Jiaohe Wood Sound

At the Jiaohe Ferry in 1978, the spring water flowed over the bluestone slabs, and the fragrance of wood shavings mixed with the fragrance of locust flowers floated for twenty miles. Lin Yanqiu's boyhood was filled with the straight ink lines popping out of the ink fountain, the snow-white shavings rolled up by a long planer, and the everlasting sound of axes and chisels in the carpentry room. He thought he would stick to the ax and plane passed down from his master for the rest of his life, making furniture and repairing farm tools for the villagers, until the spring breeze from the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee blew along the Jiao River into Yantian Village, like a chisel, cutting through the stagnant days. When Su Wanxing's white coat fluttered in the wind in the health center, he knew for the first time that the world was not just a ten-mile radius on both sides of the Jiao River. From the machine tools in the collective carpentry room to the doorsteps of the carpentry shops in the old streets, from the wheelbarrows traveling from village to house to the scaffolding of the decoration team, from the security of the iron rice bowl to the anxiety of the self-employed. Seventeen years have passed, the water in the Jiao River has risen and fallen, the growth rings of the old locust trees have circled again and again, and the old streets in the county have been demolished and rebuilt. They did not have a legend of getting rich overnight, or an adventure that changed their lives. They just held each other's hands tightly in the torrent of the times, and carved their poor days into ordinary fireworks. The Jiaohe River remains the same, and the sound of wood continues. This is the half-life persistence of an old carpenter, and it is also the most realistic change and fireworks of a small Jiaodong town from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.