Father's brick factory

Father's brick factory

Text/Dong Faliang

I dream about Meng Yuan's father's brick factory again and again. The sun in the years is chasing my feet. The mud he stepped on clung to his father’s smiling face in his sweat. The naturalness in the smile intoxicated the rows of adobe mud bricks standing in the wind in the brick factory, and radiated the youth who was carrying a bucket of bricks and running bricks for his father back and forth.

Year after year, the stars blink, and the scene back then is still as clear and friendly as yesterday, lingering. Even the dry tobacco pot in my father’s hand is filled with the fragrance of mud bricks. Nourish your heart.

It was a special era. The day after I bid farewell to my 14th birthday, I went out with my father to make a living and learn a craft. I remember the morning when my father took me away. At dawn, a few chirping magpies on the old elm tree behind the house woke me up. When I opened my eyes, I vaguely heard my mother’s choking sounds and my father’s magnetic words coming from the kitchen. I was busy getting dressed. When I walked to the kitchen, the scene in front of me was unexpectedly quiet and peaceful. Only the flames in the hearth of the old stove were driving wisps of white steam out from between the pot lids, filling the stove with the fragrance of braised corn. Room. However, at that moment of confusion, I still noticed the helplessness on my mother's face and saw the tears welling up from the corners of her eyes. To this day, half a century has passed, and the scene from that year is still often reflected in my mind, and that unforgettable moment is forever fixed in my heart.

In those days, it was really difficult to leave my hometown and my mother for the first time and go to a foreign country. My family is too poor to afford a bus ticket, so I have to rely on my two legs to make a living. On the first day, I followed National Highway 312, climbed over the Gucheng Ridge, and passed Shangzhou City. Before I reached the Muhu Pass on the top of the Qinling Mountains, my feet had blistered, so my father had to accompany me to Minghu Pass in Shaanxi Province, 15 kilometers away from the city. Take a rest in Banqiao. The landlord was a private teacher from Banqiao Primary School. That night, a bright moon hung in the sky like a disc. The old street was silent, with only the sound of the Danjiang River running south of the street, making the ancient town travel through history with the moonlight in its arms. As the years passed, I became a little more agile and a little more mysterious. Seeing me in pain and embarrassment, my landlord, Mr. Zhang, vividly recited to me "Morning Journey to Shangshan" by Wen Tingyun of the Tang Dynasty. At that moment, for some reason, Wen Tingyun's "Morning Journey to Shangshan" "Starting in the morning to conquer the Duo, the travelers are sad for their hometown. The cock sounds in that cottage and the moon is shining, and the frost on Banqiao is everywhere." It made me forget the pain, and also left a footnote for my later abandonment of work and literature. Looking back now, even before I went to my father's brick factory to study art, poetry had become the direction of exploration in my life.

By the time we walked to Xi'an Railway Station, four suns had passed above our heads. Fortunately, there was a "revolution" at that time, and people who had no money to buy train tickets had to climb on the train. Just like that, I followed my father and climbed onto the coal truck, and arrived at Mengyuan Railway Station in a daze. We walked back and forth for a long time. We arrived at a place, in front of a brick kiln and two earth-tile houses surrounded by large fields of crops.

My father said, "Baby, here we are." He suddenly felt a little disappointed. Is this my father's brick factory? This is where my family asked me to learn and make a living. Fortunately, the weather was sunny that day, and the endless green wheat seedlings in the fields greeted my father and me with emotional applause swaying in the strong wind on the plateau. Fortunately, that day, the clouds passing over the brick kiln reflected the golden fields around the brick kiln. The rape blossoms are blooming, and the wind blows the fragrance into the heart and mind. Especially my father, his face is full of spring breeze, his smile is full of joy, and he is full of the fragrance of the kiln soil. I have never found my father so happy and excited, and I never thought that my father's feelings for the brick kiln were so deep. At that moment, I was completely infected by my father. My father’s brick factory was my dream to make a living.

In fact, my father did not own a brick factory. His brick factory was a brick and tile kiln called Fengjia Village on the Mengyuan soil slope at the foot of Huashan Mountain. That night, I was lying on the Tukang. For some reason, I couldn't fall asleep. I stared at the purlins on the roof beams with my big eyes open, counting from east to west and from west to east. My mind was filled with random thoughts. This is how to make a living. The brick factory was the place where people learned skills and raised their families. There were one brick kiln, two earth-tile rooms, and an earthen bed in the house with three large pottery tanks for water storage. I think if the mother knew all this, she would be sad for her little son who had never traveled far.

Cicero, the famous ancient Roman philosopher, said: "All beautiful scenery is upside down in the heart of the lake."

People are so weird, no one can get along with money, When I thought about how I could earn money for my family by learning to make bricks from my father, this brick kiln looked so beautiful, the earth-tile house was better than the one back home, and even the three large pottery jars looked pleasing to the eye. In this way, a father who was a doctor and his apprentice son made a brick kiln and two mud-tile houses on the land their home. In this way, my father's brick factory became my brick factory, the Feng family brick kiln factory became my new home, and my father became my doctor and male mother who took care of me and cooked for me. Later, Uncle Feng, a man from Murakami who was good at making bricks like his father, came with his son Renyi. The brick factory suddenly had two masters, father and two apprentices, and the place became lively. Later, Uncle Feng and Renyi also moved into a house made of earth and tiles. My father and I had company, and the earthen kang became lively at night. You know, in those days there were no mobile phones, no TV, and no newspapers. To have a friend of the same age in the wilderness was a great joy for me. At dawn, the two of us got up together, one ran bricks and buckets for the master, and the other used a frame truck to pull plastic buckets. We brought back cooking water from Si's house five miles away and stored it in three large water tanks. At night, you can climb to the top of the kiln and look at the Beidou to count the stars.

It didn’t take long for the brick factory to become everything in my life, especially learning my father’s unique skill of making bricks by hand. Although the days were hard and tiring, the work was very exciting and happy.

For some reason, I miss my days in the brick factory so much, and I can’t forget the brick-making skills my father taught me step by step. The first step is to select soil and dig out soil and mud. The excavated soil must be broken into pieces, and the stones, tiles, tree roots and other debris inside must be removed. Use a shovel to pile the soil into a mound. Use a hoe to dig a hole in the soil mound and fill it with water. Wait for the water to seep in. Later, my father and I stepped on the mound of soil with bare feet, turning it over and over with a shovel as we stepped on it, until the mud became sticky and tough, and we could make bricks. The brick platform is a wooden chopping board platform made of thick wooden boards. The mold is a rectangular brick bucket, which can hold two bricks of mud. My father would lift the mud high every time, throw it into the brick mold with force, and flatten it with force. After the four corners of the mud are scraped off, use a scraper to scrape off the excess. After scraping it off, I picked up the brick bucket and walked to the site that had been leveled and sprinkled with plant ash. I pushed the brick bucket down and there were two square bricks. After the bricks are dried and put on the shelves, the rest is to install them in the kiln and fire them. As soon as the kiln was on fire, my father's dry smoke pot would often be in his mouth, and his red face would appear on the red cave entrance. When he was tired, he would sit next to his father, looking at the red kiln entrance, and staring at the whirring sound. The fire was burning, thinking about the quality of the bricks, and looking forward to the bricks coming out of the oven soon. After they were released, I could collect the wages from Murakami. During that time, although he was only thinking about making more bricks and earning more money, his father's meticulous craftsmanship in brick-making craftsmanship unknowingly penetrated his heart and made him a farmer's son. Come to today. Looking back now, during those days in the brick factory, he never complained about me or scolded my father. Although he was uneducated and uneducated, he taught me to respect the soil when making bricks and to bake them into color as a person. Can produce bricks with good quality. Although my father later read to my mother that he should not have taken me to the brick factory to suffer, leaving so many calluses on the little baby's hands, but during those years in the brick factory, I learned his father's secret technique of "fighting with two palms" My craftsmanship was closely nurtured by my father, and my father’s craftsmanship inspired me to become who I am later.

British poet and writer Oscar King said: "A person's real life is the life he has never experienced." In the days of the brick factory, although I got up early and went to bed late, the mud work was very tiring every day. , although the house leaks on rainy days and you fall asleep counting the ding-dong sounds at night, within a few days, there will be a neat row of adobes lined up for you to inspect. The beauty in your eyes and the joy in your heart are just like the green leaves under the leaves. Full of red strawberry fruits.

I remember that day when I received my first kiln wages, my father and I went to the county post and telecommunications office to remit money to my family. I was so excited that I wrote a letter to my mother at the post and telecommunications office. I spent all my time writing that letter in my textbook. The best sentences I learned in school describe my father's brick factory, praise everything about the brick factory, and proudly tell my mother that I can see Huashan Mountain as soon as I open my eyes, and that a bucket of bricks can make money for the family. Three months later, my worried mother asked my eldest sister and brother-in-law, who were worried about me, to come to the brick factory. The eldest sister told me that after my mother received my letter, she happily let him read it twice and even asked her niece Jianya to read it to her. , said that the more her mother listened, the happier she became. Hearing this, I felt sad. I quietly told my eldest sister and brother-in-law not to tell my mother when I got home. The brick factory was an uninhabited village where people had to go five miles away to get water, and you could still hear wolves howling at night. Seeing the situation here, the eldest sister begged her father to let me go home with her. My father also felt sorry for his younger son and asked me to go home. But I knew that the whole family relied on my sister’s salary to survive. I told my eldest sister that I would learn a craft from my father and earn some money to lighten the family’s burden. The eldest sister left the brick factory with tears in her eyes. On the day she left, she suggested that we go to Huayin County together and take a group photo of the four of us in a photo studio to take back to our hometown to show to my mother. I really didn’t expect that with all the vicissitudes of life, this group photo would become a lifelong treasure for my father, my elder brother-in-law, and me.

Later, my father learned about my letter from my eldest sister and told Uncle Feng of the brick factory. The news of my letter praising the brick factory suddenly spread in Mengyuan and in several villages adjacent to the Feng family. After all, my father's face became brighter, and I became famous in the kiln factory. Although I was only 14 years old at that time, in the eyes of adults, I was quiet and fair, unlike the local children who grew black and strong due to the soil and water. Whenever bricks and tiles came out of the kiln, men, women and children from the village came to earn kiln labor points, and the crowds I was very attractive, especially to several girls of the same age in Fengjia Village. Although rural people were very feudal in those days, I also received a letter from a girl named Feng Lili. My father told me that people from the Si, Ma, and Zhao villages near the brick factory were proposing to him, and there was another family that pestered my father to ask me to be their son-in-law. For some reason, my father declined all of them. I heard from Jingcun's fourth uncle that his father didn't want to spend his younger son's life on a dry plateau where even water was difficult to drink.

If life is just like the first time we met, why waste time visiting the land. Later, a heavy rain flooded the earthen kiln, and the earthen-roofed houses were too leaky to be inhabited. The villagers cut off the tail of capitalism and started a revolution to stop the brick factory. But that piece of land has grown up in my innocent years and my relationship with my father. Once I lose the earthen kiln and earthen house, I will lose the years of relying on my father. On the day I left the brick factory, I cried so hard that the people in the village who sent me and my father off at that time also shed tears. That moment became an unforgettable pain in my life.

Years, a deep love that meets unexpectedly.

Nearly half a century has passed, and now, I am already in my seventies, and the scenes from those years are still vivid in my mind. Whenever I think of my father, I think of my father’s brick factory. Whenever I think of that land, I can see my father’s house in my dreams. Smile, sometimes when I wake up from a dream, I feel that my father is beside me. And I often wonder whether the sun in the brick factory belongs to my father or mine, and whether the sweating shadow under the sun belongs to my father or his younger son and apprentice. I don’t know where my father learned the skill of making bricks from. I only know that the clay he made is strong and the bricks he made are evenly thick and strong. All I know is that my father never scolded me under the scorching sun, and always lovingly let me rest in the shade. All I know is that my father’s words, “Making bricks is like being a human being, you must be sincere, and you can’t fool the person who built the house by cheating on your craftsmanship.” It became my motto in life.

Yes! That was not my father’s brick factory, it was my school of life. The uneducated father used his persistence in making bricks to accompany his son to grow step by step over the years. My son was growing up, but my father was gone. At the moment when I was critically ill, my father was in my arms, lovingly facing my mother and doctor at the bedside, telling the people around me in a weak tone that he could not let go of me who had not yet started a family. At that moment, I didn't dare to cry, but in the light of my father's tears, I saw rows of bricks made by my father and me in the Huayin Tuyuan Brick Factory, silently and solemnly, lined up in rows as the departing people. Father sees him off.

As long as the spine is not bent, there is no mountain that cannot be lifted. My father's brick factory is a mountain in my heart, which keeps my spine from bending in this life.

2021.4.8. Yu Longjuzhai

About the author

Dong Faliang is a member of the Chinese Writers Association and a member of the Chinese Photographers Association. He publishes personal essays, poetry, There are more than 10 photography collections. He is currently the president of Shangluo Cultural Industry Association and the editor-in-chief of "Great Western" magazine.