“Slow down!” Long shouted at him in our home dialect, “Wait for us!”
“I can’t. Too many people and these people are too slow!” Father halted, shouting back in his introverted voice, “I can’t bear this slowness, this laziness and this sickness anymore! See you at the top!”
No idea when he last had his trousers rolled above his knees. But he had always been a quick person, even after he became a cripple. Guess the stillness of the guardroom had long bored him. Now with the openness of nature, the depth of a forest, the height of a hill, the lovely chirps of birds and the refreshing air, he seemed eager to throw himself into Mother nature’s embrace and take part of the wildness. Step by step, he moved boldly towards the hilltop, as a slave breaking out of his chains in search of his innocence, his strength, his youth and his faith. Rolling trousers was merely an old habit that a farmer couldn’t change, and his identity, of being a farmer, could never be changed. Although he was no longer young, his muscles no longer existed, his knee no longer recovered and the newly worn shirt wrinkled with his bending back and prominent bones, his brisk movements looked familiar yet strangely unfamiliar. The liveliness, the steadiness, the fi rmness could be observed from the unchanging heroic view of his wriggling back. However, out of acceptance, the growing smallness of his fi gure was new, distantly new.