Chapter 3 Chapter 3 "Su" is the inheritance of life between a father and son

While interviewing for this book, my sister called me out of the blue and said she was buying another house. "Don't you already have a house in the city? Besides, the small western-style house in your factory area is spacious and grand enough! Why add another house?" I didn't understand my sister's motive. "I bought it for your brother!" said the younger sister. "What kind of house will you buy me? I have someone to live in Beijing, so what's the use of buying a house in my hometown?" I didn't understand. "Didn't you say that you will return to your hometown after retirement?"

"I—oh, what year and month did that happen! Besides, you don't need to worry about being a younger sister when I retire from my old age and return to my hometown!" "That won't work! Your little salary and manuscript fee won't add up to a good house, so I'll buy it for you..." The younger sister said proudly. I was excited.I have a sister and a younger sister. Due to historical reasons, they did not study much, but now they each have their own businesses, and the business is doing well.Especially my younger sister, who alone supports a company with good returns, has gone through a few extraordinary experiences, but after all, she is much better than me now.The same goes for my sister.There are three of us, sisters and brothers. In the past, I ranked first in economic conditions by earning manuscript fees, but it didn’t take long for me to be left behind by them.In contrast, I am now a "difficult household".The three of us, sisters and brothers, have a deep relationship. My sister and sister are very kind to me.As long as I open my mouth, they can generously contribute to me as a writer in the capital.I looked petty by comparison—the usual pettiness of city folk.

"I want to buy you a villa with small bridges and flowing water next to it, gardens and green spaces in the front and back, and gardens and lakes in the neighbors..." My sister described to me the "pension" she wanted to give me on the phone. Zhai", also known as "Jiangnan gifted scholar's villa". "Why is it so good?" I asked. "Because you are from Suzhou! You are the pride of our He family. How can the literati in Suzhou not have such living conditions?" After finishing speaking, the younger sister giggled on the other end of the phone.

How much does that cost?I'm thinking... "Don't worry, elder brother. I will take care of everything. I just want you to say: In a few years, are you going to retire and return to your hometown to live in Suzhou?" The younger sister's words seemed a bit serious. "Well, that shouldn't be a problem." "Okay, you don't have to worry about the rest." My sister put the phone down.In the days that followed, from time to time, she would send me information about various houses from her hometown, and sometimes she asked me to make a phone call with local friends in Suzhou, saying that they had better real estate information.

I don't have to worry about such things, I know that my sister's arrogance is what I am most willing to selflessly dedicate and embody in my brother.But her words often remind me of another person, my father. His father died of illness three years ago. At the age of 72, he failed to overcome a hurdle in life after all.In the past three years, he is also the person I miss the most.This surprised me, because when my father was alive, he was almost a person who had bet against me for more than 30 years—the problem between our father and son is the same as that between father and son in many families, and no one will let the other.This kind of result is usually after one of them dies, and the other suddenly finds that all the disputes between father and son in the past have become meaningless.

The disagreement with my father is whether my son who grew up in "Paradise Suzhou" should leave this beautiful land and whether I should eventually return to my hometown. My father has only one son. Although he has been a cadre since he was young and was a member of the Communist Party when I was born, he is very traditional in his bones. Even my illiterate grandfather is more open-minded than him. "He should be allowed to venture out! Swimming in small rivers and ponds won't make a long way." At the end of 1975, the controversy surrounding whether I should go out to serve as a soldier began.Three generations of grandparents and grandchildren have two completely different opinions. It is not my father who stands on the same front as me, but my grandpa (Suzhou people used to call their grandfather grandpa).For this reason, my father started a years-long contest with me, and used that little power to "cruelly attack" me as a son. At that time, as a small "capitalist roader", he was demoted to a rural The production captain, he actually used primitive and even brutal methods to punish my disobedient son.He asked me, who was sixteen or seventeen years old, to follow an adult to be a "tracker" - rowing a boat to Shanghai to transport waste ammonia and other heavy labor.It is only 100 kilometers from the small town of Heshi in my hometown to Shanghai, but it takes two days to row the oars manually, especially after it is full of goods, and it takes three days to complete the difficult journey when it encounters the upstream tide.The days of being a "tracker" are unbelievable now, but I was only sixteen or seventeen years old at the time, and that's how I got here...

My father was the production team leader. In order to dissuade me from thinking about "far away from home", he used various methods to punish me: he punished me to participate in river-lifting——picking mud and building river dams in the bitterly icy bottom of the river in winter.I still remember that in the winter of 1975, I spent three months on the embankment by the Yangtze River.During the day, I worked with the strong laborers to pick mud and build the dam. In the windy and windy weather, I had to complete the assigned tasks.The militia members became crazier one after the other, and the icy cold river water and the howling wind couldn't stop their "ouch!" You must also persist until the last moment of work.The only thing that may belong to freedom is lying alone in the straw pile and crying secretly at night-I still feel pain in my muscles and bones when I think of the farmland water conservancy project construction of "learning from Dazhai" when I was a boy year after year... We belong to Youth martyrs of that era.

It was also at the end of this year that I escaped from my father's power control and won a chance to serve as a soldier. I won and became a soldier of the People's Liberation Army that young people at that time envied.My father couldn't stop my dream of leaving home, but I knew he was waiting for the opportunity to continue punishing his son—he believed in his bones that I shouldn't leave my hometown in Suzhou. "What's the matter with going out?" He often said such words to me in a low voice.He thinks he is the smartest man in the world. I have been publicly ridiculing him for his backward "peasant consciousness".

"You know what a fart!" My father was very angry at this. At the beginning of 1976, I left my hometown and my father, and started my own life journey.And this walk is more than 30 years.In the past 30 years, my father and my hometown of Suzhou have become another kind of relationship in my life that is close and distant.In the past, I always thought that I was the winner and he was the loser in the dispute with my father; as for my hometown Suzhou, I thought that I would no longer feel any loss and concern for parting from it—I felt that my career and life On the way to another beautiful paradise...

But now I find that I was wrong. The conclusion is: In the dispute with my father, he is the final winner, and I am the loser who is willing to bow down.The relationship with my hometown Suzhou, let alone a word: I will always be her son, and my life cannot be separated from her embrace. This qualitative change is due to my father's departure and my new understanding of my hometown. As my father's son, I should be considered a promising person. In 1980, because of my "outstanding achievements" in news reporting in the army, I was directly transferred from a garrison engineering corps in the mountainous area of ​​western Hunan to the headquarters of a certain military force in Beijing, and I have since become a Beijing citizen.Later, I also mobilized my parents to move to Beijing many times, but my father never agreed, did not say the reason, and was even a little stubborn.Beijing is so nice, next to Tiananmen Square!My relatives and friends in my hometown said this to my father, but he was "stubborn" and "if he dies, he will die on the land of Suzhou." He always said that.

Father was found to be terminally ill at the end of 2004.This is also the only unforgettable day when I spent ten days with him every day after leaving him for more than 30 years.My father was undergoing chemotherapy in a hospital in Shanghai, and I accompanied him as an escort, spending time with him every day.In those days, our father and son were inseparable, and we didn’t talk about anything except the word “death”—it was obvious that my father was extremely reluctant to leave this beautiful world.As a son, I always deliberately find some happy topics to make his frown go away. One night, I was lying on the accompanying bed and uncovered the "resentment" between father and son—— "Dad, in fact, I have grown up, and you have always been cruel to me." I said. My father stared at me with wide eyes: "Really?" "That's not true. In order to prevent me from leaving home and Suzhou, you have been punishing me with the little power in your hands, and made me suffer a lot when I was young..." Facing my scolding, my father gradually showed a smile on his face, and said, "You still hold a grudge." "Of course, the pain on my body, I still often commit..." This made my father frown, and his face was full of apology, "Really? It still hurts now?" When I saw his appearance, I laughed, "It's a long time ago. I'm pretty strong now." The father's face suddenly relaxed, and he even showed a smile, and said very comfortably: "You don't remember that I treated you well?" "Of course. When I was a child, I felt that your body was very warm..." "real?" "Yes. What I remember most is that after you became a 'capitalist roader' that year, I happened to be on winter vacation, and we were divided into one shift to transport waste ammonia to Shanghai. On the way, we got into a fight with Shanghainese. The boat leaked after being hit by someone, and the cabin was completely wet, so there was no place to sleep at night. In the end, you went ashore and carried a bundle of straw on the ground, and let me sleep next to you naked..." "Oh—it was hard for you at that time. You were only fifteen or sixteen years old, and you had to do a job with a strong labor force." I saw my father turn his head and close his eyes, as if he was blaming himself. "Dad, can I sleep with you?" For some reason, I suddenly made a special request to him who was dying of illness. The father lying on the sickbed turned his head slowly, looked at me with some surprise, then lifted a corner of the quilt with his hand, and said, "Come here." This is the first time in decades that I have been in bed with my father since he left home - a bit emotional to be honest, there are memories of childhood in this excitement, and there is also a kind of pain - I know the doctor has said that my father is the most There is still half a year to live. I slept very soundly that night, because my father's body was so warm... This warm body brought back the unforgettable scenes of my teenage years. Suddenly, in the dark, my father said with difficulty and pain: "Why is my body not warm at all now?" Yeah?I jumped up and touched his body seriously: "It's very hot, and it's hot!" "No, I'm cold..." My father suddenly grabbed my arm as if he had fallen into an abyss, so I could only lean close to him nervously... I immediately realized that my father was afraid of death in his heart. "It's okay, it's okay, after two courses of treatment, it will be fine." I couldn't find more suitable words to comfort my father, so I had to say such lies.In the months that followed, I told him such lies, both by my side and over the phone from afar. I noticed that my father's body was always hot and very hot-it was because the abominable disease was attacking and destroying his increasingly dry body mercilessly and presumptuously. In the following months, I returned to my hometown from the capital many times to visit my father who was dragged away step by step by the god of death.I still notice that my father's body temperature has been rising, and sometimes I even feel his body is a burning fireball - so hot that my father can't get into bed, now every time I think of the piercing pain scene before his death, I still tremble with fear ... On the eve of the National Day in 2005, my father's condition deteriorated sharply. At first, he was infused with oxygen every hour, but later he couldn't do without oxygen at all.In the end, my mother and I had to decide to send him to the hospital again.This National Day holiday is the last day of my farewell to my father, and it is also the last few days of his life.I used to hear that those lung cancer patients died of pain in the end. I didn't believe it, but after witnessing my father's illness, I really felt the horrible lung cancer. Pain focuses and ultimately destroys a person's life and will. The sick father is so pitiful.While he sucked in oxygen with great difficulty, he had to endure the pain of snake bites all over his body.My family and I stayed on his bedside, helpless.I wanted to help him turn over, but as soon as my hands touched his skin, my father would cry out that it hurts... I wanted to lie down but couldn't get into the bed, and after I got into the bed, I couldn't turn over, couldn't move, and when I turned over, my muscles, bones, and flesh hurt even more.I wanted to gently lift him up and lie on the cushion for a while, but my father said that the cushion was too hard—his skeleton had been eaten away by the disease. "Come on, lean on my back!" Seeing my father's pain, I wiped my tears and suddenly came up with a trick - curl up on the head of the bed with my father back to back, let him lean on me Rest on your back for a while... "How? Is this okay?" I lowered my head, curled my body to about 45 degrees, and asked my father gently.Father didn't answer.The mother on the side told me gently: He fell asleep. What a miracle!How many days the father who yelled and yelled, actually leaned on his son's back and fell asleep soundly!My tears once again wet my chest. Ten minutes, twenty minutes... one hour, two hours... first my feet became numb, then my waist became numb, and then my whole body became numb.But I feel extremely happy, because this is the only little thing I can do for my father.During that time, I felt the familiar and warm body temperature of my father, and at the same time, I felt deeply sacred—I realized that when our father and son were close to each other, the lives of two generations of our He family were going on. The last legacy... That is the blood that is passed from one person to another, from the previous generation to the next generation... It is a kind of inheritance of essence, a kind of character, a kind of cultural inheritance, A kind of inheritance of soul, a kind of inheritance of father-son love that is incomparable and parting in the world! As a son, I feel that even if I stay with my father forever in this posture, it is still a necessary responsibility, a necessary obligation, a necessary conscience, a necessary quality, a necessary humanity, and a kind of fatherly love. The love that can only exist between you and your son! It feels so good to be back to back with my father!It made me really feel what a son is, why parents want to have a son, and also feel the bond of flesh and blood between father and son. Oh father, the son is so happy to be able to feel his father's body temperature for such a long time, even though it is so weak, it is his father's body temperature!Because this familiar body temperature once let me get rid of fear, let me get rid of embarrassment, let me increase my courage in humiliation and wandering, and grow up rapidly, until I can hold up a sky! "You are tired, come down and rest for a while." When the father lay down again, there was an extremely satisfied smile on his face. I stretched my arms and legs, my body was a little sore, but I said, "It's okay." At noon that day, several comrades-in-arms who hadn't seen each other for many years invited me to dinner.I didn't want to leave my father, but he persuaded me to go, saying, you have been in the army together for many years, and it is rare to get together after parting, so you should go. When I returned to the hospital about two hours later, the moment I pushed the ward away, I was stunned: my father’s sick bed, and my thin and dry mother actually imitated me and curled up on the bed, with my father behind my back. Leaning on the back... Seeing the curled figure of the two old people who depended on each other, especially the 70-year-old mother, as the only child, I didn't know how distressed I was at that time... I wiped my tears and hurried to bed to replace my mother. When my father and I were back to back again, I only heard the father behind me sigh comfortably: Your back is still wide... Tears blurred my eyes again.Father, what else can my son do for you? "I want to take me to Suzhou Park to have a look while you are at home. I heard that it is very beautiful now..." Knowing that I will return to Beijing in a day or two, my father suddenly proposed. "Okay. Let's go tomorrow." But after I said this, I regretted it a little. My sister told me that my father was already in pain even turning over. Would it be bearable to go outside again?But after discussing with my sister, I decided to take my father for a walk around the city of Suzhou.I knew in my heart that this might be the last time my father wanted to see Suzhou, his beloved hometown. The next day, our father and son took my sister's "Mercedes-Benz" car to the old city of Suzhou and then to the new district of Suzhou.Along the way, my father cheered like a child who had just left the house, and told me what it was like in the "past" from time to time.Whenever he sees those antique new scenery of small bridges and flowing water, he will dance with his arms and legs, not like a seriously ill person. Before sunset, we arrived at the shore of Jinji Lake in the industrial park.I saw my father's eyes shining under the setting sun: This place is so beautiful, when was it built so well?He asks me every now and then.I didn't intend to watch it, but I was also infected by my father's emotions. I couldn't help but follow his gaze to watch everything around me—no, the new Suzhou by the Jinji Lake is like a beautiful paradise.The water is blue and blue, and groups of water birds are playing and passing over our heads, as if they want to amuse us; there are tall modern skyscrapers on the shore of the lake, but you don't think it is a noisy city, because Surrounding the skyscrapers are vast green spaces and gardens, as well as many unknown trees.The road is smooth, not a single piece of paper and waste can be found.By the lake, there are several dreamlike long dikes, from which melodious singing sounds, which is fascinating... "Do you know why people have said that Suzhou is heaven since ancient times?" My father asked me suddenly. "Because she is so beautiful, even more beautiful than the heaven people imagined!" "Then you now know why I have been unwilling to listen to you and move to Beijing, right?" the father continued to ask his son. I laughed and said, "The main reason is that you are not used to the weather and living habits in Beijing, right?" "No." Father shook his head. "Why is that?" I was a little confused. "It's because you will come back sooner or later..." My father stared at me deeply after finishing speaking. This look from my father shocked my heart strongly: Is that so? "Yes, because you are my son." That day, my father threw such a sentence to me in a casual manner.And this sentence was also the last sentence he said to me. One morning a few days later, I had just returned to work in Beijing when I received a call from my younger sister and my sister, informing me of the sad news of my father's death. Father's death day is the 11th day after National Day.It has been more than three years now, but my father's words have been shaking and tumbling in my heart... Just because I am my father's son, I have to go back to my hometown Suzhou?For more than three years, this question has been asking me. I can't find the answer, and I even constantly struggle with it, trying to find the opposite reason.But the more this struggle, the conclusion of "Because you are my son, you must return to Suzhou" is like a huge irresistible magnetic field, attracting my soul and body - I can't break free, the more The more I broke free, the more I was attracted, until I completely surrendered and surrendered... In the past three years, entrusted by the Suzhou Municipal Party Committee, I have conducted interviews in Suzhou, which has undergone tremendous changes in the reform and opening up. My great changes and emotions towards my hometown were completely induced by my father in another world, until I accepted the change without regrets and made a new choice-this choice was my final decision to return the second half of my life to To Suzhou, my hometown where I was born and raised... Every in-depth interview, every time I set foot on this vibrant, vibrant and beautiful land again, I feel how lucky and happy it is to live here, to be her son, to serve her, to add color to her thing. On the third anniversary of my father's death, when I came to Jinji Lake again and lay on my back on the green land by the lake looking at the blue sky, a familiar voice suddenly came from my ear: You are my son, come back —— Is the Father in heaven calling?I jumped up suddenly and looked around, but I didn't find my father's shadow.But it's a real voice.When I was lying on the green land again with doubts, the voice of "You are my son, come back--" sounded and sounded clearly again... I finally understood—it was the land of Suzhou, which gave birth to me and raised me, calling for her son. At that moment, I suddenly understood what it means to return to the root of a leaf, and what is the inheritance of life between father and son. I know that I am not only my father's son, but also the son of Suzhou, a beautiful land. Therefore, the word "Su" is inseparable from my life. My sons, daughters and descendants will also be inseparable from this word, because the gene of "Su" also flows in their blood... The folks in Suzhou told me: they, their relatives and children are the same as me, "Su" is not only the beginning of their life, but also the destination of life, and the starting point of a new life at the same time.No matter how far away from home, no matter how long the wandering, the soul will eventually return to the land of "Su".This is an unchangeable law of life and ancestral precepts of Suzhou people.