“Many times, people become more and more realistic because of the cruelty of life, and life becomes more and more cruel because of human reality!”

—— "Ordinary Life"

Li Wenming finally finished reading the book recommended by his friend. He closed the book and smiled bitterly, thinking to himself, yes, the ideal is very full, but the reality is very skinny. This is Let us ordinary people live ordinary lives.

Li Wenming, 35 years old, was born in an ordinary rural family in Liaoning Province. He has been extremely smart since he was a child, and finally lived up to his parents' expectations and was successfully admitted to the Medical College of Hanbei University in Hanbei City, Huzhong Province. After he was admitted to college, he suddenly became a celebrity from all over the country.

Li Wenming remembers that his Hanbei University admission notice was delivered to his home personally by the village chief. At that time, express delivery was not as developed as it is now. Everything in the village was sent to the village committee. People from the village committee would collect everyone's things and send them to the post office in the town for mailing. If there was a reply, the village chief would pass it through every now and then. A loudspeaker announces pickup. Therefore, in the memory of Li Wenming when he was a child, he could often hear "Old Si Zhao, ah~ Old Si Zhao, there is a package you sent from Henan. Please have time to register and receive it from Uncle Zhao in the village committee communication office." Later it was simplified to::

"Liu Laogen, ah~, Liu Laogen, there is a box you sent from Guangdong, Tieguai Li, ah~, Tieguai Li, there is a registered letter from your Southwest Military Region Seal... Please come to the old place of the village committee to collect the comrades whose names you heard." Li Wenming still remembers the year since he finished the college entrance examination, his father, uncle, mother, and sister. Everyone began to pay special attention to the loudspeaker broadcast in the village.

In the era of Li Wenming’s father, because the family was extremely poor and lacked food and clothing, the Li family spent many years of savings, plus the subsidies given to their uncle when he was injured and retired from the Vietnam Self-Defense Counterattack, to collect three dollars. A large betrothal gift was given to his father Li Yuanchao for his marriage. And his uncle, Li Yuanchao's younger brother Li Kangyue, became one of the few old bachelors in the village. Because he was shot in the leg and walked with a limp, many old acquaintances in the village jokingly called him "Tieguai Li". He agreed with a smile and would not take it as an insult.

At that time, Li Yuanchao had a very strict family planning policy. Because his first child was a girl and he was from a peasant background, the policy allowed him to have another child. However, he did not expect that the second child would still be a girl. At that time, family planning was strictly enforced, and the penalties were severe, which might even bankrupt your family. However, the idea that only having a boy was considered to be the way to continue the family lineage was deeply rooted in the patriarchal mentality. "Not giving birth to a boy is unfilial, and even parents can't rest in peace after they die." Some old people in the village even talk about this. Due to various circumstances, Li Yuanchao had no choice but to endure the pain and secretly abort the second-born girl whom the village doctor had inferred from his pulse. For this, his mother cried for several months. Even now, no one dares to repay Li Wenming in front of her in advance. There is a second sister. Later, Li Wenming didn't have Li Wenming until Li Yuanchao was in his thirties. Li Wenming can be said to be the only child of the Li family.

Therefore, Li Wenming has been favored by his grandfather, grandma, father, mother, uncle, and sister since he was a child. It can be said that he has "three thousand favors in one body."

“It’s almost the end of August, why haven’t you heard from Mingming yet?”

“That’s right, I heard about the admission notice of Changguijiawa from the neighboring village. The books have all come down."

Just when Li Wenming and his family were worried, the village chief came with a group of people playing gongs and drums. It turns out that the village chief felt that since the village had not produced a single college student from a prestigious university in more than ten years, Li Wenming was making the whole village proud. But the village chief knew that Li Yuanchao's family was poor, so he decided to convene a meeting with the party members in the village. Everyone scraped together more than 12,860 yuan, and the Zhaojiaban band, which was invited for weddings and weddings in the village, also came for free. To support them, according to their words, "I came to enjoy the joy of civilization, and I hope that my children can get into a good university like Wenming in the future." This was perhaps the simplest wish of all the parents in the village at that time.

"Village chief, we can't ask for this money! We are all in the same village, and no one can have much better life than anyone else, you~!" Li Yuanchao said.

"That's right, village chief. We accept everyone's wishes. If you can come to me, our Li family has hit a wall and become prosperous." Because Tieguai Li had joined the army, he was the only one in the village besides the village chief. There are only a few people outside the country who know a few words, but only a few, so they often don’t even know that they have said the wrong idiom.

At that time, Li Wenming also felt particularly proud, as if his whole body was suddenly emitting an invisible light, which even enveloped his entire family.

Even distant relatives who I have never met several times will sometimes be flattered by others: "Oh~, there is a big shot in your Li family, then... He was a scholar before!"

Some people disagreed: "A scholar? Wen Wen was admitted to a first-class university. It can't be said that he was the first scholar."

"..."

? In short, all those who are related to each other have a bright face.

Later, when Li Wenming went home for the summer vacation from college, his sister Li Wenjuan told him about this. He did not correct what they said, but just smiled and continued reading. However, he felt a little more pressure in his heart.

In fact, Hanbei University is one of the top famous universities in the country, and some majors are even as good as Tsinghua University and Peking University, including medical-related majors. Of course, Hanbei University is also very difficult to pass in each province, and the admission rate is also extremely low. It is not an exaggeration to describe it as one out of hundreds of thousands.

However, he, who has shouldered the huge hopes of the Li family and fellow villagers, naturally knows what it means. If I don't behave well in the future, how can I have the honor to return to my hometown? Will his parents and relatives also be gossiped about?

Time flies, the whole family, and even the whole village are looking forward to the day when Li Wenming returns to his hometown in glory after graduation. Earlier, some people in the village still hoped that Li Wenming would return to his hometown in glory after graduation. After civilization, it would be great if I could become a high official and build roads in the village. Later, no one mentioned this statement again. Unlike other majors, Li Wenming studied medicine. Medicine, a matter of life and death, is a very serious profession. It can be said to be the most rigorous among many professions. Therefore, generally speaking, medical majors are different from other undergraduate majors. It takes longer to successfully graduate. Li Wenming’s clinical medicine major is a seven-year program, which is three years longer than ordinary undergraduate majors. Seven years! Some have already graduated with master's degrees. As a freshly graduated undergraduate, he could only work as an intern in a hospital.

As a Li Wenming born in the 1980s, as an intern doctor with a meager salary, as a Li Wenming who barely makes a living without a house or a car in Hanbei City, sometimes late at night You will also feel helpless and suffer from insomnia.

Since graduating from college, he didn’t even dare to go home anymore. Except for going back for a few days during the New Year, at other times, he refused to return to the small village where his whole family was proud of him.

He was also afraid that his former elementary school classmates from the same village would come to him, especially if they asked to stay overnight. In that case, he would have to pay for them to arrange a room in a nearby hotel, and he would never dare to let them I saw the small partitions in the dilapidated old apartment I rented that was about to be demolished. Yes, a small partition, a small partition in a living room. When renting, the agent said it was finely decorated, which is true, but it looks like it was finely decorated in the last century. The floors are already broken and deformed. If it rains in the summer, there will be mold from time to time. smell. Whenever the lights are turned on in the kitchen, you can always see a crowd of "Xiao Qiang" running away. Fortunately, he eats in the hospital canteen and doesn't cook here like other residents. Li Wenming lived in such a small partition when he just graduated. Because the hospital's staff dormitory was full, he couldn't apply for it. The new staff dormitory hadn't been built yet, and there would be a subsidy for living in an outside hospital, so Li Wenming Choose here.

?He kept a small part of the money he saved, and sent the rest to his family. Because my father's old asthma problem is getting worse and worse, he cannot stop taking the medicine. He studied medicine in order to be able to treat patients like his father in the future. At first, he did not have such a great ideal as hanging a pot to help the world. He only knew that medical treatment required a lot of money. If he could see a doctor, he would at least be able to help. One's own relatives. This was the result he got after spending a day or two thinking about filling out his application form after studying hard for twelve years. He wanted to be a doctor, so he chose the major of clinical medicine.

?Now many years later, when he learned that many alumni who chose popular majors such as computer and finance, some started their own businesses and became big bosses, and some became Internet companies with annual salaries of hundreds of thousands. Executive, he once regretted it. Because he discovered that making money is the last word. With money, he can treat his father's illness, afford a house, and give his loved ones better living conditions in return for their upbringing. But now, although I have studied medicine for many years, I have left my hometown and cannot be with my parents all the time. How can I treat the elderly man?

Yes, with the tide of reform and opening up, many changes have taken place in the countryside over the years, and the small village he was so familiar with has become more and more unfamiliar to him.

Many parents began to let them go out to work while they were still graduating from junior high school. Many people went to study automobile repair and maintenance and started a small business in the town. Some even traveled thousands of miles south to Guangzhou, Fujian, to earn money. Scrap products, doing small business, entering factories...

Of course, most of their lives are still tight. But the first batch of people who went out to work really made some money. The Liu Laogen family, the first family in their village to build a small foreign-style house, built it after their family earned money after working as a scrap collector in Fujian for more than ten years. Li Mazi's family at the west end of the village was also the first family in the village to buy a car. Li Mazi's son Li Wenming knew him. He was a frequent student who was among the top ten in the class. He liked to be naughty and mischievous. He was killed by his old man before he finished junior high school. Dad took me to Guangzhou.

However, in Li Wenming’s family, because his father was ill, the whole family lived on those lands. Before, you had to pay various taxes and fees when farming. The village called this "taxation and retention". Sometimes after a hard year, after deducting the "withdrawal", the cost of buying seeds and pesticides and other related expenses, we still lose money in a disaster year.

It doesn't matter if the year is too good, if the prices of agricultural products fall, we will still suffer losses.

In this way, Li Wenming and his family paid for Li Wenming's seven years of college through frugality. Although he had good grades and was even admitted to graduate school, he gave up because he needed to work early. When he sent his first month's salary to his family, he thought to himself that he could no longer take money from his family.

Today, his family is the only one in the village who still lives in a leaky tile house. And the old people in the village will no longer force their children to go to college. I was sent to study Errenzhuan a little early and was admitted to art school. I heard that you can make money faster if you are famous for your art! Most of them send their children and themselves to go out to work before the nine-year compulsory education is completed. Many of them are not forced by their parents, but because their children are tired of studying. Often the head teacher calls their parents who are thousands of miles away and says:

"Your son fought with so-and-so again, you better Come back."

"Your son fell in love at a young age, and his parents want to talk to you."

"Li Fang? No impression. Is he my student? Oh! Come to think of it, he’s your son? He hasn’t come to class for three months since he got into a fight last time!”

So, no one in the whole village is studying for college. Things are so desperate. As the only university student from a prestigious university that the village was once proud of, Li Wenming gradually became the most important founder of this trend without realizing it.

What makes Li Wenming even more uncomfortable is his parents’ pressure to get married.

Because of the serious imbalance in the male-female ratio caused by family planning, some smart people in the village discovered early on that there were very few female babies from all over the country. Therefore, many people arrange marriages for their sons early. Some of them are considered adults when they are seventeen years old and eighteen years old, and they are given a marriage. Li Wenming remembers that one year when he came home during the Spring Festival, his sister Li Wenzuan took him to see his niece. As the old saying goes: There are three types of unfilial piety, the greatest of which is not having children. Li Yuanchao saw that every family in the village had arranged life-long events for their children. There were many families where the children could be called grandpa, and he was naturally very anxious. After Li Wenming broke up with his undergraduate partner of five years after graduation, he was heartbroken and has never been in love again. After graduation, facing the cruel pressure of life, he no longer had time to think about the love between his children. He just wanted to make more money to treat his father. If he could buy another house in Hanbei City for his parents to live in in the future, That would be even better, so that he would definitely be able to cure his father's disease, or at least not let his disease get worse.

Li Wenming remembers an Internet joke his roommate Anan once showed him, describing the difficulties of his generation, especially those born in the 1980s, who came from poor families:

< p> "When we were in primary school, there was no money to go to college;

When we were in college, there was no money to go to primary school;

When we were not able to work, work was Assigned,

When we could work, we had to beat our heads and bleed so hard that we could barely find a job that would starve us to death;

When we couldn’t make money, the house was

When we can make money, we find that we can no longer afford a house;

When we are not old enough to get married, we can marry a wife by riding a bicycle.

When we reach the age of marriage, we can’t marry without a house or a car.”

Li Wenming is undoubtedly lucky because he met someone who doesn’t despise his background or his ordinaryness. The woman is also a nurse in the same hospital as him. Later, they had a child, and the hospital provided them with a small apartment of more than 60 square meters in the newly built staff dormitory building. As a parent, Li Wenming felt even more difficult about being a parent, so he felt even more guilty towards his parents in the countryside.

In Li Yuanchao's mind, no matter what others said, his son never failed to live up to his hopes. Later, Li Wenming got married again and he became a grandfather. When he heard his grandson calling out the word "Grandpa" in a confused voice, he smiled happily with his "silver hair as white as snow and his face as deep as black earth and ravines". This is also one of the few smiles that Li Wenming remembers his father having. Not only Li Yuanchao, it can be said that in the minds of Li Wenming's mother, sister, and uncle, Li Wenming has always been a person worthy of the Li family's pride.

“My son is a doctor!”

“My nephew is a doctor. Back then, Sun Yat-sen and Mr. Lu Xun were both doctors.”

“Your uncle is a doctor. You have to study hard in the future, like your uncle, you know?”

Later, his wife had to resign from the hospital and work as a housekeeper for a few years because she had to take care of the children. She was a housewife, and after her children went to kindergarten, she found a job in an eye hospital. In this way, the ordinary Li Wenming and his family of three live an ordinary life in Hanbei City.

Li Wenming lay down for a long time unable to fall asleep. He recovered his thoughts, got up and poured a glass of water. I quietly opened the door to my son's room and found that he had fallen asleep obediently after a day of turmoil, with a pool of drool left at the corner of his mouth. When he returned to the room, he saw the moonlight imprinted on his wife's face. His angelic and beautiful face still fascinated him.

He suddenly noticed that there were two crow's feet in the corners of his wife's eyes. He leaned down and kissed her gently at the corners of her eyes.

If there is an emergency, Li Wenming will receive a call from the hospital even at two or three o'clock in the middle of the night. I hope there will be no illness or disaster tonight and that everyone will be safe.

Li Wenming lay down gently and slowly fell asleep.