She is not the kind of girl who walks leisurely on the stone street and is as sad as lilac, because the town is no longer the lonely Jiangnan town in the rainy lane described by Dai Wangshu. The alley of the town has been widened into a main road, and the black and white house has also become a shop with colorful signs hanging along the street. These signs all look the same style, but the background is hastily changed to blue, red or bright yellow.
Every autumn, girls in small towns can always smell burning straw, which is a form that can be sniffed out with their noses, like cooking smoke, and is also a symbol of farm life.
More than once, the girls in the small town saw those ordinary aunts wearing wavy hair and thick fluffy pajamas, which blocked the cold wind but could not cover the fat accumulated for a long time. They haggard and haggard with the vendors. She clenched her fist silently, gritted her teeth and said to herself, I must not become like that in the future.
Girls' compositions in this small town are often praised by teachers. When she went to the podium and read aloud, her voice was very small, like a mosquito buzzing. But even if she reads aloud, no one may listen carefully.
She loves the small town, where the river network is dense and has the reputation of land of plenty, and because of the small town, people living here are somewhat related. It is easy to meet familiar friends when shopping in the market, and you can meet your classmates in the old place in about ten minutes by phone. She can also ride a bicycle, throw off her hands, and go crazy in the streets, and she can travel all over the town in one afternoon.
Yes, don't be confused by her name. Small town girls and tomboys are the same age.
But in a small town, any rumor can reach everyone's ears, and whoever is good with him has quarreled with him. No one will care about the truth of the rumor. It is enough to have a rumor for people to talk about there.
Living in a small town, from kindergarten primary school to junior high school, the classmates and friends around the girl in the town don't seem to have changed much. Because there are only one or two primary schools and junior high schools in the town, she doesn't know much about the sadness of leaving and the sadness that she will never see again after graduation.
The girls in this town failed to enter the university, and their grades were good, and their compositions were often praised by teachers. But this is only a middle school in a small town, and not many people can go to college. She doesn't want to go to a secondary vocational school, and her family has no money to give her a private undergraduate course.
This small town girl who graduated from high school feels that she has everything except a college diploma. She can write articles, be a writer or a reporter, and she is good at math. Maybe she can become an accountant.
So she packed her bags, got on a crowded bus and staggered to the provincial capital, or a place farther than the provincial capital. But she found that the paper diploma was really useful. She also found that even if she could write an article, she could not be a writer or a reporter, but she was good at math, and no one hired her as an accountant without an accounting certificate.
The girl in this small town got a job in the city. She is a parts assembler in an electronics factory. Like all other girls in light blue uniforms, she stood in front of the assembly line and repeated her actions over and over again.
Back to the dormitory at night, the autumn in the south is hot and dry, and the fan overhead creaks and creaks, but it still doesn't turn. The girls in the town can't sleep, just staring at the mottled ceiling. Vaguely, she smelled the familiar smell of burning straw again. Not surprisingly, this is on the edge of the city, and naturally there is a smell of farmers scrambling to spread.
The girl in the town wants to find a man in the city, but the well-dressed and serious young people in the city have never really looked at her, but there are many male workers in the factory who show their love to her. Those people are from small towns, she thought.
Girls in small towns have been in cities for several years, but they still haven't become writers, journalists or accountants, let alone married men in cities. She suddenly felt that there was not much difference between a small town and a city, except that she could go to the busy downtown on weekends. Even then, she felt like an ant crawling outside the crystal ball. The colors in the ball only belong to others, and she can only watch.
"For girls, it is better to come back and find someone to marry and behave yourself." Mom told her so.
So she returned to the town, with some wishful thinking and some reluctance.
The girls in this town finally married the young people in the town, who came back from working in distant cities. Later, she gave birth to a child. She is no longer a small town girl, but gradually, she has become a small town young woman, a small town woman and a small town grandmother.
She imagined countless times that on a rainy night that no one saw, she once again resolutely fled, left the town and went to a far, far place without any bags. But where is the distance? She asked herself. I only heard her husband's snoring and the dense cicadas outside the window.
Young women (or women and grandmothers) in small towns go shopping. She is too lazy to change her pajamas. When she came back, she had children to take care of and housework to do. Who has time to dress up?
The food in this market is getting more and more expensive. She complained to the familiar vendors, and her eyelids turned around like starving goldfish.
In a casual look back, she saw a teenage girl with her neck held high, her mouth stubbornly pressed into a line, and her eyes looked at her coldly and disdainfully.
She smiled, brushed away the hair stuck to her face by sweat, and walked home with a heavy basket containing pork, potatoes, loofah and eggs. At noon, she wants to make braised pork, loofah and egg soup.
In the gap between thinking about recipes, a feeling was inserted into her mind, like a cloud breaking into the clear blue sky.
She said to herself, it's another small town girl.