After reading the first article “Shanghai Floating Life” in “Read Library 2101”, it made me think of some of my own father’s experiences. My father was born in 1971. After failing the entrance examination, he started some small businesses to make a living, selling fireworks, melons, popsicles and working as a tailor, but it is said that he lost his money in the end.
In 1996, he was introduced to his mother, who was also a tailor at the time, and soon got married. My mother recalled that the price of a top was 4 yuan, pants 2 yuan, and only a few cents for repairs, and occasionally there would be people from the same village on credit, and credit would not be given.
In 1997, shortly after I was born, my father started working outside the home for the sake of my milk powder money. At that time, my uncle’s friend in Henan to do the intercom circuit board business, so my father was introduced to the factory, the results of less than a year, the old factory manager died, the factory manager’s daughter took over the factory. Due to poor management, it was soon declared closed, and my father had to return home with the 1000 yuan he earned. At that time, I had a serious illness, and the money was basically spent on hospitalization.
In 1999, my father decided to try his luck in Xi’an, the nearest city to his hometown. Since my father did not have the strength to work and wore glasses, the result was predictable, and he returned to his hometown in no time. But my father also knew that our family’s only acre of land was unable to solve the food and clothing of three people (at that time, it was still the era of agricultural tax), so he went to Xi’an to work for the second time, but the money he had until he spent it all still could not find a suitable job, and returned to his hometown for the second time.
I don’t know if my father thought about it for a long time, but he finally raised the topic of working with his mother for the third time, but by then the family was already in a situation where they couldn’t even afford to pay for the trip. Mother said she went from door to door to borrow money, many people in the village thought our family could not have the ability to repay and decisively refused, scraping together a total of 50 yuan over several days.
My mother said to my father, “This is the last money I can come up with, you see what you can do. “The next day, my father took the only 50 yuan on the road to Xi’an for the third time, my father also knew that there was no way back, desperately looking for a job, and finally got an interview at a construction site.
Later, my father said that the interview leader just met with him and did not intend to recruit the weak-looking him, my father said: “I can do everything, leader! “The leader sneered and said:” We are all out of hard work here, young man you can not. “The father insisted:” I can! ” “Carry the poles you can? “”Yes! “So the recruiting leader reluctantly agreed to give my father a try at the site. After carrying the poles for several months, but without money to buy shoes that fit, he had to carry the poles all day long and walk the hills, and his toenails were so worn that they became thicker and thicker, so much so that it was very hard to cut his toenails today.
The change of luck probably came a few months later, one day the big leaders to the site inspection, inadvertently found that the workers in the father was a high school student, looking at the father still looks quite smart young, so asked him if he would like to learn to learn technical work. Father nodded desperately, because the site is really fast boiling. So, the big leader transferred him. Father began to follow others to learn to design cable drawings, drawings to be drawn on the computer, at that time, the northwest rural color television has just become popular, not to mention the computer.
My father said that when he first started to contact the computer, he could not even stabilize the mouse, and when the mouse wavered slightly, he had to find the cursor on the screen for half a day. And this learning on the life, others left after work, my father stayed all night and all night in accordance with the drawings designed by others to study hard. Whenever it was too sleepy, my father would always recall the days when he was carrying poles in front of him, a shiver immediately awake. With luck and hard work, my father gradually figured out the computer know-how, the level of computer graphics continued to grow, and finally could sit in the office building that he could not even think of before to work.
In the Spring Festival of 2001, when I was four years old, my father came home with 10,000 RMB for the New Year. My mother was surprised and happy, scared that my father had done something illegal, but happy that almost no one in the countryside had ever seen so much money.
In February of that year, my father saw a job posting in Xi’an’s Huashang newspaper and successfully jumped ship to the headquarters of the Shaanxi Institute of Communications Planning and Design with his ever-improving business skills.
Now my father will be proud to talk about this experience, at that time he interviewed all the project assessment results for proficiency, the interview manager asked him how much he wanted to pay, and at this moment the highest salary my father had ever received was 500 yuan a month, so he had the courage to say: “800? “The manager did not say anything, let go back to wait for notice. My father took advantage of this gap to go home to see me, but halfway home, I received the news that the interview had passed on the coach, so my father, who had just arrived home, hurried back to Xi’an again the next day. The next month’s salary was 1,500 yuan, a figure my father will never forget.
This time, my father brought home a 12-inch second-hand black-and-white television set bought for 50 yuan, a five-stroke typing primer, and a Little King learning machine with its own keyboard. It turned out that my father wanted my mother to learn to type so that she could stop working as a tailor and find an easy job typing in Xi’an.
Since this was the first time my mother was exposed to these new things, she had a hard time learning them. In order to remember the five-stroke typing recipe, she posted notes everywhere on her bed, walls and rolling board, and recited the words every day. At this time, my father attended professional training at China Telecom’s headquarters in Beijing, and eventually obtained a national communication engineer qualification. The family moved to Xi’an in order to provide me with a better education. I still remember that it was 2003, when I was six years old.
We lived in an urban village close to the Big Wild Goose Pagoda, a 3-story residential building, each room was about 15 square feet, and the rent was 130 RMB per month. My mother jokingly said, “I rented a house with a view of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda”. Since I was already in elementary school, my mother’s plan to learn five strokes and work in a typing store was scrapped in order to take care of me at school and at home for meals. But not long after, encouraged by my father, my mother was motivated to learn again, and she planned to learn to draw cable drawings on the computer from my father as his personal assistant.
At that time, the domestic communications industry used CAD drawing software, and my father taught my mother from the simplest point, first teaching her how to draw horizontal lines, vertical lines, squares, circles and tables. My mother said that the most difficult part was that as soon as she touched the mouse, the cursor on the screen would be lost, and my father would scold her with hatred, asking her if she had a good stiletto or a good mouse.
After teaching the simplest part, my father went away on a business trip to investigate the site, and my mother took a copy of my father’s finished design drawings and drew them on the computer. It was the first month of the year, the rental room was unusually cold, the mother was draped in a quilt, drawing an all-nighter. Two days later just after my father arrived home, my mother was excited to show her results, saying: “finally learned, will earn money! “The result is that the father looked at it and thought it was completely not working and wanted to delete it all.
It turned out that the mother did not know how to copy and paste in the drawing, so the icons drawn were not the same size, and she watched her father delete his own results. She was so distraught that she secretly decided to learn CAD!
In this way, under the guidance of her father, her mother learned step by step to copy, paste, cut and paste, line extensions, and mirroring. …… began the road of working on cable drawings at home.
At that time, the communication cables in the villages around Xi’an were often stolen to sell the copper wire inside. As the fame of my father’s drawing grew, more and more people came to him privately to do this kind of salvage work. Usually my father would leave such private work to my mother, who was already skilled in cartography. Mother said that her main job at that time was to take the hand-drawn paper of the repairers and recreate it into standard computer drawings, an A4 drawing was 50 yuan and an A3 drawing was 80 yuan.
With the increasing workload, the mother stared at computer graphics all day, and gradually had a state of wanting to vomit whenever she looked at the computer screen. My father motivated her by saying that she should adjust her state and do well, and that she would not have this opportunity again after this time. (It is true that today, in 2021, as the communications market continues to mature, this industry has entered a downturn.) I recall every morning at that time, whenever I sleepily dressed for school, I always saw the back of my father and mother who had already woken up and struggled to work.
Because of the drawings all day long, once it was summer vacation, my mother would not be able to cook, and you would often see a boy on a scooter in the alleys of the city village, and on his handlebars would usually hang the cold skin and meat buns that he bought to take home. I also gradually learned to buy groceries and all kinds of things, and I remember very well that I could buy four steamed buns with one yuan.
My mother’s original plan was to go back home to build a house as soon as she had saved up 30,000 yuan. My father said she had no talent, and at that time the streets of Xi’an were frantically distributing house sale advertisements, so in 2008 my father had the idea of buying a house, and a year later in the trend of rising house prices, my father finally made up his mind that he had to buy a house immediately.
The day he went to pay the down payment, my father felt that whether the money into the bag or take the newspaper wrapped in a bag, he was not comfortable, and finally a head to me to take. My father thought that thieves would not be able to target children, and my father and mother were a little nervous along the way, but I didn’t have any trepidation about taking the “big money”.
In 2011, we moved into a new home, and this time it was really our own home.
My father and I didn’t have a very good relationship, or rather a very bad one, and we often didn’t have more than three conversations a day, and we quarreled three times, once during the midterm exams, once during the entrance exams, and now during the holidays.
After reading “Shanghai Floating Life”, it was a coincidence to see that the author’s family moved to Shanghai in 2003, and the author’s experience was very similar to her father’s. The author’s daughter would be 21 years old now, three years younger than me. Seeing these past events reproduced in the form of words, I felt I could better understand my father’s life from his marriage to my birth and then to today.
The author of this article, Guo Jintao, is a reader of Read Library and takes the opportunity of the article “Shanghai Floating Life” to talk about the life journey of his parents’ generation.
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