Corps Years

I was born in the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a company that cannot be found on the map. There are no mountains and no sea. But in October, there was a white patch of land that was wider than the sea - the cotton fields were in bloom. It was so white that you couldn't see the edge, and it turned into silver waves when the wind blew. From the age of one, he crawled on the ridges of cotton fields, to the age of seven, when he carried a cloth bag bigger than himself and dug into the cotton bushes; from the spring when he sowed cotton seeds with his parents, to the autumn, when he sat in the tractor bucket and sang songs and ran to the fields. In my childhood, I grew up on the "chugging" tractor, was fed by the smell of lunch in the field, and slept on my mother's back. In this book, there are the company's cooking smoke, the school's red scarf, and the afternoon of fishing in the anti-seepage canal; there is the embarrassment of not being able to reach the cotton branches when picking up cotton for the first time; there is the evil smile of secretly stuffing cotton wool into the necks of classmates; there is the creaking scale when weighing cotton under the sunset; there are also the increasingly rickety backs of the parents, and the tears of a teenager when he carries his luggage and looks back at the silver sea at the foot of the Tianshan Mountains. From the underground nest to the adobe house, from the cotton field to the examination room, from the little one lying on his mother's back to the age of eighteen when he left home - this is the common memory of a generation of children of the Corps, and it is also a long letter written to the oasis watered by youth. If you grew up in a place called "The Company," you'll see yourself here. If you haven't, you will see that there is a kind of childhood called Xinjiang Corps.