A house with only women: the season of picking germs

bacteria picking time

It's been almost three months since I left home in June. Yunnan is a good time to pick up mushrooms. I saw a lot of people going to Yunnan on the Internet, and no one said that it was not delicious or fun. Everyone was satisfied and returned with joy.

Friends from other places always have some romantic reverie, thinking that we Yunnan people have a special preference for picking mushrooms, singing nursery rhymes such as "the little girl picking mushrooms, carrying a big bamboo basket" and so on, they happily went up the mountain. But since I was a child, I felt that people were just following the natural season, just like the melons planted in front of the house are ripe, and when the season comes, you know it is time to pick them. Of course, this corresponding season may be unique to Yunnan.

There is so much rain in this season, just after reading this sentence, you can probably think of the chicken fir and fungus growing wildly in the mountains, hiding here and there, it's time to pick them up. We use the word "picking" when going up the mountain to pick up fungi. Compared with the written "picking", it is less purposeful. It seems that you only know what you will encounter when you enter the mountain.

When I saw the harvest of my friends going up the mountain last week, I said that there are many that look like chicken fir, but they are not. I found a few mud eggs, but I can't eat them. In the end, I picked up some milk powder, rhododendron, and what looked like chanterelles, scattered here and there. In fact, Yunnan people themselves do not have a standard guide for eating wild mushrooms. For example, some are labeled as poisonous, but we actually eat them. Whoever judges whether it can be eaten or not is probably an experienced old man.

Fuxia wrote an article about Yunnan cuisine in The Economist, she explained why no one knows about Yunnan cuisine outside of China: people who enjoy urban privileges seem to be able to eat food from all over the world, but Yunnan cuisine reminds everyone , sometimes you have to get the hometown of the food to get the real taste.

Just last month, a friend I met when I was in Nanchang suggested that I ask for some Yunnan specialties from my hometown, such as wild mushrooms. At that time, I couldn't explain to him why the Yunnanese felt this way. The food they ate outside didn't taste right. It sounded like our tastes were too tricky.

But Fuxia's explanation is a kind of experience as an "outsider", which helps people who have similar experiences to her to understand. And we can only judge, like the old man teaching the mushrooms in the mountains to eat or not, instinctively testing, not out of a shy nostalgic emotion - but we would rather be misunderstood like this, and often laugh it off.

I have talked so much about picking up mushrooms, but the number of times I go into the mountains is actually very small, and I can recall specific scenes, and I can’t even count them with one hand. In Shangri-La in the rainy season, the wooden houses standing in the fields can pick up many red fungi on the road leading to the forest behind, but many outsiders are just curious and do not dare to eat them, so they have to dry them under the eaves for people to watch.

Then last year, I met a friend Matters knew offline, and made an appointment to go into the mountain to pick up mushrooms. It's a pity that I went late, and the mountains are full of people picking up bacteria. I'm afraid there are more heads than mushrooms in the pine grass forest.

The parents of my classmates heard that the purpose of our trip was afraid that we would lose hope after going up the mountain, so they entered the mountain ahead of time and found a few chicken fir and green head mushrooms, one of which was the size of a bucket used to dig well water at home. Covered with green pine grass, it seems to be growing there, fresh and lively. Thanks to this, I finally got the so-called "mountain treasures".

In addition to fresh wild mushrooms, Auntie also specially fried a plate of bee pupae to entertain us. I remember that when I was a child, the beekeepers in the village treated guests, and they often used this dish to entertain guests and make snacks. But I didn't eat it often at home before. My aunt smiled and got up and scooped a large spoonful for me. It was hard to be generous for a while. He wanted to trick Achuan to try it, but he refused to take a bite, saying it was too scary. Therefore, the enthusiasm of the Yunnan people had to be absorbed by the Yunnan people.

After leaving the forest

But every time the rainy season ushered in, and every time I saw someone going up the mountain to pick up fungi, the first thing I thought of was not these, but when I was a child, there was a woman whose face was already blurred, she took my hand, Take me from the town, along the country road, through the fields, and into the mountains with a small bamboo basket.

A young woman and a child, such a lonely combination, have better luck than today's "professional fungus pickers". I remember that before I even walked into the deep mountain, I filled two bamboo baskets. I said I couldn't walk, and she took me home without a word.

This is a sister from the same village. She taught me the types of bacteria at that time, which I remember to this day. When we parted, she seemed to give me all the bacteria in the basket and asked me to take it home.

In my impression, she seems to have been so silent all the time, because of a tumor in her throat, or a strange disease that other people's rumors are not clear about. So she often closed her lips tightly into a thin straight line, burying her head in her work, facing everyone's complaints one by one, and refusing to make a sound.

Since that separation, we have returned to the town from the vast and free mountains and forests, back to the complex network of people and people. It seems that there is no news of this person in my life. But it seems that because I keep thinking about her, the story of this person continues to grow in my brain. In the version of the story I accidentally synthesized, she adopted a puppy that I had to give away because my parents moved with my parents when I was a child, and later died of an unknown disease. Naturally, my puppy couldn't live alone in the world.

Played it out countless times in my mind, I always thought this story was true, and subconsciously felt that it had happened before. But I recently remembered that I specifically asked my mother about her, and only then did I know that it was just a result of reasoning, the result of things that I didn't see, people I didn't see, and the result of continuing to grow in my brain because of constant concern.

In my mom's version, which I think is the most believable, her story goes like this.

I heard that she had married a man before, maybe from a neighboring village. Later, she found a tumor in her throat, and she didn't know what the disease was. The man's family decided not to want her anymore and let her go back to her parents' home. After she came back, she found a man from the next village. At the same time, her brother also had a girlfriend. The family wanted her to ask the man to ask for money for his brother's daughter-in-law, but the man was unwilling, saying that she had both Sick and wanted money, but refused to ask her. Later, they arranged a matchmaker with the villagers and introduced a widower to her. Then her brother sent her to the widower's house. The widower gave her some money, and her brother handed her over to the widower and went back. I spent a few years with the widower in this way, and then I couldn't make it any longer. When I went back to the village, I heard that I married and gave birth to a boy, but I don't know about it later.

I don't know how to tell this story, those "men don't want her" kind of descriptions are what I hate the most, but I keep them all to show how this bloody crime can be done time and time again What escapes is the frivolity that stems from such language.

When the story was peeled off layer by layer, she finally lifted the veil of pain from the light and hazy description of a "silent woman who went up the mountain to pick up fungi" and collapsed in an instant. Or walking on a wire rope that I couldn't see clearly before, and almost fell down and shattered every time I took a step—mainly because the naive, near-fairy-tale fantasy ending formed in my brain was now shattered by this cruel truth. .

When I heard that she was still alive, I was pleasantly surprised, but I didn't expect that the so-called life was just such a life. They kept exchanging money for this woman, trying to find a buyer, and if they couldn't get what they wanted, they changed hands immediately, and they ate her up and didn't stop until they achieved their goals.

Recalling the beginning of "Hidden in the Dust", the woman was looked at as an animal, and the crowd didn't even bother to whisper. Instead, it was as calm as saying the truth of the century: "She can't have children, so she has nothing to choose from." And director Li Ruijun was in After the film was released, it was said that there was a phenomenon in the countryside. Men were often left behind, but female bachelors were seldom left. Women were not easily left behind. Then they came to the conclusion that women have a gender advantage in the countryside. The absurdity is astounding.

My sister, all her versions of the story finally converged into this sentence: I heard that I married and gave birth to a boy, and I don't know about it later. What is worthy of praise is that "a boy was born". If it is impossible to bear children, or a girl is born, there will be no such an ending. She will still seek life under different men all her life, "husband", "boyfriend", any name is not appropriate, and it is too frivolous to say "buyer", it can only be used as a rhetoric, not practical discuss.

Because it ignores rhetorical anger and accusation, and calmly acquiesces that a woman belongs to her father and brother, and is an item that can be bought and sold, it becomes a language trap and often becomes the reason for a felony sentence in court. Therefore, some people advocate that all references to "trafficking" in the crime of abduction and trafficking in women should be abolished, and the "crime of abducting and trafficking in women" should be replaced by "crime of hijacking and transferring control of women".

Language is for communication, not for trapping. I think this proposal is also to remove the traps of the previous stage, but if these concepts are still difficult, traps are still created, and of course they must be overturned again.

When I started to compete with others, and started to cling to words, I got farther and farther away from the story. But the woman who carried this story with her body seems to have lived on me with the ghosts of many women. My anger is caused by them, and it can only be quelled by them.

Only when my sister becomes the silent woman who once took me up the mountain to pick up mushrooms can I get away from so many words and abstract discussions, but I already know another version of the story, and my brain won't be like this anymore Based on a childhood fantasy scene, a naive fairy tale grows, that is not her real destiny.

Maybe we shouldn't have walked out of the forest full of fresh bacteria, and shouldn't have returned to this dense network of people and people. This jungle is more dangerous than we imagined. All of them fail here, and the woman becomes a fungus first.

A Home Only Women: Mom's Name