1 The
initial understanding of sunflowers was vague and remote, far less real than a sunflower seed.
When I was young, sunflowers only grew in textbooks and lived in remote places. Within a few kilometers, I had all the world I had. Compared with the children who grew up in the deserted deserts of the Gobi, they were lucky to be born in the countryside. Although poor, at least there are green trees, crops, and plants to paint their eyes with rich colors. My eyes reflected pure gray-brown, occasionally flashing red, green, and white. It was the limestone painted on the walls, the poplar trees beside the wells, and the iron-containing hills were bright graffiti in the eyes of children. The far-reaching, vigorous, and boundless words contained in it are to be slowly experienced in adulthood. The young man’s mind is pure and simple, without the concept of desolation and poverty. You can have fun everywhere without being scolded by your parents. I have lived in Karamay since I was a child, a city born for oil. The adults in the whole city are all engaged in oil and oil-related matters, but I know that there are many people in unfamiliar places. The same, because every autumn, cars are like busy worker bees, bringing back grain, fruits, and oil from those distant places… Sometimes, I mean sometimes, some sunflower seeds are also transported. Plants connect people in this way.
The seeds are black with white stripes, with a large round head and a small pointed head. Use academic terms to describe “rectangular ovoid achene with lignified skin”. Sunflowers like places where the climate is cold, the land is fertile, and the temperature difference between day and night is great. After a long period of brewing, sun exposure, and fertile soil, the sunflower seeds have thick and firm skin, with the sturdy line quality of the prints. When they pick up, the sound of “quack, quack” is crisp and sweet, and the seeds of the sunflower have Hetian jade. Luster and warmth, long-lasting scent stretches between lips and teeth.
This kind of bright black melon seeds with white stripes mostly come from the cold Altay region. When I arrived in Nanjiang at the age of 30, I saw the white melon seeds for the first time. The melon seeds are thin and thin. In my cognition, there is only one kind of melon seeds with black and bright white stripes, which is far less healthy and full than the melon seeds in northern Xinjiang. This kind of melon seeds are very expensive nowadays. In the 1960s and 1970s, melon seeds were very cheap because parents paid for it. I have no idea how much they cost. The raw melon seeds are packed in a cloth pocket, and my mother Tibet is usually easy to find. It’s not that my mother’s techniques are clumsy. There is very little furniture in the house. There are only two rooms, a few beds, a table, and a low-rise kitchen on her own. My way of stealing melon seeds is both secretive and superb, at least I thought it was at the time. Grab a handful at a time, secretly carry your pockets, and chat while walking on the way to school. The process is deep and timeless, and it becomes more and more visible with age. Time continued to stretch forward, and memories pulled me back, back to that small starting point, and I became another me, a little girl with two thin grass-like braids and a yellow schoolbag on her back.
This little girl has a broad and protruding forehead and a protruding back of her head. She always envied other girls with a flat back head. The two braids she combed are like two jumping sika deer, and her two braids are separated by a hill, lonely and alone. Lonely, like her lonely and lonely childhood. After six years of left-behind children return to their parents, she always feels left out and lonely. She often suspects that she is not the mother’s birth. Her sensitive and suspicious personality is related to the injuries in her teenage years.
She is a master at eating melon seeds. She spit the skin of melon seeds high and floated according to her mood, imagining that it is a boat or a bird approaching the ocean and clouds, or spitting out flatly. See how far away it is, imagine The power of a bullet, or spit fiercely on the ground, watching the melon seed shell tumbling in the wind, my feet smashed hard, and hearing the sound of tearing melon seed shells, an abomination emerged clearly in my mind. Face, of course, face changes with mood and time. In fact, it didn’t take long for the things that were considered particularly important and difficult to pass by then disappeared, and no one who hated them remembered it. In most cases, she likes to spit out the skin of melon seeds as she wants. Watching the skin of melon seeds fly up and down in various parabolic shapes, the depressed mood is temporarily relieved.
2
The freshly harvested melon seeds have a light taste from the land. The piles of melon seeds are mixed with soil and broken leaves. The fragrance of raw melon seeds is not as strong as that of ripe melon seeds. I am especially obsessed with this kind of taste. I still don’t like the overripe sunflower seeds and the under-fired melon seeds. I feel like a humble gentleman, who can experience the true feelings in the ordinary and watery interactions. When I was young, I had to wait until the Spring Festival before my mother was willing to fry melon seeds. Before my mother decided to fry melon seeds, I was a guilty conscience, worried and red-faced, afraid that my sagging pocket would expose my stealing behavior, so I quickly figured out how to deal with my mother’s questioning. I don’t know if my mother forgot, or pretended not to know, she never blamed her children for melon seeds. Stir-fried melon seeds can’t be rushed, they need to be slow. My mother is too impatient. In all likelihood, some of the melon seeds are mashed, and some are still fresh. Anyway, the smell permeates the whole room, and it doesn’t last for three days. Absolutely, that is the oil overflowing from the plump body of melon seeds. During the Spring Festival, there is a plate of fried melon seeds on the table in the living room of every household. Whenever I visit someone’s New Year greetings, my uncles and aunts will put melon seeds in the pockets of the children’s clothes. Take the spoils of the “mopping up” home and hide them every day, so that they can be slowly dissipated in the future. When the parents were not at home, a person hid in the room, holding a nice little book with melon seeds in his mouth. If you put a fruit candy in your mouth, the sweet and sweet feeling is too wonderful.
Many people have competed with melon seeds to compare speed. Only when I was eating melon seeds, my mouth looked like an industrial assembly line. The melon seeds came in from one corner of the mouth, and the other came out of the melon seed shell, and the fragrant nuts had been chewed by my teeth and slipped into the esophagus, and the depth was unfathomable. Gastrointestinal. This kind of kung fu is not practiced in one or two days. It takes time and a lot of melon seeds. This skill has nothing to do with the brain, practice makes perfect. The melon seeds I eat can definitely be piled into a yurt. These melon seed shells leave deep melon-shaped triangular grooves above and below my right incisor. Just pick up the melon seeds and habitually get stuck in the triangular grooves, like shooting. You can’t even aim without aiming.
Later, I saw Mr. Feng Zikai wrote that he taught the Japanese to eat melon seeds during the trip: “Looking at the Japanese practice, it’s really pitiful! He stuffed the melon seeds in his mouth like this, and bit it. However, he had no choice when biting. He soaked the shell of the melon seeds with saliva. When he held it in his hand, he slid back and forth, unable to start, and finally fell to the ground, nowhere to look for it. He swallowed empty saliva, and then Pick one to bite. This time he was very careful when peeling it. He placed the crushed melon seeds on the food table in the cabin, bent his head and peeled it carefully, as if repairing a clock. About a minute or two later, I finally peeled off some pieces of melon kernels, and slammed them into his mouth to eat. I asked him how he was like, and he nodded and said it was delicious
. It’s just following the footsteps of the predecessors…
A literary friend thought that my level of eating melon seeds was comparable to that of a female educated youth from Shanghai in the first division of their corps. She licked the sunflower seeds and saw the seeds go in one by one, but they didn’t come out of her mouth. You can see her cheeks are blowing up like a balloon, until her mouth can’t hold up anymore, and her hand is over her mouth. She vomited all the melon seed skins from her mouth. She emphasized that this way of eating is “more, fast, better, and economical.” The literary friend said that he still wonders, the Shanghai girl’s fair skin, beautiful face, and her usual speech are gentle and gentle, and she never grinned like a tuanchang girl. Why is the melon seeds so ambitious? He thought that maybe because he used to hold fight meetings and study at night, it was so boring, girls licked melon seeds, and boys smoked mohe cigarettes to pass the time. I was afraid that the leaders on the stage would discover that, in order to cover the leaders’ eyes and ears, they would develop their unique skills over time.
