White Clouds on the Ridge Know No Past or Present; the Fairy in the Cave Comes and Goes
As of today, I have been in my hometown for eight days, the longest I have stayed here in the last decade. Tomorrow evening I will say goodbye to my father and return to Beijing; this time I have kept him company for a full nine days, exactly as planned. To be honest, I am quite reluctant to leave the countryside and return to bustling Beijing.
Country life is simple and quiet; apart from a few more mosquitoes, everything is comfortable. It has been raining often in Huanggang, Hubei, lately, so although it is the dog days of summer, it is not hot. At home I read books and chat with my father every day, very relaxed. When the weather is cool, the whole family rides electric scooters to scenic spots in our county or the neighboring one; during this trip we also visited Li Shizhen's hometown once more.
Over the past semester I finished the Western-medicine course in Pathology at school; during this visit home I also read through the 10th edition of the People's Medical Publishing House Pathology textbook again. As I read, I sighed from the bottom of my heart: my father is truly an easy elder. None of the various major diseases mentioned in Pathology has befallen him, and his brothers and sisters are also almost untouched by them, which is why they are generally long-lived.
Recalling when I first started studying medicine, I was quite critical of my elders' lifestyles based on the various views I had learned from textbooks, always trying to teach them to adjust their diet and habits. But time is silent; twenty years later, these elders of mine have, through their longevity, silently refuted all my nagging.
In my family, apart from my grandmother and aunt who have religious beliefs, no one else does. We are not strict vegetarians, but the family's overall diet and routine can be summarized as: low salt, low fat, low protein, mainly vegetarian, much labor, little fuss. At present, not a single elder on my father's side has the "three highs" (hypertension, hyperlipidemia, hyperglycemia), nor respiratory disease; the incidence of malignant tumors is extremely low. Though there is anemia, these old people are still as robust as middle-aged adults. Two of my father's uncles passed away in their nineties a few years ago, both working until shortly before death and finally passing away peacefully without illness.
My brother and I are typical small-town exam-products who left the village in the 1990s after college and made our way to first-tier cities. I now study and practice medicine; what I learn, see, and hear is mostly health-related. I return home several times a year to visit relatives, and I still share a strong spiritual bond with my hometown.
Now I actually hope that one day I can return home for good, following the traditional way of life of my ancestors. The old family house is still standing; I had it repaired and reinforced a couple of years ago, so it should not collapse within 50 years. My father has turned our courtyard into an orchard plus vegetable garden; the various seasonal vegetables he grows are more than enough, and he often gives some away.
The village gives every elderly person over 60 a subsidy of a few hundred yuan a year; together with the over 2,000 yuan in annual rent from our few mu of farmland, my father can support himself on that alone. We children are not useless to him, but even without us he really could survive.
Our house is built on the highest slope in the village. On a clear day, looking into the distance, my father says you can see Mount Lu in the neighboring province—but we small-town exam-products, having done too many practice problems, have long since lost our vision and could not possibly see that far. Though we cannot see Mount Lu, we can see the red sun rising in the morning, the drifting white clouds and the endless blue sky, and the rolling mountains in the distance. The world changes, but these things remain unchanged through the ages.
Eight days ago I was still in Beijing, where the daily news was full of war, predictions of AI replacing humans, worrying epidemics, and countless scandals; the topics friends discussed were full of pressure and anxiety. Every day I also read many medical examination reports: hepatic and renal insufficiency, abnormal blood counts, thrombosis, tumors, ascites—it is hard to remain untouched by such information.
The day before yesterday, my wife and I climbed to the top of a hill near our county seat, where there is a Fairy Maiden Cave enshrining several clay Bodhisattvas. The couplet at the entrance reads learnedly: "White clouds on the ridge know no past or present; the fairy in the cave comes and goes as she pleases."
Standing at the mouth of the Fairy Maiden Cave, holding my wife's hand, gazing at the buildings and roads far below at the foot of the mountain, I silently savored this couplet. As if reading my mind, my wife blurted out: "After I retire, let's go back to the hometown together and live like this!"
At that moment, bamboo groves lined both sides of the mountain path, a cool breeze blew, and a long-tailed lizard scurried quickly past us. Everything was quiet and beautiful.
At that instant I suddenly recalled a passage from the film One Round of Bright Moon, in which Master Hongyi said to his disciple Feng Zikai: "Let the wind in the air, the insects in the grass, and the cicadas in the trees tell it to you." Perhaps certain moments in life can only be expressed in this way.