home and spring

Since I am keen to express, I rarely mention the concept of "home". On the one hand, I am arrogant, and I don't really want to talk about some material things. On the other hand, my original impression of home is rather negative, and I can hardly recall any happy scenes with my original family. Due to my predicament in intimate relationships, it is difficult to imagine that one day I will "marry a family". . If I have had a similar imagination, it probably has nothing to do with my family. For example, when I was a teenager, I used to fantasize about growing up and living in a small attic, like the one that John Christopher lived in Paris, lonely and strong; Or at least I have longed for the scene of living with a group of friends that I have come across, singing about wine, and composing poems.

These imaginations are not created out of thin air. In my past life, it can find traces. I don't have a deep memory of the houses I have lived in in the past six or seven years, because I move every two years, and in the same community, the apartment types are similar. But from coming to Shenzhen in 1993 to moving out of Hongling in 2008, I remember every house I lived in.

The bungalow where I lived at the beginning is on the current Songyuan Road, where Carrefour is located. In front of it is an old building with a height of five or six stories. There are hundreds of families living in it. It is a bit like some apartments today, but it is very dilapidated, so it is better to say that it is more like a dormitory building in the era of the unit system. At that time, commercial housing was not common, and the living conditions of most people in the customs were not very good. Our bungalow is only 20 square meters in size, and it is divided into three blocks. The front is the living room, the middle is two beds on the left and right, leaving an aisle, and the back is the kitchen and toilet. Originally, only my parents and my little sister lived there. After I came to Shenzhen, the house became very small. After more than a year, we moved to a three-bedroom and two-bedroom on Songyuan South Street with a monthly rent of 3,500.

There is a small room of four or five square meters in the three bedrooms and two halls. It was promised that it was for me, but I didn't enjoy it for a long time. In order to help the family, they rented it out. A room of more than ten square meters was also rented by my dad to his former employee "big guy". Therefore, in the so-called three bedrooms and two living rooms, our house only has one dining room and one master bedroom. My parents separated the dining room with a curtain and put two beds, one for me and the other for my grandfather later. As I hid and sobbed on the iron cot, expressing my dissatisfaction with the arrangement, the head of the household twitched his belt and gave me a solid whack. I have mixed feelings about this house because of various things. My dad often invites friends to play mahjong at home, which makes me smoke a lot of second-hand smoke, but he and my mother are basically absent on Sundays. I have been tinkering with many things in the kitchen by myself. The dream of "Little Chinese Chef" is shattered at that time. I also occasionally sleep in the master bedroom, which has two large beds, a white bedside table in the middle, the sheets are light blue and light red patterns, a wardrobe with almost only partitions, and a desk with locked drawers. My parents have maintained the aesthetic level to this day. The only arrangement that touched me was the orange ceiling lamp above my head. On Christmas Eve in 1995, the cheap, warm light of the setting sun in the suburbs created an ambiguous reflection on the pages of a comic book by my bedside that shaped my obsession with the holiday.

After more than a year, the big guy moved out. The adults in the family felt that the rent was not worth it, and moved to the electrical company (actually a community), the building where the Ah Shui family used to live. A Shui's father and my father opened a restaurant in partnership, and later contracted the canteen of an electrical appliance company. The operation was good, so he bought a small house on the other side of the community, about 40 square meters, and A Shui's room was only large enough for Gotta get a bed and a desk. I think their old house is better. There is a tree in the front, and there is almost a small botanical garden in the east. It is hard to imagine that a community would set out such a space for planting some towering trees. The house has three rooms with a balcony at the front and back with a great view. This time I never rent the room to outsiders, but I still have to share a room with my two younger sisters. They sleep in the bottom bunk and I sleep in the top one. It is the first time I have a bookshelf. These two objects, the bunk and the bookshelf, have been used in our home since 2014.

I lived in this house for more than three years, from the fourth grade to the first year of junior high, and it was the era of rapid academic progress. I have written about the past few years in my previous articles, for example, the fourth grade went to Monkey's house to play games every Friday evening, the fifth grade began to attend the Math Olympiad class at Hubei Elementary School, the sixth grade liked the monitor of the next class, and entered the first year of junior high school. Crest Garden. But these things have a black hole in the unfolding of space, which is my home. I didn't record how I walked from the electrical company to the Emgrand Hotel station on Sunday morning, took the No. 5 bus to the East Gate, and I didn't write that I got up at six o'clock every morning and washed in a hurry in the green and green toilet. Just to get to class early. I seem to have forgotten that my confidence in asking for recognition from others actually came from the hard work I had used in that dim room. Although this Hegelian desire has been ruthlessly ridiculed in the face of the world, it has always been associated with a "home" in the geographical sense.

After struggling for a short year in a two-bedroom apartment on the basketball court of the electrical company, my parents finally put down their decency and moved into the one-bedroom, one-bedroom apartment that I used to live in an idiot's house (one of my elementary school classmates, his father is also my father's friend). The hall is only twenty square meters in size. In the past few years, my dad's business was ups and downs. He turned the restaurant he had operated for several years into a meat market, and tasted a little sweetness, but the lease expired soon, and the other party was unwilling to renew the lease. In order to maintain the business, he took down the small botanical garden we mentioned earlier, cut down all the big trees, and built another meat market. In my opinion, his actions like this are simply "going against the sky". The small botanical garden is like a secret base for the children nearby. I don't know what means he used to get this done, but it's clear that such little cleverness is not enough to make up for the shortcomings of investment vision. The new "Songyuan Meat and Vegetable Market" business is bleak, and the money he is betting on will soon disappear. Lose money.

The most embarrassing part of the new home is that the toilet is only one square meter, so I have to stand on the puddle to take a bath. The bedroom is a quarter smaller than my current room, but it can fit two beds, a bookshelf, a wardrobe, and a desk, and a family of five can squeeze into it. In that age of hormonal turbulence, I didn't have much time to care about my family's financial situation. Thanks to a generous deskmate, I borrowed dozens of world literary masterpieces and eagerly entered my literary enlightenment. One day, my second sister borrowed a copy of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" from nowhere. We took turns to read the book, and our love for novels was surprisingly consistent.

Probably considering that I was going to take the high school entrance examination soon (the admission rate of Shenzhen high school has always been very low), the two of them quietly moved their home to a community near Hongli Road on Songyuan South Street. , and I have a room alone. It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of this house to me. On the first day I lived there, I found the “Qiuzhi Bookstore” at the junction of Hongling Road and Hongli Road. In this bookstore, new books are sold at 10% off, and old books (not second-hand books, but books that have been published for a long time) are generally 45% or 40% off, and some are as low as 20% off. The Complete Works of Shakespeare in Tragedy (translated by Zhu Shenghao) and The Complete Works of Tagore on my bookshelf are at 45% off. Because of financial constraints, many books stood there and read, without ever being driven out. It includes a collection of commentaries commemorating the 120th birthday of Lu Xun, Baudelaire's "Flower of Evil", Beicun's "Zhou Yu's Train" and Jinhe's "The Legend of Wukong".

The new home is more comfortable than the three-bedroom, two-bedroom house I lived in six years ago, but the rent is also more than 3,000. We stayed there until the summer vacation of my second year of high school. The bunk is placed in my room. The upper bunk occasionally accommodates some guests. The lower bunk is against the desk by the window, so the head of the bed is also by the window. My love for literary masterpieces is at this point insane. After dinner, I first leaned against the head of the bed to read, then lay on my bed to read, then turned my face to my back, often fell asleep like this, and didn't do my homework. "War and Peace", "Martin Eden", "The Sorrows of Young Werther", "Don Quixote" and "John Christopher" mentioned at the beginning are all finished in this way. In the first week of the summer vacation of the third year of junior high school, I bought three books from the Xinhua Bookstore on Hongling Road (where the Yongantang Pharmacy is now), two of which were novels by Yasunari Kawabata. Found a letter to myself. I read the letter in front of my desk, and my mood was unexpectedly calm, but I read "The Dancing Girl of Izu" late at night, and finally "tick-tocked tears" like the hero. I realized that my first love was irretrievably over.

Due to my growing disappointment with exam education, conflicts broke out between my parents and I frequently during this period, which only eased slightly after university. However, this is probably the second spring of my dad's career. It can be seen from the items added at home: he used the Nokia 8310, which was very popular, and the latest DVD player in the living room. I have a computer with an LCD screen, although it is not connected to the Internet. I used a DVD player to play the albums of Hikaru Utada, Nicholas Tse and Jay Chou. At that time, there were copies of CDs that cost between 7 yuan and 15 yuan a piece, and if they were more than 10 yuan, the packaging was no different from the original. My sister also began to know how to enjoy it. She would go to "88" to buy bubble tea, ask her classmates to borrow "YES" magazine, and listen to popular radio stations in Hong Kong with the air conditioner turned on at night. She likes a host called "Pear" the most.

Ah Shui appeared in my life at the right time, taught me to surf the Internet and use QQ, and disappeared again. Before that, literature had already helped me construct a world outside of reality, and the Internet had built a second one. These two worlds sometimes overlap. I have visited many websites such as Xici Hutong and Banyan Shuxia. I have also published poems written by myself in a local BBS literary edition in Shenzhen. Modern Literature", just click on a link and go in. Of course, I didn’t spend 5 yuan per hour on the Internet to contribute to China’s online literature career. At that time, I liked a junior high school classmate who was already in a different school. I went to school for two or three hours every Saturday just to chat with her. sentence.

From my home to the Thunderbird Internet Cafe on Hongbao Road, I have written over and over again in several articles, but almost all of them started from the bookstore for knowledge. The view from my room is not very good, because I live on the second floor, and the two buildings in the community are not too far apart. I can only see some low green plants and the balcony of another building from the window. In this section of Songyuan South Street and Hongli Road, there is a Northeast Dumpling Restaurant, which sells cabbage and meat buns, which I have never eaten elsewhere. There is a newsstand at the end of the street, which seems to have sold some ideological readings. I sang about the street lamps there in a poem, and now the lampshade used on the patio at home is in that shape.

There was no disturbance at home in those two years, and I was almost completely immersed in my own sentimentality. When I was packing my old books last time, I saw a copy of "Modern Essays", most of which were prose from the Republic of China. I remember that I bought it during this period. Zhou Zuoren, Zhu Ziqing, Yu Dafu, Shen Congwen, and Lu Li wrote my favorites, and Lu Xun, which is the most difficult for me to give up. Unlike those of my friends who are addicted to the history of the Republic of China, all my complexes about the Republic of China are in its literature. "In my backyard, I can see two trees outside the wall, one is a jujube tree, and the other is a jujube tree." This sentence made me firmly believe that there should be at least two trees in my patio, Even if I don't like dates.

My compilation of the myth of the "Flanders Road" (the section from the bookstore to Ruby Road) begins with moving to the next house. The community is just across the road from the Qiuzhi Bookstore. There are hardly any property and security guards. From the outside, it looks like a slum. Ironically speaking, even though the rent is only 2,000, the room is no smaller than the previous one, and in my sister's room there is a balcony facing the "Cafeteria" (an open-air show). It can be said that there is nothing wrong except that the house itself is relatively old, and because it is on the top floor, the sun is severe and the indoor temperature is high.

There are two desks in my room, one of which is placed in the corner just against the foot of the bunk bed. In my senior year of high school, I put my computer in the past, and I sat at the end of the bed at night, watching e-books and literary films on the computer, and sometimes watching romance films like "Go Left, Go Right". At that time, the junior high school classmate I liked has gone to Australia, and we still have email exchanges. I still hope that she will have a good life there. I still have people I like in my heart, but I also know that there will be no results. I write poems almost every week, and they make me feel like I'm not wasting my time, albeit a parody of romantic poetry.

In the third year of high school, my relationship with a classmate became closer, because his family lived in Cuizhu, and his mother offered to let me go to his house for dinner every evening, from the afternoon to the evening for self-study for nearly an hour and a half, There is no time to go back and forth for a meal. This year, my body has suffered many disasters. In the first half of the semester, there were many wounds on my feet. In the second half of the semester, the skin on my face was severely allergic. In addition to my family, his parents also took care of me a lot. In hindsight, the layout of their house also affected my design for the decoration of my house this year. For example, in their study, there are two bookshelves and a computer; in his room, there is an air-conditioned quilt with good texture, and the bed is Facing the desk, the aisle is not large, there are some hanging cabinets above the desk, and the whole room has a feeling of being wrapped. I like going to his house. It has something to do with the hospitality of his parents and the atmosphere created by his house, but it seems to have little to do with him, which makes me always feel a sense of guilt towards him.

After both my sisters were in school, I occasionally slept in their room (with my own sheets). From the current point of view, their beds are quite fashionable, like Japanese tatami, with only a solid layer of wood under the mattress. I wrote about the sound of a supercar crossing the road in a novel in my freshman year, and it was even more thrilling to hear on such a bed. I covet their balconies, and like the protagonist in The Little Prince, I also love watching the sunset. Sometimes before the sunset is over, the microphones of the Café de la Café are blaring, and the gaudy neon lights on the stage and their coquettish flashing rhythms are all declaring the subjectivity of the audience: this is a platform that provides entertainment for the middle and lower class workers. Show. Now everyone is no longer happy. Shenzhen is gradually "gentrifying" in all aspects. At that time, I despised these programs, but I felt even more lonely.

We lived here until the spring of 2008, then moved to Buxin Mountain Villa, and moved to the current community in 2014. After I went to Guangzhou for postgraduate studies, I rarely returned home during the winter and summer vacations. In 2012, I went back to Shenzhen to write a doctoral dissertation. My family was worried that I could not find a good job. So our family has lived in this house the longest, but I have the least affection for it. It's just that I wrote in "Yuanyuan" that during the Spring Festival of 2013, I took a drunk girl home for a day and a night, during which she lay on my lap and looked at the dim light and said she liked this room , This trance reminds me of that Christmas in 1995.

Looking out from my bar now, there are no traces of life in those six years, only steel bars and scaffolding that slowly rise. After graduating from university, I have become less and less sensitive to the environment I live in. This is not to say that I don't care about the quality of living, but because there are other things I care more about, the more connected I am with my home. less and less. A typical example is the one I lived in from the sixth year of 2018 to this June, because when I moved in 2018, I went to Beijing, my mother and my sister just stuffed my books into a few bookshelves, but after returning I'm too lazy to organize, and some books I just bought have not been read for two years, and I always feel that they have to leave sooner or later.

Probably because every time I move, I have to fight hard. My mother finally persuaded me to buy a house in this community this year. From viewing the house to paying the deposit, to applying for a loan, to transferring the property, to obtaining the real estate certificate, to handing over the house, it only takes one month. I do these things reluctantly, because I never wanted to be bound to something material. The decoration of the house, I was very Buddhist at the beginning, and said that if the construction team can package the design, it does not matter at all. After turning around a few times in the new home, some past memories suddenly brought inspiration. In addition to the above, there are also some hotels and B&Bs that I have stayed in during my travels. The whole house should look like, gradually clear in my mind, so there is the current appearance.

During the renovation process, my family and I often quarreled over some details, but these did not cause lasting unpleasantness like the quarrel over my future eight years ago. My mother runs on both sides of the house every day, and when it rains, she has to go to her new house to close the windows. My father doesn’t play mahjong and stays at home for longer. When the green plants on the terrace had reached a certain scale last month, he suddenly couldn't help but say to me, "I have brought several owners to see it, and they all said that this house is the most stylishly decorated in this community." From what I know about my dad, the authenticity of this statement is questionable, but he seems to be trying to express his approval of me in some way. He was considered wealthy when he was young. After listening to my grandma, he built a two-story, six-room mansion in his hometown. Although he had no sense of design, he still spent nearly 100,000 yuan. From an afterthought point of view, this is of course a loss-making investment, because this money can buy a house of not much size in Shenzhen in the early 1990s. But if you think about it, his mentality back then seems to be no different from my mentality of buying a house this year: it is nothing more than giving his family psychological comfort and a place where they can live for a long time to the best of their ability. After all, they have been in Shenzhen for more than 30 years and need something to prove that their life is not a complete failure.

At that time, I posted the whole decoration process in the circle of friends. Some of my friends thought that I was going to fade out of the public discussion, and the tone was quite regretful. To some people, "home" and "public sphere" seem to be two opposing categories. It seems that the more time a person spends at home, the less qualified he is to intervene in public affairs. Not to mention the “individual is political” that feminism often says, even from the perspective of past political practice, “home” and “publicness” are not mutually exclusive. Have we forgotten how much public action in this land begins with getting justice for our loved ones?

I put a table and four chairs on the patio, planted flowers all around, and bought a projector and a floor-to-ceiling screen. I don't know if I'll have the opportunity to invite people I know and people I don't know to watch some controversial documentaries here, or if I'll have a chance to get a few friends and have some serious discussions, but I'm going to start with these details , to break the boundaries of the private and public nature of the home and rebuild a holistic life.