For as long as I can remember, there has been this established tradition in my hometown, Shaoyang County: all descendants, no matter where they are, must return to their hometowns during the Tomb-Sweeping Day to pay homage to their ancestors. Tomb Sweeping Day is a grand and sacred day in the eyes of hometown people, more lively than the Chinese New Year.
In the early 1990s, people from my hometown migrated to big cities with the spring breeze, working hard, establishing themselves, and settling down. My relatives left their hometown and came to Zhuzhou to engage in the clothing business. One after another, the whole family immigrated here, and Zhuzhou has become our second hometown. For more than 20 years, my father and brother have gone back every year to pay their respects, but I have only gone back a handful of times. Sometimes I always feel that part of my life is still in my hometown. As I grow older, this feeling becomes more intense, like a country song that sings endlessly in my heart when the loop button is pressed.
This year, I took care of the things around me early and planned to go back to my hometown with the "big army" to settle my affairs.
At six o'clock in the morning, we rushed to our long-lost hometown, with a big family and four cars. There are many cars on the expressway, and it is even more congested when we get off the expressway. There is a long queue of cars lying on the ground for several miles. It was supposed to be a three-hour drive, but it took more than five hours.
My home is in Wufengpu, which is a thousand-year-old ancient town located at the intersection of the economic corridors of Shaoyang, Hengyang and Yongzhou. It was known as "Little Shanghai" in the past. Wufengpu is known as the "Hometown of Blue Calico." The blue calico was once sold across the country and is now listed as a national intangible cultural heritage. My hometown is a hilly area with developed red soil hills and a mid-subtropical monsoon climate. It often experiences continuous rain and heavy to heavy rains. After the rain, red water accumulates all over the low-lying areas. Therefore, my hometown has become the "red hills" in the writings of literati.
With the passage of time, the way home has become convenient and unfamiliar.
Our village is one kilometer away from Wufengpu Street and is called Qilitian. As the name suggests, it is named after the large paddy fields. When I was a child, I stood in front of my house and looked at the fields. I couldn't see beyond. Now, starting from the entrance of the town, I can see rows of modern buildings standing on the paddy fields, spreading neatly, and a new street has emerged and is about to arrive at my doorstep.
The group of people first came to the cemetery. I saw that the mountain was overgrown with weeds, entangled with thorns, and there was no place to step. The men raised their hoes to dig the soil and weed. My father arranged three animals and rice wine in front of the tomb, lit incense candles, paper money, and placed paper flowers on the tomb. We knelt down to worship in turn. After the ceremony, we lit firecrackers.
The camellia oleifera trees on the mountain were glowing with green light. I was pleasantly surprised to find tea slices, a childhood delicacy. Every time before and after the Qingming Festival, we children from the countryside, like little birds, burrowed into the tea mountains, climbed over the hills and ridges, opened our eyes wide, climbed the branches to look for them, picked off the tea pieces and stuffed them directly into our mouths without washing them. Tea slices bring back beautiful childhood memories. I took off a piece and gave it to my nephew. He chewed it, frowned, and hurriedly spit it out.
Our yard is called Songshushan, and there were dozens of families there. A road divides the yard into two, and my home is under the road. The houses under the road are all old houses built in the 1970s and 1980s, with red bricks and black tiles. The doors and windows are closed all year round, and they are swaying in the wind and rain. With mottled walls, damaged eaves, and spider webs woven around old windows, the old house is an incongruous addition to this era. Several mud houses have completely collapsed, recording the length of time like ruins. Their final mission is to wait for the return of their owners during the Qingming Festival. Needless to say, the owner of the mud house has already built a mansion in a prosperous city. This pile of mud is just a kind of sustenance, a symbol of status, and a place of roots.
I stood in front of my house, looking at everything familiar and unfamiliar, and I said to myself, I am back! I have fallen into the arms of my hometown, feeling uneasy joy in my heart. It was so quiet in the yard. I couldn't hear the sound of people, nor the crowing of chickens or the barking of dogs. I could only hear the crackling sound of firecrackers coming from the hillside not far away. At noon, I remember that when I was a child, it was the time when pots and pans were ringing and the smoke was misty, but I couldn't smell the fireworks. The air was filled with the smell of grass and earth. I remember back then, as long as it didn't rain, young and old would sit on the stone pavement in front of my house with their rice bowls. Everyone would put vegetables in each other's bowls, and you could have several different flavors in one meal.
My house was built in 1986. It is a three-room red brick house with two floors. It was the best house in the yard at that time. My father paved the front and back of the house with cement, built a square pool with bricks in the front yard, raised fish, built several cement pillars next to the kitchen, and built a grape trellis.
The grapes become soft when ripe, do not turn purple, and are very sweet. When we were children, we waited like snails under the trellis for the grapes to ripen. During the summer vacation, we stood on tiptoes from time to time, grabbing the grapes and pinching them.
The stairs outside are covered with moss and weeds. The front half of the second floor is an open-air platform used to dry rice, beans and other crops. My father works outside all year round. During the double harvest season, my mother took me to the fields to thresh the rice. My mother would carry the threshed rice back in baskets one by one, rest for a while under the stairs, and then carry it upstairs. The stairs were relatively steep, more than 60 degrees. My mother put a towel on her shoulders and kept wiping the sweat dripping into her eyes. She gritted her teeth, the muscles on her face were twitching, and she climbed up step by step.
Behind the house are three pig pens. In the past, two piglets and a sow were raised. The sow gave birth to piglets twice a year. My sow became extremely delicate as soon as she gave birth to piglets and only ate wild boar grass. My mother said she was suffering from tuberculosis. That sow was an important source of income for my family, and my mother took special care of it. Every year in early winter, when the weeds are in decline and the sweet potatoes are harvested, the consumptive sows torture me so hard that pulling pigweed has become my inevitable homework after school. My presence has been left on the canal dam, beside the pond, on the field ridges, and in the orange orchards. I was alone, holding a basket and lowering my head, looking for the rare bright green among the withered yellow weeds. Pulling pigweed has become the most common farm work for a country boy like me.
Looking into the house through the window, my bed and desk were still in their original positions, covered in thick dust. Countless days and nights, I sat on a wicker chair and read, leaned on the desk to write, and huddled under the quilt in the cold weather to memorize texts. Whenever she watched us studying in the room, a smile would appear on my mother’s tired face. . My mother worked from dawn to dusk every day and seldom let us work. She wanted us three siblings to have enough time to study and get out of the farm. She often whispered in our ears that she did not study well and was afraid of traveling in cars when traveling far away. My mother rarely gets angry and scolds people. When she was a child, she dropped out of school out of anger after being scolded by her grandfather. She regretted it so much that she would never let her children make the same mistake again. Many years later, even if my sister and I were laid off, she was still happy and satisfied because her daughter had been admitted to school.
The back of the house is covered with shrubs, making it impossible to get close. Two cypress trees stand side by side, with branches and leaves overlapping each other, majestic and vigorous. The two of them look at each other but seem to be within reach, just like us two sisters. My younger sister is married to Jiangsu. We often video chat on WeChat. Although we seem to be close at hand, we are still far away. These two cypress trees were planted by my sister and I when we were young. That day, my sister picked up a few cypress saplings on the road, and we planted them in the open space behind the house. We felt like we had found a treasure, and couldn't stop snickering. We planted several densely packed rows, just like transplanting rice seedlings, planting several trees at a time, and the pits were shallow. Later, the saplings died one after another, but fortunately a few trees survived. In my hometown, cypress branches were used to decorate the mourning hall when the elderly passed away. Gradually, several cypress trees were cut down one by one, and finally two were retained.
There is a piece of private land next to my house. My father dug a few bamboos from the mountains and planted them in the ground. When the warm spring breeze blows on the earth, bamboo shoots emerge from the soil one after another. They have a beautiful name, "Spring Girl Bamboo Shoots". Spring girl bamboo shoots are fresh and delicious, and are deeply loved by people. Seeing them bursting out of the ground means spring is here.
Moso bamboo reproduces very quickly. Its roots expand and spread endlessly in the soil. In a few years, a bamboo forest can be formed. Due to no one taking care of it, the moso bamboo grew in all directions at an alarming speed, and the surrounding roads disappeared. There is a well behind my house that provides domestic water for the entire yard. The sound of the bucket echoes behind the house from dawn to night. Nowadays, tap water is supplied to every home, and the lifeline connecting the wells has also withdrawn from the stage of history. The moso bamboo crossed the road and penetrated into the back hill of the neighbor's house, turning the bare autumn hillside into a continuous bamboo forest. At this time, it was the season when spring bamboo shoots were growing rapidly. I saw some scattered buds scattered in the cracks of the bamboos. I was surprised when my aunt came over and said, "There are no bamboo shoots left at this time. They have been pinched away. Some people from the yard next door came before dawn and could pick off twenty or thirty kilograms in the middle of the morning and sell them easily on the street for a good price."
The puddles around the house were covered in sediment. Filled with leaves, my father wielded a hoe to clean them. I lingered in front of my house, walking softly and measuring every piece of land religiously. Like a passerby, I take photos of the house, the well, the pool, the bamboo forest, etc. and save them in my mobile phone. I also save the memories and homesickness. I believe that no matter where I am, they will be able to comfort those people. Lingering nostalgia.
We haven’t opened the door to our home. We haven’t opened it for many years, and we have less and less reason to open it. The lock on the door is rusty, the paint is peeling off, the wall is mottled, and the precipitation of time accumulates on the window sill. The orchids I grew when I was young are still there, the cacti are still there, and the sagebrush is still there. The peach branches are lush and leafy, and the crown of the tree grows into a ball. Are the peaches picked by naughty children before they are ripe, or are they become delicacies watched by birds? The grape trellis next to the house has fallen over, and the grapevines have long since disappeared, leaving some sweet and sour thoughts in my mind.
There is a large pond in the center of the yard, which is pumped for irrigation during droughts. There are several large stones beside the pond embankment, which is where the women wear their clothes. Summer is a paradise for children. We jumped into the water with plastic washbasins, touched snails and clam shells with our feet, and played with each other in the water. We often forget the time while playing. In the evening, mothers stand on the slope and shout their children's names in a dragging voice. Some of them shout and curse at the same time. When they hear the curse, they wipe their faces one by one and hurriedly climb up, carrying their shoes. I ran home, the water on my body dripping down.
My house is located at the back. There are no houses on either side, and there is a house on one side but no one lives in it. Uncle Ande lives in the front. They are two old people who look after the house. Their three daughters are married and their son is in Shenzhen. work to earn a living. When I pushed the door open and walked in, Aunt Ande was at home alone. She said that no one was planting crops in the fields now, and all the fields were growing flue-cured tobacco. Uncle Ande had contracted seventy acres and worked in the fields every day. Only then did I remember that when the car drove into the village, I saw that the fields were all covered with plastic films, and I felt puzzled at that time. Aunt Ande said that there are only three families and three pairs of elderly people living under the road. Grandma Hou'an's son's family opened a clothing processing factory in Shaodong. They took the two elders there for only a week, and the two old people came back quarrelsomely. A few days ago, Grandma Hou'an fell at home and lay on the ground for more than a month. He was discovered hours later and was sent to the hospital after calling 120.
On the road is a school. I completed four years of primary school in this school. As soon as I heard the school bell in the morning, I grabbed my schoolbag and ran. The bell hadn't stopped when I arrived at the classroom. When I was six years old, I took my household registration book and went to register for the first grade. The teacher refused to accept me and I went home crying. My grandma later took me there, but it was useless to plead with me. There were too many students at that time. I studied in kindergarten for one year. This is my alma mater. When I see some rural primary schools while wandering around, I can't help but think of her. As time goes by, my memory of childhood reading gradually fades. Only two teachers have always been unforgettable. One is the kindergarten teacher. She is a beautiful female teacher with long hair and a slim figure. One day, the teacher taught me how to write the word "五", but I couldn't write it well. She was very angry, held my hand and taught me: "Of all the cadres in your house, you will be the only farmer in the future!" The other one was Teacher Li, He is a private teacher in this village who teaches Chinese. He wears thick glasses, and there are many circles reflected on the lenses. He was the first person to come to school every day. He taught in the village primary school for decades and never became a full-time teacher until his retirement. On the first day, Teacher Li changed my name. My father named me "Youliang". Teacher Li changed "You" to "You" in my homework book. Later, I heard that Teacher Li died of lung cancer in the county hospital. That afternoon, the car transporting the body suddenly stalled when passing the school. The driver could not start no matter what he did. Some people said that Teacher Li might have to go back to the school for a visit. Half an hour later, Hit it again and the car will start immediately.
Nowadays, there are very few children in the countryside, and they are all sent to town primary schools. This village primary school immediately became a memory of our generation. Now it has been renovated and turned into a freezing factory.
The road is like a time and space line, dividing a courtyard into two centuries. Under the road, the original appearance of the last century is preserved, while on the road is the scene of the emerging rural areas in the 21st century.
There are many billboards on the roadside. There are several families living on the road. Grand and beautiful new houses are rising from the ground. Various high-end cars are parked in front of the houses. Flowers and plants are planted in front of the house, and evergreen trees are pruned into circular or pagoda shapes. This is a distinctive modern symbol, symbolizing a prosperous and leisurely life. As time goes by, the hometown people who have always stayed in their hometown have seized the business opportunities that are coming, and with their hard-working hands, they have entered the fast lane of development.
Our former vegetable soil no longer exists, replaced by a large-scale driving school. Opposite the driving school are several mechanical processing factories. The former tile factory is now a large brick-making factory. I heard that the government has approved a large piece of land. The hillside near the road is about to be bulldozed, and high-end residential areas are being built...
Many old people in the yard have exhausted the light of their lives on the red soil where they cherish each other, and they have passed away one after another. My grandparents also lived in Qingshan, Zhuzhou. Wufengpu is now the hometown of our fathers and our generation. It attracts us like a huge magnet. But for our next generation, I believe that in their eyes, this is already our hometown. If not that place, my hometown is naturally Zhuzhou.
This time, my second grandfather also returned to his hometown. He is 85 years old. He just came out of the hospital a few days ago and returned to his hometown regardless of the obstruction of his children. After a long journey, my father felt very distressed when he looked at the weak body of his second grandfather. He said that the old man would come back every two years in the future. After hearing this, his second grandfather quickly waved his hand and said firmly, no, as long as he can move, he will come back every year! I can understand my second grandfather's mood. Hometown is the source and root of human life. Hometown is here, and there is still a place to come in life.
At three o’clock in the afternoon, the whole family got in the car and headed back. Looking at the familiar yet unfamiliar scenery outside the window, I silently said in my heart, Farewell, Red Hills, Goodbye, my dear hometown!