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【text/xiao he, columnist of guancha.com】

i was born into a family of scholars - literally, a family of scholars. a large part of my childhood memories is entangled with the smell of ink. i could tell the difference between 12g draft paper and 50g paper at a very young age, and i could tell the size of the paper by feel, operate the all-in-one machine that "i couldn't afford to pay for even if i sold ten of them", and wear the yellow rubber gloves with ridges to feed paper - but i wasn't as skilled as my father, and occasionally fed the wrong paper.

my father contracted a copy shop and worked from dawn to dusk to earn money. from the time i can remember, i rarely remember him enjoying life. all his money was spent on paying for my surgery and hospitalization. they raised me bit by bit with efforts far beyond those of similar families.

i disobeyed my father twice in my life, both times for my own future when i was going to college. although i succeeded in both cases, i know he was doing it for my own good; if i chose a major based on my emotions, i would be destined to be far away from home and fail my parents' kindness in raising me.

but i really want to live my own life. dedicating my life to the field of science and engineering was my sister's dream. i took away my sister's dream, and now i have the conditions, i want to realize it on her behalf.

and before that, from a certain point in time, it had really become a dream that i dared to pursue.

one

twenty years ago, in the late autumn of november, xingwu road primary school was preparing to hold an unprecedented military training at a certain armed police regiment's teaching team located in dafeng commune across the river. registration was voluntary and participants had to bring their own daily necessities and pay a fee.

at that time, in people's minds, the silk city was divided into the lower half of the city that existed before liberation, located on the alluvial plain of yujiang river, and was encroached by the narrow streets and dilapidated bungalow docks of the qing dynasty; and the upper half of the city that was newly built after liberation, located on the northwest side of changdao island in the middle of the river, with state-owned factories and institutions, wide roads and lush sycamore trees.

when i was in primary school, although the recorded calls of "xiagang brand professional braised eggs" on the streets had become a kind of joke among the kids who didn't know the taste of sorrow: "xiagang brand, professional atomic bomb; fifty cents each, very loud!" but the collective thinking was slow to change. primary school teachers would still scold us: "no wonder people see you and say, 'kids from the lower half of the city, no matter how you teach them, they can't be as hardworking as kids from the upper half of the city.'" i, who can remember things, still occasionally heard the saying "if you want to get married, marry someone from the upper half of the city" when i grew up. the "upper half of the city" seemed like some kind of western paradise that was worth all the hardships.

but the distance from xingwu road to dafeng is much farther than the distance of "marrying into the upper half of the city".

dafeng is already out of the small silk city, belonging to the silk zone, and the lower half of the city is at the two ends of a whole urban-rural bus line. it takes 40 minutes to take the no. 9 bus. i, a little girl who had just joined the team, was separated from my parents for three days and three nights, carrying a quilt, lunch box, and plastic basin in the cold wind to go to dafeng, a place i knew nothing about and heard was deserted. for me at the time, this was far beyond my little brain’s understanding of “marrying far away in a foreign land”. it was like flying to the end of the world with flowers.

at the end of the sky, where is the fragrant hill?

i used to be a frail and sickly girl. i had mumps, pneumonia, pharyngitis, and now i have myocarditis. i had good grades in elementary school but often missed classes due to illness. several old buildings in the inpatient department of the district hospital are filled with fragments of my childhood memories.

the illness made me mature early, but it also made me emotionally depressed, cowardly and timid. people of my age might not be able to tolerate it - for example, my military-loving sister who loved to put up large pictures of world military on the wall, always liked to hold me in her arms when she took me to the newsstand to buy "weapons knowledge"... i could always accept it. but because of my body that easily collapsed, i was afraid to persist, and i was used to stopping when something started to make me feel physically uncomfortable.

i hope military training won't kill me...

there were not many girls who signed up. the details of how i was "signed up" are fuzzy. i only remember that i was very scared, but i couldn't find my sister. my sister had a hard time in high school. she rode her bike to school before i woke up every day, and she was still not home when i went to bed. my parents urged me to go. the idiom "ye gong hao long" left a deep impression on me that time, because my mother read it out in dialect to describe me: "we used to have to eat bitter memories when we were in elementary school, but now you dare not eat the three-day canteen, and you are imitating your sister, sticking all kinds of things on the wall. you are sick and sick, and you are pretending to be a tomboy! if you don't want to go, tear down those planes and cannons, clean up the bedroom for me, and make it look like a girl's boudoir..."

to this day, i am still very sensitive to the four words "ye gong loves dragons" and cannot bear to hear them.

two

that day i wore the school uniform as required and arrived at school very early. my father carried my luggage - a quilt stuffed in a basin, a lunch box, a cup for washing mouth, and something else i forgot - and took me to the playground.

the small playground of xingwu road primary school was packed with several green military vehicles with white license plates. the teacher helped us stuff the basins and quilts into the vehicles, and then carried us up as well.

the military vehicle was a truck. i remember it clearly. there was no tarpaulin on the way there. i managed to squeeze into a position with a very good view at the front corner. i watched the convoy leave xingwu road, go up dongfang street, turn onto the long swing bridge of yujiang bridge, cross the river in the bone-chilling early morning of late autumn, and turn left at the foot of tashan. everyone was very excited at the time. some people tied their red scarves to the poles used to support the tarpaulin on the military vehicles. they fluttered in the wind, and when they were finally taken down, the edges had been blown away by the wind.

after crossing tashan, the world became completely unfamiliar to me. the cold wind of november blew the dust on the road against my cheeks and ears. there was a smokeless desert on both sides of the road. i could only see the jade-like yujiang river in the mist on the far left, and a bright silver-shining heavy industry in the sky with black smoke floating in the distance, as well as small houses and shops on the right and the rolling hills with layers of forests behind.

that was the eve of the real estate development boom that swept into my hometown. the yu river i saw was roughly the same as what du fu and lu you saw a thousand or several hundred years ago, except for a few more sand-dredging ships and a low old dam: reed marshes, dragon banks, pebble beaches, real fishing sampans, children paddling sideways, and water chickens flying back and forth with fish in their mouths. our children can’t see any of that now.

on the morning of the first day, we arrived at the place and unloaded the truck on the grass at the gate. there seemed to be a gathering on the playground. the leader gave a speech, and then we were divided into classes. the military classes, with ten people in a class, carried our things into the dormitory.

it was a two-story building with a row of large slogans on the top: "political qualification, military proficiency, good style, strict discipline, and strong support." in front was a training ground with a rostrum, in the back was a shooting range, on one side was a canteen, and on the other side was a high-rise red brick rough building used for armed police training. there was a corridor on the second floor facing the front, with a λ-shaped staircase protruding from the middle to the first floor.

if my memory serves me right, there were five bunk beds in the room, not connected together, with a gap between each two beds for one person to pass through, not a large bunk bed. the lower bunk had no fences on both sides, and it looked like it would easily roll off; the upper bunk had fences on both sides.

the door is on the right side when you look out. there is a small bed next to our bunk, which is for the squad leader (instructor). there is a window on the bed. there is a small long table (table) at the entrance on the other side. the toiletries, lunch boxes and kettles we brought are placed on it. the windows on both sides are made of aluminum alloy frames and have blue curtains.

the strange thing is that i can't remember how i washed myself at that time. there was definitely no faucet in the bedroom. i can only remember that there was a faucet stand for everyone at the entrance of the cafeteria. where exactly is the faucet for washing ourselves? at the left end of the corridor on the second floor? at the right end? on the first floor? they all look a bit similar, but i don't remember going there before.

it was 20 years ago. i was only a few years old at that time, so i have forgotten some details.

there were no bugles in the camp, and all activities were done with whistles. on the first day, we opened our blankets and put down our basins, and it was time for lunch.

we ate in the one-story cafeteria on the left side of the dormitory. a dozen students gathered around a large round table, using their own tableware (that should be the case, because i have the impression that i was holding a stainless steel lunch box, which had been with me through many times in the inpatient department of the special hospital, so it must be mine) to eat while standing. there was a large bowl of dry rice with a hole in it, and a large bowl of vegetables in the middle.

i don't remember what the soup was, but it must have been there. it was in this teaching team that i developed the habit of liking to soak rice in soup, because it was fast to swallow - i used to eat quietly and slowly, and it would take me half an hour to finish a bowl of winter amaranth porridge. but there was limited time there, and the dry rice grains in the canteen "kong" were loose, so i could drink it directly in the salty soup. my parents told me that it was indigestible and bad for the stomach. in the end, i went to the canteen in dongda village. the rice with toppings was on a plate, and the stir-fried dishes were on a plate plus a very small rice bowl. i couldn't soak them, so i changed my habit of soaking rice in soup.

i still don't understand why there is such a subtle but real difference in taste between the dry rice from the canteen and the dry rice cooked in a tin pot by my parents.

most tables in the cafeteria had no seats, so students had to stand. but there was a compartment on the right side of the entrance, and outside the compartment there was also a large round table with chairs. our team leader and some instructors with green epaulettes would sit around that table to eat. the food itself was no different, and everyone ate the same.

after the meal, two people from each table would go to the kitchen to get a long straight bamboo or coconut fiber pot brush to wash the table and discard the leftovers. this job was rotated, and it was never my turn in three days. therefore, i never went deep into the cafeteria and had no impression of the back hall, but we lined up to wash our personal tableware under a tap outside the cafeteria.

in the afternoon, we practiced marching on the playground between the dormitory building and the row of shaded trees. we stood at attention, stood at ease, turned, and stood at attention. because there were only ten of us, we lined up in one or two rows, always walking back and forth in roughly the same small area on the playground next to the shaded trees. i clearly remember that every time i turned to a certain side, there was a water tower in the distance; other than that, everything seemed to be slowly slipping away with time. the air around us was getting colder and colder, the shadow of the big tree above our heads was getting farther and farther away from us, and our shadows were getting longer and longer on the ground that should have been cement.

like all the military training i experienced in junior high and high school in my hometown, we did not learn to march in step.

finally, we taught a song. our class was taught the song "strict discipline": "the bugle is loud, the steps are neat, the people's army has iron discipline..." because "discipline" sounds very similar to another word that easily makes people think of dirty things (the two are pronounced exactly the same in our dialect), a group of undeveloped girls shamelessly joked with each other during meals and breaks: "discipline - discipline, in discipline, there is me! in discipline, there is you! in discipline, there is infinite combat power!" when the instructor heard our non-combat singing, he raised his arms and pretended to hit us, and we ran away laughing.

on the first night, an open-air movie was shown. the screen was used directly from the rostrum in the playground. since i was sitting at the back row, i could only see the projector beam and the bright and dark spots flashing back and forth. i could only hear the sound of gunfire and explosions at the time. i inferred that it was some kind of revolutionary war film. i never understood the title of the film from beginning to end, and it was too difficult to ask, so it has now become an eternal mystery.

three

i was placed on the outermost bunk. i don't have any special memories of the first night. i was probably too tired and fell asleep. because it was located in an open rural area, the river breeze blew freely through the teaching team's small building. anyway, the nights in late autumn in dafeng were particularly cold. i woke up in the morning wrapped in a quilt and shivered for at least an hour before i heard the whistle on the playground.

i remembered a point that seemed like it should have been there but wasn't: probably because we brought our own quilts, we were not trained to fold them, at least not strictly required to fold them in a tofu-like way, so i don't remember it at all. but i did learn another strange thing: the instructor taught us to remove the laces of our own shoes and tie them into a "butterfly" shape - to this day, i still tie my shoes with laces in this way.

the next day, we went out with basins to wash, gather, sing, and eat breakfast. the morning was the same as before, marching in line, turning, squatting, standing up, at ease, and standing at attention.

the school's team leaders were all young female teachers. the teaching team gave each of them a set of armed police camouflage uniforms with the national emblem embroidered on the top of the head and pine branches embroidered on the collar. they put them on excitedly the next day and took pictures of our training from various angles with their cameras; until we were really not worth photographing, we just posed for pictures of each other under the shade of the trees.

when the shadow of the big tree above our heads finally moved from the horizon to cover us, a whistle was blown in the center of the playground, and each class went back to sing and eat lunch.

there was an activity the next afternoon to experience shooting.

this was one of the important experience projects of this military training, and it was the first time for me to see a military gun that could fire at close range; but because what was going to happen the next night completely overwrote my memory cache, to this day, i can't remember any details of the shooting.

did our students actually touch the gun? (the school leader should have taken the gun and fired under the guidance of the instructor) what gun was used? (although i was very young at the time, i already had some "military" knowledge. if i remembered their appearance, i should have been able to distinguish between the 56-and-a-half and the 56-charged.) i only know that some people were given shell casings as souvenirs, which led to the events of the third day.

at that time, i certainly couldn't tell the difference between the type 56 and type 81, but if i had a visual memory and could remember the color of the buttstock and handguard, i should be able to tell them apart now. i simply forgot everything about the event.

when the lights in the dormitory were turned off the next night, i finally realized how uncomfortable it was to sleep on a hard bed or on the upper bunk - the bunk bed had a very slight swaying, which was imperceptible to the lower bunk, but a sensitive girl sleeping on the upper bunk would feel in the dead of night that the bed board was not stationary, but oscillated left and right at a very low amplitude like a cradle; although it was very slow, it really gave people a sense of panic as if they were suspended in the void, making people feel that once they fell asleep and relaxed their vigilance, it would take advantage of them and knock them over like a dump truck.

in the middle of the night, something even more frightening happened: i wanted to go to the bathroom.

i quietly put on my school uniform jacket, slid down from the upper bunk along the shelf, put on my shoes, walked around the squad leader's (instructor's) bed to feel the doorknob, and slowly opened the door a crack - if i remember correctly, the room where we went to the toilet at night and the light was always on was supposed to be the men's toilet, and there was a long brick trough on the floor against the wall.

the railings of the second floor corridor were just two long iron pipes, which did not block the wind at all. the cold frosty wind with the smell of soil blew into my face and into my arms. there was a yellow light at the end of the road i was going to. the faint chirping of insects drifted from the field behind the small building, reminding me that this was already the real countryside. behind the high walls of the teaching team, there was only the vast wilderness where i, a young child, could not find my way home.

at that time, i recalled some fragments of military songs that i remembered: to be honest, i miss home, too; my old mother at home has a head full of white hair... i often miss her in my dreams, her in my dreams.

i knew the lyrics at that time. as a pure little girl who had just joined the young pioneers, i didn’t understand “her in the dream” and thought “her” was “my old mother at home”, so the whole paragraph became the meaning of lu binghua - the tea garden in my hometown is full of flowers, and my mother’s heart is far away; the stars in the sky are silent, and the baby on the ground misses his mother.

that was exactly how i felt at the time: i missed home.

so what are the lyrics for the song that follows? having said that, i know that responsibility is great?

i forgot. maybe if i don’t serve in the army and don’t love my country, no one will protect my mother.

four

on the third day, all of us in the platoon knew each other very well. after the afternoon whistle training, we started singing songs, with each class singing the songs they had taught. we sang "the military bugle sounds loud and clear, and the steps are neat," while the class next door sang another song that i had never heard again since that military training until i saw it in a clip from "soldiers assault." it seemed to have no score, no soundtrack recording, and had never been performed by any singer. it was an "internal" song that only existed and was passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation of soldiers:

"with a steel gun in hand, and a red heart dedicated to the motherland. we are revolutionary fighters and the people's soldiers. we will do whatever the party central committee says. oh oh oh ~ oh -, we will do whatever the party central committee says!"

stills from soldiers assault

later, when i listened to this song in "soldier assault", i felt that the tune in my memory was different from the second and second to last sentences they sang. whether i remembered it wrongly or it was really different, i may never know.

after the singing, we (three classes) formed a big circle and played the game of handkerchief dropping, singing and playing. that was the only time in my life that i really played handkerchief dropping. i was inexplicably moved to tears and i still remember it - maybe it was because i liked the atmosphere of collective friendship that my generation of city kids (at least myself) never had in school? i don't know, but it was like something soft in my heart was touched, and i thought how nice it would be if life could always be like this, living in a big warm family where everything was done collectively.

things took a strange turn the rest of the night.

when we were dismissed, a brave girl in our class suggested that we could use the free time in the evening to go to the shooting range to touch the bullet that had hit the target the day before, so that we could put it back into the shell we had received and form a complete bullet.

the left boundary of the shooting range was the back of our small building, and the target path was a muddy field covered with grass. at that time, there was a gap between the red brick training building and our small building. it was very narrow, but we, a few years old, could squeeze through it; the girl (i forgot her name. she was in another teaching class at school, but she was assigned to the same military class as us during military training) slipped out of the dormitory building under the cover of going to the toilet the next night and squeezed in through the gap, but because she couldn't see, she lost her direction and didn't touch the bullet. this time she wanted to pull more people.

girls were very crazy in childhood. when this idea came out, everyone responded immediately. several classes put together a team of eleven or twelve people. only the instructors were kept in the dark.

when the scheduled free time arrived, more than a dozen of us took advantage of the cover of night to squeeze through the gap one by one and sneak into the shooting range. after we went in, we found that the intelligence was wrong. the target trench was not right after the gap (we didn’t know this term at the time, but we had just seen the target reporting site the day before, so we knew there was a ditch where the target reporters hid). we also had to cross a large field.

next, we who were standing watch in front of the crack were discovered by an instructor, which alarmed the instructors of several classes and the leaders with green shoulder straps on the armed police side. then our team leader also rushed over. several adults rushed into the shooting range and carried us who were feeling for the bullets inside out one by one like chickens, and stood us in a row outside the crack.

i forgot which teacher it was, but he scolded us harshly in front of the instructors.

five

on the fourth day, i woke up very early. i quietly put on my clothes without disturbing other people or the instructor, tiptoed down, put on my shoes, opened the door a crack, went out, and then closed the door.

the sky was a dark blue in the early morning, and the bone-chilling wind made me shiver. i remember clearly that the walls of the second floor were made of tiles and the railings were made of iron, and touching either of them was like grabbing ice cubes - because i touched them.

i walked around the camp aimlessly for a few times, trying to remember everything in front of me: the big tree that shaded the small playground, the stage (rostrum), the hardened playground, the red brick rough building, the lighted toilet that led from the fork in the road to the shooting range, the two-story building covered with blue curtains, the first-story cafeteria, the hollow wooden guns scattered on the grass at the entrance (now that i think about it, they were probably the whole wooden support of the 56 semi-automatic rifle without the receiver removed), and a muddy road full of puddles at the entrance.

teaching team, this is where i actually lived for three days.

who can say that i am a tomboy because i like dragons too much; what can boys do that i can't do because i am afraid of getting dirty, tired, or afraid of this and that? i have a complete training memory in a real military camp. i have been a soldier!

this time, i didn't cause any trouble. although the instructor who got up early to run saw it, he didn't say anything. when the whistle blew on the playground, i had already returned to the dormitory and packed up my things like everyone else. the squad leader began to teach us how to "hit the explosive pack" - because the first time we saw a backpack with two horizontal and two vertical lines was in the explosive pack in the chinese textbook illustration of dong cunrui blowing up the bunker. we seemed to call it "hitting the explosive pack" at the time, and i don't know who called it that first.

a song was playing on the radio outside. i remember this song: you help me, i help you, ideals connect us; officers love soldiers, soldiers respect officers, and we fight the storm together on the journey... the most beautiful thing in life is military life, military life; shouting to comrades makes tears shine, the love between officers and soldiers is unforgettable, unforgettable.

the last subject was a march, walking barehanded. i remember the distance was 3 kilometers, from the entrance of the teaching team to the nearby west bus station, where the military vehicles were waiting for us. when writing this article, i measured it on baidu maps, and the straight-line distance was only 1.9 kilometers, but we walked along the street at the time. i only remember that my cheeks and ears were burned by the cold wind of late autumn, and the flying dust unique to rural roads in the wind blinded me. i couldn't stop crying all the way.

the area has changed so much that i can’t even remember the route i took even if i memorized all the key landmarks.

six

that military training was unusual for xingwu road primary school, and i never experienced military training again until graduation.

later, when i went to junior high school and high school, i had a three-day military training. under the scorching sun, we marched in a small space on the school playground. day students learned to stand at attention, at ease, turn, stand at attention, and march in step (not goose-stepping). boarding students had to fold their quilts, which they actually folded in the classroom. on the last day, there was a drill performance. the instructors were always armed police, but i didn't have the same feeling that i had back then. i just followed them and marched along. the three days passed silently.

graffiti i drew more than ten years ago. the military uniform has been changed. thanks to my mother for not throwing it away, i actually found it.

the date on the college entrance examination countdown sign at the entrance of my alma mater was getting shorter and shorter, and finally it was time to return to zero. after the third year of high school, the college entrance examination ended uneventfully. later, when i was helping a friend's child decide on his college entrance examination application, i accidentally found out that i had the highest score among the detection and guidance majors that my alma mater recruited in my province that year.

"the reed flowers are white and beautiful, and the petals are flying all over the sky. thousands of threads of meaning are lingering, and colorful clouds are chasing on the road.

chasing over mountains and over water, for whom do the flowers fly? the wild geese fly in pairs, with the acacia flowers as matchmakers.

during a winter break after entering college, i took a walk with my dad. silk city is very small, and we walked along the newly built river bank for a few hours and walked directly to dafeng. dafeng street actually has a skyline, but there is still only one main street. i easily encountered dafeng middle school, which is still in the same place. the school has tall buildings and looks brand new, but the water tower behind it in the direction i looked at that year is still the tallest building.

when i saw the water tower, my heart was shocked. i took my father's hand and jumped over a pile of muddy roads and went around to the back of the school. as expected, through the gate i saw the teaching team that i had dreamed of many times - the rough building used for training, the dormitory building, the cafeteria, the office building, and the big tree that could cover half of the playground. everything was there.

in this age when all my childhood memories are being rapidly erased, they have all remained the same, except for a police badge hung in the middle of the stairs leading to the second floor of the soldiers' dormitory building (there should not have been one before), and the slogan "politically qualified...strong guarantee" was replaced with "obey the party's command, be able to win battles, and have good work style", and the letters seem to be the same size.

but why have this building and yard become smaller?

as far as i can remember, the twenty characters "political qualification... strong guarantee" were all over the roof of the second floor of the small building. now it's covered with only twelve characters?

a sentry about my age, wearing a type 07 military uniform, saw me looking at the door and walked straight towards me.

"comrade, what do you have..."

speak mandarin.

"oh...i'll just come back to take a look."

"'come back' for a look?"

"i've trained here." i interrupted what the soldier was about to say and told him seriously. then, ignoring the shocked expression on his face, i turned around and skipped through the puddles on the road in front of the camp gate and returned to my father.

i complained to my father how the place where i had military training had become so small, and everything in my memories seemed to have been half as small.

"how old were you when you were in this military training? were you in the first or second grade? now you are nearly 1.6 meters tall, and even with high heels you are taller than me." dad said philosophically, "it's not that they have become smaller, it's that you have grown up."

"the path of cultivation has no end. when the flag moves, don't wait. a lifetime of fame is as light as smoke. the most miserable people will never be young again."

many years later, i thought of my original intention, got up quietly, opened my computer notebook, and typed out this article.

postscript

this is something i wrote a few years ago when my research was not going well. i wrote half of it in one go, and later it became longer and longer as i continued to write. i took it out and spent some time polishing it in the past few days.

it is difficult to describe the impact of military training in primary school on a little girl. before military training, i was a weak girl, and now i am still a weak girl, unable to do even a pull-up. before it, under the persuasion of my sister, i had become a pseudo-military fan; now i am still just a pseudo-military fan, not caring about military affairs, the history of famous generals, and obviously lacking the kind of affection for the military in general that many men always like to talk about.

i just had a crush on the pla. i didn't get to marry a serving soldier or a veteran, as i had dreamed of as a child, but with that crush i was doomed to be a communist for life.

the events described in the article were deeply imprinted in my young mind, and i can still draw many scenes today (including some scenes not mentioned in this article) - the problem is that, considering that the teaching team is a registered military management area, i found that my memory is too good after verification before submitting the article. i originally wanted to draw a few art pictures and put them in the article instead of photos, but i finally felt that it was not appropriate. therefore, there are no pictures in this part; for the same reason, don’t ask whether the text description is completely true, it is not, i blurred it!

it's been twenty years since this happened, and the world has changed. but until they have new barracks, i'll keep some of the details secret in my heart - if they're going to stay in those buildings for a hundred years, no matter how many times they're shown in public reports, i'll keep them secret forever.