Cui Zengqi: Journey to Yunnan (9)

Cui Zengqi: Journey to Yunnan (9) Phoenix City Cui Zengqi I walked into the place where I lived, which was a "dam"...

Phoenix City Cui Zengqi I walked into the place where I lived. It was a "dam". Yunnan people usually call a flat piece of high land Bazi, which was the living base of the employees of the Mingliang Coal Mine of the former Resources Commission. I stood on this piece of land made of red soil and stones, and the past came to my mind. The hard but happy childhood life was vividly in my mind. They were stories that I will never forget. In my memory, there are two long rows of bungalows built with taxis, inhabited by employees who moved from the mainland. At the west end of the house there is a cooperative selling daily necessities and a sewing club. There is a castle-like gate at the east end. There is a tiger stove for boiling water and a small hall in the middle. This is a residential area independent of the local residents. Now the original houses no longer exist, and only one family has built a new two-story house to live here. Where I live, I only see a stone wall built on the hillside behind. When I first saw the stones on the wall, I felt so familiar, as if I had just seen them yesterday. How can the human brain be so magical? How come the images of these rocks are still in my mind after seventy years? I have never deliberately memorized them like English words. That stone wall is where I loved making frozen tofu when I was little. Whenever it was the coldest time in winter and thin icicles hung on the eaves, I would put a piece of tofu in a bowl at night, add a little water, and hand a piece of frozen tofu to my mother the next morning. In this Bazi, I also learned how to light a stove. When I came home from school every day, the first thing I did was to take the stove at home and light a few coals at Laohuzao. After lighting the stove, I waited for my mother to come back to cook. In order to improve life, my father raised a sheep on the opposite hillside. Sometimes I would follow him to milk the goat. I once opened a piece of land on a hillside and learned to grow potatoes. Due to the natural degradation of organisms, the harvested potatoes became smaller and smaller every year. This pastoral life has cultivated my spirit of hard work and hard work, and the collective life in Bazi has given me the characteristic of loving contact with society since I was a child. Because I don’t have many children and many people are single, I have become a public son in the community. I am cared for and caressed by uncles and aunts wherever I go. People always smile at me, touch my head, hug me, or give me something to eat. I always smile back, bringing happiness and laughter to everyone. My parents are very kind to their friends. Several single men often come to our house as guests. My mother’s Jiangnan cuisine is particularly delicious. There is an uncle named Hu Bochen who almost always has dinner at our house. He is a close friend of my parents. After I started working, I received a lot of care from my parents’ old friends. This period of my childhood had an important influence on the formation of my character. I have always lived in a happy and peaceful environment, like an undefended city, and I am honest and innocent about what happens around me. Maybe my father saw my weakness. Before he passed away, he left me the words "You must not have the intention of harming others, and you must have the intention of guarding against others."

Photo of the puppy and me in front of our home seventy years ago. During the war, cultural life in the ravines was very lacking. There was no television then, and you couldn't see movies, let alone see shows. So the workers in the mine organized a Peking Opera club. My parents were both fans of the Peking Opera club, and I naturally became a fan. Every morning we would go to a valley to sing our voices, listening to the echoes in the valley echoing in our ears. Our family even went out to perform "Sang Yuan Ji Zi". In the past few years, when I joined the choir of the Senior Citizens Association, people said that I had a good voice and a strong voice. They asked me if I had received professional training. I had no answer. I just said that it was given by my parents. In fact, this foundation may have benefited from the bad voice of that era. The "Borrowing the East Wind" and "Wujia Slope" that I can hum not quite accurately but still manage to be in tune are also from that period. I also remembered an unforgettable story. When I was seven years old, I held a grand wedding here. One day, when the adults all went to work, my neighbor Lu Liwen and I, who was one year older than me (the childhood friend I mentioned in the last issue and asked the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of Yunnan Province to help find), decided to hold a wedding. So I took out the makeup powder box and rouge lipstick that my mother usually used and rubbed them on her face until her face turned red. I used the space under the desk at home as a wedding room, and the two of them squatted under it and held the wedding. When my mother came back from get off work and saw it, she was so angry that she scolded me severely. In fact, my mother really likes this "daughter-in-law", but she feels sorry that I used up all his cosmetics and did it too early. When I later read Guo Moruo's autobiography, I saw that he touched his sister-in-law's soft hand when he was thirteen years old, and I suddenly felt a strange feeling in my heart. It seemed that from that time on, he had a desire for the opposite sex. And my marriage was six years earlier than Mr. Guo’s. It’s really ridiculous! But it was just a children's play, and the real feelings towards the opposite sex didn't appear until the age Guo Lao said.