Chapter 110 Section 6 The Hometown of Tieshi Paeoniae

From Shanghai, I immediately flew to Beiping (now called Beijing), bought a train ticket from my nephew Gan Dawei, and went to Tieling, Liaoning to see the place where I was born.The daytime express train leaves at eight o'clock in the morning and arrives at ten o'clock in the evening.I can see every inch of the land as I did more than sixty years ago.I can really see those places that I have heard about all my life. I drive past Xingcheng, Huludao City, Jinzhou, Goobangzi, Xinmin... I am almost always in an excited mood, physically tired, but I don’t want to close my eyes for a moment. on the eyes.In the winter of 1925, my father followed General Guo Songling and led thousands of troops to capture this country.When the car passed the iron bridge of Juliu River, it was already dark, and the iron bridge was very long, so we couldn't see anything.I bought a round-trip ticket, hoping to see it clearly when I crossed the bridge in the morning on the return journey, but I changed the plane on the return journey, and could not see the east bank of the Juliu River on the long iron bridge. Next to the ambitious General Guo, he rode his horse and set up a formation, believing that he would enter Shenyang City tomorrow. Unexpectedly, he fled for life after one night. When he escaped, he climbed the iron bridge inch by inch.

This trip back to my hometown had already made me dizzy with excitement, but there was also a surprising adventure.I bought a soft sleeper first-class ticket with Taiwan compatriot ID card. There are four people in one compartment, and there are two Russians and an interpreter in the same compartment.They are engineers from the Russian Sea Cucumber to Bao Engineering in Anhui Province, China, and I am a female professor of English literature from Taiwan.They looked at me like a Martian, I looked at them, thinking about the anti-communist and anti-Russian slogans for more than 30 years, and now I was locked in a fast-moving carriage with the enemy for 14 hours... The four of them were cramped to each other Sitting, it seems that people from different planets meet in space.Their curiosity about Taiwan exceeded the scope of the interpreter’s vocabulary, so sometimes they used a few English words and spread out the world map they carried with them. They kept asking me questions about Taiwan’s geography, history, education, family, Women's status, clothing, food, housing, transportation... I also asked them about Russia, from Tolstoy to Stalin... It was really a rich exchange.

The car passed Shenyang Station, went up and down, and there was a lot of excitement. Another hour later, it was already 10:30 in the evening, and the car entered Tieling Station, but except for the stop sign, it was pitch black, and you couldn't see your fingers.The announcement on the car said that the electrical equipment was being replaced. Outside the car was the platform. I saw a station attendant walking over with a lantern, as if emerging from a dark abyss. I couldn’t see if there was anyone beside me. I got out of the car with the little box, and the two Russians in outer space said, "It's too dark, don't go!" I told someone to pick me up, but they said, "But I can't see anyone!" They gestured with their hands and asked me to follow them to Harbin, and let their interpreter take me back to Tieling tomorrow morning. Their faces were full of uneasy concern and sincerity, just like the simple Russian peasants in Tolstoy's book.While hesitating, I called my cousin's name to the dark platform, "Zhenlie! Zhenlie!" At this moment, I heard someone shouting from afar, "Sister San, Sister San!" (I was ranked first in my hometown) and then There was a sound of footsteps, and Zhenlie ran over with his family.Even though they are old, they are still recognizable.The Russian returned to the car.As the car drove away, they stretched out their hands and waved them desperately. In the lights of the car, it could be seen that they felt relieved.

Looking back sometimes over the years, it was really a strange, symbolic homecoming trip.We went to Taiwan to fight against the Communist Party and Russia, and hated them for half our lives. At the station in the darkness of my hometown, these two Russians jumped off the train to protect me! And they brought back the Russian impression of Taiwan (compared with Russia on the map) , is a very large and very small country), it should be a modern "place where people have full freedom, so a woman can carry a handbag alone, travel thousands of miles out of Shanhaiguan, looking for her hometown after sixty years.

It must be God's will that I can find Qi Zhenlie and return to my hometown. When family visits were opened in Taiwan in 1987, my father had passed away, and the house in Neihu was vacant and unoccupied, and gradually neglected to tidy it up. The grass in the yard grew to cover the flower beds.My sister and I are no longer able to maintain an empty courtyard where no one lives, so we can only go back sometimes to see the desolation.Before the Chinese New Year in the second year, I went back and saw a letter in a letterbox full of fallen leaves, with an address in Tieling, Liaoning on the cover.

Zhenlie and I lived with Taizu. My mother lived in Beiping for two years after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War. His two brothers used to live together in order to go to school.He remembered that I always forced him to study when I went home twice during the summer vacation, and strictly supplemented him with English.I remember that the two brothers were both handsome and energetic.I came to Taiwan alone in 1947. To me, the people and things in my hometown were as dark as the train station that night in Tieling.We had to call out the names of half a century ago to find my way back to my hometown.After the mainland was "liberated" by the Communist Party, Brother Zhenfei moved to Zhenjiang, Jiangsu. Because of his university qualifications, or because he participated in the Marshall Plan peripheral translation work that the United States mediated the war between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, he found a job at Jiangsu University of Technology and married a virtuous wife. The three daughters and son-in-law are very filial to the Gu family, and they are one of the few happy people.After graduating from middle school, Zhenlie joined the Air Force and had reached the stage of flying.Due to his family background as a landlord, he was grounded and ordered to return to his hometown to cultivate land. He had grown crops in Xiaoxishan for more than ten years, and was finally "rehabilitated" to work in the Tieling Petroleum Company. His wife worked as a nurse in the health center, and the family had enough food and clothing.But "falling from the sky into the ground" (northeast people call "field" as "ground") caused great psychological trauma to him, and he failed to quell his grievances throughout his life.When we were parting, my sister-in-law asked me to persuade him to take off that air force leather jacket, which was already worn to white, but he refused to throw it away. It was the most glorious memory of his life.

Another cousin, Qi Zhenwu, used to be a farmer in his hometown, honest and honest.When the Korean War broke out in 1950 (also known as the Korean War), the mainland was full of voices for "resisting US aggression and aiding Korea" (the Chinese People's Volunteers participated in the Korean War).When he attended the village meeting.In winter, everyone sits on the hot kang. The conscription cadres ask volunteers to stand up, and at the same time ask people to add fire to the kang. Those who are too hot to sit still are applauded as soon as they get up, and they are welcome to join the army. Tanker (railway carriage for freight).The next morning, the car had crossed the Yalu River and arrived at Sinuiju Station in South Korea. From then on, it was a dark life, with constant bloody battles and constant transfers. People are just machines with guns. No one knows who the enemy is. Of course, the hometown cannot connection.After the end of the Korean War in July 1953, the survivors chose to leave the army or return to their hometowns: more than 14,000 officers and soldiers who did not want to return to the mainland came to Taiwan, which became the "January 23 Freedom Day" that attracted worldwide attention. President Chiang's anti-communist forces have gained a lot of momentum.

Reporters from all over the world visited the village of martyrs. The reporter from Taipei found that Qi Zhenwu, from Tieling, Liaoning, was on the list. He came back and asked my brother, "Could it be your family?" My father, how to recognize each other?Father said, you asked what his father's nickname was.He said his father's nickname was "Old Pimple".My father also went to meet him himself. He is the son of the same great-grandfather brother. We call him the fifth brother.After he retired from the army, he found a job as a warehouse keeper. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in late 1970. My cousin Mao Zhongying, the son of my elder brother and my aunt, was buried in the Christian cemetery in Yanchao Township, Kaohsiung.

Thirty years later, Qi Changkai, brother Zhenwu's nephew, somehow found my name in a quarterly PEN magazine, and called from Shenyang to Taipei PEN to find me and get in touch.He said that since the end of the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea, he did not know whether his uncle Qi Zhenwu was alive or dead or where he was living. Could it be like this?” (I asked my cousin Zhongying to ask someone to take a photo of the cemetery and send it to Chang Kai. They seemed to feel some comfort when they saw the photo of the Baishi tomb.) How could this be? When I returned to Xiaoxishan, I also asked, how could this be?

I took the daytime train from Beijing to Tieling, Liaoning alone, just to see every inch of the land.My cousin Zhenlie took me back to Xiaoxishan from Tieling.I went back to the old site of the village and asked people, "Where is Guikulanghao Mountain?" Everyone said they had never heard of the name of this mountain.It was only then that I realized that what my mother said when I was a child, "Ghosts cry, wolves howl on the mountain", was her mood at that time. Because my father has been working in the national government, the ancestral homestead has long been destroyed, the ancestral grave has been plowed into fields, and the village has been merged into the neighboring village Cizilin.Half of Xiaoxi Mountain, where I used to run all over the mountains and pull mallet weeds, has been cut into a quarry.Stones of various sizes shine milky white hard and cold in the sun. It is said that the stone quality is very good, so the railway station five miles away is named "Luanshishan Station".The ancestral grave of the Qi family has been bulldozed, and the peonies I picked in my childhood are nowhere to be seen now, and I can’t be like Rip Van Winkle in "Li Bo's Dream", who slept in the mountains for twenty years, with white hair on the temples, and returned home. When I arrived at the village, I stood at the intersection and cried, "Does anyone recognize me?".I left at six with no one I could have possibly known.

During this journey of thousands of miles to return home, I saw rows of windbreak forests, fertile and fertile fields stretching out to the silent sky. The hometown of my father's ancestor Tieshi Shaoyao has no place for me to stand on. For many years, I have been paying attention to peonies everywhere, but I rarely see them: probably because of the climate in Taiwan.See less.Almost all of them live in apartment buildings. There is no garden, and no leisure to grow that kind of delicate flowers, right?I remember the ancestral grave I went to with my weeping mother, surrounded by tall pine trees, peonies blooming under the shade of the big trees, and there was enough shelter from the wind and snow.I remember that my grandmother put a lot of flowers I picked back into a big vase and put them on the big dinner table, and the whole room seemed to be lit up.The pines and cypresses of the ancestral grave were destroyed along with the hometown, but the petals of peony flowers are always the flowers of my hometown.