The me now and the me when I was a child are two different coordinates.
The current coordinates are: A middle-aged man in his early fifties, or an almost young old man, takes the modern transportation subway and travels through the city every day, working hard and humblely to support his family.
The coordinates of my childhood are: an innocent child, playing and growing up in the countryside freely and ignorantly.
Just comparing these two coordinates can make people feel the vicissitudes of life and sigh.
What I want to recall is my childhood fishing past. Jiangnan Water Town, no matter you walk horizontally or vertically, forward or backward, left or right, you will definitely see the sparkling river within a few steps. Inadvertently, the river flows silently all year round, as if it is dispensable in life. Only when you look back do you realize that they have given so much happiness.
Living in Xicen Town, Qingpu County, Shanghai, I started fishing in small rivers when I was very young. I think when I was six or seven years old, I could already be near the water without being in danger. My friends and I made very simple fishing gear: we found a paperclip on the table in the office of the grain management office in the small town, and bent it with our teeth to make a fishhook shape; the thread was pure white cotton, and if it was more advanced, it would be Where can I find a piece of standard transparent fishing line? The float has already been prepared. When the adults are killing chickens and ducks, they pick up a few thick feathers, cut them into pieces the size of rice grains, and thread them on the fishing line with a needle; the fishing rod, Then just look for a piece of bamboo that has turned yellow. The most difficult thing is fish sinker , which requires lead. This thing is not easy to find. After you find it, bend the lead around the fishing line, then use a hammer to hammer it firmly and attach it to the fishing line.
The homemade fishing rod is now complete.
Small river, of course there are no big fish. Among the fish we caught were "stone fish" (local dialect), a very small fish, dark brown, slender and slender, the largest being only four or five centimeters long. There is the giant catfish. I originally thought it was a local name, but I didn’t expect to find its scientific name in the dictionary. It is not big, fat and flat, and the largest one is only five or six centimeters round. There is "jade fat fish" - I still can't verify how to write these words. It is larger and seems to have more meat. These kinds of fish are extremely greedy and will bite the rod soon after the line is put down. At this time, the float floating on the water surface starts from the first one and suddenly dives into the water. As soon as it is lifted, a fish is often caught. These stupid guys were helpless in front of our crude homemade tools.
Because they are too small, these small fish we catch basically don’t eat them. At that time, no utensils were prepared to hold the fish, such as mesh bags placed in the water, so that they could continue to survive. The small fish we caught were basically placed on the stone slabs by the river. Without the company of water, the small fish would soon die. The saddest thing is that sometimes we are fishing in the middle of summer, and the stone slabs are baked by the sun like a teppanyaki. If the small fish is left on the teppanyaki for a while, they will soon look like dried fish. Now that I think about it, this is a bit of a waste of natural resources. At least I use them to feed chickens and ducks.
However, at that time, very few people raised chickens and ducks.
In addition to "stone fish", "snake catfish" and "jade fat fish", we will also catch "tip fish", which has a pointed mouth and looks like a loach. It has a fierce temperament and looks like a fish when biting the hook. The hook was so strong that it struggled vigorously when it came out of the water. This often frightens us children, and we quickly put it back into the river after catching it. From time to time, I would catch the puffer fish , which had a big belly. Later I found out that the reason why it became like this was that from the perspective of biological natural selection, it used this weird shape to scare off opponents. For a while, at a turning point where the water flow was slightly turbulent at the Grain Management Station, we actually caught many small carp. We probably encountered a carp nest. Carp was basically the most advanced fish I could catch at that time.
A few years ago, a friend from a certain county in Guizhou produced fish sauce that was sour in the popular "A Bite of China".I looked at their products and found that the secret to their deliciousness lies in a small wild fish found in the local stream. Adding a few small fish to each bottle of fish sauce gives it a unique flavor. I took a closer look at his small fish, which looked very much like the "stone fish" I caught in the Jiangnan water town when I was a child. But we didn't eat this kind of small fish at that time. It was just fun to catch it. How could we know that decades later? , similar small fish have become an exclusive secret recipe for fish sauce acid, and have exerted huge economic benefits. The times of
have changed so much.
In addition to fishing with a fishing rod, there is also an extremely simple and efficient way to deal with these small fish, which is to use a towel "hoop" (sound). The living habits of these small fish are that they like to stay on the river bank. In this way, you only need to hold the two ends of the towel with both hands, open the towel, and fish up from the depth of the water, and you can catch a lot of them. But as a result, the towels also "suffered". The originally white and clean towels became covered with moss, aquatic plants and impurities in the water, and turned black. When I was young, I didn’t know how to wash it with soap, and when I brought it home, I would hang it with the adults’ towels. The next day I got up to wash my face and found that the towel was clean again. Apparently, my grandpa silently helped me clean it.
My grandpa never said anything or scolded me for doing this, which made me live a free and unrestrained childhood.
What is completely different from us children using towels to "hoop" fish is that adults use serious fishing nets to "hoop" fish. After dinner one time, an adult named "Zhou Yin" from the grain management office brought a fishing net to "hoop" the fish. The local fishing net in Xicen was made of two thick bamboo poles about three to four meters long and a fishing net. The child was short and weak. It is too small to be operated at all. The net was raised from the river. Although the mesh was leaky, the huge and bulky "Water Cube" was still as heavy as a ton and difficult to lift. Every time I saw an adult lifting a net from the river, using all his strength, bit by bit, I would consciously stay away. I never thought of taking the adult's fishing net from the corner of the house and going out to "hoop" the fish. Mind you - you still have this bit of self-knowledge.
Fish like this, in that era of material scarcity, were an excellent meal and a good opportunity for to beat 's teeth. Now that I think about it, I couldn't eat a bite of his fish, so I don't know why I was so silly and fussy around.
There was a flood, and the water overflowed to a row of houses by the river of the Grain Management Office. One of them was the home of a childhood friend of mine. We have been fishing on the stone steps here all the time. At this time, we can sit on a chair and lean against the door to fish without leaving the house, taking out the fishing rod. Such a picture of happiness and joy has become the life ideal that I long for in the future.
Fishing and "hooping" fish accompanied me through a happy childhood. When I was taking a biology class in junior high school, the teacher said on the podium that "fish is a lower animal". I was stunned for a while. How can it be! How could fish be lower animals? Their vigorous swimming in the water and their agility and quickness in disappearing after seeing people are so cute... I very much doubt that the biology teacher is wrong. I felt as if someone was attacking the celebrity idol in my heart, and I felt very disappointed.
is a little bigger, I know what the biology teacher said is right.
In my second year of high school, I returned to Shanghai from Guiyang and stayed with my eldest aunt. Once, I was fishing in the bamboo row in the small town. At this time, the fishing rod had already been replaced by a real fishing line and a fishhook with a reverse hook. In the dim water, there are pieces of wood as thick as a basin tumbling. Fish should like to hide here. At this time, a summer thunderstorm suddenly started, and several people who were fishing together ran to the eaves to take shelter from the rain. I also followed them to hide from the rain. In the misty mist, I looked from a distance and saw the float on the water began to move wildly, followed by a violent sinking. Ignoring the heavy rain, I ran over and reached out to lift the pole. Guaguai clicked, a big fish, three or four taels in size. Immediately, I went to pick up my companion's fishing rod again, and there was another big fish.
My dear, cunning fish are good at biting the hook while we are hiding from the rain.
This is the biggest fish I have ever caught in my life. This time, I no longer catch it and play with it like I did when I was a child, then leave it behind when it dies. After taking it home, the eldest aunt made a dish with these two fishes seriously, which tasted particularly delicious.
When he grew up, he settled in Guiyang due to household registration reasons. He always recalled fishing in his childhood. The more I thought about it, the scene from my childhood of "staying at home and fishing by the door" really broke into my dream. Suddenly, on a cement floor in front of the door, fishing lines were lightly thrown into the river in the rain, and the fish in the water were within reach; suddenly, behind the second-floor classroom where I studied in elementary school, the original rice fields turned into schools of fish. In the place of play, you can catch fish by stretching out the fishing pole from the classroom window... In the chaotic dream, I was wandering in the world of fish.
I once read the news. A farmer in the mountains of Sichuan actually opened an underground river in his house near the mountain. The fish overflowing from the underground river filled the fish pond. It is said that thousands of kilograms of fish can be harvested every day. When I saw this news, I was filled with envy and felt that this farmer was so happy. ——I thought to myself that I would never encounter such a magical realm.
In the famous "The Voice of China" a few years ago, Yao Beina, who died young due to breast cancer , sang a song "Fish". The song was touching and the emotion was touching, and it was praised as " The soul sings”. The lyrics of "Fish" use a lot of rhetorical techniques to compare the woman in love to a fish, while the male lover is a passerby who looks like a fish in a fish tank. The woman cried, "I am a fish. I looked at you outside the fish tank, knocked on the glass, and you smiled at me and left... I leaned against your reflection in the water, fully expecting you to come closer again, longing to lie in your warm hands... ..." Because the lyrics were so obscure, I sang it several times before I discovered its beauty. Similar to "Fish", there are also "Ask for Love", whose lyrics go "Mountains and rivers cannot bear too much sorrow", and "Short Hair", whose lyrics go "I have cut my hair short, cut off my worries, and cut it." The bifurcation of the earth's unloved world" all use the adhesion technique in rhetoric.
I usually like to write articles, and sometimes I want to dabble in lyrics. Inspired by "Fish", I wrote a song called "Chipfly", which was inspired by the idiom "Chipfly shakes the tree". I compare myself to a cricket, and love to a big tree. A cricket shakes a tree, and it is ridiculous to overestimate its own capabilities. Because each of us is as small as a cricket in love. We are often bruised and bruised by love, and we love so much that we hate it for a long time. I learned that a friend who plays music in Guiyang was looking for lyrics, so I sent "Pipfly" to him. He looked at it and shook his head. It was wrong. It was too profound and could not be understood by others.
I was speechless after hearing this.
Ancient poetry never lowered its level from the beginning, catering to fishermen and woodcutter farmers with mediocrity. Even today, they still have strong vitality and shine. In addition, I remember that several writers, including "The Ordinary World" by Lu Yao and , were almost rejected because their works were considered bad at the beginning, and they almost "died at the hands of slaves." Of course, the "Pipfly" I wrote will not cater to the tastes of the world.
Thinking of this, the depressed mood was swept away by the bright sky. It's a pity that this piece of work that was once a figment and a labor of love can no longer be found on the computer.
