In August 2009, the sisters Wang Renshan and Wang Qi approached me to look at the death file of their stepfather Yu Rudi. On March 9, 2002, I found in Panjiayuan a file of dead rightists that had been compiled by the public security authorities in July 1963 – the “Investigation Form on the Death of Rightists” (the “Investigation Form”). “), which included 94 dead Beijing rightists, Yu Ru listened to among them. The Wang sisters said that with the death of their father Hu and Yu and their mother Wang Kai Shun in the last two years, they began to investigate and learn about their stepfather’s situation. They told me about the short marriage between Yu Ruling and Wang Kai Shun that ended in tragedy, which made people sigh.
One
To understand the marriage between Yu Ruyuan and Wang Kai Shun, we must first talk about Hu and Yu, Wang Kai Shun. He was born in 1921 to a large landowner in Ningxiang, Hunan province, and was raised by his grandmother after his parents died of an infectious disease when he was young. Wang Kai-shun’s grandfather was a Qing Dynasty scholar, but his family fell into disrepair. In the spring of 1946, he went to Shanghai to run a publishing house, and Wang moved from his hometown to Changsha because of the death of his grandmother, to transmit information for the underground party. -Communist Youth League.
In the spring of 1947, Hu joined the Young Communist League and studied in the Political and Economic Department of the Hong Kong Dade College, which was founded by the South China Bureau of the Communist Party of China, and was closed down by the British Hong Kong authorities at the end of 1947. During his stay in Hong Kong, Hu learned that the New Culture Publishing House, an affiliate of the Cultural Federation, needed funds to print and publish Mao’s works, so he sold all the properties left to him by his father and entrusted Wang Kai Shun to personally deliver the money to Hong Kong. Hu and Yu worked in the compilation section with Russian language expertise, while Wang Kai-shun worked in the periodicals section on distribution.
The change came suddenly in 1953. Hu and Yu thought that the gold ornaments his mother had left to his sister and him were the proceeds of exploitation, and convinced his sister to exchange all their gold ornaments for 3,000 yuan in cash and send them to the peasant union in his hometown. In January 1954, the International Bookstore handed Hu and Yu over to the Beijing Public Security Bureau without verification and took him back to Ningxiang, Hunan Province, to be taken into custody. Although the local Public Security Bureau had no evidence, Hu was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for being from a landowning family and sent to Chenglingji Farm in Yueyang, Hunan Province for reform through labor. Malaria, dysentery and schistosomiasis were prevalent in the Chenglingji area, so Hu and Yu had to pick up soil and build dikes during the labor camp despite suffering from malaria and dysentery. There were 320 inmates in Hu’s labor camp, but only a few dozen remained after six months, and the rest of them died of disease. Fortunately, Hu and Yu took “quinine” and “dysentery” sent by Wang Kai Shun from home to save their lives. Hu later suffered from severe schistosomiasis and was treated in a schistosomiasis hospital. When the doctor looked up his file, he realized that he had already served his sentence, and only then did Hu learn why he had been sentenced and the length of his sentence. After two years of treatment, Hu’s condition gradually improved, and after he recovered, he moved to Hunan Yiyang Liugia Lake Farm to make a living by herding ducks and fish. To avoid involving his family, he cut off contact with them during his treatment in the hospital.
The day after Hu and Yu were arrested, Wang Kai-shun was called to the International Bookstore’s Security Section to inform her that Hu and Yu had been arrested for denunciation by the Farmers’ Association in her hometown. She wondered why her husband, who had sold his property in 1947 to support the revolution, was linked to the land reform after the liberation. At the year-end summing-up meeting, the bookstore leaders qualified Hu and Yug as counter-revolutionary bully landlords.
In July 1954, Jiang Muliang received a letter from Hu and Yu, saying that he was suffering from consumption, malaria and dysentery on the farm and that his life was in danger, and he wanted to send medicine quickly. Jiang Mu-liang was Hu and Yu’s teacher, who guided him to the revolutionary path. After receiving the letter, Jiang immediately conveyed Hu and Yu’s situation to Wang Kai-shun. Wang Kai-shun was surprised that her husband was still alive and worried about his illness, so she quickly sent the medicine and clothes to him.
After this matter was known by the unit, the leadership severely criticized Wang Kai-shun for sending something to her husband without the permission and check of the organization, which was a position problem. At the same time to strengthen the surveillance of Wang Kai Shun, household registration police often door-to-door inquiries, more students in Wang Kai Shun’s eldest daughter Hu Li Nian seat to write “landlord son of a bitch”, she was abusive. In 1955, when the purge began, the leaders named Wang Kai-shun to distinguish the contradictions between the enemy and us and to take a firm stand at the life meeting of the section. She was advised to “think politically about everything” and to be resolute in breaking off with her husband for her personal and children’s future. Although Wang Kai Shun understood that her husband had been wronged and her feelings were hard to let go, she wrote a divorce report with a contradictory and painful feeling and handed it over to the organization in order to remove her hat as a “counter-revolutionary landlord’s family” and to prevent people from calling her child a “landlord’s son”. In the spring of 1956, the personnel department informed Wang Kai-shun that Hu and Yug had been found and were in the hospital for treatment of schistosomiasis, and that his life and death were uncertain, and that he had agreed to a divorce. Hearing this news, Wang Kai-shun deeply blamed himself, but the wood had become the boat.
Two
One day, Li Lixing, head of the bookstore’s personnel department, told Wang Kai Shun that Yu Ruyuan, head of the overprint import department, liked her and hoped she would consider it. Yu Ru listen and Wang Kai Shun live in the same hospital, Hu and Yu after the accident, Yu Ru listen often take care of the Wang family, it should be said that Wang Kai Shun for Ru listen to have a certain understanding and good feelings. Together with life, political double pressure and family and friends continue to persuade, Wang Kai Shun by repeatedly weighing, and finally agreed to Yu Ruyuan into her life.
March 6, 1956, Li Lixing will call the two to the office to open a marriage certificate, wishing the two people white head harmonious old, and repeatedly urged Yu Ru listen to treat the child. Yu Ru heard, “she is kind, is the object of my pursuit, I am willing to organize a family with her, will make her and the child happy, thank you for leading the concern ……” that day, the two to the police station to register their marriage, and then picked up the foster care in a relative’s home Renshan, this broken The family was rejuvenated. After the marriage, Wang Kai Shun sometimes think of the seriously ill ex-husband is still secretly sad. However, Yu Ru listened to the care of the family more or less alleviated this pain. Soon, the Beijing Normal College enrolled in the training of in-service cadres, Yu Ru listen to actively support his wife to study and further education, to take up the task of transporting children to kindergarten and take care of the children to school, life is bitter, but harmonious and peaceful.
According to the questionnaire, Yu Ruling died on April 6, 1961, at the age of 39. Yu Ruling was born in 1922 in Jintan, Jiangsu Province, a bureaucratic landlord family, graduated from Nanjing Jinling High School in 1933. For R listen to the work experience before liberation, Wang Renshan sisters and Yu R listen to the relatives are not clear, only according to the “questionnaire” records are as follows: “(19) 43 years to join the Nationalist Department of military work, and participate in the Shanghai office of the pseudo-political department section, the pseudo-first supply command section, foreign affairs department section. After liberation, he stayed and joined the International Bookstore.” Yu Ruyuan’s good friend Zhao Yingshu, who was at the International Bookstore, told me that Yu was then the head of the import section of overdue journals, “overdue journals”, which were mainly responsible for acquiring expired foreign journals of scientific value to provide to domestic scientific institutions. Yu Ruyuan was proficient in four foreign languages, including English, and was regarded as a talented man in the unit. He is not a member of the party, only the business, the organization for this reason is specially equipped with party members deputy section chief to supervise him. As a business cadre, Yu Ru listen to some do not know foreign languages, but also commanded the cadres of the Liberation Zone is very disgusted. Zhao Yingshu recalls: “We were single, working with little contact, go out together in their spare time. He is very brisk and optimistic, like to make friends, who asked him for help, he was willing to help …… sympathetic to Wang Kai Shun at the time, but can be like Yu Ru listen to go to that step, there must be considerable courage. Wang Kai Shun’s husband was taken away, three children and so small, many people dare not touch her, Yu Ru listen to the act is a kind of chivalrous act, equal to save the family.” On this point, Wang Renshan has a deeper understanding. She said, “Yu Ru listened to his mother, ‘I do not want children, we have these three children is enough. I want these three kids to go to college no matter what. He saved the family, otherwise my mother with our three children really do not know what to do. When he came, we felt grounded and settled.” However, in 1957, the anti-rightist movement pushed Yu Ruling into the abyss, and the life of Wang Kai Shun’s family was thrown off its normal track and began to violently lurch.
According to the questionnaire, the main reason Yu Ru listened to be beaten into a rightist and sent to correction is “the person’s reactionary ideas, the (use of) party rectification opportunity to attack the party. Publicly defended Chu Anping ‘party world’, and opposed others to say Chu Anping’s speech is anti-Party and anti-socialist. And said ‘whether the Party’s activities within the enterprise are necessary, but also fundamentally considered.’ And suggested that the Party organization was a ‘clique’ and that Party members were ‘house slaves’. The purge campaign was slandered as ‘going too far, with more than 20 people fighting in the store, many of them in the wrong place.’ On the issue of Hu Feng said ‘Hu Feng is not a counter-revolutionary, I do not have the material.'” On March 1, 1958, Yu Ru listened to the internment of re-education through labor, initially escorted to the Northeast Xingkai Lake Farm, later transferred to Qinghe Farm.
The situation when you listen to leave home, Wang Renshan has a clear impression: “He left at home to pack boxes, but also to say hello to me, said to go, I thought it was a temporary business trip, very calm, not at all that miserable atmosphere.” I guess at that time, even Yu Ru listen to themselves did not expect, this trip will be treading into the dead, the bones of the body. Yu Ru heard the labor farm, wrote to Wang Kai Shun, hoping to go out in the future with her to teach in the mountains, to live a quiet life. Wang Renshan once drew a winged horse for Yu Ruxiang and sent it to him, and he wrote back, “Seeing the horse drawn by Bai Niu (Wang Renshan’s nickname), I especially want to go back on a horse.” However, Yu Ruliang could never return.
“Investigation form” records, at 17:50 on April 6, 1961, Yu Ruling died of anemic edema combined with pulmonary edema in the Qinghe farm labor reform office, burial site for the North Brick kiln cemetery 81. April 8, 1961, Qinghe farm “informed his wife Wang Kai Shun “In March 1958, Zhao Wentao, a cadre of the Second Ministry of Machinery Industry, was beaten into a rightist and sent to the Qinghe farm for re-education through labor in the third branch, and was sent home at the end of 1961 with his rightist hat off. He said to me, “Qinghe farm three years of hardship died of no other diseases, all starved to death.” By extension, Yu Ruling is no exception.
Zhao Yingshu said, Yu Ru listen to the news of his death is by the international bookstore through him to tell Wang Kai Shun, because he is more familiar with Wang Kai Shun. When Zhao Yingshu told Wang Kai Shun about Yu Ruling’s death, her facial expression was unusually calm. “She must have been holding back in her heart.” Wang Renshan’s recollections confirm Zhao Yingshu’s speculation: “I was in the 5th grade at the time, and my sister was in the first and second grade. One day when I came home, I saw that the family was stony-faced and the atmosphere was heavy. Mom said that Dad was gone. At that time, Mom was lying in bed crying and asked me to keep an eye on my sister.” For the death of Yu listen, Wang Kai Shun wrote in her memoirs written before she died, “A Dream Hard to Fulfill,” “I lived with Yu only a year, but after all, husband and wife a, so that I am sad and desperate.” She once confided to her daughter: “I rely on a go in this life, it seems that only by themselves.”
III
After the Anti-Rightist Movement, Wang Kai Shun was assigned as a language teacher at the Girls’ Fifteenth Middle School in Chongwen District, Beijing, through further study at the Teachers’ College. The school was later renamed Guangqumen Middle School, and the “Hongzhi class,” as it was known in the community, was located in this school.
At this time, Wang Kai Shun’s only dependence and pillar was his own children. The three children went to school in order to reduce the burden on the family, when the school meals only buy rice and eat free soy sauce mixed with rice. One day in 1959, Wang Kai-sun’s sister, Wang Kai-song, received a letter from Hu and Yu from Liujiahu Farm in Yiyang, Hunan Province, saying that he had been in a schistosomiasis hospital for two years, had recovered from his illness, had served his sentence, and was herding ducks on the farm. Hu and Yug in the letter expressed his mixed feelings: “…… according to reason she should be another marriage, will forgive her, but not what I want, I can not let her and sorry for her! I have no home to go back to!” Obviously, this is a letter that throws stones to ask for help. After reading it, Wang Kai Shun’s sister, out of sympathy, passed the letter to Hu Li Nian, Hu’s eldest daughter, and letters began to be exchanged between father and daughter; on the eve of the Spring Festival in 1961, Hu returned to Beijing, where he had been absent for a long time. This Spring Festival had a special meaning for Wang Kai Shun, as it was a reunion of relatives after many years of absence. At this time, Yu Ruyi was struggling with the edge of death, and on April 6, he left the wind and snow of the world that he loved to hate.
Yu Ru listened to go, Wang Kai Shun family’s suffering did not end. After the start of the Cultural Revolution, the Red Guards of Girls’ High School 15 took out the secretary of the party branch and the principal, ordering them to drink each other’s urine and making them beat each other, and Wang Kai Shun was also hit. She recalls in “A Dream Hard to Fulfill”: “The rebels beat me all over my body, cut my yin and yang head (i.e., my hair was cut into crosses in the middle), and made me kneel on the ground, but not yet relieved, they tied me to a tree in the courtyard and beat me with a wooden whip, then put me in the cowshed and called me a stinking landlady and a family member of the counter-revolution. On one occasion, the Red Guards beat me with a stick on my back, causing an injury to my spine, and I was denied leave to see a doctor. Later, when I returned to my hometown in Hunan to carry heavy loads, such as carrying grass and rice, my spinal injury developed into an arch shape and I could not straighten it.”
In August and September of 1966, the Red Guards began a large caucus, and the school’s “cattle and snakes had to be dealt with,” and Wang Kai Shun was escorted by two Red Guards back to his hometown of Ningxiang, Hunan. At that time, his eldest daughter Hu Linian, who was 18 years old, was attending the Beijing Normal College, his second daughter Wang Renshan enrolled in 1965 and went to the Beidahuang Farm in Heilongjiang, and his youngest daughter Wang Qi was only 10 years old. When she left, Wang Qi pulled her mother’s lapel and cried, “Mom, you can’t leave, if you leave, we’ll starve to death! The escort “Dong Chao” and “Xue Ba” handed Wang Kai Shun over to the Changsha Public Security Bureau and went on a “pilgrimage” to Shaoshan. The next day, Wang Kai-shun was sent from the internment center to the Ningxiang County Public Security Bureau. She told the Ningxiang Public Security Bureau that I had divorced my husband ten years ago, my parents had died early, and I had no relatives in my mother’s family. So the Public Security Bureau let her go back alone to the Forward Brigade of Ningxiang Tamenquan Maitian Commune, where her mother’s family was located. Here, the taste of class struggle was very light, and some distant relatives and former alumni gave help. The leaders of Maitian Commune thought that her family should not be classified as landlords, but only as a broken landlord family, so they issued a certificate for her to go back to Beijing to implement the policy. Wang Kai Shun thought it would be difficult to explain the situation back in Beijing, so she prepared to go to Ningxiang County first, and then to Changsha to find her sister. Who knows the car to the county, but she accidentally met her ex-husband Hu and Yu at the county bus station. Hu and Yug said he learned from his daughter that Wang Kai Shun was sent back to the countryside, afraid that she could not live in the countryside, so he voluntarily applied to return to the countryside, but did not want to meet here. After some discussion, the two of them felt that the class struggle in their hometown was not as fierce as in Beijing, so they decided to go together to Hu and Yu’s hometown of Tiechong, Ningxiang, Hunan Province, to start living together again.
Back in Tiechong, Hu and Wang found Liu Jilong, the secretary of the brigade, to sign a “re-marriage certificate” for them. Liu was honest and forthright, and he arranged for Mr. and Mrs. Hu to go to the production team in Kaitou, where the harvest was good and the drought and floods were guaranteed. Life was hard, living in a hut, Mr. and Mrs. Hu not only had to undertake the extremely heavy labor of reservoir repair and double robbery, but also suffered discrimination and insults from the “three tigers”. The so-called “three tigers” refers to the local brigade captain, deputy captain and other three people. They were so vicious and rampant that the local people called them “tigers”. It was these three people who asked the county court to shoot Hu and Yug in 1954, but were not supported. The poor peasants who knew the truth whispered to Hu and his wife that the 3,000 yuan Hu sent back in 1953 had been divided among the “three tigers” and not given to the peasant union. They fabricated a false accusation and tried to kill them to silence them. Only then did Hu and Yug understand the reason for the unjust sentence, and was glad that he did not say a word about the money after he returned to his hometown. In the double robbery rice cutting, bending over to cut rice is very tired, Wang Kai Shun injured back bent for a long time on the pain, to often straighten the waist to stand for a while, but in order to catch up with the task, can only cut desperately. Hu and Yug were not easy either, the team’s second-rate bullying him, let him pick 150 pounds of rice, fell in the paddy field, vomiting blood more than. The couple was dragged out of every campaign to show the public that they had been in front of the ghost gate several times. Their daughter, as a “second generation rightist”, was also humiliated during the Cultural Revolution.
In 1978, Wang Kai Shun was transferred to the Ningxiang County Education Bureau to work as a language teacher and classroom teacher in the senior high school of Ningxiang No. 3 High School in Huangcun Town, the county high school. In February 1980, Hu’s reputation was restored, and in 1988, Hu moved back to Beijing from Changsha and went through the retirement process according to the policy. In the years that followed, Mr. and Mrs. Hu lived a quiet and peaceful life in Beijing. In their quiet days, I wonder if they still sometimes think of Yu Ru-hearing, who had brought warmth and care to this broken family.
In Beijing in the early 1950s. A group photo of the staff of the overprint section of the International Bookstore. The fourth person in the front row from the left, wearing white, is Yu Rudian.
Finalized on April 6, 2013 at Ping Ya Jiu
Old Photos, June 2013, No. 89
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