The Lost Cloud-Lin Qingxuan
A cloud came from the other side of the sea and slowly floated to his head. He stared intently at the clouds flying towards the notches of the mountains. He felt the direction of the sea breeze and judged that the clouds would pass through the slot and fly to the place where the sunset hung high across the sea.
So, as usual, he lay on the hillside of Victoria Mountain, waiting for the flow of clouds; Occasionally, I turned my head and looked at the cable car trying to climb the mountain, twittering and heading for the top of the mountain. Every time he sits and watches the cable car, he is always moved. What a beautiful and peaceful mountain it is. Along the mountain, there are villas with elegant colors. Standing high, you can see the whole Kowloon coast of Hong Kong, and you can see the waves rolling. Seen from a distance, the waves are a bit like dandelions on the banks of the river in memory. When they are scattered with the wind, they will find traces.
I can't remember when I began to like to look at clouds like this. After work, he often strolls to victoria hill Station, buys a ticket, and sits alone in the last position of the right window, rising with the car. The mountains on the cable car path are unpredictable, and I don't know what will happen in the next moment. Sometimes my eyes are flat and I think I can see farther at the next stop. The next stop is blocked by a big tree, and sometimes you will meet a building with dozens of floors across the line of sight, because of that changeable interest. He didn't feel his seclusion, he felt the pleasure of emptiness.
He seldom sits on the top of the mountain because he is not used to the noisy sound in the building called Taiping Pavilion on the top of the mountain. Usually get off the bus halfway up the mountain and find a secluded place. You can look up at the mountains, the sea, the clouds, the sky and the island where he has lived for 20 years. Like a little star, he is listed among the islands around Hong Kong and Kowloon.
When the weather is fine, you can see luxury private yachts docked at the seaside from a distance. In the beating of the Hong Kong-Kowloon ferry, it seems that voices and laughter on the yacht can be heard. Nearby, sometimes the rich in Britain will entertain their guests in the spacious green courtyard. Pink and sideburns are like a valley where butterflies dance in the garden. China servant with dark hair carries cocktails, wears a black suit and a black bow tie. They are busy looking for someone to deliver wine. Among the colorful butterflies in the valley, they are like moths in the night, scrambling to find a place with lights.
If the sky is cloudy and the wind is blowing hard, he will look up at the clouds running like the tide with rapt attention, and his thoughts will fly: the clouds are the wings of the sunset and the wind, and the clouds are white butterflies shining with nectar; Clouds are the color of white camellia in autumn; Clouds are the faded sleeves of years; Clouds are melancholy shadows, and clouds are distant voices; Clouds are ... clouds sometimes even elegies written all over the sky!
When he was a teenager, he liked watching clouds. His family lived in Hsinchu, Taiwan Province Province. In the windy city in winter, the wind speed is very strong, and the clouds come faster than other places. It seems that I am in a hurry to go on a distant date. After school. He often sits on the blue campus with a book in his hand and is fascinated by clouds. At that time, after a long series of years of escape with his father, he felt scared and even worried when he looked at those clouds. He felt that he was a peaceful white cloud when he was young. Because of the strong wind, he pushed himself against other clouds to survive and ran in a hurry, but he didn't know why he ran like that.
When he was young, his hometown was in Hangzhou, but Hangzhou hardly left any impression on him. I only remember that the day before he left, his mother was busy sewing a secret bag for his father and putting some gold and silver in it. He sat by and watched his mother sew clothes. I don't know why the silent mother shed tears. He was bored, so he ran to the yard alone and stared at the clouds in the sky. I remember the clouds were yellow and amber, a little old and a little cold.
Because of the impression of the cloud! After graduating from college, he is eager to go abroad. He is the only man left in the family! My father didn't agree with his long journey at first, but later he agreed. At that time, studying abroad seemed to be the only way for young people.
On the eve of going abroad, his father said to him under the light, "You can go abroad and ask about your mother by the way. Then the father and son looked at each other with red eyes and couldn't say a word.
He saw his father's tall, slightly hunched figure turn out of the door, propping up his cheeks, and felt that tears were boiling out, but when they flowed to his chin, they were cold and fell on the glass table and scattered all over the floor. Only then did he know that his father agreed to let him go abroad, and he was still thinking about his mother who stayed in Hangzhou. My father told him sadly again and again. When he left his hometown, he promised his mother, "I'll pick you up when I get settled there." He seemed to see the young man's father from the cabin, tearfully looking out the window at his hometown, which was getting smaller and farther away. He thought that his father was leaning against the window to watch the waves, and he must be watching the broken waves. The mood of leaving his mother should be the same as when he faced it on the eve of going abroad.
In the first few years in America, he did try his best to find his mother, but his hometown was like a foggy sea, and he couldn't get any reply at all. His school is in the north of the United States, and it freezes every winter. Waiting for news from his mother, he felt that the weather was particularly cold. The summer he got his degree, he saw his classmates' parents coming from all over the country at the graduation ceremony, and suddenly remembered his father in Hsinchu and his mother in Hangzhou. Under the clear sky, when the students took pictures of him, they were so cold that they cried. I don't know why I am desperate for the idea of reuniting with my mother.
That year, my father died suddenly. He traveled thousands of miles in mourning and never saw his father for the last time. He only found a photo of his mother when she was young from his father's belongings. At that time, my mother was very beautiful, wearing a black bun and a cheongsam that almost reached the ground, with the beauty of old China. He wanted to put this photo in his father's grave, but he finally put it in his bag as a souvenir of his mother.
That photo aroused his idea of looking for his mother.
In those years when the American economy was in recession, he was chased by the wind again and again like a drifting cloud. After failed and bleak marriages again and again, the old black and white photos of his mother became the only comfort in his life. What his American wife said when she left him: "You grew up without a mother, and you don't know how to get along with women at all;" China people of your generation have been living an absurd life and don't know how to live a basic life. I often whip my mother in the loneliness at night with her photo.
His decision to come to Hong Kong was an accidental choice. There is a vacancy in a company in Hong Kong. Besides, he has the same yearning for finding his mother as a dream. The most important reason is that if he is a man with a hometown, his two hometowns are very close to him in Hong Kong.
After the Cultural Revolution, I found my mother died five years ago by looking for friends and contacting relatives in his hometown. Among the mother's relics brought out by friends, there is a photo of my father wearing a black suit when he was young, which I have never seen before. Exquisite suit, confident smile, in his later memory, far away from his father. The picture of his father and his two shadows like men are so similar. His father once had such a flying posture, which he never expected.
He looked at the glowing photos of his father when he was young, just like looking at his copied face through foggy frosted glass. He not only photocopied his father's appearance, but also inherited his father's sadness of drifting in the boat of years all his life. That kind of sadness was unexpected when the young father took pictures, and he could not feel it before middle age.
He decided to pay homage to his mother's grave.
The closer the train is to Hangzhou, the more he has the impulse to run away, because he doesn't know if he can bear it at his mother's grave. Looking at the dancing scenery outside the window. It's strange that the gray crowd is like a shadow, I can't see it clearly. When he got off the Hangzhou station, he could hardly find a place to stay because of the spots formed by spitting on the platform. Is this my dream hometown day and night? He leaned against the pillar of the platform, shivering with cold, and it was noon on a sultry summer day in Hangzhou.
He didn't find his mother's grave in the end, because most people were buried hastily during the Cultural Revolution, and there were no tombstones. He had to kneel near the cemetery where his mother was most likely to be buried, and he couldn't hold it any longer. He cried in the sky and deeply felt the loneliness and desolation of being a human being without shelter. When he thought of what his wife said when she left him, this generation of China people not only didn't have a chance to live a basic life, but even couldn't find the name on the tombstone.
He didn't leave his hometown immediately, and even went to West Lake, Wang Yue Temple, Lingyin Temple, Pagoda of Six Harmonies and Yandang Mountain according to the travel guide. Those places that don't exist in his memory, but he is sure that at his youngest beginning, his parents held his hand.
What impressed me most was that he went to Feilaifeng to see the stone carvings. There is a fat Maitreya Buddha with a happy smile, which was carved in Guangxu period in the late Zhou Dynasty. He lay on a huge stone wall and smiled for more than a thousand years. There is a pair of couplets, "The spring is chilly and the peaks fly from place to place". It is said that "Feilai Peak" was originally a small ridge on Jiuhua Mountain in Tianzhu, but I don't know when it flew from India to Hangzhou. Facing the smiling Maitreya Buddha, he painfully recalled his parents' old age. A mountain peak can fly around, and the drifting of people is particularly small. In front of the Buddha statue, he sat alone for an afternoon, until the white clouds in the sky disappeared and the sunset disappeared on the back of the peak, and he got up and went down the mountain. He fell heavily between the steps, which made his waist ache for years. Every time I think about the discrete burial of my family, his low back pain quickly spreads all over my body from where I fell.
The quiet life in Hong Kong didn't make his scar fade away in time. Sometimes he listened to the sound of the last train from Kowloon to Guangzhou, with tears in his eyes, and sometimes he remembered Hsinchu and his two hometown sourly, making him know that Hong Kong is a rootless place, just like his life experience. Every day in the underground tram, he watched the crowded pedestrians rush to the exit, as if they were buried in the crowd of 5 million people, flowing, flowing, and he didn't know where it was going-that feeling was still watching the clouds. The sky was a pool, and the clouds were boats with no direction, moving with the wind, some flowing to the left, some flowing to the right, and some drawing arcs in situ.
Even sitting on the Hong Kong-Kowloon ferry, he used to stand at the bow and blow the cold wind on the sea, because if he didn't stay awake on the smooth ferry, he would become an uncertain homo erectus. It is clear that Hong Kong and Kowloon are so close. Didn't his father take him by boat when he left his hometown? People in Hong Kong and Kowloon are used to going from this ferry to that ferry, but after he left, there was always a faint fear that the ferry would suddenly stop at an unknown place.
"Aberdeen" is also his favorite place, where the tired and living people make him feel extremely real, and a long list of white sailboats that overlap and dock always don't know where to go. Once, he sat in the cable car of Ocean Park and looked down at the white sailboat in the distance. White sails are as gorgeous as wings, giving him a sad illusion. Hong Kong and Kowloon are like a sailboat on the shore, which can accommodate 5 million people and set sail at will, but the course is uncertain.
There are several dolphins from Penghu, Taiwan performing in Ocean Park. Every time he sits on the high platform and enjoys the dolphin show, he recalls his boyhood when he served in Penghu. At the seaside where he is stationed, there are often a large number of dolphins swimming, which has always been a source of wealth for fishermen. The first time he went out for a walk from the barracks, he met a long line of dolphins lying on the coast. At that time, the tide had just receded and the dolphins were not dead. The pores on the back of the neck are closed one by one, swallowing the last foam of life. He thinks dolphins are extremely beautiful. They have smooth and shiny skin and blue backs, like the sea when there is no wind. The abdomen is almost pure white, like waves splashing on the sea; Some pregnant dolphins have a sunset glow in their abdomen, which usually contains the color of pink amber.
The fisherman told him that dolphins are timid, intelligent and kind animals. Fishermen beat gongs and drums at sea and chased them to the preset bay. When the tide receded from the bay, they were exposed on the beach, waiting for death. Some lucky dolphins were selected by foreign ocean parks for training and performance, and most of them gasped at the seaside, then they were slaughtered and sold to the market at low prices.
After listening to the fisherman's words, he looked at more than 0/00 beautiful dolphins at the seaside and silently swallowed his last breath. He couldn't help squatting on the beach, burying his face in his hands. He felt his tears, soaked his green uniform and landed on the shore where the dolphins were waiting to die. Not only crying for dolphins, but thinking that you are the life in the belly of dolphins' sunset glow is doomed to start your own life.
Over the years, his parents died one after another and his wife left him. He not only thought of death, but also saved him in the end. It was the scene of him squatting by the sea watching dolphins when he was an officer, which made him feel that being alive was precious, although it was difficult. He gradually realized how their mother felt on the eve of leaving her hometown. In the minds of China people, living apart is even worse than waiting for death after reunion. Aren't those smart and thoughtful dolphins also like this, hoping that their offspring will return to the vast ocean?
He's sitting in the stands of Ocean Park? Every time I think of dolphins panting on the coast, I can hardly see the performance. A few times when bunny hop was high, he was awakened by everyone's applause, and he was in a cold sweat. Smiling Hong Kong people in the stands looked at the dolphins left by foreign parks, and those who flew away seemed to be receiving survival training in a small seawater performance pool, gradually forgetting those who breathed on the coast and gradually losing the vast ocean they once owned.
The clouds in Penghu are the most beautiful clouds he has ever seen. In the noble sky, clouds don't float loosely like other places, and every flower is tightly condensed like a clenched fist, almost pure white, without any impurities.
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The clouds in Hong Kong are also beautiful, but they are loose and messy, with no center of gravity. They are like dolphins in the ocean park, and they have been fattened in captivity for a long time. Perhaps because of the sea breeze, the direction of cloud flight in Hong Kong is uncertain. Often the clouds on the right are horizontal and the clouds on the left are straight.
After all, he is still lying in Victoria Mountain watching the clouds. The clouds he just saw are flying in orderly from the concave part of the mountain. I don't know why the last one is a little far from the cloud. When all the clouds pass through the concave part, that one completely deviates from the course and turns to the fork in the road around the mountain. Perhaps because of the evening wind, the clouds are getting farther and farther away and running to an unknown place.
This is a rare phenomenon that he sees clouds. Why does the last cloud refuse to fly in the direction of the previous cloud? It's fighting something! Or it's just a lost cloud! The cloud floating with the wind is like a wandering song, lost like a note that slides too high or falls too low, bringing the whole stable and beautiful melody into a deep and lonely mistake.
Night rises gradually, surrounding the cloud like a cocoon, slowly and slowly devouring the white of the cloud until it is completely invisible. He felt sad that he was a cloud, because he got lost and even his last struggle was drowned.
When I took the cable car down the mountain, the brilliant lights of Hong Kong and Kowloon in the distance had already lit up and waved to him. Because of the speed, the cold wind hit him in the face from the window. He looked up and saw a pale moon cut and pasted in the dark sky, so unreal in the wind. Looking back, he saw his cold and tearful silhouette on the last row of right window glass.