Red Apricot Blossoms Are Crazy

Author: Lü Zheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-04-01
Features: My aunt, Hongxin, is the second daughter of my mother's cousin and three years older than me. Since she was born in the summer, when the village's apricots were ripe, my aunt named her Hongxin. Originally, they planned to give her a formal name after she started school, but she was too busy and registered for elementary school using her nickname. Later, her name was also recorded as Zhang Hongxin in the household registration book at the police station and has been used ever since. She is a devout Buddhist believer. Saying she is devout doesn’t mean she has joined the Buddhist monastic order or become a monk—it simply means she firmly believes in the Buddhist principle of "good deeds bring good rewards, and bad deeds bring bad rewards." Like millions of Buddhists in China, she only hopes for the Bodhisattva’s blessings for the country’s peace and prosperity, and a happy life, without any deep knowledge of Buddhism.
I remember when I was five years old, one noon, my cousin and I were playing at the village entrance. A traveling monk came to the village. He had a kind face and gentle demeanor, embodying the typical image of a monk in the hearts of the common people. The monk saw my cousin at the entrance and said, "Young master, do you have a place to eat in the village?" My cousin stared blankly at the old monk. Seeing that neither of us understood, the monk made a gesture of eating with his left hand holding his chin like a bowl and his right hand like chopsticks, opening his mouth and scooping food into it. He said, "Is there a small restaurant in the village where you can eat?" In reality, my cousin and I had already understood his meaning, but we were unfamiliar with the term "young master." My cousin shook her head and said, "There’s no restaurant, but we have food at home. My mom steamed a big, big tray of steamed buns this morning!" My cousin spread her arms wide in excitement.
The monk came to my cousin’s house, and I followed. Actually, when my cousin mentioned her aunt steaming big steamed buns, I was already salivating. Back in the rural hometown, refined grains and steamed buns were only possible during festivals. My uncle was a teacher at the school, so he had a monthly salary, unlike other villagers who earned labor points throughout the year and only received dividends at the end of the year. Naturally, our family’s living standards were higher than most. At that time, my aunt often helped our family. My older brothers and sisters all went to school, while my sister and I were preschoolers, just playing all day. There were no kindergartens in the countryside, so we were quite free. However, our family relied on our parents’ labor points for a living, and life was very tight. Whenever my aunt made some delicious food, she would always bring some to our house. The two families lived very close to each other, and my aunt often came to chat with us when she had time. My cousin was in the first grade of elementary school at that time, and her studies weren’t very demanding. In the countryside, it was popular to focus on driving tractors and farming in primary and middle schools, so little knowledge was actually learned. My cousin would often come to play at our house whenever she had school, which was something I looked forward to.
My mother was very skilled. She often taught my aunt to draw flowers and birds on the soles of socks and shoe insoles and then embroider them with silk thread. My mother would always give my aunt the best embroidered insoles and ask her to put them in my uncle’s shoes. This might have been the most primitive and simple form of barter in the countryside at that time.
In the early 1970s, the suburbs of Beijing were still very poor. Families who ran out of food after each meal were everywhere. Every June and July, the old grain supply had been exhausted, and the new grain had not yet been harvested. Starving people began to dig wild vegetables. Whether they were herbaceous or woody, edible wild vegetables became people’s lifeline. Wild vegetables still couldn’t fill people’s bellies, so they started targeting the leaves of fruit trees. On the streets, it was common to see people with severely swollen faces after poisoning from eating the wrong wild vegetables. P3-5