Chapter 24: Xuanlin’s Story (1)

Seeing my confusion, Xuanlin said, “Just listen to me. Don’t ask any questions.”

Facing this young boy who had only three months left to live, I had no choice but to respect him, so I nodded and said that I would listen to him carefully.

On the coffee table, the smoke from the hot tea was wafting. Xuanlin, despite his lung cancer, asked me for a cigarette. As a result, he began to cough violently after taking the first puff, and a kind of morbid flush appeared on his pale face. He looked at me with a gentle smile and began his story.

“I was born in 1978. My hometown is a place you may have never heard of, and the village where I live is even more remote than that. You can’t imagine how poor we are…” Xuanlin was a bit short of breath, but that didn’t affect his ability to narrate the past in a gentle and calm tone.

In Xuanlin’s narrative, a picture scroll unfolds before my eyes, depicting a barren village. At the time, I never imagined that a story I had overheard would contain an important clue about my master.

Let’s call the village where Xuanlin was born Shicun, because the most obvious feature of this village is that there are many stones.

The surrounding mountains are stone mountains, and the surrounding valleys are also hard rock under the flat land. Because there is not much land that can be cultivated, this village is extremely poor, and it is the poorest village in the village governed by the famous poverty-stricken county.

Xuanlin was born in Shicun in the summer of 1978.

In such a village, it is a luxury for children to go to school. Not to mention the money, even the nearest elementary school is more than ten kilometers away from the village. Moreover, the so-called nearest elementary school is only a poor elementary school with only 40 children.

This is the luxury of going to school in Shicun. Even if parents can afford to send their children to school without worrying about labor and with very little tuition, the children still have to get up at 4 o’clock in the morning and climb over the mountains for several hours to get to school.

Therefore, children here have no concept of going to school. When they are young, they run in the fields. When they reach a certain age, they start to share the chores at home. Then they grow up, get married, have children, and repeat this life…

Influenced by the environment, Xuanlin thought that his life should be like this. Isn’t this the rhythm of life for people in Shicun? In fact, it wasn’t like this. When he was five years old, Xuanlin was taken out of the mountains by his father. He doesn’t know what kind of price was paid to let him live with a family in the county seat and go to elementary school there.

Xuanlin was still young at the time and did not know what such a move meant for the people of Shicun. He only knew that his life had become very distant from his parents, so distant that he could only look forward to his father picking him up and taking him home to Shicun during the winter and summer vacations!

Why did he look forward to it so much? It was because the family he was staying with had no blood ties to his own family. It was just someone his father had met in the county town in his early years, and he was not kind to him, or rather, he was already almost harsh. A small child’s fragile heart obviously could not bear this.

He didn’t know how much money his father gave to the family each year, but he knew that he couldn’t escape. He tried to escape from the man’s house or from school several times, but every time, after a few days at most, he would be caught by his father who had come from Shicun and beaten severely.

“Where could I possibly go? A child with no money and no knowledge of the way could only wander around the impoverished county seat. I’ve forgotten the hardships of this period of my life,” Xuan Lin said with his trademark gentle smile, and then continued, “I only remember that I lacked warmth and security from a young age, and that my extra sensitive personality was the result of this.”

Yes, such past experiences can indeed create such a personality, and such people are also more extreme. After encountering warmth, they will value it even more and cannot afford to lose it.

Xuanlin’s last escape occurred in the fourth grade of elementary school. This time, after he was caught by his father, he was not beaten for the first time. His father just silently took him back to Shicun with a pale face.

He thought he was free, but in fact, as soon as he returned to Shicun, his father hung him from the tree in front of the house and beat him severely with a hemp rope. That time, his father was particularly ruthless, so much so that he could hardly feel the pain afterwards, and all he wanted was to pass out as soon as possible.

Finally, his grandfather saved him, took him into the house, and told him something.

Xuanlin didn’t understand the details at the time. At that time, he only vaguely understood that his family had once been very prosperous, but for some special reason, they could only settle in this poor little mountain village, and it had been many generations.

The family didn’t want to continue like this, so he went to school with the hope of taking the whole family out of the stone village. There was no way to change the fate of the poor and boring stone village without going to school, right?

His grandfather told him that the family was impatient and expected him to escape for the last time, otherwise he would have to live on the street and finish primary school.

“You know, the last gold piece hidden in the family is going to be spent on you. You must finish reading this book! Grandpa knows that you have been wronged by that family, but you have to endure it. You are a boy, and you can only learn to be patient if you want to soar to the sky.” When Grandpa said this, he coughed very hard, but the cane pounded the ground again and again, and it also pounded on Xuanlin’s young heart.

So he stopped running away, so he studied hard, so despite his young age, he sensed for the first time that his home was different from the ordinary homes in Shicun, as if there was a huge secret hidden there.

But Xuanlin didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell anyone anything, because he was too young after all, and some things were not at the level of concern that children would care about.

Time passed quickly, changing many people and many things, but it seemed that it could not change Shicun.

That year, Xuanlin was 16 years old and was already a second-year student at the county’s key middle school. He had already left the family he had been living with since junior high school, and with his excellent grades, he had received a reduction in boarding and tuition fees. This was a good change, and it made him believe in the power of hard work.

However, when he returned to Shicun during the summer vacation that year, he found it difficult to see the power of change. The village seemed to be able to shackle and even destroy people’s vitality, creativity and freshness about the world. He felt that he really should leave here with his family.

This idea grew like a weed in his heart, and he almost forgot to eat and sleep as he planned what he should do and how he could leave with his family. While planning these things, he finally remembered what happened in the fourth grade.

He remembered that his family seemed different, that they had once taken out a piece of gold, and that he had once guessed that there was a huge secret in his family…

He originally wanted to refrain from asking, but he was a sensible child and knew that if adults didn’t say anything, children shouldn’t ask. However, the more he observed the details, the more he felt that the family was full of strange differences.

First of all, there were complicated rules. There were fixed rules for eating at home, for sleeping, and for being polite… These rules made Xuanlin, who had already seen a bit of the world, realize that this was not something that a family in a small mountain village could care about and insist on, not to mention that these rules were not ignorant rules, but rather quite elegant.

In addition, Xuanlin noticed that his father, who seemed to have lived a rough life and had never been to school, was not vulgar in his speech. During several deliberate attempts by Xuanlin, he could also feel that his father seemed to be very knowledgeable about history and the thoughts of Confucianism in ancient times, and his opinions were even deeper than his own.

Finally, Xuanlin could no longer bear it. On a hot summer night, Xuanlin went for a walk with his father, and they walked to the edge of a small stream. It was here that his father confessed to Xuanlin a family history that was like a fairy tale.

It was also on the edge of the stream that his father said that Xuanlin should inherit the family’s craftsmanship.