When I was still studying in Wuhan, I used to walk along the Hankou riverfront, where old buildings from the last century still stand. Those decades of war and upheaval are faintly visible in the facades, and what they carry is not only the memory of that stretch of riverbank but the memory of Wuhan people in those years. What carries my own memory, though, is a three-room earthen house belonging to my grandfather.
When I was just learning to speak and walk, my parents were busy at work, so I spent most of my time at my grandfather’s. I liked to run barefoot in the small courtyard outside the house. In one corner stood a thick catalpa tree with a scar more than a meter high—one year a runaway tractor had struck it and torn a piece away. Even in the hottest summer the courtyard stayed cool. Grandfather would take a palm-leaf fan, tell us old stories, and enjoy the breeze moving through the yard.
The kitchen was always the most distinctive room. A black chimney breathed on the roof and every so often coughed a little smoke back at us. The earthen wall beside the stove had been smoked hard, as hard as my grandfather’s backbone; perhaps every inch of the earth had been steeped in soot. Besides the earthen wall there was the earthen stove. Food cooked in the old iron wok over that stove always tasted best—maybe a bit of soot falling from the chimney added seasoning. It was not only I but my father as a boy who lived on that stove and that old wok.
As a child I must have been restless. I liked to pick at whatever I saw. There were always bits of wheat straw and rice straw poking out of the wall, and I would bend my little fingernails and pick at them. Eventually I asked Grandfather why the wall was full of straw. He said mud on its own was soft, good-for-nothing stuff; add straw and it held together better. Once tamped and dried, it could carry the main roof beam.
Behind my grandfather’s house lived a neighbor. The wall along the irrigation ditch had leaned badly, but three wooden posts had been propped against it, and it had stood that way for years. Grandfather said the family could not afford to repair the house then and had to use wood to hold it up. They never expected that holding-up to last seven or eight years, and nothing had gone wrong. Not long ago, when my sister went back to the village to get married, that neighbor had already built a new house—a handsome three-story Western-style house. Grandfather said the three wooden posts had become the door frame, and the earthen wall had been used in the foundation and as fill. It had held up its last bit of backbone, buried underground, keeping watch over that family for a lifetime.
Grandfather says he cannot get used to the apartment buildings we live in. He always feels he cannot breathe: too stuffy in summer, too closed-in in winter. Old earthen houses are better, warm in winter and cool in summer. I think the mud and my grandfather came out of the land together, and after years of wind and rain their breathing has perhaps long since fallen into step. We do not quite understand it. A few earthen walls are no longer just shelter from wind and rain. Even a lump scraped from the wall at random has grit; even mixed into water, its grains stay distinct and refuse to muddle together with the rest.
These earthen walls look frail, but inside they are tough. Their warm-in-winter, cool-in-summer nature is just like that of my grandfather’s generation. Even a life plastered from mud must fill itself with straw and wheat stalks, must poke out now and then, filling every corner. Even if the earthen house sways and collapses, they can use their hands to pinch out another future; once it is tamped down, there is another kind of life.
In my grandfather’s village, new houses have risen one after another, but the earthen walls at our old home are still there. Grandfather says they are what the ancestors left; they should not be moved lightly, because they are needed to anchor the roots. We understand, really. He has lived on Chinese soil for more than eighty years, and his backbone has long been leaning straight against that earthen wall, set into it so firmly that it cannot be shaken. He cannot get used to the city, cannot get used to cement, cannot get used to this stuffy, noisy world of ours.