With You - Chapter 73: Postscript: Zhenhua Middle School, happy graduation

Before writing this postscript, I just finished the phone call with K, a classmate from elementary school.

K and I haven’t contacted since graduating from elementary school. He found me through the Internet this time and called to greet me.

In fact, it’s hard to tell the “recent situation”. The information needs to be updated after graduating from elementary school, which spans 12 years. Everything needs to talk about the background. There are more backgrounds in the background, and more strangers are connected between strangers. There is really no way to talk about the status quo, so let’s talk about the past.

But I found it harder to talk about the past. Because he can’t remember.

In the end, only gossip. He began to recommend me to drink more Kung Fu tea, when I suddenly said: “Yes, your grandma is from a tea family.”

Even myself was a little surprised.

Not to mention my classmates, he said categorically that her grandma has been a housewife for a lifetime, and it is absolutely impossible for her to come from a tea family.

But I remember, so clear, like what happened yesterday.

In the summer of the upper grade of elementary school, I met him in the small supermarket outside the school during lunch break. I was sleepy and wanted to buy a bag of instant coffee to drink, but the owner put all the coffee in the bottom row of the shelf, and I squatted on the ground looking for it. He came from the side and kicked me like a ball without paying attention.

I usually sit in the second row, a fake and annoying little monitor; K sits in the penultimate row and stops every day, either because he talks in class or because he forgot to bring homework. We don’t talk at school, and occasionally we just nodded when we met outside the school.

I don’t know why that day, maybe he was embarrassed after kicking me, so he took the initiative to strike up a few words to relieve himself.

“You want coffee?”

“Yeah, sleepy, is Nestlé delicious? Is there any difference between the long bag and the square bag?”

I still remember K’s round eyes.

“You have to drink freshly ground coffee. You can’t drink freshly ground or Nescafe. Nestle is bad, Maxwell is so good.” He took it for granted.

It’s really good. Maxwell is not sold in our city.

K has a long-standing reputation in this regard. The things he likes are not sold in the shops in our hometown. But it was the same when I was a kid. Once I knew something that was a bit off the beaten track in that era, I would instinctively like it.

Everything that no one else has heard of is so naturally worthy of love.

In the few minutes I was queuing to check out, K opened the chatterbox. I therefore know that he has three coffee machines at home, and he only drinks Maxwell coffee. Friends of his parents gave him a very large amount of coffee, too much coffee to drink, and it was moldy.

I’m not to be outdone, but I rack my brains and don’t know how to fight back. I can only say in a different way: “I still prefer tea.”

Drinking tea is more advanced, more educated, and more in line with the identity of my deputy captain.

I’m not a lie, at least my grandfather would make tea in a teacup every day, which is also considered a family tradition. Someday. I will inherit such an advanced hobby.

K collapsed immediately.

After half a minute, he suddenly stubbed his neck and said, “It’s okay to drink tea. I can’t finish all the tea in my family. My grandma belongs to the tea family.”

“What tea family?”

“My grandma was married from Fujian, a tea family, eldest lady. And my grandpa is a warlord.”

……I lost. It was a complete failure.

At the time, I never thought that his grandfather would not be born until after 1930 at the earliest. When he grows up to be a warlord, the war of liberation has started. When the Kuomintang and the Communist Party were fighting, in which province his grandfather was separated?

But I remember K’s happy look. If I suddenly became the grandson of a tea family and warlord, I would be very happy too.

He happily paid the money and invited me to drink the first bag of Nestlé coffee in my life, and said with restraint that Maxwell really tasted better, and he would definitely invite me to drink if he had the opportunity.

I played this episode to K over the phone in an eloquent manner, and he laughed over there, and kept saying that it was definitely his slander.

K is well-known for “running the train with his mouth full”. After laughing, he himself had to admit that he was very capable of doing such things.

“But how can you remember so clearly?” He was surprised.

Yeah, why.

I and K have nothing to do with each other before and after. Even before he called, I never thought of him. I remember his face when he was a child, but I couldn’t remember his name.

But I remember.

I remember K from the tea family likes Maxwell the most;

I remember that the quiet class of elementary school spent some inexplicably writing “Eat carrots, eat carrots and fart” in the classmates of boys who secretly loved her;

I remember that the sports committee member was removed because he was chewing bubble gum on the stage of the radio gymnastics competition. During the “stretching exercise” section, he blew a huge bubble, baffled his face in the wind, and did not dare to move. Had to wear a bubble gum mask to complete a whole set of broadcast exercises;

I remember aligning my pen nib with the nib on the same table, gently squeezing the ink sac, giving his pen “pass the true spirit”, because the girl at the back table said “Wow, you two are kissing” and excitedly pointed The tip is hard, the pen drips all over the tablecloth;

I remember the ordinary-looking squadron leader of the next-door squadron when the team counselor praised her, lowered his head and showed a shy smile. The curve of his neck was colored by the sunlight, and it was incredibly beautiful in the dusty room;

I remember on the way home from school in the first year of high school, a strange boy passing by me suddenly said to himself, “I should be able to recite it when I squat in a pit tonight.”

Or it was a clear and sunny autumn afternoon in the second year of high school. I took a book and went across the flag-raising square to the arts and sports center for a music class. I looked up, looked at the sky, took a deep breath, and said to myself that one day, I will fly. Like a bird, no one can stop you where you want to go.

My mind is like a hard disk with huge capacity, with complete hierarchical folders mixed with isolated pictures and videos. There is no division of types and no order of creation time.

I don’t know when the memory of the mouse will touch which icon, and without warning, a piece of information from the past jumps out, incredible, but unquestionable.

This is not a special talent.

Who has no memories, who will not be nostalgic.

However, I really appreciate God for making me so sensitive in this regard. Without warning, I thought of a person who couldn’t remember his name, and when he was unprepared, a past moment swept over with color and smell, and the feeling was so strange that it was indescribable. People will always get old and always lost, but I still have the opportunity to return to the playground when I was young when I close my eyes, and let the year’s troubles and joy control me again, gently I took my hand that year, shook it, and told her that the future will be better.

I am waiting for her in the future.

People say that there are two kinds of people who like to remember: those who are not mixed well now and those who were not well mixed up in the past. The former is obsessed with proving that “Lao Tzu’s ancestors have also passed away”, while the latter is keen to show that “Lao Tzu’s hardships are here.

Fortunately, I am neither, so I will not tamper with memory with ulterior motives to serve vanity.

Memories are a kind of preference. Some people have it, some people don’t. The difference is like me and K. There is no superiority or inferiority. For me, the most important significance of this ability is probably that it allows me to go back to the beginning through the growth path of myself and my peers, remember who I am, and how I got to this point.

There are many small beasts living in the human body, with ambition, vanity, shame, enterprising, competitive, caring, cruel and indifferent. I remember at every stage of my growth, how they awakened one by one, their powers ebb and flow, they controlled me to do right or wrong things, I liked incredible boys and hated girls who were harmless.

It took a long time for me to truly learn to control myself instead of being controlled by these little beasts. Forgive after harshness, let go after expectation, and finally live a truly happy and strong life.

This is more important than anything else.

I have many young readers who are still adolescent, and they will send me many letters about the troubles that may be smaller than sesame in the eyes of adults. But I don’t really think these troubles are trivial. Our family and school education seldom teach them to know themselves, so they look for their own coordinates in comparison with others, and after being hit by the society, they quickly label themselves, using material and social class as the criteria, thoroughly Nail oneself in a certain frame, and then lauded that he has matured and become realistic, “the age of innocence is gone forever.”

This is terrible in my opinion.

There is a saying “Don’t forget your original intention”. In fact, many people have never had the “initial intention” since they were young. The most primitive talents, strengths and preferences were overwhelmed by external forces when they were still unconscious. , Not to mention forgetting.

Someone once asked me, why not write something “profound”, such as society, workplace, marriage, and officialdom?

I think the idea of ​​judging whether the work is profound or not based on the protagonist’s age is superficial.

I like to write stories about young people.

I remember that Hardman Cigarette once said that when she watched a movie one day, she misunderstood the sentence “Saturday is less cars” in the subtitles as “Saturday is younger.”

Of the seven days a week, Saturday is indeed younger. Working from Monday to Friday is an adult’s responsibility and anxiety; Friday night’s madness carries a sense of revenge for the first five working days, which seems so impure; Sunday night is full of concerns for the next working week Panic, this heaviness and forward-looking is not a teenager either.

Only Saturday. Saturday is relatively young, so you can sleep as much as you want, and you can push everything to tomorrow, without worry or resentment.

I like to write about teenagers on Saturday.

Like to write about their happiness and sadness, struggle and compromise. They grew up in unreasonable and unconditional parental love, but they began to learn to chase a conditional and need-reasonable love between men and women; they grew up in being loved, and then learned to love others; from being carefree to being the first in the world Treat maliciously…

This is a story of growth, a story that will end on Saturday.

Superficial adolescence will not follow a profound adulthood as a matter of course. Wisdom needs rooting to germinate. The seeds are hidden in the hearts of young people, and it is not always possible to give birth as long as there is time.

This process is fascinating and profound enough.

All I can do is to give them hope while being honest.

Do not whitewash the kindness of the world, nor promise that you will gain after hard work, but believe that God creates everyone for a reason. What you have to do is to find that reason and live up to this life.

There are three parts in the “Zhenhua Middle School Series”. The first two parts are called “Hello, Old Times” and “Secret Love: Oranges in Huainan”. “The Best of Us” is the final chapter. Yu Zhouzhou and Lin Yang, Luo Zhi and Sheng Huainan are the protagonists of the first two parts respectively. Like Geng Geng and Yu Huai, they are both students of Zhenhua Middle School.

In “The Best of Us”, their current situation is also explained.

In fact, these three stories originated in the same boring winter. In the foreign student dormitory in Tokyo, I inexplicably typed the first word, and then there were the best of them.

“The Best of Us” ostensibly tells a love story between the same table, but in fact, what I want to write is gratitude.

A little girl who used Ah Q’s spirit to survive in the land of tigers and wolves like Zhenhua is completely unsuitable for her, and finally one day grows into an adult whose eyes always shine.

She did not appear in the “Time” magazine, neither entered the ivy nor became a rich man, but she no longer followed the trend, but was rooted in the field she loves, lived happily and with dignity, and was no longer entangled by the glitz of the outside world. Tied up.

In the end, he can open his hands to hug the person he liked back then, and use the temperature he once learned to warm the young boy who is no longer young.

She became the best brood. And you will eventually become the best you.

If you let me go back to the early spring of 2009, back to the day when I wrote the first sentence of this novel, “My name is Geng Geng”.

I am afraid I would never have thought of it, four years later, many children will say to me, you know? When I was most sad, it was your book that gave me hope and the greatest comfort.

Actually, I know, and you know, the stories are all fake. Yu Zhouzhou and Lin Yang, Geng Geng and Yu Huai are all typefaces on paper. They never existed.

However, the most beautiful thing about a good story is that it gives you the courage and strength to turn the fiction you see into the reality you can do.

There were 1,517 graduates at the graduation ceremony of Zhenhua Middle School, and the romantic principal let them fly 1,517 pigeons.

Among them are Yu Zhouzhou, Chu Tiankuo, and Xin Rui from Class 2, Lin Yang, Jiang Chuan, and Ling Xiangqian from Class 2, and Geng Geng and Yu Huai from Class 5.

More importantly, among these 1517 people, there is still one you.

Zhenhua Middle School, happy graduation.

August Chang’an

July 2013