When I was a student, my classmates were only curious about the fact that my village was called RaoWeiChi. After entering the society, their curiosity and surprise is more. First of all, they would say that there are very few Rao surnames, and secondly, they would argue about what kind of village can be used as a "city".
Perhaps it is too much curiosity, which makes me feel proud to talk about my hometown as a village girl in the city of Rao.
Rao for the city of the village is located in Huanggang City, Hubei Province, the southern part of the town of Meichuan, from Rao for the city of Wan ancestral name. There are 415 households and 1,788 people, so the village name is also "Rao for the city".
Rao for the city is famous not for its population, but for its celebrities and literati. Rather, it is famous for its many celebrities and literati. History records that in the Tongzhi period of the Qing Dynasty, the third son of Rao's ancestor, Jia'nai Gong, moved out from the nearby Rao Wenzhuan and created this village where the literati gathered.
According to the genealogy of the clan, in a few decades at the end of the Qing Dynasty, there were nine graduates. In the Republican period, there were eight doctoral students. In the sixty years after the founding of New China, there were 405 university students (as of 2012), of which more than 50 were from the "ten most prestigious schools".
History, no matter how glorious, is the past, and the glory is the ancestors. Today's Rao for the city after the storm, more beautiful than history, more desirable.
To write about Rao for the city, we have to start from the two camphor trees at the entrance of the village.
The two ancient camphor branches and trunks are thick, two or three children hand in hand to hold. It is said to have a history of more than two hundred years, in my elementary school, one encountered termites gnawing, the trunk of the hollow, only the bark wrapped, the village people think, the tree will die, but now, the balsam camphor tree is still tenacious.
Daughters married off from the village would get up early in the morning on their wedding day to wash their hair and take a bath, and the bath water had to be filled with soap horn, copper coins, and balsam camphor tree branches and leaves, and that balsam camphor tree leaves were plucked from the balsam camphor tree at the entrance of the village.
They are the witnesses of the village, and the luxuriant branches and leaves show the tenacity of the people of Rao for the city and their yearning for life.
The road into the village has long been turned into a concrete road, one straight to the center of the village, one to the village of the "front door", and one into the nature, where all the village's fields and ponds, slopes, forests, is the paradise of our childhood, I was often with my peers and go to the place to herd cows, to catch rabbits, pheasants, and of course to steal the fruits of other people's homes, but also the most important thing is that the village is not a place for the public to see. I used to go there with my peers to herd cows, catch rabbits and pheasants, and of course, steal other people's fruits and sugar cane. The land has been used for several generations, and now it has been contracted by a special person, and has never been idle.
In the era of part-time work, the land in many villages is deserted, but here there are still rapeseed flowers in the spring, yellow rice in the fall, the fragrance of lotus in the summer, and snowflakes in the winter.
My home is in the center of the village, the most densely populated place. When I was a child, it was an earth-plated house, warm in winter and cool in summer, but it could not withstand the test of time, and in 2003, it was converted into a building. The village was in the midst of a building trend, and every family was converted to a building.
Villagers in the original home base, the default style, are built into three-story building, no high and low, a row, a vertical, very regular, very good-looking. The first time I saw this, I was in the middle of a long journey, and it was a long time ago that I was in the middle of a long journey, and it was a long time ago that I was in the middle of a long journey. The appearance of the house is also the same, since the distant relatives, a long time did not walk, will also enter the wrong door, but the villagers are enthusiastic, the visitor is a guest, pouring tea and water in no time.
In the past two years, the village reform. The first time I saw this was when I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley. The village center built "Ping Yang family" and square. The square has a basketball hoop and ping-pong table, and on holidays or at night, the square is very lively, square dance, waist drums, and now the village one or two-year-old children hear the music, will be very rhythmic twist up.
Let's take a look at the other side of the road. The concrete road into the "front door" is lined with laurel, cedar and other landscape trees, most of which are more than one person high. In the middle of the green belt, inlaid with sky blue colored tiles.
"The front door" has a special location, with mountains, water and fields. The people who live by the mountain are planting a piece of flower in front of the door, and behind the door is green bamboo. In the spring, with a fire burning in the stove, you can open the back door and stir-fry a dish with bamboo shoots.
There are a lot of ponds here, and they are all subcontracted to each family. In the summer, we often came to fold the lotus leaves as a hat, picked lotus flowers, pretending to be the Hexian Nun, when the lotus is ripe, carry out their own wooden pots, put in the water as a boat to steal the lotus.
Now the "front door", under the leadership of the village secretary, the abandonment of many years of stinking pond dug into a large pond, planted with lotus, but also with the carving of the fence Yu Che surrounded, like ink paintings as good-looking.
In the middle of last year, when I went back to my hometown, I found that the alleyways were all over the place, the ground was very clean, and there were all kinds of bonsai at the corner. The walls of the houses in the village were all whitewashed, with many pictures and drawings, among which there are portraits and profiles of our village celebrities Rao Hanxiang, Rao Mugong, Rao School Man and other sages who have been studying hard and are determined to serve the country, as well as "Jing Zhong Bao Guo," "Meng Zong Crying Bamboo," "Three Character Classic," and "Three Character Sutra." "Three Character Classic", "Disciple's Rules", "Thousand Character Classic" and other filial piety pictures.
Walking on the concrete road in the village, smelling the flowers, looking at the exquisite wall paintings, as if this is no longer the previous village, but into the picture world in general.
In 2017, a reporter interviewed our village secretary, Rao Xilong, who said that Rao for the city to become a "farmers' university" type of village, is his dream of governing the village.
I look forward to it and believe that his dream will come true!
I look forward to, and believe that he will dream come true!