Chapter 58
◎A Poetic Age◎
“Second Sister-in-law, are you worried about Wani’s marriage?” Wu Fangmei saw Yu Yahong pickling sour cabbage by the well and moved a stool to sit next to her.
“Yes.” Yu Yahong had a toothache just thinking about this. That Matchmaker Yang had taken her gift but was not doing her job properly. The men she introduced were either in their thirties and had achieved nothing, widowers with children, or had physical defects like a limp, or they would stammer for a long time without being able to say a complete sentence. Her Wani was such a pretty and well-proportioned girl. How could she be matched with these crooked melons and cracked dates?
Occasionally, there were one or two who were barely passable, but Wani herself was not satisfied. This dragged on, and more than half a year passed just like that.
“Sigh, where is my Wani’s good fortune?”
Wu Fangmei moved her stool closer to Yu Yahong. “Speaking of which, I have a distant cousin’s nephew who is about the same age as Wani. He has a junior high school education and is an accountant in his village’s production team. He’s a good match for Wani. My cousin’s nephew is the only son in the family. His father is the brigade leader in the village, and his mother is also a hardworking and easy-going person. That young man is really good-looking, tall and thin. His family has a detached courtyard with seven or eight rooms. If Wani marries that young man, she will have endless blessings in the future and won’t have to suffer anymore.”
“Really? Is there such a good thing?” Hearing Wu Fangmei’s words, Yu Yahong stopped her pickling and her eyes lit up.
“Hah, of course it’s true. Wani is my niece who grew up in front of me. I, as her aunt, can’t harm her!”
Yu Yahong calculated in her heart. Although the fourth sister-in-law, Wu Fangmei, was a bit lazy, she was not as shrewd and calculating as the eldest sister-in-law, Zhang Guixiang, who was full of bad intentions. If she said she wanted to introduce a marriage for Wani, even if it was not necessarily reliable, she would not deliberately find some unpresentable characters to disgust them.
“Second Sister-in-law, if you think it’s suitable, I’ll go back to my parents’ home tomorrow and talk to my cousin. Their family will definitely be satisfied with Wani!”
Yu Yahong was now completely in no mood to continue pickling sour cabbage. An eager smile appeared on her face. “Then I’ll have to trouble you, her aunt, to pay more attention to Wani. I have some fabric scraps. You can take them back and use them to make two new coveralls for Manya.”
“I think that’s a good idea!” Wu Fangmei beamed with a smile.
…
Tangtang clearly felt that starting high school was just yesterday, but in a blink of an eye, she was also about to graduate from the county high school.
There were still two or three days before leaving school. The school basically no longer arranged classes. The several graduating classes were in a state of chaos, busy packing their luggage, getting their diplomas, taking graduation photos, exchanging gifts, and having farewell dinners.
Tangtang’s heart was shrouded in a sense of melancholy.
This time, leaving school was not like in primary school or junior high, where after a two-month summer vacation, she could continue to study in a new environment. This time, leaving school meant that her student life would come to a complete end. She was not as lucky as her big brother and second brother, who had joined the army and been recruited for work. This meant that she, like her cousin Wani, would have to rely on her own hands to scrape a living from the land in the future.
But what Tangtang firmly believed was that even if she returned home to farm, she would not follow the trajectory of most girls, who would help out with farm work at home for a year or two after graduation and then find a suitable husband in their own village or a neighboring village to live their lives.
She was sure that her parents would also support her decision.
In addition, another point of comfort was that although the high school learning environment was chaotic, she had not neglected her studies. She had insisted on attending classes seriously, and had gnawed through the knowledge of mathematics, physics, and chemistry bit by bit. Her dense study notes filled several thick-covered notebooks. She had wrapped every textbook issued by the school with a book cover and stuffed it into a wooden box, planning to take it home.
Most of the graduation gifts were exchanged between classmates. But in these three years, the teachers had provided her with a lot of enthusiastic help in her studies. She felt that she should also give the teachers a gift to thank them for their tutoring all along. But Tangtang had no idea what to give. She couldn’t afford anything too expensive, and something as ordinary as a notebook or a handkerchief felt unoriginal.
Not having decided on a gift, Tangtang simply put all the money she had in her pocket and went to the street to look around.
She didn’t know if it was her own state of mind, but the street today seemed much more desolate than usual in the autumn wind. There were only a few pedestrians, and a light drizzle was falling. She squeezed the eight yuan in her pocket and stepped into the county department store.
She walked around the counter. On the counter was a stack of handkerchiefs with a peony pattern, twenty-five cents each. Not to mention anything else, Tangtang herself had received more than a dozen handkerchiefs of this style, all from her female classmates.
Seeing someone come in, the salesclerk said, “Little girl, what would you like to buy?”
“I want to buy a gift for someone, something a little more original.” Tangtang briefly stated her needs.
Hearing this, the salesclerk lifted the wooden partition of the glass counter and took out a box of fountain pens from inside. “How about this fountain pen? It’s from the provincial capital. It has an exquisite appearance, and the writing is smooth and doesn’t smudge. It’s good for both giving as a gift and for personal use.”
Tangtang took it and looked at it. The pen barrel was engraved with a fine wheat ear pattern, looking very fine. She couldn’t help but widen her eyes. “How much is this fountain pen?”
The salesclerk looked at the price tag. “Eight yuan each.”
Hearing this price, Tangtang silently pushed the box of fountain pens back. “I’ll look at something else.”
Although the money she had with her was enough to buy one fountain pen, she wanted to give gifts to several teachers, and one fountain pen was obviously not enough. Tangtang saw a stack of paper fans in the corner, packed in a transparent plastic bag, with a layer of dust on them. Compared to these non-durable paper fans, most residents preferred to use homemade cattail fans. Perhaps because they were not selling well after being imported, they were just casually placed in a corner.
“Can you show me this?”
Hearing this, the salesclerk put the bag of paper fans on the counter with one hand.
Tangtang took out a paper fan from the transparent plastic bag and opened it to look. It was a basic bamboo paper fan. The fan surface was ordinary white paper, plain with no pattern, but the bamboo of the fan ribs was not bad. It was made of mottled bamboo. When she got close and sniffed, she could still smell a light, fresh fragrance of bamboo.
Tangtang was very fond of bamboo. Bamboo could reproduce asexually through underground stems. The buds on the bamboo rhizomes would sprout new shoots and grow into new bamboo. This method of reproduction allowed the bamboo forest to form a huge root network underground. Once the conditions were suitable, new plants would continue to sprout. A bamboo forest could spread over hundreds or even thousands of mu through the bamboo rhizomes, and even form a sea of bamboo.
This was the so-called endless vitality.
And bamboo had been an affordable plant since ancient times. It could be used to make paper, furniture, chopsticks, baskets, lanterns, etc. Throughout the ages, wherever there were people, there was bamboo, and it was closely related to people’s daily lives.
Seeing the plain white fan surface, Tangtang thought that she could also draw on it, which would make it more original.
Tangtang bought the fans, and also bought ink and a brush for painting. After returning to the dormitory, she carefully tore off the paste on the edge of the fan and spread it flat on the desk to paint.
Tangtang dipped the brush in the ink and scraped off the excess water on the edge of the bottle. She first tried the brush on a piece of waste paper. The first stroke landed on the upper right corner of the fan surface, and the ink spread along the fold, creating a very light green shadow. She was painting a fisherman on the river. The tip of the brush turned lightly on the white paper, and a few strokes outlined the shape of a straw raincoat. The water waves rose and fell along the folds of the fan surface.
On the day before leaving school, she finally finished painting all the fans. After the ink was dry, she used paste to stick the fan surface back to the fan ribs. The several teachers who received the fans she painted all liked them very much.
Among them, the chemistry teacher, who had given Tangtang the most help in her studies, also gave her a beautiful large red-covered notebook in return, and wrote a very beautiful line of words on the title page:
[Never forget your original intention, and you will achieve your goal. Never give up your bamboo-like ambition, and the crabapple blossoms will bloom on their own—from Teacher Yang to classmate Xintang.]
Teacher Yang patted her shoulder with a serious tone. “Have a safe journey.”
The notebook that Teacher Yang gave her was undoubtedly the most precious gift Tangtang had received. She couldn’t help but bow, and after choking for a long while, she finally said, “Thank you, teacher.”
It was five in the afternoon when she left the school. She was carrying a wooden box with a roll of bedding on top of it. When she walked to the school gate with her yellow schoolbag on her back, her brother, Su Juesheng, had already packed his things and was waiting at the gate. He didn’t look much better than her. The forced smile on his face was uglier than a cry. “Tangtang, give it to me.”
Tangtang handed her schoolbag and bedding to her brother.
Su Juesheng had already bought two bus tickets. 5:30 in the afternoon was the last bus back to Yuhuai Village. The bus arrived soon. Before getting on the bus, Tangtang couldn’t help but look back at the school gate with the sign “Yuanlin County Middle School.” Reluctance, melancholy, and various complex emotions welled up in her heart, making her nose sting.
Goodbye, my student days, my poetic age.
The bus drove on the bumpy road. The carriage was bustling with people. Under their feet were all kinds of luggage bags, so crowded that there was no room to breathe. Tangtang leaned against the glass window, looking at the green fields outside, with large patches of sorghum planted. In the ditches and on the slopes, farmers could be seen bending over to work everywhere.
From the county town all the way back to Yuhuai Village, it had to pass through more than a dozen stops. Passengers got on and off. By the time they returned to the intersection at the bottom of the slope of Yuhuai Village, it was completely dark.
The brother and sister struggled to move their luggage from the bus. They had just walked a few steps when they saw their parents waiting for them at the village entrance from a distance.
Su Huimin and Yu Juanfang came forward with a flashlight and helped to carry the luggage in the two children’s hands. “You’re back. Let’s go home.”
If it weren’t for being outside, Tangtang really wanted to throw herself into her parents’ arms and cry.
Yu Juanfang’s long arm wrapped around Tangtang’s shoulder, giving her the gentlest comfort. “Let’s go, let’s go home.”