxi in Chengdu and Du Fu Thatched Cottage.I saw their eyes staring as big as light bulbs one by one, and they were all silent, as if they had stopped breathing.After I finished speaking, there was a long silence before someone exhaled.They kept exclaiming "Aga—" and "Aga—" from the bottom of their hearts. I saw undisguised admiration on their faces, and they praised one after another: "Wow, it sounds so good. Your family is the real Yunnan dialect." !It turns out that Yunnan dialect is like this. But I felt sorry for my innocent little trick, and I felt a kind of unreasonable sadness in my heart.I believe that it is not their fault that these kind-hearted compatriots can't distinguish their hometown dialect. They were originally a boat far away from the mainland, a fallen leaf from a big tree, and let the storm of fate blow to the ends of the world.What does it matter if their descendants, so that their descendants can speak their native dialect? O my rootless countrymen! 4 Someone told me how many people there are in the Golden Triangle, how many orphans and widows, how many disabled men, how many wild dogs in cemeteries, and so on.I traveled hundreds of kilometers into the Golden Triangle Mountains and interviewed dozens of villages along the way, and what I saw and heard was true. Years of wars and chaos, people's lives are devastated, human life is like ants, like withered grass, gunpowder smoke, crying and mourning. "Cars rattling, horses rustling, pedestrians with bows and arrows at their waists. Grandparents and wives see each other off, but the dust does not see the Xianyang Bridge. Pulling clothes and stopping the road, weeping, the cry goes straight to the sky... The blood in the side courtyard turned into sea water, and the Emperor Wu opened the door. I don’t know what to say. Don’t you know that the Han family has two hundred prefectures in Shandong, and there are thousands of villages and thousands of villages growing Jingqi. Even if there are healthy women who plow the plow, there is nothing to grow on the long acres... Believe that it is evil to have a boy, but it is good to have a girl: give birth to a girl You have to marry a neighbor, and give birth to a boy and bury it with the herbs. Don’t you see, Qinghai head, the bones have never been harvested in ancient times. The new ghosts bother the wronged old ghosts cry, and the sky is cloudy and rainy and wet! (Tang Du Fu "Song Chariots")" Such a tragic scene of "thousands of villages and thousands of fallen thorns" lasted for two thousand years in the ancient land of China, and then continued for another fifty years in the land of the Golden Triangle.Men fought and worked hard, some took back their bones, and some didn't expect anything back, just like a fishing boat that never returned, and the widows had to drag their orphans and widows along to live their lives with difficulty.In many places, it is not uncommon for me to come into contact with such families where two or even three generations of widows live together. People who died in battle, even if their bodies were smashed to pieces, and only a lock of hair or a white bone were found, they still had an explanation.Therefore, there is a rule among fighters, that is, to bring back one thing of the dead in battle, even a piece of clothing and rags, for burial.Therefore, as a symbol of the tenacious existence of the Han tribe, there are those eye-catching and huge cemeteries on the hills outside the village. I once lingered in front of the large and luxurious cemetery of General Duan Xiwen, the "father of Messler". I also carefully inspected the illustrious home of General Lei Yutian and the tombs of many army commanders. These cemeteries not only As he wished, he retained the status, power and infinite scenery of the master during his lifetime, and also vividly showed his subordinates that even in another world, the chief will live better than the soldiers. In stark contrast, the earthen graves of the soldiers who slept on the hills are not very beautiful; People manage weeds to grow wildly, and even those tombstones are crooked.Some have a stone tombstone with a few Chinese characters engraved on it, indicating the date of birth, surname and place of origin, etc., and some have no tombstone or name at all. Perhaps only their living relatives remember their final destination. Such luxurious and simple, prominent and nameless cemeteries abound in every refugee village in the Golden Triangle. As for the total number, there are hundreds or thousands of places, and the number of dead is thousands or tens of thousands or more. No one has been able to figure out their exact number.I don't think it makes much sense even if you understand it. The living have not escaped the sea of ​​suffering, so what if you understand the dead? It was with this thought that I wandered around among the graves. At that time, I was accompanied by the guide Xiaomi, but he is a person who believes in feng shui. He has a lot of opinions on my insistence on visiting the cemetery. He thinks it is an unlucky suggestion that will bring bad luck and bad luck to his young life. He can’t figure out why I just chose Like that kind of place, and what's the point of a big living person hanging around in that kind of place?Are you going to bury yourself with them?So he hid on the highway alone and waited for me.I don't believe in ghosts and gods very much, so I am not afraid of bad luck. The reason why I insist on coming to the cemetery is because I want to see with my own eyes what kind of mood those former Kuomintang remnant soldiers who have been buried in the ground retain. I saw that the officers were still arrogant and domineering, and the soldiers were wistful and frowning. Even if they went underground, they could not be confused.I saw thousands of British, Australian, New Zealand, and Canadian soldiers who died in battle at the cemetery of the Allied soldiers on the famous Bridge on the River Kwai on the Thai-Myanmar border (the classic twentieth-century war film "The Bridge on the River Kwai" was based on this theme) The tombstones, from colonel to private, each occupy the same area (about one square meter) of cemetery, and an identical cast bronze tombstone is engraved with each nationality, name, date of birth, army number and military rank.It is a harmonious expression of the democratic idea of ​​Westerners that everyone is equal even in the kingdom of heaven. No privileges, no matter how great power you have in the world, no matter how high prestige you enjoy, even if you are a general with the respect of thousands of people, you will be punished. Time relentlessly stays in the past.When we arrive in the kingdom of heaven, you, me, and he who stand before God also have nothing but a stripped naked soul. The smoke of gunpowder has finally cleared, and the smoke of wolves has gone away. The old battlefields and killing places are now undergoing changes, and the Golden Triangle is returning to tranquility.I seem to see those people who are sleeping in the ground, a pair of eyes full of expectation, passing through the tunnel of time and the wind and rain of history, and meeting my sight through the battlefield filled with gunpowder.They are all Chinese, descendants of dragons, lying forever in foreign lands, and their descendants continue to grow and multiply in the Golden Triangle. They are the roots, and their descendants are the trunks and branches. This is much like transplanting or grafting trees, and eventually Will bear local fruit.I think this is an irresistible law of nature. A necessary prerequisite for species evolution and not to be eliminated is to adapt to the environment. The roots are silent underground. I think they seem to be waiting for something, or they want to express something, but the cemetery is silent.I wander in the vast and boundless silence, and I feel that there is something calling me in the dark. It is not a sound, nor a word, an image or a shape, but a kind of breath, a kind of induction.It is not material, because matter cannot pass through the boundary between the two worlds, so it must be non-material, similar to ideas, essence, soul tentacles, etc., and I feel it entirely with the sixth sense, that is, inspiration . I began to enter a non-physical world! How is this possible?I thought I, a self-proclaimed atheist, might be crazy, or at least out of my mind, because there was no one in the cemetery, how could I possibly talk to the dead?Or how could I possibly receive any coded message from the dead?But why am I suspicious?The stillness is still freezing, oppressing my nerves, I feel something getting closer to me, I can't see it, but I must have sensed it, just like you sense someone behind you, but when you turn around, there is nothing.Just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean you don’t have anything. This is my new discovery. I always feel that I’m getting close to something, and I’m going to grab it, but I always miss it.So my soul struggled and struggled with myself, the hand of my mind was boundless and invisible, if there was nothing, suddenly I heard a series of hurried and urgent footsteps, these footsteps did not come from the sky and the earth, but from the depths of my heart place! I looked around suspiciously. A brilliant sunset was slowly sinking like a huge aircraft carrier. Behind me, the overlapping mountains of the Golden Triangle burned brilliantly in the afterglow of the setting sun.I saw in the mountains and valleys in the north, a famous and surging river gradually cooled and solidified in the torrents of time. Its shape is like a Chinese dragon totem. The first half of the dragon is in China, called the Lancang River, and the second half runs across southern Asia. , the name is the Mekong River.And under my feet is the habitat of those unfortunate souls, and on the far hillside there is an empty road leading to Messler. Sit south and face north!facing north... ... In an instant, I suddenly had a great enlightenment, my soul came out of my body, Xia Xue Donglei, and Shi Potian was shocked.My whole soul collided head-on with that wandering historical idea, like a spaceship docking with a space capsule. I burst into flames! Please understand those wandering Chinese!They are buried in the ground. These descendants of the Yellow Emperor, the descendants of the dragon, no matter what they did during their lifetime, whether they served in the army, left their hometowns, fought against the Japanese, counterattacked the mainland, smuggled drugs, fought for hegemony between dragons and snakes, fought against each other, and loyal to the court. Crowded together affectionately, with their backs to the Golden Triangle and the exotic and unfamiliar Indian Ocean, their gazes intertwined with mine, what a vivid gaze of eagerness and anticipation, so I understood that on the land under my feet, a group of wandering Rootless Chinese, they always face the north, which is their common motherland and hometown, and the place where their souls and spirits yearn for! oh north!My eternal... North! I think of a Japanese film "Wangxiang" that touched countless Chinese audiences: the prostitutes were buried in Nanyang, but they all turned their backs to Japan, because the motherland they had been thinking about day and night had abandoned them.But this group of Chinese people who have left their hometowns, they all face the motherland and will not change until death! In the autumn of 1998, the scene I saw in the Golden Triangle was not a movie, not an art form, but a real scene that broke my heart and gallbladder. Thousands of graves, all neatly facing the north, facing the motherland!What a shocking and touching scene!Later, I successively inspected Duan Xiwen's tomb, Lei Yutian's tomb, and the cemeteries of Han refugee villages, and they were all surprisingly identical, without exception!They all face the motherland and hometown, and they can't afford to kneel! At this time, my tears burst out again, and it rained heavily.Yes, people can die, corpses can rot, tombstones can peel off, and names can be forgotten, but this is not important, what is important is that they are connected to their ancestors by blood, and the awe will last forever.It is enough to have this yearning, this posture, this kind of yearning and gratitude for the homeland of the descendants of the Chinese people who will never change. They will sleep in the Golden Triangle forever, but they will always be Chinese. I bent down and knelt down, and kowtowed three times to the dead, and to the souls of all my compatriots that my soul haunted. 5 Seeing me walking on the road with a dazed expression, Xiaomi asked me nervously, "Did you see anything?" I said, "They... went home." Xiaomi said, "Who are they?" I changed my words and said: "Oh...it should be us, let's go." So we left the cemetery and went back to the hotel. A week later, I returned to mainland China. October 1, 1998 - July 5, 1999 First draft The second draft was revised in December 1999 The third draft was revised in February 2000 Responsible Editor Zhou Changyi Footprint Hong Qingbo (The full text is published by People's Literature Publishing House. This electronic version is from the third issue of "Contemporary" in 2000. There are omissions due to deletions at the time of publication.)