Crossing the highlands of Mongoliania

Both are real names.

Ma Shi, Yang Fen.

All commonplace things on the ranch.

All are the name of their father.

Ma Shi Yang Fen's hometown has pastures and deserts, hills and Gobi, but also gold mines, and a vast Tang Tang Ulungu River, which can be translated as the place where the mists rise.

Where the mist rises, the frontier of the frontier.

It is a border fortress in the true sense of the word, with a 280-kilometer border with Mongolia, and was a pasture for the Xiongnu people when the Qin and Han dynasties changed.

Later the Xianbei herded horses here, and later the Turkic people herded sheep here.

During the Tang dynasty, the Beiting Dugufu towers guarded this area, and during the Qing dynasty, the Jungar Ministry fought hard to dominate this area.

......

The nomadic ancestors, different tribes and different races, one crop after another, have claimed this place as their homeland, and have shuttled in and out of the mists, like the tides, like a horse lamp.

They gained and lost, fused or perished, captured or surrendered or died in battle, or left without looking back.

The people who are not looking back are left with nostalgia.

Nostalgia is the most sadistic, nostalgia is also the most relentless, the easiest to pick up, but also the easiest to lose.

Bitterness is nostalgia, not bitterness is lost.

The first thing you need to do is to get a good idea of what you want to do.

The fog is up where, the enigmatic frontier.

This is never a place of long-lasting love.

Altai, Xinjiang, Ulungu River Qinghe County, the pastures of the Kazakhs, the hometown of Ma Shi Yang Fen.

The population of the county is 20,000, too small a county, smaller than a town on the southeast coast, naan can be rolled.

No one is willing to roll naan, people here are simple, life is extremely simple, trample food things will not even think about.

Equally simple is the imagination of the people of the outside world, as well as the imagination of their own lives. In addition to eating, working, and raising dolls, the word "life", most of the people here do not have any high expectations.

There is also not to say to people. Exorcist Novel

The two names, Ma Shi and Yang Fen will not be laughed at with harmonies, whether on the street or in school.

All are commonplace things on the ranch, jokes sprinkled.

It's all from your father, who dares to laugh?

No one dares to mess with Ma Shi's father.

He has three major hobbies, drinking, cursing, and loving children.

When the military people are straightforward, look at things that do not look good in the open cursing, cursing uselessly to drink the life of the big Usu, Usu drinks too much after looking at anyone, including children.

He is fierce to anyone, also fierce Ma Shi, but never hands, people around feel quite strange, when half a lifetime of soldiers never hit the children, but also rare, even Ma Shi themselves are strange.

He loves Ma Shi in a very strange way - to buy leather shoes.

Buy good leather shoes, specially commissioned from the mall in Urumqi to buy, from small to large. Qinghe windy and dusty, he would squat by the door every day before going to work, panting and panting to his son to polish his shoes, not polished into a mirror not get up to go to work.

He went out every day with black shoe polish on the palms of his hands, a hull hair, and a face black.

Passers-by laughed at him: old horse again to his son as a filial son?

He raised his feet pretending to kick people's bicycles, a pair of military leather shoes on his feet crumpled and cracked skin and open lines, wearing almost ten years.

Ma Shi's father most admired person is Yang Fen's father, every time mentioned, every thumbs up: that is a real cultural people.

When the poplar trees in the county were to be cut down, Ma Shi's father was the one who was ordered to do it, and Yang Fen's father was the only one who stood up against it in the whole Qinghe County.

Yang Fen's father was not good at arguing, and incoherently blocked: cut a few fewer trees ...... to give the children a little shade on their way to school.

The literati love poplar, the ax seems to be cut into his own body as well.

Some people laughed at his acidity, and others vaguely understood him, but the tree was finally cut down, and he sat dismally on the stump, hanging his head and propping his hands on his knees.

Yang Fen's father was an accountant, counting money.

Like Ma Shi's father, he was one of the first to reclaim the frontier, coming from Beijing.

The fate of that group of people was the same, most of them came from the green and lush countryside, and most of them failed to return to their homeland, the Middle Kingdom, for the rest of their lives.

As the frontier was bitterly cold, Yang Fen's father wrote articles to keep warm, from youth to middle age, almost as his only hobby.

There is a big book in the house, which is pasted full of tofu block reports cut out from newspapers, all written by his father, who was an excellent correspondent of many Xinjiang newspapers.

The most valuable thing in the house is a gold pen, a penny of article fees saved up, only used when writing articles, usually solemnly wipe clean, stuffed into a cloth sleeve, put into a leather bag, the bag hanging on the wall, next to the hanging knife.

The pen was not lent to Yang Fen when he had to borrow it for his midterm exams, and his father valued it as much as his life.

The writer Yang Fen said, in fact, from Ga Ga's time (Xinjiang dialect, when he was small), he knew that his father's biggest dream was to publish a book.

This dream he never said to anyone explicitly, need to say? Decades have passed, and this dream is properly hanging on the wall with the golden pen, with the knife hanging next to it.

From the time he left his hometown to the time he recognized it as his hometown, my father spent a lifetime.

Whether active or passive, he had to fall in love with this vast and secluded place. Any kind of love needs to be expressed, and my father's way of expression is the Xinjiang of the stroke of the golden pen:

The rapid drumming of the knife maqam, the iron ringed horse sticks of the Ashik ascetics, the beaver and the kestrel, the settlers and the Mazar, the dombra playing of the young Kazakh Akan ......

In addition to submitting press releases to newspapers, my father also submitted long book manuscripts to publishers, I think.

In those days when there was no courier and no email, he must have rubbed the green mailbox on the street corner countless times. When the letter carrier's bicycle bell rang, did he also get up in a panic, his heart pounding?

I don't know, I didn't hear him mention it, a man's real heart, how can you tell people?

I only remember a thick pile of manuscript paper on the dining room table at midnight, he transcribed word by word by the light from the small 15-watt bulb overhead. Brew a cup of warm black brick tea, light a newspaper roll of Mohe cigarette, rustling lightly, two kinds of green smoke, each curling.

Yang Fen got up for the night, sleepy-eyed, passing by, his father's palms spread out, covering the manuscript paper: alas, could not sleep, practicing words ...... gold pen shine faintly, a blush, actually hanging on the middle-aged man's face.

I have never heard him mention the submission, nor have I heard him talk about the return of the manuscript, but I have only seen him sitting alone at midnight, the gold pen rustling on the paper. Year after year, from one midnight to another.

The gold pen was only used to write articles, with one exception.

At the police station, the father bent his head and signed his name.

It was a bond that needed to be signed by the guardian, signed to release Yang Fen on bail. The name was written strictly and neatly, the father's usual style.

A police officer chased out, his right hand raised high, a flash of gold.

People all over the street looked up and listened to him shouting: Yang accountant, why did you forget to take your pen?

The county has only one street, and father and son slowly walk through.

Home early passed, the father's footsteps but not stop, the edge of the city before the hill, he finally turned, Yang Fen after jumping half a step, subconsciously cover the face curled up waist. Dad! He confessed I will never gluttony again, I never go to the doorstep to steal again.

There was no expected slap in the face, and no pocket heart foot, the father did not hit him.

He explained with trepidation: the market department into a box of Jianlibao, the kind of TV only ...... I will never crave again.

The daylight is shining, the snow has not disappeared, and the wind is frozen for a long time, only to hear the father say: ...... newspaper sent the article fee, later to give you as pocket money. Yang Fen crouched on the ground crying: Dad, I gave you shame ......

The father did not go to help him, the father stood in place, his hand clenched into a fist, which clutched the pen.

The father has always been mute, the father's lips trembled for half a day, and then squeezed out a sentence: ...... no matter where you are born, you have to be a productive person. His neck veins rippled, whispered, strained to say: whether I have no success ...... you have to have success.

The lapels fluttered, fingers cold, dry grass bent down, the wind from afar.

The rumbling chariot-like, overwhelming cavalry-like, across the plateau of Mongoliania, churning the waters of the Ulungu River, sweeping the wilderness of the northwest, sweeping from one distant place to another.