Seven Days Book S5E1｜Every moment of growth

On the first day, write down a moment that you feel is the most shining moment in your life, whether there is an audience or not.

Jane Fonda talked about the stages of life in the episode of the "Wiser Than Me" podcast. She divided her life into three acts: the first act from birth to the age of thirty, and the second act to the age of sixty. And then to ninety is the third act - how funny and wise. If age numbers could represent anything, it would be best to use them as coordinates for life drama.

Although I have just entered the second act, it is difficult for me to choose the "most" shining one from the past. Every moment when I feel that I have grown up is a shining moment, far or near, dim and bright like stars in the sky of personal life. These stars may symbolize a specific success or failure, standing up after frustration, brave escape, realizing that one no longer needs external recognition, and breaking away from various visible or invisible shackles...In the construction of the curtain of life, they each Not a single one is comparable and indispensable.

When my mind comes to the memory of a person, I don’t know why I remember him, because he is a stranger to me who has only met a few times; I don’t know when I started to feel that “I want to remember him.” It's so important that it has become a shining moment in my life. At this moment, I have no audience, because I am the audience. It's very possible that I'm his only audience.

He was an old man named Li Huaqing who was a "five-guarantee household" in the village when I lived with my grandmother in elementary school. From the moment I had an impression of Li Huaqing, he was an old man living alone with no relatives and friends, relying on the extremely low security in the countryside and selling rags to make a living.

The so-called "home" is just a thatched house in a bamboo forest provided by the village government. Once, some classmates and I were curious and ran to the hut to take a peek. The ground was covered with hay and there wasn't even a bed. There was a skeleton of a chicken or a duck hanging under the eaves. My first reaction at the time was, "How did he hang the chicken and duck skeleton with the head and body intact?"

At that time, I was still in the first few grades of the primary school in the village. Li Huaqing often sat on the concrete floor at the gate of the school. He has short, white hair, a thin build, and wears a shabby blue cloth coat. He carries one end of a bamboo pole on his shoulder, and the other end hangs empty bottles and cans he picked up from everywhere and junk items that he can barely sell for money. His speech was difficult to hear, but he smiled often, revealing his gums, which were missing several teeth. Some male classmates always liked to tease him, so he pretended to be drunk to scare them. Sometimes he would be very generous and give random children a few cents to buy snacks. We were surprised, wasn't he extremely poor?

No one knew how he lived alone, and no one cared. The adults in the village described him as "crazy" and "long-lived". When he threatened his children, he said, "Call Li Huaqing and I will arrest you." But I was never afraid of him because he always smiled.

Many years later, I went to my grandma's house and passed by his "new home" on the side of the road. It was finally a brick house. But when I looked into the brick wall with no glass windows and air leakage, there was still hay all over the floor, and there was still no bed.

Later, my grandmother moved to the city, and the permanent population in the village became smaller and smaller. She only went to the village to visit relatives and friends during the holidays. My family only goes there during sacrifices, once during the Spring Festival and once during the Qingming Festival.

One winter, I went home to celebrate the New Year. After the Spring Festival, I went with my family to visit the graves of my ancestors. I suddenly remembered Li Huaqing and asked my grandmother. It turns out that he had already passed away during those years when I was not in Sichuan. The family members were surprised that I still remembered him, and lamented the old man's lonely and helpless life in his later years. Even the burial was handled by the village. I asked him where he was buried, and later after asking neighbors in the village, I found out that it was on the mountainside next to my grandma’s old house, on the other side of the tombs.

It was the most inconspicuous cement grave mound, located in a field, one person long, less than one meter wide, and half a meter high. During the Spring Festival, every family visits graves, and every grave is "busy" with newly hung colorful paper, unburned paper money, and traces of firecrackers flying. Only Li Huaqing’s grave was surrounded by overgrown weeds, and it seemed that no one had cared about it since he was buried.

I evenly distributed some of the sacrificial objects I bought and burned them for Li Huaqing. Although my family laughed at me, they didn’t say anything bad.

Then every year, whenever I went there with my family to buy sacrificial offerings, I would buy one specifically for Li Huaqing and burn it alone at his grave. The custom there is to burn paper and recite it, so that the deceased can know who the sacrifice is for. I didn’t know what to say, just things like, “I’m here to see you again, old man,” “Do you have any left over from last time’s cooking to buy wine?”, “But you had a way when you were alive, and there must be a way over there.” , "I may not come every year, but as long as I come I will come to see you", "In case I don't come for a long time, you can borrow it from my uncle next door, my uncle is very generous"... Burn slowly like this After collecting all the paper money, I bowed and said goodbye.

I went there again one year, and while choosing sacrificial objects, my family chatted with the shopkeeper and learned that they had heard about a stranger burning paper for an old man from a five-guarantee household who was once famous in the village. The shop owner looks quite young, and he probably heard about it from older people, because most of the people who remember this "famous old man with five guarantees" are getting older, and there are fewer and fewer of them. So I thought: In this way, more people will remember Li Huaqing.

Later, my husband accompanied me to burn paper for Li Huaqing. A man who had come all the way from Europe stood at a grave in the countryside of Sichuan and listened to me tell the story of this legendary old man. I wonder what the old man would have thought if I knew this.

It has been more than five years since the last sacrifice, and I don’t know when the next time I will go there will be. As long as the deceased is remembered by one person, he or she will not disappear. This shining star of memory has become brighter at the moment of writing.

Thank you for the gift of childhood memories. ✨