Flowers are not flowers, and butterflies are not butterflies.

The polar flower is not an ordinary flower, but a summer flower of Cordyceps sinensis.

Hu Die is not an ordinary woman. She is the epitome of thousands of abducted women in Qian Qian, China.

I accidentally browsed the introduction of the book "The Flower of the Limit" on the Internet, with only a few crosses, which was very brief. The author is Jia Pingwa. This story is about what happened to a woman who was trafficked from the city to the countryside. Actually, I feel very strange about this subject. There has never been a case of abducting and selling women around me, and I have only seen reports of related cases in the legal report column of CCTV or in news and Weibo. Therefore, I was attracted by this book, more because of the expectation of my favorite author's new work and my curiosity about the fresh plants in the title.

So I bought a physical book on Dangdang. The cover is simple and mysterious, which is my favorite style. Before I opened the page, I had no idea how much mental shock it would bring me.

The heroine Hu Die was born in the countryside. She had a hard time and her father was gone. Mother dragged her and her brother to lead a hard life. Hu Die dropped out of school for his younger brother's education. Later, my mother went to the city to collect garbage to earn money to support her family. She went to find her mother, came to the city for the first time, and came to the rented compound. Hu Die was glad that he had become a city dweller and thought that city dwellers should have the image of city dwellers, so he dyed his hair and bought high heels. Later, Hu Die also met a person who would blush-Qingwen, the son of the landlord uncle who rented the compound, and an out-and-out college student. Later, determined to make money, she was abducted by a trafficker posing as Mr. Wang to the small mountain village where her nightmare began. Her city dream was shattered.

The novel takes Hu Die as the first perspective, and looks at everything that happens in the small mountain village through her eyes. Hu Die is beautiful, but her beauty was ruthlessly plundered by the unknown, desolate and remote Geliang village, and she was imprisoned in arid yellow land and dark caves. Like all kidnapped women, Hu Die struggled, resisted and ran away. Even though the villagers caught him rudely, tied him up like an animal, tied his ankles with chains, and gave birth to his son Rabbit after he was forcibly possessed by her husband, Hu Die never gave up the idea of going out from the mountain village, and even secretly found an opportunity to dial a distress call-although he had no time to convey any information. She always thought she didn't belong here.

But at the end of the novel, Hu Die seems to have had a dream when he heard that his mother came to see him. In the dream, she followed her mother and fled back to the city. When he came back, Hu Die found that everything had changed: the reporters' chasing and blocking, the neighbors' gossip, and the buzzing of rabbits. She misses her son, and she doesn't miss the city any more. She sneaked back to the small mountain village by train.

Hu Die woke up and knew it was a dream, but she didn't think it was a real dream. She still waited for her mother according to the information revealed to her by others, but in the end she didn't wait. The last paragraph of the book describes the process of Hu Die's despair while waiting, until she turns back and sets foot on the road to return to Heijia.

If it weren't for this book, it's hard to say when I would really understand the problem of "trafficking in women", which can actually be said to be a very serious problem in China. I tried to find out the number of women abducted and trafficked in China every year. A netizen's words were shocking: "No one can count how many women, college students and innocent young women have been abducted and trafficked in China. Although various news reports have always emphasized that there are fewer and fewer similar cases and how the society is stable, I would rather believe that the truth has not been revealed. " In every remote, primitive and poor mountain village like Geliang Village, there may be one, two or even more Hu Die. When we were young, we were taught not to trust strangers, not to walk with strangers, not to eat strangers' food, and to tell our children not to trust strangers when they grow up and get married. It seems that in people's cognition, children who are not sensible are easily targeted by traffickers. Actually, it is not. They know your inner desire and use it as bait, waiting for the fish to bite. What may be used to kidnap children is a piece of candy and a toy. For a woman like Hu Die, a job that can earn money is a great temptation. You may think it's because Hu Die, who was born in rural areas, dropped out of school early and didn't get much education, but there are also many cases in which educated female college students were abducted. Xue Mei, the heroine in the movie Blind Mountain, is a typical image. Compared with Hu Die, they can't accept the reality of being kidnapped, and the reversal from heaven to hell makes them live in extremely gloomy pain all day.

Back to the novel, let's start with the topic of "extreme flowers". Extreme flowers are a specialty of Geliang Village. As soon as Cordyceps sinensis became hot in Qinghai, villagers packaged and promoted a kind of summer flower of Cordyceps sinensis in the village to make money, called polar flower. This has set off a crazy upsurge of extremely beautiful flowers in recent decades, and a few extremely beautiful flowers are hard to find after people's relentless excavation. The Flower of the Polar Region is inextricably linked with the heroine Hu Die. Hu Die was imprisoned in a cave with an extremely beautiful flower embedded in a picture frame, and Hu Die, who was imprisoned in the cave, was as beautiful as this extremely beautiful flower, and sadly became a rare and expensive winner in Geliang Village.

Then it focuses on some characters in The Flower of the Limit. In Jia Pingwa's works, the language full of local flavor is popular and easy to understand, and the vivid images of all the people in Hu Die and Geliang Village are shaped by brush strokes. As the main character in the novel, Hu Die's mental journey is an important clue. From struggling and even wanting to die, to giving birth to a child, she "learned to be a daughter-in-law in Geliang Village", learned to make various kinds of potatoes, and learned to cut paper with Aunt Pockmarked ... Although Hu Die has always had the belief of fleeing back to the city, it is undeniable that her psychology in Geliang Village has quietly changed with the passage of time. Children, in particular, have become the most important bond between her and the village. Just then, Hu Die dreamed that although he escaped, he returned to the village because he was worried about his son. This is very realistic. Many women who have been abducted and given birth to children are often blocked by a mountain corner and ruin the rest of their lives. After all, the mother's nature is to love and care for her children, just as Hu Die cried to her mother in the article: "I have a mother, but the rabbit has no mother;" You have children, but my children are gone! "

Let's talk about everyone in Geliang Village. Heiliang, a countryman who bought Hu Die as his daughter-in-law, is not as rude as he imagined. On the contrary, he is different from some idle bachelors in the village. He runs his own grocery store and works hard. It's better not to say that he has money than not to cook, which is why he can buy Hu Die. From beginning to end, he provided delicious food for Hu Die and the best treatment for Hu Die. However, he grew up in Geliang village. He can't find the present situation of his daughter-in-law to carry on the family line and the primitive and backward concept of buying a daughter-in-law, which makes him follow the traditional practice and drag a young and immature life into the abyss of despair. Like other men in the village who treated their daughter-in-law, he also imprisoned and captured Hu Die, only with some buffer time. Others in the village are the main force to arrest Hu Die who escaped. Their vulgar language and behavior are contemptible, but they are actually just poor people in Geliang Village. In addition, there are mysterious grandfathers, pockmarked aunts who are obsessed with paper-cutting and believe in ghosts and gods, and prostitutes who are also trafficked, giving up themselves and attaching importance to emotions ... All the words and deeds of small people have become a portrayal of real villages in China, such as Geliang Village, which also implies the author's distress and worry about the living conditions of some rural societies.

"Without buying and selling, there is no killing." This public service advertisement is often seen on the screen. And I want to say that without buying and selling, there is no trafficking. There is a market only when there is demand. For a traditional feudal village like Geliang Village, apart from the most basic survival needs, carrying on the family line is the biggest thing. But as Heiliang himself said: "Now the country is developing cities, and cities have become maws, sucking rural money, rural things and rural girls!" They have no choice. This group of bachelors in the village are as strong as blood onions produced in the village, but the girls are as rare as flowers. Undoubtedly, this is a kind of sadness, and it can also lead us to think about the huge gap between urban and rural areas due to the speed of development, and even some kind of opposition. Where is the way out for rural areas?

Jia Pingwa narrated Hu Die's story with profound brushstrokes, full emotions and unique ink and wash literature. According to the postscript he wrote for Flowers Blooming, Hu Die's prototype is the daughter of a fellow villager who was also abducted. After being rescued, maybe he couldn't stand the exposure of the media, was pointed at by onlookers, or missed his children, and secretly returned to the abducted place when his father was going to marry far away. After listening to the villagers' complaints, he felt that "it was engraved in his heart like a knife", so there was a heroine named Hu Die, but her wings were broken and she could not fly freely like a real butterfly, so she nagged.

After reading "Extreme Flowers", I have a lot of thoughts. I have to thank it for reminding me to pay attention to a serious social reality, which I feel and think about:

Flowers are not flowers, butterflies should become real butterflies. We don't want to see more "Hu Die", so we need villages to find their own way out of construction, improve all aspects of the system, and focus and continuous attention from all walks of life. Only in this way can the butterfly get rid of bad luck and become a truly free butterfly.