Chapter 65 dutch water

The first time I heard the place name Holland, I was six years old in the countryside of Yuyao (now Cixi), Zhejiang. I read early, I was in the second grade when I was six years old.After school that day, I saw many people at my house, watching my mother write letters around the table.It turned out that the old lady in Hexi was seriously ill, and her relatives were notifying her son in Shanghai to return home quickly. The mother's pen stopped in the chatter, and the old lady Hexi has been talking about something to eat for the past two days, and everyone listened intently but couldn't understand it.

Let's talk about it when her son comes back.people say. No, my mother said, maybe what she wants to eat can only be found in Shanghai, so I wrote to his son and asked him to bring it.Otherwise it will be too late. Mom was right, and everyone fell silent. I'll go and listen!It was Grandma's voice.Grandmother and old lady Hexi used to live in Shanghai in their early years, and they fled back home together after the Anti-Japanese War began. My grandmother has small feet. According to her, she cried when she bound her feet when she was a child. Her mother couldn't bear it, so she loosened them secretly, so her feet are half-big, but she still walks with a limp.Apart from going to the temple to chant sutras, she rarely goes out, let alone Hexi, because there is an old stone bridge there, and the stone slabs have already slipped.On this day, I supported her, and she used me as a crutch to move to Hexi step by step.

The old lady Hexi was lying on the bed, very happy to see her grandmother, but she couldn't lift her hand when she wanted to reach out.Grandma quickly leaned over and asked her softly what she wanted to eat. The old lady Hexi seemed a little embarrassed, but she finally murmured. Grandmother frowned, asked her to repeat, then smiled, looked up and said to the crowd: She wants to drink Dutch water. This is the first time I heard this strange water name, I went home and asked my mother.My mother only said that the Netherlands is a country far away, but she doesn't know what Dutch water is, so she asked my grandmother to describe it.After my grandmother briefly mentioned the characteristics of Dutch water, my mother said, "That's soda water!"

It turned out that in my grandmother's generation, soda was still called Dutch water. Did the first generation of soda in Shanghai come from the Netherlands?Or is the soda originally made in the Netherlands, and then the soda in other countries is also called Dutch water? I have never verified this. I only know that after my mother finished writing the letter, a young man rushed to Xiaolin Town in the north to post it quickly, and my mother specially asked him to send the letter without delay. A few days later, the Hexi old lady's son came back, and when he arrived, he took out a glass bottle from his travel bag with a small iron cap on it.He took out another switch from his pocket, flipped it lightly, and the iron cover opened, and the water in the bottle was bubbling densely.He stopped pouring it into the cup, and put it directly in the mouth of the old lady in Hexi.

The old lady Hexi took two sips, then shook her head, not wanting to drink any more.Her son put the half bottle of soda aside and stopped talking.I didn't understand at the time, was it because the old lady Hexi didn't want to drink it anymore, or did she think her son bought it wrong? That night, the old lady died. This matter has long been forgotten. When I arrived in the Netherlands today, I read the name of the country softly, and suddenly I remembered it like dust. Ordinary Chinese people in previous generations were ignorant of the Western world, and they occasionally heard about it, mostly because of the Western utensils, including food and clothing, that were introduced into China at that time.It's like the knowledge of ordinary people in the West has been limited to silk, porcelain and tea for a long time.This kind of ecological communication full of texture seems trivial, but it directly penetrates into the bottom of life, and even penetrates into the bottom of life. It has a profoundness that far exceeds the propositions of various people in the political, military, and diplomatic fields.Look at this old woman who only lived in Shanghai for a while, the last thing she chanted in her life was the name of a small country in Western Europe.

I guess the old lady Hexi would not be used to it when she drank soda for the first time in Shanghai, but she quickly found a kind of comfort that relieves the nose and clears the throat from the discomfort.This brief transformation process included the happy docking of the two ecological cultures, and when the possibility of docking was lost later, it became a kind of will-like longing. Everything in thoughts is better than reality.The old lady who has been away from Shanghai for a long time has actually re-adapted to the traditional customs, so she was disappointed at the first sip of the bottle of soda that finally came to her mouth, and shook her head at the second sip.She finally lost her concern and left Holland in this way.

With the end of her life, she completed a small tug-of-war between two ecological civilizations.