This topic was triggered by my poetry, because my creative activities for decades began with poetry, and most of my initial works were poems about rural life.
It can be said that my creation started from the land of my hometown. The dwarf cypress beside the pond bank, the legend of holding water to cool off in summer on the earth slope, only weeds and hills with intermittent rivers, and the uncles and aunts in the village who were rude and tired of working gave me the desire to write and gave me poems.
My hometown, the hilly land that gave birth to my life, gave me the biggest concern in this life except poetry and later prose.
An old soldier who has left the northwest at the age of thirteen, his favorite food in his life is mutton bread in soup. And that well-known leader can never leave the "pepper" he used to eat in his hometown when he was a teenager. His strong Hunan accent has never changed in his life.
Dan ink can be grinded, but red can't be taken away.
The native land permeates the nature that is indelible for everyone.
Soil not only nurtures everything, but also becomes our flesh and blood.
When I was a child, my hands and feet were cut or slightly bruised. The eldest sister in the village conveniently picked up a few drops of mud tumor left by the rainstorm from the earth wall of the house, which was dust without any sand, and then sprinkled it on the wound, saying, "Dust in the sky, medicine on the ground, will be tongue-tied."
It is true that the wound is not inflamed and heals quickly. Later, I found that many adults also use this prescription to treat injuries.
Soil gives people life and everything.
The soil hides pain, suffering and sadness, as long as the sun and the moon.
This is life on the land, memory on the land.
Time flies, and now it's snowing in the temples. Every Shan Ye in my hometown is still picturesque, and those irregular buildings are still deeply engraved in my mind like circuit boards.
The countryside is my native land and China in my mind.
So, in my hometown, in all the villages far away from the town, every change will make me happy. I used to praise the changes and progress there with poems.
In my poems, all villages have my hometown, and the hill that raised me is far from changing as fast as I described.
The famous oil painting Father, which was born more than twenty years ago, has already become the epitome of my hometown in my heart.
I have been looking forward to my parents and the whole hometown coming out of the firmly nailed frame as soon as possible.
About the countryside and farmers, it is an eternal topic for me, a complex that can never be solved.
two
Land is the mother of all things, but it must be cultivated.
The cultivator was originally the owner of the land, but he was enslaved by the land, and his fate can only be linked to the land forever. This is the largest number of farmers in China.
That plow, that hoe, that sickle, together with the way and posture of operation, have been attacked from generation to generation and imitated from generation to generation, unchanged for thousands of years.
My hometown, neither yellow nor black, has been desperately claimed by several generations of ancestors with the gradual exposure of soil erosion slate. Today, it is still selflessly dedicated to us, still our only source of life, still the place where we live and multiply, with neither hope nor infinite hope.
For a long time, there was almost no household registration management in rural areas, and there was no need for household registration management. During the "commune" period, when a farmer moved from one place to another, all the examination and approval procedures were completed as long as the other production team leader nodded. However, it is this invisible household registration without a list that firmly nails the people born there to the yellow land.
Facing the loess and facing the sky, it is the simplest portrayal of the lives of several generations of farmers.
Backward primitive mode of production, the lowest labor return in the world, they have to pay hard physical labor. Especially in the busy farming season, the overload and intensive rush to plough and transplant make every farmer who works in the field in a state of extreme exhaustion.
Under the scorching sun and cold wind, field work is a struggle with fate. What remains in my heart is a heavy burden that can never be unloaded.
In June, the sun is like fire. In the hot paddy field, people keep poking around their waists, and they are all tired like machines that may lose their support at any time. All kinds of rough straw hats can't stop the piercing sunshine, as if to plunge their heads into the depths of the mud; Everyone's hands and feet were blanched by boiling mud, their skin was wrinkled and some fingers began to rot. Sweat keeps dripping down, and before the sludge on your hands is washed clean, you should quickly grab the skirt that has been dyed white by sweat and salt and has given off a bad smell and wipe it on your face.
This scene, looking down from the sky, is a poem; For those who are soaked in mud, this is a kind of pain that they can't wait to get rid of at once.
In the eyes of those of us who don't know poverty and hardship, it is poetry; In the eyes of parents, it is fatigue.
People miss a moment and miss a year. Anyone who has dealt with Tukla will not think that this statement is exaggerated. Long-term collectivization of "big pot rice", although agricultural production efficiency has been reduced to a minimum, farmers are increasingly afraid to slack off.
Cattle and sheep don't chew Vitex negundo leaf bibimbap, chewy grass-roots porridge, and even dig Guanyin soil to fill their crazy stomachs. Everyone is afraid of that smell, but many people can't escape.
Knowing that "politics is in command", the cadres of the commune and brigade are still talking about farming for the revolution and connecting the ridge with Asia, Africa and Latin America, but they turn to the villagers and shout: Who dares to delay the "double grab" unless he has a big mouth!
In fact, no one dares to be lazy in the days of grabbing and grabbing. In the middle of the night, all the men, women and children in the village squatted in the mud to pull out rice seedlings. The team didn't clock in to calculate your working hours, only counted the rice seedlings behind everyone. A few hours later, I hardly fell asleep and was awakened by a terrible whistle. Everyone dragged their heavy steps, forced their eyes to fight and walked into the rice fields to be inserted. At that time, the muddy water had not been boiled.
The tense season is like a whip hanging over people's heads, but team cadres can wear neat shirts and clean cloth shoes and report to their superiors at a meeting for a day and a half. More male and female workers should strive to "land". For years, they couldn't afford to lie down and had little chance to escape.
People who have experienced or witnessed that kind of field work will not believe that there is more bitter, more tired, longer and more helpless hard work in the world.
Regrettably, people engaged in this kind of work are getting farther and farther away from the aura of "model workers". Fortunately, this is not what they need. At least at that time, their highest pursuit was to fill their stomachs and feed the youngest.
Officials take it from the people, and the people take it from the soil. I wonder if the ancestor who first said this proverb was a philosopher?
However, people are living people, but the soil is unconscious mud dust.
In the chaos of farming society, sharp spears or bayonets can help the government forcibly take it away from the people, but after harvesting limited grain, it is impossible for cultivators to beat a grain out of the frozen soil with hoes or palladium hoes.
Every grain of rice and wheat, every melon, bean, onion and garlic that farmers need for their lives must be planted by themselves, and they have never expected to reap outside their own labor.
I remember that shortly after I joined the army, my father attended a meeting in my hometown as a representative of military families. In the letter, he not only conveyed his happy mood, but also told me that the conference gave everyone a towel and an enamel tea urn. For this father who has never left farm tools and fields in his life, this may be the first time that he has not earned unexpected income through labor.
Now, my father is completely old. When he was young, his white and handsome face had already become dark, his mouth was replaced with false teeth, and his face collapsed year by year. The only thing that has not changed is that his body is still so straight. In order to be "quiet", he and his mother have had dinner with their two younger brothers. Because the younger brothers often go out to work, everything seems to be "starting from scratch" for the two old people. Year after year, from breeding to harvesting and threshing, every link depends on oneself. The hardest thing is that he carries 200 kilograms of rice to the top of Gaopo every year.
Every time I advised him, he always replied faintly: many people don't have sons working outside, who do they expect? When I went home again, I brought him another two thousand yuan, which they could use to buy food rations, and strongly begged him not to grow rice again. But he still didn't answer me directly, just saying it's not easy for you to be outside. When I said this, I noticed that his big black hand trembled slightly.
An old man in his seventies is still digging for food as he was young.
Just like my father refused me, he was not the only one, there were many others, and there was no way out.
Yes, fate determines that they must struggle endlessly with soil, nature and cold and heat. At the same time, fate has given them the greatest resilience. Once they lose this resilience, they will lose everything.
Crops are born with suffering.
three
Good and evil, rich and poor, honor and disgrace, and even life and death, everyone has the right to strive for and choose more or less, and only parents and birthplace can not allow any choice. Otherwise, I believe no one wants to choose the fate of being called "cowherd" or "bitch" as soon as they land. Fate is innate.
Congratulations on giving birth to a student!
-Cowherd.
Congratulations on your new daughter!
Bitch.
Up to now, most rural people still dare not have much hope for the identity predicted by this congratulatory message, but the self-deprecating answer is probably correct.
However, many people have asked their children what do you want to be when you grow up?
None of the students answered "be a farmer", not in rural areas, and even less in cities. If they are asked to answer from the ideal point of view in their hearts, it can be said that none of them will.
However, fate always forces a large number of rural students to become farmers. So many years ago, "jumping the farm gate" became the highest ideal and goal of countless farmers' descendants.
So, the young mother in the city pointed to the sweaty farmers in Gai Lou who pulled carts to pull dung and move bricks, and warned her son, "If you don't study hard, you will be like them in the future!"
Farmers have become a terrible fate in life.
In less developed areas, the living conditions of farmers have been accurately described by the mothers of urban children.
When I was a child in the countryside, I heard that some criminals refused to come back after serving their sentences, preferring to apply to stay in a reform-through-labour farm. This is not just that they have no face to see the villagers again, but that no matter how hard they work, there is always a bite to eat, and labor is always a bit rhythmic. In order to get a little better treatment than farmers, they would rather associate with criminals for life.
It has long been said that there are businessmen, scientists and artists in cities and only writers in rural areas.
Many writers grew up in rural areas, and many writers have "experienced hardships in a vast world".
Therefore, not only crops, but also poems, essays and novels have grown on the yellow land.
Just because of various conditions and opportunities, many heads that may grow articles in the vast world failed to grow in the end. Because the land that can breed works needs only livelihood, not goods.
four
Just like those who have lived a comfortable and superior life for a long time and don't know happiness, people born in hard and tiring environments have more or less played down the feeling of hard work. Although they complained to heaven under the torture of pain, they did not have a comfortable experience after all. In other words, they are all born to their fate. Otherwise, the hard farming without holidays, sundays, pauses and endings will really become an unavoidable pain.
This is how my father came, and so is my grandfather. Grandparents and even many generations have lived like this. As an exiled feudal king in the story said when talking with the cultivators on the road, "My family has been emperor for generations, and your family has been farming for generations." It's a good thing he didn't say it was just a different division of labor.
Those who have been with the earth for generations, if they have a strong sense of pain, it is his unfortunate fate and misfortune.
People who don't belong to this fate are forced to live in the countryside because of political movements or other reasons, and more or less see and experience such labor. These days are as terrible as purgatory in their works.
Land belongs only to those who were born on it.
After the end of a crazy era, the educated youth in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan Province once had a feat of tens of thousands of people going on strike, thousands of people going on hunger strike and crying in order to return to the city.
"Don't go back to the city, or die for me!" This firm oath also declares that the land does not belong to us! Efforts do not belong to us!
They exchanged their lives and blood and tears for victory.
At that time, two or three distribution schools voluntarily returned to the soil, and some enthusiastic educated youths volunteered to go to the countryside, all of which were sung as feats.
At this time, how miserable it is for thousands of educated youth to leave the land.
At the beginning, the feat of countless students in cities all over the country going to the countryside like a trend under the wave of the leader's giant hand touched hundreds of millions of farmers; Later, hundreds of millions of farmers also thought it was natural to yearn to return to the city.
It is not because they have made any contribution to the countryside, nor because they have brought burdens and troubles to the countryside, but because the poisonous sun, cold wind and mud in the world, as well as the black stoves of heatable adobe sleeping platform there, should not be tolerated by children in the city.
At the turn of the century that just ended, the news of Beijing once blew up the "Old Third Session".
At that time, some people in the capital set up the "Educated Youth Restaurant", which was hung with the words "Four Volumes of Xiong Wen" and "Loyalty", as well as sickles, hoes and straw hats branded with historical marks.
At that time, the educated youth invited each other to visit, and when they returned to that specific era, they recalled the painful hardships, and the taste in their hearts was indescribable.
The trace of suffering engraved on people's hearts is deeper than happiness.
As a result, many people cried, and an era was soaked by the tears of a generation of city people.
In an era far from the edge, I don't know how many generations of rural people have been soaked in sweat and will be soaked in sweat. It seems that God didn't give them the qualification to know their hard work, they couldn't walk out of the field, and they wouldn't have sad memories of their third child.
Farmers' farewell to land is also a farewell to life.
five
Land is the mother of all things and human beings, and the most selfless thing in the world is mother.
But in front of the city people, the eyes of the country people often naturally reveal a kind of humility and an unspeakable gaze. Even more city people who don't want to look down on them will immediately realize that the people standing in front of them are people living in another well-defined situation.
This kind of eyes is unique and only belongs to the eyes of farmers in China.
Even children can tell city people from country people at a glance by their skin color and clothes, which is probably the national conditions of China and the characteristics of China.
In the eyes of some well-dressed city dwellers, country people are not only rustic and dirty, but also short-sighted, narrow-minded and selfish. Yes, they may have a big fight with the village cadres over two sweet potatoes or two corn cobs. However, they can take repairing bridges and roads as their responsibility and saving people as their virtue. When passers-by are exhausted from hunger, an old man can cut off a piece of dried meat hanging on the beam for the first half of the year and cook noodles for him without hesitation. This is beyond the understanding of many urban brothers and sisters who refuse to sweep the corridor, live in dormitories with cleaner and smoother pavements and kick garbage under other people's beds. If the two positions are reversed, the behavior of the elderly will be regarded as a model of spiritual civilization and greatly appreciated.
The bounden duty of land is dedication, without extravagant hopes.
In the era when China was busy making gods and rebelling all day, and waves of "Red Sea", hundreds of millions of rural people never forgot that only land can provide people with basic living conditions. At least they can't cheat the field. Like some rebels who get paid, they go to the unit to get paid, go to the grain store to buy rice, and then go to the streets to engage in "revolution."
In the past, ladies and gentlemen called the girl who waited on them "maid" and later "servant". /kloc-after 0/949, many old names were changed, and girls who came to work in cities to make a living were also renamed as "nannies"; After the reform and opening up, some street employment agencies were euphemistically called "domestic attendants". Southeast Asia and other places have always called "maids" unchanged.
Names can often hide the essence. However, in the past few decades, it is difficult for us to find a young woman who is also a "domestic servant" in the city. Even today, there are few laid-off women workers in cities to join the team of hourly workers and "Yue Yue".
I always remember a TV series called "I love my family". My family has a smart and kind little babysitter. Once the whole family had dinner together, the father of a revolutionary veteran cadre suddenly brought up the topic that "sons are easy to seduce little nannies", and his two sons immediately quarreled angrily. Among them, the boss deliberately led this doubt to his younger brother, stood up and pointed to the little babysitter and shouted: "Be lenient in confession and strict in resistance!" This is a farce, and not many people make it come true. However, in real life, besides country girls, does anyone else suffer this kind of mental abuse?
In this TV series, it seems that more than one scene treats the personality of the little babysitter as a joke. Expressing life in this way is obviously a deliberate farce and exaggeration, but this immoral creation may awaken some people's personality consciousness. From this perspective, we should thank the director of the play instead.