The Time Here Is Not Too Long.

Synopsis of the story of "The Time Is Not Too Long Here" My name is Yu Xi. Xi is the break of dawn. Grandpa said that the night he gave birth to me, he brought me back from the toilet and saw Dongfang turning white. At the east end of Yufang Old Street, there are blue brick houses in front and back. My great-great-great-grandfather was a private school teacher, my grandfather taught Chinese, and my grandmother was a cook at the village banquet and the women's director. The sound of books for four generations and the fireworks in half the room. There was a canteen in front of me, and the sound of mahjong in the back. By the time I was born, the sound of the joystick of "The King of Fighters 97" in the game arcade was mixed with the crackling sound of the keyboard of the Internet cafe. My dad is a third-generation normal school student. During my internship in Nanchang in 1993, I cut off the phone line in my mother's dormitory. My mother came from Wuhan, my grandfather wore a military uniform, and people chasing her lined up outside the cafeteria. My dad kept busy delivering breakfast, four servings at a time, and took care of all her roommates. The senior who had broken up with her for half a year had received busy signals on all seventeen calls. In 1995, the commander's daughter married into Yufang. Half of the wooden boards of the aqua toilet collapsed, and she cried on the wedding night. There was an argument later, and then he picked me up and left. Wuhan, Beijing, Shanghai—the headquarters compound, tube towers, and pavilions. I have friends everywhere I go, and lose contact in the early morning every time I leave. I am soft-spoken and quick-tempered. In the second grade of junior high school, the boy who said, "Your mother might as well go back to Wuhan" was pushed down the steps and was given a demerit. Grandpa doesn't scold me. On the day the old house was demolished, he squatted beside the ruins and waited for me. He said: When you were a child, you would cry here. I would carry you to the toilet and read the poem, and you would stop crying after reading it five times. After graduating in 2019, I returned to town and converted the second floor of the Internet cafe into a library. Grandpa donated two boxes of military books, grandma made three copies of handwritten recipes, grandpa brought 372 old books, and wrapped them in newspapers for forty years. The library opened, and my mother stood at the door: I was looking for the phone line from back then. In the fall of 2022, I used the dial phone left by my grandfather to dial five numbers. Grandpa's headquarters, the Tongzi Tower in Beijing, the pavilions in Shanghai, and the old house in Yufang. They're all gone, all connected. The fifth call went through. The son of the Sentinel, the girl who lent me my crayons twenty years ago. She said: You said you would call back, but I have been waiting. The old street outside the window remains the same. My dad still buys four breakfasts a day and distributes them to the neighbors, and he has done so for thirty years. Grandpa said: Scholars should be soft-hearted. The time here is not too long. Enough to connect a broken wire, enough for four generations to wake up from the same sky. Intention: intention True heritage never grows on straight telephone lines. It broke. Cut by nail clippers, stretched by seventeen busy tones, shaken down by quarrels, and dragged across three provincial borders by suitcases. It broke on the collapsed board of the dry toilet, in front of the sweet-scented osmanthus tree where the old house was demolished, and in the breath when grandpa stopped reading the poem. But where it was broken, roots took root. The father cut the cord, and the mother spent thirty years to catch the echo; the grandfather hugged his grandson, and the poem read at the toilet door was still under the eaves forty years later; the sentry's son waited for a transoceanic call for twenty years. Even the business in Yufang Old Street is the same: the canteen is discontinued, and the mahjong parlor is restored; the mahjong parlor is cleared, and the game hall is opened; the game hall is demolished, and the second floor of the Internet cafe is built into a library - the books of four generations are moved into the same room, like broken threads being twisted back one by one. It turns out that the so-called family tradition is not that a thread is threaded from beginning to end, but that after it is broken, someone still remembers how to pick it up. The time here is not too long. Enough to connect a broken line, enough for a soft-spoken, short-tempered child to finally become the one to pick up the phone after losing contact countless times. What he received was not reconciliation, but an echo. It was my great-great-grandfather who said, "The heart of a scholar should be soft." It was his "Quiet Night Thoughts" that he coaxed me to sleep. It was his mother's trembling hands when she left home, my father's silent sweeping of broken glass, and grandma's shovel pressing through the morning and evening of forty years - all the broken sounds were continued on his end. Where there is a break, there is something new, and where there is something old there is something new. The phone line never really cut off - it just waited for the afterglow, for the dawn to break, for people to connect.