Liao Jingsheng

My impression of my father has always been a man who is unsmiling, but his tall and magnificent body is deeply engraved in my heart like a brand.

In my childhood memory, my father is like a superman, and nothing is impossible for him. Perhaps full of love for work, his mother often complains that he is like a "cow", has endless strength, silently contributes to the unit, painstakingly, and sometimes even forgets to care for his family. Yes, when he bent down to be a "cow", and when he faced the morning light and stepped on the stars to protect the water lifeline of Yunhe, I believe it is not only I think he is like a mountain - solid and reliable.

Others spent most of their childhood in amusement parks, parks and youth palaces, while my childhood was accompanied by construction sites and waterworks. Whenever my father asked me to go out to "play", it must be to go to the water plant first and then to the construction site. He pulled out the motorcycle that was older and bigger than me from the garage, took me to the fuel tank and hurried to drive me to the construction site. At the construction site mixed with piles of broken cement and brown soil, the roar of machines and the smell of acetylene and plastic came from time to time. In sultry weather, workers with steel chisels and shovels sweated like rain... After he took me off the motorcycle, he plunged into the construction site without looking back, stood on the muddy mound to command workers to work, and also walked down the "trench" from time to time The most standard demonstration for everyone. This is a true portrayal of him at the construction site, and it is also a picture of my childhood in my memory.

I still remember that one time before I went to the construction site, I read the article of "Iron Man" Wang Jinxi in my Chinese textbook. When I saw my father jump into the puddle in spite of the dirt, and then the workers swarmed in and finished the rescue task together in the thigh deep sewage, I immediately thought of the text I had just read. My father became Wang Jinxi, and the puddle became an oil field. They were all for the people and their families. At that moment, I understood my father, and his image became bigger in my heart. The noisy and messy construction site is the battlefield of life, and there is no doubt that my father is a hero on the battlefield.

My meticulous father also has a gentle side in front of me. Every time I came back from the construction site, most of them were in the sunset. He would take me to the roadside shop to buy a favorite chicken leg bread. I sat on a bumpy motorcycle and devoured it. When I was greedy, I even licked the stick with chicken legs several times. He always looked at me and smiled indulgently. I looked up. Under the sunset, my father's suntanned face was shining with gold and a smile of pride. I was proud to finish today's work, or I was proud to eat contentedly. I didn't know when I was young. However, the simple chicken leg bread and a touch of setting sun are the best memories of my childhood.

Father's pursuit of work is beyond our comprehension. At the end of one year, because of the cold wave, the water pipes and water meters in Yunhe and many mountain areas were damaged by freezing, which led to my father's busy work. In fact, as the leader of the engineering team at that time, he could give the task to his workers and reunite with us, but he wanted to lead the workers to the farthest and coldest place in the cloud. The cold wave was especially dangerous. The freezing rain covered everything with a thick layer of ice. Some remote villages and towns were difficult to reach because of icy roads and fallen trees. However, the desire of the masses filled his father with fighting spirit: "It's almost New Year's Eve, and the masses should not be unable to drink tap water."

On the New Year's Eve of that year, the family prepared a rich New Year's Eve dinner. Everyone had already arrived, but there was no father. At this time, he called, asked us to eat first and then hung up in a hurry. From the singing and dancing at the opening ceremony of the Spring Festival Gala to the unforgettable Tonight, the New Year's Eve dinner that year never came to him. The next morning, I saw him lying on his back in bed, sleeping soundly, and the shoes wrapped in thick mud in front of the bed. I don't know what time he came back at night. I don't know whether he will regret missing his relatives' toasting on New Year's Eve. I don't know whether he and his co-workers will smile when standing at the construction site on the hill overlooking the gorgeous fireworks in the county. I think he and the workers must be firm in eyes and full in heart, carrying equipment to help the masses solve their problems again and again.

In fact, after going out to school, I gradually understood my father. I am ashamed to say that after he was elected as the national model worker, I learned a lot about him from newspapers and others. For example, he lifted a pipe on the construction site and hit his own foot. I only knew that his foot was injured, but I didn't know that he just stayed in the hospital for three days and didn't listen to the advice. He sneaked to the construction site with plaster and crutches; I only know that he often took me to a mountain village for a while, but I don't know that he fought with his fellow workers day and night for more than a month to finish the task ahead of schedule in order to get clean tap water for the village as soon as possible. My mother and I never understood my father's workaholic behavior of neglecting his family. At home, he seldom told us about things on the construction site. The muddy trouser legs seemed to explain everything. Colleagues and friends praised his father as Yunhe's "living map", because he can not only remember the road network of Yunhe and all villages and towns, but also know the distribution of underground pipe network clearly. Even today, when the urban area is expanding rapidly, he can quickly add the main pipe network trend of the newly developed block to his "map", keeping real-time updates like an online electronic map. Now I can finally understand him, just as Paul Kochagin said: "When he looks back on his past, he will not regret for doing nothing and wasting his time, nor will he feel guilty for being mean and living a vulgar life." When his father dedicated himself to the water supply and drainage industry and fought for it all his life, he had no regrets in his life.

However, as I grew older, I gradually found that my father was not omnipotent, and my height and education gradually exceeded him. He is not good at using computers, smart phones and other modern technology products, and was jokingly called "antique" by my mother and me. With the development of electronic office, my father is obviously hard pressed for this new way of office work, so I sometimes wonder why some simple things are so difficult for him. He hurried to find me and asked me to help install office software such as "Zhe Zheng Pin" on the computer and mobile phone. He asked me how to forward the documents on "Zhe Zheng Pin" to WeChat, and occasionally sent a manuscript written by him on WeChat for me to type into a document. When I saw these scrawled manuscripts, I couldn't help thinking of the keyboard with a thick layer of ash on his desk, as well as the piles of documents and tea cups wrapped with starch. The sometimes incorrect sentences and punctuation in the manuscript made me feel that my father was helpless about his educational level. He was no longer the father who taught me math in primary school and showed off simple English in front of me. At this time, no matter how busy I am, I will stop the work at hand and help him input the polished manuscript into the computer word by word. After returning home from the summer vacation, I bought a microphone to plug into the computer, installed voice recognition software, and taught him how to input voice step by step, so that he could barely keep pace with the times. After I went to Lanzhou to study, there was less contact between us. He should also know that there was no common topic between his knowledge and me when I became a graduate student. So every time he called or sent me a WeChat message, he talked to me very little. The topic was only about whether the money was enough and how the school was going. He often told me not to save money and be good to myself. Although there are only a few words, I can still feel my father's yearning for me through the screen, which may be his concern for his son who is not good at expressing his feelings.

Doing what I do and loving what I do is my most true evaluation of my father. Just like a lyric in "The lone brave": "Who says that a man who is covered with mud is not a hero." His father is an lone brave in the Yunhe water conservancy industry. He shines and heats in the dark, walks around the streets in the middle of the night with a leaky listening stick in his hand, and wields a shovel to remove mud and muddy slurry in the hot sun. Walking under the street lamp, he is small and great, just like the guardian god silently contributing his own strength to the cloud and water supply.