Past Events in Xucun

Everyone has a hometown in his heart. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far away, no matter good or bad, rich or poor, my hometown is always in my heart. It is neither far nor near, and I will never leave it. The good things and the bad things in childhood are engraved in the deepest part of my memory. It doesn't matter if I don't think about it, it just makes my heart hurt when I think about it. In Xucun, my hometown, due to the severe flood in 1998, the Shiliping embankment burst. It was later designated as a permanent flood storage embankment. All the immigrants built a town and moved to the hills ten miles away. All that remains of the old site of Xucun are stretches of deserted housing estates and scattered broken houses that seem to collapse in the wind. In recent years, due to the land leveling and integration of villages and townships, Xucun has ceased to exist and has only become a home in memory. My father has been asking me to move several ancestral tombs on the old site of Xucun to the mountains, but I have been undecided. Xucun is gone, and if the ancestral graves are moved up again, the connection with Xucun will be completely severed. The past events of Xucun are just the epitaph I made in my heart for my hometown. Yanbo, Sanmao, Weimin, Renxiu, Xiuju, Qiuxiang, Yuanboda, Zhiyier, Secretary Peng, Uncle Nan, Uncle Qingshan, Uncle Chuyuan, etc. Some are my own experiences and those of my family, some are familiar people in my memory, many of whom I can hardly contact anymore, some have never even seen each other again, and some have passed away. It's just their teenage years, and their stories from that time can never be erased from my mind. The older they get, the clearer they become. The purpose of Xucun Past is to record these people, these things, so that I dare not forget them and ruminate on them late at night.