I want to tell a Family history, those stories I think if I do not say, will eventually be interrupted by the tumultuous Life I struggle with, so that I threw in the depths of memory, dusty in the years, far away to the quiet sea without waves.
I was born just to the full moon, was carried back Home by my grandmother to raise, at that Time my father was working in Shandong, my mother was alone in Henan, with children is very difficult. For most of my childhood, I lived under the care of my grandmother and aunt, the two women I first remember. To this day, my grandmother is still the most noble woman I’ve ever met, and I’ve always thought of her as a grandma. She is a living dictionary, poetry, song and all kinds of things, women’s red do exquisite, as a child to make me a lot of purse, but I remember most is when I was three years old, she taught me to recite the “Ugly Room Ming” scene, I know what is “laughing there are great scholars, no white man” it? But what I remember is the look on her face as she taught me to read, the pride that could not be erased over the years, and her admonition that to be a human being is to live a kind of weather.
My great-grandfather was a major general in the Kuomintang army and was posthumously promoted to lieutenant general after his death. When I was born, he had been dead for nearly thirty years. I heard about him occasionally from the adults when I was a child, but my grandmother was always reluctant to tell me his story when asked. But every year on New Year’s Eve, we burned paper to this great-grandfather, and at that time I loved to fold Gold yuanbao, folded until my hands were full of gold dust, and my grandmother would say, “Hurry up and kowtow to your ancestors, and kowtow to your great-grandfather, so you can go eat. My curiosity about my great-grandfather’s life came from this annual worship.
But later, I heard a lot of versions, the mouths of many different, each of his children have a different evaluation of their father, I’ll just pieced together that one ancestor based on my judgment. Great-grandfather was the young master of a large family in Jiangnan, Yangzhou City was his hometown, the family was originally generations of business, to the Republic of China, the days are still very prosperous. Parents sent their children to school, he was deeply influenced by progressive ideas. I think that at that time, the idea that the rise and fall of the world is the responsibility of the people was in full swing, and the educated people in society were worried about the country and the people, and it was the time of great emancipation. So he said goodbye to his parents and enrolled in Huangpu V. Since then, he never returned to Huangpu. From then on, he never returned to his hometown, nor did he return to his roots. Sometimes I wonder if this is a reflection of the youth of that generation. “If you don’t care about your parents, what can you say about your son and wife?” Subsequent things his children can not say so, graduated from military school from the army, successive battles, and constantly promoted, but the military, very old to marry and have children, his wife is also a lady, also considered to know the books and manners. During the difficult years, she gave birth to eight children for him, survived six, only one boy. My grandmother was the fourth of these children.
My grandmother’s third sister and sixth sister and seventh sister could not let go of their parents and always had resentment, probably because they did not raise them when they were young and did not do their duty. If the children are still young, they can be entrusted to the care of the neighbors in the countryside, and so on. So the young lady, no one remembered her original name, and her head turned white overnight. Later, the family’s four young girls were sent to others to raise. The children had memories at that time, grandmother’s third sister was already a teenager, but she was allowed to take care of her three sisters in someone else’s home.
My grandmother went to school for a few days, and she told me that her mother would teach them to read during her free time under fire, so she was very good at the Four Books and Five Classics, and played with poetry and Music, making me sweat every time. But perhaps her life is tied to her own reading, her heart has so much of the family and the world, more or less tainted with the temperament of some old-time readers, and after so much suffering in life, so I always told me, proficient in the four books and five scriptures also did not get half useful, the world, a hundred useless is a scholar.
The war ended, but the civil war started again. Their father finally returned home, but their mother had died a year earlier, and never saw her husband again. When my grandmother’s eldest sister found out the family letter in 1994, the siblings present hugged and cried, the most bitter crying I had ever seen. Only then, her husband was about to usher in the “bright future” of the new China. He could only take two children with him, and the army would not wait for anyone. So he decided to take only the only boy and his eldest sister, who had already reached adulthood.
This part of history is the one that no one wants to touch, and it is yellowed and blurred by the erosion of time. All I know is that from then on, the third sister became the pillar of the family, taking care of the remaining sisters, and within a few years, they each married someone else and went their own way.
The two lucky ones, who fled to Taiwan, seemed so miserable. At that time, the eldest sister took the second brother to flee south with the troops, and many families of the Kuomintang soldiers were mixed in with the fleeing group, and they were specially placed and organized into temporary companies for management. At night, the boys and girls slept separately, and emergencies often occurred during the night. Many times, the Communist troops were just a few hundred meters away, and whoever was slow and fell out of line would have to fall out of line and never be able to keep up with the group. One night, still an emergency, everyone was gathering to run for their lives, the eldest sister in the line of boys frantically looking for her brother, in fact, only a few minutes, the troops to leave, but the brother was not found, the eldest sister had to follow the troops to go first. From then on, the two of them were separated from each other, separated by the shallow strait. When the siblings finally met again more than 40 years later, they realized how the truth was. At that time, the younger brother just ran to the bushes to relieve himself, and returned to the camp in two minutes, and the troops had already left. The younger brother finally followed other deserters and escaped to Lianyungang, where he found a job and settled down to stay in Red China. But because of his bad origins, he was never reappointed and spent his life in poverty.
The sister, on the other hand, had a very different fate. When she arrived in Taiwan, she received preferential treatment because of her father’s relationship. She went to college, got a good job, married a good husband, and lived a comfortable and prosperous life. Their father, knowing that his siblings were separated, was concerned about the only boy, and let his sister go to Taiwan with the army first, and stayed behind to look for the boy, missing the last train. After that, he stayed on the mainland. Of course, he did not find his children and had no way to return to his hometown. He was branded as a counter-revolutionary in Siyang and died in his hometown. His children did not know about their father until several years after his death, and they suffered for life because of such a father. I heard that he was killed by the people’s struggle and beheaded, and Zhou Enlai personally approved a letter to the locality saying that this man must not be killed and that the Central Committee would make its own arrangements. But the masses were very enthusiastic in their struggle, how could they throw cold water on it? The end was that he was beheaded and shown to the public, and he died at the hands of the people he had set out to serve his country as a teenager, and they said he was a lackey of capitalism and an executioner of the people.
Years later, we found his name on the list of Whampoa V – Chen Huai Bing – and my grandmother told me that you should remember his name. My grandmother’s eldest sister had a picture of him, dressed in military attire, with a heroic frown on his face. I can’t help but speculate that my grandmother’s unwillingness to be defeated in life and to succumb to circumstances is also due to her adherence to his bloodline.
For such a father, grandmother’s sisters suffered a lot and became the target of successive struggles. Later on, my grandmother married my grandfather, who was then of a clean background and knew a bit about poetry. They got married, and from then on, they started to depend on each other and know and cherish each other for the rest of their lives. They were the most loving couple I have ever seen, taking care of each other and being considerate of each other. On my twenty-second birthday, my grandmother told me that as the eldest female in the family, it is right to tell you the truth of being a woman: “Choose a man, eyes should be good, must find a kind person, because as the eldest daughter in the family, we all want you to be happy in life, do not care what outsiders say, and do not compare conditions, money, only follow your own heart. If you use the old saying, what you are looking for is your lifetime of dependence. You should be humble and think more about each other. Marriage is the number one priority, other than that, I can’t care about my studies and career, there are only four words you should remember – self-improvement.”
I think this is my grandmother’s life experience, the four words “self-improvement” is what she always abide by. From a young lady’s life of luxury, she had to go to the countryside to do daily farm work, raise her children, and endure the eyes of the neighbors in the countryside. But she believed that “to live is to live a kind of weather”, she always believed in tolerance and love, so in the end, her sincerity touched the village, and their relationship was harmonious. She encouraged her children to go to college, and even though her family was in need, she insisted that they go to school.
In those years she walked peacefully, she maintained a calm heart. Whenever I think about my grandmother’s life, I can’t help but feel that this is the cultivation of the old days. In the most common words, she has “seen the world”.
In 1994, it was worth writing about the last and only gathering of my grandmother’s family, as the thaw in cross-strait relations finally brought her elder sister, whom she had not seen for decades, back to her hometown and allowed everyone to meet. So decades of unsolved mysteries, such as the death of their father and the separation from their brother, were solved. The elder sister told everyone that their father was treated as a martyr by the Kuomintang government and was posthumously awarded the rank of lieutenant general, with an annual pension. So she went on to live a good life. The family reunion was such a peaceful and joyful scene, but I often wondered what kind of heartache was in each of their hearts. Because originally, they all had the opportunity to live their lives again, free from so much suffering. Alas, recalling the scene again, what the onlookers could feel was the huge gap between the rich and the poor.
In 2009, my grandmother’s eldest sister in Taiwan passed away after a long life, and she was the one who suffered the least and enjoyed the most in her generation. Her death also signifies that there is nothing more for us to worry about on the other side of the Strait. Her children were scattered all over the world, some emigrated to Europe, others to the United States. No one ever returned to the small village in northern Jiangsu, the hometown of their mother’s mother, the place where their mother grew up as a young girl, the place where their mother’s father is buried.
People say that death is like a lamp going out, but usually we do not think seriously about when and where the lamp in our ancestors’ hearts was lit up to shine on this still and suspended world. The immensity of fate makes people humble. But I, in the New Year of 2010, just for the sake of the vertical row of crisp brush letters I received, listening to the sound of firecrackers outside, I suddenly saw the cold moon in the sky suddenly unfold, foreshadowing me to write about the family that once lived in this land for a thousand years.
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