August 7, 2024
From the time I can remember, I must be around 4 years old. In 1979, the 1980s were not yet here, in Wuxi, I lived in a bungalow in the east courtyard of the 702 Family Courtyard. There were seven or eight families in one bungalow. The bungalow ran from east to west in a long strip. My family lived in the first house in the east end. My mother made a fire to cook, a briquette stove, and cooked at the door. This was the case in every house. I can’t remember anything. Sometimes I go back to watch a movie in the open-air cinema across the west courtyard at night. I am very happy. Every family carries their own stools and chairs and walks towards the open-air cinema. Before the show starts, they grab the favorable terrain in advance, and then start taking out snacks and melon seeds, eating and drinking. The children start chasing each other and playing with each other, including me.
The neighbor next door is surnamed Liu. He has two children. I remember the older one is called Liu Zhi and the younger one is called Liu Dan. Liu Dan is about the same age as me. He often plays with a bunch of us kids, and they play crazy until dinner time every day. When it gets dark, his brother Liu Dan will carry a red cherry spear (made of wood) and drive him home for dinner. He will pick up a swordsman sword (also made of wood, made by their father). Later, they made me a knight's sword), and they fought all the way home, as professionally as a Peking Opera class. In the end, my brother Liu Zhi won and drove Liu Dan home to have dinner together. This happened every day, like the last scene of the day. Then everyone dispersed and went home to eat. The aroma of cooking smoke was already wafting in the courtyard. It was real cooking smoke, because they all used briquette stoves to cook. It’s a pity that cameras were not widely available at that time and there was no Internet or WeChat. Otherwise, we could have recorded many memories that would be very tasty now, like air-dried and pickled sausages.
The family home of No. 702 is divided into east and west courtyards. Our family is in the east courtyard. The children in the courtyard are from different places across the country. In addition to Shanghai, many of them are from Hunan, Sichuan, Beijing, Dalian, and Guizhou. Children in some places play more wildly, and I will be led to get used to roughhousing and even more serious fights, and learn some bad habits. When I was a child, my brother had a good personality and rarely argued with others, let alone fights. Therefore, he was often bullied. Remember to listen. My mother said that I was not born at that time. After get off work, my mother lit the stove at the door of the house and cooked. My brother went out to play for a while and came back crying from the west end of the bungalow. He was bullied by other children. My mother said that he should go to the east end to play. Not long after, my brother came back from the east end crying...
My mother said that when I was a child, she didn’t see me back after dinner. She went out to look for me in the courtyard, and she saw me not far away. I was surrounded by several older children. I was in the middle with my eyes closed and my fists waving wildly. I beat them as if I was being beaten. In fact, the older children were only half-teasing. Seeing how "brave" I was, they thought it was fun and kept teasing me. As soon as I saw my mother coming, I burst into tears.
When I was about 5 years old, my parents were afraid that I would get into trouble because I was naughty, so they locked me at home with a small padlock after I went to work. But I found that the key to the lock was also in the drawer at home. My friends came to play with me, and I leaned against the window and handed them the key. , opened the door, cheered, and everyone rushed in. I kept showing off my toys and gadgets. I remember there was a wooden pencil cut in half, turned over like a small wooden boat, coated with ballpoint pen oil, and put into the water. It can move forward in the water. It is quite fast and interesting. Today's children probably have never played with it. Maybe many of them have never used a ballpoint pen, let alone how to get the ballpoint pen oil out of the refill. Today's children all use iPads directly. There is a little friend named Zhu Ningfeng. We all call him Dashan. His nickname is because he is big and looks like a mountain. He turned on the faucet to fill up the water tank, and tried the pencil speedboat, but the water stopped. He turned the faucet to the maximum, and there was not a drop of water. Forget it, let's stop playing. Everyone swarmed out and went to play outside. I also followed. This caused trouble later. The tap water came, but the faucet was still open. Moreover, the leak at the bottom of the pond was still blocked, in order to store water and release the boats, which led to the scene of Jinshan Temple being flooded. We came back to my house after playing, and everyone was going to lock me back in. Everything returned to its original state, and nothing happened. When we arrived at the door, we hadn't opened the door yet, and we discovered a strange phenomenon. Water kept pouring out from under the door. What's going on? After thinking about it for a while, I realized that the faucet was broken and the house was flooded because the faucet was not turned off!
When I opened the door, I saw waves rolling in my house, and all the toys and gadgets under my bed floated out on the waves.
I panicked and realized that I was in trouble, so I hurriedly made amends. We all scooped up water and poured it out. But at that time, I was afraid that others would find out. In the hearts of us five or six-year-old children, this was a big disaster. We were afraid of being blamed or even beaten by adults. It was normal, so we closed the door, and then used wooden bars, stools, and anything that could wipe water to scrape the water toward the door. Later, a neighbor who passed by discovered the same strange phenomenon. The door of my house was locked, but water gurgled out from under the door. . .
Soon the matter was leaked, and in the end I sighed and scolded me. I couldn't remember whether I was beaten or not. If I was beaten, it probably didn't hurt, otherwise I wouldn't remember it.
When I was about 6 years old, there was a time when I stayed at home and did not go to kindergarten. I can’t remember the reason. During the day, my parents went to work, and I was home alone, sitting on the bed, flipping through a book called Zhang Leping’s The Wanderings of Sanmao. This was probably the first book I read that I was very immersed in. It should be said that it was a comic book, with a large page of 16 pages, much larger than an ordinary comic book. (I still really want to find this big comic book, but it is a pity that it has long since disappeared, lost, the fragments of childhood are lost). I just remember that I was very immersed in the various small joys and tragic experiences of the little protagonist Sanmao in the book. My mood rose and fell with the little protagonist's experiences. This is a children's literature that accuses the old society, and the end is naturally a tragedy. After reading a book, I couldn't calm down for a long time. I read it over and over again many times, and experienced Sanmao's experience, which was deeply engraved in my heart. Later, my mother worked overtime at work, probably late, and she was afraid that I would be anxious and scared at home alone, so she asked an uncle from my colleague to come to my house to pick me up and take me to her work office. I walked with this uncle from home to my mother’s work. I had known this uncle before, and I remember this uncle. Guan, whose surname is Guan Gong, is very familiar with my parents. Along the way, I chatted with my uncle about The Wanderings of Sanmao and recited the book in its entirety. Later, my uncle told my mother that he was surprised that I could talk about the whole story of Wanderings of Sanmao in such detail and completeness along the way.