Three or Two Things about Rebirth

Since the large-scale expansion of college enrollment in 1999, a large number of students have left Jiayang to study abroad, but very few are willing to return to their hometown after graduation.

The population of this small town, which was already sparsely populated, has become even smaller.

The parents of students in Qiu Luming's training class often say that they hope their children will study hard and go to the south. There is no trace of nostalgia in their tone, and they are all eagerly planning to settle down and live in the place where their children go to.

Many retired elderly people also rushed to Hainan to spend the winter.

——This small county town in the forest area has been despised and abandoned by “its own people” after its resources have been exploited to the maximum extent.

The departure of young people and the good implementation of family planning have led to a sharp drop in the proportion of children in recent years. Township primary schools have been closed one after another. Villagers with school-age children have all gone to the county town to buy or rent houses. Large areas of rural houses have been left vacant. Some villages even have less than ten households left behind.

Most of the farmers' land has been outsourced, and those who farm their own land have bought houses in the county town. They return to the village to farm in the summer and move to the city to spend the winter.

This makes the housing prices in Jiayang County higher than those in Yi City. The newly built residential areas in the east of the county have basically been connected to Taiping Village. Among the large villas and low-rise buildings, the Qiu Family Clinic and the bungalow courtyard appear very special.

The old houses on Binjiang Road have long been relocated and replaced by buildings.

Qiu Jiye doesn't want to live in a building. He thinks it's not down to earth, and he also thinks the heating in the building is too strong. The floor heating that is like an oven 24 hours a day is bad for the body.

So the Qiu family took the compensation and built a bungalow on the land south of the clinic. This time they made use of the land approved that year, laid a high foundation, and built five large houses with shiny tiles. The north and south yards are a total of 200 square meters, and they also have several flower beds, and there is also a half-acre vegetable garden in the southernmost part.

The gate of the bungalow is on the north side. Once you walk out of the gate, you will find the back door of the clinic. If you turn right and walk a few dozen meters, you will get on the road from Jiayang to Taiping Village. After crossing the road, walk a few hundred meters and you will reach the river bank. The first floors of the nearby buildings are all businesses, including shops, restaurants, hotels, and pharmacies. Taiping Village also sells pork, chickens, ducks, and geese raised by villagers. Transportation and shopping are very convenient.

In 2016, sixteen-year-old Jiaojiao was admitted to Beijing University of Chinese Medicine on an exceptional basis, and Qiu Luming and his wife moved to a small bungalow near the clinic.

The building of the customs is too old, and the prefabricated house has poor sound insulation and heat preservation. A few years ago, Qiu Luming bought a house in a newly built community about 200 meters away from his parents' bungalow. It is 140 square meters, with three bedrooms, two living rooms and two bathrooms. He specially reserved a bedroom for his parents, but unfortunately they did not come to live there.

In fact, Qiu Luming doesn't like to live in this building in winter. His family uses radiators, but there is floor heating upstairs and downstairs, and the whole house is paved without leaving any dead corners, as if only in this way can they earn back the heating costs. Three generations of grandparents and grandchildren live downstairs. In summer, the old couple in their sixties live with their grandson, and in winter, their son and daughter-in-law also come back from the countryside to live. The old man is very reluctant about the heating fee of nearly 5,000 yuan per year, and insists on opening the heating valve to the maximum. When he can't stand the heat anymore, he opens the window to dissipate heat.

The heating valve in Qiu Luming's house has been completely closed, but the house is still very hot. Qiu Luming stepped on the ladder and touched his ceiling, which was also hot. Isn't this just the upper and lower fire of the oven?

She suspected that this low-temperature baking would bake herself into a human-shaped cookie.

Zheng Wei went downstairs to persuade his neighbor to close half of the valve. The old man, wearing a cross-bar vest and sweating profusely, opened the door. He recognized Zheng Wei as his upstairs neighbor and asked what was wrong. When he heard that he wanted to close the valve, he got anxious on the spot. When he persuaded him one more time, the old man blushed and shouted, "I paid for it, why don't you use it? How does your heat affect my family?"

If Zheng Wei had been so hot-tempered ten years ago, he would have pulled the old man by his torn vest and told him whether he was bothering his family or not. But now Zheng Wei just smiled, closed the door for the old man, went downstairs to pack up his things, and moved to the bungalow in Taiping Village with his wife.

When colleagues found out that their family had given up their apartment and instead lived in a bungalow and burned a small boiler in the middle of winter, and that they had to pay the heating bill and buy coal at the same time, they all joked that they were really making money.

There are not many people living in bungalows in the county town, and those that do exist are all old houses that are not warm and difficult to heat.

The Qiu family's new house shares a small boiler with the clinic behind for heating. In winter, the room temperature is around 20 degrees Celsius, so you can just wear a thin sweater. It's neither too cold nor too hot, which is very comfortable.

The job of burning the boiler was hired from an old lonely man from Taiping Village. He usually lived in a room in the clinic's wing. In addition to burning the boiler, he also worked part-time as a night watchman and sweeping the yard.

The old man's surname is Bi. He is in his early sixties and is very hardworking. When it snows in winter, he always gets up early, takes a big broom, and sweeps the yard all the way to the gate of the Qiu family. He then turns around and sweeps again all the way to the side of the road.

Qiu Jiye is eighty years old, still in good health, and walks with a breeze. Regardless of the weather, he gets up early every morning and practices Tai Chi or Ba Duan Jin for half an hour. He sees patients in the morning and rests in the afternoon. He sees at most eight to ten patients a day, and he won't see more than that, saying that he is physically exhausted and won't be able to see accurately. Many patients who come for follow-up visits are not in a hurry, and they stay in nearby hotels or B&Bs. There are beautiful mountains and clear waters, no industrial pollution, clean vegetables, and simple folk customs. People develop feelings for the place after living there, and some even buy houses to escape the heat in the summer.

He Manshu is 78 years old. Apart from taking a half-hour walk after meals, she does no other exercise, but she is in good health. She grows flowers and vegetables in the summer and reads and knits sweaters in the winter. She is the one who takes care of Qiu Jiye on weekdays, but she has become slower and more leisurely. As she gets older, she smiles at everyone she meets and refuses to say a single unpleasant word.

After she turned 75, she stopped giving training classes. She had to talk too much every day, which was a bit exhausting. She changed to writing a blog every day, writing about her flowers and plants, posting sweaters and dolls she knitted, and writing ancient poems she created. Over time, she gained more fans and friends. Although it took up a lot of her time, she enjoyed the process. This was her own little world outside of her family life.

Qiu Luming was very pleased that her parents were healthy and well. She did not have a strong ambition for career, and most of her promotions were based on her qualifications. Although the business had changed slightly, it was not difficult and she soon became proficient in it.

For decades, every Spring Festival, the three sons of the Qiu family would rush back to Jiayang with their families. Qiu Moshi lived the farthest away and was the busiest, so most of his holidays were wasted on the road. With the convenience of transportation, from taking buses to driving private cars and then to flying, the travel time has finally been greatly reduced.

During the Spring Festival, the Qiu family's yard was decorated with lights and there were laughter in the house. The five empty rooms were finally filled with people. There was a large kang in the east and west rooms, each of which could accommodate seven or eight people. When Kuan Kuan was a child, he loved to brand his belly and back on the kang, and he would do somersaults with Jiaojiao.

When the wind is light during the day, we go to the dam by the river to slide and slide. At night, we set off firecrackers and fireworks. A group of adults surround the elderly and children and try their best to make them happy.

In 2009, several groups of people suddenly came from Anhui. They were all He Manshu's relatives, or to be more precise, the descendants of her half brothers and sisters. They had heard of Qiu Jiye's reputation and came specially. They first cried and recognized their relatives, and then tried their best to persuade the two elders to open a larger clinic in Anhui, or accept invitations to work in some large hospitals.

Qiu Luming was very surprised to see these relatives. She had always thought that there were no relatives on her mother's side, but she didn't expect so many people to suddenly appear.

An old man with white hair, about the same age as He Manshu, called He Manshu "Auntie" and took out many old photos, recounting what happened in the past with tears in his eyes.

When He Manshu saw the family photo, she also shed tears, but she was still very cold to them. She turned them down after looking at the photos and directly rejected them on behalf of her husband, and even did not invite them to have a meal.

After going through this several times, Anhui finally gave up completely.

Qiu Luming finally found out about his mother's background. It turned out that He Manshu was the daughter of a prominent family in Tongcheng, Anhui during the Republic of China. Her biological mother was the fourth concubine of the He family, and she was the youngest daughter of the He family. When she was ten years old, her biological mother died of illness. With the liberation of the country, the family suffered a great change. Many family properties were handed over to the public. When she was fifteen years old, her father also died. She was her father's youngest child and the most beloved child. In his will, her father divided the property into four parts, one for each room, the largest share was in the eldest room, and the other three rooms were divided equally. However, the eldest room had the most children, so after careful calculation, she, the only heir of the fourth room, received the most.

The usually kind first wife turned ruthless and seized her inheritance with her children, leaving her only a small amount of money and driving her out of the house. The 15-year-old girl had no power to resist and was desperate. It was the second brother born to the second wife who took her in and gave her a shelter.

At the age of sixteen, when she was admitted to a university in Beijing, she had very little inheritance left, and she lived a hard life relying on scholarships for the rest of her life.

It was also during this period that she met and fell in love with Qiu Jiye.

Qiu's family is a family of traditional Chinese medicine, but he studied in a Western medicine university. Traditional Chinese medicine has been suppressed, but someone has tried every means to get several medical books in his family's collection. For this reason, the family clinic was forced to close. His old father secretly gave the medical books to him and asked him to take them away for safekeeping. In the end, the medical books were hidden in He Manshu's dormitory and escaped.

Qiu Jiye has always been promoting that traditional Chinese medicine is backward and a feudal dregs. After five years, none of his classmates knew that he knew Chinese medicine. When he graduated from medical university with excellent grades, his home had been searched many times. To make matters worse, his quota to stay in Beijing was also occupied by someone else. He had nowhere to turn to, and after much deliberation, he discussed with He Manshu, who was also classified as a child of the five black categories, and took the initiative to apply to come to the northernmost border of the motherland.

When they arrived in Jiayang, life was much better than they had expected. They cured diseases and saved lives, taught and educated people, doing the noblest profession, and were respected and loved by the people of Jiayang to the greatest extent. Although He Manshu inevitably suffered some unfair treatment for a few years, on the whole, their lives were much better than those of their relatives in their hometown. He Manshu's second brother died in the mid-1960s. When He Manshu got the news, it was three years later. The grass on his grave was already very tall. She cried and never mentioned her hometown again, as if she had no relatives from her mother's side.

It was not until the 1990s that Qiu Jiye heard that the three secret recipes of the Peng family, a family of traditional Chinese medicine that was once as famous as the Qiu family, had appeared in Japan as early as the 1960s, and that they had been patented and mass-produced. He was so angry that he roared and smashed the teacup in his hand on the spot.

The wheel of history rolls by, raising dust and crushing the dust.

After Qiu Jiye’s youngest brother passed away, he no longer missed his hometown and only regarded Jiayang as his hometown.

As Jiaojiao grew up, Qiu Jiye's wish finally came true, and his medical skills finally had someone to carry on his legacy.

This child successfully inherited the advantages of both the Qiu and Zheng families. He is gifted, healthy, and has cleverly avoided his parents' shortcomings. He can be said to be a model of eugenics and good parenting.

Qiu Jiye taught his granddaughter how to observe, smell, ask and palpate, and became familiar with medical theory, pharmacology, astronomy and geography. The little girl was also very hardworking. She was able to diagnose diseases at a very young age, and she did not fall behind in school courses. At the age of 16, she was admitted to the University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. After graduation, she stayed in Beijing to work for two years, and then returned to Jiayang to stay with her grandfather, continuing to improve her knowledge of Yixue and practicing Qigong. After another two years, she gradually took over the clinic and was called Doctor Zheng.