One
Mom is gone. She left us, left the earth, and returned to the land where she was born and raised.
She is still here, and she will always live in our hearts, in the students she loved so much, and in the folks she loved so much.
My mother’s name is Yang Zhiyun (once known as Yang Xiuan), and she was born in Yixingbu, a northern suburb of Tianjin, on the 14th day of the 11th month of the 1921 lunar calendar. Her father, Yang Fengxiang (the author’s maternal grandfather, editor’s note), was a village doctor who made a living by running a small pharmacy; her mother, Yang Ma (the author’s maternal grandmother, editor’s note), was a housewife who could not read or write.
She may have been adopted by her grandfather and grandmother, so people say, but she still refuses to talk about it. Grandpa and Grandma treated her like their own daughter, and no one wanted to talk about the past.
The author’s parents at their old house on Wenjin Street in Xicheng District, Beijing, in the 1990s
My mother was born in a difficult time and a difficult place.
Yixingbu was a major town in the north of Tianjin, and since ancient times it was a necessary route to Baodi and Jidong from Jinmen, a geographical location that made it a military stronghold for attacking and defending Tianjin.
In modern times, Yixingbu has been in disaster for a long time due to internal and external troubles and constant wars. When my mother was a child, her hometown was already a poor and unlivable village. The village was a dirt road, a dirt house, a dirt bed, and the crop yield was less than 100 pounds per acre.
People were mostly engaged in trading buckwheat hides, hemp stalks, Panicum stalks, herbs, etc., and were struggling to get by.
A folk song tells the scene at that time.
Living in an earthen house, sleeping on an earthen bed, men doing business outside, no rice soup at home, children crying for hunger, women in tears, sisal for corn flour, mudding their bellies to survive the famine.
In 1936, Grandpa died of illness at the age of 45. The pharmacy was run by grandma alone. Grandmother hired two guys named Zhao from Shandong to help take care of the pharmacy. In addition to the pharmacy, she also rented 10 mu of land from the “Deaf Tenth Master” (a landowner surnamed Yang).
In October of that year, the Japanese invasion army conducted a large-scale exercise in the suburbs of Tianjin to seize Pingjin in the “imaginary enemy” style. Six to seven thousand Japanese troops formed a half-moon arc-shaped encirclement from the northwest to the southeast outside Yixingbu, and many crops and farmland were destroyed by the sound of gunfire and artillery. The people did not dare to go out, they could not harvest their crops, they could not do business, and they lived in hardship without food and clothing.
On April 22, 1937, the Japanese invasion forces were about to invade North China and decided to build a temporary airfield to prepare for the airlift of troops and supplies to Tianjin. The address was chosen in the southeast of Yixingbu village. At that time, many farmlands were destroyed and many farmers were taken to work, causing Yixingbu to suffer yet another damage. The “7-7” Lugou Bridge Incident marked the beginning of the eight-year war of resistance.
From February 1937 to January 1938, my father taught at the Yixingbu Shifan Elementary School. During this period, my father and my mother fell in love and got married, and in April 1938, my father was admitted to the History and Geography Section (later changed to the Department of History and Geography) of the National Beijing Teachers’ College (later changed to Beijing Normal University). In that year, my mother gave birth to her first son, whom my grandfather named Guanghua (meaning “restoration of China”), but unfortunately he only lived for one year and died of pneumonia.
On September 15, 1942 (the sixth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar), my mother gave birth to me again during the national tragedy. My grandfather was so distressed that he named me “Jiabao”. In that year, the Japanese were sweeping North China, and the area around Jinbei became a place where they “cleared the countryside” and implemented the “three light” policy.
One day in October, a group of Japanese invaders entered Yixingbu and gathered the whole village in the square in the southwest of the village and set up machine guns around the villagers to force them to hand over the Eight Route Army. My mother hugged my newborn child and crowded in the crowd, terrified. The ghosts yelled and threatened to shoot if they didn’t hand over the people. The courtyard was silent, and my mother, fearing that I would cry, held me tightly in her arms.
In the midst of the military chaos, the pharmacy opened unsettled. Fake and nationalist troops often came to harass them. One afternoon, when my mother was washing clothes in a wooden basin against the window, a dog was lying under the window outside, but she did not see it. Suddenly, a group of Chinese soldiers came and shot the dog to death. The sound of gunfire stunned her and she put down her clothes, unable to speak for half a day. I was terrified and hugged my mom tightly and hid behind her. At that moment, all I could hear was the sound of wild laughter outside.
In December 1948, the Ping-Tianjin Campaign entered its second phase when the PLA attacked Tianjin. The Kuomintang defenders ordered the burning of farmhouses in more than 70 villages in northern Tianjin in order to clear the field and clear the shooting boundaries, resulting in the destruction of 140,000 villagers’ homes and families. More than 200 houses were burned in Yixingbu. Grandfather’s family lived in the western slope, the house was all burned to ashes, in 1926 to run the Shifan elementary school was also burned to the ground. Grandma’s house and her small pharmacy were not spared.
Already more than half a century old, the grandmother fled with the villagers in a panic and lost all the savings she had brought along on the way. Looking at the loss of her small pharmacy for many years, her home was gone, and she had no money, how could she live in the future? She was so grief-stricken that she suffered for many days, and since then, she fell ill and passed away in 1949 at the age of 51.
During those days, my mother had to serve my grandmother, take care of me, and deal with the aftermath of the small pharmacy. I could see that her heart was very heavy and sad.
Two
Mom was strong, self-reliant and upwardly mobile.
In order to struggle to support the family, she looked for jobs everywhere and taught at Yixingbu Shifan Primary School and Tianjin County Seventh District Central School. She knew that every job was hard to come by, so she cherished it very much. Before and after the victory of the war (July 1944 to July 1946), she studied in the nursing school of the “Madaifu Hospital” in Tianjin, but later resigned because I was left unattended.
My mother did not go to school much, but she attended teacher training courses and night school for bookkeeping in order to find a job. In 1954, she left home in pain and went to Gansu with a group of young people to teach. In Tianshui Fuxi Primary School as a teacher, a go is most of the year. I was only 12 years old that year and had just started junior high school. My father was at work and had no time to take care of me, and I had to cook with him at night. It was then that I learned to steam nests and boil thin rice. My three-year-old sister was placed in my fifth aunt’s home.
In 1959, my mother became a language teacher and classroom teacher at Dongmenli Elementary School. She read a lot when she was young and had a solid foundation in the language. Her student Yu Ya recalls.
Our language classes were always taught by Ms. Yang. The students loved her classes, starting from phonetic literacy to reading and composing, every lesson was clear. The reading lessons really brought people into the text, and they could basically recite it after a few times. She has poetry in her belly and loves to tell stories so that her students can learn the truth of being a human being.
Student Sun Xiuting recalls.
Ms. Yang laid an exceptionally strict and solid foundation for us. I remember that she had a whip, and the sound of its clicking on the blackboard echoes powerfully in my ears to this day. In the deeper understanding, while teaching knowledge, the teacher implicitly instilled in us the principles of being a human being and the rules of dealing with things, and gradually, our class had a class style: it was guided by the culture of learning, self-discipline, and attention to moral quality.
Yu Ya asked: Do we all have a spirit of dedication to a belief?
I said yes, that I would be moved by some kind of sublime beauty. If one fights for a just cause, one would not hesitate to die – even at this age. Sun Xiuting replied.
When Mom reached her nineties, her students still thought of her. They are now successful in their careers, but when they are together they still often mention Ms. Yang.
It is a great blessing in our lives that our teacher Yang has reached the advanced age of over ninety years of life, and we are still children with our teacher in our lives. The students who are now nearing old age remember their teacher this way.
Mom was an extremely compassionate and kind person.
Mom sympathized with the poor.
The Han family, the neighbors in front of the temple in Yixingbu, was a poor farmer with many children and a difficult life, but the whole family suffered from tuberculosis. Mom had been friends with the family since she was young. After liberation, the Han family only had one pair of siblings (Han Yuqin and Han Fuqui) in Tianjin. Mom took care of the orphans while her family was in dire straits, until the older sister found a job at the Seventh National Cotton Factory and the younger brother graduated from the 35th Middle School in Tianjin and became a physical education teacher. When Han Fu-kyu had no place to live while attending 35th Middle School, his mother let him live in her own home, a nine-square-meter hut that was already overcrowded with a large young man.
The Hutong in front of Damoan on Ximenli Street, where my family lived, was a place where the lower class people lived, living on their labor and business, earning little and barely getting by. As time went by, the houses became more and more dilapidated, the roads became more and more muddy, the hutongs became more and more chaotic, and the residents became more and more crowded.
When I first moved here, a family of scholars came to the hutong, and people were very polite to each other. They called the father “Mr. Wen” and the mother “Ms. Yang”. The parents were honest, modest and got along well with each family.
The landlord, Grandma Liu, was alone, with no family to take care of her, and lived on two houses and a little savings in the rented yard. My family rented a north room outside the courtyard and lived there for more than 40 years. My mother was very kind to the elderly, and although the rent was expensive, she always paid on time and sent something to the elderly from time to time. The courtyard, toilet and kitchen were cleaned up very well. “During the Cultural Revolution, my family was “evacuated” to the countryside; after the Cultural Revolution, I came back here and didn’t move until the neighborhood was demolished.
Many people in the hutong neighborhood were friends of my mother. Among them were tricycle riders, those who ran a silk-pulling workshop, those who ran a sauce garden, and orphans and widows. My parents did not interact with them deeply, but they were warm and sincere with each other, and sometimes helped each other. There is no professional or cultural barrier here, no false sentiment. For many years, the parents did not have any disagreements with any of the families. This relationship lasted until those “unprecedented” times. When the family was suffering, the neighbors quietly sympathized with us and tore down the big-character posters put up for Dad in the hutongs at night when no one was around, but none of the families took the blame.
I remember, at that time, the family meals were very simple, each meal usually only one dish, rarely eat meat. Sometimes let me go to the butcher store to buy two cents meat, but also to explain to fat and lean, which is to improve the food. When it comes to New Year’s festivities, the family eat a “noodle”, Mom always carry a bowl full of noodles, put a good fried sauce and vegetable code, to the neighbors to send home. This was my mother’s heart for the neighbors, and her passion for treating people.
Three
My mother lived a simple life and lived a clean life.
In 1950, my father, mother and I moved to Tianjin and rented a hut of only a few square meters, with no money. Dad’s salary was only 37 yuan a month, but the rent alone was 8 yuan (the money for a bag of flour). This hut accompanied our family for decades, during which time we added a sister and a brother to our family. Mom was so frugal that our clothes were mended and repaired. That’s how, the salary last month can not receive the next month, but also borrow some money every month. At that time, Dad had a small notebook, specifically to keep accounts.
I grew up knowing the hardships of life, the simple habits of life throughout my life.
I remember when I was in junior high school, my mother once made me a new pair of cloth shoes. That day, I was happy to wear my new shoes to school, but unfortunately it was raining heavily at the end of the school day. When I arrived home, my mother was waiting by the door in the rain, looking at me from afar, walking barefoot and holding the new shoes in her hands. She rushed to me and took me in her arms. In the rain, I looked at my mother, she was in tears, her face was full of tears and rain.
Poor people are not short of will, and my mother was strict with herself and with her children. I remember that Tianjin has just been liberated, there is no place to settle in the city, the home house has been destroyed, my father and mother took me back to Yixingbu, temporarily borrowed a distant relative’s house to live, I rented the village in the Yang family under the field warehouse for the school building Shi Fan elementary school to continue school.
One day, I picked up a penny on the street and put it in my coat pocket, and was found by my mother. She asked where the money came from as she fought, and actually broke a broom. From then on, I learned the truth that you can’t take any money that is not your own. I have kept this truth in my heart for decades and have never violated it once.
My sister is 9 years younger than me, and I often transport her to kindergarten. Once she came home from school, she brought home a rag doll. Mom asked her where she got it from, but she just cried and couldn’t tell me. My mom told me to take my sister and send the doll back to the kindergarten immediately. Only when we got to the kindergarten did we find out that they were given to every child in the kindergarten.
My mother had a bad temper and never coddled her children, but was very strict. Looking back now, the lessons my mother taught me when I was a child have served me well throughout my life.
Mom was strict with the whole family by making such things as the root of morality. In the year when Tianjin was just liberated, Dad entered the North China People’s Revolutionary University and worked in the Tianjin Municipal Bureau of Industry and Commerce for a while after graduation. At that time, it was the period of private industrial and commercial enterprise reform, and Dad’s job required him to deal with private industrial and commercial entrepreneurs. Mom was very vigilant and often instructed Dad not to accept any money or goods from others. Dad was very honest, never got involved in any wrongdoing, and never took a penny from anyone, as a result, he was clean in the “Three Against Five” campaign later.
In 1978, she stayed in the countryside for nearly 10 years before she was able to implement the policy and return to her original home, a small, ramshackle hut in front of Dharmaan Hutong, where she lived for another 15 years. The company’s main business is to provide a wide range of products and services to the public. The first thing I did was to take care of the family.
Mom was strong and opinionated.
As far back as I can remember, I saw that she had to worry about and make decisions about everything in the family. Dad had a hard and difficult life. He experienced both the old and new societies, and in the midst of the vicissitudes of the world, he was content to live in peace, but finally he did not escape the whirlpool of politics. He was “restricted in use”. He began to work on the farm and later worked in the school library. During those years, it was as if something big had happened to the family, and my mother was worried, trying to persuade my father and take care of the whole family.
The disaster of the “Cultural Revolution” fell on our family. Dad was seized and arrested, put under surveillance at school, and his salary was suspended. Large-character posters were posted from the door to the alley. From her own modest salary, Mom saved enough money for Dad’s food and sent it to school herself. In 1970, the family was forcibly evacuated to the countryside again. First, the family was sent to Wuyuan in Inner Mongolia (my sister was in Tongliao in the countryside), but my parents were already over 100 years old at the time, so it was difficult for them to bring their young son to adapt to the environment there. After repeated negotiations and contacts, the family was relocated to the Xiaodian Commune in the northern suburbs of Tianjin, where they worked for six years. After the smashing of the “Gang of Four”, my father was transferred to Yixingbu Ninety-Six Middle School in the northern suburbs of Tianjin as a teacher.
On November 5, 1978, the Tianjin Hebei District Education Bureau issued a review of the political history of my father, saying that “no new problems were found” during the review of the Cultural Revolution. In 1982, he went through the retirement procedure, and in 1986, he became a retiree.
My father was tolerant, but had a personality. When I was just one year old, the Japanese invaders were clearing the countryside and sweeping, and pedestrians were strictly checked and were not allowed to bring a grain of rice. Once, my mother asked my father to buy some rice to bring home because she did not have enough milk. When it was dark, my father crossed the roadblock with a bag of rice in his arms, and the Japanese invaders, armed with guns, insisted on searching him, but my father refused and was almost killed by a bayonet.
“During the Cultural Revolution, my father was locked up in school and was often subjected to brutal “interrogations” and beatings. One day, the rebels punched my father’s face and swelled his eyes so much that he could not see. My father couldn’t stand it any longer and pointed to his heart and said, “Boy, hit him here!”
Although he was a bit stubborn, he often thought of the whole family and was able to endure the pain that no one could endure, and became more reticent. When he had nothing to do, he often copied ancient poems or interesting articles from newspapers to relieve his melancholy.
Mother understood him best, as if she was the only one who could see his inner thoughts and feelings that were difficult to express. She never complained about her father, but always comforted and thoughtfully considered him. They were together for 75 years.
My father left nothing behind, he took all the hardships, pain and love with him, and walked away so peacefully, as if the world had given him this path.
Four
My mother taught me to be a man.
My mother loved reading ancient books and often told me stories about Yue Fei, Wen Tianxiang, Zhuge Liang and other historical figures, as well as stories about elders I knew well. When she was doing housework, I used to pester her while she told me stories while doing her work. Mom always said that people should work hard and move up. She always combined being a human being, ambition and responsibility with hard work and conscientiousness, which made me understand that people should not only be able to do something, but also learn to be a human being first. These words of my mother touched my heart deeply. I often shed tears while listening to her words, and I was determined to study hard for the sake of my country and the people, and to be a man of character, knowledge and ability. Whenever I remember the look of my mother’s voice and her words that I still can’t forget, a feeling of reverence and gratitude sprang up in me.
My mother was worried about me taking on a big responsibility. I have kept two letters from my mother in my hand. One letter was written in November 2003, when I first became prime minister, and the other was written in October 2007, when I was about to become the second prime minister.
The first letter reads, “It is not easy for you to be in such a high position as a minister today without any backers, not to mention your family. Your character is to strive for perfection, but with such a large country and a large population, it is difficult to achieve perfection.” She asked me to do “to get through to the top, to make peace with people, and to remember that a lone tree cannot make a forest.”
The second letter reads, “The achievements of the past five years are the result of your hard work, which is not easy to come by. The next five years will be difficult and complicated, and it will not be easy to keep it up. With such a large country, so many people, and such a complicated economy, you will have to accomplish many things one by one, and it will be thankful if its effect can reach half. So many things, how wide your shoulders can withstand? This requires everyone in the same boat to smoothly and steadily through five years of difficulties.”
Mom’s heart is in her children and in her country. She watches the news every day to learn about domestic and international events. She never asked me about my work, but often told me in various ways what the public reflected and reminded me of it.
On February 2, 2009, during my visit to England, I made a special trip to Cambridge University to give a speech. On that day, it was snowing heavily and the Cambridge auditorium was packed. The title of my speech was “Seeing China through the eyes of development”. I introduced China’s past, present and future to the students and teachers in words full of emotion, and my speech received a lot of applause.
At the end of my speech, there was a “hiccup”. A Western-looking student disturbed the audience, shouting and throwing shoes at the podium. I stood with my head held high, unperturbed, and showed calmness and composure. After the meeting was quiet, I spoke, “Such despicable tricks cannot destroy the friendship between the people of China and Britain.” “The progress of mankind and the harmony of the world is a historical trend that cannot be stopped by any force.” My words elicited a long and enthusiastic applause from the venue.
I did not know that at this very moment, my mother, who was sitting in front of the TV watching the live broadcast, suffered a sudden cerebrovascular embolism because she was worried about her son and was stimulated, and has since then lost her eyesight, had difficulty speaking and walking. That year, my mother was 88 years old.
I retired after 28 years of service in Zhongnanhai, including ten years as Premier. For a person of my background, “being an official” was a matter of chance. I was ordered to be careful, and I was on thin ice and in the abyss, and I always made a plan to return to my job from the beginning.
After I retired, I was very happy to return to my mother, but I felt bad when I saw that her condition was getting worse day by day. For eight years, I seldom went out and often accompanied her.
“Whoever says that the heart of an inch of grass is rewarded with three springs of happiness.” My mother’s love, my mother’s kindness cannot be repaid. Many of her teachings have penetrated into my cells and into my blood. Many things among people can be imitated by each other, or even painstakingly done. But the only thing that cannot be faked is the sincerity, simplicity and kindness of emotion and heart. Just look at his eyes, look at his compassion, look at his courage in distress, look at his spirit of commitment at the critical moment of the country’s future and destiny, and you can see his true nature. I sympathize with the poor and the weak, and oppose bullying and oppression. The China in my mind should be a country full of fairness and justice, where there is always respect for the human heart, humanity and the essence of human beings, and where there is always an air of youth, freedom and struggle. I have cried out and fought for this. This is the truth that life has taught me and that my mother has given me. (End of full article)
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