Ahua (serial)
Preface
This article records the story of Ahua, a rural woman on the southeast coast during the past thirty years of reform and opening up. Adapted from real cases. This is the author's first attempt at novel writing. Please share your thoughts with pen pals.
(1)
The story begins in the 1870s.
It was a summer morning, and Ahua got up as usual and started busy making breakfast for the family. A big pot of sweet potato porridge.
This is an old courtyard house from the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China. In the middle is the patio. There are three curved hills on the ground paved with red bricks. The intersecting hills and valleys are the channels for water distribution. Rainfall is scattered in the middle of the patio, and the water is diverted out of the courtyard between the hills. On the side of the steps from the foyer to the patio, there is a drainage outlet for the outer row hidden. To the north of the patio is the living room, to the south is the foyer, and on the east and west sides are the wing rooms and gallery rooms. The hall in the living room is the ancestor's spiritual place, and behind the hall is the kitchen. On the side rooms on both sides, there are two low wind towers protruding from the roof. The wooden platform outside the wind tower is covered with red bricks at the four corners. The red brick platform is flanked by guardrails of green ceramic wine bottle columns. The ancestors have many descendants, and more than ten rooms in the porterhouse, wing, gallery, and wing are filled with their own small families.
Ahua’s mother was often severely beaten by her father. She died of injuries when she was twelve years old. One of the twin sisters starved to death due to the Great Famine, and the other was given away. people. The one who gave it away also died of starvation soon after. Currently, there is the eldest brother, the younger brother, and his father, a family of four, crowded in the innermost side of the west wing. The total built-up area is less than 10 square meters.
While eating, my father talked about the arrangement of the matchmaker to introduce the target. At noon, during the farm break, the matchmaker led Awen, a man ten miles away, to the door. Ahua has two ponytails and wears floral coarse cloth and several patched clothes, with a delicate look on her face. The young man who came for the blind date looked stupid. He was wearing a worn and patched blue cloth covering his thin and dark body. He sat there scratching his head from time to time. When introducing themselves, they said that their family was poor and lower-middle peasants for three generations. When asked how old he was, he said, "He is three years older, head and tail removed." (A-Hua was 20 years old at the time, and we found out after the marriage that he was 25.) A-Hua despised him and wanted to break off the engagement. But my father accepted the bride price of five yuan and declared: "If you don't want to marry, you have to marry someone in this family. We have a mother-in-law. If you don't marry her, we won't care about her." My father had found a good family before, just because His mother died young and he did not marry. Unable to resist, my father had no choice but to give up. This time, her father hid all the family's money, and Ahua couldn't borrow the money to break off the engagement, so she compromised and got married as soon as the wedding date came.
(2)
At the wedding at that time, there were no rings. The woman would have a gold tooth, put powder on her face, pull off the fluff with wool, pull off two pieces of cloth, and wear one of them. A bed and quilt, a hot water bottle, two boxes and a red painted bedside table, and they got married.
On the wedding day, Awen borrowed a blue Zhongshan jacket from his clan and wore his father’s new, washed, faded, unpatched trousers. After a period of excitement, the Chen family, whose ancestors had been ignored and bullied by relatives for three generations, married the eldest daughter-in-law.
Awen's grandmother, Sister Ping, is a strong woman who can do some paper money and incense candle business. He is also a smoker. She and her husband Omu have two sons and one daughter. The eldest son inherited her husband's intellectual disability gene, and the younger son and daughter followed her. When her youngest son was five years old, because of a dispute over black smoke, Sister Ping asked the Tiger King in the temple to intervene. There is a legend in the countryside that when a tiger king appears, he will die in infancy. The owner who invites the Tiger King needs to stuff a large piece of raw meat into the Tiger King's mouth, otherwise he will bite his family members. However, Sister Ping, who was in such a hot mood, forgot about the stuffing of raw meat. It shocked my five-year-old son. From then on, the burden of passing on the family line fell to the eldest son A Ming, who in his late teens and 20s could only work and could not take care of himself normally. After her daughter got married at the age of sixteen, she ran back to her hometown and jumped into a well in the middle of the night because of a disagreement with her husband's family, and died, leaving no son and a half.
Awen's mother, Xiuer, was adopted from the town next door to the Chen family and was Amin's child bride. Sister Ping treats Xiu'er better than her own daughter. Xiu'er has read books and knows a few words. After Talin Village was abandoned twice, she followed Sister Ping to Quanzhou and Xiamen, and then returned to Talin to rebuild her home.
Sister Ping built the first tile-roofed house in the village with a mixed structure of wood, stone and adobe with an attic. The house faces east to west (depending on the Feng Shui terrain, Sister Ping's maiden name is Huang, and her maiden family is the hometown of Qihuang warlocks), in a straight shape. The attic and rooms are on the south side. The protruding ear room at the end of the north is the kitchen. The wall of the kitchen shares the north and west sides with the same clan. The middle part is the living room, which is divided into a front hall and a back hall. There are storage tanks in the back hall, and the front hall is for dining room and daily use. This house was built for Xiuer. At that time, it was considered a mansion in the village. Today, the copper plate used to pad the door frame bears the imprint of the Guangxu and Xianfeng eras.
As she grows older, Xiuer becomes elegant and comely. At the age of marriage, Xiuer is unwilling to marry Amin. With Sister Ping's consent, we have a son-in-law. Ajin, who is in the lower village, was decided.
Ajin lost his mother when he was breastfeeding. He is the fifth among brothers. He was raised on his sister-in-law’s breast milk and has been raised by his eldest brother and sister-in-law. He is one year younger than his eldest nephew. As he grew older into his teens, he had episodes of madness (now called mania) from time to time. People of the older generation believe that there are ghosts that follow them, which cannot be dispelled and which relapse from time to time. When I was little, a gecko crawled into my ears, which made me a little deaf. Because of my hearing loss, I speak very loudly. He is handsome, about 1.7 meters tall. Faced with this situation, Xiuer still insisted on recruiting a wife, even though the village was abandoned due to two conflicts where people were killed and left with all kinds of grievances.
The latest village was abandoned. Because the ducks from the upper village ate the wheat from the lower village that was drying in the village's drying field, they were beaten to death by the lower village. Conflict broke out, and then they had a fight. The people of Shangcun didn't have martial ethics. On the day of the fight, they secretly invited bandits from a den on the mountain to sneak into the crowd. In the melee, one of Shangcun's own people was killed. When a person dies, no one cares about it, and no one collects the body. The whole village declares the village abandoned and flees. This time Xiu'er and the others fled to Xiamen, and a village with the same name appeared there. There are villages with the same name in Quanzhou and Xiamen, all of which have been abandoned several times and have been concentrated in permanent places.
On the day of Xiu'er's wedding, as soon as the firecrackers went off when Ah Jin's family went out, the bandits from the same clan ran to Sister Ping's house with a shotgun to beat Xiu'er to death. Even though he was stopped outside the wedding room by the same tall man, he still fired a shot into the middle of the wedding bed. Xiu'er happened to be relieving herself on the toilet with the curtain beside the bed, otherwise she would be gone.
Many people from the same clan are very evil-minded, hoping that Sister Ping’s family will be extinct or stupid from generation to generation, and then occupy the land and houses. After Ah Jin got married, his hope was shattered.
Although Sister Ping agreed to the idea of recruiting a son-in-law, and although A Ming also died when he was about twenty years old, she still disliked the deaf A Jin. It was also very unpleasant to see the loving and harmonious scene between the two couples, and they even refused to let him serve at the table. After giving birth to three children, Xiu'er had to secretly hide some food for Ah Jin at the back door when the family ate. Then all the income from the business was taken to her mother's family, leaving no money here.
Ah Jin and Xiu Er are very competitive. Their first child is a boy, named Ah Wen. Sister Ping is very kind to Awen. She has been carrying her on her back since she was born, rocking her and coaxing her. People use their hands to lull her grandson to sleep, but she uses her back as a bed day and night. The second child was also a boy, but he died shortly after birth. The third child is still a boy, named Ah Xing.
After Ah Xing was born, Ah Jin found the opportunity to follow the trend of working and ran away from his family to build the railway. He left there for five years without any news. Xiu'er, who was eager for her husband, took her son out and found him again. After returning, they gave birth to another son and two daughters, A Sheng, A Bao and Xiao Xue.
(3)
A ladder made of thick camphor wood is connected to the attic on the south side. Connected to the attic is the large room on the east side. There is a small wing room connected to the west wall of the big room, about 5 square meters. There is a wooden grille with a small double-opening oil paper window on the outer wall on the south side of the small room, and a large wooden grille window on the inner wall on the west side. Outside the inner wall on the west side is a small square hall of the same size with a south door. The small hall is connected to the hall on the north side.
Ahua’s wedding room was arranged in a small wing. Directly opposite the door is a newly made wooden bed with hollow carvings and red paint, and an earth-yellow mosquito net is pinned to a hook beside the bed. The curtain on the top of the bed is a curtain of red cloth bouquets. The gap between the end of the bed and the wall, which is 40 centimeters wide, is a door made of brown coarse cloth. Behind the door is a bucket for relieving yourself at night.
The size of the wedding bed is 205 cm long, 145 cm wide, and about 260 cm high. There is no decorative cover on the top of the bed. In the middle of the bed is a horizontal solid wood board, where two wedding wooden boxes are placed. There was no place to put the bedside table that accompanied the wedding, so it was placed against the wall in the small hall.
On the morning of the second day of the wedding, Ah Jin cooked a bowl of pork liver noodles and came to the room. When he saw that the mosquito net was still there, the couple had not gotten up yet, so he smashed the bowl on the floor. This is also the day when Ahua returns home.
According to the marriage customs at that time, the wife of a newly married couple could not stay in her husband's house until she was pregnant. After one or two days of intercourse, the wife has to go back to her parents' home, and then after a while, the husband comes to call her and comes back. Otherwise, it will be regarded as dissolute and ridiculed. In between farm work, the new daughter-in-law in the field was always talked about and laughed at by her fellow villagers.
Ah Hua is very disciplined. Once she comes home, she stays there for a long time. She won’t go back to her husband’s house unless Ah Wen calls her. It took me three or four years of marriage to conceive a child. First, she married a boy from the same village. After five years of marriage, there was still no movement in her belly, which made her husband's family suspect that she was a child that did not lay eggs. Later, she got pregnant around the same time as Ah Hua, so she was not divorced.