Chapter 2 wedge

The year before the advent of the 20th century, my parents were born in a village twenty miles apart in the Liaohe River Basin in northeast China.The fertile prairie they inherited was originally the hometown of the heroic shepherds of "the sky is dark, the wild is vast, and the wind blows the grass and the cattle and sheep are low." However, the history of China for two thousand years is almost all the history of the prairie.Since the heyday of the Han and Tang Dynasties, many heroes of the Han nationality have been made; and the Mongols and Manchus also rode horses in the Central Plains and established the Yuan and Qing dynasties for more than 400 years.The Qi family are Han Chinese from Taiyuan Prefecture, Shanxi Province, and they settled in Tieling County, Liaoning Province. Fanjiatun, our family's estate, is very close to Hetuala, the "Land of Longxing" in the Qing Dynasty, and an hour's drive from Shenyang.In my childhood, I heard from my elders that the construction of the Great Wall stopped when it reached Tieling; in the 17th century, after the Qing Dynasty entered Beijing, Emperor Kangxi issued an edict to stop the construction of the Great Wall.From the Qin Dynasty to the Han, Tang, Song, and Ming Dynasties, border troubles continued. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Manchu army marched straight in, and the Great Wall stretched for thousands of miles. How could it be stopped?

By the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, the 1.23 million square kilometers of prairie in the three eastern provinces had indeed belonged to China's territory. However, internal and external troubles made the country weaker and weaker, attracting Russian border aggression thousands of miles away and Japanese aggression.The richness of her land resources makes her a disaster place, but no one can conquer the stubborn souls on the prairie who have ridden and shot thousands of miles for generations. I was born in a difficult time, and spent my whole life drifting. There is no pastoral land to return to, only the hometown with singing.When I was young, I heard my mother sing "Su Wu Shepherd" bitterly. Twenty years later, when I arrived in subtropical Taiwan, thousands of miles away, there is no snow and ice. In Taichung, which is only a hundred miles away from the Tropic of Cancer, she actually sang beside my son's cradle: "... Su Wu shepherds the North Sea..."I said, "Mom, can you sing something else?" Sometimes she sang "Meng Jiangnu".She said that since she married into the Qi family at the age of nineteen, her husband went out to study a month later, and only went home a few times during the summer vacation.She guards her young children, just like Su Wu hoped that the lamb would grow up and be born again, supporting the almost hopeless wait.She didn't leave Shanhaiguan until she was 30 years old. After three days and two nights on the train, she was finally reunited with her family.From then on, I followed my husband farther and farther away from home.Except for "Su Wu Shepherds", she has never sung a real lullaby.

Before I was twenty years old, I traveled from the Liaohe River to the Yangtze River, and the Minjiang River to the Dadu River. During the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War, my hometown is still singing.People from war zones in the eastern, western, southern and northern provinces rushed to the wartime capital of Chongqing. They were displaced on the muddy roads, under artillery fire and bombs, and they all sang, "The Great Wall is thousands of miles long, and outside the Great Wall is my hometown..." Hometown What is it like? "My home is on the Songhua River in the northeast..." When singing, everyone thinks about the Yongding River, Yellow River, Hanshui River, Huaihe River, Ganjiang River, Xiangjiang River, Guijiang River, and Yijiang River in their hometown. Jianghe, "The river whimpers and flows every night, and it seems to flow on my heart."

My family will never return home.