Zheng Yan | Coming by boat

In the summer of 2023, I suddenly went to Dali. In the summer of 2024, I gave a lecture at the Shanghai Museum's Egypt Exhibition, and I have completed 83 sessions to date.

I have been to Dali several times before. Although I am from Yunnan, my way of seeing Dali is that of a tourist. This time, I went with Shao Yue, who said she must go to see her old friend Jason.

Jason's home is next to a large field. His leg is temporarily lame, so he sits in the kitchen, drinking coffee and working. He runs a public account called "Cangshan Hiking Home" and works with a group of local new and old Dali people to take people who come to Dali to experience local life.

We rented a car and traveled around.
Every morning before leaving and every night after returning, I would go to Jason's kitchen and workroom to chat. He lives in Dali at the pace of Shanghai. In summer, the city is packed with tourists and he still processes orders in the middle of the night.

When the rainy season comes, mushrooms on the mountain grow overnight, and people nearby will carry baskets to the forest to pick them.

When I was very young, I went back to my hometown in western Yunnan with my parents. I also went there with my older nieces and nephews, but my memories of it are very vague.

We followed Xiao Jing to pick mushrooms. After I picked them for the first time, I gently patted their heads with my hands to let the spores fall into the soil so that new mushrooms could grow after the rain. Maybe not many people in Yunnan know this. We also followed Atu to watch the stars at the West Lake in Dali. While waiting to see the Summer Triangle and the Milky Way, we had dinner with a father and daughter and a mother and son on a small boat. It was cloudy and rainy, and the clouds gradually dispersed at 10 o'clock. We actually saw the moonrise. Only people wait for the sunrise, and the moonrise is an extra gift from nature when watching the stars.

For many years, my hometown, which used to make me feel full of energy after just a few days of returning, has made me more confused and unfamiliar. In the summer of 2023, it seems to be back again.

Memories are easily blurred. I followed a teacher to the Bund City Walk in the evening, and then rode a shared bicycle along the street to People's Square to take the subway. I found that I hadn't been to the Bund for 10 or 20 years. I remembered that when I was in my 20s and just graduated from college, I walked on the streets of Shanghai and secretly told myself not to be a person who goes with the flow, uh, young people. There are so many museums on both sides of the Huangpu River. Dongyi Art Museum opened a new exhibition of Modigliani today. I must take a day off to come and see it.

On the way back, every street scene made people sigh, Shanghai is Shanghai, the prosperity and the market are seamlessly connected. Shao Yue said that Shanghai, like Suzhou, is a unique city. A group of people seemed to be drinking on the street. When I got closer, I found that it seemed to be the door of a garage, or even a parking lot. There was a curtain hanging high, and the atmosphere was full.

I heard that Julu Road used to be Jason's base. When I walked to a triangular intersection, a row of wooden signs hanging at the door of a gate brought me back to the 1980s and 1990s in an instant. I only remember one "Hope Project" donation point and vertical plaques of various organizations.

When she arrived at the hotel, Shao Yue opened a movie called "Coming by Boat". She suddenly remembered that Jason had invested some money in this movie, and the director happened to be her fellow villager. At the beginning of the movie, a line of subtitles appeared, and the co-producer 's name was Jason.

The story unfolds slowly, and in the last shot, the grandmother is holding a basket of flowers and sitting on the boat that is taking her to her wedding.
I suddenly wanted to sit up, the director seemed to be a kindred spirit of the ancient Egyptians. The ancient Egyptians in the desert also traveled on boats along the banks of the Nile River, and there was also such a boat waiting to take them across the Styx where they would arrive after death.

My brother once told me that hometown is a wandering seed. I suddenly realized that history is the same. Today's Egyptians are mainly Arabs, and they are not the main ethnic group that created ancient Egyptian culture . Chinese civilization has been passed down to this day, but how much similarity do we have with our ancestors who created a brilliant civilization?

Only by constantly looking back can we find the belonging of our souls in the past and in a foreign land.

The grandmother in "Returning by Boat" has her soul sailing in a canoe on the shallows, passing through a fertile land, which perfectly overlaps with the other side of rebirth in ancient Egyptian mythology, a fertile land without pain, aging and death.

Without death, there is no life. It is time to make up for the death education, make up for the fact that there are other powerful others in the world, and make up for the fact that temples, tombs, gardens, and grottoes are all ideal worlds in a certain sense.

And thinking about what kind of life you want to live is the most powerful driving force for creating an ideal world.

There is a group of mysterious people in Dali who live their lives in a certain arbitrary way.

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Zheng Yan is Shao Yue's work partner. Together they give museum tours in Shanghai and Suzhou. I met Shao Yue 13 years ago when I was hiking along the Lancang River before I came to Dali. We have been friends for many years. Last summer, Shao Yue and Zheng Yan came to Dali and stayed at my house. They rented a car and traveled around by themselves.

Although I don't know much about museums, Honghong went to listen to Zheng Yan's explanation and exclaimed: "Shao Yue, the teacher who explains the ancient Egypt exhibition, is very good. 368 yuan for 3 hours is definitely value for money. I'm attracted to this teacher", "You participated, it's Zheng Yan".