"It's not that he doesn't remember that he had another life, like some old photos at home that haven't been burned and turned yellow. It's a bit sad to think about it, but it's so far away that it seems like a world away, and it has indeed disappeared forever. Beijing, which was seized by the police His family kept a family photo left by his late father, which was the most complete one in his big family. His grandfather was still there at that time, with white hair, he had suffered a stroke and could not speak, lying in a bed On a rocking chair. He is the eldest son and grandson of the family, the only child in the photo, sandwiched between his grandparents, wearing crotch pants, showing a chick, but wearing an American boat cap. It was an eight-year war of resistance Just after the war, another civil war has not yet started. The photo was taken in front of the round gate in the garden. The garden is full of golden chrysanthemums and purple cockscombs. The summer sun is very bright. That is his appreciation of the garden. memory, but the photo was stained with water and turned grayish yellow. On the background, the two-story English-style building behind the picture, with a corridor below and a railing upstairs, lived in this family. He remembered ten people in the photo. Three people, this unlucky number, include his parents, his uncles and aunts, and an aunt, but apart from the aunt in the United States and him, all the buildings behind the round gate are from this world. Disappeared.

"When he was still in China, he visited this city on his way back and found this courtyard. It was originally behind the bank where his father worked, but there were only a few simple residential buildings built with gray bricks for several years. Ask about the access No one can tell whether anyone has ever experienced such a courtyard. But he remembers the back door of this building, and there is a lake under the stone steps. On the Dragon Boat Festival, his father and colleagues in the bank crowded on the stone steps to watch the dragon boat race. , a colorful dragon boat beat gongs and drums, and came to snatch the red envelopes picked out with bamboo poles at the back door of a family in Linhu. But he never went to the other side of the lake, even if he went around the lake and looked back, he would not be able to recognize this dream-like memory from a distance.

"It was a declining family, warm and fragile. This era is not suitable for survival, and it is doomed to have no successors. After his grandfather passed away, his father lost his job as a director in the bank soon, and the family quickly declined. The second uncle who is the only one who can sing a few lines of Peking opera! Because he was a democrat and cooperated with the new regime for a few years, he turned into a rightist and became taciturn from then on. The old man who was so helpless and shriveled, he endured for several years, and then died silently. His whole family either died of illness or drowned, killed by the mountain pass, went crazy, or followed her husband to labor camp, and then The incense was cut off, and all that was left was his evil seed. Now only his eldest aunt, who used to be the shadow that enveloped their whole family, was said to be alive a few years ago, but he has never seen it since the photo was taken. His aunt's husband was serving in the Kuomintang Air Force at the time, a ground supporter, never threw a bomb, and died of illness a few years after fleeing to Taiwan. He had no way of knowing how his aunt went to the United States, nor Take the trouble to ask again.

"But when he celebrated his tenth birthday, Lao Xi Jing was only nine years old according to the lunar calendar. The family was still prosperous, and that birthday was also very lively. Get out of bed early and put on new clothes and new leather shoes. It was an excessive luxury for a child. I also received many gifts, such as kites, checkers, jigsaw puzzles, foreign colored pencils and air guns with rubber stoppers, two volumes of the complete works of Grimm's fairy tales with copper engraving illustrations; The few silver dollars wrapped in paper were given by his grandmother. There are Long Yang from the Qing Empire, Yuan Shikai’s bald head, and Chiang Kai-shek’s new silver dollars in military uniform. The big head was so heavy that it was put into a small suitcase of his that contained stamp albums and various glass marbles. Then the whole family went to a restaurant to eat dumplings with crab roe and steamed dumplings. In a garden restaurant with a rockery and a pool of goldfish There was an extra-large round table, just enough to sit on. For the first time, he became the center of the family, sitting next to his grandmother, who should have been his grandfather who passed away not long ago, as if he was waiting for him to support the family. He took a bite of a hot soup dumpling, his new clothes were splashed with oil, no one scolded him, everyone laughed, but it made him very embarrassed. The reason why he remembers is probably because he just got out of the haze of a child and felt he was an adult , just feel embarrassed.

"He also remembered that when his grandfather passed away, the mourning hall was full of filial curtains, like the backstage in a theater, which was much more interesting than his child's birthday. A group of monks beat and chanted sutras, and he Flipping the filial curtain to get in and out is really fun. His mother asked him to wear hemp shoes, and he reluctantly accepted, but he refused to wrap a white cloth around his head, because he thought it was ugly. It probably belonged to his grandmother. However, his father had to wear a white cloth on his head, but he wore a white linen suit. Most of the condolence guests also wore suits and ties, and the wives wore cheongsams and high heels. One of them could play the piano and sing It's a coloratura soprano, trembling like a sheep bleating, of course not in this mourning hall, but at a family party, that was the first time he heard such singing, he couldn't stop laughing. His mother whispered in his ear He, but he couldn't help laughing out loud.

"In his memory, the time when his grandfather passed away was like a rare holiday, without any sadness. He felt that the old man should have died a long time ago. He had a stroke for a long time, and he was always lying in a rocking chair during the day. It was only a very natural thing to die sooner or later. Death meant nothing to him. But the death of his mother shocked him. She drowned in the river next to the farm. It was discovered by farmers who got up early to go down the river. The body had swelled and floated on the river. His mother He responded to the party's call to go to the farm to reform his thinking. When he died, he was in his prime, only thirty-eight years old, and his image in his heart was always so beautiful.

"Among his childhood gifts was a Parker gold pen, which was given to him by one of his father's colleagues in the bank. At that time, he took the uncle Fang's pen and refused to let it go. The adults thought it was a good thing. It is a sign that the child may become a writer in the future. Uncle Fang was so generous that he gave him the pen. This was not when he was on his birthday, but when he was younger, and because he wrote a diary, About eight years old. He was supposed to go to school, but he was thin and sick. His mother taught him how to read and read, and taught him to use a brush to write strokes on the regular script printed with red models. He didn't feel strenuous. After sketching a book, his mother said, well, let’s write a diary with a brush in the future, and save some paper. I bought a composition book with small oranges, even if it takes half a day to write a full amaranth, it is still his Homework. What he wrote in his first diary is roughly: the snow falls on the ground, it is pure white, and people walk by and leave footprints, which makes it dirty. It was preached by his mother, so that the whole family and his acquaintances knew. Since then, he has been out of control, and he has resorted to writing his dreams and narcissism, sowing disasters in the future.

"His father didn't approve of him staying in the room to read and write all day long, thinking that boys should be naughty, go out to meet the world, socialize widely, venture into the world, and don't take it seriously when he is a writer. His father thinks he can drink very much, saying that he is addicted to alcohol It's better to say show off, they were called playing customs at that time, that is, at the banquet, they were separated from each other one by one, and they had to turn three or five tables in a circle before they could stand down to be a good man. The unconscious man was carried home and put downstairs on his late grandfather's couch, when the men were away and his grandmother, his mother and the maid couldn't get his dad into the upstairs bed He remembered that he actually lowered the rope from the window on the second floor—he somehow hoisted up the recliner and the person, and slowly pulled it up. His father was hanging high in the air! Drunk and smiling, swaying in his memory, this It is one of his father's great achievements. I don't know if it is his hallucination. For a child, it is difficult to distinguish between memory and imagination.

"The life before the age of ten was like a dream to him. His childhood life was always like a dream. Even if it was fleeing, the car bumped on the muddy mountain road and fell twice. In the truck covered with tarpaulin, he spent all day Hugging a basket of oranges to eat. He asked his mother if there was such a thing. His mother said that oranges were cheaper than rice at that time, and the villagers gave some money to load them on the car. His father worked in the national bank. The bank had guards escorting the banknotes, and the family members also evacuated with the bank. "Now his family's former residence appears many times in the dream. It is not his grandfather's family who lived in a western-style building with a round door and a garden, but an old house with a patio left by his grandmother. The little old grandmother who also died It was too big, always rummaging in a big box. In the dream, he was looking down from above. The house had no ceiling, and the rooms separated by wooden walls below were empty, only his grandmother hurriedly rummaged in the box. He still remembers that his family has an old-fashioned painted leather suitcase, and at the bottom of the suitcase is a bag of house deeds and land deeds from his grandmother. Those properties have already been pawned or sold, and they can’t wait. The new regime came to confiscate it. His grandmother and his mother panicked when they burned the yellowed rotten paper. He didn’t report it because no one came to question him. But if he was really questioned, he might report it! His mother and his grandmother are conspiring to destroy some evidence, even though they love him very much.

"This dream happened decades later, and he had already arrived in the West. In a small hotel in Tours, central France, the paint on the old shutters was peeling off. In the gray sky, he woke up still in a trance. In the dream just now, he stood at the corner of the uncollapsed attic in the old house, leaning on a crumbling wooden railing and looking down. Outside is the pumpkin field, and he caught crickets in the rubble piled in the pumpkin vines. He still clearly remembers that in the dream, the rooms separated by wooden walls had many tenants, but the residents all disappeared, just like his Grandma, like the life he had. That kind of life memories and dreams are mixed together, and those impressions transcend time and space.

"Because he is the eldest son and grandson, his family, including his grandmother, have great hopes for him, but he has been sick since he was a child, which made them very worried and worried. They have told his fortune many times. The first time he remembers it was in There was a temple where his parents took him to escape the summer heat on Lushan Mountain. The Immortal Cave there was a place of interest, and there was a big temple next to it. There was also a dining hall and teahouse for tourists. The temple was cool and there were not many tourists. At that time He was sitting in a sedan chair up the mountain. He was in his mother’s arms, holding the handrail in front of him tightly, and couldn’t stop looking at the abyss on the side. Before he left China, he revisited the old place. Naturally, there was a direct bus, but there was no When he found this temple, even the ruins were gone. But he clearly remembered that there was a long scroll hanging in the living room of this temple, which depicted Zhu Yiwuzhang with a pockmarked face—it was said to have been enshrined since the Ming Dynasty Zhu Yuanzhang took refuge here before he became emperor. Such a specific and complicated matter could not have come from a child’s imagination. The portrait of Wuzhang’s pockmarked face was cut out every few years. I actually saw it in the collection of the North Palace Museum .Then this temple really existed, the memory is not an illusion, and the old monk told his fortune. The old monk scolded loudly at that time. "He slapped him hard on the forehead, which surprised him, but he didn't cry. That's why he remembered it, and because he was always proud and used to it, he still didn't get slapped. - Years and years later - he regained his interest in Zen After gaining interest, he read those koans again and realized that this may be the first life enlightenment given to him by the old monk. It’s not that he didn’t live a different life, and then he forgot it.