Some people live in villages, towns, alleys and outside houses forever;

Others are destined to walk around all their lives, wandering inside and outside villages, towns and houses.

At the age of 20, I got on the train for the first time because I left home to be a soldier. I saw TV, heard about the China women's volleyball team, ate an unlimited amount of steamed stuffed buns and jiaozi, and learned that novels can be divided into three categories: novels, novellas and short stories. 1978 In the military camp, I contacted and worshipped the pen and ink and solemnity of China's literary publications People's Literature and People's Liberation Army Literature.

I also heard that there is a kind of publication in Beijing that specializes in literature called "Literary and Art Newspaper".

Turning this year with too much historical weight, I saw Vivien Leigh, a blonde, on the cover of a book in the teacher's library. I was so surprised that I was in awe of the fear brought by beauty. I stood there for a few minutes, not knowing that my life was being pounded by books at that time.

I can't believe foreigners look like this.

I can't understand that there are people in the world who look completely different from us.

I took three novels with Vivien Liyan's photos in Gone with the Wind back to the company's white coffin-shaped mosquito net, and spent three nights reading volumes one, two of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. Suddenly, I realized how biased and wrong my understanding of reading and stories was-I always thought that novels all over the world were the same as the red classics and revolutionary stories I had read, but the situation was the same.

So I started reading Tolstoy, Balzac and Stendhal.

As long as Jean Valjean comes out of the text of Les Miserables, my hands will sweat, feel uneasy and afraid.

In order to resist the restlessness and heartbeat caused by reading, I need to keep closing the pages and make my joints rattle.

When I was reading Madame Bovary, I didn't know why I got out of bed in the middle of the night in the cold winter, ran around the playground of the military camp alone for no reason, then climbed back into bed and swallowed the book word by word.

It was the American writer Mitchell who brought me into another world.

She took me by the hand and took me into a sacred and solemn church, like a handmaid dressed casually and somewhat gaudy.

This always reminds me of that cold night in the middle of winter, when the sky was white and the village was cold. The sound of running water outside my house gradually turned into the cold sound of ice, biting my ears and the silence above the village.

It was the end of 1978, and I was going to be a soldier. After the cock crows three times in the morning, I will get on the bus at the commune compound and meet at the county armed forces compound.

So I stayed up all night, staring at the Leng Yue and tranquility outside the window until I heard someone's footsteps in the village street. Then I hurriedly got up and stood in front of my father's bed, looked at his sickly, thin and yellow face and said, "Dad-I'm leaving ..."

At this time, my father stretched out his yellow hand from the bed, squeezed my hand and gasped and asked, "Let's go ... work hard when you leave!" "

This is the most common and profound sentence my father said to me when I was leaving my hometown at the age of twenty.

The weight and strength of this sentence, like a mountain, lifted my gloom and future, making me confused about youth, as if I couldn't walk out of the wilderness until Mitchell took me to see those sacred works and helped me push a completely different door open a light-exposed gap.

I started reading and writing in the real sense, trying to contribute and publish.

1979 published the first "Lost Short Story", with a remuneration of 8 yuan, which is as exciting and exciting as 800,000 yuan today.

I used two yuan to buy sugar and cigarettes for the company commander, platoon leader and comrades-in-arms, and another six yuan, plus three months' allowance, finally got enough twenty yuan, so I quickly sent it home to buy medicine for my father.

In the following years, when I was a soldier, I published one or two short stories every year, and the money I earned rose from ten yuan to dozens of yuan. I sent them from the post office to Tianhu Village in Songxian County, Henan Province, and then my mother or sister sent the money to the drugstore and hospital in the town to give it to my father, until I was promoted because of my writing, married because of my writing, and vaguely felt that I might become a writer one day. Father thinks I really have a bright future, a career and a family.

At that time, in the winter of 1984,

At noon, my wife and I rushed home by train and bus. The yard of that village is already crowded with people. My sister, brother, neighbors and doctors are all standing, squatting or whispering blankly in the house and yard. When I quickly stepped into the courtyard, almost everyone's faces breathed a sigh of relief, and three words whispered from their mouths: "Come back ..."

I don't know whether to ask me or talk to myself, then get out of the way and let me go to my father's bed at once.

At that moment, although there was light in the room, the walls were dim, and the dim light mixed my father's face.

I rushed to my father's bed quickly and eagerly, and gave a quick cry, "Dad ..."

And my father, still lying in the bed where he has been lying for more than ten years, looked at my face, with an eager and sad smile, and said to me in an almost inaudible voice, "Come back ... let's eat ..."

This is the last sentence my father said to me in my life.

Less than an hour after this sentence, my father died in my arms, and he lived a hard and ordinary life.

If a leaf falls, how hard it works and how hard it struggles, the generation and rotation of leaves are no different from other leaves.

However, in my life, I can't forget what my father said to me during my decades as a soldier-"Try to make progress when you leave". Six years later, when my father stood in front of his bed at the end of his life, he used his last strength to say to me and the world, "Come back ... let's eat ..."

These two sentences are often said by China people. Under normal circumstances, it is not worth deep consideration and entanglement to take off sweaty clothes or put them on.

But I can't forget these two words.

Even today, thirty-four years after my father's death, these two words still wedge into my mind.

I always associate these two sentences. I understand the former sentence as my father asked me to go out and travel around the world, and the latter sentence as going home for dinner and rest when I am tired of wandering.

Just as I believe that this house will eventually prosper into a village, I believe that trees will bear fruit, and fruits will rot, die or produce new fruit trees.

All this is the repetition and repetition of all that.

Whether you stay on a piece of land all your life or leave the land to go somewhere, the doomed thing is irresistible.

What we can change is within the scope of fate, and all success or failure must be in the cycle of life and death.

I never think about anything beyond my destiny.

Resignation is my only way and proposition to deal with the world.

My father told me to "make progress when I leave", and I began to work hard for this "success".

Mitchell gave me another world, where I thought and touched it, wrote and read, made money and started my career. Then when I am tired, I go back to that village and land, chat with my mother, brothers and sisters, and do what I can for my neighbors and villagers. Then when I recovered, I went farther away from the village and stayed at home for a few days when I was tired.

I believe that wandering back and forth between the village and the distance is the itinerary and repetition arranged by God, just like the bus always goes back and forth on the same line.

I know I am bound by the world, but I have never been able to blindly resist fate and destiny.

I know that my life's efforts are accompanied by narrowness, servility and powerlessness, but I seldom go home to rest before going out for a long trip, even if I spend my life on a bus arranged by others.

1985, after my son was born, my mother came from her rural hometown to the ancient city of Kaifeng to take care of my children.

That year, my first novella was published in Kunlun magazine, which is now closed. It was less than 40,000 words, and the remuneration was close to 800 yuan.

For this 800 yuan, our family is as happy as another child;

To celebrate the reward, the family went into the restaurant to eat a sumptuous meal and bought a 18 inch TV set.

From the publication of the first short story in 1979 to the publication of the first novella in 1985, both my wife and I knew the bitterness and suffering of those six years of hard struggle.

My mother took the thick magazine, turned over the 20 pages of type that belonged to me, and said, "You can earn 800 yuan by writing so little, which is much better than farming by farmers-in this way, you can work all your life!"

I also think it's much better than farmers farming. There is no need for wind and rain, and fame is beneficial. This is well worth doing all my life. And when I left, my father asked me to work hard and my mother asked me to write for life. How can I stop reading and writing from my hometown and land?

Then continue reading and writing.

Later, in the golden age of China literature, the positive energy series I wrote was broadcast in the central prime time for three consecutive years, and the payment was much faster than the novel. So every month I send my mother money that she thinks can't be spent on eating meat every day, and live a beautiful life in which the mayor and even the county magistrate and county party secretary will go home to pay New Year greetings every Spring Festival, making the whole village feel that I really made a promise and gained a reputation.

In this way, if a house becomes not only a village, but also a city in a blink of an eye, the spirit and scenery of my home in those years are really like a spring after a cold winter, and even the cries of sparrows on the eaves and branches are different from others.

But 1994, I was still writing as usual, but because of the trouble and entanglement of a novella, I wrote a review letter for half a year in the army. Plus, I write all the year round, sit all day and hold a pen every night. Finally, I got lumbar spondylosis and cervical spondylosis at the same time. I can only lie in the hospital bed every day, and even have to be held in my hand to eat.

During this period, my mother, brother and sister all rushed to the army from home to see me. When I saw that I couldn't walk, and I was still lying under a special activity frame given to me by a Disabled Persons' Federation factory, my body was open, my head was down, and my arms were hanging in the air, my mother said, "Are you addicted to writing?" Do you want to write good people as bad people or disabled people? "

My brother looked at the lounge chair and deck and commented, "Why ... living well is much more important than writing!" " "

And my sisters all said exactly the same thing: "Our life is very good. You don't have to lie down like this and write things that people don't like every day. "

Then there is the silence and silence of the family. My family advised me not to write, or if I really wanted to write, I would write what others liked, such as the TV series broadcast by CCTV.

Looking back at what they said at that time today, I understand that it was not just what they said, but the voice and understanding of a village and a piece of land, which was the realization and correction of the switchman after my fate changed.

At that time, I couldn't understand the voice and spirit from the earth. Just to make them feel at ease to go home, I nodded again and again, as serious and pious as writing a review. It was not until they all left Beijing and returned to their own land that I began to lie under the chair frame specially made for me by the Disabled Persons' Federation and continue to write the book "Time flies in the sun".

Until the sun flies, wrote "Bitter as Water" and "Suffering", and changed jobs because of writing "Suffering", and relaxed because of changing jobs and wrote two other more annoying novels, a leader of our county officially announced to me by phone in the Spring Festival that year:

"I said Lianke, now I tell you the truth-you are actually the most unpopular person in our county!"

After listening to this sentence, I suddenly realized with a bang what changes have taken place in my relationship with that land, just like an ox running away unconsciously and stepping heavily on the handle that serves it every day. They already think I'm not the son of that land.

They don't think the son of that land should be like me