There are thousands of intersections in Shanghai, but this is the only one that entangles my heart – No. 158 Tongxin Road is a three-story Xingya-style building built during the Japanese occupation period. I was born in the District No. 1 Hospital located in the building. . The front of the courtyard is a T-shaped cross, you turn into the vertical. Next door is my alma mater, Tongxin Road elementary School.

The T-shaped cross is lined with three gates facing south along the street. The first door is the main door of the hospital, which is never closed. There is a secured door leading to the ward in the building. My mother is the head nurse of the obstetrics and gynecology department. When I was a kid, I used to sneak into the maternity conservatory and watch the whole row of babies wailing on the bunk. Babies would use my finger as a pacifier and suck it with gusto. Every day, a man would take away a large stack of round aluminum boxes from the delivery room. My mother told me it was the placenta inside. As soon as every baby is born here, this garment is stripped away.

The second gate is the iron gate of the elementary school, which opens and closes regularly in the morning and evening. A four-story flat roof building, a two-story sloping roof building, and a cinder-paved playground built during the Great Leap Forward period were the places where my disciplines were cultivated. When I was in fifth grade, I found out that a girl in my class had very expressive eyes and a magnetic voice, so I thought about chatting with her every day. Seeing that she was reading “”The Dream of the Old Mistletoe Tree””, I handed her the “”Little Leap”” that I kept at home, and said earnestly: Lazaro must be more interesting than the old tree that fell at the end. From then on, we often changed books and read, and we were admitted to Fuxing Middle School together.

The third door, sandwiched in the middle, is the thick wooden door of the hospital mortuary. As soon as the corpse car arrived, the door was slowly opened, and half of the car would back in. The dead body was carried into the car from the refrigerated room, and then the door was closed and the car drove away. On school days, the pupils lined up in front of this door before entering school as a group, smiling, without any taboo or fear. The sacred song of atheism reverberated in me.

There are many landmarks in Shanghai, but the landmark that is truly engraved in my heart will always be the meaningful T-shaped cross in my childhood.”