A rainy day in Tengchong

It started to rain in Tengchong.

I was reminded of the unbearably long rainy season that out-of-towners spoke of, from May to October, a specific date, and suddenly it didn't feel very reliable.

Yesterday, I wanted to choose a topic and thought of rain, so I asked my local colleagues, when is the rainy season in Tengchong. She glanced out the window, perhaps thinking the question was amusing, and answered me, all year round.

It seems that outsiders have only seen a little bit of the rain in Tengchong.

I came home from get off work a few days ago and was about to ride my bike, but found a few raindrops on the seat. I looked up at the sky and thought, I'd better get home soon, I don't know when the rain will fall. Sure enough, when I got home and had dinner, I heard the sound of rain hitting the glass outside the window.

I listened carefully and felt that something was wrong. On a whim, I reached out from the window to pick it up, only to find out that fine hail was falling. But in the end, we escaped the rain—white rain called "white rain" in our dialect, "white rain jumping into the boat".

In this way, for several days in a row, I have managed to dodge every rain lightly, and the raincoat in my bag has been dry, and I haven't had a chance to take it out and wear it.

But not this morning, even if a person can be as dexterous as a cat, he will inevitably get caught in the rain once.

It had rained a lot at night, and when I woke up in the morning, the ground was wet. I sighed, and stuffed my raincoat into my bag again, praying in my heart not to use it. With that in mind, the rain will come.

Before I got to the parking lot of the motorcycle, I saw something moving in the pond, the water surface was rumbling, and fish that I couldn't see were frantically blowing bubbles below. I had a bad hunch, maybe it was going to rain, and they were breathing so desperately. The raindrops fell and became more and more dense, and today I finally put on a raincoat.

The road was slippery, and it was already difficult to ride a bicycle. Unexpectedly, after walking through an intersection, the heavy rain came. It was poured on me thoroughly, and the front panel of the raincoat formed a depression, with a pocket of water.

I didn't dare to ride too fast, the motorcycle couldn't support it, and the rain was oncoming, so disturbing that I couldn't keep my eyes open. I felt my arms start to tighten, gripping the handlebars stiffly for fear of falling over the next second.

Ride further, and arrive at the place where the passionflowers were smuggled before. It was still a sunny day, I thought. But if it weren't for the rain today, this slightly redundant detail might not have come to mind.

Just when I was slightly stunned, a carriage passed slowly and slowly. The horse was tall and beautiful, well-proportioned, and its color was particularly bright in the rain. The driver was wearing a hat, half-sitting on the carriage, with a few blue gas canisters behind him. It was also raining, but he didn't feel embarrassed at all, and he was even a bit dashing, as if it had nothing to do with him how it rained.

After parting with him, a completely irrelevant scene began to flash in my mind. The text I had read before was played back and forth line by line. It was about a Westerner's incomplete memory of Tengchong.

All I remember is that it was an afternoon, one afternoon in 1931, he was here too, and saw a beautiful horse.

"After entering the city from the South Gate, I walked on the wide street. The street seemed to be empty, but it was the cleanest street in Yunnan. There were also clumps of bamboo in the city, and their rustling reminded me of them. It was a fine summer day under the Leifeng Pagoda on the West Lake in Hangzhou... As the sun sank below the blue peaks, a young Chinese woman rode past the city gate. Her black-and-white foal was draped in bright red on its back. The dragon blanket. As she approached my dusty mount, she looked up at me, smiled, then bowed her head to the saddle again. I held my hat aloft and waved it. She looked like a young queen Riding past. That's how I remember Teng Yue."

The author of this text was actually Edgar Snow, which appeared in the Sun Daily on September 15, 1931. I have no feelings for this man, but I only heard that his book "The Red Star Shines on China" ("A Journey to the West") is listed as a must-read for primary and secondary school students, and has always been called "an old friend of the Chinese people".

But there are too many oriental "images" with a certain mysterious atmosphere swaying in it. The Chinese woman on horseback and the bright red dragon carpet are unforgettable once they enter the mind. Such "unexperienced", almost babbling, maybe he wrote it before he entered the "red zone".

Because of that, my bad morning wasn't too bad.

Then all the way uphill, I rode very slowly. But I felt that my hands had relaxed a lot, and even the rain hit my face and rushed so densely that it made it hard for me to breathe. I still wanted to laugh and laugh out loud.

How many times a person can have such an experience, if they avoid it every time, I am afraid it is not so lucky.

God's face changed too fast, I saw with my own eyes that the light that pushed through the clouds was quickly withdrawn again, and the shadows of the trees were dark and flashed by the side. But the rain came to an end, and soon it was sunny again. The sky reveals a new blue, the clouds are white, thin, and the light that comes out of them returns the bright colors to the earth.

This is the rain in Tengchong.

I remembered that after the rain yesterday evening, the air was fresh, and the trees showed a clean and fresh green, like the scene I had seen in "A Spring Story".

A woman was riding a bike past a low magnolia tree. Maybe she saw the flowers blooming so well, so she stopped while talking on the phone. While talking, she picked a magnolia.

It was also after such a rain that the sky was exceptionally blue, and there were no heavy clouds to be seen. I don't think it would rain again.

Although I only got wet once, I mistakenly thought that I had figured out the habit of Tengchongyu. Unexpectedly, only half an hour later, the rain started to fall again.

That cloud seems to be able to be summoned by anyone at will, and they can go as soon as they call it.