1968 In the winter, a group of children with about 100 or 200 people followed their parents to the May 7th Cadre School, a place called Guitou on the Wujiang River in northern Guangdong. I played there for several years, tempered for several years, and finally broke up because of the end of the cadre school. No one expected that 50 years later, a large part of them would get together again and publish such a heavy commemorative album together.
This is a book that records their deepest memories and even describes their dreams in a sense.
There is an article in the book that tells the story of children in these cities being naughty on their first day in local primary schools. When they first arrived in the mountainous area, everything was novel. An article recalls that the author himself was excluded from the school propaganda team because of the so-called family composition problem, and was hurt and became silent. As a result, he often went to the library and read many world famous books such as War and Peace and La Traviata, with some gains and some losses. The author also recorded an experience of catching snakes, saying that when he was a child, the snakes that lived in Xishan were almost gone. Every time he catches a snake, he invites his friends to eat snake porridge. Once he went swimming with his friends and accidentally stepped on a snake. He calmly bent down and caught the snake ... Everyone has his own story. This book reproduces the scenes of distant years through collective memory. Especially with the help of WeChat group, memory becomes more specific, clear, rich and accurate. From this, we seem to have returned to the past.
Those who have a strong memory and are obsessed with it are still struggling to pursue the evolution from a branch of the Agricultural College to an agricultural school, to a cadre school, to a local place, and restore the past lives of this land that we are fascinated by. For us, the unforgettable years carried by this land have "incredible charm" because it is far away and beautiful.
Reading this book is both heavy and exciting. What is heavy is that many people recall the past with different degrees of suffering and even unbearable memories, and a page deep in the memory reappears again. Although we are optimistic and open-minded, we are inevitably a little heavy; What is exciting is that we finally see that this life is not only remembered by ourselves, but also by many people. We have so many angles and such strong memories. "Those who may know our memories and ourselves have either disappeared or left ... Just when people think they are lonely and inseparable, others appear, followed by the groups to which others belong." (1) We finally see that Guitou is not as simple as catching fish and birds across the Wujiang River in the general sense-far from it. This book was recorded and discussed so intensively and widely for the first time, which is almost the most essential and profound thing in the life of Guitou Cadre School. Finally, we explored and touched the most indelible part of our memory from the outside to the inside.
Life is an encounter, meeting a world and meeting countless people. And there are always some encounters that will be more unusual. They are rooted in the depths of memory, and their tenacious presentation in the river of time gradually fades away. Obviously, you can't go back to the past, but memories can be kept anytime and anywhere. This is the meaning of this book.
Guitou has our childhood, the majestic Paparazzi Ridge and the Wujiang River in Jing Qing, the simple villagers with beautiful scenery, and our rural classmates who are still coming and going ... We like this place. But at the same time, that particular era decided that Guitou was by no means an idyllic paradise. At that time, all the beautiful definitions of life were dreams. Especially in our parents' generation, more people regard it as a place of pain and disaster and feel complicated in indifference. I always remind myself to make some proper recognition of the past.
Since 1972 left Guitou, I can't remember how many times I've been there: interviewing passers-by, coming specially, coming alone, visiting classmates and friends, remembering all the people and things I've met here in my life ... In fact, most of our eyes are thinking about when I can go back to Guangzhou or get arrangements. Even if we are naive, probably not many people want to live here forever. However, after saying goodbye, it soon became our hometown of nostalgia, and the longer we miss it, the more we miss it. I often think, when we miss here, what do we miss? -"What do we cherish in our hearts?" ②
Is it the lush years that have gone forever? Yes, those days of reading, swimming and fishing were a little confused about the social world, but also carefree days, although I always felt that I had a lot of troubles and troubles;
Is it the arcade of Sanlian building, the tile roof of agricultural machinery factory, and a touch of Xishan reflecting them? Many scenes symbolizing life have disappeared or rotted, but the land bearing them is still there. As one of the authors in the book said, "Paparazzi have a long history and the Wujiang River has a long history".
Are those hardships the trials of their own lives? Those hardships have become precious wealth of life, and they have been used endlessly since we left here and entered the society for decades. ……
It seems that all of the above, not all, or both. However, in any case, our nostalgia does not belong to those popular slogans and the absurdity of the times-it is only a part associated with our memory, a bleak background of our memory.
In fact, those parents who are old or even gone today are the main body we remember that Guitou is endless.
The question is, do we know them? I believe that those young hearts among us who feel the hardships of life prematurely already know their parents very well, and even they themselves are deeply affected and hurt. If it is unfortunate, then we are fortunate to get a unique perspective-the perspective of the children of the cadre school. We have witnessed a lot. Remember them more, try to walk into their inner world, their persistence and troubles, their pain and joy, their inevitable characteristics and weaknesses as an ordinary person ... telling them is telling Guitou's life; Knowing them also helps to know ourselves.
This book is mainly written by the children of cadre schools, but it is also rare to include some articles about the memories of adults, that is, the students of those years. Among them, photographer Liang Zude's article "Clay Fighter" tells a story of volunteering to be an amateur "Clay Fighter" in the cadre school, grabbing the hand of the camera and doing the work of repairing the clay figurine, in order to get in and out of the "bullpen" at will, thus secretly helping the people locked in it-sending soup, handing notes and so on. One day, with a deliberate cough, the author skillfully interrupted the desperate meditation of an upset cowshed man under the roof beam. The author's sympathy and pity for the persecuted, as well as all the adventures he has done within his power, are moving and make people firmly believe that human nature is eternal, and even in extremely difficult times, the beauty of human nature will still be presented in a unique way. What is especially rare is that this article also makes people see the social atmosphere and realistic environment revealed by the author intentionally or unintentionally. These memories are more accurate and comprehensive.
We can never write such words. Memories of personal experience make up for the observation limitation that the children of cadre schools still belong to "outsiders" in a strict sense. How much do we know about the most personal experiences or encounters of our fathers or the feelings in the game? What is closest to reality may be farthest from understanding. Perhaps until today, we still don't know enough about our parents, in all these aspects-far from enough.
Memory has a social framework. On the one hand, we tend to regard childhood and adolescence as the best stages of life, and the nostalgic mentality produces fantasies based on and affecting memory; On the other hand, it is also a more important aspect. Under the influence of later social life, our memories were constantly changed, so that we lost some essence to a considerable extent.
According to the theory of collective memory, there is a certain remodeling mechanism for people's memories of lost years. This mechanism stems from the continuous influence of social life. These include beautifying the past with some elements of illusion and fantasy. This theory means that the memory of a group is actually the reconstruction of an image. In order to make memory adapt to the changes of social equilibrium conditions or conform to the order of current concepts, society and ourselves reorganize it, select some of them from the memory inventory, erase them and arrange the rest, which often distorts the past, at least causing many changes.
This fantasy memory tries to "convince ourselves that compared with the past world, especially with our childhood and youth, today's world is monotonous ... Although we are sure that our memories are accurate, society sometimes requires people not only to reproduce the previous events in their lives in their minds, but also to polish, delete or perfect them, and even give them a charm that reality does not have." Our generation's memories and judgments of past life are probably full of illusions.
The memory of glans penis is no exception. At that specific time and space, between the distant village houses and mountains and rivers, there is a beautifully built campus, which is a concrete and special image of this memory. However, when we revisit the old place after many years and try to find the old scenery, we always feel that those "old scenes" seem to be missing something and seem to have added something. Although the scenery in front of us feels very cordial, it is difficult for us to completely return to the psychological state of our previous life. To truly remember Guitou, we need not only the positioning of the group, but also the tracing and questioning of the inner self.
In this respect, even this heavy book, we can't assert to what extent it has been accurate and complete, and it is far from the end of Guitou's memory. The memory of Guitou needs to be examined for a lifetime. ?
* * *
Finally, in many ways, this book is quite similar to the oral history that frequently appears in recent historical accounts. We might as well regard it as an oral history of Guitou Cadre School from the perspective of the children of Cadre School. As the editor-in-chief of this book, Tu, a senior student, showed admirable talent and work spirit. The joint efforts of many authors and editors have enriched this book.
Oral history is non-objective in some features, but it is full of sense of existence and scene, simple and primitive. What is important is that countless sets of oral statements with strong subjective colors and efforts to restore the truth constitute objective facts. Similarly, not all the memories in this commemorative book are accurate, but this does not affect the significance and value of this book in the least. It is these memories that reproduce the past, which makes it possible for us to make our own judgments in rich enough memories and find and know ourselves in the reconstructed memory framework in the book.
? (written in the spring and summer of 20 19)
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■ Notes
(1) See [France] Maurice Habwach's On Collective Memory, translated by Bi Ran Guo Jinhua (Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2002 1 Edition), p. 087.
(2) quote a famous prose writer white. See [America] e.b White's Revisiting Myanmar Lake, translated by Jia Huifeng (Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 20 1 1, 1 edition), page 2 1, page 25.
(3) See [France] Maurice Habwach's On Collective Memory, translated by Bi Ran Guo Jinhua (Shanghai People's Publishing House, 1, June 2002), p. 085-p.09 1 page.
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