Yu Junjian: Curtains

Reading before going to bed, I read a passage from Mr. Yang Jiang: \”Don\’t peek at other people\’s curtains. It\’s better to hang one yourself, whether it\’s a gorgeous one or a simple one.\”

I am in elementary school When I was a kid, there was a classmate who was very reticent. One time, a study group went to my house to do homework. When he heard my mother speak Jiangsu dialect, he suddenly started talking to me more. He lowered his head in embarrassment and told me that my mother’s accent was the same as his father’s.

Later, he rarely invited me to visit him Home. His family lived deep in a small alley. There were no gutters in the alley, that is, no sewers, so sewage flowed across the street and everywhere. Among a row of low wooden houses inhabited by more than a dozen families, his house is the most conspicuous one because there is a snow-white curtain hanging on the window.

Later I learned that he was dependent on his father. living together. His father opened a tailor shop and worked as a small boss in the old society. He was an unpopular person at that time.The mother, who was a local, left them.

He saw me noticing his snow-white When I was hanging the curtains, I blushed all of a sudden, lowered my head in embarrassment and said to me, I asked my dad not to hang the curtains, but he insisted on hanging them. The neighbors next door laughed at us, saying that this was a bourgeois way of thinking.

While reading before going to bed last night, I suddenly read a passage from Mr. Yang Jiang. She said: \”People are hanging curtains. Don\’t peek at them. I\’d rather hang one myself, whether it\’s a gorgeous one or a simple one.\” That’s okay. If you don’t bother to hang it, or are too lazy to hang it, you might as well leave the window open. However, you have to respect other people’s curtains.”

Young people may not know that in those days, whether or not to hang curtains and what kind of curtains to hang was not only disrespectful to others. A simple question at home is a standard for likes and dislikes in the world, and it is also a sharp tool that can be used to dig out the roots of thoughts.

I dreamed about this classmate last night. With a blurry face, he lowered his head and said to me: \”Jun Jian, I don\’t want to study anymore.\”

I woke up from my dream and remembered that when I entered junior high school, we were in the same class. A few days after school started, he really said this to me. I remember that the next day, he did not come to school again.

That was 1968.

We never met again, and it has been more than fifty years. (Yu Junjian)