When we were twenty, we were all the same

"Lu Xiaolu, what is your ideal?"

"Lu Xiaolu, have you ever considered anything else."

"Lu Xiaolu... ...." Following Lu Xiaolu, he kept running around and was stopped by various people, who either laughed at him, tried to reason with him, or simply scolded him. He would talk nonsense and say it back with a playful smile. However, he will be scared, confused, and even lonely and sad. At the age of twenty, he saw through the truth of life. He even saw his own mediocre life, but he didn't know how to change or what to do to fill the endless emptiness of life.

Lu Xiaolu said, my twenty-year-old youth was rotten and sweet. I thought the same as him, how happy it is to rot with the fragrance of fruit, how bright and bright, but I am not Lu Xiaolu, and I am not as lucky as him to taste the sweet and rotten taste of youth. The road was in Dai City, and I was wandering between several old cities. My twenties were like the smell of those stinky ditches outside the moat, and what I saw when I looked up was the front covered by smog. My twenty-year-old is rotten and moldy in my opinion, and has no sweet smell at all.

I am living as mindlessly as Lu Xiaolu. He ran around in the factory, working in the fitter class, the electrician class, the plumber class, and the saccharin workshop, going to and from work, day after day. I was changing between several different identities, in school, in the shop where I worked part-time, in the big city, and in the small mountain village of my hometown, wandering around without knowing where to go. Lu Xiaolu didn't abide by the factory rules, was late for fights and climbed the wall, and teased the little girl in the laboratory to disrupt the rules of the meeting. But he didn't know why he did this. He didn't think he was the kind of rebellious young man Bai Lan mentioned. He felt that he should be rebellious. He is a small worker but wants to be a poet, but that will only make others laugh at him.

I skipped classes at school, didn’t listen carefully, and didn’t want to socialize with my classmates; I worked several part-time jobs, and often quarreled with employees or contradicted the foreman; I went to a few cities and looked around, and I felt I'm very confused. I don't want to go back to my home in a small mountain village to be a traditional rural person, but I also don't want to wander endlessly in a big city. I don't know where I'm going, I have nowhere to go. Like Lu Xiaolu, I don’t know where my confusion comes from, and I don’t know why I do what I do. I am neither rebellious nor pessimistic. I just want to try to look forward to life but it is always difficult to do so.

Lu Xiaolu used numbers to summarize what he had done in the factory throughout his life. Maybe he just moved a building. At the age of twenty, I seemed to have seen my future. No matter how hard I studied and worked, I still couldn't afford a house in a big city. Lu Xiaolu said that his twenties were like an endless maze that he never got out of. And I feel that my twenties are passing quickly, but coming slowly. I don’t know when this confusion will end.

Lu Xiaolu said that his sweetness was given by Bailan, and I regret that I have never met Bailan. Bailan is probably the girl in everyone's heart. She is as white as the white clouds and as blue as the blue sky. She is as pure as the white clouds and as brilliant as the blue sky. Like a dream, but real. She is Lu Xiaolu’s dream and Lu Xiaolu’s hope.

"After walking thousands of miles, I can't forget you, my Xiaolu." Lu Xiaolu followed Bailan's guidance and went to Yeda, which filled some of the empty emotions of being twenty years old. Then he searched for Bailan's dream, but he didn't find Bailan, but he found the light of the future, resigned and left Daicheng, went to Shanghai, and completely bid farewell to his life as a worker. That reckless and enthusiastic young worker has become the memory of Lu Xiaolu, who was thirty years old. He no longer has to work the third shift in the saccharin workshop, he no longer has to be grabbed by the leaders of the labor department, and no one will laugh at Lu Xiaolu anymore. Xiaolu wrote a poem...

Thirty-year-old Lu Xiaolu stood outside the factory in Daicheng, telling a girl a story about his twenties. He began to miss those years in the factory, the Babylon of his youth, that rotten yet sweet-fruity place where he had lived for a long time. I wonder if I will be like Lu Xiaolu after I am twenty years old. I don’t know, just like ten years from now, I will be surprised that I have lived this way for a long time.