Text/Li Jikai
I often lean on my lounger, sometimes in the sun. If there is no sun, a bit gentle breeze will be around. In a trance, I see my body on the lounger like undulating hills. This reminds me of where I lived as a child. Embarking from the Yangtze River, walking upward for a dozen miles and climbing up the hill to reach my home, I could tell that my home was located in the highest location. At that time, when I looked down in front of my house, I firstly could see bamboo forests, Chinese parasol trees, factory buildings, field paths, and some small dirt slopes in the foreground. Further away are some farmhouses and towns, and then the railway station. If my vision was good enough, I could even see a grayish-white ribbon which is the flowing Yangtze River in the horizon, and the increasingly faint mountains beyond the river on the other side. Now I am sleeping in my lounger. My eyes are at the highland like the entrance of my old home, and my feet outstretched resemble the Yangtze River. When I was a little boy, I used to start from the foot of the hill and climb to where my eyes are located.
The prolonged memories about the past are better than none. One cannot choose his hometown, so I can only pluck the details of memories that sprout up like the bamboo shoots after rain from time to time. The exact appearance of some memories is like an unexpected rain that makes one feel like feeding on the sky. I felt throughout my childhood that heaven and earth were constant, that everything grew and changed slowly, and that I never wanted to grow up in a hurry. After all, at some point, a person leaves his familiar past. By the time I left my hometown, I was no longer a child. I remember that a childhood friend gave me a pair of pigeons before I moved. But when I settled in my new home, the pigeons flew away and never came back. A month later, I received a letter from my friend, saying that the pigeons had flown back to the hometown.
The Yangtze River close to me is in its middle and upper reaches. After flowing slowly through many locations, it reaches the place where I went to college in Chongqing. I stayed there for ten years. After that, it flowed eastward passing more places and crossed the Three Gorges to Wuhan. My current home is still near the Yangtze River. I found myself neighboring the river for so many years. There are always railroads and stations along the Yangtze River, and late at night the sound of trains and ships on the river can always be heard.
One’s childhood home is always remembered throughout life, just like one 's preferred taste for a certain food and the memory of a certain smell. Many people 's hometowns have disappeared. For example, a few years ago, my old father had the opportunity to look for his former home in Shuangliu, Chengdu a few years ago. The old stone roads and wells were long gone, so he only took a picture in front of a supermarket and barber store at night, saying that this was where his old house was located. Such a change is common in the world, but what should be remembered will be definitely kept in the memory. With this mentality, I didn’t feel strange to see the birds and vegetables in the field on returning my hometown. I saw their ancestors years ago, as if they should have been here all along.
Facing the flying time, one’s true face can only stay here and now. The changing colors of the seasons that I have experienced in the past decades, and the countless things that can be said or not in my memory, have finally mixed into a gray color. This is a gray envelope sealed with my personal history. Painting has been my profession and I know the natural and unspeakable formation of a kind of gray, which is an inevitable result. Just like the dust in life, the light or strong taste of dust will appear as time passes.
At the moment I lean backwards in my lounger, I imagine my body becoming a long road with mountains and rivers, idyllic plants, or the rolling hills I climbed every day when I came home as a child. It is as if I am watching myself every time I leave and return home.