The Origin of Nostalgia
I grew up living in a village; all around were neighbors, and life was bustling door to door. Whenever the New Year approached, children would take money given by adults to buy a lighter and eagle firecrackers, light them, and immediately throw them into the river to play with water cannons, seeing whose sound was louder.
They would also head to the railway tracks at dusk to wait for the train’s roar, counting the train cars one by one. After the train passed, we would walk along the tracks toward the next village.
At night, we would usually ask for adults’ permission to go to the fields to watch fireflies, catch grasshoppers, and look for mulberry trees to pick mulberry leaves to raise silkworm babies.
I miss those days very much.
After I entered high school, we moved away and never experienced that life again. Now I live in a residential community; the neighbors nearby don’t know each other, and there are no peers of the same age. Most people spend the holidays at home with a computer and a cellphone for the entire summer.
Old Photos
I heard the old village was demolished, so it won’t look the same as before. So I used Baidu Maps Time Machine to relive memories of the old place in the cloud.
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This is the village gate in 2016; at night, many kids would play hide-and-seek in front of it. They’d hide in various concealed corners, two people pairing up to catch someone.
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This is the village head’s bridge; when we were little we often climbed onto the toilet’s tiles to play, which now seems really dangerous. In front of the blue large cart there’s also a dog hole, small but easy for kids to squeeze through. Kids often crawled out of the dog hole to play outside the village.
In this river before, a child drowned; a fruit-seller at the market, who swam very well, jumped in without a second thought and saved him.
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We used to catch a viper in this rice field with friends; at first we thought it was a yellow eel, but the head looked wrong, so we threw it away. Then it chased us; we stuck a wooden stick into its head and used a sharp stone to strike its heart to kill it. Later, carrying the snake’s corpse back to the village, the elders scolded us and left it in the village’s drainage ditch. To the right of the rice field is a forest, and in the forest there are mulberry trees where silkworm larvae can be found.
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This is the train tracks; at six o’clock in the evening after dinner, trains often pass. A group of us would come here to watch the train pass and count how many cars. Then we would walk along the tracks. By the way, there was a time we found an unknown skull on the tracks (we didn’t know what it was as children, and I still can’t recall it now); it scared me so much that I ran away.
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This is the cemetery entrance, it’s a slope. The nearby paths are very smooth, and riding bikes there is very comfortable; we often arranged to ride bikes here with friends. To the left of the blue sign, in front of the blue bike, there’s a small ditch; it used to hold many crayfish and loaches, as well as tadpoles, and we’d often come here to catch wild things.
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This is the entrance to the cemetery through a small slope underpass; it’s a great slope to ride down. By the way, a former neighbor seemed to be from Anhui; one summer his brother came here to play. Around 10 p.m. they rode an electric bike here and reportedly saw a wild man—very tall, perhaps 2–3 meters, mostly covered in hair. Because it was so dark at night, you couldn’t see the face clearly, but the wild man saw them and chased them. The brothers were so scared they rode away on their electric bikes. When they got back to the village, they cried. We asked around and heard the wild man was very curious. It happened to be during a period when Jiangxi TV’s Hong Yu hosted Classic Legends, and one episode was exactly about, so that week I eagerly searched online for information about wild men.
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This is inside the cemetery; the photo doesn’t show any graves, so I’ve just posted it. In the center there is a slope; I used to ride my bike down from the top and, halfway, I panicked, forgetting there were stone pedestals below; behind me there were stairs, and I couldn’t brake on the slope, going faster and faster, and ended up crashing badly, scraping my skin and not daring to tell my parents. Afraid of being scolded, I went back, disinfected with hydrogen peroxide, and continued to play happily.
I’ve written for a long time; this place is truly the place I know best and miss the most. Looking at the map, there’s a feeling I can’t quite put into words. That’s all for today’s story. Here’s a Time Machine—if fellow readers have nostalgic places, you can also go back and take a look.
I have little fondness for Baidu’s products; the Time Machine on Maps is probably my only favorite.