Wind through white mulberry

Author: Liu Qing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1997-10-01
Features: The history of a town for half a century, the early maturity of two girls' emotional endings, and a colorful story told across three springs and four winters. The people of the town discover that a toxic flower has withered, while another blooms in its ordinary way. Twenty years later, Yushu Town has changed beyond recognition. The lighting stadium at the town center is now a cross street running through it. The once-large square, after becoming a street, left little open space, which was turned into a parking lot for the western part of the town. The town center has shifted eastward, moving to the area around the former Hongqi Hotel. The white flour pancakes, sausage platters, and pig offal soup of the Hongqi Hotel once captivated the people of Yushu Town, making them stop and salivate, but at that time, apart from an old woman adorned with medals on her chest, no one in Yushu Town dared to frequent it often. Whenever they peered through the dirty glass window of the hotel and saw the pockmarked, short, and plump old woman sipping the meat soup in small spoonfuls, their stomachs would unconsciously spasm. Even the young and fiery-tempered would complain that they had been born twenty years too late, that war had passed them by, depriving them of the chance to enjoy such delicacies. The medals hanging on the old yellow cloth military uniform made drinking the offal soup a symbol of status. At that time, they never imagined that one day their own children would be eating chocolate and wafers, casually tossing a few coins to the owner of the amusement hall, playing electronic games and pinball machines right where the old woman used to drink her soup. Time had transformed the 40-square-meter liberation grain store, which once specialized in soy sauce, salt, vinegar, and corn flour, into a six-story shopping mall. The young generation of the town flocked to set up high-end boutiques inside, sometimes secretly running "rolling bao" [note] businesses. The store was always filled with lively shouts and arguments. The old flower market and brick kiln street were now, with shopfronts crammed together. On rainy days, white, floral, red, and other colored rain cloths glistened in the bright rain, and rain curtains like waterfalls cascaded down from them. The three little-headed people who often roamed the flower market street had dwindled to just one. His head, not much larger than a strong man's fist, was covered in wrinkles, while the crotch of his rough-spun pants had shrunk. Twenty years ago, it wasn’t like this. The three of them had suffered from inguinal hernias, almost the same size as their heads. People didn’t know whether to call the living one , , or , but there was only one left. Ironically, his chin had grown a patch of sparse, yellowish whiskers. This newly renovated street is called the Central Market, where the daily opening of shopfronts is marked by firecrackers. The sign for the Central Market stands just 200 meters away from the flower market. The flower market was once the most sordid place in the town. To say it was sordid wasn’t because it had toilets or garbage piles. On the contrary, the open space in front of the flower market had a large flower bed, planted with yellow trays, purple step ladders, and fiery-red. The flower bed was built by the town police station, but no matter how it was decorated, it couldn’t change the Yushu Town people’s perception of it as extremely dirty. The flower market had been a brick kiln before the Japanese occupation of the town, housing over a dozen large heated beds for sale. Now the flower bed still exists, but the flowers are gone, replaced by a rough concrete and steel sculpture 20 meters tall. The sculpture is crude, resembling a human-shaped frame, and is now the town’s current town landmark. The town of Yushu Town had its landmark redone two years ago, but this era-appropriate landmark has yet to be recognized by the people. Those over thirty years old say, "What’s the point? The person who designed this doesn’t have a brain like the little-headed , , and . Does Yushu Town really need a new landmark? Isn’t the white mulberry tree the town’s symbol?" They say the white mulberry tree is the symbol of Yushu Town. But the white mulberry tree has disappeared in this town, which is moving toward a new era. Now standing in the town are dense dragonfly wings and scaffolding like TV antennas. Yushu Town is becoming a large construction site, where the ramming machines pound loudly every day. The migrant workers, wearing old safety helmets, have bare backs covered in sweat and dirt trails. They are laying brick walls and building houses for the new Yushu Town. During breaks, the workers gather in groups, speaking in strange southern dialects, but this doesn’t hinder their communication with the local elderly. Gradually, these outsiders realize that the old people of Yushu Town always mention these words when speaking: "Those white mulberry trees!" Their way of specifying time when narrating events is also very interesting. For example, they might say, "When the mulberry money grew," "When the mulberry leaves flew all over the street," "The year the lighting stadium had moths," "The year they cut their pants legs," and even "The year the lighting stadium held the sentencing assembly." In their dreamlike narration, every time period is sealed with a story.