[There is inevitably a lot of curiosity about the lives of the children inside military compounds. Among those born here are Wang Shuo and Du Liang, and of course Fei Xueying Xiang. So let's take a look at what sort of trouble he got up to as a child.
Just to add, I really like the name Fei Xueying Xiang because I once had a book collection called "Xue Hong Tang", which has a similar poetic feeling -- but then someone said, don't be so vain, Sa. Hong is just a goose, and when domesticated it becomes a goose. They're eagles over there, and do you think he's out wandering around in the snow for nothing? He's just waiting for you to come out so he can catch you and roast you!
Yeah, worthy offspring of the People's Liberation Army...
-- Sa Xu]
In 1986, when I moved to the independent home that truly belonged to my parents, I was only two years old. Someone asked, do you remember this?
Of course not. But I do remember how after a fire near our residential building was extinguished in 1986, everything was soaked with water. At that time, my mother was pushing me in a stroller and we happened to pass by...
My compound was a three-unit family courtyard belonging to the army. Although it was purely a military residence, there weren't many households, counting mine there were only about ten or so. Our courtyard is one of the larger ones rarely found in modern cities, divided into upper and lower levels. Despite having electric poles, the central area of the lower level had a decent amount of clear space with a flat ground. As long as there wasn't an airflow problem, even a Mi-171 could take off and land without any issues. [Sa Comment: Only someone familiar with the Air Force would say something like this. The Mi-171 is a helicopter, like the one that crashed in Zhengzhou back in the day.]
When we first moved in, there was a small willow tree planted about a meter apart all around the courtyard. The eastern wall of the upper part of the courtyard always leaked water, and there was a nest of large ants in the "fault line" between the upper and lower courtyards, each about the size of a fingertip. Later, only three trees remained in the yard, but on the night when NATO bombed our embassy in Belgrade, they were stripped by unknown individuals during reader exchanges, and within a year they all perished. [Sa Comment: Perished? Isn't that a bit extreme?] Now, locust trees have been replanted.
As a child, I was the king of the kids in the courtyard, and I also liked to play games that required some technical skill. Using the principle of leverage to seal stone slabs covering wells, using levers to throw stones, making beer bottles into cannons and fireworks as propellants to shoot bottle caps... [Sa Comment: This seems a bit off. Initially, I guessed his father was in the Air Force, but now it feels more like he might have been in the artillery or engineering corps...]
But playing too much with technology isn't exactly kid stuff, so naturally, activities like damming water from seepage and cruelly torturing insects began to occur.
The key to "damming water" is how long you can hold out. The water seeping through the eastern wall was severe, like a spring, flowing continuously until it disappeared underground about ten meters away. No one knows the quality of the water, but generally, no one touches it. Building multiple "dams" along this "small river" is common, upstream or downstream doesn't matter because no one can hold indefinitely. Otherwise, the bladder (the dam) will burst eventually. When the upstream dam cannot hold, water is released downstream, where drainage devices (like broken wine bottle mouths) can be used to drain water. If the dam is destroyed, it's considered embarrassing. [Sa Comment: This is likely a game taught by engineers. In history, Zhao Xiangzi, Guan Yu, and Chiang Kai-shek have all done similar things.]
In summer, catching crickets involved spraying fuel into their burrows with a disposable lighter, then igniting it with the flint. A brief heat wave lasting less than 0.1 seconds would force the crickets out if their burrow was short enough.
This tactic works well for crickets hiding in cracks that are hard to reach directly. (It has a fog bomb effect, though I didn't understand the encyclopedia entry on fog bombs when I was young.)
If the lighter is set to maximum power, the fuel evaporates quickly, absorbing heat and freezing. Its terrifying effects on small insects I won't elaborate on...
As for tactical use of magnifying glasses, to ensure stability and precision, we would immobilize the insect while keeping it conscious before focusing the light. The specific process was too horrifying to describe...
Captured crickets were usually buried alive in pits, sometimes subjected to cruel methods like chopping off limbs akin to Empress Lü, cremation if there was fire, or occasionally using the electric ignition gun from the boiler at home as an execution tool. When conscience struck, we'd place semi-dead fat bugs next to ant holes to watch the ants perform their dismembering acts...
The most terrifying game was injection. My father was a military doctor, and we always had medical supplies at home. Whenever I fell ill and received injections, I would confiscate the used syringes to play with. Sometimes, I dismantled new syringes bought from home. This thing with the needle was quite scary, especially when injecting water into insects. And when there was no water, air could be injected...
[Comment by Sa: The first half suggests there might have been chemical defense troops in the compound – they were the ones who used flamethrowers to great effect in northern Vietnam in '79. The second half might not necessarily reflect paternal guidance... perhaps Japanese prisoners left behind a secret manual that somehow ended up in Fei Xueying Xiang's hands?]
Am I, born in a military compound, a little... sinister...? [Comment by Sa: You've noticed?!]
Boys' games were plenty, but girls' games were few. Strangely, most families in this compound had boys; only two had daughters, and they either didn't live nearby or rarely appeared.
I don't know much about girls' games, but seeing girls carrying dolls running out in other military compounds gives a very warm feeling: soldiers also have a gentle side.
However, girls in this compound never played with dolls outside. Even occasional pretend play was limited to among the girls themselves, presumably because they wouldn't want to play with a group of mischievous boys led by an intelligent boy [Comment by Sa: Likely referring to Fei Xueying Xiang...] who loved causing animal terror events and adventures. Haha. At most, they'd come out to jump rope or bury flower jars.
Speaking of burying flower jars, there's a story. A "flower jar" involves digging a hole in a secluded place, putting beautiful wildflowers collected from the courtyard into it, optionally adding decorative candy wrappers or cigarette foil. Then cover it with glass and hide it with soil. You can check it later, giving it a time capsule feel. Most girls played this, but boys burying flower jars would be ridiculed by everyone. However, the older generation of boys enjoyed pranks and often brought us along to destroy the girls' flower jars. To sabotage a flower jar requires some skill, needing familiarity with every plant and tree in the courtyard to know where it's inconspicuous and hard to find.
Our predecessors excelled at this. Often while casually playing somewhere, they'd discover something, immediately stop their current activity, and call everyone over to watch them magically uncover a flower jar. Looking back as adults, these actions somewhat resembled grave robbing.
"Where there is oppression, there is resistance." Girls "had their own tricks," beginning to counteract the flower jar diggers.
Thus, tactics from the movie "Landmine War" were employed. [Comment by Sa: Hey, red daughters of the revolution!]
Once, after the boys broke a flower jar, they customarily observed the expressions of the girls in the courtyard to determine whose flower jar it was. Unlike previous times, the girls remained calm and occasionally threw a few glances, even sarcastically taunting the boys. This time, it was the young Northeastern men who became perplexed.
The bad boys gathered together, listlessly pondering: Why is this? What's going on...
Not long after, while watching a rerun of "Landmine War," the boys finally realized: the girls had set up "real and fake mines": the one destroyed above was a simple decoy flower jar, while the real one was below! Truly worthy offspring of a military compound... [Comment by Sa: Extremely cold... this is a trick used by Pharaoh Tutankhamun, how did your little girls learn it?]
So not long after, under the cover of moonless nights, the bad boys managed to locate the real flower jar... Of course, moonless nights are exaggerated; parents wouldn't let kids go out at night. But the fact remains: they succeeded in finding it based on the girls' expressions the next day.
After that, the cold war continued. Despite the girls employing strategies like "decoy tombs" (setting up multiple flower jars in different locations, known in Warcraft as "chaotic jar flow"), real and fake jars, even "triple real and fake mines," methods to preserve calcium in cooking, none of these stopped the "flower (jar) thieves" from continuing their exploration: once-used tactics like "real and fake mines" lose effectiveness. Just like a line from "Saint Seiya": "For a Saint, the same move can only be used once." Even the great Zhuge Liang dared to play the empty city strategy only once.
Someone asked, then wouldn't the decoy tomb strategy work?
Use decoy tombs? Even if you have countless decoy tombs, can they withstand the relentless enumeration of these energetic boys...
Finally, due to being outnumbered and overwhelmed, the girls couldn't resist the numerous boys. The once-popular "flower jars" disappeared from our courtyard. It's rumored that before quitting, someone buried a "flower jar" with horse manure, but whether it's true and whether any bad boys fell victim remains unverified. [Comment by Sa: This kind of thing is probably due to traitors among the boys. Girls probably wouldn't come up with such a trick, judging by age, they should have started realizing gender differences. Children in military families mature earlier.]
I've already moved to the newly built residential building. Not far from the entrance is still the old courtyard. Although the old trees have been killed, and a slope for transporting materials for the new building has been laid, reducing the area by 20%, my childhood memories remain intact.
I wonder if there are any flower jars left from those days in this courtyard... Hopefully, we won't encounter the legendary "horse manure mines," haha. [Comment by Sa: If decades later you discovered one, how would you feel? Can the stream before your door still flow west?]
[Finished]