Chapter 2 lover (2)

second quarter For a long time, I have not had a dress of my own.My dresses are all pockets and stuff, and they're repurposed from my mother's old dresses, which are pockets and stuff.Except for a few dresses that my mother asked Auntie Du to make for me.She is a housekeeper who never leaves her mother, even if her mother goes back to France, even if her brother tried to rape her in his room in Sadec, even if we are too tight to pay her, she still will Willing to leave mother.Auntie Du grew up in a nun's convent. She is good at embroidery, can make pleats, and can do needlework by hand as she did centuries ago.The needles she used were as thin as a strand of hair.Because she can embroider, my mother asked her to embroider sheets.Because she can make pleats, my mother asked her to make pleated skirts for me.The fringed skirts look like a sack to me, for they are outdated and always children's, with double pleats in the front, awkwardly made collars, and skirts that fit too close, or Just attach a bias cut selvedge.I wear these pocket dresses that change shape as soon as I put the belt on, so the dresses become permanent, timeless pieces of clothing.

When I was fifteen and a half years old, I was very slender, even a little thin, with the breasts of a child, my face was covered with light rose and red rouge powder, and my body was ridiculous but practical. Wear clothes that don't make anyone smile.I already understand the things around me. For me, I see everything around me, everything is already in my eyes.I want to write something.I have already told my mother: writing is my voluntary.For the first time, she didn't answer after listening.Later she asked me: what to write?I say write a book, write a novel.She said bluntly: After you pass the math test, you can write whatever you want, and it has nothing to do with me.She objected to my idea, thinking that it was useless, that writing was not considered work, and that it was just a joke—later she simply said to me: This is a child's cranky imagination.

A little girl in a felt hat is reflected in the river, leaning alone on the side of the ferry.This men's felt hat dyed the whole scene rose.This is the only color.In the hot misty sun on the river, the banks were blurred, and the river seemed to join the sky.The river flowed quietly without any sound, just like blood flowing.There is no wind outside the stream.The motor of the ferry is the only sound on the entire sound surface. This is an old-fashioned rocker arm made of cast iron.Sometimes there was a soft voice.Then the barking of the house dog was heard, and it came from everywhere, from behind the morning mist, from all the villages.The little girl has known the boatman on the ferry since she was a child.The old boatman smiled at her and asked her about the "principal's wife".He said that he often saw her mother crossing the river at night, that she often went to the leased land in Cambodia.The girl said that her mother was fine.The ferry was surrounded by river water, bare on both sides, flowing through stagnant water in the rice fields, but the two streams did not mix.The river comes from the Cambodian forest, and it picks up whatever it encounters along the way.It took everything thrown into its arms, thatched huts, forests, burned wreckage, dead birds, dead dogs, drowned tigers, drowned men and their wives, Clusters of hyacinths, all of which flowed toward the Pacific, were carried away by the deep and sharp storms of that undercurrent before they could drift, all suspended above the might of the great river.

I told her that my greatest wish was to write, nothing more.But she became jealous and didn't answer, just glanced at me suddenly, shrugged her shoulders slightly, and showed an unforgettable look.I thought at the time that I would be the first person to leave home.But it will take a few years for her to lose me and her daughter. She has long known that one day she will leave and leave the house.She won first place in French.The principal said to her: Madam, your daughter took the first place in the French test.The mother didn't say a word, she didn't say anything, she was not happy, because it wasn't her two sons who got the first place in the French test.My dirty mother asked him again: How did you do in the math test?The principal said: This time I am not the first, but sooner or later I will be the first.Mom asked: When can I get the first place in the exam?The principal replied: "When she got first place, Mrs.

My mother, my maternal love, my unbelievable monster, she is wearing a pair of cotton stockings that Aunt Du mended for her, and in this tropical place she still feels that she must wear stockings to look like the principal's wife, Her poor frocks, ragged and ugly, were mended by Aunt Doo, who had inherited her habit at Picardy Grange, which was to use everything to the last, and she felt that she ought to make the best of it. use.The heels of her pair of leather shoes were worn out a long time ago, and she walked crookedly in them, making her uncomfortable.Her hair is tightly combed and tied into a bun like Chinese women. She really embarrasses us, and she really embarrasses me on the street and at the school gate.Whenever she came to the gate of the middle school by bus b.12, everyone looked at her, but she acted as if nothing had happened, and never took it seriously. She should really be locked up, beaten up, and killed.She looked at me and said to me: Maybe you should come out and hang out.Day or night, she always made up her mind.She never asked me to learn anything, and thought I should have dropped out of school and gone about my life.

When the mother gets fresh air, she breaks out of her despair, and at last she finds this man's hat and these shoes trimmed with gold.She asked me what it was, and I said it was nothing.She looked at me, these things made her happy, and she smiled slightly.She said that these things are good, and they are quite suitable for me, but when I dress up, my appearance changes.She didn't ask if she bought the items, she sure knew she did.She understands that she still has it, and there are times, as I said, when we can cheat her of what we want and she can't do anything about us.I told her, these things are not expensive at all, so you don't have to feel bad.She asked where she got it from.I say bought it from Rue Catina, the disposal from the disposal store.She looked at me happily.She may feel that her daughter has such an imagination, and it is undoubtedly a sign of comfort to be able to come up with this outfit.Not only did she approve of my ridiculous attire, this indecent attire, although she was a modest widow dressed in gray like a prostitute nun, my indecent attire made me feel ashamed. She is happy.

This men's hat is actually related to the poverty of the family, because no matter what method is used, one must try to get some money for the family.All around this house is a barren land, and the sons are ignorant, and they will accomplish nothing, and even the land is salty, and it must be a waste of money, and it must be hopeless.All that's left is this growing daughter, who may someday know how to make some money for the family.It was for this reason that the mother allowed her daughter to go out into the streets in this prostitute's attire, which she did not know at first.But it is for this reason that the little girl has learned how to divert people's attention to her money without a teacher.This can make the mother smile.

If the girl really went out to sell herself to make money, her mother would definitely not stop her.The girl will tell her mother: I asked a certain client for five hundred piastres to go back to France.Mama would definitely say, that's great, if I want to go back to Paris and settle down, I don't really need this money, and she will say: I can give five hundred piastres.The girl knew in her heart that this kind of business was exactly what her mother had made her daughter choose, if only she had courage and strength, and if she wasn't exhausted by the daily pain of it. In the narration of my childhood story in my book, I suddenly couldn't figure out what I avoided, what I said, I think I said about our love for my mother, but I don't know if I said about my mother. Hate, said that our love and resentment for each other, both love and hate, are so strong in this family's common history of bankruptcy and destruction, but all this was still beyond my comprehension at the time, Not yet impassive to me, but deeply hidden in my flesh and blood.Because I can't see everything in front of me like a newborn baby who has just landed.And the destruction of this family is the beginning of silence.Since then, I have been living in silence, working in silence all my life, and I am still alive, facing today's weird young generation, and I also have a part of the mystery of the bulbul. I think I have never *Account* since *actually never *I waited in front of this closed gate without doing anything*?) ***Can’t check here***

When I took the ferry on the Mekong, the day I came across the old black sedan, Mom hadn't given up her lease of the seawall.We still traveled at night as before, and we still traveled together as three people, and we stayed there for a while.We lived in that bungalow with a verandah, facing the mountains of Siam.Afterwards we headed back to the city.Mom didn't have much to do there, but she still went back there from time to time.In the corridor over there, my little brother and I stayed beside my mother, opposite the forest.By this time we were all grown up, and we were no longer ashamed to bathe in the lake, nor hunt panthers in the swamps of the estuaries, nor go to the forests, nor the villages of the pepper zoo .Everyone around us has grown up.Whether on the buffalo's back or anywhere else, there was no trace of the child.We got that weird thing too, the same slowness that had infected Mama, and now we got that slowness too, and we learned nothing but to look at the forest and wait and weep.The low-lying land was completely ruined, the servants only cultivated the bits and pieces of land on the high ground, we left them the rice, and they stayed there without wages, and they only used the huts that Mama had someone build.They like us like family members in their family.They still look after the house as before.There was no shortage of old tableware.Rain-corroded roofs continue to disappear.But the furniture was still wiped clean.The whole house still maintains its original shape, clear and picturesque, and can be seen from the road.The door of the house was left open every day, so that the cool wind could come in and dry the wood in the house.Doors and windows are closed at night to prevent wild dogs and smugglers from the mountains from scurrying in.

So, as you can see, I didn't meet the rich man with the black car at the Graham's, as I wrote before, but on the ferry, two or three years after we gave up the lease. Seeing him, that is, the day I am talking about, seeing him in that foggy and hot sun. A year and a half after that encounter, my mother took us back to France.She sells all her furniture.Later, I went to the dam for the last time to have a look.Sitting in the porch, facing the setting sun, she looked towards Siam again, for the last time, and never again, not even when she later left France again, changed her mind again, and returned again. When she went to Indochina and went to Saigon to go through her retirement procedures, she never went in front of that big mountain to see the yellow sky and green forest.

Yes, what can I say?It was too late in her life, but she started from scratch.She ran a French school, the "New French School," which enabled her to pay part of my tuition and support her eldest son as long as she lived. The younger brother suffered from bronchial pneumonia and died within three days of being ill. His heart could not sustain it.It was at this time that I left my mother.That was the period of Japanese occupation.Everything came to an end that day.Since then, I have never asked her about our childhood, nor about herself.For me, once my little brother dies, she should die too, even my brother is no exception.I can't bear the sudden disgust they make me feel.They are insignificant to me.Since then, I have never had any information about them.How she paid off all the debts of her sickly children still puzzles me.One day they all disappeared.I seem to see them sitting in the small living room in Sadec, wearing white loincloths, and they stay there for a month, a year, without saying a word.I could hear my mother crying and cursing the kids, she was in her room and wouldn't come out, she was yelling for everyone to quiet her, but they were all deaf, smiling and just staying there quietly.Later, I didn't think about anything.Today, my mother and my two older brothers are all dead.The same is true for my memory, and I can't recall anything.Now I don't like them anymore.The scent of my mother's skin is no longer in my mind, and my eyes have lost the color of hers.I don't remember her voice anymore, except for some soft sounds she sometimes made at night due to fatigue.As for the laughter, I never heard it again.No laughter, no shouting.It's over, everything is gone from my memory.It is for this reason that it is so easy for me to write about her now, and she can be written in such lengths, that she has become a fluent language in my pen. Mama probably lived in Saigon between 1932 and 1949.My little brother died in December 1942.Since then, she has never left the house.She said she was still there, close to the grave, imminent burial.Later, she had to go back to France.My son was two years old when we met again.This is really a meet and hate.I could tell that from the first look in her eyes.At this moment there is nothing left to pursue again.Except for her eldest son, everything else was finished.She went to live in a fake Louis XIV château in Loire-et-Cher, and died there.She lives with Aunt Du.She was still scared at night then, so she bought a rifle.Aunt Du was on guard for her in the room on the top floor of the castle.She also once bought a piece of land near Amboise for her eldest son.There are many woods there.He hired people to cut down the trees.He gambled at a card club in Paris.Those woods were lost overnight.Just after he lost that forest, my impression of him changed, and because of this, my big brother made me cry.All I know is that he was later found lying in his car in front of the Café Goupol near Montparnasse, and that he wanted to commit suicide.I don't know anything about what happened after that.And it's hard to imagine how she ruined the castle, and all this was caused by her son who lived to fifty years old and didn't know how to make money.She bought a batch of chick hatchers and kept them in the lobby on the ground floor.She got six hundred chicks in one fell swoop.But because she made a mistake in operating the far-infrared heater, none of the chicks were able to eat.The six hundred chicks couldn't close their beaks, so they were all starved to death.After that, she never tried again.I came to the castle on the day the chicks hatched, and it was a joyful day.Later, the stench of dead chickens and chicken food made me want to throw up after eating in my mother's castle. She finally died between Aunt Du and the man she called her son, in her big room on the second floor.In her last years, during the freezing season, she would herd four or six sheep into this room of hers, and let the animals sleep around her bed. It was here, in her last house on the Loire, when her affairs in the family were settled and her life of constant coming and going came to an end, that I saw for the first time what she was like. mental illness.I found out that my mother was indeed crazy.I know that Aunt Du and Big Brother have always felt about her mental illness.As for me, I hadn't seen her go mad before.In fact, she has had this problem for a long time.You are born with this defect, and you have this defect in your blood.She doesn't feel pain for this disease, because Aunt Du and her eldest son have long been accustomed to her disease, and she lives like a healthy person.Except for Aunt Du and the eldest son, no one can understand the mystery.She always had many friends, and she was able not only to maintain them through the years, but to make many new ones at the same time.These new acquaintances were young people who had just arrived from the country, or people from the Touraine region, some of whom had returned from the French colonies.She was able to keep around her many people of all ages, as they say, because Mama was bright and so active, because of her joviality, and her incomparable indefatigable nature. I don't know who took this desperate photo.It was the one taken in the yard of my residence in Hanoi.This was probably the last photo my dad took.A few months later he was sent back to France due to ill health, and within a year he died.Prior to this, he was transferred to Phnom Penh, where he only stayed for a few weeks.At that time, Mama probably refused to follow him back to France, she stayed where she was, nothing changed.In this luxurious residence facing the Mekong River in Phnom Penh, in the palace of the King of Cambodia at that time, in this terrifying and large garden, my mother was always afraid.She frightened us even more at night.All four of us slept in one bed.It was in this house that my mother learned the bad news that my father had gone.Before the telegram arrived, my mother had already had a premonition.In the middle of the night, she was the only one who saw and heard a crazy bird calling, and it landed in her father's office on the north side of the house.Also in that office, a few days before her husband's death, also in the middle of the night, my mother suddenly saw the shadow of her own father.She turns on the light.Grandfather really stood there.He was standing at a table in the great octagonal living room.He looks at her.I still remember her yelling when she heard a cry.She woke us up and told us what had just happened, how he was wearing his Sunday gray uniform, how he was standing there, looking straight at her.She said: I called him like when I was a child.She said she wasn't afraid.She ran towards the disappearing figure.Both grandfather and father died on the same date when the bird and the figure appeared.Since then, we have no doubt admired my mother's learning somewhat, because she knows everything, even the death of a person. The handsome man got out of the Limosin and was smoking an English cigarette.He looked at the girl in a men's felt hat and gold silk shoes.He walked slowly towards her.It can be seen that he is a little timid.At first, he didn't even dare to smile.He first offered her a cigarette.His hands were shaking.There is a national difference between them, because he is not white, but he must be above the girl, so he trembles.She told him she didn't smoke: no, thank you.She didn't say anything else, she didn't tell him please don't hit me.Now he felt a little relieved, and told her that he seemed to be dreaming.She didn't answer.She waits.Then he asked her: Where are you from?She said she was the daughter of the female teacher at Sadec Girls' School.He thought about it for a while, and then said he'd heard about the lady, her mother, that she'd had bad luck buying a lease over there in Cambodia, wasn't that so?Yes, it is. He repeated that it was rare to meet her on this ferry.Just that morning, a girl who was so pretty, a white girl, unexpectedly boarded a local bus. He told her it would be the perfect hat for her... wearing a man's hat... so ingenious, why not?She is so beautiful and she can dress up however she wants. She looks at him.She asked who he was.He said that he had just returned from studying in Paris, and he also lived in Sa Dec, in the big house by the river with blue glazed railing walls, which was his home.She asked who he was, and he said he was Chinese, from Fushun City in northern China.Will you allow me to take you to your home in Saigon?She agrees.He asked the driver to take the girl's luggage from the bus and put it in the black car. This Chinese belongs to the few Chinese financial circles who control all the real estate of the local people.He was the young man who crossed the Mekong River to Saigon that day. She got into the black car.As soon as the car door was closed, a kind of sadness that I could feel just now emerged spontaneously, and I suddenly felt a little sleepy, and the sunlight on the river dimmed accordingly.There is also a slight sense of deafness, and everything is shrouded in a bewildered morning mist. I no longer have to travel in the coach of the local natives.I'll have a limousine to take me to school, but I'll live forever in regret for what I've done, for everything I've gained, for everything I've given up, for better or worse , makes me feel remorse.That familiar bus, that bus driver I used to joke with, those kids sitting on the luggage rack, and my family in Sadec, the nasty guy in that Sadec family, And it's surprisingly quiet. He is talking to me.He said he hated life in Paris, the lovely Parisian girls, the weddings, the bombs, alas, and the Goupol and the Café Rodinte, I still prefer the Café Rodente, the nightclubs.These are the "wonderful" life he spent in those two years.She listened intently to his tirade about his family's wealth, which he would not need to rambling on if he could tell how many millions the family had in total.He went on.His biological mother has passed away, and he is an only child, leaving only his father who controls money.But you know who the father was, he lived with his opium pipe for ten years, he stared at the Mekong all day, he managed his wealth from his camp bed.She explained what he meant. Later it would be his father who refused his son's marriage to the little white whore in Sadec.