Chapter 17 Chapter One

He is the abandoned son of a rich man... --Victor Hugo Xu Lingjun never expected to see his father again. This is a well-furnished living room on the seventh floor of this high-end hotel.Outside the window, there is only an empty blue sky with a few scattered white clouds.And there, in the farm on the Loess Plateau, outside the window are green and yellow fields, open and full.When he arrived here, it was as if he had suddenly risen to the clouds, and he had a feeling of wobbling. In addition, the green smoke from his father's pipe was floating in the room like mist, making everything in front of him more like an elusive illusion. up.However, what my father smoked was still the kind of tobacco pipe with the head of an Indian chief printed on it. This kind of slightly sweet coffee aroma that he often smelled when he was a child proved from his sense of smell that this was not a dream, but a real one. Reality.

"Let the past pass!" Father waved his hand.After his Harvard bachelor's degree in the early 1930s, he had maintained his Kembridge style, and now he was wearing a tweed suit and sitting cross-legged on the sofa. "As soon as I arrived in the mainland, I knew a political term called 'look forward'. You should hurry up and prepare to go abroad!" The furnishings in the room and his father's clothes made him feel inexplicably depressed.He thought, the past is the past, but how can it be forgotten? Thirty years ago, in such an autumn, he pinched the address written by his mother and found a garden house on Xiafei Road.After the shower, the yellowed leaves look more haggard, and drops of water drip from the plane trees in the fence.Barbed wire runs along the walls; the gates are also iron and painted grim gray.He rang the doorbell for a long time before opening a small window on the iron door.He recognized the concierge as the man who often delivered letters to his father.The concierge led him through a concrete road lined with holly and into the living room of a two-story bungalow.At that time, of course, my father was much younger than now, wearing a beige wool vest, leaning his elbows on the fireplace, smoking his pipe with his head bowed.On the high-backed sofa in front of the fireplace sat the woman whose mother cursed her all day long.

"This is the child?" he heard her ask his father. "It looks like you. Come, come!" He didn't go over, but he glanced at her involuntarily.He remembered seeing bright eyes and lips painted red. "What's the matter? Huh?" Father looked up. "Mom is sick, she asks you to go back." "She's always sick, always..." Father angrily left the fireplace and walked up and down the carpet.The carpet is green with white patterns woven on it.His eyes tracked his father's footsteps, fighting back tears. "You tell your mother, I'll go back later." Father finally stood in front of him.But he knew the answer was unreliable, and his mother had heard it more than once on the phone.He demanded timidly and stubbornly: “she wants you to go back now.”

"I know, I know..." His father put his hands on his shoulders and gently pushed him towards the door. "You go back first, take my car back. If your mother is seriously ill, tell her to go to the hospital first." His father sent him to the front hall, and suddenly, he touched his head very tenderly, and said softly, "You If only you were a little older, you would understand, understand...your mother is difficult to get along with her. She is like that, like that..." He looked up and saw his father frowning, wiping his face with one hand. He rubbed his forehead, showing a weak and painful expression, and felt a little pitiful for his father.

However, as he sat in his father's Chrysler and walked through the French Concession with rolling golden leaves, tears came from him all at once.A sudden rush of humiliation, self-pity, and loneliness.No one is pitiful!Only you are pitiful!He has not received much caress from his mother, who rubs mahjong much more than he strokes his hair; he has not received much instruction from his father, who comes home with a gloomy, dejected, and tired face, and then goes to bed with him. Mother began to quarrel endlessly.His father said that if he was a little older, he would be able to understand... In fact, at the age of eleven, he has already vaguely understood something: what his mother needs most is his father's warmth, but what his father needs most is his father's warmth. To get rid of this cranky wife.Neither his mother nor his father needed him!He is just the product of an unfree marriage between an American student studying abroad and a lady landlord.Later, my father did not come home.Soon, when his mother knew that his father had left the mainland with his wife, he died in a hospital run by a German within a few days.

And at this moment, the People's Liberation Army marched into Shanghai... Now, after thirty long years, after so many changes that have never been accommodated in any thirty years in history, this father suddenly came back and wanted to take him abroad.The whole thing was so incredible that he couldn't quite believe that it was his father sitting in front of him, and that he was sitting in front of his father.Just now, when Mi Si Song, his father's female secretary, opened the storage room to get clothes for his father, he saw boxes of all sizes covered with colorful hotel logos: Los Angeles, Tokyo, Bangkok, Hong Kong, and so on. There is the oval label of TWA with the Boeing 747 printed on it.A wide world opens up from this small storage room.As for him, he was only informed by the international travel agency transferred by the leader three days ago, and arrived here after two days and two nights of bumpy cars and trains.The gray leatherette bag he had brought was placed in a corner of the couch.This kind of handbag is relatively "foreign style" on the farm, but when it comes to this living room, it seems to be shy and huddled pitifully.On the top of the bag was his nylon mesh bag, which contained his dental kit and a few tea eggs left over from eating on the road.He looked at the tea eggs that were grinning in surprise and shrinking together, remembering that Xiuzhi asked him to bring more tea eggs for his father the night before leaving, he couldn't help but smiled wryly.The day before yesterday, Xiuzhi must take Qingqing to the bus station in the county to see him off.He hadn't left the farm since their marriage, and his trip was a landmark feat for their little family.

"Dad, where is Beijing?" "Beijing is in the northeast of the county." "Are there many counties in Beijing?" "There are many, many county towns." "Is there any Malan flower?" "No." "Are there any sand dates?" There should be Malan flowers and sand dates in the place. "Silly girl, Beijing is a big place!" Old Zhao, who was driving the car, teased her, "Your father will go far away this time! Maybe he will go abroad with your grandfather. Isn't it, Teacher Xu?" Xiuzhi sat with her legs curled up. Behind Old Zhao, he smiled slightly at him.She didn't speak, but just this smile showed her trust and loyalty.She can't imagine that he will go to other countries, just like Qingqing can't imagine how big Beijing is.

The rutted dirt road was bumpy, and the animals staggered and shuffled on it.On the north side of the road is a neat field, and on the south side of the road, in the misty distance, is the pasture where he used to graze his horses.Everything here seems to have a magnetic attraction, and it seems so strenuous for three horses to pull a car.Yes, every plant and tree here can bring back endless memories in him, and when he was about to leave them, he suddenly felt more cordial.He knew that behind the three poplars next to each other, there was a thick jujube tree.He got out of the car and broke a branch, and several people ate one by one in the car.This is a sour and slightly sweet wild fruit unique to the Northwest. During the sixty years of famine, he used to live on this wild fruit.I haven't eaten it for many years, but now I taste a particularly nostalgic local taste, no wonder Qingqing wants to ask if there are any sand dates in Beijing! "Her grandfather never ate sand dates!" Xiuzhi said with a smile as she spat out the pits out of the car.This is her best imagination to imagine this father-in-law who came back from abroad.

In fact, there is no need to imagine, the father and son are so similar, even Xiuzhi will recognize them when they meet on the street.Both of them have slender eyes, slender, straight nose bridges, plump lips, and even the traces of their genes in their gestures.The father doesn't look old. Although his skin is as dark as his son's, it must have been tanned on a beach in Los Angeles or Hong Kong, and he is not haggard at all.My father is still so particular about his appearance, his hair is gray but not messy, and although there are age spots on the back of his hands, his nails are neatly trimmed.On the coffee table, around the exquisite coffee cups, there are Triple B pipes, Moroccan sheepskin tobacco pouches, gold lighters and diamond-encrusted collar pins scattered around.How could he have eaten sand dates! ?