In March 2002, I found a copy of the official file of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau in July 1963, which contains 94 deceased rightists in Beijing – the “Questionnaire on the Death of Rightists” (hereinafter referred to as the “Questionnaire”). Excavating, recording, and organizing this “modern burial group” is of special value to the in-depth study of the anti-rightist movement. It is also a “rallying cry” to sincerely face history, to raise the unjustly dead under the nine springs, and to restore their original faces. For this reason, I went into one dead rightist family after another to record their sadness, happiness, and difficult fate.
Zhang Peilin’s Death File
On March 28, 2008, Zhang Wuliang, the 72-year-old second daughter of rightist Zhang Peilin, came to look for her father’s death file. Zhang Peilin was listed in the “investigation form” and the contents of the file were recorded as follows.
Name: Zhang Peilin; Gender: Male; Age: 50; Ethnicity: Han; Family Origin: Landlord; Country of Origin: Jiangsu, Rugao; Any illnesses before internment: /; My composition: Old employee family; Address: No. A5, Xizhangbu Hutong, Beijing; Occupation before internment: Editor of China Youth Publishing House (Grade 7); Whether to retain public office: Dismissed from public office; Date of internment: March 1958; Former political affiliation: Democratic Association for the Promotion of Democracy (joined in 1953); nature of case: historical counterrevolutionary and rightist; length of detention: /; family size and economic status: /
Biography: Studied before 1927; served as an officer of the Rugao County Party Department of the Kuomintang in 1927. 1928-(1942) Primary school teacher and editor of Kaiming Bookstore. In 1943-(19), he served as a secretary to the Lieutenant Colonel of the 34th Division of the Wang False Army. From 1946 to 1953, he was the editor of Kaiming Bookstore. Joined the Democratic National Construction Association in Shanghai in 1946 and joined the Association for the Promotion of Democracy in 1953.
Reasons for Correction.
I. He was a historical counter-revolutionary and traitor. When he served as a secretary to the Lieutenant Colonel of the Wang Fake Army, he acted as an interpreter, worked on army movements, supplies, and military telegrams when the Japanese and Fake Army was sweeping the anti-Japanese base in Qidong, and wrote “security notices” and participated in the torture of two suspected members of the New Fourth Army. In the purge, he was treated leniently and given an administrative demotion.
II. During the Rectification, he attacked the Party and the purge movement, and called out that he had been wronged during the purge and tried to reverse the case. He also wrote large-character posters, proposing to reorganize the leading bodies of the rectification, advocating that the leading core of the rectification be formed by the rightist Peng Zigang and members of the league, trade unions, the People’s Liberation Army, and independents, in an attempt to usurp the leadership of the rectification. He attacked the reporting system, saying that “party members and activists are not afraid to sacrifice others to gain the trust of the organization”, advocated the independence of the democratic parties, and chided the DPP for “being the tail of the party” and “the democratic parties should be on an equal footing with the party. He also asked the Democratic Progressive Party “why do we have to be the tail of the Party” and “the Democratic Party and the Party should be on an equal footing.
Performance during the correctional period: During the correctional period, this activist was somewhat resistant, believing that correctional work was not an option, and was afraid of labor. After education, he had changed, but he did not close to the government and never reflected the situation. He was still able to work, but could not complete his tasks. In April, 1960, he was given a demerit for stealing a tea pot from Wang Weiquan, a correctional officer.
Former place of re-education through labor: /; date of death: August 13, 1966, 8:53 p.m.; diagnosis of death: old age, senile heart disease, circulatory swelling, heart failure. Notification of family members: August 13, 1960, notified his family members Xu Shizhen (Shizhen) property handling: Zhang did not hurt to take away the grave marker: five eighty-four west cemetery, tombstone ten rows of five; whether to have done outside the formalities: /; pension or subsidy: /; family reflections: /; whether to take off the hat: /; docket: /
His hometown Rugao and my hometown Rudong used to belong to the same county before liberation, and now they are both under the jurisdiction of Nantong City, Jiangsu Province. Zhang Peilin was born in 1906, and if he were alive, he would be a hundred years old. As the saying goes, “a hundred years is a dream”, what Zhang Peilin had was a bad dream.
The Vanishing Zhang Family Garden
According to “Rugao Talking Old” written by Zhou Sizhang, an authority on Rugao local documents, Zhang Peilin’s ancestors were originally from a farming and reading family in the southwest township of Rugao. During the Yongzheng period of the Qing Dynasty, his ancestor Zhang Xueju was the official in charge of collecting salt tax in Fujian, and his family prospered. In the early years of the Qianlong period, Zhang’s family bought the former residence of the famous scholar Chong Peijiang in Chong’s Lane and moved to Rugao City. Zhang Peilin’s grandfather, Zhang Rujie, was a scholar and served as the director (mayor) of the East Wing of Rugao City. Zhang Rujie had three sons, and Zhang Peilin’s father, Zhang Fan (the word Shuping), was the eldest son. Zhang Fan was born in 1871 (the tenth year of Tongzhi), and he was a scholar at the age of 18, and at the age of 27, he was recommended to be a “tribute” and sent to Beijing.
In 1902 (Guangxu 28), Zhang Zhidong, the governor of the two rivers, appointed Zhou Lian, the retired former governor of Fujian, and Sha Yuan Bing to build a school in Rugao. Zhou Lian resigned because of his old age and frailty, and Sha Yuanbin took on the burden alone. Sha Yuanbing is a distant relative of my family, who was the same list scholar as Zhang Jian, the famous industrialist of Nantong, and was the fourth grade editor of Hanlin Academy, and the speaker of Jiangsu Provincial Assembly in the Republic of China. Sha Yuanbing was very close to the imperial teacher Weng Tongkotewall, but when the Hundred Days Reform failed in 1898, he was discouraged and resigned from his post. In order to establish the school, Sha Yuanshou not only discussed with Zhang Jian for many times, but also found two powerful assistants, one was Ma Wenzhong, a scholar, and the other was Zhang Fan.
In September 1902, the first public teacher training school in China, Rugao Public Simple Teacher Training College (later Rugao Teacher Training School), was opened in Rugao city, with Sha Yuanbin as the prime minister (principal) and Ma Wenzhong and Zhang Fan as the deputy office (vice principal). During the Cultural Revolution, my brother Yao Zhiping graduated from the secondary school there. In September of 1904 (Guangxu 30), Zhang Fan went to Japan to study education, and after his return, he wrote and published his diary, “A brief account of his trip to the east. Based on his observations in Japan, he advocated the establishment of education for the poor and industrial schools, and created the first education on national shame in Ruishi, in response to the Chinese guns seized during the Sino-Japanese War and the items looted from the capital during the Gengzi Incident, which he saw in the Japanese Imperial Museum. He also pushed for the compilation of uniform teaching materials and the promotion of the national language. In 1906, when the Qing court announced that it was preparing to establish a constitution, Zhang Fan thought he could make a difference and raised money to donate to the capital for the position of “Cabinet Secretary”, which was responsible for the management of rewriting confidential documents of the court. In the first month of 1909 (the first year of the Xuan Tong era), Zhang Fan suddenly fell ill in Beijing and took leave to go home for treatment.
After Zhang Fan’s death, his family’s situation was greatly reduced due to his donation and medical treatment. In 1916, the Zhang family resold the house on Mao’s Lane to Mao’s descendant, Mao Guangsheng, and the family moved to a villa on the back lane of the Palace of Learning, known as the “Zhang Family Garden”. At that time, the Zhang family garden covering an area of more than 5,000 square meters was known as one of the four major private gardens in Rugao, together with the gardens of the three families of Mao, Sha and Xu. The garden was full of grass and trees, with flowing water, rockery, corridors and pavilions, and was extremely rich in Jiangnan flavor. According to Zhang Wuliang, after Zhang Pei Lin was beaten as a rightist in 1957, Zhang’s garden was confiscated and confiscated, and members of Zhang’s family were blown out and relocated.
In October 2008, Zhang Wuliang returned to his hometown alone to look for his hometown garden, which has been attributed to the Rugao Telecommunications Bureau, with a number of buildings, the former scenery has disappeared. The local housing authority said: they never knew there was a Zhang family garden in Rugao City. Fortunately, Zhang Wuliang found the old neighbors near Zhang’s garden and a copy of the household register of Zhang’s garden and nearby families compiled in 1951 – “Yingchun Township – Yingchun Security District, Group 15 Household Register”, which clearly recorded: Zhang’s garden housing is Zhang’s ancestral property, the door number is No. 8 behind the Palace of Learning Lane, living in Zhang’s family for four generations of more than 20 people The house is the property of Zhang’s ancestral shrine, and the number of the house is No. 8 in the back alley of the Palace of Learning.
In “The Peony Pavilion”, Du Liniang, facing the vicissitudes of the world, once lamented, “The beauty of the day is so beautiful that no one can enjoy it. Nowadays, not only has the former prosperity of the Zhang family become a mirror, but even the courtyard is hard to find.
From teacher to editor
Zhang Wuliang introduced that Zhang Fan had two sons and six daughters, Zhang Peilin was born on December 15, 1906, named Enpu, the word Peilin, the second son of Zhang Fan. He graduated from Nantong Textile University in 1927 and went on to teach English at Rugao Commercial School. He was well versed in English, taught rigorously and was well received by his students.
In the late 1920s, Zhang Peilin found several errors in the Kaiming English Reader published by Kaiming Bookstore and edited by Lin Yutang, so he wrote to Lin Yutang. Instead of being annoyed by Zhang’s corrections, Lin Yutang invited Zhang to work as an assistant English editor at the Kaiming Bookstore in Shanghai. Tao Tang, an expert in the history of new literature, wrote an article about this incident, which is a good story between the editor and the readers. Before the war, Zhang Peilin edited the Kaiming English Series at the Kaiming Bookstore while working as a translator. He not only published many fresh and fluent translations of English and American prose in magazines such as Human World, Cosmic Wind and Literature, but also translated Lin Yutang’s English grammar monographs, Kaiming English Grammar and English Expressions, and wrote books such as English Pronunciation, English Teaching, Hundred Tables of Oral English, and Selected Fables of Aesop, becoming an accomplished English editor in the 1930s Shanghai publishing industry.
After the Lugou Bridge Incident, the Japanese army burned the war to Shanghai, so Zhang Pei-Lin did not move west to Chongqing with the staff of Kaiming Bookstore, but returned to Rugao to teach at Nanhuai Middle School. During the war period, the troops controlling Rugao were mainly Wang’s 34th Division, with Tian Tie Fu as division commander and Fan Jie as deputy division commander. Fan Jie, formerly known as Fan Baozhang, graduated from Shanghai Mansion University and was a student of Zhang Peilin. Fan Jie insisted that Zhang Peilin should be his confidential secretary and handle documents for him. When Zhang Peilin did not comply, Fan Jie used his power to dismiss Zhang Peilin as a teacher and forbade all schools from employing him. In order to support his family, Zhang Peilin had to give in, so he was recorded in the Questionnaire as “acting as the secretary of a lieutenant colonel of the Wang False Army” and as having “participated in the torture of two suspected members of the New Fourth Army”. On this matter, Zhang Wuliang explained, “The torture was so horrible that my father could not bear to see it and did not want to record the confessions, so he left.” Since Zhang Peilin had no evil deeds during his service in the 34th Division, he was then discharged to his home after the war, and was treated as a general historical issue during the purge campaign. However, in the late anti-rightist period, this history became the basis for designating him as a “historical counterrevolutionary.
According to Zhang Wuliang, Fan Jie and Tian Tiefu later fled to Hong Kong together, and their situation is unknown. I accidentally discovered Fan Jie’s whereabouts when I checked the 1995 edition of the Rugao County Journal. Fan Jie appears in the book under the name of “Fan Zhi’an”, and in the “Postscript” of his article “Qiu Chi Overseas with a Heart for Zangzi”, there is a paragraph dedicated to Fan Jie: “In 1937, he joined the military, and became an official of the National Government He was one of the 9,000 generals of the Chinese Nationalist Party. He resigned from the army in 1947 and moved to Hong Kong with his family in 1950.” The history of Fan Jie during the war period is completely evaded. The book’s sponsor and publication advisor are both Fan Jie. The book introduces that Fan Jie, who is the chairman of the New Asia Cultural Foundation in Hong Kong, is now employed as an honorary director of the Association for the Promotion of Peaceful Reunification of China. The book also includes a photo of Fan Jie sponsoring education in his hometown, smiling and looking like a kindly elder.
After the victory of the war, Kaiming Bookstore moved back to Shanghai from Chongqing, and Zhang Peilin returned to Shanghai as the editor-in-chief of the store’s English Monthly at Kaiming’s request. Zhang Wuliang said, “When Lin Yutang left the mainland, he strongly invited his father to go with him. Although they worked well together for many years, and many of Lin’s English writings were translated by his father, he declined because of his family’s burdens. Father joined the Democratic National Construction Association in June 1945 and the Association for the Promotion of Democracy in 1946, demonstrating his views and attitude toward the Kuomintang regime.”
Victims of the Anti-Rightist Movement
In the early 1950s, the Kaiming Bookstore and the Youth Publishing House merged to form the China Youth Publishing House, and Zhang Peilin went north with his family to become the editor-in-chief of the China Youth Publishing House’s Language Study magazine, earning a monthly salary of 185 yuan. In 1956, when the Asia and Pacific Peace Conference was held in Beijing, Zhang Peilin was the simultaneous interpreter for the conference. He interacted with Liu Yazi, Ye Shengtao, Lao She, Zhao Shuli and other cultural figures, and Zhang Peilin also named his children Liu Wu Dou and Liu Wu Ji.
In 1955, during the purge campaign, Zhang Peilin’s problems during the war period were reopened and reopened. After the review of general historical issues, his position was downgraded from the original sixth-grade editor to the seventh-grade editor. In 1956, when the rectification and release began, Zhang Pei-Lin posted a large-character poster and wrote a limerick with the title “There is such a leader”, saying that there was such a leader who was not afraid of bloodshed and sacrifice during the war years, but was full of subjectivism during the peace years, so subjective that he said that water chestnuts were borne on trees, but you could not say that they grew in the mud. A clear-eyed person will know that the criticism is the community leader Zhu Yuyin. Zhang Wuliang insisted that it was because of this poem that his father had angered Zhu that he was branded a rightist.
At the end of the Anti-Rightist Movement, Zhang Peilin was convicted of being a historical counterrevolutionary and a rightist, and was dismissed from public service. In March 1958, he was sent to prison and sent to Qinghe Farm for reeducation through labor. I asked some of the rightists in the Qinghe farm who were reeducated through labor back then, but they did not know Zhang Peilin. In response to the “death diagnosis” of “old age, senile heart disease, circulatory swelling, and heart failure,” Zhao Wentao, a right-wing member of the Qinghe Farm labor camp, pointed out that there was neither a hospital nor a doctor on the farm, and that Zhang Peilin’s age and physical condition made it almost impossible for him to live. The so-called “circulatory dysphoria” was a problem. The so-called “circulatory swelling” is consistent with the swelling of the whole body caused by prolonged hunger during the difficult period. The further development of swelling, Zhao said, would mean death. The survey form records Zhang Peilin’s burial place as “five eight four west cemetery, tombstone ten row five”. “Five eight four” refers to the Qinghe farm five eight four subfield, and “West Cemetery” is just a messy graveyard, as for “ten rows of five”, it is purely made up.
According to Zhang Wuliang’s recollection, when Zhang Peilin was sent to reeducation through labor, the leader of the publishing house said to him, “You can still do translation when you arrive at the farm, so he brought many foreign language tools with him. After Zhang Peilin’s death, his family received back only a watch that he had used during his lifetime. In fact, it was impossible to work as a translator there, and all that was waiting for him was super-intensive physical labor. Zhang Wuliang remembers his father’s letter to the family, saying that they were locked up with criminal prisoners, who were particularly powerful and often bullied him and robbed him. In the last letter, his father said he had diarrhea and had no medicine to treat it, and asked the family to send long-acting sulfanilamide quickly, or it would be too late. By the time the family sent the medicine, the man was already dead. Zhang Wuliang said that in this letter, his father deliberately wrote, “The sinner of the family,” “My father must have thought that he would cause a great disaster to the family after being branded as a rightist, so he wrote this.
The Price of Loyalty
After Zhang Peilin was branded as a rightist, the Zhang family was immediately in a difficult situation. Zhang Peilin’s wife, Xu Shizhen, was unemployed and her seven children were all in school, except for her eldest daughter, Zhang Wuyou, who worked for the Jiangsu Provincial Song and Dance Troupe. Xu Shizhen was also a lady of the house, Xu family for the education family, Rugao’s famous four major private gardens in the Xu’s Ji Feng garden, is Xu Shizhen family. Xu Shizhen graduated from Rugao Normal School and taught music at Rugao Elementary School. She married Zhang Peilin in 1929 and then quit her job to raise her children at home. Starting from 1930, Zhang Peilin and his wife had seven children: the eldest daughter Zhang Wuyou (1930), the second daughter Zhang Wuquan (1936), the third daughter Zhang Wuzhi (1939), the eldest son Zhang Wuji (1942), the fourth daughter Zhang Wushuang (1944), the second son Zhang Wugou (1947) and the third son Zhang Wuhuai (1951). The names of the children are full of their parents’ feelings and expectations.
Zhang Wugong said that since his father was sent to reeducation through labor, the family had no income and relatives did not interact with each other. But with seven mouths to feed, “I had to send a letter to my sister, Immaculate, who worked in the Jiangsu Opera and Dance Troupe, asking for money. At that time, I was a reserve member of the Party, and in order to show my loyalty to the Party, I took the letter to my elder sister to the Party branch of the Beijing Machine Building School, where I was working, for review in advance. The party branch did not say anything at that time, but when my membership was renewed, they canceled my membership on the grounds that I was ‘wrong to worry about the lives of reactionary families’. When my father was alive, he often taught us to pursue progress in politics, to be loyal to the Party, and to tell the truth. When my father was branded as a rightist, we, the children who were reserve Party members, members of the Communist Youth League and pioneers, despite our misgivings, believed that the Communist Party was right and were determined to draw a clear line with our ‘counter-revolutionary rightist’ father. We called him by his first name and asked him to reform his thinking properly. The father in the ‘family portrait’ photo taken in 1956 was also keyed out by us. When my father died, we didn’t even let my mother cry, and we didn’t cry ourselves, for fear that outsiders would see us and say we couldn’t draw the line.”
Zhang Wuliang recalls that after his father was branded a rightist, the Zhang family was forced to move to a two-room house in the front yard of No. A50, West Headquarters Hutong. When his father died in August 1960, the entire family of seven was forced to move to a 10-square-meter semi-basement in the backyard, which was formerly a publisher’s storehouse and was not exposed to sunlight all year round. The tragic death of my father caused my mother to suffer a heavy blow to her body and mind. In the winter of 1960, her mother’s rheumatoid disease developed into total paralysis, and the doctors at the Union Hospital said she would not live long. The mother thought that before she “left” she had to “fix” her mentally retarded son, Harmless, so that she would not drag her other children down after she left. When Harmless was born in 1951, his mother was too full of children to have any more and took abortifacients, which affected Harmless’s intelligence. One day in 1961, his mother gave him more than 20 sleeping pills in a row. Perhaps he should not have been killed, but he was fine for a day, only causing vomiting reactions and prolonged sleep. When she saw this, she gave up the idea of suicide and actively cooperated with the treatment. Before she died, my mother told her family not to keep the ashes. She said, “Even your father’s ashes are not there, so it is useless to leave mine.” Harmless died of illness in March 1967 at the age of sixteen.
What Happened to the Siblings
Zhang Peilin’s children did not gain the trust of the organization by drawing a clear line with their father, but were branded as “untouchables” and discriminated against in terms of education, employment, party membership, wages, housing, titles, marriage, etc., leaving lifelong regrets and unhealed wounds.
The sixty-six-year-old Zhang Wuji, the eldest son of Zhang Peilin, was in high school at the time of Zhang Peilin’s accident, and was not eligible to attend the welcome event for foreign guests because of his father’s problems. He recalls, “Even though I was enthusiastic about class activities and took the initiative to clean the classroom, my teachers and class cadres thought I was falsely active, and my senior year conduct rating was only ‘medium’. I was so sad that I went home and cried, even thinking of suicide, and my originally outgoing and lively personality became introverted and cautious. In order to maintain life and study, our children have to apply for scholarships every year, and work outside during the winter and summer. I moved bricks at construction sites, dug earth pits, and applied pesticides to trees. In his letters to the family, my father had warned us that ‘disease comes from the mouth and trouble comes from the mouth’ and to remember his lessons. I never wrote a word to my father because he was an enemy of the people. I graduated from high school in 1960 and always ranked among the best in my studies, but at that time the class line was enforced and no one was admitted to the college entrance examination even if they had good grades but were not from a good background. The school mobilized me to take the entrance examination in order to improve my performance, but as a result, I was not admitted to the mathematics department of Peking University, and I did not even get into the lowest-volume teacher’s college, which made people feel that I was brushed off because of my poor performance. In addition, the issue of marriage was also affected. At that time, I did not want to get married and stay single for the rest of my life, because I could not stand to be looked at with disdain, and I did not want my offspring to be hurt in the same way as I was. It was not until my father was rehabilitated and I was thirty-eight years old that I considered getting married.”
After graduating from high school, Zhang Wuji taught in a Beijing middle school for the rest of his life, and although he served as the head of the math teaching and research team as a business backbone, and was repeatedly named an advanced individual and an excellent classroom teacher, he never made it across the party line.
Compared to Zhang Wuji, Zhang Wuqiu’s experience was even more difficult. Although she was less than 6 meters tall, thin and slender, she was tough and persistent. She repeatedly told me about the hardships she had experienced, as if she were Mrs. Xianglin telling the story of Ah Mao.
Before the anti-rightist movement, Zhang Wuliang lived a life full of sunshine. She lived in the Zhang family garden for nine years until she left Rugao in 1945 and moved to Shanghai. After school she always had two awards per semester: one for excellence in character and one for enthusiasm in service. Her father always encouraged her to not only study well, but also to serve her classmates with enthusiasm. In the early 1950s, she entered the Beijing Girls’ Thirteenth Middle School and was elected president of the school student council in her junior year because of her good studies and her eagerness to serve her classmates, and she participated in the Fourth Beijing Student Council. When she graduated from junior high school in 1954, in response to the Party’s call for the industrialization of the country, she gave up the opportunity to attend high school and university and enrolled in the Beijing Machine Building School of the First Ministry of Machinery (a four-year senior secondary school) and joined the Communist Party in 1956.
However, the anti-rightist movement not only led Zhang Peilin to a point of no return, but also completely changed Zhang Wuliang’s fate. When she graduated from the machine building program in 1958, she was supposed to be assigned to the 14th Research Institute of the Ministry of Aerospace in Beijing, but because of her father’s problems, she was not only disqualified from the preparatory party membership, but was also assigned to work as a technician in the Baji Machine Tool Factory in Nanchang, Jiangxi. In 1961, the state implemented the streamlining of cadres to fill the front line of agricultural production, and because of her father’s problems, she was sent down from the machine tool factory to the rural areas of Hebei, becoming a genuine farmer.
Lotus is the home of Zhang Wusu’s lover Chen Guoshun. Chen Guoshun and Zhang Wuliang were in the same class at the machine building school, and they fell in love with each other. Chen Guoshun came from a poor peasant, but also implicated, the two returned home together from Nanchang. Zhang Wuliang said, “Chen Guoshun grew up in Beijing, and neither of us could do farm work, so we couldn’t even earn enough money for food at the end of the year. Once I sent home a cloth ticket, my mother guessed that I had no money to buy cloth, so she gave me ten yuan. My youngest daughter was born in 1963, when my mother-in-law died and my daughter had no one to take care of her. In 1967, Mr. and Mrs. Zhang Wuqiang took their seven-year-old son to the Lotus County Shiting repair factory as a temporary worker in order to make a living, after all, they knew mechanical technology, and would turn, electrician and pliers. Later they came to Baoding, changed a number of units, and finally Zhang Wuliang in Baoding Mechanical Metallurgy Technical School as a teacher, Chen Guoshun in Baoding hydraulic parts factory work, the son in the city management. Due to the bankruptcy of the unit, the two old people now have a combined retirement salary of only 2,000 yuan, and it is extremely difficult to reimburse medical expenses. January 1, 2009 is the 50th anniversary of their golden wedding. Zhang Wuliang said with emotion: “When I fell in love, I did not mind that his family is a farmer, and when we got married, he did not mind that my father is a rightist, we can go through fifty years together, it is really not easy!
In July 2002, Zhang Wuliang found China Youth Publishing House to implement the policy. She asked the unit to help find her father’s bones, as well as solve the Beijing household registration and housing. In the process of petitioning, she did not know how many blank stares and excuses, but always insisted not to give up. She said, “If I had to go by my temper in the past, I would have quarreled early, but now I have been worn down to not be impatient.” Occasionally she gets angry. One day she talked to the receptionist about noon, and the man said, “Let me give you some rice.” Feeling humiliated, she yelled, “I’m not here to ask for food, I’m here to collect a debt!”
After much effort, Mr. and Mrs. Zhang’s account was finally moved back to Beijing from Hebei, and the publisher rented them a unit warehouse as housing, and their life was gradually put on the right track. Looking back on the past years, Zhang Wuliang feels especially sorry for her parents, who are already in their old age, she deeply appreciates the love and care of her parents for their children. Zhang said that when she got married in 1959, she sent her father, who was in a reform farm, a letter of congratulations. This was one of the rare exchanges of affection between father and daughter after her father was beaten into a rightist camp, and every time I recall this, I feel a warmth.
May the hardships never return
In the process of interviewing Zhang Wuliang, I came to her home several times. Zhang Wuliang’s family lives in Beijing Jiaodaokou, which was once the former residence of Li Lianying, the chief administrator of the Qing Palace, but has now become a compound where a hundred or so families gather.
Zhang and his wife live in a cottage of about ten square meters deep in the compound, which does not see the sun all year round. Despite the hardships of life, the fact that they don’t even dare to use the heating in winter, and the fact that they can only carry on with their illnesses, Zhang Wuzhong’s face lights up when she talks about the careers and achievements of her family and children. She happily took out her family photo album and showed me the photos of her sunny and happy granddaughter, who was attending college in Beijing. Looking at the innocent and happy smiling faces of the young people and the vicissitudes of the old people with their hardships, my heart trembled: May the young generation never know what discrimination and fear are; may the sufferings of Zhang Wuliang’s siblings and her father’s generation never return and be buried a hundred feet deep in the yellow sand.
The family of Zhang Peilin and his wife in Beijing in 1956, with Zhang Wuliang in the back row, first from the right, and Zhang Wuji in the middle row.
Finished on January 1, 2009 at Ping Ya Residence
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