Not Seeing Each Other - Selected Prose of Yu Junjian

Author: Yu Junjian / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: Not long ago, my grandmother wrote to me, saying that the old house my grandfather left at the intersection of Henan Road and Zhaojiabang Road in Shanghai had been demolished. My grandmother is my grandfather's third wife and is not related to my father by blood. But whenever I come to Shanghai, I always take time to visit her because she accompanied my grandfather through the last years of his life. I remember a few years ago when I visited her, I often met the elderly neighbors in the lane and they greeted me warmly: "This is the grandson of Grandpa Yu." But in recent years, these old people seem to have disappeared, and the lane has become much quieter. My ancestral home is Haimen Island across the sea from Chongming, but I have never lived there. Even my grandfather came to Shanghai at a young age to "make a name for himself." I was born in Guilin, which was my grandfather's "mistake." During the War of Resistance Against Japan, Guilin became the rear base, and my grandfather went there to serve as the director of the Joint Association of National and Industrial Enterprises Moving to Guilin. Later, he returned to Shanghai, but he left his "original wife" and his only son—my father—in Guilin. However, in Guilin, our family was still called Shanghai people. Because Haimen dialect is very similar to Shanghai dialect. To Shanghai people, it sounds like the speech of the countryside, but to the people of Guilin, it is absolutely authentic Shanghai dialect. So from a young age, I always felt very much like a Shanghai person. By the time I was four or five years old, my first trip away was to "go back to Shanghai." When I returned to the kindergarten in Guilin, I could tell the children about the Bund in Shanghai, the high-rise buildings on Nanjing Road, and even draw trams with two braids on the blackboard. The teacher had the whole kindergarten children come to see, praising me: "This is really different from the children who come from Shanghai." When I was ten years old, I lived with my aunt in the Jiaomin family on Shouning Road. In the summer, I would run barefoot all over the lane, having developed the habit of doing so in Guangxi. An elderly couple downstairs didn't like it and cursed me as a "rude country bumpkin." When he did, I really lost my temper. I thought, "I've been living here and going to school with the older brothers in the courtyard to paste big-character posters, write slogans, and sing model operas. I even lined up to welcome the 'comrades and brothers' from Albania in Huaihai Road. How dare you not recognize me as a Shanghai person?" Thinking this, I rushed to his door and broke his pot. Not long after I did this "heroic" act, I was struck by another heavy blow. That was when I went to the pharmacy to buy cold medicine for my neighbor's child. The old man behind the counter asked me, "How old are you?" Without thinking, I said, "Six-year-old boy," which was influenced by my mother's Haimen dialect. The old man looked at me sideways for a long time before finally saying, "What kind of 'boy' is that? The Shanghai people don't understand what you're saying." After I started working, I came to Shanghai again. A colleague asked me to deliver something to Huashan Road. That night, relying on my childhood experience of living near Huaihai Road, I rode my aunt's new bicycle and left. Perhaps because it was dark, when I rode to Yan'an West Road, I suddenly couldn't find the intersection with Huashan Road. In desperation, I asked a middle-aged woman who looked relatively kind on the side of the road, and she pointed me in the right direction without hesitation. But the result was that the road became darker and darker, and there were fewer and fewer people. Looking up, I suddenly saw the sign for West Suburban Park. When I arrived back at my aunt's house at nearly eleven o'clock at night, the whole family was already sweating profusely with worry. Because in the 1970s, when social order was not stable, West Suburban Park was still considered the wilderness of Shanghai, and I was only a teenager. Strangely enough, many of the wonderful memories I had of Shanghai have faded over time, yet I vividly remember these few incidents where I was mocked by the Shanghai people. I often ask myself, am I too petty? P15-16