Chapter 214 Rural Teacher
Chapter 214 Rural Teacher
The title of "Rural Teacher" does not sound like a science fiction novel, and the beginning is even less like it.
The story begins with a rural teacher's last lesson. The severe liver pain leaves him with no strength left. From the subsequent description, we can see that the teacher has esophageal cancer.
Feng Jingyuan frowned. It wasn't because the content was badly written, but it was beyond his expectations.
"Why do I spend so much time and effort describing this small mountain village at the beginning?" Feng Jingyuan thought silently in his heart. As a child living in the countryside, he felt a sense of alienation.
It's like this, when people see familiar things, they either feel familiar or strange.
The small mountain village comes alive on the paper with the emphasized description. The entire village is "abandoned", with the able-bodied laborers going out to work, leaving only the elderly and left-behind children in the village.
Each student's family has its own difficulties. Liu Baozhu's mother ran away with the money, and his father was decadent and drank and gambled every day. He beat and scolded his children, and once almost beat them to death. Guo Cuihua's mother was a lunatic. She stabbed people with a knife during the day and set fire to the house at night...
Indeed, every remote mountain village has one or two crazy people, both men and women, but mostly women. The specific reasons why they go crazy vary, so I won’t go into details.
No one in the entire village works because they know that the county will take care of them.
The author's words were very precise. "The mountainous area where he lives is one of the poorest areas in the country. But poverty is not the most terrible thing. The most terrible thing is that the people there are numb to the current situation."
The villagers "dismembered" the tractors they had received under the household contract responsibility system. You took a wheel, I took a steering wheel. The tractors were dismembered while they were still alive and able to work in the fields. But that was not the only cruel thing. A factory came to help with the poverty alleviation and installed a water pump for free. As a result, the whole village sold the pump and only got 1,500 yuan in exchange. After a big meal, there was nothing left.
These incidents left Feng Jingyuan with a basic impression of this village: a numb village, so numb that it no longer cared whether the next generation had a future.
Not only is it numb but also ignorant. In order to repair the Laojun Temple at the entrance of the village, the beams of the school roof have to be torn off. You have to know that many students live far away from the school and eat and sleep in the school. If the roof is torn off, how will the students shelter from the wind and rain?
"This author can write a novel. He used the beams of the school to repair the Laojun Temple..."
"In the small mountain village where I used to live, I would not send my children to school even if I had the chance, because if I did, the family would lose a strong labor force."
"Why do poor people have more children? Because childbearing costs almost nothing. Older children can help take care of the younger ones, and older children can help with the work. The poorer you are, the more children you have."
Feng Jingyuan closed his eyes. The cruelty and reality were too unbearable to watch. He opened his eyes again after a few seconds.
The teacher used to have a girlfriend named Xiuxiu in the village, but later she followed Erdan from the same village because he made money. However, Xiuxiu died of dystocia because Erdan was willing to spend a lot of money on the wedding banquet but was reluctant to send Xiuxiu to the hospital because everyone in the village was like that and never went to the hospital for childbirth.
[Later he heard that she was luckier than Erdan’s mother. Erdan’s birth was difficult, and Erdan’s father learned from the midwife that it was a boy, so he decided to keep the baby. So Erdan’s mother was put on the back of a donkey, and the donkey was made to walk in circles to squeeze Erdan out. According to people who saw it at the time, there was a circle of blood in the yard…]
"This article should not be published in Science Fiction World, it should be published in Huacheng or Shouhuo. If not, we can publish it in Tianjin Literature." Feng Jingyuan thought to himself.
There is a standard for good writing, which can allow readers to feel the world of multiple expressions through language. There is no doubt that Feng Jingyuan felt the ignorant and numb villagers in the mountainous area.
The rural teacher was in the early stages of esophageal cancer, which could have been cured with about 20,000 yuan, but his meager salary was all used to subsidize the children.
Although I don't understand why this article is about science fiction, and it is not science fiction at all, I understand why this rural teacher is willing to teach students even at the cost of his life. First of all, his teacher was also a rural teacher who taught him new things and saved his life.
Secondly, if he doesn’t teach, these students may never be exposed to this knowledge in their lifetime.
"The historical background should not be modern, but earlier, around the early 2000s." Feng Jingyuan made a simple analysis of the prices, which was also a way to divert his attention.
Soon, Feng Jingyuan knew why this article was a science fiction novel.
The perspective instantly jumped to Star Wars——
Yes, it is very exaggerated. A star war lasted for 20,000 years, 50,000 light years away from the blue planet!
The great war between the Carbon-based Life Federation and the Silicon-based Empire ended with the Carbon-based Federation winning and expelling the Silicon-based Empire to the top of the first spiral arm of the Milky Way, which is also the most desolate place in the Milky Way.
"The Silicon-based Empire, is it a robot empire?" Feng Jingyuan had read a lot of science fiction novels, and this was his first reaction.
Because the war lasted for a long time and resulted in the deaths of many lives in the Milky Way, the Carbon-based Federation decided on its future major policy to preserve as many new creatures in the galaxy as possible.
However, they have to prevent the Silicon-based Empire from performing a "stellar leapfrog" and the Carbon-based Federation has to clear the first spiral arm.
Feng Jingyuan roughly understood that stellar leapfrogging is the only way for large-tonnage warships to carry out short-range and rapid attacks in the interstellar space. Therefore, the significance of the Carbon-based Federation's sweep is to destroy all stars within a range and form an isolation zone.
However, if all stars with life are to be preserved, the workload will be too great, so the Carbon-Based Federation will conduct civilization screening on all stars and only retain and protect stars with 3C civilization or above.
Although Feng Jingyuan seemed no different from a rural teacher in the previous interstellar war, the Carbon-based Federation began to identify civilizations, which made him vaguely guess. After all, he still remembered the recommendation: the topic of saving the world.
The story shifts back to the small mountain village. The protagonist, the teacher, is already a dying man. He knows that his time is up and he is vomiting blood. He swallows all the remaining painkillers, pethidine, because he won't need them anymore.
In fact, for his level of esophageal cancer, Demerol has no effect at all, but it is better than nothing.
All the children started crying and begged the teacher to stop explaining it and say they could continue tomorrow.
If it could really be postponed until tomorrow, then he could give one more class tomorrow, the teacher thought, but his body told him that this was the last class he could give to the children.
Feng Jingyuan was no longer holding the magazine with both hands. Instead, he held the magazine in one hand and placed the other hand between his mouth and chin in a half-clenched position. It was obvious that his emotions were also aroused.
In fact, if you take his hand away, you can see that his lips are tightly closed, which still evokes some memories of the old man.
(End of this chapter)