Wedding in the village
1
Wang Dakui's grandson is getting married. In recent years, the whole family has discussed the grandson’s wedding countless times, and the one who is particularly concerned about grandfather Wang Dakui. He thought that his grandson graduated from university and worked in the provincial capital, so the wedding must be held with a grand ceremony. So, Wang Dakui booked a banquet at the highest-end hotel in the county.
The grandson came back with his partner. The village chief and grandson were childhood friends. They invited them to get together several times. The grandson and partner changed their minds and said that they wanted to hold a wedding at home. According to traditional customs, they invited relatives and friends. They also said that rural weddings were simple, peaceful, lively and festive. They also asked the village chief to help with the planning and begged grandpa to agree to withdraw the hotel banquet. Wang Dakui stomped his feet and stared at him, feeling ten thousand unhappy in his heart.
Fifty-five households in the village, all 25 households have moved to the town, and six more households have lived in the county town. The village courtyard is now deserted, and the weeds are growing as high as the eaves of the houses, and there are only some elderly and disabled people left. It is difficult to find someone in charge to help. Can this wedding be done?
"Young man, it was a sudden idea!" Wang Dakui sat on the door pier smoking a cigarette, his heart was up and down, and his crisscrossed face was full of dissatisfaction and helplessness.
But my grandson insisted on doing this, no one can change it.
2
When Wang Dakui was in his early thirties, he had not yet found a wife. My parents were almost crazy, burning incense and worshiping Buddha everywhere, and asking someone to give gifts. Finally, he used three dou of wheat to get his wife back from Nanshan Lok. From then on, the whole family was raised high when they went out.
Da Kui's father stood in the yard and promised his neighbors and villagers that he would make his son's wedding prosperous and lively and that he would make everyone eat and drink well.
那年春天，爹从大奎的舅家、姑家、姨家揍了几斗麦子、两斗黄豆，磨面、做豆腐；让大奎从镇上的百货店里给媳妇买了身新衣服，又买了一面碗口大的镜子、一把雨伞、一双红艳艳的绣鞋，然后择了个黄道吉日，迎娶媳妇进了门。
Three days before the wedding, farm work was stopped in the whole village. The chief manager is the captain Manwa, and the men and women work hard to help. The adults and children all wore new clothes for the New Year. The men ran around the village, moving tables, pulling stools, borrowing pots and pans, and setting up stoves; women gathered around the kitchen, picking vegetables and washing dishes, busy and playing.
The smoke rising from the yard was covered with a strong fragrance and spreading inside and outside the village. Several beggars who came from afar leaned on the wheat piles in the yard, saliva flowing from the corners of their mouths.
On the wedding day, the general manager Manwa had a first words, and the main relatives and guests who were gifted to attend the table, and outsiders were behind; the people who helped in the village should do their best to be "hard". In this way, there were still people who shouldn't have been on the table mixed up with them. As soon as the dishes arrived on the table, chopsticks were fighting, and the rice, noodles and oil prepared by the owner could eat at the bottom of the meal. When the guests were sent away, it was the men and women in the village who helped, there was nothing good to eat. They had to cook two pots of large stewed vegetables by themselves. The owner also sent tobacco and alcohol from the agency store to greet everyone. Da Kui's father blushed and toasted everyone with his son, apologizing and thanking.
The chief manager Manwa was drunk. He cried and made a fuss and overturned the wine table.
Wang Dakui knew in his heart that Manwa was two years older than him. The wife he married was originally introduced to Manwa. It was because Manwa's family could not produce the three dots of wheat. The matchmaker introduced the woman to him again and had today's wedding. From then on, the two families met and walked around and didn't speak for a long time.
3
After the land was reached, Wang Dakui's family was able to share twenty acres of thin land. The whole family was united, farming, raising pigs and sheep, and working hard to earn money and hoard grain, preparing to engage his son. He demolished the earthen house, built a brick-and-wood tile house, and then arranged to find a wife for his son.
The conditions in the mountains are poor and it is difficult to get engaged. Fortunately, my son works in Xi'an and talks about a Shanxi girl by himself. But the woman's family is poor and she has much more bride price. There was no choice but to borrow from relatives and borrow from the bank, and then he collected the dowry for the woman's family and planned the marriage according to the other party's request.
Wang Dakui stood up straight and told the neighbors in the yard that my son’s wedding must be held in a foreign style and high-end manner, the first in the village.
On the wedding day, three chefs were invited and thirty tables of banquets were placed in the yard in front of the door. Eight cool and eight hot, there are fish and chickens. Before the meal started, the table was full of guests. The villagers helped and relatives and friends, all of whom were helping each other and squeezing to the wine table. Over the years, every family has surplus food, but not every day can eat meat, and people still want to eat banquets. The fish on the plate did not turn over and the chicken did not spread its wings, and the sister-in-law and aunt put it into the bag they carried with them.
Guests come one by one, and then walk one by one. Thirty tables of flowing water mats were eaten, and the prepared rice, flour, oil and the slaughtered three pigs were eaten. The woman's family agreed to come to ten tables of guests, but fifteen tables came, and the seats were in chaos. Because the greetings were not in place, the relatives of the woman's family quarreled and made the wedding banquet messy.
The men who helped the village were drinking, shouting and drinking, but a few of them couldn't control themselves and were drunk. The worst thing is that Lai Zi in the village was drunk and slept in the wheat piles in the yard, rolling around, shouting, and scolding the owner for being stingy and not giving the guests good food. And the two boxes of cigarettes he had hidden from the banquet were scattered all over the floor.
4
0 The head of the grandson’s wedding is the village chief. Three days before the wedding, the village chief informed the whole village in the "big family" group of the village to go home to attend the wedding. The villagers rushed back from all directions, some helped clean the courtyard and hung lanterns and posted wedding couplets, making the deserted village courtyard prosperous and steaming.
The day before yesterday, the large dining car drove into the village and parked at the yard. Various ingredients were built into small hills. The chefs and workers are busy preparing seats.
On the wedding day, Wang Dakui and his family were wearing brand new clothes inside and outside, standing in the yard, smiling and greeting the guests. The guests they could think of came, and the guests they didn't expect also came. A reporter came to the county TV station and the camera master was Lai Wa's son. He carried the camera and ran up and down to shoot. The town cultural center also sent twenty actors to perform on the stage set up by , , millstone and farm tools. The props for installing the table setting are all exerted and sweated.
The village chief presided over the wedding and carried out one by one according to the most traditional wedding agenda in the village. The groom and bride worship the heaven and earth, respect their ancestors, recognize relatives, and then give great gifts to the villagers in the village. Finally, all the villagers took a group photo and took a family life.
The grandparents sat in the middle, and almost everyone in the village participated. Even Manwa, who suffered from sequelae of cerebral hemorrhage, came in a wheelchair in brand new clothes, and the groom and the bride pushed him onto the stage. Wang Dakui hurried forward and pushed Manwa to his side.
After the wedding, the village chief solemnly announced to the villagers: Our village will be re-planned, and this old village will disappear soon. This time I used this wedding to leave a souvenir for the village...
promised
That year, I was transferred from the school to work in the town government. The wheat harvest ended, and in July and August, the main task of town cadres was to urge public food to be purchased. It is particularly difficult to urge public grain in the town where I work. Some villagers are unwilling to go to the grain station to pay grain consciously. They have to rely on the hard work of town and village cadres to mobilize, otherwise some villagers will refuse to pay. Why is this happening with
? After I entered the village and households, I finally understood. There are multiple conflicts between the village and the villagers, and waiting for the cadres to come to resolve them. Only when they were satisfied with the problem, they were willing to pay the food.
As soon as the mobilization meeting of the town government ended, the cadres went to villages and households to record the problems reported by the villagers. If you can solve problems, help solve them; if you can't solve them, give the villagers a promise. In short, the villagers must pay the public grain.
I want to go to the village where I am urging grain, to the west of the town government. There are more than 300 households in the village, and only half of the households have paid off their public grain. Village cadres accompanied us to urge each household. The most common problem among the villagers is that several brick and tile factories opened in the village rented villagers' land and did not redeem the rent on time; some of them have been redeemed, and there is also a deduction. We and the village cadres helped to verify and supervise. A few days later, the tenants paid the rent, and most of the villagers paid the public grain.
For a few villagers with problems, we will go to the household to solve the problem. My countryman and Xiao Zhao, the Youth League cadre in the town, went deep into the homes of three groups and one household. After entering the house, the couple still slept in the bed. When the cadres came in, the hostess got up. But she sat by the bed, holding her face, and was silent. I asked their family why they did not pay public grain.
"His family and his neighbor's house have a dispute over the village base." Xiao Zhao has figured out the situation.
The neighbor is a brick factory owner. When building a building, he squeezed his house's base by 1.4 meters. They failed to stop it and even fought, and the man's left leg was broken. The village cadres mediated and handled the matter, and the neighbor only paid the medical expenses, but the construction of the building was not affected, and he still occupied his house's base.
I walked out of the house, observed the scene, and found that what the hostess said was the facts. The neighbor's beautiful two-story building stood there, forcing her three tiled houses to be ugly and pitiful. But the other party’s building has been built, so it is impossible to demolish it. I could only give them spiritual comfort and ask her how the man's injured leg was. She said that the leg injury had been healed and the heart injury was difficult to heal. Whenever I think of others being rich and powerful bullying, I feel so nervous that I don’t have the heart to do the work in the field. This year's wheat has grown in the fields and is inadequate to harvest.
Her words are thorny in my heart. I thought that after all, I could persuade his family to pay off the public grain, we would complete the task. But facing them, the several plans I had thought of were flooding tears. I couldn't bear to make things difficult for them, but just wandered around at home and outside...
Her son sat in the inner room and did his homework quietly. Our conversation with his mother did not seem to affect him. Out of the teacher's instinct, I approached the child and picked up the homework he wrote and asked him about his study at school. He asked me to read his quality report and pointed at several certificates posted on the wall. It seemed that this child named Gao Xiang was an excellent student. I asked about Gaoxiang School again and mentioned the names of several teachers, asking him if he knew him, and he nodded curiously. I told him that I was also a teacher, and your teachers include my past colleagues and my classmates.
"Uncle knows my class teacher and my math teacher!" Gao Xiang stood up and went to tell his father excitedly.
The man lying on the bed sat up and answered my words. The couple's faces were no longer covered with clouds.
Xiao Zhao told them about the country's policies and promised to solve the problem about the village base.
I didn't say anything. I was thinking that villagers should not use it to threaten the government to help them solve the problem by not paying public grain. Although we cannot solve the problems they have reported, we have to help them think of some solutions. We cannot use their kindness to write blank checks for them, but should do our best to help them.
"Your children are very outstanding!" I said to them sincerely, "The dispute between your two families about the village base has been formed for more than a year. The conflicts need to be resolved, the problems need to be resolved, and it takes time. I think you should live a good life and raise your children well." I left the phone to the children and told him that if there are any difficulties in learning, you can find me. I think that's the only thing I can do.
After saying that, we left his home and returned to the government. I've been thinking about how to solve his family's problems.
A few days later, Xiao Zhao told me that the county Youth League Committee organized a summer science and technology camp for middle school students and allocated three quotas to the town. After reading the registration requirements, I thought that Gao Xiang, the child from that family, was very good at studying. So, Xiao Zhao and I discussed and prepared to give Gao Xiang a chance. We rode our motorcycle to his house. Gao Xiang was the only one at home. He said that his parents went to the grain station to pay the public grain.
Xiao Zhao and I stood in the courtyard in front of his house and gave him the notice of participating in the science and technology summer camp. After reading the notice, Gao Xiang jumped happily.
The noon sun shines through the gaps between the leaves, sprinkling mottled light and shadow. The breeze blew, and the light and shadow danced happily in the courtyard.
Ten years later, Xiao Zhao, who was promoted to mayor, invited me to visit the town where I had worked, but everything here has become unfamiliar. The village I had in charge of in the past has been converted into a botanical garden.Mayor Zhao took me into a small villa and tasted the farm food. After entering the door, the proprietress recognized me at a glance and happily told me about the development and changes of his family over the years. She also specifically told me that her son Gao Xiang had graduated from A&F University and worked in an agricultural research institute in the provincial capital. He helped design the village development plan. (Author Tian Guangming)
