Du Xiaoxiang
——Twenty-Two Chronicles of Mengzhuang
Jia Dashan
When we first arrived in Mengzhuang, we didn’t have to work in the fields every weekend afternoon. We sat together and read the newspaper, and the team also recorded the work. Those are our days of study and our days of rest.
One afternoon, I was reading the newspaper and a basket fell from the sky. When we looked up, we saw a dark-skinned but pretty girl standing on the eaves of the south courtyard. She smiled at us and got off the house. ——That is the youngest daughter of Lao Du, the tofu seller on our team, named Xiaoxiang.
Xiaoxiang is here to get her basket. Xiaoxiang usually doesn't like to dress up, but that day she wore a clean light floral gown, which looked very bright, and she still had a faint smell of fragrant soap. I put down the newspaper and said:
"Xiaoxiang, what are you doing in the room?"
"Dry some radish slices."
"Why did the basket fall?"
"It's blowing, the wind is blowing."
She looked at the sky, and she laughed first. There was no wind that day.
We asked her to sit down and play for a while, but she didn't sit down and acted like she would leave immediately after taking the basket. But she didn't leave. She looked at us one by one with a pair of bright and joyful eyes, as if looking for a rare thing:
"Who is he?"
"Who is it?"
"Wu Song, your Wu Song."
I understand, she came to see Ye Xiaojun. The night we arrived at Mengzhuang, a gala was held in the village. We performed three programs: a large chorus, a small chorus, and finally Ye Xiaojun said a piece of Shandong Express - "Wu Song Fights the Tiger". He didn't speak very well, and there was no accompaniment, but he won waves of applause and made people shout with joy. After saying one paragraph, it didn’t work, so I said another paragraph. So Xiaojun became a star. The girls and wives in the village all wanted to admire his style. The production team leader also called him "Wu Song" when assigning tasks.
I told her that Xiaojun went back to the city and would be back tomorrow. She said:
"I heard that he can also play the huqin?"
"Yes, he can also play the transverse flute."
"He is really good. He can make up so many words and phrases, and he can make them up quickly and smoothly. One sentence in the blink of an eye, one sentence in the blink of an eye..."
We all laughed. I told her that those words and sentences were not made up by Xiaojun, but had been written by someone, and Xiaojun had memorized them. I also told her that the person who wrote the words was called the author, and Xiaojun was the performer. She listened carefully and kept nodding, as if she had acquired a new kind of knowledge and understood a profound truth.
At the end of autumn that year, a club was established in the village with our educated youth who went to the countryside as the main body. We worked during the day and rehearsed at night. During the day, the work is to pull the loess from the field to the village one by one, and pile it up in one place to be used as fertilizer next year. Pulling soil is not tiring, one person drives the shaft, and a dozen or even twenty people pull the rope, leisurely, like taking a walk. But I feel that pulling soil in winter is more painful than hoeing in summer - hoeing in summer will have an end no matter how long the field is. Pulling soil is different. As long as the years are not exhausted and the loess in the fields is not exhausted, we will never complete the task, day after day, trip after trip. Only at night can we change into clean clothes and gather in the club to freshen ourselves up and entertain ourselves. A few years later, I read the Bible and it was written in the Book of Genesis: Heaven, earth, man, grass and trees, birds and insects, as well as day and night, were all created by God. I think the greatest achievement of that god is that when he created day, he did not forget to create night. If there was no night, how would we have spent those years in Mengzhuang!
Our program is not exciting, but it is very lovable.During the performance, the square in front of the stage, the slope behind the square, and the surrounding houses and trees were all full of people! Xiaoxiang always puts a bench on the west side of the stage, closer to the front, and stands on it to watch (there are two girls on the bench, one on the left and one on the right, with her in the middle). When she was watching the performance, she raised her chin slightly, opened her mouth, and used strength in her eyebrows and eyes. I was playing the erhu on the stage, looking at her focused expression, and thought naively: Could it be that our ancestors expected that there would be a small incense in the future, and then invented orchestral gongs and drums, singing and dancing?
In the twelfth lunar month of that year, many young people in the village asked to join the club, and Xiaoxiang also signed up. Xiaojun is the director of the club and must test them to prevent them from cheating. Xiaojun was cold-mouthed, but Xiaoxiang just sang a line, and he laughed. He said that she had a loud voice, was tone-deaf, couldn't sing, but could sell tofu.
I saw Xiaoxiang go out of the club, hide in a corner, and start crying. ——It’s such a cold day!
Xiaoxiang stopped watching our rehearsal.
won’t watch our show either.
She saw us on the street and pretended not to see us.
Xiaoxiang does not have a talent for literature and art, but she has always loved literature and art. That year, on the third day of the third lunar month, Wuxingcun received a play. She watched it both at night and during the day.
The troupe left and she disappeared.
Villagers rumored that Xiaoxiang ran away with the actor.
Her father was not in a hurry because the troupe had arrived in Beisun Village - Xiaoxiang had an aunt from that village.
After six or seven days, she came back. We asked her what she was doing, and she said:
"Me, I went to the theater.
"Where are you eating these days?"
"I, Xiaoxiang, can I have no place to eat? "
"Where are you sleeping?"
"I, Xiaoxiang, can I have no place to sleep? "
She didn't mention her aunt. She said that she and a Kun Jiao (formerly known as drama actress. Also called Kun Ling) in the theater troupe, became sisters, and finally raised her face and said:
"Oh, I have relatives in the literary and art circles! "
Jia Dashan (July 1942 ~ February 20, 1997), Hebei Zhengding. After graduating from middle school in 1964, as an intellectual youth who went to the countryside He went to work in farming in Xiciting Village. In 1971, he began to publish works and was later transferred to the Zhengding County Cultural Center as director, vice chairman of the Zhengding County CPPCC, member of the Standing Committee of the Hebei Provincial Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, and vice chairman of the Hebei Provincial Writers Association. The fate of things reflects the reality of rural society through the personality description of the bottom characters.
His works such as "Fetching the Scriptures" created in the 1970s mainly wrote about grassroots cadres from a political perspective; the "Dream Village Chronicles" series in the 1980s no longer directly wrote about politics, but about the human nature and human feelings of ordinary farmers living in a specific political environment; his works after the 1990s are intended to explore the commonalities of human nature.
“In this world, there is the bitterness of optimism, the ugliness of beauty, the weird humor, the stubbornness of thought and the warmth of hardship. "This is the evaluation of Jia Dashan's works by Tie Ning, chairman of Chinese Writers Association.
In 1978, the novel "Qijing" won the first national Outstanding Short Story Award. He also won the award with writers Wang Meng, Liu Xinwu , Jia Pingwa and others.
Since then, he has created He has written a number of excellent short stories such as "Flower Market" and "Chronicles of Dream Village", and his works have won many awards.
's representative works "Qiu Jing" and "Flower Market" have been selected into Chinese textbooks in middle schools across the country, and "Zhao Sanqin" has been included in "100 Scenes of Rural China" published by Japan's Galaxy Bookstore.
In the literary world of the 1980s, he and Jia Pingwa were known as the "two Jia" in short stories.
