Under the Ula Mountain

I spent a day visiting my hometown in Bayannur.

To the north lies a mountain, the Ula Mountain. Stretching for hundreds of miles, it’s a barren mountain.

Standing on the roof of a bungalow, I saw vast expanses of cornfields, reminiscent of scenes from “Interstellar.” However, this time coming back, I did feel a bit like time traveling. This feeling came from the four-hour journey from the capital to the Hetao Plain, as well as from the reunion after a long absence from February to September.

When I talked to Mengmeng about the old house, it awakened many old memories for me, memories that required some effort to recall.

To the north are goji berry fields, to the south are vegetable fields, to the west is land, and to the east is also land. To reach the town, you have to take a long single-lane road, you have to traverse a tar road, and then pass through a row of tall, slanting poplar trees before reaching the main road of the town, which is quite far.

Thus, my hometown held me captive, unable to move freely.

Grandpa and grandma always tried various ways to entertain me. Sometimes I followed grandpa to ride a bike and mow the grass, sometimes we went for a donkey ride, and as a last resort, we fed sheep, pigs, chickens, played with dogs, caught cats, rummaged through boxes and cabinets in the utility room looking for my dad’s old stuff, or went exploring in the motorcycle garage. But none of these were interesting anymore. I just lay on the heated brick bed watching TV, spending an entire afternoon watching scam advertisements for the next episode of a TV series. Then I would drowsily fall asleep. Besides grandpa and grandma, I was the only child around on weekdays. The neighbors were either far away or had a big age difference, so most of the time I lay under the quilt and looked at the clouds in the sky, listened to the calls of partridges outside, and watched the days and nights go by.

I didn’t mention the several fruit trees planted in the old house at once. Except for the grape trellis that left a deep impression on me, I didn’t remember much about the other fruit trees. But I’ve always loved grapes, not limited to any particular variety, just the round, small bunches are endearing. However, what made me uncomfortable was: I didn’t ask for any fruit trees to be planted for me, but they always had to be named “planted for me,” as if only I could eat them and others couldn’t, as if I immediately took on the debt of a fruit tree, so I wasn’t interested from childhood to adulthood.

In the vast village, everyone lives scattered, but there is only one small grocery store, and it’s the kind that doesn’t have everything. The family’s small grocery store is not nearby. You have to turn nine or ninety-nine corners and then it’s hidden behind a bungalow. There are no signs on the way there, but I still remembered its location and spent an afternoon walking there with a big sum of one yuan to buy snacks and then walking back. If you found a tree branch on the way, you could kill all the vegetable heads along the way. Looking back now, the feeling at the time was more like a person’s adventure, finding fun in boredom.

The Hetao Plain is also known as the “Jiangnan on the Frontier,” actually referring to the relatively flat areas in western Inner Mongolia. Goji berries were the specialty of the township back then, with continuous goji berry fields planted in large areas. When the goji berries were ripe in the summer, if the family couldn’t pick them all, they had to hire people to help. In June, July, and August, when it was over 30 degrees Celsius, a group of men, women, old, and young people wearing headscarves from all over would pick goji berries under the scorching sun. And I sat under the shade of branches playing with mud and dirt, as well as various insects in the soil.

To the north lies the green Ula Mountain. The dappled shadows of the goji berry fields lie coolly underneath, a childhood filled with single-digit dappled shadows.