Writing / essay · 2018 · 中文
Zi, Bo淄,博
关于故乡淄博的个人知识:淄川与博山、夜市与工厂、蒲松龄与小米粥——「它们未必准确、极可能无用」。
我是淄博人,这一点在我二十多岁并且常常难以流畅地介绍自己时,是个我不需犹豫就可告诉陌生人的事实——它和学校、职业、自我定位等通通无关。更重要的是,淄博对多数人来说都不意味着什么。
我并不打算在此铺陈我对淄博的个人情感。正像一位朋友说的,少有谈“乡愁”的当代人细想过他们所谈的是否真是“故乡”,而“愁”往往过早地主宰了表述,总之,人、时间、地域之间复杂的关系被一律压平。何况,我的经验显示我的同辈们并不恋家,大多顺从了父母的期待或自己打定主意地去了新的城市,仿佛“离开”才是这里城市经验的正当部分(如我,15岁就离开了淄博)。在这篇不希望过长的文章里,我想分享的是我对淄博的个人知识,它们未必准确、极可能无用,但当你开车堵在柳泉路上或在张博路上飞驰时,会有些展开遐思的起点。
一
我生在1992年,十岁前长在淄川,也就是“淄博”里的“淄”,“博”是相邻的博山,一个繁华已过的旧都。初中在语文课本里读到蒲松龄的《狼三则》时,8开课本下方写着“蒲松龄……山东淄水人,现今淄川”,想到不远处的聊斋宫(我曾失足落水到一个深湖中)和狐仙园,尚是儿童的我隐约望见了灰头土脸的小城的前世,前世里有酸腐文人写下的“般阳八景”,水光山色两相宜,草长莺飞,平湖落月。
但当时现实生活的景象,淄川可能和任何改革开放早期的中国东部城镇都相似,白天人们如梦初醒般地开工厂、搞零售、摸索政策和胆量的边界,夜里汇聚在狭长拥挤、布满鲜艳长裙和尼龙袜的夜市上。夜市一边往往是占领草坪的大排档,男人们脱光上衣压住轻浮的白色塑料椅,目光越过青岛啤酒、酸辣土豆丝和炭火烧烤望向天际线处的工厂,从傍晚凉风习习时就开始消磨夏夜;另一边是优雅些的交际舞,一台收音机拢住一个舞池,慢三、平四,男女搭配不够了,两个女人也会抱着跳,那阵子拉丁、探戈还不为人所知,女人和男人们步伐雀跃但走得并不快。冬天,人们齐整地遁入屋内,不管是力求体面的大酒楼还是烟火浓重的炒鸡店(我们靠近莱芜,土鸡肉劲道),都会配上白酒,当时还流行房间内自带卡拉OK,酒醉兴起时,红了脸的男人拔起桌上花瓶的假花,红花绿叶献于麦克风前,嘶吼声便暂时中断。父辈们散席时的争抢付账和落座时推让主宾位序一样,毫不含糊,都有颇具观赏性的肢体拉扯。
姥姥家在淄川体育场附近,向东上坡会到淄博矿务局的大门口,门内是个小型社会,医院、剧院、学校,凑在一起。“淄博”就是因为1950年代这个煤矿开发单位的设立而出现的新行政区域,在此之前,德国人和日本人先后在这里搞过开采(据说90年代时德国的工程师还联系过矿务局,嘱咐要安全检修当年他们的先民盖下的房屋)。实际上,即便淄博后来拓展为五区三县,淄博的经济发展也一直围绕着资源开采和轻重工业,普通人的一辈子乃至一家几代人的生活也常常和淄博矿业集团、临淄石化、山东铝厂、鲁泰纺织这些核心经济体的命运纠缠在一起。今天淄博本地的矿都已挖空,只留下巨大的锥形煤渣山。矿务局的技术团队跑去全国各地承包挖矿,在工厂大院长大的子弟也大多借着父辈们攒下的资本离开了黑色的煤渣。
没有大变化的是矿务局门口的洪山镇集市,日子是阴历每逢二、七。小时候姥姥经常带我赶集,摊位喧哗热烈,绵延千米,姥姥则精挑细选,买足一筐菜回家。即便2000年后,超市慢慢进入小城,“赶大集”仍让人充满期待,这既像盘算许久的远征,又是重逢熟悉的时刻,比如年前一定要上买盗版印刷的万年历、新年画和给灶王爷上贡的糖瓜,生活以此循环。糖瓜则在供奉后分给小孩子,他们常常在啃糖瓜时掉落了乳牙。
二
从淄川沿着张博路开车去张店,经过杨寨会发现打印着磁砖的广告牌连绵不断,似乎所有的地板砖和洁具公司都在此展销。杨寨的确是北方的建材和工业陶瓷中心,和广东佛山齐名,以前每次走到这儿都要赶紧摇上车窗户,要不就会有一嘴粉尘,污水污染也多,印着着白瓷砖的广告牌上总挂着污浊雨水流过的痕迹。这两年污染治理被列入了政绩考核,地板砖工厂被强制迁出,听说有些是去了河北。
住在淄川时,去张店意味着去市府——一个集结着百货大楼、各种“市”(市中心医院、市政府、淄博宾馆)和火车站的城区。那时淄博商厦的地位无可撼动,它意味着上得台面的端庄和丰富,而我对大多数牌子的最早认识,比如妈妈身上的“鄂尔多斯”白色羊绒衫(今天伦敦很冷,我穿了它),都来自这里。更不要说我7岁时,商厦底层最先开了麦当劳,洋气的干妹妹办了场生日聚会,我在末座也分得了些麦当劳叔叔送的纪念周边。商厦旁边的美食街并没有很多美食,倒有些最早开的潮流小店,它们后来蔓延到了王府井商业中心(重名罢了,张店城西还有义乌小商品城,卖得并不便宜),和后来进驻淄博的银座商城连接在一起。这一片常常堵得水泄不通。
我读小学的最后一年,全家搬到了张店,那时人民公园就在我家不远处扩建,我毕业的那个暑假,正好重新开园。那时觉得人民公园巨大无比,我和伙伴们约在那里见面时,常因为园子太大又没有手机而错失对方。有一个湖心岛,几只孔雀住着,常发出婴孩般的叫声,如今那里只有长高了的树丛。公园临着共青团路,市委和市政府都在这条路上,路边种着挺拔的法国梧桐,树高到人会觉得自己渺小了一点。我仍然以为这里是张店城里最浪漫壮阔的地方,毕竟有两列树,历史悠久。如果你来,可以背着手在这里走一走。不过如果是四月时就绕开这里吧,都是顺着强劲春风扑面而来的白絮。
共青团路往西走,会到步行街,这里因为靠近理工大学的旧校区,简欧式的灰色花岗岩门楼里开过许多书店、咖啡厅,但可能因为风水不佳都没留存下来,总弥漫着一股荒芜感。淄博作为一个后工业城市很颓丧,热闹时太粗糙,所以也不长久。我去武汉时陡然觉得那儿最适合我乡愁,恐怕是武汉的豪迈尺度、众多的工业遗迹、以及东湖的辽阔水波和废墟堤岸更接近我对淄博的幻觉——既颓丧又多情。武汉朋克多,淄博则出产摇滚乐手,除了博山人谢天笑之外,鲍家街43号、逃跑计划等很多乐队也有或有过淄博的吉他和贝斯手。我读初中时班里大概有四分之一的人在学吉他,时代进步了,一代代吉他老师在选曲上更为开放。我的朋友谢抗抗曾说过一个故事,她大学暑假去姥姥家,听到读初中的表弟在正在家里练吉他,表弟一开口,唱的是“昨天晚上我可能死了,怎么死的我也忘了”。
三
购物商场这几年在张店井喷式增长,我回淄博时常惊愕这里何以有如此多财富需要花费。华润万象汇开了之后,一线城市的常见品牌在张店都可以买到了,因为城区不大,逛街甚至比北京方便。今年夏天,我在大众点评上看到一位滨州人点评了张店的海底捞火锅,说自己下班后和朋友驱车两小时到了淄博,吃得满足,尽兴而归。那一刻我意识到,淄博的身躯和活力已经超出了我的记忆,在我没经历也不关心它的日子里,它并未变老,而是和我一样蔓延着和外面的世界融为一体,成为彼此陌生的样子。如今的500万的人口中已有如此多的外乡人以本地人的方式使用着它,让它在工业衰退之后继续以消费的方式扩张着。
初中后,我离开淄博去了外地。我那时不太爱吃,食物也不在我的思念里,但是去了外面才发现,喔,原来西红柿鸡蛋,可以红是红,黄是黄,而非一片酱色。我家没有博山人,不过做饭还是有博山菜的影子,大概一切菜都是可以加酱油的,下酒时也爱切成薄片的博山香肠,入冬后阳台上会放一盆鲅鱼、海带、猪肉、白菜熬煮在一起又凝结了的博山酥锅。博山菜的材料都很常见,红肉居多,虽然不太精致但用料足、又舍得花时间调制。有道菜叫豆腐箱子,豆腐切块,油炸后一面掀盖、内部挖空、塞入剁碎的肉、木耳和海米,冬天里常和排骨做成热汤,加许多胡椒。二十多岁到了国外,我常在冬天冰手冰脚的时候想念一碗羊杂汤、出油的博山炸肉还有随时可以挖出一碗放到微波炉叮热的酥锅,意识到自己的胃,属于山,属于肉。
我爸妈喜欢“进山”,而淄博在丘陵地带,山离城并不远,往往开车一小时之后就进入了一片山林,它们并不高峻,更适合耕作和游逸。在山里时,爸妈常变得矫情,我和他们的重要对话也往往是一家人开车在盘山公路上时间仿佛卡壳的时候发生。爸妈轮换开车,我们穿过隧道,驶过桥梁,路过露出巨大白色伤口的山体——那是开采石灰的作坊,炸出来的。他们会望着山,忍不出地说起这是哪里,有什么故友或者奇人异事,就像我在这里写着,想象我在和你一起旅行时会跟你说些什么。每次有外地朋友造访淄博,我想推荐的一多半其实都是丘陵路段上穿行的经验,你可以听这里的过往,到农家乐吃炒鸡,在河边停下,望水底的鱼。
在北京的时候,爸妈会给我寄成箱的沂源苹果、猕猴桃,偶尔有西河煎饼和香肠,不过那时并不珍惜反到觉得收货如山倒,一收到箱子就分装进塑料袋派送朋友。是这两年了,我才不再拒绝把行李箱装满新打的小米、散装称好的肉干。淄博火车站我已轻车熟路,知道躲不过要抬着箱子上下,还好,后面还要拖到北京机场,从伦敦的传送带上拽下,再举上三层楼梯到家。开始做饭以后,我才注意到熬小米粥时会有一层薄薄的米油,它轻飘飘地浮动在金黄的米汤上。
如果你到淄博之后,用了大众点评找到了博山菜、KTV、大商场却仍不满足,甚至在体验过咖啡馆、酒吧、游戏厅后仍有空虚,可以在路上瞎逛逛。我觉得淄博和大多数中国的城市一样无聊,但你可以尝试怀想一下自己成长的地方,然后在这里,观察生活。
Machine translation (AI) of the Chinese original, not yet reviewed by the author. Please cite the original.
I am from Zibo. In my twenties, when I often struggled to introduce myself fluently, this was one fact I could tell strangers without hesitation – it had nothing to do with school, career or how I saw myself. More importantly, Zibo means nothing much to most people.
I don’t intend to lay out my personal feelings about Zibo here. As a friend once said, few people today who talk about xiangchou – homesickness – have thought carefully about whether what they are talking about is really “home”, and the “sickness” tends to take over the telling too early; in short, the complicated relationships between people, time and place all get flattened. Besides, my experience suggests that people of my generation aren’t particularly attached to home. Most, going along with their parents’ expectations or having made up their own minds, left for new cities, as if “leaving” were the proper part of the urban experience here (like me: I left Zibo at fifteen). In this piece, which I’d rather not make too long, what I want to share is my personal knowledge of Zibo. It may not be accurate and is very possibly useless, but when you are stuck in traffic on Liuquan Road or speeding along Zhangbo Road, it might give you somewhere for your thoughts to wander off from.
I
I was born in 1992 and grew up until the age of ten in Zichuan – the “Zi” in “Zibo”. The “Bo” is neighbouring Boshan, an old capital whose prosperity has passed. When I read Pu Songling’s “Three Tales of Wolves” in my middle-school Chinese textbook, the note at the bottom of the large-format page said, “Pu Songling … of Zishui, Shandong, today’s Zichuan”. Thinking of the Liaozhai Palace not far away (where I once slipped and fell into a deep lake) and the Fox Fairy Garden, my child self caught a faint glimpse of the dusty little town’s past life – a past life in which pedantic literati wrote about the “Eight Views of Banyang”, water and mountains complementing each other, grass growing tall and orioles flying, the moon setting over a still lake.
But the reality of life back then was that Zichuan was probably like any town in eastern China in the early years of Reform and Opening. By day, people – as if just waking from a dream – started factories, went into retail, and felt out the limits of policy and of their own nerve; at night they converged on narrow, crowded night markets strung with brightly coloured long skirts and nylon stockings. On one side of the night market there were usually food stalls that had taken over the lawn, where men stripped to the waist weighed down flimsy white plastic chairs, their gaze drifting past Tsingtao beer, hot-and-sour shredded potatoes and charcoal barbecue to the factories on the skyline, whiling away the summer night from the first cool breezes of early evening. On the other side was the more elegant ballroom dancing: one radio held together one dance floor – slow waltz, slow four-step – and when there weren’t enough men and women to pair up, two women would dance together. Latin and tango were still unknown then, and the men and women stepped lightly but not very fast. In winter, people retreated neatly indoors. Whether it was a grand restaurant striving for respectability or a smoky stir-fried-chicken joint (we are close to Laiwu, and the free-range chicken there is chewy and firm), baijiu always came with the meal. Private rooms with their own karaoke were in fashion then; when drink got the better of them, red-faced men would pull the fake flowers out of the vase on the table and present the red blooms and green leaves in front of the microphone, and the bellowing would stop for a moment. The fathers’ generation fought over the bill at the end of a meal with the same rigour with which they deferred to one another over the seat of honour at the beginning – both involved a good deal of physical tugging worth watching.
My grandma’s home was near the Zichuan Stadium. Heading east uphill, you came to the gate of the Zibo Mining Bureau. Inside was a small society: hospital, theatre, school, all packed together. “Zibo” itself was a new administrative region created in the 1950s because of the establishment of this coal-mining unit. Before that, the Germans and then the Japanese had carried out mining here (it’s said that in the 1990s German engineers even contacted the Mining Bureau, reminding them to carry out safety checks on the buildings their forebears had put up). In fact, even after Zibo expanded into five districts and three counties, its economic development always revolved around resource extraction and light and heavy industry. The lives of ordinary people – and often of several generations of a family – were entangled with the fortunes of core economic players such as Zibo Mining Group, Linzi Petrochemical, Shandong Aluminium and Lutai Textile. Today the local mines are exhausted, leaving only huge conical mountains of coal slag. The Mining Bureau’s technical teams went off all over the country to contract mining work, and the children who grew up in the factory compounds mostly used the capital their parents had saved to leave the black cinders behind.
What hasn’t changed much is the Hongshan Town market outside the Mining Bureau gate, held on every day of the lunar month ending in two or seven. When I was little my grandma often took me to the market. The stalls were loud and lively and stretched for a kilometre, and my grandma would pick carefully, buying a full basket of vegetables to take home. Even after 2000, when supermarkets slowly arrived in the little town, “going to the big market” still filled people with anticipation. It was like a long-planned expedition and also a moment of reunion with the familiar: before the New Year you had to go and buy a pirated perpetual calendar, new New Year pictures, and malt-sugar melons to offer to the Kitchen God. Life went round in this cycle. After the offering, the sugar melons were handed out to the children, who often lost milk teeth biting into them.
II
Driving from Zichuan along Zhangbo Road to Zhangdian, you pass Yangzhai, where billboards printed with tiles go on and on, as if every floor-tile and sanitary-ware company were exhibiting here. Yangzhai really is the north’s centre for building materials and industrial ceramics, as famous as Foshan in Guangdong. In the past, every time we got here we had to wind up the car windows quickly or end up with a mouthful of dust. There was a lot of wastewater pollution too, and the billboards printed with white tiles always bore the streaks of dirty rain. In the last couple of years, pollution control has been written into officials’ performance reviews, and the tile factories have been forced out – some, I hear, to Hebei.
When we lived in Zichuan, going to Zhangdian meant going to “the city” – a district where the department store, all the “municipal” things (the Municipal Central Hospital, the municipal government, the Zibo Hotel) and the railway station were gathered. Back then the Zibo Commercial Building’s status was unassailable: it stood for presentable dignity and abundance, and my earliest knowledge of most brands – such as the white Erdos cashmere sweater my mum wore (it’s cold in London today, and I’m wearing it) – came from there. Not to mention that when I was seven, a McDonald’s opened on its ground floor, my fashionable god-sister held a birthday party there, and from my seat at the far end of the table I too got some of the souvenirs Ronald McDonald handed out. The food street next to the Commercial Building didn’t actually have much food, but it did have some of the earliest trendy little shops, which later spread to the Wangfujing commercial centre (just a shared name – there’s also a Yiwu small-commodities city in the west of Zhangdian, not especially cheap) and joined up with the Ginza Mall that came to Zibo later. This area was often gridlocked.
In my last year of primary school, the whole family moved to Zhangdian. People’s Park was being expanded not far from our home then, and it reopened just in the summer I graduated. People’s Park seemed enormous to me then; when my friends and I arranged to meet there, we often missed each other because the park was too big and we didn’t have mobile phones. There was an island in the middle of the lake where a few peacocks lived and often let out cries like babies. Now there’s nothing there but taller clumps of trees. The park faces Gongqingtuan Road, where both the municipal Party committee and the municipal government are located, and the road is lined with upright London plane trees, so tall that you feel a little smaller. I still think this is the most romantic and expansive place in Zhangdian – after all, there are two rows of trees, and they have a long history. If you come, you can walk here with your hands clasped behind your back. But if it’s April, go round it: it’s all white catkins blowing into your face on the strong spring wind.
Heading west along Gongqingtuan Road you reach the pedestrian street. Because it’s near the old campus of Shandong University of Technology, many bookshops and cafés have opened behind its grey granite gateways in a simplified European style, but perhaps because of bad feng shui none of them survived, and there is always an air of desolation. As a post-industrial city, Zibo is dejected; when it’s lively it’s too rough, so the liveliness never lasts. When I went to Wuhan I suddenly felt it was the place that best suited my homesickness – probably because Wuhan’s bold scale, its many industrial remains and the wide waters and ruined embankments of East Lake came closer to my fantasy of Zibo: dejected yet full of feeling. Wuhan has lots of punks; Zibo produces rock musicians. Besides Xie Tianxiao from Boshan, many bands – Baojia Street 43, Escape Plan and others – have or have had guitarists and bassists from Zibo. When I was in middle school, about a quarter of my class was learning guitar. As times progressed, generation after generation of guitar teachers grew more open in their choice of songs. My friend Xie Kangkang once told me a story: during a university summer holiday she went to her grandma’s and heard her cousin, then in middle school, practising guitar at home. The moment he opened his mouth, he sang, “Last night I might have died, and I’ve forgotten how I died.”
III
In the past few years shopping malls have mushroomed in Zhangdian. When I go back to Zibo I’m often astonished that there is so much wealth here needing to be spent. Since the MixC World mall opened, the brands common in first-tier cities can all be bought in Zhangdian, and because the city centre is small, shopping is even more convenient than in Beijing. This summer I saw a review on Dianping by someone from Binzhou of the Haidilao hotpot in Zhangdian: after work, they and their friends drove two hours to Zibo, ate their fill and went home happy. In that moment I realised that Zibo’s body and vitality have outgrown my memory. In the days I didn’t live through and didn’t care about, it hasn’t grown old; like me, it has been spreading out and merging with the world outside, each of us becoming unfamiliar to the other. Of its population of five million, so many are now outsiders using the city the way locals do, allowing it to keep expanding through consumption after industrial decline.
After middle school I left Zibo for elsewhere. I wasn’t much of an eater then, and food wasn’t among the things I missed, but once away I discovered – oh, so tomato-and-egg stir-fry can be red and yellow, rather than one brown mush. There are no Boshan people in my family, but our cooking still carries traces of Boshan cuisine: roughly speaking, soy sauce can go into every dish. We liked thinly sliced Boshan sausage with drinks, and once winter came there would be a basin of Boshan suguo on the balcony – mackerel, kelp, pork and cabbage stewed together and then set. Boshan cuisine uses very ordinary ingredients, mostly red meat; it isn’t especially refined, but it is generous with ingredients and willing to spend time on preparation. There’s a dish called tofu boxes: the tofu is cut into blocks and deep-fried, then a lid is lifted on one side, the inside hollowed out and stuffed with minced meat, wood-ear mushrooms and dried shrimp. In winter it’s often made into a hot soup with pork ribs and plenty of pepper. When I went abroad in my twenties, on winter days when my hands and feet were freezing I often longed for a bowl of lamb offal soup, oily Boshan fried pork, and suguo that you could scoop into a bowl at any moment and zap in the microwave – and I realised that my stomach belongs to the mountains, and to meat.
My parents like “going into the mountains”. Zibo sits in hilly country, and the mountains aren’t far from the city; often, after an hour’s drive, you’re in the forest. They aren’t high or steep – better for farming and for wandering. In the mountains my parents often turn sentimental, and my important conversations with them tend to happen while the three of us are driving along winding mountain roads, when time seems to jam. They take turns driving; we go through tunnels, cross bridges, pass hillsides showing huge white wounds – lime quarries, blasted open. They look at the mountains and can’t help saying where this is, which old friends or remarkable people and strange events are connected with it – just as I’m writing here, imagining what I would tell you if we were travelling together. Whenever friends from elsewhere visit Zibo, more than half of what I want to recommend is actually the experience of travelling through the hills: you can hear about the past here, eat stir-fried chicken at a farmhouse restaurant, stop by a river and watch the fish on the riverbed.
When I was in Beijing, my parents would send me boxes of Yiyuan apples and kiwis, and now and then Xihe pancakes and sausages. I didn’t value them then; if anything, I felt buried under the deliveries, and as soon as a box arrived I’d divide it into plastic bags to hand out to friends. It’s only in the last couple of years that I’ve stopped refusing to fill my suitcase with freshly milled millet and loose-weighed dried meat. I know Zibo station well now, and I know I can’t avoid carrying the case up and down stairs. That’s fine – after that it still has to be dragged to Beijing airport, heaved off the carousel in London, and lifted up three flights of stairs to home. It was only after I started cooking that I noticed that when you simmer millet porridge a thin layer of rice oil forms, floating lightly on the golden broth.
If, once you’re in Zibo and have used Dianping to find Boshan food, KTV and big malls, you still aren’t satisfied – if even after cafés, bars and arcades you still feel empty – you can just wander the streets. I think Zibo, like most Chinese cities, is boring. But you can try recalling the place where you grew up, and then, here, observe life.