1
When I saw Yang Chunli in his second uncle’s house, he was draped in his jacket and his two sleeves were swinging around like an idle man going to the door in snowy weather. It’s just that people are too fat to be associated with this feminine name.
Dinner was a bowl of potatoes with their skins on. Yang chunli sat down, picked up the potatoes with her right hand and peeled them with her mouth. Her left sleeve was slumped over her knees. Then he saw that the cuff was empty.
His id card listed his age as 18, much younger than his appearance. A year ago, he lost his left arm in a cement factory in Tianshui. Before that, he had been away working for eight years.
“No, the teacher beats people badly.” In the old siheyuan primary school, Yang Chunli was in class, but her mind was full of weeds just like the abandoned school site. Her mind was like the sheep swimming on the hillside behind the house at any time. The teacher taught by violence according to the local customs.
In his third-grade class, five students dropped out to go to Inner Mongolia with him. Among the children who went out together, the oldest was 13 years old, and the youngest was Yang Chunli this year. At 1.2 meters, he was not fat at all, and the family’s perennial potatoes did not provide him with enough nutrition.
A youth who has lost an arm
The village contractor with a group of children to train to bus, to the Inner Mongolia Urat Front banner of the kiln to stay down, dry water work. The bricks that just came out of the machine were wet and had to be dried on the empty yard before being sent to the kiln. This way of life did not require the skill of a master worker, so the contractor asked the village children to work for him with low wages.
A child’s life is not easy. The water billet is loaded and unloaded from the machine to the car, and then transported to the sunning yard by the electric car for 12 hours a day, with no rest days.
In the first year, Yang chunli felt a little unable to support herself. She mainly took off the bricks. “One brick weighs 7 jin, and a truck carries 140 yuan, which can carry 80 to 100 yuan a day,” she said. At the end of the cart, his arms were wooden. At the end of the rice bowl, he found that he was shaking unsteadily. Twice, the bowl fell to the ground and was broken. At night hands up face is difficult, do not wash their feet to sleep.
The other is cold, “too cold,” and the pipe of mud froze so that it could not stop. From the north wind from the unprotected, through the empty field Yang Chunli wrapped mask, hat, gloves, cun cun on the skin, the moisture of the brick to promote the cold package, frozen package broken, wipe a little fat baked, even to deal with.
After the winter month of the lunar calendar, the sun loses its last touch of heat. The brick work stops and people go back to their hometown to wait for the Spring Festival. At this time, Yang Chunli can see the mother at home, and work in Inner Mongolia, but not the usual father.
In the kiln, the children are “black” without official status.
A few years later began to check the child labor, the boss will get the news in advance, let Yang Chunli and his partners hide, play a day. But there was nowhere to go except to circle around the inspectors in the kiln.
The brick kiln was far away from the town. Before coming out, the friends who thought they would meet the world could only stay in the brick kiln on the wasteland and could not see much green in their hometown, except for buying daily necessities in the town during the festival.
2
After working in the kiln for five or six years, Yang chunli grew in stature and her salary did not rise. She did not want to work any more, so she went to lanzhou to carry steel pipes on a construction site. Later, she went to Tianshui cement Factory to work for her father.
On the eighth day it happened. Yang Chunli works the night shift and needs to clean up the garbage scattered under the cement conveyor belt. Otherwise, she will be fined if she is detected at dawn.
Carrying a shovel under the belt, Yang chunli’s shovel touched the gear on the belt and carried one of his arms inside.
Yang Chunli did not feel pain, pain in the five days of coma with the lost arm was taken away, until the wound was healed. The cut edge of the uneven growth of granulation, need to take a daily plaster application. Sometimes I think my arm is still there. I wave it in my imagination and only feel a dull pain.
For a man born in a village, the loss of an arm without crossing the threshold of 18 is more painful than the pain – something that has not been reflected in the accident settlement.
The agreement, signed on behalf of the contractor, the cement factory and Yang Chunli’s uncle, offered a one-time compensation of 140,000 yuan, including nutrition, lost work and medical expenses, but no compensation for lost labor.
Yang chunli returned to the small village at the foot of the Minshan Mountains, where her working life, which began at age 10, ended as a child laborer without an arm.
Another change is that he is getting fatter and fatter. The hormones injected while he was in hospital, and his habit of eating instant noodles and chicken thighs for every meal he got back home, quickly made it look as if he could only afford his own cumbersome body and was no longer fit for any kind of work.
The area of Yuangeng village is nearly 3,000 meters above sea level. The land is barren, which cannot produce bulk grain except for potato oats. People in the village do not cook proper meals. Skins and potatoes, steamed buns sold by vendors and instant noodles are daily meals. Vegetables are scarce.
With a sum of money in hand, Yang Chunli not only bought medicine, but also had some expenses. His neighbors said that he went to live in a hotel in the county town and took part in gambling, which quickly consumed his money. A year later, with a little more than half of the 140,000 yuan left, Yang Chunli felt a little guilty.
He began to realize that it was more than enough to pay for his lost arm and for the rest of his life after the age of 18. At the time of the accident, as a minor, he did not have a chance to think about it. But suing to overturn the agreement now seems too complicated and difficult for his parents, who live in a mud hut, and for him, who has only been to the third grade.
Her parents lived in an old house with a half-built roof, and Yang chunli lived in a simple, boarded up room, which was cleaner but cold. At night, when he could not sleep, he thought about the way out for the rest of the money. A partnership with his father seemed the only way, though he was not at ease with the lack of an arm as he pulled the sheep on the steep slope at the back of the village.
His friends were still working and meeting each other during the Spring Festival. Yang chunli was not willing to play cards with them, preferring to take a long bus ride into the county town.
3
When it snowed in the morning, the electric bike could not be ridden. Ma Silk took her daughter Lele to school on foot.
The village to the intersection of the frozen, the old father in the village at the mouth of the snow, so that mother and daughter do not walk slippery. In recent years, Ma Silk and her daughter had been living at her mother’s home.
At nearly 3, 000 metres above sea level, the snow falls frequently and the roads leading from the village to the county are rutted with deep snow. On the way I met a group of children who were going to school together.
For the past three years, She had been chauffeuring her daughter to school every day for fear that her ex-husband might hijack her. She herself had never been to the county seat or further afield, fearing that her ex-husband would threaten to “kill me”.
At the age of 23, Ma Silk wears two long and narrow knife scars on her slender waist, which were stabbed by her ex-husband. Some young and pretty faces are marked with panic marks. Ma Had never been to school or traveled abroad. When she was 18, she was introduced to her husband by a matchmaker. After marriage, she found that her husband drank heavily and would strike others when he got drunk, carrying a kitchen knife.
When the silk trees returned home with their newborn child, her husband followed them. At first, the husband had started beating her for having a girl, but now he was determined to get her back. Ma’s father reasoned with him at the entrance to the village. His ex-husband picked up a stone and broke his head, which left him with a dent in the back of his head.
My father and Ma Silk borrowed money to go to hospital after they were injured, and each spent more than 20,000 yuan. In order to pay back the money, the old man borrowed money from his younger brother, Yang Chunli’s father. More than three years later, Yang chunli came to ask for the money on behalf of her father. In fact, this money is also Yang Chunli work to save.
“Because of the money, brother feelings are not good”. “Said the silk trees’ old father in a leisurely manner.
After two years of hard work, she finally got a divorce. She was afraid to go out to work, so she had to work as a waitress in a restaurant in a town 30 miles away, helping her parents with housework, and cooking food on a nearby road building site. In sunny days, she sold broomsticks for some personal use for herself and her daughter.
Two years later, she had her second date. He was a driver, and her mother, who had married in her village, was an acquaintance.
But this time, she had bad luck again.
When my parents got familiar with each other, there came a “trend of collecting money” in the countryside, which was to invest in dividends. After being prodded by someone else to put in money, her mother would ask Her father to lend her some as a surefire way. As a result, the leader of the group made a donation and fled.
Interest does not calculate, 150 thousand capital pit, the home sold out also fill uneven, let alone the bottom itself is a hole. And the marriage fell apart.
The Little village after Snow
The silk trees that repeatedly troubled her were still confined to the eaves of her mother’s family, and her father’s thin and cramped roof was not enough to shelter her. Half of the houses in Longnan were built, and the adobe houses only contained space for a Kang. There was a grown brother in his parents’ house, so Ma Silk could only “guerrilla” for many years. Kang Tou, a friend who grew up in the village, slept all over. Her daughter, Lele, slept with her grandfather, who lived alone.
When he was in primary school, He needed three yuan a day. In summer, he had to spend more than 10 yuan to buy water and cool down. Having to find a place to make money, ma Tassels went to the mountains in leisure time in winter to cut down bamboo trees, and made brooms into which she could sell them to earn some money.
In the past two years, the government “targeted poverty alleviation”, the adobe house of my father’s family has been renovated, the adobe outside is coated with white powder, the roof has been rebuilt, and the roof has been suspended with cheap cloth instead of plywood, which makes the roof look more foreign. Because the younger brother couldn’t sleep, he also built a temporary wooden house.
Her husband worked for many years, and her sister returned to her family home with her children. In my father’s home, compared with the silk trees that had no strings to pull and brought troubles to her, my sister’s status was obviously much higher even though she looked a little ordinary. When her sister came back from working outside, she was not used to the soup made of potato chips and sauerkrant in the family. After everyone had eaten, she made a dish for herself.
While working in a restaurant, she gained 120 jin of weight and lost 106 jin within a month when she returned home. The family of seven eats less than 100 jin of rice a year.
A father’s house is not a permanent home. According to the custom here, once the younger brother got married, the silk trees that he married would not be fit to stay at his mother’s home. My younger brother, 23 years old, is already a senior young man in the countryside. If it were not for the family debt and the threshold of nearly 200,000 yuan bride price, he would have married and had children just like his elder sister.
“I am married, and my sister will certainly not be able to stay.” Run a night back brother, in the uncle’s house clearly said.
But The silk trees had no plans. She dare not go to find a partner, think a man is not a good. “Where are the good people? All the good people died.” She said without raising her head as she fried the chips. She never ate her own meals at the road-building site, because the dinner circle was full of men.
The only plan is to muddle through these years, when Lele went to junior high school, can board in the school, he went out to work. She’s not hopeful about having a family in the future, and the last song she shared on WeChat was “wet heart”.
4
My grandfather, the eldest brother of Ma’s father, lived in an unmodified adobe house high above the village. The wall has the arm thick crack, the window and ceiling with newspaper paste, kang cave smoked over the wall black. Under the roof of half cover, because of many things, the area is more narrow. The sum total of a man’s life is here.
Furnaces and kangs took up more than half the room. On the chest of drawers, piled with objects, were skin-care products and hair-oil labeled “Franglinka” and “Temperate Biquan.” They did not seem to belong to the house of a man in his fifties, but they cost no more than 20 yuan and were sold by vendors in the village.
A TV that seems not much bigger than the face, it is the most important electric appliance in the room, screen resembles the curtain of outdoor movie, see half can break suddenly, flash out faint yellow snowflake.
In order to make it easy to lie on the Kang and watch TV, a big mirror was installed on the foot of the kang. After sleeping, people could see the TV pictures reflected in the mirror, although the TV was originally small, it was twice as far away. Once lele broke the mirror, his grandfather did not scold her, but bought another one. “He is stubborn,” lele said, which is why she grew close to his mother.
Grandpa home no place, mother again in the restaurant, ten days back once. Before the planking house was built, the little granddaughter Lele slept with her grandfather for years. I still live here on weekends when I don’t have to go to school.
Lele has been sleeping with his grandfather since he was more than a year old. In addition to eating here, his clothes and snacks are also wrapped around him. In addition to grandpa’s copycat care products, the chest of drawers also has Lele’s dabao and lanolin moisturizer. Two packets of lele’s favorite cookies were placed on the small square table.
She prefers these snacks to meals.
Grandpa would drive a tricycle and earn some living by pulling sand and gravel for people, as well as a subsistence allowance for lonely old people. When Lele was not at school, Grandpa always picked her up in his car wherever he drove.
Above the chest of drawers were some young photos of Grandpa, standing on a dusty avenue, wearing a shirt and sunglasses. He liked to take pictures. In another framed photograph, the man’s head, tucked into the collar of his too-narrow suit, looks exaggerated, half buried in a flower bed, half hidden behind him in Tiananmen Square.
Here is a picture taken by a peddler some time ago. The suit is made in the mold, and the head is put into it. It costs 20 yuan each. Another photo on the kang’s wall shows grandpa with Le Le standing on a flower bed, with birds singing and flowers in the scene, but the two grandparents and grandchildren’s feet are floating on the landscape.
At night, grandparents and grandchildren lie on the bed in the kang watching TV, the bed has a kind of almond taste, has not seen the original color of yellow and green. The grandfather and grandson jutting out from the quilt looked like a pair of insects.
An old lady in her eighties
Grandpa had a family, but no family of his own. Nearly 30 years ago, my wife, who had been married for several years, ran away with her daughter and married a man from Anhui province. The wife’s family was also in yuangeng Land. She would go back to her family several times a year. Her daughter would also come back to visit her grandmother.
The daughter did not call for her father. On the wall, a picture frame with the words “Just Married” describes the marriage, but there is no picture of his wife and daughter.
Instead, the walls are plastered with photos of Lele from childhood to the present. Uncle also knows, this slide photo will not increase all the time, “she grew up, married to go”. “He said quietly.
There is also a main room in the courtyard where the brothers’ mother, who is in her 80s, lives. The old man almost never went out of the house. He made fires out of smoky lumps of wood, made cracked and shapeless steamed buns, or ate soup sent by grandpa. Outside the wall of the main room is a kang dong, separated by a section of grandpa will be stuffy some firewood.
Very few people would go into the main room, and the old man would not come out, but occasionally he would lose his temper and stand in the yard and swear. Lele didn’t like the great-grandmother either. “She’s getting old and cursing. It’s better to die early.” That seems to be the thinking of the yard’s descendants, too.
Before going to bed in the evening, Lele eat cookies, grandpa to cook a package of instant noodles, baked a few potatoes on the stove, patted the shell to eat. This is the daily diet of the villagers, grandpa this year more than 1000 jin. After eating potatoes, Grandpa took the gout danpian, went to bed to watch TV, this is the fixed program before going to bed.
Lele fell asleep looking at the anti-Japanese opera in the mirror of kang foot. The fire was warm, and there was a warm, dirty smell in the old room. Although the Wenchuan earthquake left it with a crack that could be inserted into its arm. “The earth house is not pretty, but warm.”
A mouse scurried across the ground, unnoticed. The family’s commissaries lay where they were, and it was no trouble to feed them.
In the middle of the night, the big man got up and went out to relieve his hands on the snow in the yard. There was no toilet, and the usual solution was in the open space behind the house. “There’s lots of empty space, everywhere.” After coming back, the elder brother did not go to sleep immediately, he unscrewed a medicine bottle on the small table. My stomach hurts again.
In the middle of the night, grandpa couldn’t fall asleep any more. He also turned on the TV for a while. He slept with the TV on many nights, when the stomachache did not bother him.
In his selfish heart, Grandpa made his future plans. When the old mother in the main room died, he left. There was a girl married in Tianshui. Her son opened a hotel in Sichuan. There was a spare room in the courtyard.
For some reason, he trusted the strange place more than his own village and his brothers. “Nothing but good air.”
There were seven brothers in the family. Besides the elder brother, there were two single ones. Two of them were dead — one was ill, and the third was killed by his wife 20 years ago.
Uncle said, the third wife because of gastritis to see a doctor, and the township hospital doctors hooked up, two people to discuss the death of the third. The third brother was in excellent health and they used a lot of methods. First bought the watermelon poison not dead, mixed with rat poison in the tea jar again, the old third after drinking tea coma, the doctor played dozens of blood vessels sodium chloride, plus with the electric drill drill, still did not die, finally simply cut the back of the head with a machete, the person finally died.
After the third daughter-in-law late at night shout big ye to see, say is to drink to walk fell down, “I see not right”, after report to the police, forensic medicine examines the toxin in haemorrhage, two people did not sentence to death however. After serving a 20-year sentence, the woman was released from prison and was afraid to come to the village. Her two sons were brought up by the fourth brother.
5
At nearly 3, 000 meters above sea level, the village is as inconspicuous as the brown hills around it.
From Lanzhou southward to here, past those dusty hills of Longdong where no vegetation grows, to the boundary of Minxian county, both sides of the road appear ditches and vegetable beds, there are still fresh green in winter, it seems that we have finally left the most ancient and poor hinterland of China’s inland and said goodbye to the latitudes of water shortage.
But as the altitude rises, and as you reach the mountains of the Yuangeng belt, the life that increased vegetation brings is gradually extinguished, suffocated by cold and closed poverty.
Heating is a big expense here. My uncle’s stove burns a bag of coal in five days and costs 2,000 yuan in one winter. Sometimes you have to burn wood.
There are many wild Chinese medicinal materials on the mountain, which are the source of petty income. Angelica astragalus in Min County is very famous, but there is no large area of artificial cultivation in Suolong township, someone to harvest the mountain to dig. Every year can dig a month, a day 100 yuan, the whole 2000 yuan or so. After all, the less medicine you dig, the more long-term income you get from chopping down bamboo and sticking a broom.
On a snowy day, people boiled small POTS of tea and chatted with admiration for an expert in the village who had cut bamboo for 13 days and made a broom with it. He earned 200 yuan a day, which was a considerable income.
Apart from a broom, there is no major livelihood worth mentioning. Apart from working outside the factory, Ma’s younger brother drove a car for a sand-maker. Without a driver’s license, he had to send his boss home all night and make up for his drowsiness by sleeping on his kang in the morning.
A driver’s license to tianshui, the cost of more than 20,000, here is simply unimaginable.
People who could afford it moved out and bought houses in the county town. Last year, a girl went to the county seat. Her brother went to school in Minxian county. Her mother had to accompany her while her father went out to work. A few miles up from the entrance of yuangenji, there was a teaching spot, with only a student and a teacher left. “The wall and the classroom are all in good condition.”
For yuangeng people, more than 30 sets of county housing prices, they are out of reach. It is a more realistic hope to get the state’s supportive policies to restore some of the adobe, but that luck will not fall equally on everyone.
Grandpa did not have a decent income, can not like his younger brother as part of their own, the state subsidies to rebuild adobe houses. But he is also not optimistic about the transformed adobe house, “changed a shell. Mud hut not pretty, warm “. The money that two younger brother family installs a house all is borrowed, rely on son to work to return, decorate the purpose of earth room also is the son wants to marry in the future, have no room true not line.
Yang Chunli, who had lost his arm, had no hope of getting married, so his family did not renovate the earth house, but built a movable plank house for himself.
There are more than 20 single men among the 600 or 700 people in the village. The principal of the primary school said that some people are not married on their own initiative. Girls are married out of the mountains, outside the daughter-in-law married not in.
In addition to renovating the house, the government paid for public toilets, which were unused and “not flushed.” It was settled, as it had been done for thousands of years, in an open field or in a barn.
Drunkenness is widespread, accompanied by vicious cases. “You are surprised to hear about his family. By the stove, people did not know about the incident in Dingxi County, not far away, where a mother was killed by a family allowance. Instead, they talked with great gusto about the murder of 17 people by one person in distant Guangxi province. It seemed that the tea boiled in the pot could be chewed for a long time.
In the evening, at the entrance of the village, two of the newly installed street lamps had been broken, and the remaining one glimmered in the snow, like a useless warmth. The snow fell silently, the day’s layer had hardened, and nothing seemed to have happened in the dusky adobe.
(Some of the characters in this article are pseudonyms)
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