Chapter 1: Grandmother and the Golden Silkworm Compulsion
I was born on August 20, 1986, which happened to be the fifteenth day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar.
There are four ghost festivals in China: March 3, Qingming Festival, July 15, and the first day of October. The Qingming Festival and the first day of October are festivals for sweeping tombs and paying homage to ancestors and relatives, offering sacrifices and expressing condolences. March 3 is popular in the Jianghuai and Jiangnan areas, and legend has it that ghosts will appear on this day. However, on July 15 (July 14 in some places), the six paths come out, the ghost gate opens, and the ghosts wander around, which is the day when the yin qi is the most prevalent.
Of course, this is all folklore, not necessarily to believe. However, this day is both the folk ghost festival, the Taoist Festival of the Middle Ages, or the Buddhist Bon Festival, to speak of its special, there is still some reason.
I was an early reader, sixteen years old after I graduated from high school, one to two years younger than my average classmate. This was not because I was early and bright, but because there were fewer students in elementary schools in remote areas, and the age of entry was not much of a concern. This also caused me to be ignorant by the time I took the college entrance exam, and as a result, I fell out of the exam and came out of society early.
I came out to work in 2002, outside the person as a duckweed, drifting everywhere, 7 years I have been to a lot of places, Yiwu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, Foshan, Zhongshan, Dongguan, Zhuhai, Shenzhen, I have to wait, as a factory laborer, foreman, deputy supervisor, set up stalls to sell fruits, as a Western-style pizza store cook, but also in the construction site for a period of time to do the rebar workers, insurance, salesman, selling furniture, and also to do a lot of work. ......05 was also tricked by fellow villagers to Hefei to do a month of marketing.
I was the poorest time three days only ate two buns, the most broad time in the Dongguan metropolitan area has two sets of houses, a small car.
Staying in a place for years, a small circle of people is no story, only **. But a long time in a foreign land bouncing around, have seen all kinds of life, but there will be a lot of stories. For example, the masses are happy to see the racy, such as the dark side of society, such as a variety of strange people anecdotes, such as ...... Sex Du Dongguan ("All the way to the West" now seems to be very hot, in fact, a lot of things in there, it should be the scriptwriter personally went to pick up the wind to get, a lot of places are very real.)
There are a lot of stories in there that are worth telling, but I'll start with something that was a turning point in my life.
The end of August 07, my grandmother was seriously ill.
In Dongguan with someone to open a jewelry store I received the news, immediately returned home.
At that time I already had my own private car, a blue Passat. But because I was not familiar with the road, so I took a long-distance sleeper directly to our county, but I did not think that I would embark on a completely different path with the previous life.
My hometown is located in the southwest, minority areas, east of Xiangxi, is the gateway to the 100,000 mountains.
When talking about western Hunan, some people will think of the ancient city of Phoenix in Mr. Shen Congwen's "Border City", some people will think of Huaihua, a city of communication between the north and the south, and, of course, some people will think of corpse-driving, parasites, and bandits in western Hunan.
Geographically speaking, we are actually part of the radiant circle of western Hunan culture and folklore.
For example, if you have read "The Story of Banditry in Western Hunan", you may be able to imagine our place: poor mountains, bad water and unruly people. Of course, it is mainly because of the high mountains and dangerous roads, poor transportation, and too many people and too little land, too poor. Before the liberation, many of the mountain people in our area worked the land and livestock with hoes and sickles during the day, and then sharpened their knives at night and went to rob the roads.
They were peasants who scratched their food in the earth and couldn't beat a fart with three sticks, but when they robbed the road, they were the little ghosts of the King of Yanluo.
This is a profession and a habit.
This is a profession and a habit.
Another example is compulsion, some people say it is a feudal superstition, well, even if it is a feudal superstition, because before I was twenty-two years old, I, like many of my comrades who are well educated by the party and the state, is a materialist, and does not think that there are ghosts, zombies, messy and strange things exist in this world.
Although, we have a lot of these legends in our family, although, my grandmother is a parasite breeder.
In the ignorant old China, especially in the remote places, there are many people without education, the controller and spreader of knowledge is often some religious people, such as Taoism, Buddhism, shamanism ...... and many ethnic minorities of the primitive religion, and these people are the spreader of religion-.... -My grandmother was the godmother of the Miao village.
Miao witchcraft inside the combination of a lot of magic, Chinese medicine, witch medicine, there are desirable places, there are incredible places, the most criticized is to drink talismanic water - in a special yellow paper with chicken blood, vermilion sand, rice soup and something else mixed with ink scribbled haphazardly, and finally burned, with the remaining ash brewed water to drink.
I remember my grandmother as a withered little old lady, unsmiling, with a nose like an eagle's hook, a toothless mouth, and a face that had collapsed on one side. She is now more than 80 years old, in the Miao village life, specializing in giving people incense (a kind of fortune-telling), healing, exorcising ghosts and feng shui, ten miles of the neighboring townspeople or very respect for her.
My mother told me that my grandmother was suffering from cancer, advanced stomach cancer, and there was no cure.
When the sleeper bus arrived at the county town, it was already 7 o'clock in the evening. There is no public transportation in the remote county, and the latest shuttle bus between the town and the county town on weekdays is at 5:30 p.m. I was in a hurry to find a way to get to the county town. I was in a hurry to find a broken cab, and after bargaining with the driver, I finally arrived in my town two hours later.
No one picked me up, I went home by myself. The last time I went home was at the beginning of 2005, when I just ran back from the Hefei pyramid scheme, and two years have passed. And I also from that time empty-handed boy, become a small fortune.
My mother took over my luggage, told me that my grandmother was not here, back to Dunzhai.
She said she would die in Dunzhai, the land where she had lived for eighty-six years, where the well water was sweet, the rice smelled good, and even the wind smelled of rapeseed flowers.
My mother had two sisters and a little brother, and she was the eldest. My grandfather died early, at the time of the Four Olds. My grandmother wasn't very good at housekeeping, so my mother, who was older, always had to work harder. Later on, my two aunts married one after another, and my brother-in-law also grew up, so he and my father moved to the town and started a small business.
Some years ago, my brother-in-law made a fortune in gold mining and moved to the city.
Grandma refused to leave and lived alone in the Miao village called Dunzhai. She has always been in good spirits, and with the help of people in the village to take care of her, there was no need to worry. But now she was actually sick, and it was stomach cancer, which is a terminal illness.
The next morning I went to Dunzhai with my mother.
It used to be a dirt road up the mountain, but in 2004 it was opened to traffic, so I chartered a van to go there. It was a bumpy ride, but after about half an hour, we finally arrived at Dunzhai. Before entering the village, I saw the huge old acacia tree in the center of the village, the drum tower, the sunbathing area and the temple at the end of the dojo.
I carried some gifts and followed my mother inside the village. The road was muddy, the weather was dry and dusty, and my mother was constantly greeted by people, who responded with a sad face and a heavy heart.
I saw my grandmother again, and by then she was in her final moments of life.
There were many people gathered at the old house, most of the relatives had returned except my sister-in-law who was far away in Karamay, Xinjiang, and I met my second aunt, my brother-in-law, and several cousins, among others. Grandma was lying down in the bedroom with the sun at her back, and when I walked in, I smelled a musty odor. My heart sank, Grandma was a clean person, but she was old after all.
The mother said, "Mom, Lu Zuo came over to see you!"
Inside the yellowed comforter there was an old woman in her old age, her hair was snow-white, her skin was like the bark of an aged pine tree, she had black and yellow spots on her face, her eyes were lifeless, her crooked mouth still had some saliva, and her sanity was not clear at all. This is my grandmother, an old man close to death.
I held her chicken claw-like hand, she did not respond at all, after a while, glanced at me, and fell asleep again.
My mother says to me, "It's unrecognizable." She shook her head and sighed.
I stayed in Dunzhai for two days, and my grandmother remained in a state of confusion, not waking up. Several relatives were discussing whether or not to send Grandma to the city hospital for treatment, but never reached a unanimous opinion. My brother-in-law said it was better to respect Grandma's opinion and not to go back and forth - his family was not in good condition and had already spent a lot of money on Grandma's illness.
At this time, one of my cousin's sisters-in-law, who was taking care of Grandma, ran to the hall and said that Grandma had come to her senses and asked us to come over.
"Are you Lu Zuo?" Grandma looked at me with her old eyes lying on the bed. I nodded and she asked, "When were you born?" My mother interjected, "Azuo is 86 years old, twenty-one." Grandmother shook her head with difficulty and asked again, "When were you born ...... month."
"August 20th, the fifteenth day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar." I said.
Suddenly, Grandma's eyes lit up, then she coughed loudly, there seemed to be phlegm in her chest, I helped her pat her back, and finally spit out a mouthful of thick black phlegm a few minutes later. Then she looked up and said, "Master Gong, you're finally here."
Grandma was suddenly in much better spirits, and she could actually get out of bed. She directed her brother-in-law to dig out a small jar of clay altar in a vacant lot behind the house, and on top of the mouth of the altar was the thick oil paper that had been used to make umbrellas in the early days. Along with the jar was a wooden box containing a thick, yellowed wire-bound book.
Grandmother pushed aside her daughter, who was supporting her, and shakily came to the low coffee table where the clay altar was placed. She mumbled Hmong words and waved her hands shakily in her hands. After about ten minutes of this, she violently lifted the oil paper.
Inside was dark, and after a while, a golden-colored silkworm pupa crawled out.
This silkworm chrysalis fat, fleshy, almost as big as an adult's thumb, eyes have degenerated into black spots, fat body has dozens of pairs of feet, two pairs of soft as paper wings attached to it. I stared at the black dots on its head, and didn't find the fatness cute at all, but felt the eerie glow coming from above.
Grandma was still reciting a vague Hmong language, gurgling, which I hadn't learned, so I couldn't understand.
However, her hand suddenly pointed at me.
The silkworm chrysalis transformed into a golden thread and, amidst the gasps of the people next to me, suddenly burrowed into my mouth.
The inside of my throat went cold, and I felt something flow down my throat and into my stomach.
Then a fishy odor churned up in my esophagus, and all of a sudden I felt that breathing became especially difficult, as if the lobes of my lungs had been eaten away, and a piece of my heart seemed to be missing while another organ was added to my body. As this fishy odor churned, an overwhelming sense of nausea tore all my thoughts away, and inexplicably I felt a numbness in my scalp, and I passed out.
Grandma died, the day after she woke up.
She walked peacefully, took my hand and told me a lot of things, she said that what she gave me to eat yesterday is called the golden silkworm compulsion, is the king of the compulsion, can prolong life, but also can strengthen the body, there are many other uses, but because in the compulsion box inside the box for too long, so the poison, the first and fifteenth day of each month, twelve o'clock in the morning when the toxin is involved, there will be a heart-breaking pain will appear. To detoxify the poison, the only way is to find short mule's hat grass to eat.
Grandmother also told me that the golden silkworm compulsion was alive, and if I couldn't subdue it within a year, I would surely die - "If you don't have the life to enjoy the golden silkworm compulsion, come down and be my companion." In addition to the Golden Silkworm Compulsion, Grandma also left me a book called "suppressing the mountains twelve methods" such a handwritten copy of the broken book.
