Yan Shan Ji Prose

1

When I was a child, in Shanglin Village, I stood on the grain drying field in front of my house. When I looked back, I could see the tops of the tall mountains to the northwest. My father said, what you see is Yandang Mountain. Looking forward from the village is the vast sea with sparkling waves. My childhood was spent between the mountains and the sea. In 1966, my eldest brother was a junior high school student at Yandang Middle School. Every Saturday, he and other classmates would bring firewood home, sometimes a bundle of firewood, sometimes a bundle of tree roots. My mother said, Yandang is good because the firewood there can be burned well. In my mother's heart, Yandang Mountain is a firewood mountain. Sometimes my mother comes back from the street and buys a load of firewood. The seller carrying the load of firewood is from Lingyan Village in Yandang Mountain. We call him the firewood collector. Because the bundle of firewood was so large, the firewood seller had a hard time carrying it into the house through the door, and then stacked it in the corner of the room. When my mother was lighting the fire, she would pull out the firewood from the high-folded bundle. How long such a load of firewood can burn depends on the quality of the firewood. If there is a lot of hard firewood (miscellaneous wood with branches), it will be able to withstand burning, while if it is soft firewood (hairy firewood), it will be difficult to burn. The former is more expensive. , the latter is cheaper. The firewood bought by my mother can usually be burned for about ten days. The Yandang Mountain I know is the Chaishan Mountain that my elder brother mentioned to his mother when he was studying Yandang Mountain.

People in the village call it Yanshan, and I also call it Yanshan. Autumn has arrived, and the autumn is deep. I put on my autumn clothes and long trousers, facing the cool breeze, raising my neck, and saw a group of geese flying in the distance. They crossed the mountains and got closer and closer to me and Shanglin Village. Until I heard the cry of the wild geese - "Ga -" "Ga -" "Ga -". Then a group of friends who raised their necks also imitated the cry of the wild geese - "Quah——" "Quack——" "Quack——". As we learn their calls, they fly high over our heads toward the seawall, land, and then fly south along the shore.

When we were old enough to study, we went to the Central School in Zeqian Village, a village in front of Shanglin Village. Go to school in the morning and face the sun in the morning. When school is over in the afternoon, the sun sets in the west. Sometimes the sun is very big and very red, hanging above the Yanshan Mountain. It is about to set, making the faces of my friends turn red, and their eyes are also unusually bright at this time. bright. On the way to and from school, there are cow thorns, blue lizards, fart bugs, and wet cow dung. The cow thorns will suddenly prick us and make us scream. The blue lizard makes our steps chaotic and quick, and we step on the sun to warm us. The wet cow excrement will make the soles of your feet feel warm and slightly itchy. On the way home from school, as long as you look up, you can see Yandang Mountain. At that time, no one cared about such a mountain except for my eldest brother who was studying at Yandang Middle School and my mother who often bought firewood picked from Yandang Mountain. We see Yandang Mountain almost every day, and the term Yandang Mountain almost does not exist in our ordinary primary school life. We are a weed at the foot of Yandang Mountain, living in the wind, rain, clouds, and air of Yandang Mountain, growing up in the wind, but never caring about Yandang Mountain itself.

二

One year during the Spring Festival, the weather was fine, and many people suddenly appeared on the long seawall. Together with the sea breeze, they came from the sea, from the Yuhuan Islands on the opposite side. Come up. They were well dressed, and the place these people went to was Yandang Mountain. My friends and I would stand in the open space in front of the village and watch them walk past the village road in batches. Their faces were bright and filled with unspeakable joy. The adults in the village did the same, standing in the open space and watching them walk by. The adults looked a little more confused than the children: It’s unimaginable that so many people would come to see a mountain. What’s so good about the rocks, the vegetation, and the firewood? After the Spring Festival, everything returned to calm. The long embankment is as empty as ever. The sun rises and sets, the tide rises and disappears. The villagers work at sunrise and rest at sunset. Starting from this year, a large number of tourists visited Yandang Mountain by sea every Spring Festival. It was not until the Yuhuan Island was connected to the mainland by a direct road that the route for tourists to Yandang Mountain was changed from sea to land. In the third grade of elementary school, the teacher once said in class that tomorrow, everyone should tell their families to bring their lunch and go to Yandang Mountain early tomorrow morning. Some students said, don’t we see Yandang Mountain every day? What is there to see there? The teacher said, just go, where are there so many words! This time I went to Lingfeng in Yandang Mountain. The lunch I brought from home was a ball of glutinous rice wrapped in a handkerchief, with dried fish and a small piece of meat stuffed inside. The distance from the school to Yandang Mountain is four kilometers. The students were all thinking about the lunch in their handkerchiefs or schoolbags. Before they reached the mountain, some students started to have lunch (actually it was still breakfast time). Only a few students arrived at Lingfeng and visited Lingfeng for a while before starting lunch. Watching them eat lunch with relish made us who had had lunch early feel very uncomfortable and were already hungry, but we had to hold back. . We were almost in a state of hunger. When we saw the towering spiritual peaks, strange rocks, and flying black clouds, we felt fresh, surprised, and scared.

When I wrote an essay in the second week, I wrote: "A group of our classmates had lunch too early and traveled to Yandang Mountain hungry. The mountain wind was too strong and blew our clothes. We I ran back home quickly" and other anecdotal sentences. Due to the lack of scenery description, the Chinese teacher only gave it a passing score of 3 points. And those students who could persist until the end to have lunch were able to describe the scenery of Lingfeng in much more detail. I saw many red ink circles of praise drawn by the Chinese teacher on their composition books.

However, from then on, I will often think of the spiritual peak of Yandang Mountain, the hunger I felt at that time, the cliff peaks I looked up at, and the confusion, tension, strangeness, and even fear I felt when I saw the scenery. . Whenever I look up and see Yandang Mountain on the way home from school, the feeling I had when I visited Lingfeng Peak will occupy my ignorant heart. When the weather is fine and white clouds are floating on the top of Yandang Mountain, my mood is relaxed; when dark clouds are pressing on the top of the mountain, or it is rainy and I can't see Yandang Mountain clearly, I am in a bad mood.

三

The stream with a wide riverbed behind Shanglin Village is called Baixi. On both sides of this stream are Maoyang Village, Baixijie Village, Shanglin Village, and Shanghuang Village. , Shangruan Village, Jiangbian Village. During the dry season, there is not a drop of water in the entire stream, and the stream bed is filled with dazzling white pebbles. Starting in June, the typhoon season comes, with heavy rains. The floods from various streams in Yandang Mountain cause the water of Baixi River behind the village to surge instantly. Roaring floods rushed towards the East China Sea. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, a gong sounds suddenly to wake up the sleeping villagers and alert everyone to the coming flood. The water level at this time must have reached the most dangerous point of the creek dam. If it rose another foot, it would break through the dam and endanger the village. At this time, the laborers would wear raincoats, flashlights, move straw bags filled with sand, and guard the stream dam all night long. We kids also often wake up until midnight. Whenever a heavy rainstorm begins, parents will say that the water in Yandang will come down soon. I wonder how high it will rise this time!

The next day, the heavy rain stopped and the flood receded. The children came to the high stream dam, ran wildly with bare feet, looked at the wide stream, and shouted loudly. The noise of the children seemed so insignificant amid the sound of running water.

After one day, when the water recedes, you can see through the water and see the stream bed covered with clean blue pebbles under the water. When the sun shines down, countless swaying bright circles cover the rocks underneath and dazzle our eyes.

One day later, the water in the stream will drop again, and the children can go down to play in the stream. At this time, the children would look up in the direction of Yandang Mountain and wonder, are all these streams really flowing from this mountain? At this time, the clouds in Yandang Mountain are white, the wind is clear, and the mountains are green and green.

Although we visited Lingfeng once in the spring, and although we could see Yandang Mountain right in front of us, Yandang Mountain was still far away from us children. When we were children, we only glanced at Yandang Mountain from a distance, sometimes in the early morning, sometimes at noon, sometimes at dusk, just so often. Our most direct relationship with Yandang Mountain is the water, clouds, breeze, and the Yandang Mountain firewood that my mother bought for cooking.

Four

The eldest brother is in the third grade of junior high school at Yandang Middle School. When we went there in the spring, the eldest brother was joking with another classmate of his. The eldest brother's laughter was very loud, and his classmate was sitting on the lower bunk of the checkered berth and listening to him. The eldest brother took us around their school playground and saw the basketball court on the playground and his classmates playing basketball on the basketball court. When we returned to my eldest brother's dormitory, one of his classmates took several light bulbs, unscrewed the lamp heads, and then grinded a small hole in the cement board. He did this very seriously. The elder brother went over to help grind it. When each bulb has a small hole, turn on the faucet and fill the hole with water. Slowly, several bulbs were filled with water. The eldest brother's classmates, together with the eldest brother, picked up the heavy light bulbs and threw them against the wall one by one. The lightbulb hit the wall and exploded dully, leaving radiating water marks on the wall. The light bulbs were quickly thrown away. They looked very relaxed after throwing away the light bulbs. The water stains on the wall quickly faded away.

This school is my eldest brother’s school.

Winter is coming, and my eldest brother graduates from junior high school and goes to serve in the army. On the day we left, my third brother and I went to the street to take a military vehicle to our eldest brother’s Yandang Middle School. A group of young men who joined the army were wearing grass-green military uniforms without collar badges. I almost didn’t recognize my eldest brother. Soon, they sang: "We all come from all over the world, and come together for a common revolutionary goal." As they sang, they got in the car and set off, leaving Baixi and going further. Another place unknown to me. Before leaving, my eldest brother told me that there was a small soft-covered notebook for me at the bottom of the closet at home. I went home, found this notebook, and solemnly wrote my name on the cover, feeling sad.

Many years later. I have never been to Yandang Mountain again.

五

When I really entered Yandang Mountain, I was already an adult.

In the summer of 1984, I was transferred from the factory to work in Yandang Mountain. This year, I rode a Feige bicycle into every corner of Yandang Mountain. These locations are: Xiangling Head, Chaoyang Cave, Xiegong Ridge Foot, Guanyin Cave, Beidou Cave, Beikeng, Nangeng, Yandang Middle School, Xiangyanmen, Martyrs' Tomb, Jingming, Xiazhe Waterfall, Zhongzhe Waterfall, Shanngling Yan, Xialingyan, Lingyan Temple, Lotus Cave, Longbi Cave, Ma'anling, Nengren Temple, Dalongqiu, Longqiubei, Luojiaolang, Luohan Temple, Dajing, Shimentan, Puxi, Nange, The victory gate. I rode slowly, and within a year, I visited these places. I took a closer look at some of the cliff inscriptions.

Among so many cliff inscriptions, I like the "Picture of the Open Sky" on the roadside behind Lingyan Temple, the "Famous Mountains on the Sea, Unrivaled in the World" in front of Lingyan Temple, "Pressing the Sword and Walking Slowly across the Wild Goose Mountain" in Guanyin Cave, Dalongqiu's "Thousand-foot Pearl". As for the modern cliff inscriptions added after 1985, except for a few, the rest are almost all failures. Since then, whenever I see these modern inscriptions, I feel very sad.

Once I stayed in Nankeng for a long time, sitting on the mountain road, not wanting to get up again, listening to the gentle sound of wind and the friction of branches and leaves, and almost became relatives with the vegetation around me.

Also in the south pit, leaning against the sloping wall of a huge rock, the bulge on the rock surface presses against the back, conveying the feeling of being rough, firm, and rooted in the earth. The sky is extremely blue. The flesh is both humble and heavy at this moment.

While working in Yandang Mountain, I still lived in Shanglin Village, riding my bicycle, leaving early and returning late. In 1986, I built a three-story house in Shanglin Village. There was a balcony on the west side of the house. Standing on the balcony on the third floor, I directly faced Yandang Mountain. At this time, I can clearly know the location of various scenic spots hidden deep in Yandang Mountain that my naked eyes cannot see, the details of the scenery of each scenic spot, the specific shades of colors of the rocks and the positions of the trees. And the beauty of waterfalls when the rainy season arrives. My view of Yandang Mountain at this time and my view of Yandang Mountain in my youth have finally been connected and continued in time, space and deep in my heart.

Six

In the meantime, during my work, I met Mr. Chen Leshu, a music teacher from Wenzhou Teachers College who lived in seclusion in Beidou Cave, and Mr. Chen Leshu, who graduated from Hangzhou Art College in his early years. Mr. Huang Binhong’s student Mr. Sheng Mufu, the chef of Xiangling Hotel Lao Tang, the secretary of Yandang Township Lao Jin, the vice principal of Yandang Primary School Zhang Yongshun, the deputy director of the administration Xie Jun, and colleagues Yuan Mao and Shi Lizhi. At that time, Mr. Chen Leshu lived in Beidou Cave. In the cave, he played the violin in the afternoon sunshine against the couplets written by Dong Qichang, "Loyalty and filial piety are heirlooms, poems and books will last for generations". The pieces he plays include "Minuet", "Torselli Serenade", "Meditation", and excerpts from "Butterfly Lovers". Sometimes he also plays the erhu, "River Water", "Good Night", "The Moon Reflected in Two Springs" and "Birds on the Empty Mountain". 》. Sometimes I would walk up the stairs from the foot of the mountain and hear the faint violin music he played in the mountain breeze from a distance. Mr. Sheng Mufu, who was with him in Beidou Cave and lived in another wing, quietly spread out rice paper and used burnt ink to draw the landscape of Yandang Mountain, the Couple Peak, the rhinoceros looking at the moon, the Fruit Box Bridge, the Great Dragon, and the When the dragon was in full bloom, the light and elegant waterfalls painted were inky black. Sometimes to make a living, Mr. Sheng Mufu also draws some bookmarks with landscape themes of Yandang Mountain. The bookmarks are made of foam plastic. After the paintings are completed, they are hung at the door and sold. There is no price tag, and tourists pay for it themselves. When I went there, he would tell me some past events, such as the unpleasant incident between Kang Youwei's son and Jiang Shunan when he followed his father to Yandang Mountain, and the writer Jun Qing's interaction with him when he went to Yandang Mountain. Lao Tang, the chef of Xiangling Restaurant, is a member of the township work team. He is a born optimist. When he was in the work team, he was always happy to take the lead when going to the countryside and mountains. Whenever he had free time, he would either sing Peking Opera or talk about rural areas. Dirty jokes, my emotions are often infected by him, and I temporarily forget the unpleasantness of the work team itself. Zhang Yongshun, a Chinese teacher at Yandang Primary School, likes to write poetry when he is not teaching. He approached me and asked me to start a literary club and a magazine together. We named the magazine "Yanhu Village" that day, and Zhang Yongshun started to prepare manuscripts the next day. , sent it to a typing shop for printing, I designed the cover, and soon "Yanhu Village" was officially launched. This is the earliest literary society in Yandang Mountain. Mr. Xie Jun, deputy director of the Administration Bureau, was the first management member I came into contact with when I came to work in Yandang Mountain. He graduated from the Chinese Department of Jiangxi Normal University and worked in Yandang Mountain for decades. He traveled to every corner of Yandang Mountain and compiled Books such as "Folk Stories of Yandang Mountain" and "Selected Ancient Poems of Yandang Mountain". After he retired, I once met him on Yunpu Road in Yueqing. He said he had opened a calligraphy and painting shop on Yunpu South Road and wanted to sell the calligraphy and painting he had accumulated in Yandang Mountain over the past few decades. Later, when I received scholars from other places who visited Yandang Mountain, several of them who had been to Yandang Mountain before would ask about Xie Jun's current situation. In 2010, Shu Ting came to Zhongyandang Mountain in Baishi, Yueqing, and asked me about Mr. Xie Jun. She said that when she went to Yandang Mountain in 1990, she was very impressed by him. I said, Mr. Xie has passed away. She was surprised and sad to hear this.

There is also Yuan Mao, whose stage name is Yimo. He works in the Landscape Department of the Administration Bureau, working next door to me. Half a year after I left Yandang Mountain in 1988, he also left his job and went south to Shenzhen, where he founded the World by himself. The Chinese Artists Association compiled several large octavo volumes of "World Chinese Artists" and engaged in ink exploration. Later, he went to New York, then returned to China, living in Beijing 798, and then in Shuhe Ancient Town, Lijiang. I met him recently and talked about the past twenty years. Looking at the vicissitudes of life and tiredness on each other's faces, we both felt infinite emotion.

There is also Mingzhi. Mingzhi is the same age as me and graduated from the Chinese Department of Wenzhou Normal College. In 1985, he was transferred from Yandang Middle School to the Yandang Mountain Management Bureau. When he came, I had been working in Yandang Mountain for more than a year. He sat opposite me in the office, and we usually talked a lot. He was ranked high in the county in chess, so I often saw him holding a set of chess and looking for someone to play chess with, but he could not find an opponent in the administration. As far as chess was concerned, he was lonely.

He read the only poem written by Xie Lingyun in Yandang Mountain, "Traveling across the Mountains and Streams from Jinzhu Stream". In the annotation of the poem, there is a sentence from Xie Lingyun's "Traveling in Famous Mountains": "Shenzi Stream, Nanshan and Qili Mountains are divided, and it is several miles away from Jinzhu Stream." After reading it, I pondered for a long time and said that Shenzixi should be the name of Shi Village in Jingdi. Because Xie Lingyun could not understand the Yandang Baixi dialect, he mistakenly heard Jingdishi as Shenzixi. His loneliness later extended from chess. He was lonely in people, things, and the world. Gradually, he entered a great loneliness. One day, he came to work with a pair of leather shoes hanging on his shoulders and did not put them down while sitting at his desk. I said, you are carrying leather shoes. He smiled. A few days later, I didn't see him coming to work. When I asked him, he said it was due to health problems and he wouldn't be coming for the time being. After I left Yandang Mountain, I once met him on Renmin Road in the county town. He was sitting on the curb, looking at a place blankly, his eyes unfocused. However, he saw me and shouted my name loudly. Civil soldiers! From then on, I never saw him again, and it has been more than 20 years. Sometimes when I accompany guests into Yandang Mountain and walk through the door of his house, I will think of him, an old colleague, Mingzhi!

Seven

After I left Yandang Mountain and went to the county town, the number of times I entered Yandang Mountain did not decrease. I go to Yandang Mountain almost every other month. Most of the time I go with guests or friends. I also participated in several creative writing sessions held by the Federation of Literary and Art Circles in Yandang Mountain. The Federation of Literary and Art Circles PEN has been held in Yandang Mountain many times. One PEN meeting was held at a farmer's hostel in the Yanhu Scenic Area, where accommodation cost 25 yuan per person per night. The hostel was located next to the ticket office outside Meiyu Waterfall and close to the stream. This PEN meeting was held in winter, and more than a dozen authors came wearing thick sweaters. Chen Xianyu, director of the Federation of Literary and Art Circles office, and Zhuo Daqian, the author, went to the village to pick up meat, fish, and vegetables and brought them to the hostel. The two of them worked together on the PEN meeting. Gangtoujun. The night came, it was so dark that we couldn't see our fingers. A group of people walked out of the hotel, walked hand in hand through the ticket office, and came to the bottom of the Meiyu Waterfall to listen to the sound of water. Then he groped his way back to the hostel, sat down, ordered some peanuts and pork head meat, heated up the farm rice wine, and talked nonsense all over the place until late at night. During this pen meeting, held seven days a week, I brought a novel idea to write. The title of this novel is "Shaking Summer". I wrote the first paragraph of this novella at midnight on the first day - "Huang Dou is tired of teaching life, but Huang Dou still has to continue teaching. In the evening, Huang Dou lives in his own single-room dormitory in a corner of the school, Wrote a letter to a friend in the provincial capital Hangzhou. Huang Dou wrote in the letter: What can you do if you don’t teach in Bazhen? This means that Huangdou must teach in Bazhen, and he can only teach. What can he do if he doesn’t teach? What can I do?" The next day, I went to the Xishiliang Waterfall and sat on the huge rock opposite the waterfall. I listened to the loud sound of the water and watched the waterfall cascading down. The chill in my body instantly increased. The power of the waterfall reaches directly into my body through the form and noise of the waterfall. This is a moment when no one needs to talk. When facing it, there is no need to talk or think, only the feeling of the body and the real coldness of the body. Of course, this is how I feel when facing the West Shiliang Waterfall alone. This feeling is very free, a mixture of illusion and reality. Back at the hotel, I continued writing the novel. At the end of the week, the novel is four-fifths complete. On the sixth day of the PEN meeting, we were preparing to climb the mountain to Yanhu Gang, which is more than 1,000 meters above sea level. Li Zhennan, deputy director of the Forestry Bureau, had contacted the Yanhu tea farm the day before to provide support. However, on the fifth day, it rained heavily and it was impossible to climb in the mud. We were traveling on the mountain road, so we canceled our original plan to climb to the top of Yanhu Gang. This pen session lasted for seven days, and apart from the novel, my experience only ended at Xishiliang Waterfall.

Eight

I have written very little about Yandang Mountain. Three short articles: "The Feeling of Yandang", "Crossing Ma'anling" and "Leaving Yandang Mountain", totaling 5,000 words. The first two were published in "Southern Zhejiang Daily" and Shanghai "News" respectively, and the latter one Published in the internal magazine of Xiaotai. Compared to the vast and vast thirty years, this bit of writing is just an invisible particle of dust, almost non-existent.

And more about Yandang Mountain that I talked about in my interactions with friends from all over the world. I described to them the landscape of Yandang Mountain and the people and things in Yandang Mountain. They also hope to see the shadow of Yandang Mountain or Qiuyan in my pupils. What they heard was "Yandang Mountain" pronounced in Mandarin. The Yandang Mountain in that dialect was still far away from them. For example, if you go to Shanglingyan Village, Xialingyan Village, Nengren Village, Luohansi Village, and Lingjiao Village, listen to the villagers talk, listen to them talking about Yandang Mountain in Taizhou dialect, you will be like another Yandang Mountain. Once, I accompanied some friends to Yandang Mountain and to Shanglingyan Village. I met several villagers leaning against the stone wall, looking at the tourists with cold eyes, observing, talking, and snickering. They folded their arms and spoke loudly in Taizhou dialect about village affairs and the conflicts of interest between the village and the travel agency. At the same time, they laughed at some of the pretentious tourists in front of them. The opposite is true for children. Once, I saw a six or seven-year-old child from Xialingyan Village running around like crazy. He answered every question he encountered from tourists and told some little secrets about his family to strangers. People in the Baixi Street area at the foothills of Yandang Mountain call the above-mentioned villagers Yanshan people. The villagers speak Taizhou dialect, which will appear and circulate in every tourist stall, or sell Yandang Mountain local specialties to tourists in Mandarin with a strong Taizhou accent. My past writings, the little bits of writing, are still far away from them. I'm ashamed of my words.

At the same time, this makes me feel relaxed because of the insignificance and non-existence of my words.

Among the vast writings about Yandang Mountain by predecessors, I have a special liking for the poem "Yandang Lake" written by Zhang Lun's son Zhang Jiuyi, who died young: "The ancient temple facing the water and the mountain is secluded, with the sound of bells and the rain falling on the reeds. Continent. The wild geese stir up in the night, breaking up the autumn in the south of the Yangtze River. "No matter where I am in Yandang Mountain, when I look back at the sky above the mountains of Yandang Mountain, this poem will always pop up in my mind. . When I walked with Pompeo to the playground in front of the empty old office building of Yandang Middle School, walking on the old empty campus roads with fallen leaves flying and no one around, we were talking about Hu Lancheng, who had fled to Yandang and taught here, and what jumped out of my mind was But it is this poem by Zhang Jiuyi. Several years ago, I asked calligrapher Zhang Baoli, a colleague from the Federation of Literary and Art Circles, to write the poem Zhang Jiuyi for me, and then stored it deep in a bookcase. This poem, its transcendental atmosphere often affects me, even appearing late at night, attacking and shrouding it in the pitch-black darkness.

To me, it has become a symbol: empty, cold, solitary, and remote; it is another Yandang Mountain, a poetic Yandang Mountain.