“At the sound of a gunshot, you’re a son and a daughter for nothing.”
My mother was uneducated, but my father was a writer and painter, and knew a few strokes of calligraphy and painting. I learned later that he dropped out of school in the fourth grade of elementary school and taught himself to be a painter and calligrapher, so he worked as a union propaganda committee member. From the early 1950s to the end of the Cultural Revolution, my father’s salary never rose.
On Sunday mornings, my father would lie in bed and flip through the pages of Jiefang Daily, where there were children’s “early morning” movies, and if he saw something he liked, he would ask me to take my sister to see it. When he saw something he liked, he would ask me to take my sister to see it. If he didn’t like it, he would give me some change and ask me to take her to the street to have her shoes shined. I remember at that time my sister and I each had a pair of small shoes, brown, high-topped, staccato, and very smart. My father had a bicycle, and sometimes he would take us to the street to eat breakfast, with me on the front bar and my sister on the back bag rack. At that time, prices were mostly calculated in cents, with early movies costing “five cents,” children’s shoes being shined for “five cents,” and spring noodles costing “eight cents. “It was a little more expensive than a small wontons, “one jiao”. The bridges over the Suzhou River were steeper and taller in my eyes than they are today, and the workers had a hard time pushing them, so my father came down to help me.
The child’s eyes see only a small half of society, the other half my father is hiding behind his back, not to say. In 1950, she had just married from the countryside and had not yet fully integrated into the city, but the sound of police cars arresting people came from time to time on the street, and when they heard that sound, the children would shout, “The robber car is coming,” and run outside to see what was happening. When she heard that, she was afraid. Once my grandfather said to her, “You need to be prepared, too, because next time it will be the boss’s turn (my father)”. She was so scared that she couldn’t even get down the stairs. I know now that the “rebellion” arrests created an atmosphere of terror in the city, so that everyone was in danger. Mao Zedong’s reply to the East China Bureau’s report on the war in Nanjing and Shanghai was stern: “There are too few killings in cities like Nanjing and Shanghai. [1] Was I actually born in a city of “more killers” in such a time?
When I read about Hobbes later in life, I was told that he was born in 1588, when the Spanish Armada attacked and terrorized the city, and his mother gave birth prematurely out of fear. Why Hobbes wrote the way he did as an adult, and why he named the new country “Leviathan,” has to do with his childhood memories and even his intrauterine memories. What is the subconscious? It is a psychological gene that is written into a person’s mind before he or she has formed a memory, also known as a “placenta. He was not conscious of it, but his writings after that were basically an annotation and release of his early memories, which was hopeless. I later concluded that the 1950s were “the era when executioners and poets ruled together”, and I understood Wang Meng’s “Long Live Youth”, as everyone had his own memories. Everyone has his own memories. But I really detest such a sensational poem – “All, all days, come on! All days can “come,” but not all days can be generalized, and especially not “poet” over the other half.
I remember late, and there is a piece of iron slag at the bottom of my memory that seems to be a marker. It was 1958, the year of the Great Steelmaking, and there were all sorts of small blast furnaces throwing away slag lumps on the street. I picked up a piece from somewhere and, without telling my father, squatted in a nook and cranny, looking at it with my head bored, turning it over and over, unable to understand it. The object was strange and oddly shaped, somewhat like the rockery stones my father liked – “thin, leaky, penetrating, and wrinkled”, but iron cold and hard, not in line with the natural objects that could be seen in the vision of a child. I still give up. I forgot all the toys I had as a child, but this “toy”, which is not a toy, is very impressive, and this is probably the beginning of my love of digging around.
At that time, the city also had a street commune and a street canteen. The big canteens were disbanded for some reason, and everyone went home. In the big cities, people were not starving to death, but the rations were drastically reduced, with sweet potatoes and bran noodles, which southerners called yam and black flour. Now it is fashionable to eat bran noodle knots, sweet potatoes, when I was a kid, I ate them all, and I was so afraid of eating them that I left a mental barrier, but now I will never touch them no matter how much publicity I get. At that time, it was also popular in elementary and middle schools to cultivate chlorella and put it in the toilet urinal. The family’s hunger stuff was tofu dregs with carrots, which the grandmother got from somewhere and put on the rice pot to steam every now and then, with a fishy smell of medicine that was hard to swallow. It was also something that hurt when you ate it, but now it’s all health food.
There was a small chalkboard in the store, on which were written the ration ratios of rice, noodles and potatoes, which were subject to change, and which connected the pots and bowls of each household. There was one date that was so important that it was like a knife carving, and I can’t even forget it now: the 26th of every month: from that day on, residents could buy a month’s worth of grain four days in advance. As soon as the 26th of the month arrived, she immediately asked me to go with her to the grain store to buy the next month’s grain, as if we were really in a state of “no overnight food at home”. When the truck came to unload the grain at the grain store, there were always some scraps left on the floor of the truck after the sacks were carried, so the boys stood next to the truck and waited, and as soon as the goods were unloaded, they jumped up to the truck and fought.
What are two other details that can be contributed to today’s literary scholar? On New Year’s Day, I went to my father’s unit to watch them perform a modern play called “A Gun”, which was nothing more than a hometown covering the New Fourth Army, a love affair between soldiers and civilians, in which the actress secretly cooked biscuits to feed the wounded, and sang while stirring the spoon. On the way back to the stage, the children all stood up and stared at the bowl with their necks sticking out. In the end, they came to a “consensus” (actually, a desire) that it was true, which led to today’s Internet slang: “envy, jealousy, hatred” and drooling together.
There were seven children in the neighbor’s house, and they scrambled to wash the dishes after dinner, especially the porridge pot. After the adults intervened in the “political negotiation”, it was decided that one person would wash the dishes for one day, and the dishes would be changed every week. That was not learning from Lei Feng, but rather grabbing the little porridge soup left at the bottom of the pot, curling my little index finger, scraping the bottom, and then licking it. Our generation generally does not grow up, because of those years of hunger and malnutrition. I’m not too bad, I didn’t delay growing up, but my father and grandfather preferred boys to girls, saving one bite at a time from their own rations, and sometimes even quietly took me out to eat a burnt cake, noodles and so on, which my sister is still angry about to this day. My father played the wounded New Fourth Army soldier at that time, but he said he fainted twice during backstage rehearsals from hunger, and his calves were puffy and swollen when he pressed a pit, which showed that the biscuits were fake.
Even though I was young, I could sense that people’s hearts were floating and social unrest was, in today’s terms, a serious “stability maintenance” situation. There were rumors among the elders about which road someone had been “skinned by pigs” (a Shanghai dialect for “robbed and stripped naked”), which river had a nameless floating corpse, and which we were not allowed to go out as soon as it got dark. The gym teacher was a bit harsh, commenting: “The sound of a gunshot, the son of a bitch for nothing!”. I have a hometown from the school run out of the same age playmates, he taught me some countryside songs. Later, learning history, only to know that it is the successive dynasties will appear, “the song of the barren years”, adults road to the eye, do not dare to say, children but in the city and countryside roadside singing, the emperor heard are afraid. “Great Leap Forward” after the Shanghai area circulated “barren song” also so, are very reactionary. We sang them in private, or shouted them at the top of our lungs on the way back from school, but they were actually blind shouts. The third song below, in particular, stomps its feet and shouts in unison, but also pats the backpack behind the buttocks “accompaniment”, very rhythmic. It is now recorded for historical purposes as follows.
Don’t get excited, get excited about becoming a rectangular toilet. [2]
How many good couples have been separated by the Communist Party and Chairman Mao? [3]
Who farted, shook the earth, passed through Petrograd, and reached Italy. [4]
“A liberal arts degree is either a crime or a crime.”
I entered elementary school in 1960. As my eldest son was an enlightened child and my father valued education, the whole family went to the Yongan Company on Nanjing Road to buy school bags and pencil cases, and I even asked for a small blackboard. After that, he kept telling me stories about his youth who was out of school and eager to go to school. He told me that once he picked up a piece of colored calligraphy paper with a recruitment picture on it from the street and thought he could go to school for free. All of a sudden you fall into a hole in the ice.
Not long after I started school, a female teacher named Qian paid me a lot of attention, asking me where my father was and how he was doing. When he came back to talk to his father, he recalled that it was his classmate from before he dropped out of school, sitting at the same table, and the daughter of the school board member! Can’t believe she’s teaching my son today? I’m not sure if I’ve ever been to a parent-teacher conference, but I think I’ve made a special effort to visit Mr. Qian. I guess my father was in a bad mood at that time. He hated not hearing that school song that was only popular in the 1990s, with lyrics and music by Gao Xiaosong: “You at the Same Table”.
Before the third grade, my father subscribed to Children’s Time for me, and after the third grade, he subscribed to Juvenile Literature and Art, until he stopped his own Jiefang Daily before the Cultural Revolution, when his family became embarrassed. I used to own a full set of “Youth Literature and Art”, which I miss very much now, but the children in my alley borrowed it from time to time, not keeping a single copy. From that time on, my father began to take me to the “Duo Yunxuan” on Nanjing Road to look at the calligraphy and painting, repeatedly pondering a word, a picture, but also in the palm of his hand to copy, a bubble was a Sunday afternoon. I was so young that I couldn’t understand it, and it took so long to read that I got bored with it, so I was out of touch with calligraphy, painting, and literati.
At that time, when a new movie was released in the cinema, two free tickets would be given to the propaganda cadres of each unit in advance, and my father would take me there. I stopped watching the early movies and skipped the teenage movies that my peers loved to watch, but all of a sudden I entered the adult stage, creating another contrast. Many of my peers had seen movies like “The Seventy-Two Tenants” and “Three Mao Students”, which my father disdained. He hated local comic operas, calling them oily, inferior and regional prejudice, full of Shanghainese vulgarity and small in scope, just as he later hated Zhao Benshan; he took me to see those Western translations that my peers had never heard of, such as Mumu, Resurrection and Laughter in Paradise, which were very “niche”, at an inappropriate age for me. He especially admired Lao She and Beijing People’s Art Theatre’s “Teahouse”, which he considered to be stagecraft, and was very atmospheric. Thirty years later, when the troupe came to Shanghai for its premiere, I bit the bullet and bought him the most expensive seat in the middle of the front row at the Maggie’s Theatre. But he didn’t know the embarrassment I felt as a teenager: talking about theater and movies with friends my own age, I had never seen anything they had never heard of, and I had never seen anything they knew well or could even imitate, which was weird for both sides. This education made me look so old and age-inappropriate, a few years older than my peers, that my older classmates called me a “repeater”. Because I had aged so much, I didn’t look old when I became an adult, so I ridiculed myself as “water-washed cloth, from old age.
There were two other things that had a negative impact on my emerging “worldview”. The first was that my grandfather offended the bureaucrats in his unit and had his salary cut by two levels, from $60 to $48, which is insignificant today but was not a small amount in the early 1960s. My father was dissatisfied, and wrote complaints to all levels of agencies, all the way up to the Shanghai Municipal Committee and the East China Bureau. But he was a cadre after all, and knew that such letters would end up in the hands of the accused officials, who would retaliate once they recognized the handwriting, so he revised and finalized the papers and sent them to me for transcription before sending them out. This was hard work for an elementary school student, often taking a Sunday to copy, and that’s how I remembered Ke Qingshi’s name. I remembered Ke Qingshi’s name this way. How much does it affect a child’s mind to be involved in “petitioning” at such a young age and to become a “petitioner”? [5]
Another incident was that my father had a cousin who was politically active and stubborn, who could scold his real father (the landlord), who had come to his hometown to flee the countryside, with a slap. The unit mobilized its employees to “eliminate the four evils” and to swat flies in winter, which he resisted by complaining. In 1961, he gnawed on the bark of a tree to earn a living and saved his life, but he didn’t know how to escape from the labor camp. When the door opened, the two old brothers recognized each other and cried with their arms around each other; in the light, their cousin was in prison with a dirty face, starved to death, and a big sore on his back, just like the fugitive played by Chen Daoming in the opening scene of the movie The Return. They didn’t want to wake up the neighbors, so they wrapped the light bulb in old newspapers and talked all night, just like the underground party. That night I was awakened and lay under the covers, pretending to be asleep, but I couldn’t remember what they said and I didn’t necessarily understand. But there are bureaucrats on earth, and bureaucrats can harm people. Such an impression is like a branding iron burned into a young man’s heart, and it can never be erased.
The contrast between this impression and the positive education I received at school was so strong that my father may not have expected the consequences, or may have expected them, and may have underestimated them. From the third grade on, these “negative energies” began to fester in my heart, and I repeatedly broke the rules. At that time, my extracurricular assignments were not heavy, and I had a large chunk of free time in the afternoon, so my classmates would play around for a while or go to the shantytown near the school. I would point to the shacks where the poor lived and imitate a long-running column in the Party newspaper, “Under the Great Wall of Capitalism,” but I would say the opposite: “Look, this is under the Great Wall of Socialism! ” Is this the beginning of my “Just like my classmates, just like my classmates, just like my classmates”? In fact, it was the beginning of my trouble with literacy.
The first time I wrote an essay on a topic, I crossed out the title I had been given by my teacher, and then I wrote another one: “Evaluation of my class’s three best students”. In today’s terms, this is not in line with the main theme, a blatant offense, should be severely punished. But the class teacher, Ms. Pang, who taught language, favored me and gave me a “good”, not punitive, punishment. Now I think that was the earliest fork in the road of my life, if Ms. Pang could “nip the disturbance factor in the bud”, maybe there would not have been what happened later, I have medicine to save?
When my grandfather died of illness in 1964, my father did something very impulsive: he put on mourning clothes and pasted a white paper on the office of the party secretary. This was considered a rebellion at the time, and was definitely recorded in the internal control file, which became a political obstacle to his promotion for the rest of his life. That year, I was in junior high school and junior high school, and the atmosphere at home was infected, and I made a mess of the final exam. I didn’t write “good deeds,” “spring trips,” or “autumn trips” under the proposition of “an unforgettable incident. Instead, it is about the dark side of life – the unjust death of the grandfather, and the depression and grief that envelops the family. It was very long, divided into small chapters of “I, II, III”, and was very preoccupying. At that time the atmosphere on campus was already very tense, the teachers could not go after work, working overtime to learn “nine comments” or “editorial”, “highlight the political”, a serious face. Teacher Pang saw my “article” no longer dare to make decisions, submitted to the principal to judge the paper. As a result, I met a good person again, the principal is a member of the CDL, the early 60s also wore gold-rimmed glasses and cheongsam, a bit “Republican-style. She actually gave a “good” after reading it, and let me pass without repeating the grade. But Ms. Pang thought not to be careless, perhaps the principal’s account, she wrote to her father, and seriously asked him to go to her house on Sunday to talk once.
At that time home visits were very common, but are teachers to students home, and in turn, parents to teachers home interview, is never heard of. The parents dressed as if they were going to some serious meeting and took the tram to Ms. Pang’s house in the city center. That afternoon, I waited for my parents to return and prepared for a lecture. My father came back without saying a word, but from the looks of his face, they had a very uncomfortable conversation, probably about the “anti-rightist” movement that was so prevalent among adults at that time of the year? Because my father gave me the letter from the teacher’s interview, which contained the grim words, unimaginably from such a gentle woman teacher – “Your son will grow up to be either a man of great benefit to the people, or a great rightist”! I myself was terrified when I read those words. I didn’t necessarily know what a “rightist” was at the time, but I guessed from the teacher’s either/or tone that the latter sentence meant a terrible end. Strangely enough, my father did not punish me for such a serious incident, but I guess Mr. Pang asked him about his regular tutoring, and he blamed himself? My father gave me that letter to keep, and I kept it in my pocket for many years until I lost it during the Cultural Revolution. Thirty years later I was also a teacher and returned to Shanghai from out of town, and after much trouble I finally found Ms. Pang and took my son to see her. She was over seventy years old and recognized me immediately, saying that she had been teaching for fifty years and had always thought of me as a student and was always relieved. She also remembered the letter with this sentence, in fact, the first half of the sentence may not, the second half of the sentence seems to be she said, it was really carved fire, carved that generation twenty years of shock and fear.
My father’s family upbringing for me was torn between “positive energy” and “negative energy” in this way. That’s what I’ve struggled with since becoming a father myself. Hamlet’s opening line, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” is a classic. But in this gloomy environment in China, it can only be dwarfed to “to say, or not to say, that is the question. Even if we do, when do we say it to our children and to what extent? It was equally difficult. When my son was in elementary school, my wife and I had a serious discussion about the issue behind his back, and eventually decided to start talking about it when he was in middle school, in a gradual and progressive manner. But when he was in fifth grade, what the authorities called a “political firestorm” occurred, and my situation worsened, spilling over into his elementary school. Two men in uniform, watched by teachers and classmates, called the child out of the classroom and questioned him, “What did your father say at home? This disrupts our progression. Social events intervene across the board, putting on a uniform and shouting at a ten year old boy, “Tell, or don’t tell, that’s the question!” We had to follow up and start talking to him two years in advance. The year he entered the university, when he insisted on applying for the liberal arts, I regretted it and couldn’t help telling him the story of how Xu Fuguan, as a thinker and historian, prevented his four children from applying for the liberal arts in a row. Xu Fuguan probably faced the same problem, and was forced to say, “In this era in our country, studying the liberal arts is either a crime or a crime.
I quoted Xu’s words, is really impatient to say, the said said, should not say also said, even the bottom line are said broken. The first day of the first session of the college entrance exam, he wrote this sentence into the essay, and came back very proud, saying that today’s proposition essay, just in time, written into the sentence! This scared me terribly, scared yet can not say, said afraid to affect his back there are four exams. He was lucky to get away with it, probably because the number of candidates in Shanghai increased dramatically that year, the volume of the examination paper was too large, and many university teachers were temporarily deployed to go. I don’t know which of my peers saw this paper, or even my Fudan brother, younger brother, guessed that his father was a fellow student in distress, and had a feeling of solidarity, so he raised the muzzle an inch higher and let the dog pass?
Confucius had many legacies, and I have never looked down upon his macro politics. But there is a microscopic personnel, so I was convinced: “can be with the words, but not the words, lost people, not to say, lost words. That is two thousand five hundred years ago, the ancient pre-Qin, people are not intensive interaction, moving like a businessman, how could he have such a fine resolution, to distinguish and then torn between the dilemma? People today admire these words, mostly for the frustration of adults interacting with their peers, such as Lu Xun’s famous saying, “The spacing between porcupines and their thorns. Was Confucius mostly like that in his day? But I thought it was a matter of homeschooling, a slip of the tongue or a slip of the person, first between the two generations? He deliberately concealed the truth and his true thoughts out of his love for his son, and in order to avoid disaster, he could not bear to speak to his wife and children, resulting in the spiritual isolation of the two generations, which eventually led to tragedy. As a result, the whole family was mentally isolated from each other, which resulted in tragedy. Now the situation is better, even if my father doesn’t say anything, my children can see it on the Internet, but the problem still exists, and it will be passed down from generation to generation.
I wore a red scarf when I joined the team in the third grade, and my father was very happy that day, taking the “positive symbols” of the squadron vice squadron and study committee very seriously. I’m still wearing this on Sunday for a girl, not a big problem, for a mischievous boy, the psychological awkwardness is still fresh in my mind today. In fact, when I was a teenager, my “position” was at this level, and I never got promoted, because I made a mistake in a fight, and even jerked off a bar and was demoted to captain. Sometimes he would talk to me when he was depressed, saying politically incorrect things, which today seem like no big deal. He said it all, but then asked me not to say it. How far did he go? I had no idea what I was talking about, so I just wondered what “dissatisfaction with reality” meant.
At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, I graduated from elementary school and was not supposed to participate in the Cultural Revolution. My father asked a high school student in the neighborhood to take me out (the one who was scraping the bottom of the pot and treating me very well), gave me five yuan, and said he wanted to go out and “make a go of it” and “see the world”. “Positive energy”. The first time I was in the hospital, I had to go to the hospital to see a doctor. The next year, we were assigned to the middle school according to our place of residence, and Guangzhou sent the IOU to us to clear the accounts, and it arrived. My father didn’t say a word and acknowledged the debt and paid the money back, which I remember was more than twenty dollars, not a small amount at that time.
In the spring of 1968, in my second semester of middle school, I finally got into big trouble because of reading wild books and idle books. I only learned Chiang Kai-shek’s “Ningbo” catchphrase from the book and talked and wrote it everywhere, which is called “post-modern graffiti” today. When I was careless, my classmate in front of me had already written “Long Live Chairman Mao”, but I couldn’t see it with my elbow pressed down. The next day this podium was carried into the task force, with reactionary slogans on it, to solve the case, and the Public Security Bureau police car came. I quickly went to “surrender”, not intentionally, but still characterized as “hostile internal affairs” (enemy-me conflict, people’s internal conflicts to deal with), almost not arrested. My father was furious and no longer encouraged me to read more books, but pried open my little bookcase and burned it to the ground, regardless of the positive or negative energy. The drowning should have drowned me, but when it didn’t, there were two people who secretly sympathized and helped me. I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to do that, but I think I’m going to be able to do that. [6]
There was another person who was even more amazing, the captain of the labor propaganda team at that time, Master Jiang. When I graduated, he went to my father’s unit for an overseas transfer, and when he looked at the file, he saw that it was a long-lost friend from the 1950s. When he came back, he not only did not include the above material in my political evaluation form, but also took the material out of my file and destroyed it. My father kept this from me for many years, and I was kept in the dark, carrying the burden for many years. Until five years later, when the army was over and the recruitment process began, the political cadre read my file and repeatedly questioned me about a deep family connection overseas – did you know that you had a cousin brother from your grandmother in Taiwan? Of course I don’t know. What I do know is that I have a political problem, but I don’t even ask, as if he doesn’t know? When I returned to Shanghai, I asked my father, and only then did he put the matter to rest.
“That liberalism of yours, how dangerous!”
In 1970, I graduated from junior high school, and the class of ’69 was “all red”, and all of them went away, not one of them was missing. I chose to go to Lankao, which was not assigned by the state, but my mother disagreed no matter what, because it was too bitter there. It was my father who convinced my mother that I should go to Lankao to learn from Jiao Yulu, to suffer more and perhaps become an adult. Before he arrived at the train station to say goodbye, he was in tears even thinking about it. My father came to Shanghai from the countryside in his early teens to make a living, suffered enough from discrimination, taught himself to be an adult, and finally stood his ground. My motivation at that time was twofold: I admired the fact that there was a group of high school students there, who were very orthodox, well-educated, ate together, lived together, worked together, and were far away from the tastes of the little people. I’ve written reactionary slogans, pointed fingers, and carried that burden with me everywhere I went. The interest of small citizens is always intertwined with political pressure, and one has to walk away with a clean slate.
When I returned to Shanghai from the north after fifteen years, I didn’t want to come back, but once I did, I found that there was a gap. The language is similar, the food is missed, even the humid air is also very friendly, only the psychological barrier, such as the blood type is generally unbearable. Whether one has ever traveled far in one’s life, especially from a big city like Shanghai, where one is a small citizen, has a great impact on the rest of one’s life. I can’t help but thank my father. Although he didn’t think of what I’m saying now, he agreed to my long-distance travel and didn’t stop me at that crucial step, and even gave me a helping hand.
In those years in the countryside, my father treated me as if I were still around, and sent me my allowance at the standard rate of one yuan per month when I was in school, which was enclosed in a letter. At that time, my work share in the production team was at an all-time low, four cents a day, and I couldn’t get it until the end of the year, so my father sent me one dollar a month to solve my major problems: salt, stamps, and lamp oil for reading at night. In order to write this memory, I asked my wife to find a small account book she had kept back then, when she and I were in a collective household. Thanks to her careful keeping, I find it hard to believe when I look at it today, but it was also counted by “cents”: 8 cents for oil, 12 cents for lamp oil, 15 cents for salt, and occasionally more than 10 yuan in “big bills”, which was the money my father sent to me as we returned to Shanghai in the winter. One 10 yuan and 20 cents note was sent by my uncle, and the 20 cents note was from my brother who had just entered elementary school. At the same time, my father sent me monthly copies of “Study and Criticism,” “Morning Glory,” “Self-Study Series in Mathematics and Physical Chemistry,” and other books that I wanted, and he was generous with the money.
At that time, the family’s financial situation was getting worse every year. My father joined a group of Shanghai cadres and went to Jinggangshan, Jiangxi province, to visit the Zhiqing people there, and it was his turn to “go to the countryside”. The “Albanian”, falling again and again. My mother had to scrimp and save to support her three younger siblings in Shanghai. My father and my eldest brother, the two pillars of the family, could not be relied on, and my younger sister could not pay her school fees on time and was treated badly by the teachers at school. My younger sister was later told as a joke, and my older brother was sadly disappointed. After I left home, my father was so focused on my self-education that he could not even pay my younger sister’s school fees on time. This has never happened before in our family. As the eldest son, I couldn’t help but feel guilty. The year before last, her daughter went abroad to study, and I insisted on sponsoring the tuition. As soon as the two adults gave in, the little girl wondered, “Uncle, why are you doing this?” I could only say in a general way, “I owe your mother.
In 1972, when I was hired to work in a factory, I didn’t have to send my allowance money, but my father still sent me books, periodicals and magazines from Shanghai on a monthly basis, so much so that all the workers and cadres around me envied me and would ask me to borrow them. In 1978, when I started to apply for graduate school, my father became the back-up for my self-study materials, and no matter what books I wanted, he would try his best to find them. Once I saw a man in a used bookstore on Fuzhou Road who wanted to sell me a history textbook for my undergraduate degree before the Cultural Revolution, and I needed it. I was also unlucky in those years. I took the exam four times in three years, and every time there was an accident or story, and the last time I was so frustrated that I threw my pen away and didn’t want to take it again. My father wrote me a small note on the screen and had me stand on the desk: “I was born a hero, but I will die a ghost. He encouraged me to take the exams again, to seize the day, and not even to come back for the New Year.
But my siblings told me that in those years, my father would get upset on New Year’s Eve and would lose his temper over the slightest strife. My family knew why, and with bated breath, they spent the New Year with him. The last time I passed the exam, according to my father’s promise, I didn’t have to say anything, but when I received the admission notice, I could just send a seven-character telegram: “The news of success is back as paper money. He really took the telegram and lit it in front of my grandfather’s portrait, and that was the end of his wish. Only then did I have a better understanding of my father’s “literati calligraphy and painting” and “literati sentiments.” [7] [7]
I returned to Shanghai in 1985 after graduating from graduate school, and at first I was teaching in an army college. That Spring Festival, my father’s work unit suddenly sent me a cake and Spring Festival couplets of support for the military. But he valued this identity more than I did. In the 1980s, the military culture was still good, and I agreed that in that era, business efforts were quicker and promotions were faster, and my father wanted me to cherish it even more. When I came home on Sunday, every time there was an inappropriate comment at the dinner table, he would put his chopsticks down and say, “You’re a soldier, a regimental officer.
He admired Peng Dehuai the most in his life, but in his old age he began to miss Mao, while I always sympathized with Hu Yaobang. He thought I was an “intellectual prejudice” and I thought he had “Stockholm syndrome”; he couldn’t understand these foreign terms and called me “forgetful”. The thing that hurt him the most was an argument about what type of cadres were good and what type of cadres were bad, and I blurted out that for thirty years propaganda cadres were the worst, and that they were all helping to lie and fool the people about China. My father was so angry that he slammed the door and left.
In hindsight, I was annoyed that I had “forgotten” my father. I forgot that my father was originally a propaganda cadre, a minor official who had been a propagandist all his life, but if it wasn’t for his influence, how could I have stood out from the small town hall atmosphere as a child? Now wearing a tiger’s skin, but also to speak out, rashly discussing the government, that is not also his “original”, his “genes” in the blame? Another time, I was watching CCTV international news and saw a military coup in an African country where soldiers shot students, but the news spokesman of this country said it was the students and people who killed the soldiers, and showed some pictures of the soldiers who were killed. My father tsked at this and said, “What kind of words are these? How can you treat soldiers like this? He thought I appreciated that he was defending my dignity as a soldier, but then father and son got into an argument. My mother, who never discusses current affairs, suddenly spoke up and snapped at my father: This is bullshit! If a soldier has a gun in his hand and he doesn’t shoot, how can the people gather around and shoot him? My father was always the most educated and politically knowledgeable person in the news, and he always explained to my mother. It seems that my mother has been loyal to my father all her life, but has not been influenced by my father’s profession, and still retains her natural human nature.
My father guessed the reason for my transition out of the military and was sad, but he never told me why. He was worried about me in the early years, and then I was worried about him, and I didn’t want him to be worried anymore. In fact, he was always paying attention, looking at every article behind my back, and the more he read, the more worried he became, but he never broke the news. Both father and son are literate, and at this critical point, they know what they are talking about and will not break the news to each other. Until 2005, when he was seriously ill and I was going to give a lecture at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan, he had no choice but to go to the hospital to say goodbye. The other was waiting, and had to go to the hospital to say goodbye. He propped himself up on his sickbed and suddenly said, “Your liberalism is dangerous. This breaks the point at once. I was stunned by the news and didn’t know what to say. I was speechless and could only remain silent. My mother, on the other hand, went back to her father’s position and recited the letter from Mr. Pang fifty years ago, saying quietly, “Can’t you stop talking about it? More poisoning?”
Those were the last words my father left me with, and he walked away with his heart in suspense. Say? Or not? This is still a problem today. Or, as the mother said, even if it is said, it is said less? Mr. Pang is gone, my father is gone, and only my mother remains in suspense, pity the parents!
[Note]
[1] See Yin Shu-sheng, “Mao Zedong and the Third National Public Security Conference,” Yanhuang Chunqiu, 2014, no. 5.
[2] A Ningbo accent, with harmonic allusions, presumably from the hometown of Jiang Jieshi in Xikou?
[3] Northern Jiangsu accent, too frank, only dared to sing in private behind teachers’ and parents’ backs, [4]] Mandarin, passed through Petersburg, referring to “criticizing the Soviet Union and opposing the revision”.
[4]] In Mandarin, after passing through Petrograd, it meant “criticizing the Soviet Union and opposing the revision”; after reaching Italy, it meant “on the differences between Comrade Togliatti and us”, and it was the most important article alongside the “Nine Commentaries”. The General Secretary of any Communist Party at the time of Taos. Such complex implications that children don’t understand are probably taught in dark corners by bearded men from Beijing? It was the only place where people had political complexes and were concerned with theory. I heard later that this nursery rhyme was so widely circulated that it was still sung by children in Changchun in the 1970s, even in the northeast.
[5] Two months ago, I met with 80-year-old Mr. Zhu Zheng in Shanghai and asked Yang Xiaokai what happened to Liu Fengxiang, the man who had inspired him in prison, whom he had mentioned many times before his death. The two of them were in Changsha in 1957, and happened to be in the same newspaper company as Liu Fengxiang, and also fought together as rightists. Mr. Zhu said that Liu Fengxiang remarried against all odds, and the matchmaker was a ten-year-old girl. The child petitioned for the family’s injustice case and ventured to Beijing to meet Chairman Mao, but he met Chen Boda, who received the petition paper and promised: “Chairman Mao is not at home, when he comes back, I will definitely hand it over for you. At that time, Liu Fengxiang was also petitioning in Beijing, and he got to know this little girl. After that, it was the child who was able to match her mother with Liu Fengxiang, and a marriage was formed, which was also a strange thing.
6] Forty years later, Li Min saw my essay “Farewell to Shenzhi in a Dangerous City,” which was written in remembrance of Li Shenzhi, and recalled that she was also a member of the Wuxi Li family, with whom Shenzhi was related. In 2000, when I was named, Shenzhi came to the South for the last time and met with the president of the University of Shanghai, Qian Weichang, and we had a good evening conversation. The world is such a small place. Forty years after one another, the Li family came to my aid one after another, as if there was some kind of destiny.
In the early 1980s, when cross-strait people-to-people contacts thawed, my father visited the Cold Mountain Temple in Suzhou and met a Taiwanese tour group, which he then talked to. My father said, “I have an uncle in Taiwan who has been separated for many years, and I don’t know if he is still alive. The other asked what his name was. When my father said his name, a Taiwanese citizen exclaimed, “Oh my, isn’t that my father Yang, our neighbor? I will see you every day.” My father was overjoyed. My father was overjoyed and bent down, that is, he put his knee on the roadside and wrote a cursive letter, asking them to bring it to him. We laughed at his wishful thinking, for it was just a favor, how could he bring it? But my father firmly believed that the old school people had the integrity of the old school people, and the Knee Book under the Cold Mountain Temple would be brought! Mr. Yang answered the letter quickly, and my father read the letter to my grandmother, beginning with a name in his native tongue after a gap of fifty years. Hearing “Third Sister”, the grandmother sat down and cried, “You’re still alive after so many years? Are you a man or a ghost?” That’s why she told me the history of the revolutionary family, which she had been hiding from me for fifty years. Previously, “Papa Yang” had been “lurking” in my father’s and my father’s files, a ghostly figure that had caused suffering to two generations, but he was suddenly “reincarnated” as a living person and was now available for relationship. When I visited Taiwan in early 1997, I followed my father’s order to visit them. They were no strangers to our suffering, and “spoke bitterly of the history of the revolutionaries,” and then concluded, “The same thing happened to us, because you were not used seriously. So we are their ghosts, too? The two sides of the Taiwan Strait are one family and we are ghosts to each other!
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