In recent days, on my way to and from work, I have been making a detour to an area where the road is being demolished and built. Because the road is under construction, the road is difficult to walk, and we have to pay attention to safety. But in order to leave (or pick up) the past experience in memory. I still walked for several days until the traces of more than 30 years ago were completely erased from the world by construction machinery!

This section of the road used to be a very remote hutong, called Wuqi Hutong. Because on one side is the courtyard wall of a primary school, and on one side is a red brick house built for the 57 soldiers who returned to the city. At that time, in the old house where everyone lived a few decades ago (my family had lived in a house for more than a hundred years), I envied the owners of these new houses to return to the city.

Perhaps young people under the age of 30 no longer know what is the May 7th instruction, what is the Wuqi cadre school, and what is the Wuqi soldier. Maybe what I want to leave (or pick up) is not just my personal life experience, but the national nightmare of that era. Maybe today's young people can't understand why nightmares are worth remembering! Yeah, it's because they don't know how to get sweet without bitterness. Although over the years I have been trying to be a public intellectual, trying to fulfill the historical responsibility of a public intellectual of the Chinese people, often criticizing the evils of the times, and even being misunderstood by many readers, thinking that I am psychologically gloomy. In fact, I very much cherish the achievements of progress made after the reform and opening up. It's just that I have higher expectations for my dear country, so like a conscientious doctor, to find every bit of unhealth in this society that places all my hopes on me. This is a doctor's pursuit of the highest level of his profession and a person's desire for life (health). Is a descendant of the yellow land, infatuated with the Yellow River culture.

How can the sparrow know the lofty ambition!

The May 7th cadre School is a farm set up in accordance with Mao Zedong's May 7th instructions during the Cultural Revolution. It is a place where cadres of Chinese party and government organs and intellectuals from scientific research, culture and education departments are centrally accommodated to carry out reform through labor and ideological education. Cadre school is the abbreviation of cadre school, which varies greatly in name and practice. in fact, it is a place of reform through labor in disguise, which is equivalent to the Nazi re-education camp (the reeducation-through-labor system was born in Nazi Germany, and the Nazi Party is both the National Socialist German Workers' Party).

Such dry schools are generally located in remote and poor rural areas, and people who go to dry schools are called students. Regardless of seniority or grade, all of them are called five or seven warriors. Among them are government cadres, large and small capitalist groups, scientific and technological personnel, teachers of colleges and universities, and reactionary academic authorities (at that time, all academic authorities were labeled as reactionary regardless of differences. It was an era of reactionary academic authority, that is, the era of reactionary academic authority.) some even drag their families, and underage children are entrusted to relatives and friends in the city or hometown. In places where intellectuals are piled up, such as the Chinese Writers' Association and the Department of philosophy and Social Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, even policies excluding the elderly, the weak, the sick and the disabled are ignored and all are banished to cadre schools; the oldest are those above 70 (Yu Pingbo) and 60 (Bing Xin, Chen Bohan, etc.), and even more are those who have lost their labor force, who are frail and who are deeply nearsighted. They are all organized in accordance with the army, regardless of age or sex, assigned to designated companies, platoons and squads, and managed by military or industrial propaganda teams. They are required to lead a militarized life, go to work and finish work, and must shout slogans and sing songs in whole teams; ask for instructions in the morning and report in the evening (tell Chairman Mao what he wants to do in the morning and evening, and report what he wants to do in the evening). Routinely, several times a day, they collectively wished Chairman Mao a long life, and even took part in camping exercises. The content of their study is manual labor: farming, picking dung, raising pigs, cooking, carrying water, drilling wells and building houses are required to support themselves. Many people died of diseases caused by fatigue and torture because of overburdening.

In the late 1970s, the May 7th soldiers began to return to the city. Because after they left the city, their houses were confiscated and occupied by others. So the city found a remote suburban junction for the 57 soldiers who returned to the city, and built these bungalows for these soldiers who had almost no private property, so the path between the front of these houses and the walls of that primary school was called Wuqi hutong. My music teacher in primary school and my Chinese teacher in high school used to live in these bungalows. They are husband and wife, and their pursuit of a better life has not been extinguished by years of reform through labour. At a time when ballroom dancing was considered obscene and sinful, the whole family secretly played records and danced at home. At that time, this hutong was one of the ways for me to go to school. Sometimes when I walked to the teacher's door, I would hear the faint sound of dance music. Therefore, every time I go to the mouth of the hutong, I look forward to hearing the wonderful music. Maybe later, they found that it could be heard outside, reducing the volume. I never heard the music with an obvious sense of rhythm again.

Just after the resumption of the college entrance examination, the children of some teachers in our school (my father worked in the middle school where I went to school at that time) gathered together after school to study under the guidance of some famous teachers in our school. But the teachers at that time were very responsible, and they were not willing to teach us until after school was over. So on a winter night, it was dark when our eight banners children finished their studies. At that time, I didn't know what a man was, but I insisted on pretending to be a man to send several female students home. This May Seven Hutong is the only way we go through every night. At that time, the hutong was still a completely dirt road, and when it rained, the water had no ankles. If this had happened in those days, I would have carried several female companions across the puddle and then went home wearing bagged shoes.

Now these young girls at that time have become mothers, and they have all made achievements in their studies. One has become the president of a well-known university in the country. If it hadn't been for the demolition of Wuqi Hutong, it would not have brought back this memory of me. In fact, at that time, we, the children of the eight banners, were all students of our school, and there was nothing wrong with our teachers tutoring our students during working hours. But the parents have to avoid the suspicion, let us get tutoring in the dark after school. At that time, the walls of the school were planted with soil and grass, and some places had already become a level road for students. But the old pedants of my father's generation, whether it is windy or rainy, insist on almost halfway around the school and take the main entrance. They said, "A gentleman cannot enter over the wall!" Nowadays, however, schools have to install cameras to prevent some young teachers from leaving early over the wall (merged junior high school teachers often jump over the wall and leave early).

After the reform and opening up, this Wuqi hutong has also been built several times. Huangsha Road will be changed into asphalt road, and asphalt road will be changed into square brick road. The puddle is gone, but the trees and bungalows in the hutong are still the same. It's just that the trees are getting more and more luxuriant, and the red brick bungalows are getting older and older. Thirty years later, the trees have embraced each other so thick that people envy red brick houses, and they have also become the architectural relics of the city. Now, with the expansion of the city, the May Seven Hutong has been erased from the city, but the nightmare brought to the Chinese intellectuals is deeply rooted in the consciousness of the Chinese intellectuals. Therefore, I often meet some older seniors on the Internet, exhorting me to polish the text and not to make the article too sharp. The worries of these seniors are not unreasonable. Nowadays, the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution still completely disappears in our real life. This is one of the important sources of cyber violence.