Chapter 76 Klein (10) If he wants to stand out, he must...
He Ping's hometown is a very ordinary countryside in the mountains of East China. Her first husband is called Sun Dazhi, who is also an ordinary farmer from a neighboring village. The couple is an ordinary couple, living a simple life, facing the loess and back to the sky. Apart from his wife's unusual appearance, he is no different from other neighbors: poor and ordinary.
In the second year of their marriage, they gave birth to a boy and named him Sun Xiaochuan. There was no special meaning in it, it was just a random name. A child born in a poor family was no different from an extra animal grazing on the mountain. A cheap life was easier to raise, so it didn't matter what he was named.
In the first few years of Xiaochuan's life, he experienced a period of family life that could not be called very happy, but it was still warm and peaceful. The couple lived in harmony and worked hard. They worked together to have more meat to eat during the New Year and other festivals, to save money to buy new clothes at the market, and to replace the dilapidated old house with a brand new brick house.
Unfortunately, the good times did not last long. Poverty also represents fragility. A sudden natural disaster or man-made disaster can easily destroy all the stability in front of us.
When Xiaochuan was four years old, Sun Dazhi went to the city to work during his off-season. He had an accident at a construction site and lost a leg. Sun Dayong, the eldest brother of the Sun family, went to the city to seek justice for his younger brother. The foreman, a wealthy and powerful man, was ruthless and not only refused to compensate him, but also had the brothers beaten and threatened to kill them. In those days, there was no such thing as fairness and justice. Sun Dayong had no choice but to carry the lame Sun Dazhi back to the countryside, leaving him to his fate.
The sudden loss of their most important labor force deprived the family of nearly all their income. They had no choice but to rent their land to relatives for farming, and from then on, the family of three relied on He Ping's laboring labor for a living. Sun Dazhi was devastated, spending his days either sleeping at home or going out on crutches, drinking and gambling, squandering the little money He Ping had earned. Xiaochuan, at a young age, had already learned to cook, wash clothes, and take care of himself. He often went to the mountains to collect wild vegetables and pig grass, and to the creek to catch fish and shrimp to supplement the family income.
He Ping hated her hard life and her useless husband. To make life easier, she secretly fell in love with a village man who had made a little money doing business in the city. But the man's wife was a ruthless person. After catching them in the act, she dragged He Ping, naked, out of the gate, beat her, scolded her, and humiliated her to the extreme. That day, the entire village ran to watch the fun.
Sun Dazhi was lame and cuckolded, and he lost all face in the village. He began to drink and gamble more and more. When he was drunk, he beat He Ping. Even Xiaochuan, who protected He Ping, would be beaten by him without mercy.
Things became unsustainable over time, and finally one day, Xiaochuan clearly remembered that it was his fifth birthday. Sun Dazhi went to the neighboring village to gamble with people, and he and He Ping were at home. He Ping took out a piece of cake from somewhere. It was not the soft cake with cream in the city, but the hard old-fashioned egg cake. However, it was still a rare delicacy in this family.
He Ping said that she bought the cake specially for Xiaochuan because it was his birthday. Xiaochuan was so greedy that his mouth was watering. He wanted to stuff the delicious and sweet cake into his stomach in one bite, but he couldn't bear to eat it alone, so he held the cake in front of He Ping and let his mother eat it first.
He didn't know what he had done wrong. He Ping stared at the cake for a long time without saying a word. Suddenly, tears welled up in her eyes. She knocked the cake out of his hand like a madman and slapped him twice, making him dizzy and his ears buzzing. Then she hugged him, and the mother and son burst into tears together.
The next day, He Ping disappeared. Everyone in the village said that she ran away with a carpenter from another place. From then on, Xiaochuan and Sun Dazhi were the only ones left at home.
In the first few years, when Sun Dazhi's mother was still alive, Xiaochuan's life was not too difficult. Although he suffered from Sun Dazhi's fists and kicks from time to time, he could always get a full meal at his grandmother's house. His grandmother also used her private money to send Xiaochuan to school, and told him to study hard. Only after going to university and working in the city could he have a promising future. Otherwise, he would always be a farmer who could not leave the mountains and live in poverty all his life. There was a tabby cat in his grandmother's house. It would catch anyone it saw, but it was closest to Xiaochuan. Every day after school, Xiaochuan would run to his grandmother's house for dinner. Then, he would hold the tabby cat and enjoy the coolness under the big locust tree in the yard, listening to his grandmother mend the soles of shoes beside him and tell him those true and false legends of the countryside. Those were the few happy times in his impoverished childhood.
When he was ten years old, his grandmother passed away. The last person in the world who had treated Xiaochuan well was gone, and Xiaochuan's life became completely bleak. Before her death, she left her house and all her belongings to her eldest son, Sun Dayong, with the village chief as a witness. Her only request was that he support her nephew Xiaochuan's education. She had completely given up on her useless youngest son.
Sun Dazhi was not convinced and went to his eldest brother's and the village chief's house to make trouble several times, but to no avail. The two brothers completely fell out, so Sun Dazhi took out all his anger on Xiaochuan. During that time, Xiaochuan had to go to school with a bruised face almost every day, and there was no place to hide.
At the end of 1999, the last day of the 20th century, Sun Dazhi stayed out all night again, hanging out with the wrong crowd. He lost all his money, drank too much, and was provoked by someone who said, "Since your wife is so addicted, your son may not be yours." The speaker didn't mean it, but the listener took it seriously. Sun Dazhi returned home in the early morning and looked at Xiaochuan, who was already asleep. The more he looked, the less he could see himself. In a rage, he picked him up and beat him up.
This time he really beat the child to death. Xiaochuan's eyes were blurred by the blood flowing from his head. He could not see the direction of the fist falling. He could only curl up tightly and hug himself. He once thought he was going to die.
At the critical moment, it was the tabby cat left by grandma that suddenly rushed out, pounced on Sun Dazhi's face, and scratched it, giving Xiaochuan a chance to catch his breath. Xiaochuan ran out of the house, and he ran desperately, running to the mountains outside the village, not daring to look back.
In the cold winter, he was a scarred child. How did he survive the whole night in the wilderness? Even he himself could not remember. He could only say that he was not destined to die.
It was not until dawn the next day that Xiaochuan returned home trembling with fear, only to find that everything had changed.
The tabby cat fell to the ground and died. When Sun Dazhi went out to chase him, he slipped and fell into an abandoned dry well and also died.
Ogawa didn’t know whether 1999 was the end of the world, but his already shaky world collapsed even more at that time.
After Sun Dazhi's death, Sun Dayong took Xiaochuan home, but Xiaochuan's life didn't get any easier. Every household in the village was poor, and every extra person meant one more mouth to feed. His uncle and aunt particularly disliked him. Although they didn't beat or scold him much, they didn't treat him well. He had to take care of all the household chores, look after his younger cousins, and work in the fields. Worse still, he didn't have enough to eat. He only had two meals a day, which always consisted of cornmeal gruel with a few pieces of sweet potato or a few rotten vegetable leaves. Not only was there no meat, but even no salt or flavor. Xiaochuan spent every day in hunger. A teenage boy, he weighed less than 60 kilograms, skin and bones, and looked like a skeleton.
When He Ping left, she took everything she had at home. For some reason, she left behind only a pen. It was an old, rusty pen that barely wrote anymore. Xiaochuan didn't know if it was He Ping's pen, but he stubbornly believed it was the only thing his mother had left him. He could no longer remember what He Ping looked like, but because of this pen, he firmly believed that his mother would return to him sooner or later.
There are no secrets in the village. Because of He Ping's elopement and Sun Dazhi's idleness, He Chuan has become the object of everyone's scorn. The children in the same village always bully him, tease him, and call him a bastard, a debt collector, and a curser who has killed his parents. No one dares to play with him.
One time, his treasured fountain pen was stolen by his uncle's cousin. He and his friends, in front of him, threw the pen into the village's large water pond. It was late autumn, and the water was icy cold. Without a second thought, he jumped in to retrieve it. But the pond was too deep and too large, and he fished for over an hour without success. Finally, because he was running late for school and had no time to dry his clothes, he ran to school soaking wet in the freezing wind.
However, he was still late in the end. His head teacher was a bad-tempered old man who didn't listen to his explanation at all. He dragged him to the podium, slapped him twice in public, and then made him stand at the back of the classroom as punishment.
He stood in the corner at the back of the classroom amid the whole class's laughter, with cold drops of water and warm blood flowing down his nose at the same time, but he dared not move, as if he were dead.
What was he thinking at that time?
Is it despair? The damage to the boy's self-esteem, the bleakness of life, so despair that he wants to leave this world?
Was it resentment? Hate Sun Dazhi, hate He Ping, hate uncle and aunt, hate everyone in the world, even wanting to die with them?
It seems neither.
On the wall behind the classroom, there is an old, yellowed world map from the 1970s. On it, Russia is still the Soviet Union, Germany is still divided into East and West, and Chongqing has not yet been divided into a municipality. Everything is nearly thirty years behind.
He stared at the approximate area of his hometown in the People's Republic of China on the map, looking for the farthest corner of the world from here, London, Cape Town, Nuuk, or Tierra del Fuego.
How big the world is, and how small he is.
At this moment, a strong impulse arose in his heart, making him tremble all over. It was not death, not revenge, but escape, escape from this village, escape from this area, escape from this country, escape to the ends of the earth.
From then on, the young man planted a seed of dream in his heart with blood and tears.
He wants to go to college, make a lot of money, he wants to stand out, he must stand out.
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