In memory of my two loved ones

Time seems to be the most inaccessible, and in a blink of an eye, they have been away from us for about twenty years. During the years when they were just gone, I would often dream of them again. In that wonderful, gloomy gray-black space, their faces still seemed so vivid, yet when I tried my best to see them more clearly, they became so blurry. I tried to get closer to them, but I woke up with a start. I was dazed in the dark and silent night, so confused that I couldn't tell if what had just happened was real or unreal, and only after a long time did I slowly come back to my senses. I looked out the window at the swaying streetlights and the walls around me, and realized that I was in a different place, and that I would never see their real faces again. When I think about it, I can't help but cry.

　　Time is the elixir that makes you forget the past. In later years, although I could still occasionally think of them and miss their past, I had not dreamed of them for several years. With the passage of time, even their images are getting farther and farther away from me, so much so that they had appeared in my dreams of blurred figures, also gradually scattered, faded in the dreams of the faraway gray and black space. I can't stop time, and I can't keep their fuzzy figures that are fading away. What can I do to remember them forever? Maybe I can only write down some poorly written words to record what they had left in the world, what I can still barely recall.

　　I wrote about my grandmother in my sophomore year of high school, when she was still alive. That essay was the first time I was appreciated by my language teacher. However, I was surprised to be praised for my little essay about my grandmother and to have it read aloud in the classroom, which I never expected. The language teacher's small appreciation may be too common for others, but for me, it was a great encouragement, and this unexpected encouragement made me start to take a keen interest in the language, and my original very bad grades gradually improved. I think this essay can be written well, definitely because it comes from the emotion, which is mostly due to my grandmother ah. The first time I saw a nephew, I was able to get a good look at him, but I didn't think that her love for him would play such a big role in my essay.

　　As far as I can remember, my grandmother always wore a slouchy off-white or black cloth shirt. She was small and thin, a very gentle and soft person, never argued with anyone, let alone quarrel, quarrel for her is simply unthinkable. Even if you are aggrieved, you will only hide in your room and wipe your tears secretly by yourself. She didn't have my mother until she was middle-aged, so much so that my mother was a little younger than my first cousin. So for as long as I can remember, she has been old. As far as I can remember, she was always smiling, smiling so kindly and benevolently, exactly the same smile she left us in the only group photo, with her eyes always curved when she smiled.

　　I started living in my grandmother's house when I was very young, when my grandfather was still around. My grandfather had participated in the war against the U.S. and Korea, and I had seen many of the medals he had won with colored ribbons. He was very stout, round-faced, with big eyebrows and round eyes, and many children were afraid of him. He was my support, who bullied me, he would glare up, loudly shout, with the cane in his hand to shoo them, scare those children scattered, so much so that the parents of other children have some comments on him, but given that he is the eldest, can not say anything. When grandpa was around, he was also a solid support for grandma, but this support collapsed when I was six years old. Grandpa was gone, leaving the sheepish grandma to live alone.

　　She loved me dearly. The descendants of the family were very kind to her, and from time to time they would bring her some snacks, which she stored in that old dark gray cabinet, never able to eat. As soon as I arrived at her room, she brought it out for me to eat. I didn't know any better when I was a kid, and I didn't give in, so I just took it for granted and ate it. After I went to study in the county, every weekend when I came home, she would sit at the intersection outside the village and wait for me to pick me up and make something to eat at home. I think at that time grandma made bean casserole, casserole or fried a small cake, are delicious.

　　Grandma was illiterate and could not read a word, so she seldom watched TV, which she said she could not understand, but she could understand the opera sung by the village's grass-roots troupe. At that time, the village or neighboring villages in the agricultural temple fair, will invite a play, a simple stage in the open space, tied up with a scaffolding, a singing is two or three days. She always took me with her, the old ladies gathered to watch the play while chatting, I was there to eat some rice candy honey cake, followed by a piece of the play. I couldn't understand the play that was being sung on the stage, but I knew that people were watching it very lively, and I liked watching these lively scenes. The face or martial arts student on the stage, dancing and jumping up and down, stepping on the wooden boards laid on the stage boom. The temple fair also sells small books, grandma can always buy me one or two, I was really happy to get these.

　　My grandmother often took me to visit relatives, from far and near. No matter whose house she went to, people were always very nice to her and to me. She didn't know how to ride a bicycle, so she dragged me to the near ones on foot, while the far ones took a tractor and arrived upside down with a bounce. I went with my grandmother most often to the home of my old aunt in the village near us, in our place called old aunt, in other places called aunt. Auntie is her sister, now looking back, the two do look too much alike, they are the same kind and kind, smiling eyes are curved. When I lived at my aunt's house, my cousins were so nice to me that they took me to play and held me up to their necks and walked me all along the street. I rode on their necks, along the street loudly learn to hawk, what curium basin palladium bowl, what sell tofu selling sesame oil, a series of shouting, make everyone laugh. When I think of the unrestrained time I had, it was the most joyful time. I was once naughty and climbed on the stove to reach the food, my hand accidentally pressed to the fire poker, a prickly sound on the palm of the hand is a slip of burned blisters. When I cried, my grandmother came into the room and took a look at my hand, she was really anxious and distressed: "Oh my God, how did this happen? My grandmother was so worried about my hand injury that she dragged me to several doctors and finally cured it by applying my cousin's burn cream.

　　I also love to listen to my grandmother tell stories, she often told me about her childhood or when she was young. My grandmother's mother's family was a large family in the county, before the liberation. She said that at that time, the family also hired many people to collect crops and rent, and every autumn harvest, the family would always use a large cart to pull back a cart full of copper and grain. The family lived in a whole hutong, which I have been to many times. The hutong had a large archway built with blue bricks, and my grandmother said that the archway was originally her mother's family's property, and there were many stores on the street. When I was in junior high school, I also lived in my cousin's house in that hutong for a year or two, but there were already many other families living in the hutong. When she was married, there was a lot of gold and silver jewelry, but after the turbulent years, a lot of it was scattered there, and I was lucky enough to get a small silver lock from her after I was born. Grandmother said that after the arrival of the Japanese soldiers, Japanese soldiers and bandits often came to rob, one of her brother or uncle died because the store was robbed, and another brother or younger brother also left their hometown, since then the whereabouts of unknown. The war brought calamity to her mother's family, and the family's fortunes gradually declined with the arrival of the Japanese. She also said that when the Japanese first invaded our county, at first they would pretend to be friendly and give candy to children, but it didn't take long for them to show their fierceness. They arrested people everywhere and scared the village people to hide everywhere. The Japanese were so cruel that when some people hid in bales of straw, they stabbed them with bayonets and killed them alive. In those days, not only Japanese soldiers, but also old robbers, or bandits, went around looking for people who had some money to rob. When these old robbers could not get the money, they hung the people up and roasted them in the fire. Grandmother said that the harsh and miserable screams were so frightening that they could hear them. Alas, the decline of her mother's family is also a small microcosm of the bullying of the decaying China of the old days.

　　Like many old people in the countryside, Grandmother was a hard worker. They are accustomed to living in labor all their lives, and refuse to stop until they can't move. I asked her, "When you were a child, did your family have so much money that you still had to work? She said of course, both men and women had to do it, the women did some work at home, and they had to wait for the hired help to finish eating before they ate. My mother's health was very poor for a while, so my grandmother came over every now and then to help, she was already over 70 at that time, but she could still do it by pulling weeds and seedlings. She had been cooking on her own until she fell once and injured her cervical vertebrae, which was very serious. She had a sling around her neck to correct the misaligned vertebrae. Her thin, aged body was so weak, yet she suffered so much pain and suffering. She was in bed for about a year, and perhaps it was God's kindness to her that she finally got well again. After she got well, her body was not as good as it used to be, but she still had to struggle to do what she could. The roots of hard work have been rooted in her bones, flowing in her blood, and no amount of suffering can make her change.

　　After I went to a different place to study, every time I came home from school, I would go to visit her first. She was still so solicitous to make food for me, but by that time I already knew enough to excuse myself so that she would not be overworked. She often picked up her small cloth bag wrapped with banknotes and opened it, which was full of small bills rolled up, and had to take out some and stuff them to me. I have to laugh at her every time and say you should keep it, I can't use it. It was only after I strongly discouraged her from wrapping it up again.

　　She gradually aged, I was afraid she would leave me, but I never thought she would leave me. However by the spring of my last year of college, she collapsed. She wasn't sick, she was just old. She was so confused that even when my sister and I went to visit her, we couldn't recognize her beloved nephew and niece. I had to talk to her for a long time before she could identify them with much effort. I was by her side only for one night, the rest of the time my cousins took turns to watch over her. She was so weak that she was lying in bed, but she had to brace herself to do it when she got up at night and refused to let me help her. After this Spring Festival, I left my hometown to start school and left my beloved grandmother who was nearing the end of her life. She passed away not long after the Spring Festival that year, and the news of her death was not told to our children who were away at school until we called later and asked. She was unwilling to give others a little trouble in her life, and the time she spent in bed needing care from her offspring was so short.

　　My grandmother loved me 10,000 times over, and I have not been able to repay even a single point for the kindness she gave me. On the eve of working and being able to repay her a little, she left me with endless regrets, which makes me sad every time I think about it. Her life was ordinary, everything she did was uneventful, and her ordinary figure could be seen everywhere you went in the villages of the countryside. However, for me, she was extraordinary, because I know that every little thing she did was uneventful and accumulated to build up the life of a great, hard-working farmer.

　　I also often think of my uncle. He died even before my grandma. He was not yet forty years old when he passed away, which was the most sad and unacceptable thing for us. He was the most productive member of our family. He was very smart and clever, and he read very well. In those days when the countryside was still quite poor, it was not easy to get into college. My grandmother left very early, and I never met her, and my uncle was still very young at that time. Although she had the misfortune of losing her mother, my old grandmother, my uncle's grandmother, was still alive at that time, and she loved my uncle very much.

　　My interactions with my uncle were fragmented, and I had to try my best to piece together these fragments of interactions with him in my memory in order to reveal some outlines of him in my eyes.

　　My uncle went to school in town during high school and only returned home on weekends or holidays. He was very tall, thin-faced, and his arms were bruised when he exerted himself, and his voice was slightly hoarse. His personality was cheerful and he liked to recruit friends. He later worked in Beijing, and every year when he came home for the Spring Festival, he would get together with his buddies of the same year to drink and play mahjong. When I was very young, my uncle and the village partnership of about the same age were very good, and they would often get together to drink a little wine. I would sometimes run into them and they would pick up a small cup of wine to tease me, coaxing me to drink. I was probably five or six years old at the time, but I did not know the power of wine, and I picked it up and drank it down with a gulp, and my face soon became a light red mark. This is one of the most vivid memories I have of my uncle in middle school.

　　When I was in elementary school, he went to Nanjing to study at university. It was a big deal for our family that my uncle went to college. My grade in elementary school was also good, and since he went to college, some people in the village began to flirt with me, calling me a college student. Nanjing and the university were too far away for me at that time, and I couldn't imagine what it would look like. But I knew it was something I should be proud of and aspire to. Since he went to college, I saw him even less, and he would only come back during the holidays. I remember the first time he came home from Nanjing and I ran to see him. All the aunts came, and a few adults and children from the neighborhood came to see him too. He was sitting on a bench in the yard, his face still thin, but his voice seemed to have changed a bit. Some children were naughty in front of him, and he pretended to be serious and said to them in a Mandarin tone, "Go play! These children were amused by the novelty of the phrase, which they had never heard before, and later learned to speak it for a long time. I also took out a few of his books from college, but they were mostly obscure and difficult to understand. He studied electrical, in which I took a basic electronics book, which introduced the principle of ore radio and the way to make, I was quite interested, and tried to make one on their own, but in the end, because I know too much knowledge beyond, can only stop.

　　My uncle's college grades were very good. Most of the college students in his time would be assigned back to their own provinces, but he was selected by a company in Beijing with his excellent grades, so he went from Nanjing to Beijing again. In the rural areas in the eighties, there were very few people who could go to Beijing to work, and Beijing to me was just the look of Tiananmen Square in the news broadcast. When my uncle came back from Beijing at the Spring Festival, he brought back not only novel food from Beijing, but also his newly learned qigong, called Da Yan Gong. I was very surprised because I had only seen qigong in TV dramas or novels, but I had never seen a real person who could do it. I was very curious and asked my uncle to try what the magic of qigong was. He asked me to open my hand, and with some luck, he straightened his index and middle fingers together and pointed his luck at my palm. When his fingers were close to my palm, I really felt a gentle electric shock-like tingling sensation. This miraculous power overcame me, so I asked to learn qigong from him. I was always very lazy and rarely got up early if I didn't have to go to school, but since I wanted to learn qigong, my sister and I got up early every day and followed my uncle in the open space where the snow was swept away for a spring festival, and the practice of qigong lasted until I graduated from elementary school. Maybe it was because the learning time was too short or I couldn't get the hang of it. I tried many times, but I never got the tingling breath with my index and middle fingers together like my uncle did.

　　A year or two after my uncle arrived in Beijing, I also graduated from elementary school and came to the county high school. I also received a letter from my uncle in my first year of school, the first letter I had ever received in my life. When I got the letter from the school mail room, my classmate was a little surprised to see that it was from Beijing. I told him with some pride that it was a letter from my uncle. I can't remember the content of my uncle's letter, but it was about encouraging me to study hard. I also wrote back to him, and I can't remember the content of the letter. I kept this letter in my desk drawer at first, but later it was lost and disappeared. He also came home once with a handheld game console, which was Tetris. I had seen this thing in the county classmates, but never played it. I am very playful, from him to take over and play with joy, even sleep at night to forget. My uncle told my father to give it to me, I was very happy, but my father strongly disagreed, he was afraid that I would waste my study. Uncle also once brought back a color camera, at that time we take pictures are to go to the photo studio or have special photo people to the village to take pictures, rarely see their own camera. He used that camera to take a lot of pictures of me and my sister. My sister and I were very happy. We put on our sunglasses and leaned against the flower and fruit trees, stood in the wheat field, and stood at the gate to take pictures. He brought the camera back to Beijing and sent me the photos, some of which are still in my house, and some of which are on the frame of someone's house.

　　Later he got married and brought my aunt back home with him. He and his aunt were walking hand in hand on the road leading to the farmland in the village, a move that caused a little talk among the conservative villagers, because two people walking hand in hand was never seen in the countryside at that time. My initial impression of my aunt was that she was extremely shy and rarely spoke, except for a few words with my uncle and his close, rowdy friends. I later went to work in Beijing and talked about this when I went to see my aunt and cousin, because we really talked to find out that she was not shy, she also had the same chatty personality that is unique to Beijingers. I asked my aunt why she didn't seem to be talking at that time, she said she didn't want to talk, she couldn't understand what our old family was saying, and this explanation was strongly agreed by my wife, because she didn't understand much at first either.

　　The last time my uncle returned home for the Spring Festival was my last year of high school. That year, he took a family portrait of the whole family in our family, but not him, and later, looking back, I realized that he did it on purpose. He was already sick at the time, but he just didn't tell his family. After the Chinese New Year that year, he came back once again. It was the last time he returned to his hometown. He brought his aunt and young cousin back with him. Everyone in the family knew he had been sick and the whole family had gathered to see him. He came back to his hometown this time to come back and see his relatives and his hometown again for the last time. That time he was seen holding his young daughter intimately and talking to people. He was hugging her so tightly, how much he was reluctant to let go! He couldn't let go of his loved ones and his hometown; he couldn't let go of his wife and his beautiful daughter, who was still young.

　　The last time I saw my uncle was when I passed through Beijing on my way to college and stayed overnight at his home. His actions at the time did not reveal any illness, yet the disease was quietly robbing him of his prime. The next day he got a car from his company to drive us. It was September and not very cold, but I remember he put on a green coat and drove my father and me to the station. From then on, he and I were parted, and this parting was a permanent separation. The news of his death was not told to me, and I did not know he was gone until I came home in the Spring Festival. At that time, although I was somewhat prepared, but hearing his sad news still can not help but froze, the heart can not help but empty, the brain is a blank. I kowtowed at his grave during the Spring Festival to give him one last ride. I heard my parents say that on his last day before he passed away, he still insisted on going to the bathroom by himself. I think this was due to his stubborn character, and also because he kept his last dignity.

　　More than ten years after he left us, Grandpa also passed away. When the family sent Grandpa's casket back to the cemetery, passing by my uncle's grave, the whole family stopped in their tracks. The first one who couldn't help himself was my eldest sister, who suddenly sat down in front of his grave and cried bitterly, followed by the second and third aunts who also sat down and cried bitterly. They held back for more than a decade, their endless thoughts of their dear brother at once released. All the relatives in front of the tomb could not help but cry out in pain, and the cries went around the trees and grasses and spread throughout the silent cemetery. After a long time, everyone picked up the aunts who had cried too much and went back one after another, leaving the years of longing in this bleak cemetery.

　　With his bright heart and hard work, Uncle got out of the countryside and went to Nanjing and Beijing. However, his career came to a screeching halt just as his sails had been puffed up. He was like an eagle that had just flown out of its nest and rushed into the vast sky, and was about to soar in this vast space when it suddenly broke its wings. How sad his untimely death was!

　　I also went to Beijing to work and met my cousin who was in elementary school. My aunt and I went back home to visit my grandfather, and he knew they were coming back, so he went to the intersection early to wait. The first time I saw a photo of her, I could still see her from her circle of friends occasionally, she was already a big girl, the photo of her cousin is still so smart and clever.

　　The years have gone by and time has passed, and it has been more than twenty years since they left. I can't do magic, I can't turn back time and bring them back to earth, I can only write these poorly written words to remember their ordinary past. Although they no longer appear in my dreams, I want to use my words to leave those fragments of them in my memory, and also to pay tribute to their souls in heaven.