Local Prose: My Little Aunt

Photo: Seabuckthorn

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Time flies and many villages have been washed away. Among them, a disappearing village, though unknown, is a place I will never forget.

There is a ravine near the village, which flows like time all the year round until the last drop of water runs out. There is a memory of a grass growing in childhood, which germinates every year. This grass can be used as tea. In my hometown, it is called camellia, but it is actually Scutellaria baicalensis Georgi. Camellia usually grows in the shady place of cliffs, and there is no sunshine all the year round.

Every time I go home, Aunt Jiao always tries to bring me some trees. Looking at this grass is like seeing an old man's life, just like this camellia.

My aunt is my uncle's child bride.

When I was a child, my aunt lived under the same roof with us. I was suckled by her when I was born, and she watched me grow up.

Sometimes, people's fate is beyond their control. No matter how you change, you can't choose your parents or the living environment of your childhood.

When you are born, you may follow in the footsteps of your parents and know your ending. Just like flowers and plants, some are on cliffs and some are in ravines. Where they take root, they create different heights. With different landscapes, there will be different flowers and plants. Perhaps the environment chose vegetation instead of vegetation. My aunt is like this, like camellia (Scutellaria baicalensis) growing on a cliff. She didn't enjoy the warmth of the sun and struggled tenaciously in the wind and rain.

Auntie was born in 193 1, in a small ravine near the county seat. She is short, hardworking and thin, but her little feet never stop. Aunt has been wrapped in her feet since she was a child, but she can't see many broken steps when she walks. According to my mother, my aunt had smallpox when she was a child, and until now, there are still many pimples on her face.

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My aunt's surname is Zhu, and people call her Zhu Guihua, but she has never lived a noble day in her life, never left the land where she grew up, and never went to town to see the night view under the street lamp. Because my father died young, my mother remarried to our village and begged for a living with my mother's three brothers.

Her mother, who lost her husband in her early years, remarried several times with four children and experienced rough torture. As far as I can remember, my aunt's mother has been crazy, tall and warm-hearted. She often helps my mother knead dough, talks to herself and looks around from time to time.

It is said that my aunt followed her mother (I called her grandma) to remarry from Xiaonangou, Henan Province to Hedong, and from Hedong to our Hexi Village. Her fate was like a stream meeting rocks, and the waves rippled all the way, almost drowning her four children. Fortunately, I met my grandmother at the crossroads of fate.

When I was young, my aunt and three brothers followed my mother, wandering from one place to another, like rootless grass and rootless leaves, wandering around in the wind. My grandmother may be really poor and worried that my uncle could not marry a daughter-in-law, so she took her eight-year-old aunt in early and became her child bride. So she came to our house, an eight-year-old doll, and when she was confused, she became the second uncle's child bride.

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My aunt will be 90 years old after the Spring Festival. She is in my heart, like a specimen of my family, recording the history of our family.

Aunt is six years younger than uncle, and her thin face is always full of enthusiasm. A pair of little feet, wrapped around them, even if you are poor, you should wrap your messy hair tightly. You are thin, short, hardworking and simple.

After his father died young, the four brothers and sisters were raised by a mother who was stimulated to nag all day. In order not to starve to death, mother remarried many times. My aunt who is under 8 years old has become my uncle's child bride, and the rest of my brothers have done long-term jobs. Later, because of despair, I went out to be a soldier early. Until the victory of the Korean War, except one who married a widow, the other two brothers remained single. When I was a child, I was a child.

Because of poverty, neither she nor her brothers have studied for a day except knowing the number of coins. Throughout the year, I have never been to the county or provincial capital except working in the village. As long as I can remember, I have lived in the old house built by my grandfather and never moved. My grandfather never left my ancestral home from birth to his death at the age of 84. My aunt still lives on a heatable adobe sleeping platform in her ancestral home. The real situation in the village is the same as when I was a child. There are many old people who have never bathed in their lives and are unwilling to go to restaurants. She is one of the most common, kind and authentic peasant women in the northern rural areas of China.

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In the last century, what impressed me the most was those diligent little feet, wearing patched cloth shoes, who always struggled from morning till night, so that they have always been model workers of agricultural cooperatives and have never been sent to the reform' study class'.

Aunt is gentle and kind. Although she is poor, she is not stingy. In the 1960s, when she didn't have the next meal, I often ate porridge cooked by my aunt, wild vegetables, cat meat, dog meat, wild swan poisoned by pesticides, sorghum nest, second oat noodles, pork killed by plague, small fish washed by floods, and beef distributed to every household by agricultural cooperatives by chance.

At that time, I was thin and small because of malnutrition. One autumn night, my parents worked overtime in the farmer's cooperative, and I was so hungry that I couldn't sleep. Go out and call me back and tell me to eat a sorghum nest.

Aunt Feet used to call me by my real name. I am very kind. One spring, I was just playing with stones in the yard after school, and I heard my aunt call me by my birth name. Looking back, she had an extremely rare pancake in her hand and could not bear to eat it. She secretly put it in my hand, which was left for me when her eldest brother came to see her to entertain guests the other day.

Living under the same roof, my aunt regards me as her own child. For those peasant women who have no chance to go to school, enthusiasm, tolerance, hard work, hardship and affinity should be concentrated on her. This is a rare traditional virtue and a noble traditional culture.

Aunt Bigfoot loves cleanliness. Even stupid clothes bleached and dyed with white cotton cloth are always washed and patched. At that time, grandpa was wearing patchwork clothes, but she washed and dyed the worn-out clothes. On the heatable adobe sleeping platform at home, there is a sorghum mat woven by her own hands. It was during the slack season, and she knitted it with sorghum stalks. The kang is not big, and five people fall asleep at night. Bedding and kang mat can be cleaned at any time, which is a paradise for our brothers and sisters to play. There are some broken quilts in the corner, which are always neatly folded. Because of its tolerance, I often play with my brother and sister at her house.

She is proficient in housework and the work of agricultural cooperatives, and is often named by female team leaders to participate in collective labor. In case of large-scale overtime work, or people in the commune, when killing sheep for dinner, occasionally ask her to help in the kitchen.

In that era of extreme famine, cooks in canteens and keepers of agricultural cooperatives were the most popular, but none of our family was a keeper. I only remember that a middle school student in the county participated in the construction of the reservoir, asked her and her father to go to the school in front of our house to cook, secretly went to the classroom to find me when cooking, and quietly stuffed me with a steamed bread from time to time, which was swallowed during recess.

She cooked with her father, took home the cage cloth in the cage drawer, and let me go home from school, lying on the cage cloth looking for those rare steamed bread dregs. This kind of treatment often haunts my dreams.

Perhaps because of extreme poverty since childhood, she is particularly enthusiastic about people who beg for food and flee the country. She often gives her sorghum buns to refugees to beg for food. It was freezing for nine days, and she was afraid of fleeing and begged to freeze to death. She also left beggars at home to keep out the cold for the suffering people.

She gave birth to eight children, only three survived, two of them died at the age of one, and the rest were abandoned in the wild because of poverty after birth.

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When I was a child, I experienced troubled times and often talked about hateful bandits. Speaking of bandits, I gnash my teeth. She often settles me down and says, "Adults don't beat villains, the poor don't beat the rich, and the rich don't beat the government."

In the old society, no matter how dark and unreasonable it is, who dares to stand up against it? I dare not say. Therefore, when bandits stand in front of you, they will exchange avoidance and patience for survival. Whenever they hear dogs barking, they get up in the middle of the night and run into the ravine, and always try to avoid bandits.

Aunt and my mother, their sister-in-law is very affectionate, and occasionally they never ask questions because the hens are in the wrong nest. I once quarreled with my neighbor's aunt over a trivial matter. Later, when I saw my neighbor's son, I took him home. I gave two dried yams to my son, and kept saying, "Adults have nothing to do with children."

At that time, there was no oil and water and no meat for a year. There are few guests at home. She always takes a rose to borrow some white flour, and when she comes back, she cooks some noodles or fries some egg pancakes herself to entertain guests. My cousins and I stood in the ground watching delicious food, listening to their adults chatting, and when the guests were left, they always gave me a pancake to solve our long-awaited eyes.

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Several years passed, and the camellia growing behind the sun turned yellow again and again. My aunt finally brought up her three sons with great pains. A brother and a younger brother went to college after resuming the college entrance examination, but their hair was gray and their waist was bent. The only constant is that their little feet are still flapping their edges, and they are still hardworking and kind. She has a pair of little feet, little steps, and never stops. She is always surveying the land in her hometown. Every summer and autumn, she always brings back some Zameng flowers and camellia, and keeps them for me when I go back to see her.

When I went to visit her, I saw that I still lived in my grandparents' ancestral home, which had been decorated for decades, and there were hundreds of years of red cabinets underground, clean and spotless. During the Spring Festival, we will still cut paper and stick it on the window.

Occasionally looking at the pancakes left on the stove a few days ago, thinking of poverty made her hardworking and thrifty.

Half our destiny comes from the sky and half from ourselves. Camellia is born with insufficient viability. No matter how you change it, you can't change it. It will sprout on the shady slope of the mountain every year and accompany us every year. This is the fate of Scutellaria baicalensis Georgi.

Postscript vanishing words

In this ever-changing era, no matter how modern it is, it is impossible to erase the local accent engraved in your mind.

Grandma Feet looked for lice in the sun, and when she was a few years old, she was my child bride. Mills, carriages, breeders, horses in breeding gardens, and unicycles for threshing with children; Cattle returning from the north gate at dusk, crows and white-billed eagles on old elms, firewood rakes and the back of leaves swept by moonlight, and so on. Every time I go to the grave to worship my ancestors, I can't help but emerge.

Those familiar names and people are basically disappearing, kerosene lamps, mills, wells, mills, swamps and grass beaches, winding rivers, sheepfolds haunted by wild wolves, and wolves that ate grandpa; Grandpa's sickle, his grandfather who talked about the romance of Sui and Tang Dynasties under the oil lamp, and so on.

Dolls with stones and sheep dung eggs as toys (equivalent to Go), grandfathers who have never bathed all their lives, adobe houses that have lived all their lives, old geniuses who look after fields, bean curd shops of Mrs. Sanliu's family, seven-year-old elder sister who puts pigs, abandoned babies screaming under willows, old Wei Zhu, whose father and son can only marry one wife, and the old man who lives in the village and can't afford to marry a bachelor who specializes in cheating.

In the era of hunger and cold, food and clothing are scarce, white market cloth, black market cloth, boiled blue and boiled black, cloth tickets, food stamps, meat stamps and so on. And all this deja vu has disappeared with the circulation of the sun and the moon, and now it is gone and gradually disappears from us.

Too many memories come to my mind and make me feel heavy. Only by saying them can I relax. I don't know how to classify them. I can only make some memories from my most familiar little aunt. Dedicated to those who deserve my memory and my peers who have experienced that era.

About the author: Lu Youcheng, pen name Hippophae rhamnoides, born in February, 1963, graduated from North China Electric Power University 1984, and is a senior engineer. I like writing poems after my major, and I am good at philosophical prose poems. Articles can be found in China Writers and Artists, Writers of the Times, Literary World, Literary Appreciation, Essays of Hundred Schools, Flowers, Reading Abstracts, Short Stories, Young Writers, Wind in the Bohai Sea and Selected Western Essays. Prose poems "The Disappearing Village" and "Father" were selected into "Chinese Soul —— Annual Selection of Prose Poems in 2020" and "Classic Works of Modern Poetry".

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