Chapter 5 Chapter 3 The Cry in the Grass

My maternal grandfather Pei Xincheng was Han Chinese, and my maternal grandmother was Mongolian. They lived in Xintaizi, a small town twenty miles away from my home.My grandfather was a wealthy gentry. His family owned a mill and owned a lot of land.In 1904, he accompanied Mr. Jiang, a county inspector, to inspect "Fanjiatun Primary School". To serve the country.That day, in the self-cultivation (civics) class, they heard Qi Shiying, who was small and thin, ask the teacher, why did the Japanese and the Russians (Russian-Japanese War, 1904-1905) fight in my hometown?When he was in a private school when he was young, he saw the artillery battle at Nanshantou. The Russians ran away, but the Japanese won.A few years later, the Pei family and the Jiang family entrusted respectable people from the local area to propose marriage; Jiang Duxue's daughter was the same age as my second uncle, and Pei's miss Yuzhen was the same age as my father. They were well matched, and the parents of both parties agreed to get engaged.At that time, my father and my second uncle had gone to Shenyang to study in middle school, so there was no chance to express their opinions.During the summer vacation, my father went to Xintaizi Town with the elders of the family, saying that he wanted to see the rare vines planted in the northeast of Peijiazhuang, and he saw my fourteen-year-old mother.She had a good impression of her fiancé whom she had met once, and felt that it was much better than marrying a husband in the country. She probably had some sweet dreams, and she only thought about the bright side, and she also had a lot of longing for the outside world from then on.

My father was most influenced by his second uncle since he was a child.The second uncle is four years older than him and full of new ideas.When news of the Revolution of 1911 reached Shenyang, he cut off his braids. His nine-year-old brother envied him and cut his braids himself.He followed his brother to the Governor's Mansion to petition for the opening of the Congress and knelt for several hours.When they were in junior high school, because they were dissatisfied with the school's curriculum, the two brothers went to Tianjin privately to be admitted to the Xinxue Academy run by the Church of England, and then went to Japan to study.My father passed the official examination with excellent grades, entered Tokyo No. 1 High School, and was distributed to Kanazawa No. 4 High School a year later.During the summer vacation when he was nineteen, his family called him back to marry a daughter-in-law—the grandmother was sick, and the family needed someone to take care of the house.My father refused to go back, so my grandfather asked a cousin to go to Japan to persuade him to go home, or to arrest him.My father told us until he was old that if he wanted to get married at that time, he had several conditions. First, he should not kneel down, wear red clothes, or cover his face with a red cloth. He had to ride a horse instead of a sedan chair.Second, he wants to take his married daughter-in-law abroad to study with him.If he agrees, he will come back; if he does not agree, he will not come back, and the family has agreed.When he goes home, except for letting him ride a horse, everything else will be done according to the old tradition.He went to Japan again a month later.

After my mother married into the Qi family at the age of nineteen, she never left the visible and invisible doors of the manor house for ten years.My father is an only child, and she has to do all the traditional things that a daughter-in-law should do; when she has a little spare time, she has to tailor clothes, fit shoe soles, embroider shoe uppers, and the most comfortable thing is to embroider pillows and draw patterns by herself.She has no friends, no so-called social life, and she is grateful to God for being able to go back to her mother's house twenty miles away twice a year.In my memory, my mother in my hometown either stood at the table with her hands down to serve her grandparents to eat, or she cried in the pasture.In the past ten years, my father has gone back four or five times during the summer vacation, staying for two or three months at most.One year, my mother was pregnant and wanted to eat cherries. At that time, cherries were only harvested once a year in July and August, and there were peddlers in the countryside who sold them from town to village.One day when the peddler came to the entrance of the village, my 21-year-old father ran to the entrance of the village to buy. Without a bag, he came back with cherries in the lapel of his robe.That bag of cherries, from the entrance of the village to the courtyard, supported her many lonely years during the nine years.

This year, he returned home from Japan for the summer vacation, saying Yuzhen's name was vulgar, so he changed her name to Chunyi. Later, he went directly to Germany from Japan, and he sent his family letters and photos to his grandparents. At the beginning of the letter, he wrote "Parents and adults respectful at his knees", and at the end of the letter he wrote my mother's name, "Say hello".At that time, I was probably embarrassed or afraid to write a so-called love letter to my wife. Two people of the same age took completely different paths in the process of growing up.The woman stays in her hometown, and the house in the manor house is full of housework; cooking three meals by the stove, polishing the utensils for offerings before the New Year, constant festival preparations, endless pots and bowls to wash, and endless sweeping outside the Great Wall. Wind and sand...In October, watching the long-term workers put Chinese cabbage and radishes into the cellar, the year will come to an end.And that nineteen-year-old man, in the vast world, indulged in books and thoughts, and participated in young people's society and activities... The road between the two of them went further and further, and she could no longer imagine how broad and far-reaching the sky he was roaming. Even if people want to confide their feelings, there is no common language to tell the difference in life experience.

The main force that supported my mother to live in loneliness and waiting was of course the birth of my brother and me.As if leaving a token or a substitute, my father returned home every summer vacation, my brother Zhenyi was born in the spring of the second year, I was born in the spring of the next two years, and my brother Zhendao was born three years later.In the sparsely populated Qi family, our birth is of great importance and significance.But in that era, medicine was backward, and infant mortality was high. When my brother was three years old, he was running and jumping indoors, put his hands on the stove, and took him to Shenyang to treat his burns. Died four days later.

My mother couldn't accept the fact that her youngest son died suddenly. She cried and blamed herself, and gradually fell into a trance.In traditional society, it is very unlucky for a young daughter-in-law to cry when she is "well".The open space in the backyard is covered with pastures as tall as a person, from the tender green when the snow melts in spring to the vastness when the snow falls, sheltering her suppressed crying.After the snow melted, she took me to the ancestral grave a mile away, and fell down on my brother's small new grave and wept bitterly.I remember that pine trees were planted around the ancestral grave, shaking violently in the early spring wind, and pink flowers bloomed all along the old grave, and I went to pick a large bunch of flower belts while my mother was crying bitterly. When I got home, my grandmother said it was a peony flower.When I grew up, every time I saw peony flowers, I always seemed to hear my mother's sad and depressed cry.Its large, somewhat transparent, and seemingly fragile petals have a noble and delicate beauty, which is different from all kinds of wild flowers beside them; in my future life, it represents many spreading and never fading in my life. Images of beauty and sadness, especially the pain of women from previous generations.

After my mother returned home from the ancestral grave, she often sat on the edge of the Kang in a daze, staring out the window blankly, and sometimes she couldn't even hear her grandmother calling her.Every year after going to the grave in Qingming, the earth thaws and a lot of ferns grow. There is a kind of fern called "Qumocai", which is bitter and tender. Women in the village go to the wasteland on the other side of the river to dig Qumocai. Of course I am happy to follow.When we arrived at the wasteland, we saw a herringbone-shaped flock of geese flying back from the south, and the sound of the geese was mournful.My mother would often stand up and stare at it for a long time, only returning home after everyone had left.