Zhao Wuji relied on Zhao Gongming's mobile phone to contact him and returned to the small rented room that Zhao Gongming had rented after participating in the project.
A somewhat old diary was placed on a small table by the window of the small house and came into Zhao Wuji's sight.
"I am born after 1995. I have lived in a family home of a state-owned cement factory in the northwest since I was a child. This is a closed "independent kingdom" centered on the factory. The hospital is built in the factory, the school is opened in the factory, and the school uniforms are factory-owned. ’s logo, the kindergarten chorus sang the factory song.
This factory is a product of Project 156 in the 1950s. At that time, in order to solve the weak industrial base, the state built hundreds of factories in cities such as BJ, Xi'an, Lanzhou, and Baotou outside the old industrial base in the northeast. The factory where my family works was built on an uninhabited soil slope in a remote town in Gansu. Not long after its completion, it achieved a breakthrough in cement kiln technology and once shipped tons of cement to all parts of the country.
In the history of the Republic, this is a group of factories that laid the foundation of the country's industry; but for an ordinary family, this is a special living space.
The club in the factory has stood here for more than half a century, contracting the functions of a cinema, auditorium, stadium, reading room and so on.
The first is language. Because there are many workers from the Northeast, a Northeastern-style Mandarin is popular in our factory. For example, "This book costs thirty cents", three is the second tone. Later, some researchers said that this was a "language island" phenomenon in factory and mining areas. In junior high school, I entered a local off-site school and surprisingly discovered that my classmates actually spoke local dialects. In this school, even though we are in the same northwest town, I still deeply feel the loneliness of a stranger.
Let’s talk about the family courtyard in our factory area. It is divided into north and south parts, connected by an overpass in the middle. It takes about 20 minutes to walk. Under the overpass is the mysterious territory of local herdsmen and their cows. My kids and I would sometimes sneak down there with our parents on our backs, and get excited for a long time about the cow dung all over the mountain and the ant eggs hidden under the adobe bricks.
My home is to the north of the factory, on the other side of the sidewalk under the overpass, is a poplar forest used to isolate industrial dust. Fa Xiao and I once planted a few poplar trees in the forest, hoping that they would grow into big trees, but they were The wild boar ate it mercilessly. There are more residential buildings in the south of the factory area and are more prosperous. There are schools, staff hospitals, clubs, lighted stadiums, and small markets.
Here, the adults are either from the workshop next door, or upstairs or downstairs. Everyone knows who his parents are, what he does, and what romantic past events there have been in the family. Even if they don’t know each other, just look through the factory newsletter. You can also contact us through the address book: the address book, arranged by last name, has the mobile phone and landline numbers of all employees. In my memory of growing up, the factory area has always been at the forefront of the times in communications. For example, when PHS became popular in society, the factory distributed PHS phones; when mobile phones became popular in society, the factory distributed mobile phones.
When I was in third grade, I accidentally took someone else's homework book by mistake. My mother opened the address book, blindly guessed the other person's parent's name, and made a phone call. Sure enough, it was the other person's parent. After hearing the news, the other parent rode a bicycle and came all the way to retrieve the notebook without delaying his children's homework.
Of course, my childhood friend also came from the factory area. When I was four or five years old, one day my mother said that there was a new neighbor downstairs, and then she saw a little girl hiding behind her grandma and peeking her head in. Later, this little girl and I became classmates and became very close. Every year on New Year's Day, we knock on each other's door to see each other's new clothes. In autumn, when the aspen leaves fall, we play a game of "pulling tendon" with fallen leaves and rhizomes. Although we later chose completely different lives, we still shared our unique factory childhood and became as close as relatives.
Not only this Fa Xiao, but during the Chinese New Year this year, I visited another Fa Xiao’s home, and her family could still call my grandpa “Liu Gong” and added excitedly, “Your grandpa and her grandpa are buried together! "Although we are celebrating the New Year, we all fell silent when we heard this sentence.
But this does reveal the life trajectory of the older generation of factory and mine workers: born in a workers' hospital, attending middle school in a children's school, if they did not go to college, they would continue to attend technical schools here, return to work in the factory after graduation, and finally work in the factory. He ended his life in the factory morgue and was buried on the same familiar hilltop as his familiar co-workers.
Recalling life in the factory, I had very happy days. Every morning, pure music is played in the factory. Although I don’t know the title of the song, my dad can still play those “songs played in the factory in the morning.”
When we were little, we used four-leaf clovers to wrap around lilac tree trunks to make plant curtains; every week we would get together and use the worn stockings worn by adults to make a tube top evening dress for Barbie. At Christmas, we would go to the dance hall on the second floor of the factory hotel to steal small gifts from the Christmas tree.
In particular, the factory developed rapidly. In the few years after its listing and financing, employees were given more soap, washing powder, and gloves than they could use up every year. Cinemas, bookstores, and billiards halls were always overcrowded. The factory once held a huge fireworks show every year, and it is still the most lively and dazzling fireworks show I have ever seen. The show always ends with a row of "Parent Company Wishes You a Happy New Year" blooming in the sky.
In this happy world, even a fool uncle who lives in the overpass bridge is smiling all day when he pulls a trolley to the factory to pick up garbage every day - it seems that no matter what kind of person, he can find a job in the factory. Get a job and support yourself. The children often even walk with their idiot uncle after school. Some help him push the cart, others listen to his stories, and take away a few interesting pieces of garbage from the cart.
Even the "competition" here is simple. When I was in elementary school, the school was divided into gangs. One group was in the south, and another was in the north. One group walked on the clean and safe overpass, and the other group walked on the dusty road under the bridge. We secretly competed with each other. , but who walked faster and entered the family home earlier. If you win once, you can feel complacent for a long time.
For us children, the real pain used to be hidden: For example, when we were young, we once left the classroom and saw white flakes floating in the air. We thought it was snow, but experienced teachers knew that it was snow. The factory pollutes us and tells us to run back to the classroom. Another year, many people in the factory said that a worker fell into the mine while working at high altitude. The real situation is unknown. Everyone only saw that many black cars came to the family home the next day. I heard that the leaders came to discuss compensation.
Later, like all those once remote, huge and bloated factories and mines, the story of my "parent company" also began to come to an end. In 2006, our children's school was taken over by the local education bureau. The school's plaque, name and uniforms were changed. Since 2010, several generations of worker families have moved away one after another to county towns and provincial capitals, and fewer and fewer people are left. People who come from all over the world finally return to all over the world.
Our family also moved to a city far away from the factory and entered a new school. When the new students were introduced, other students said they were from a certain district in a certain city, county, or district. I could only say that I was from a "such-and-such factory." When my classmates later talked about me, they also said, "She is from such-and-such factory." It seemed that in their minds, "such-and-such factory" was a normal geographical division like counties, cities, and provinces.
In order to blend in with everyone, I also tried to speak in dialect like everyone else, but failed - I spoke too substandardly, it was awkward for me, and others couldn't understand me. In the end, I just broke the pot and stopped speaking. Some gangsters in school "interviewed" me about this, "Why do you always speak Mandarin, can you please stop pretending?".
That was the first time I felt like a stranger in my own place of residence. It was also from that time that things began to take shape: As the third generation of factory workers, and as the last generation of factory and mine workers, I inevitably became a cultural island.
Unlike the previous two generations of factory and mine workers, as an adult, I took a job that had nothing to do with factories and mines, and started a wandering career in Guangzhou and BJ. Because I always speak fluent Mandarin, few people can identify where I come from, just like I never know where my hometown is.
Over the years, I drifted like catkins and adapted wherever I went. Later I learned some fashionable words and said that I was a true "cosmopolitan". But in fact, that’s because I don’t really feel like I belong anywhere. I have never really integrated into any place - except for the family courtyard of the factory area on a hillside in Gansu.
Many people in Gansu will show off a bowl of beef noodles after returning home during the Spring Festival. I also tried to establish my nostalgia for beef noodles, but found it a bit difficult - beef noodles pay attention to "one clear, two white, three red and four green", and I neither like noodles nor can I eat spicy food at all (red ). My most profound memory of beef noodles is when I ordered noodles in a restaurant and forgot to tell them not to add spicy food. As a result, the noodles were so spicy that I burst into tears on the spot. There were a lot of oil splatters on my clothes, and I was very embarrassed to eat. From then on, I never asked anyone to eat beef noodles unless necessary.
I envy those who can express their nostalgia over a meal of beef noodles. They are people who truly have their hometown. They grew up here and speak authentic dialects. Even though the street scene changes every year, their lifestyle remains the same. The lifestyle I was familiar with has long since disappeared along with the factories and mines.
This Spring Festival, my classmates and I wanted to go back to the factory area for a reunion. We found that the building of our alma mater was gone, the courtyard had changed color, and the illuminated stadium where singing competitions and basketball competitions used to be held was empty; The canteens and small markets were all demolished; someone smashed the floor lamp in front of the square and it stopped working. The familiar neighbors are no longer there, and the strange faces sitting at the door are staring at us - we realize that we seem to be the outsiders.
This puts people into a parallel time and space: Are everything we have experienced false? Of course it's not fake. Later I discovered that there are many people across the country who have experienced such "parallel time and space." Director Lin Xin used three documentaries to record a series of stories that happened in the "Northwestern Tongchuan Mining Bureau", which was also a project during the First Five-Year Plan period, and investigated a serious mining accident in the factory area. In Wang Xiaoshuai's "Green Red", Jia Zhangke's "Twenty-Four Cities", and Wang Bing's "Tiexi District", we can also see the life of factories and mines during the third-line construction period.
In a conversation with Xu Zhiyuan, talk show actor Li Dan also talked about his life in a caustic soda mining plant deep in the grassland of NMGXLGL: collective life, far away from home and north, with people from Shanghai and the Corps living upstairs, and he didn’t know where to eat. Where does the seafood come from? "When I was a kid, I had everything. But then the mining area quickly became depressed and there were more dogs than people."
Pan Yitou, the author of "Children", a book focusing on life in factories and mines, said that there is a kind of hometown called "Our Factory". "As the last generation of children of factories, they witnessed the closure of factories and the layoffs of their parents when they were young, and they have long known that relying on It is better to rely on yourself than to rely on the sky and the earth. Many people fly to the city and fly to the coast in search of material security. Some settle in the city, and some move overseas. From collective life to the opposite independent atomized life ." People from isolated islands, from those "independent kingdoms", eventually became isolated islands.
When I think of my childhood, I have the impression that I was singing factory songs loudly with a little red heart between my brows and bright lipstick. More than twenty years later, the melody of the factory song can still be blurted out. In order to test whether I remembered it accurately, I went to search for it. Unexpectedly, this song actually appeared on the video website. It was sung by a boy from the factory and mine who formed a band when he became an adult. Below the video, new user comments are posted every year, lamenting the past. I don’t know if they are the same as me. As soon as the prelude started playing, I felt like crying. I realized that maybe that was what "home" felt like. "
"This is why I couldn't find a home and became a homeless person. I actually knew the dangers of the Digital Life Project, but I still participated. If you read this text, it proves that this danger really happened."
