Guawa prose

In our Longnan dialect, Guawa means silly baby.

In the mid-1970s, there was a man named Guawa in the village where I joined the team for training. He was about thirty years old at the time. This Guawa is actually not stupid. When he was a child, he once fell down the stairs, broke his right arm, and bit off a small part of his tongue. He became disabled and struggled to speak. Therefore, his family called him Guawa. Over time, it became a custom, Gua Wa. The baby became his name.

Although Guawa is disabled, he is a strong labor force in the village. He and a landlord are the only two people in the village who work full time all year round. He can do any physical work. They earn ten work points every day just like forced labor.

Guawa’s mother died early, and she lived with her father in the home of her brother and sister-in-law. His brother and sister-in-law only regarded him as a robot that could work and eat because he only wore a tattered black cotton-padded jacket for many years and had never been washed or mended.

In addition to working and eating, Guawa’s only consumption is smoking. He was very addicted to smoking. He carried a dry tobacco pot all year round and smoked it whenever he stopped what he was doing. They grow their own tobacco leaves on the wild slopes and have to beg for gasoline for their lighters. He once asked me for gasoline because my father was working as an oil depot for a large construction site. I gave him the diesel by mistake for the first time, so that when I saw him again many years later, he still treated me as a joke. Speaking of. The flint in his lighter had to be bought with money. At that time, the financial resources were almost zero. But Guawa had a trick up his sleeve. Once he found out that the hen fed by his brother and sister-in-law was about to lay eggs, he would lurk by the henhouse. When the chicken had finished laying eggs and had just jumped out of the nest before it could crow, he would rush over, hug the chicken and carry it under the ridge. He threw it away, then picked up the egg at lightning speed and ran away. He went to the foot of the mountain and sold it to an employee of the Forest Management Bureau for five cents. He also bought back five flints, which can be used for a long time. This method has been tried repeatedly by him.

Because of his disability, Guawa never married. He once had the only chance to marry a wife. A middle-aged woman who was begging for food received charity from Guawa. After knowing that Guawa had no mother-in-law, she volunteered to stay and live with Guawa. Guawa was very happy, but his brother and sister-in-law firmly disagreed. Because once Guawa gets married, half of the house, farm tools, and food will have to be given to him, and the brother and sister-in-law will also have to lose a strong laborer who works full time throughout the year.

Several years later, when I saw Guawa, who was already in his sixties, he was still worried about this matter!

More than thirty years later, I was invited to the village where I had joined the team to congratulate a farmer friend on marrying his daughter-in-law, and I met Guawa.

He is already over sixty years old, but his mental outlook is very different from before. He is wearing a new cotton-padded jacket and trousers, a new locomotive hat, and his face is red. He and I met at a friend's banquet. After the banquet, we both drank too much, but he insisted on inviting me to his room for another drink. I was very happy to get his place. He had long since separated from his brother and sister-in-law, and was still alone, but the house was not shabby. He took out a bottle of wine from under the single bed, made tea, and drank with me. While drinking, he told me that now he has three incomes. One is to look after olive trees for a certain unit, with a monthly income of 600 yuan; The income is 500 yuan; the third is to receive a monthly living allowance of 200 yuan for the elderly and widowed, with a total monthly income of 1,300 yuan. He said that he had never dreamed of the life he was living now. His only regret was that due to the opposition of his brother and sister-in-law, he and the beggar woman were unable to get married!

We chatted, drank, and talked about many past events, including the diesel I gave him. He said that I was also addicted to cigarettes and had exchanged gasoline for his dry tobacco many times. At this time, Guawa no longer smoked dry cigarettes, but smoked Lanzhou brand cigarettes worth ten yuan a pack. The two of us gradually became drunk in the smoke...