March 2026: What Is The Current Situation Of Traditional Cultural Composition Of The Motherland?

What happened last Friday, even now when I think about it, I still feel oppressive and uncomfortable. Hearing that those people were trying to snatch our things again, I was so angry that I walked around the room many times. When I got home at night, I asked my mother with a lot of suppressed energy: "Mom, did you have any children's songs when you were a child? Can you sing a few lines to me?" My mother was stunned for a moment, and said with a bitter smile on her face: "Where could there be any children's songs? My family was poor at that time, and I had to work in the fields to earn work points at a few years old. My throat was full of dust, and I couldn't sing any songs at all."

I didn't get anything from my mother, and the fire in my heart felt like a ladle of cold water had been poured on it. It made a tingling sound, a puff of smoke came out, and then disappeared.

I walked upstairs dejectedly, and when I passed the computer desk, I suddenly had a bad idea. My dad's computer, which I have never been allowed to touch, even turned it off today. I walked over quietly and turned on the monitor. The moment the screen came on, my heart stopped beating.

White text on a blue background: "Please enter your password."

Hold. It's fucking over.

At that moment, I suddenly understood that it wasn't just me who was in a bad situation; my mother's generation was so poor that they didn't even have the leisure time to sing; and my generation couldn't think of any complete nursery rhyme in front of the computer; if this continues, it's not that others will snatch it away, but that we ourselves have already discarded those things.

Who is "stealing" our memories?

To be honest, it's really weird. On the one hand, we blame others for stealing, but on the other hand, we completely forget about it. If you randomly find a young person on the street, can he recite the twenty-four solar terms? Can he sing a few lines from his hometown opera? The answer is no. However, it can instantly answer which Korean idol is returning today and which Korean drama has launched a new episode.

They took the worn-out items that we had discarded, wiped them clean and claimed, "This belongs to me." We became anxious and angry about this, stamping our feet and shouting curses. What happens after we finish cursing? He turned his head and went to swipe the phone in his hand.

Children in front of the candy painting stall

I recall that when I was a child, there was an old man setting up a stall at the corner of the street, and the sugar syrup made a bubbling sound in the small pot. He held a spoon and asked with his head tilted: "Children, do you want a dragon or a phoenix?" The spoon tilted, and the hot sugar water flowed down. After three hooks and two strokes, a phoenix stood on the board. When the sun shone, it showed a golden and shiny appearance, which made people reluctant to eat, but they couldn't resist the urge to take a lick.

Nowadays, there are fewer such stalls, and you can occasionally see them in scenic spots. The price has increased several times. The child took a photo with his mobile phone and sent it to his circle of friends. After taking the photo, he threw it to an adult and said, "Mom, eat it. It's too sweet."

It is too sweet. Too cool. Too tacky.

But that is our own sweetness.

Why are we losing it?

There is a question that I have not been able to figure out for a long time: there are so many ancient civilizations in the world, why are our belongings always remembered and robbed by others? Then I read an article that said that Dunhuang silk was shipped abroad box after box in the past, and thousands of pieces were collected in the British Museum, Guimet Museum, and Hermitage Museum. Chinese scholars traveled all over the world, took photos, conducted research, and restored them on paper through "putting together" methods.

More than one hundred and twenty years have passed. Some of those silks, some of which had never been unpacked, were haphazardly placed in dimly lit drawers and slept quietly for a hundred years. In the end, they still stayed there quietly.

We feel angry, but anger cannot solve the problem. If each of us can sing our own songs, draw our own paintings, and tell our own stories since childhood, how can others rob us? How could it be snatched away?

The cross talk that night

That night, a cross talk was played on TV, performed by Dabing and Zhao Weiguo. The soldier squatted behind the chair, lowered his head and muttered. Zhao Weiguo performed in front, twisting his waist for a while and acting coquettishly for a while. Suddenly there was a long "Hmm——", Zhao Weiguo was stunned for a moment, and then sneaked away. The soldier was still squatting there and twisting, and the whole audience burst into laughter.

I laughed so hard that tears came to my eyes. After I finished laughing, a thought suddenly occurred to me, could Koreans copy such a joke? The answer is that it cannot be copied. The reason is that what is contained in it is a plot that only Chinese people can understand, a rhythm that only we have, and an overtone that only people who have grown up in this land can hear.

Mother's birthday, who remembers it?

It's so weird when I think about it sometimes. We can remember the birthday of our favorite idol, we can remember the specific moment when the game was updated, we can remember that a certain online video creator delayed the appointment again, but we forget when our parents’ birthdays are.

I flipped through the calendar on my phone, set a reminder, and found an old photo from the photo album. The photo was of my mother when she was young. At that time, she was wearing two braids, standing in a wheat field, with a smile on her face and exposed teeth. She probably didn't have any children's songs at that stage, right? However, she would hum a tune that she claimed was taught by her grandmother, but she didn’t know its name. She just hummed it casually while working.

I asked her how she sang it. She thought about it for a long time and hummed two lines softly, but these two lines deviated from the proper tune. Then she took the lead in laughing and said: "Forget, forget, I haven't sung for many, many years."

Although my mother could not recite the poem "Whoever speaks of an inch of grass will reap three rays of spring light", she understood its meaning. She did the following things to her grandmother, washed her feet, cut her nails, and talked with her, and she continued to do this for more than ten years. On the day my grandmother passed away, my mother sat by the bed and waited. Holding the hand that had cooled down, I didn't say a word, just sat quietly like that until the sky darkened and night arrived.

Filial piety is not just about serving tea and water, or just stuffing red envelopes during the Chinese New Year. Filial piety means that you have to remember, you have to remember what kind of food she likes to eat, you have to remember what she is afraid of, you have to remember that even she was able to sing when she was young.

The kite flew away, but the string was still in my hand

I went to the park a few days ago and saw someone flying a kite. It was a rather large sand swallow with a long streamer on its tail, which was trembling in the wind. Next to it was an old man, holding a spool tightly in his hand and looking at the sky with squinted eyes.

I leaned over and asked, "Uncle, did you make this kite yourself?"

The old man turned his head and said with a proud look on his face: "That must be the case! Cao's kites have been passed down for more than three hundred years. This is a sand swallow kite. Look at these wings. The curvature of the wings will be greatly affected by even a millimeter difference." He showed me the bamboo frame and told me how to select bamboo, how to tie the thread, how to paper, and how to draw the eyes, all in a clear and coherent manner.

"Who among the young people are still learning this nowadays," he sighed, "they are all playing with drones."

I looked at the sand swallow in the sky, and for a moment I felt like crying. It flew so high and so far, but the thread was held tightly in the old man's hand. As long as the thread doesn't break, it can be pulled back no matter how far it flies.

But what if the line is broken? What if no one remembers to answer it?

Is there any help?

On the way home, I thought about it for a long time.

We in this generation were born in a period when we had the most good things, but we were also at a stage when it was easy to throw away good things. On the other hand, when he scolds others shamelessly, he himself has no intention whatsoever. We regard tradition as baggage, old antiques as jokes, and "rusticism" as the source of evil.

But those objects are the only things in the world that we can show off, others cannot learn from, and things that truly belong to us.

My mother sent me another WeChat message today, asking if she would go back for dinner on the weekend. I replied "reply". Then he added: "Mom, if you think about it again, is it true that you can't recall a single word of the tune that your grandma sang when she was a child?"

After a long time, she replied with a voice message and clicked on it. There was the sound of wind in the background and the sound of car horns in the distance. She said with a little embarrassment in her voice: "I only remember one sentence...'Little swallows, wearing floral clothes, come here every spring'...I really can't remember the rest."

I saved this sentence and set it as an alarm.