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Zhao Wuji relied on Zhao Gongming's mobile phone to contact, and returned to the small room where Zhao Gongming rented after participating in the project.

A somewhat old diary was placed on the small table by the window of the small house, and entered Zhao Wuji's sight.

"I am born in 95, and I lived in a hospital affiliated to a state-owned cement factory in the northwest. This is a closed "independent kingdom" centered on the factory. The hospital is built in the factory, the school is run in the factory, and the school uniform is in the factory. logo, the kindergarten chorus sings the factory song.

This factory is a product of Project 50 in the 156s.At that time, in order to solve the weak industrial base, the country built hundreds of factories in BJ, Xi'an, Lanzhou, Baotou and other cities outside the northeast of the old industrial base.The factory my family works in was built on a deserted slope in a remote town in Gansu Province. Not long after it was built, it achieved a breakthrough in cement kiln technology and once shipped tons of cement to all parts of the country.

In the history of the Republic, this is a group of factories that laid the foundation of the country's industry; and for an ordinary family, this is a special living space.

The club in the factory has stood here for more than half a century, contracting functions such as theaters, auditoriums, stadiums, and reading rooms.

The first is language, because many workers from the Northeast have gathered, and a Northeast-style Mandarin is popular in our factory, for example, "This book is thirty cents", three is two.Later, some researchers said that this is a phenomenon of "language islands" belonging to factories and mines.In junior high school, I entered a local school outside the factory, only to discover unexpectedly that the students spoke the local dialect.In this school, even in the same small northwest town, I still deeply feel the loneliness of a foreigner.

Let’s talk about the family courtyard in our factory area. It is divided into two parts, the north and the south, connected by a bridge in the middle, and it takes about [-] minutes to walk.Below the overpass is the mysterious territory of local herdsmen and their cows. My friends and I sometimes sneak down behind our parents’ backs, excited for a long time by the cow dung and the ant eggs hidden under the earthen bricks.

My home is in the north of the factory area, on the other side of the sidewalk under the overpass, there is a poplar forest used to isolate industrial dust. Fa Xiao and I once planted a few poplar trees in the forest, hoping that it would grow into a big tree. Wild boars ate it mercilessly.There are more and more prosperous residential buildings in the south of the factory area, including schools, staff hospitals, clubs, illuminated stadiums, and small markets.

Here, the adults are either from the workshop next door, or upstairs and downstairs. Who is a child’s parents, what do they do, and what kind of affairs have happened at home? You can also contact them in the address book: in the address book, they are arranged by surname, and there are mobile phone numbers and landline numbers of all employees.In my memory of growing up, the factory area has always been at the forefront of the times in terms of communication. For example, PHS is popular in society, and PHS is distributed in the factory; mobile phones are popular in society, and mobile phones are distributed in the factory.

When I was in the third grade, I accidentally took someone else’s homework by mistake. My mother opened the address book, blindly guessed the name of the other’s parent, and made a phone call.After hearing the news, the parent of the other party rode a bicycle and traveled all the way to retrieve the notebook, which did not delay the child's homework.

Of course, my childhood also came from the factory area.When I was four or five years old, one day my mother said that there was a new neighbor downstairs, and then I saw a little girl hiding behind her grandmother and poking her head.Later, this little girl and I became classmates and became close.Every New Year's Day, we knock on the door of each other's house to see each other's new clothes. In autumn, when the aspen leaves fall, we play a game of "pulling tendon" with the fallen leaves and rhizomes.Although later, we chose completely different lives, we still shared our only factory childhood and became like relatives.

Not only this Fa Xiao, but during Chinese New Year this year, I went to another Fa Xiao’s house as a guest, and her family can still be called my grandpa: "Liu Gong", and added excitedly, "Your grandpa and her grandpa are buried together! "Although it's the New Year's Eve, when we heard this sentence, we were all silent.

But this does reveal the life trajectory of the older generation of factory and mine workers: they were born in a worker’s hospital, went to middle school in a school for their children, and if they failed to enter university, they continued to attend technical school here, returned to work in the factory after graduation, and finally worked in the factory. The mortuary in the factory ended his life, and he was buried on the same familiar hill with his familiar workers.

Recalling the life in the factory area, I had a very happy time.Every morning, the factory area will play pure music. Although I don’t know the title of the song, my father can still play those “songs played in the factory in the morning”.

Fa Xiao and I used to wrap four-leaf clover around the trunk of a lilac tree to make plant curtains; we also got together every week to make tube top evening dresses for Barbie dolls out of the stockings worn by adults.On Christmas, we would go to the dance hall opened on the second floor of the hotel in the factory to steal small gifts from the Christmas tree.

Especially with the rapid development of the factory, in the few years after the listing and financing, the employees were given so much soap, washing powder, and gloves every year that they could not run out, and the movie theaters, bookstores, and billiard halls were always overcrowded.There used to be a huge firework show every year in the factory, which is still the most lively and dazzling firework show I have ever seen. The show always ends with a row of "parent company wishes you a happy new year" blooming in the sky.

In this happy world, even a foolish uncle who lives in the overpass hole is smiling when he pulls a shelf cart to pick up rubbish in the factory—it seems that no matter what kind of person, he can make a living in the factory. Get a job and support yourself.After school, the children even often walked with Uncle Fool, some helped him push the trolley, some listened to him tell stories, and took some good-looking garbage from the car by the way.

Even the "competition" here is simple.When I was in elementary school, there were gangs in the school. One gang was in the south, and another gang was in the north; one gang walked on the clean and safe overpass, and the other gang walked on the dusty road under the bridge. Everyone secretly competed. , but who walked faster and entered the family courtyard earlier.If you win once, you can be complacent for a long time.

For us children, the real pain used to be hidden: For example, when we were young, when we went out of the classroom once, we saw white flakes floating in the air. We thought it was snow, but the experienced teachers knew that it was snow. The pollution from the factory told us to run back to the classroom.Another year, many people in the factory said that a worker was working at heights and fell into the mine.The real situation is not known, everyone only saw that many black cars came to the family courtyard the next day, and it was said that the leaders came to discuss compensation.

Later, like all those once remote, huge and bloated factories and mines, the story of my "parent company" began to come to an end. In 2006, our children's school was taken over by the local education bureau. The school's plaque, name and school uniform were changed.Since 2010, several generations of working families have moved away one after another, going to county towns and provincial capitals, and the number of people left is getting smaller and smaller.People who come from all corners of the country end up returning to all corners of the country.

Our whole family also moved to a city far away from the factory, and entered a new school. When the freshmen were introduced, other students said that they were from a certain district in a certain city, a certain county, and I could only say that I was from a certain factory.When my classmates talked about me later, they also said "she is from a certain factory", as if in their hearts, "a certain factory" is a normal geographical division like counties, cities, and provinces.

In order to blend in with everyone, I also tried to speak in dialect like everyone else, but it failed—I spoke too non-standard, I was awkward, and others could not understand, so I simply broke the jar and stopped talking.Some gangsters in the school "interviewed" me about this, "Why do you always speak Mandarin, can you stop pretending?".

That was the first time I felt that I was like a foreigner even though I was in my registered permanent residence.It was also at that time that things began to show their clues: as the third generation of the factory, as the last generation of factory and mine children, I inevitably became a cultural island.

Unlike the previous two generations of workers in factories and mines, when I was an adult, I took a job that had nothing to do with factories and mines, and started my wandering career in Guangzhou and BJ.Because I always speak fluent Mandarin, very few people can recognize where I come from, just like I never know where my hometown is.

Over the years, I have adapted to where I drifted like catkins, and later learned some fashionable words, saying that I am a true "cosmopolitan".But really, that's because I don't really feel like I belong in any one place.I haven't really integrated into any place—except the family courtyard of a factory located on a hillside in Gansu geographically.

Many Gansu people will share a bowl of beef noodles after returning home during the Spring Festival.I also tried to build my nostalgia for beef noodles, but found it a bit difficult-beef noodles pay attention to "one clear, two white, three red and four green", and I neither like noodles nor can I eat spicy (red ).My deepest memory of beef noodles is that once when I ordered noodles in a restaurant, I forgot to tell them not to add spicy food. As a result, I was so hot that I burst into tears on the spot. Even my clothes were splashed with oil, and I was very embarrassed to eat.Since then, I have not asked anyone to eat beef noodles unless necessary.

I am very envious of those who can express their nostalgia with a meal of beef noodles. They are people who really have their hometown.They grew up here and can speak authentic dialects. Although the street scene changes every year, the way of life will not change.And the way of life I am familiar with has long since disappeared along with the factories and mines.

This Spring Festival, my friends and I wanted to go back to the factory to get together, and found that the building of our alma mater was gone, and the courtyard had changed color. There used to be singing competitions and basketball competitions on the illuminated stadium, and there were no people there; The canteen and small market were all demolished; the floor lamp in front of the square was smashed by someone, and it didn't work.The familiar neighbors were gone, and the strange faces sitting at the door stared at us-we realized that we seemed to be outsiders.

This makes people fall into parallel time and space: Is what we have experienced all fake?Of course not fake.Later I found out that many people across the country have experienced such "parallel time and space".Director Lin Xin used three documentaries to record a series of stories that happened in the "Northwest Tongchuan Mining Bureau", which was also a project during the First Five-Year Plan, and investigated a heavy mining disaster in the factory area.In Wang Xiaoshuai's "Green Red", Jia Zhangke's "24 Cities", and Wang Bing's "Tiexi District", you can also see the life in factories and mines during the third-line construction period.

Talk show actor Li Dan also talked about his life in a caustic soda mine deep in the NMGXLGL prairie in his conversation with Xu Zhiyuan: collective life, all over the world, people from Shanghai and the Corps lived upstairs, and they didn’t know how to eat. Where did the seafood come from? "When I was young, I had everything, but then the mining area soon became depressed, and there were more dogs than people."

Pan Yiju, the author of the book "Children" focusing on life in factories and mines, said that there is a kind of hometown called "our factory". It is better to rely on oneself than to rely on the sky and the earth. Many people fly to the city and the coast, looking for a sense of material reality and security, some settle in the city, and some emigrate overseas. From collective life to the opposite independent atomized life .” From islands, people from those “independent kingdoms,” who ended up being islands.

When I think of my childhood, I have an impression that I, with a little red heart on my brow and bright lipstick, is singing the factory song loudly. After more than 20 years, the melody of the factory song can still be blurted out.In order to verify whether I remembered it correctly, I even searched it out, but I didn’t expect this song to actually exist on a video site. It was sung by a boy from a factory and mine who formed a band as an adult.Below the video, new user comments are released every year, feeling the past.I don't know if they are like me, when the prelude sounds, I feel like crying.That, I realized, might be what "hometown" feels like. "

"This is why I couldn't find a home and became a homeless person. I actually knew the danger of the digital life project, but I still participated. If you read this text, it proves that this danger has really happened."