Chapter 15 Part II 1.

1. Dad probably never thought that one day he would really leave Wanhangdu Road.Maybe he also thought about going to Canada many years ago when going abroad was hot. If he really went to Canada, he would probably be driving a taxi now, and if it was better, he might open a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown.But in fact, he really never thought that one day he would leave Wanhangdu Road, which was the place where he was born.The oldest pudgy physical education teacher in the elementary school where I was in third and third grades had taught my father that the middle-aged men in vests in the neighbors next door had been playing since they were young.One of them had already suffered from a stroke early on. After leaving the hospital, he walked as if half of his body had become a marionette on strings.He would skip rope in the alley in the middle of the night every night, and sometimes when he went to the toilet at night, he would hear the crackling sound of the thin plastic rope pulling on the cement floor.He was very heavy, like a man jumping rope with a heavy bag of rice.It seemed that they were not afraid of dying in the same place at all.In fact, it would be really good if I lived in the same place all my life, otherwise the oleander tree had grown into a trunk as thick as the mouth of a small bowl, and it would have been abandoned in the courtyard where no one was watching it anymore.

But the truth was that after one downpourful night that summer, Baba had given up hope of dying here, too.That was probably the most severe typhoon that Shanghai had ever encountered in Sansan's impression.Dad lifted off the cement cover of the drain in the patio, and it seemed as if he could hear the echoes of the sewers in the whole Shanghai crazily gurgling.The midsummer leaves were constantly knocked down, the close-knit trees swayed from side to side, and the huge canopy trembled crazily.In the evening, the whole sky was earthy yellow, and the thunderstorm above her head made Sansan want to hug her head and hide under the table.She was tired of the room being flooded.Half of the water was rainwater and the other half came up from the manhole, and it smelled bad.She no longer fantasizes that she is the princess of the island as she was when she was a child, and even rowed out the wooden footbath as a raft. She is just very tired of being submerged year after year.That night, the wall of the room next to the door of the school next door finally began to seep.At first, the walls were gray-brown, but in the middle of the night, a large piece of wet wall ash fell from above and hit Sansan who was sleeping on the sofa.She screamed and jumped up from the bed. When she turned on the fluorescent lamp, she saw that the entire wall was bubbling like tofu.It turned out that the drain on the top of the room next door was blocked by leaves, and the rainwater could not drain out, so it seeped into the walls of the old house.Dad wore a black raincoat in the middle of the night and asked neighbors to borrow a bamboo ladder to climb to the roof to remove fallen leaves. The lightning and thunderstorm outside were not insignificant at all, as if God really had something hysterical.Sansan looked at her father's back in a raincoat and felt chills all over her body. She opened a broken umbrella with many broken ribs and wanted to follow her, but her mother scolded her back hoarsely: "Don't follow me! This ghost The place is almost uninhabitable anymore. I have been so unlucky that I have lived in this kind of place for so many years!" But Sansan was very afraid, she was afraid that her father would die right away.She sat in the room with fluorescent lights and stared at the skylight that was not covered by the curtains. Whenever lightning flashed across the sky, she would tremble all over.There were tears in her eyes, thinking that her grandpa said that lightning should not be submerged in water, a lightning can make people smoke all over, and make the heart stop beating in an instant, even though they were all when she jumped out of the bathtub Time laughed at her and said that there was a lightning rod on the roof!But they won't understand, will that fragile lightning rod really work?That rusty clanking thing must have been blown crooked long ago, right?She doesn't believe this, if she is the damn disaster star, then what she worries about will always happen, won't it?

She just sat worriedly in the room illuminated by fluorescent lamps like daytime, listening to the whimpering wind outside, until she was so sleepy that she fell asleep in a daze.When I woke up the next morning, the water in the room had receded, but my father was still alive. He was sitting at the table wearing a denim short-sleeved shirt and discussing with my mother to ask someone to come and paint the walls again.Mom spoke softly and quickly, tapping the glass tabletop with her index knuckles from time to time, while Dad just listened to her and remained silent.Sansan was extremely happy about those baseless worries.No one died, and the wind blowing in through the wide-open windows brought the washed air so cool that you had to wrap yourself in a blanket.But when she pushed open the iron gate with a few broken banknotes to buy two fritters at the stall opposite, she found that the thick sycamore tree at the door had broken down in the middle, and the huge canopy had fallen down and collapsed underneath. The simple shed of the barber shop, and the other side is pressing against a small section of wall beside the patio.The broken part exposed a washbasin-sized cross-section, like a fierce mouth bared with teeth.Many huge black ants lined up from the tree hole to climb outside.But those emerald green palm-sized leaves on the shiny branches obviously haven't realized death yet, the canopy of the tree is struggling in one direction and stretching randomly, while Sansan is holding those crumpled dirty banknotes and wearing a shirt with two slender arms exposed. Nightgown was dumbfounded, not knowing whether to continue crossing the street to buy fritters as if nothing had happened, or to turn around and go home.The plane tree has been there since she was born.

The next day after that, they decided to move. Sansan doesn't hate this place, she has never hated Wanhangdu Road, even if the rats that have been relocated from the vegetable market are becoming more and more rampant or the corners of the stairs are always covered with garbage that can never be cleaned. Spider webs, and she didn't have a room of her own until she was sixteen, and they couldn't even get a telephone line at home.Her corner just extends from the sofa to the desk and the window sill.During the boring days, she would always play with the dusty white screen window with her fingers, or keep peeling off the wooden frame of the window.At night, she waited until her parents were asleep, then quietly took out the radio from under the sofa cushions to listen to the music program in the middle of the night, and kept her eyes open looking at the flight lights of the Hilton Hotel.At that time, she had no way of knowing that she would never stay in the same place for sixteen years, be familiar with the details of the house, know when the water is most likely to be cut off in summer evenings; buy a ticket for two cents to take the No. 21 bus You can also take the No. 15 bus, and you can get to the school by taking three stops. Every neighbor’s habit can tell; there is a psychopath living on the ground floor of No. 10, and his daughter is one year younger than Sansan. With a pale face and natural bags under the eyes, she was already a well-known beauty in the garbage middle school next door.From now on, there is no place for her to stay patiently for so long, waiting for the phlox to bloom every season, never thinking that she will leave one day.In fact, from that year onwards, residents in the old houses and shantytowns on Wanhangdu Road or in Shanghai were anxious and ready to move. The real and false news about the freezing of household registration kept coming from the neighborhood committee, and it was said that it was municipal relocation. After a while, it was said to be a commercial relocation.The family on the third floor has moved to Japan.A few days before they moved out, the Persian cat, which was raised too fat to walk, opened the window and jumped off the balcony.Every day they cooked a dish of cat fish with a strong smell mixed with rice and placed it at the window to greet it back, but the cat did not show up again until they loaded the last cardboard box on the truck.The family on the second floor also moved to a very far place, and rented the house and the pavilion to foreigners who came to Shanghai to work.At night there was always a clutter of footsteps on the stairs and empty beer bottles piled up in the corridors.My mother repeatedly took care of Sansan: "When you get home, you must lock the door, and don't open it if any stranger knocks on the door." Although those familiar things have not changed, Wanhangdu Road seems to be no longer Wanhangdu Road. Now, all the people seemed in a hurry and anxious, as if their hearts were already wild, and they could no longer live in this dilapidated old house.

After that, many people were evicted from the old houses where they lived for too long. It is often heard that some nail households who refused to leave their old houses filled the bathtubs and washbasins with water, and bought bundles of candles. He refused to leave the houses that had been demolished until only half of the walls remained.And Sansan didn't feel such sadness at all, she always thought that she couldn't wait to bid farewell to her past life.She always seizes every opportunity she can seize to forget those things that have passed.All those things related to Wanhangdu Road can be forgotten and deleted cruelly, she doesn't care at all.

In the end, they bought a small old public house on Shaanxi North Road with almost all their family savings and the housing subsidies from their father's work unit.It was a house built in 1956. The mosaic tiles on the outer wall had been soaked by rainwater to show a mottled yellowish brown color, and the luxuriant creepers climbed up the wall.The house is a direct room on the ground floor. The room has a wooden floor, a separate kitchen and a separate bathroom. You can even install a mirror in the bathroom, and the bathtub is big enough to look like a person in a TV series. Take a bubble bath.Because it is blocked by the house next to the front, there is almost no sunlight in the patio, and although the patio is large, it is not paved with soil and has no flower beds at all. It is just laid with large and clean tiles, which are washed clean in summer You can walk barefoot on it.Dad originally wanted to dig out the floor tiles to plant an oleander tree but failed.The room was on the ground floor, and iron bars were installed on all the windows, as if they were ready for battle at any time.So although it is an old house, it is different from the alley house on Wanhangdu Road. There are no exposed water pipes, no creaky wooden stairs, and no rat nests hidden behind the rice tank or in the attic. , the foundation is made several steps higher, so there is no need to worry about water ingress in summer.Of course, the more important thing is that Sansan has her own room here.Her room was only five square meters, and it became very difficult to turn around after stuffing a bed, a small chest of drawers and a desk.The only window was close to the outside stairwell, so she could hear everyone entering and leaving the building.On the first night after moving, she slept in a room where the smell of paint and paint had not dissipated. She no longer had to sleep on the sofa, and had a small bed with Simmons cushions facing the walls painted with Nippon Paint. , there are no mottled mildew spots, no wall dust peeling off, you can read novels all night without being discovered by your parents.

But in fact, that's all she remembered about Shaanxi North Road.It seems that the older I get, the easier it is to deprive those memories that are at my fingertips. After the summer when I was twelve, everything after the summer is blurred and out of order.Dad sat on her bed late at night and said: "San San, no one in middle school knows about your past, you can start over. Do you know? You can get rid of the past." But why get rid of the past?They didn't tell her what happened, but they rushed her forward.She is like a lost sheep in a flock of sheep who think there is always a way to make up for it.Sansan was unwilling to argue with her father.In fact, she really wanted to be the girl they wanted, but she tried her best but was repeatedly bumped into a broken head.She doesn't want to cry anymore, doesn't want to be sad anymore, doesn't want to scratch her hair and ask herself "Who am I?"She had cut off her childhood in the most radical way, why would they want her to get rid of the past?Sansan pretended to be sleepy and turned her head away.After Dad walked out, she fumbled for a crumpled letter from the bottom of the drawer.There are several sheets of paper in this letter, and the pen writing on the letter paper has been blurred by tears several times.She always read this letter when she felt weak, until her fingers became numb, and she cried and fell asleep when she couldn't read any more.She hated crying herself to sleep, but the nightmare seemed to never end, and she knew she wasn't the only one having it.

Xu Sansan, it took so long to write to you, but it doesn't mean I don't miss you.I miss you very much.Presumably you'll hate me for seeing this, but I guess what does it matter?You hate me but I'm still willing to die for you.I know you were admitted to a key middle school later, do you still keep in touch with your former classmates?I don't think so, the people in that class are all idiots.I don't know if you will receive this letter after writing it, you may have moved away.My father has already moved away, and I heard that the entire Yan family house has been evacuated.But my father hasn't come to see me for a long time, he probably almost forgot about me.What about you, have you forgotten me?My mom came to see me last week and brought me some chilblain cream and an old sweater.We also have to work in winter.Now when the weather turns hot, my fingers are swollen like radishes, because it's so itchy that I scratch them so hard that they bleed.Actually, I didn’t want to disturb your life at first. They all said that the students in key middle schools are very busy studying, and the teachers in your school definitely don’t want you to receive letters from places like me, but recently I’ve been very scared, and I’ve never been so scared , I have no one else to say.You know back then I wasn't afraid of a repeater calling all his little brothers to fight with me, and I wasn't afraid of them all having angle irons hidden in their pants.But recently I was so scared that I couldn't sleep every day. I just fell asleep and was about to be woken up at five o'clock in the morning.You probably don't know, but I'm going to stay here until I'm eighteen.God, there are times when I feel like I'm never going to be eighteen.Every day here is the same, and time seems to have completely lost its meaning and has been stretched infinitely.Every Monday at the flag-raising ceremony, we were taught to reform ourselves, so I was thinking, am I really a bad person?You hate me because I'm a bad person, don't you?But actually I don't know if I'm a bad person or not.In our dormitory there is a man named Datou, who is one year older than us.He's probably a little mentally ill, because his grandma hits his grandma on the head with a brick if she doesn't give him pocket money to buy cigarettes, and he's so lazy that he doesn't wash his socks until they stand up.I hate him so much that sometimes I just want to kick his ass so hard or drive his head into the urinal.But one day I was slapping him and I thought, he lives with me, we're both in this damn place, maybe we're actually the same guy, and I'm just as bad and as nasty as he is.I hated you for a while.You hurt people without scruple, and you don't even know it, but now I forgive you, no one will want to be my friend.

You know that at that time, the teachers said that I was going to enter the juvenile prison, but I didn't believe it. I didn't think things would be really that bad, but then it seemed to be a logical thing.Thinking about it now, that last summer was a nightmare, and that's when all my nightmares probably started.Now we are also taking culture classes here, but you also know that it is useless at all.No one here wants to study hard, and I don't know what to do in the future.I think that when I come out of here at the age of eighteen, I will probably be a useless person who has nightmares all day long, and I think I will never see you again, so what is the point of living like this?But sometimes I think about how important it is to be alive, and I must wait patiently until I am eighteen.But now I work every day, and when I work, I don't think about these things, I hate thinking.But at night when everyone else is asleep, I can't stop thinking about those messy things.I remembered that one day you cried and called me a murderer, a murderer. I was afraid that one day when I grew up, I would really become a murderer and a murderer.I am afraid that I will really go to prison in the future.Prison and juvenile prison are two different things, no one will sympathize with you.They all said that people would be beaten in prison.I thought if I went to jail, I would definitely be beaten to death.They all say I have a face that needs to be punched.

By the way, I cried when I applied chilblain ointment today because the open wound on my hand was so painful.I cried so I thought of you.In the past, you were always bullied by boys, and then fell to the ground and cried, but I never cried.It wasn't me at all, nobody saw me when I cried.I miss you so much when I cry.When I came out, the Yan family house was gone, and I didn't know where to live.It seems that I shouldn't think so far, maybe I won't be eighteen years old at all.The weather has finally started to get hot recently, and I can see the sky is red when I go out to practice on the playground in the morning.I'll probably never be your kind of boy, but I just hope you don't hate me anymore, because I really didn't mean to do that summer thing.People can say whatever they want about me, I don't care how much others hate me, but you already hate me enough.

Astro Boy in the spring of 1996 This letter was sent to Wanhangdu Road before moving.Sansan's fingers felt numb when she took it out of the envelope, and she mustered up a lot of courage to open the envelope.Those words were written on the thin letter paper with the letterhead of the red juvenile correctional center, Sansan could almost recite every word on the letter.She knew that the past was always inescapable, and that one day they would finally find out that she was with them at all.She's the damned bad guy, she lied and skipped class.When she was young, because the teacher always pointed to her nose and said, "Is there a place for you in the juvenile prison?", she really thought that one day she would go there with Astro Boy.After all, they used to be inseparable, and she did so many things wrong, shouldn't there be more punishment?They have all been punished, only she is still the girl who got away with it.One day they would find out that she had slipped through the net, so she cried and folded Astro Boy's letter very small and stuffed it back at the bottom of the drawer.Lying in the corner of the bed next to the wall, she blindly looked up to find the sycamore leaves being chased by the street lights and the flight lights of the Hilton Hotel.Of course not, there is no skylight to see through.Outside the window was the dark stairwell, and a smell from the inspection well drifted in somehow.She covered her head with the quilt, trying to fall asleep in a hurry again.Time seems to have passed too long, and she is no longer the twelve-year-old little girl who was crying by the Suzhou River.She is sixteen years old, and she is actually studying science classes in a key middle school, and tomorrow there will be a district mathematics examination, and the entire grade will be counted. On the day of moving, Sansan sat in the back of the truck with her father, and the furniture was firmly tied up with hemp ropes. Because it was drizzling, the truck was covered with a layer of blankets and half an oilcloth.This kind of soft rain is probably only found in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and it covered the face with a light layer.The trees on the side of the road are all sprouting green shoots.When the bicycles and the low houses on the side of the road swept back quickly, she thought with relief: If I leave Wanhangdu Road, Astro Boy will never find me again.