The Seasons of the Black Earth

Even after all these years, Yun Jie is still that same stretch of black earth, but everything and everyone has changed. The flowers look the same year after year, but the people are different with each passing year. Those of us born in the eighties, we watched black-and-white television and outdoor movies, rode our old twenty-eight-inch bicycles, used cornstalks as sugarcane, snacked on bean buns, stole melons at the village entrance, and caught fish and shrimp in the little river. It all feels as if it happened yesterday, yet it has become a distant memory. The watch we drew on our wrists as children never moved, but it still took our happy days with it. When we were little, we wanted to buy everything in the corner shop, but had no money in our pockets. Now that we’re grown, we can buy anything in the supermarket, yet we don’t know what to buy to make ourselves happy. As children, we’d cry until we started laughing. As adults, we laugh until we start crying. We can never go back to those days. All we can do is say through our tears, “Being young was wonderful!”