02 Gu Yi

Toko is the funniest person Aomame has ever seen. In addition to being Aomame's expert in making jokes, he also has another advantage: he is short.

Growing up, there were not many people who could look at Aomame on an equal footing.

Before the age of 12, Huzi was really like Aomame. He was round, short, dark and funny, like a clay doll with a disfigured face. When the word "country bumpkin" came out of his mouth, he had no intimidation at all. Aomame felt that he

He just looks like a country bumpkin. After the age of 12, tigers start jumping up and down like bamboo shoots in spring, which is a problem in Aomame's heart. She thinks tigers are not cute anymore.

Because of Huzi, Aomame's scope of activities gradually expanded. It extended from the house where the second brother rented to a street and ended at a newly built residential building.

There are a lot of nails, iron wire, bricks, beer bottles, badges, unbreakable gauze, long and short pieces of chalk, and other novel things that are inexhaustible and difficult to see.

Behind the small building where Aomame lives, there is a long and narrow corridor, only wide enough for a child to walk sideways. After passing through the jagged bricks and stones, you enter an old and broken courtyard. The transparent windows are almost invisible due to the weather and frost of the years, and no one has ever come here.

Aomame hides all her "treasures" here.

She and Hu Zi join in the same trap and work as a porter of "garbage". She is dirty but completely happy every day.

One day after the residential building was completed, she and Huzi were picking up "garbage", and a pair of clean cloth shoes grew out from under their eyes. Looking upward, a fruit called "Gu Yi" was born.

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"Mother-in-law." Huzi said this about Gu Yi. He was said to be a boy, but he looked like a girl. He was white and had breasts. He looked down on him. The twelve-year-old Huzi insisted that he didn't like Xian Chen, a white shirt and white shoes.

The innocent little boy.

Qingdou is a person who needs to adjust his tongue to speak Mandarin. He cannot understand the Xiaonancheng dialect with ten different accents, nor can he understand Huzi's tone.

Gu Yi's family of three had just moved here and were about to enter Nancheng Primary School where Qingdou and Huzi were. This information was communicated by Gu Xiezhi. Gu Yi stood quietly in the shade, without even an expression.

After knowing that Gu Yi would be a transfer student, she felt sympathy.

Qingdou believed that Gu Yi was a foreigner and a transfer student, and thought that the fate of a marginalized country bumpkin would happen to him.

She took him to the well and told him the story Huzi told her in a showy manner.

Huzi said that this story must be told by the water, with her face facing the water, so that it would be meaningful. But her second brother did not allow her to go near the river after dark, so she chose a well.

The story is about a foreign man who is quite good-looking. When he meets a girl, he doesn’t know if he is good-looking or not. She probably isn’t good-looking, otherwise he wouldn’t pursue the good-looking man. The woman pursues the man.

The man ran away quickly, but his request was denied, and the woman finally languished until she died.

After the woman died, the handsome man passed by the river one day and saw a beautiful person in the lake. He was so ecstatic that he subconsciously stirred the lake water with his hand, trying to touch it. Unexpectedly, his face was broken, and the man quickly retracted his hand.

Soon the lake calmed down, and the good-looking man appeared again. He smiled, and the people in the lake smiled at him. He frowned, and the people in the lake also frowned with handsome eyebrows in distress. He wanted to hug, and stretched out his hand again. The good-looking man

It quickly disappeared in circles of ripples, only to reappear after a long time.

Now the man did not dare to touch the water of the lake, nor did he dare to leave. He was afraid that people would run away. He would become obsessed with the people in the lake every day, and eventually he would become haggard and die.

Qingdou pointed to the well water and raised his dimples: "Do you think this man is stupid?"

Gu Yi lay down by the well, saw two faces in the well water, and said calmly: "This story is called echo."

Aomame said, "What?" She thought he had some insight into the story.

Gu Yi smiled, looked at her and shook his head, saying nothing.

Aomame thought sadly that he would be bullied for being so introverted.

Soon, sympathy faded.

After the wave of educated youths returning to the city began, the era of welfare housing distribution began. Everyone kept an eye on the housing and calculated points, which made their eyes green. Young cadres got married and applied for collective dormitories to move to new houses. The children of cadres who had been rehabilitated returned to the city and also needed houses.

Everyone opens their mouth and is in urgent need of housing. In this way, the construction of welfare housing is in full swing.

The newspaper said: Faster than "Shenzhen speed" is "Shekou speed".

However, Qingdou thought that the fastest ripples of life in the circle with her as the center were the construction speed of welfare housing in Nancheng.

Tower cranes, piles of bricks, and piles of river sand can be seen everywhere in Xiao Nancheng. Amidst the roar of mixers mixing cement, children use their own methods to build the motherland, completing the construction of various "water conservancy projects" and building canals in the piles of yellow sand.

, store water, open the gate again, release the water, push it again, and start all over again.

One semester later, Aomame and Huzi's play base was built from the ground up, and a group of people moved in. I heard that this is the best welfare house in the city at present, and the residents are the newly assigned teachers from Nancheng University and people from various bureaus.

Veteran employees of the agency.

Huzi danced and repeated what his parents said at the dinner table: "The youngest one has two bedrooms and one living room, and only one bathroom!"

They don't know what Duwei means, but they know it is a good thing.

And Gu Yi's belongings just climbed up the stairs to the third floor. Just like his status in the hearts of Huzi and Qingdou climbed all the way up.

When he reappeared, he changed into an old blue shirt that was slightly loose for the convenience of moving. The color was washed out and the collar was white, but it was still clean.

Gu Yi followed his mother all the way upstairs to the third floor. He paused and stood on the long balcony. He waved politely to Qingdou and Huzi, the new friends he met a few days ago.

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This movement took him three flights of stairs to climb. He didn't know whether people of the same age who he met once could be considered friends.

Zou Yuxin brushed her fluffy curly hair, glanced downstairs, and asked him, "Is he your classmate?"

Gu Yi lowered his eyes and thought for a moment, "It seems he lives here."

A few days ago, Gu Xiezhi couldn't wait to take him to see the new house. Gu Yi only walked around downstairs, and happened to run into this pair of dirty children. The male was as big as him, and the female was as tall as him.

The eyes are bright, and the folded eyelids open and close like fluttering butterflies.

She was very enthusiastic and took Gu Xiezhi around the area while he was at the stall selling cigarettes. She shouted at the mouth of the well and proudly motioned for him to pay attention to the string of echoes.

She raised her smiling eyes and said to him, "A lot of people are talking to us." Gu Yi said this is called an echo.

She told him another story. Gu Yi said that the story was called echo, and it was a Greek myth. She didn't understand anything, so she asked if Greek myths were also written by Jin Yong?

If it weren't for her enthusiasm, Gu Yi wouldn't have the patience to talk to her.

"That's our neighbor." Zou Yuxin leaned out and waved to the two children, "Hello, come and play at our house when you have time."

Huzi was heartless and jumped three feet, pulling Aomame to go upstairs. They didn't say they were going to play right now. But Huzi didn't blink and couldn't wait to see what it looked like upstairs. Aomame looked up.

That was a beautiful new building with new construction. After some hesitation, I followed Huzi up the stairs.

Zou Yuxin gently dismissed the guests, gave them each a scallion biscuit, and asked Gu Yi to play with them downstairs. The house was so messy and not tidied up, so how could the guests come in?

Gu Yi was not so happy when he went down, or in other words, he was not happy doing anything these days.

He didn't want to go back to Xiaonancheng or transfer to another school. He said it was his hometown, but everything here was extremely strange to him. He liked the capital and the foreign style of the place.

But after playing with Qingdou Huzi all afternoon, Gu Yi's nostalgia that was not for his age disappeared.

Qingdou was not as enthusiastic as she was that day, but she was a bitch and wanted to play with Gu Yi in a dog-eat-dog way.

Tiger jumped up and down, "Go to your house." Aomame's house was their usual place to escape the summer heat. Sometimes when he played too dirty, he was afraid of being scolded, so he would go to Aomame's place to get a bucket of well water to wash his hands and feet.

The house where Qingdou lives is one street away from Gu Yi's new home. The so-called street refers to a long alley one step away.

Aomame didn't answer, and Hu Zi walked naturally towards her house, as if it was his home. Indeed, the land was so big, and Hu Zi's direction would pass by his house.

Huzi's family lives in Tongzilou. The dark corridor is deep all the way, with ventilation and light at both ends, and there are at least a dozen or more dozens of families strung together.

Because it is shaped like a tube, it is called Tongzi Tower.

There are three tube buildings and several rows of houses in this area. Looking down from above, it looks horizontal and diagonal, very unplanned, like a "Great Wall" built by a child.

There is a public water room and a public toilet on the first and second floors of the Tongzi Building. I heard that it used to be an office building for a certain unit, and later it was converted into a dormitory for single employees. Now as the number of married employees increases, the Tongzi Building has gradually turned into a building for employees’ families.

Zhang Lanfeng must be dissatisfied with the housing. A family of three lives in one room, with a small room separated by a bookshelf in the middle. Is this for humans? Even pigs live more spaciously than this.

But in Xiao Nancheng, there was just such a room, and it was only after she wrote more than a dozen heart-wrenching letters to the boss that she finally got it.

As he walked, Huzi introduced the situation here to Gu Yi, just like when he took Qingdou to play, everything was detailed: "This is the employee family building. We were assigned to it when I was in elementary school." After that, Huzi said it.

Lai Shuti asked, "What do your parents do?"

"My father is a teacher and my mother is." Gu Yi didn't finish his sentence and looked at Qingdou with a questioning look.

But Aomame didn't raise her head, so she didn't see his eyes.

She was unexpectedly silent all the way.

He thought maybe it was the strong sun that made her wilted.

"'There are tens of millions of mansions, and the great shelter will make all the poor people in the world happy.'" Huzi became very interested and suddenly recited a poem for the teacher. In the past, she would have succeeded Qingdou, but today, she did not speak.

Huzi thought that Qingdou must be afraid of strangers.

Arriving at the small building, Aomame walked to the window edge, reached into the crack of the window with her thin walking stick-like hand, took out the key, and opened the door for them.

At that moment, Gu Yi knew that she was a tenant. No owner would live in the northernmost, smallest, and shabbiest room in a building.

He had lived in a hutong alley in Beijing and knew that a room nearby would be rented to others.

Aomame's house is very simple. A double-decker iron frame bed is crammed into the six or seven-square-meter space, and white mosquito nets are hung on the upper and lower bunks. Then there is a chest of drawers with homework books on it, which should also be her desk.

Although it was crowded, it was not dirty. The quilts were neatly folded like tofu blocks. There was a cattail leaf fan placed on the straw mat. The edge of the cloth was washed white and dark green, with a circle of dazzling red thread sewn on it.

The workmanship is quite poor.

Huzi was panting from the heat, but Gu Yi remained silent.

Aomame was really at a loss, so after thinking about it, she came up with the treasure her second brother had mentioned - Coca-Cola.
To be continued...