Chapter 97 Difficulty

Before the Anti-Japanese War, Wen Yiduo had been living a good life.From November 1934, Wen Yiduo lived in No. 72, Xinnanyuan, Tsinghua University. There are bedrooms, study rooms, living rooms, dining rooms, storage rooms, servant bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, etc., a total of 14 large and small rooms. .Electric lights, telephones, electric bells, hot and cold water and other facilities are all available.There are lawns on both sides of the corridor in front of the house, surrounded by holly and dwarf cypress walls, and a large fish tank is placed in the center of the lawn.Wen Yiduo's study room is spacious and bright, the walls are lined with bookcases as high as the ceiling, and there is a desk under the window.When I was tired from reading, I went for a walk on the large balcony in front of the door, or pulled weeds on the lawn, and watched goldfish.After the snow in winter, roll snowballs and build snowmen with the children.

After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, inflation intensified day by day, and the lives of professors at Southwest Associated University deteriorated collectively. The actual purchasing power of their salaries dropped from 350 yuan per capita before the war to 8.3 yuan.Wen Yiduo has five children, the husband and wife plus nanny Zhao Ma, and the family of eight depends on Wen Yi's salary. Ten days and eight days are exhausted, and the remaining half of the month is often spent on half-cooked meals.Their meals are often mixed with grains of sand, and sometimes the whole family of 8 eats 4 poached eggs, and not every day.There is not enough food, so they can only eat tofu and cabbage to help them survive.In order to supplement nutrition for her husband and children, Mrs. Gao Zhen often took the children to the small river outside the village to catch some small fish and shrimps, and opened a piece of wasteland to grow vegetables by herself.

Wu Han sadly recalled Wen’s situation in the article "Crying for a Father and Son": "A tattered rattan chair was given by Sun Yutang when he went to England; a neater square table was borrowed from the school and lent to you. You My desk is three long planks, like a tailor's." In desperation, Wen Yiduo could only sell the book to the school. He said: "I only sold it to the Tsinghua Library of the school. I can get it back when I have money in the future." The few books that must be used are sold.He said to his wife, "It's so sad for a teacher to sell books."

In the winter of 1940, books and clothes were all sold out. Wen Yiduo had no choice but to take off his only fox fur coat and put it on consignment. As a result, he was so cold that he developed a high fever.With tears in his eyes, Gao Zhen asked his eldest son Lihe to rush from the suburbs to the city overnight and redeem his coat. The Wen family had just moved to No. 3, Fushou Lane, Kunming. Within a month, they were bombed by Japanese planes.Wen Yiduo and his younger brother Wen Jiasi lived in a cave together. During an air raid, a bomb fell beside the cave, but fortunately it did not explode.To be on the safe side, the Wen family had to move to Chenjiaying in the suburbs.

In Chenjiaying, Wen Yiduo and Hua Luogeng, a total of 14 people, lived together for more than a year in a damp room with only 16 square meters.Wen Yiduo's family lived at the east end of the house, and Hua Luogeng's family lived at the west end of the house. A piece of floral cloth was hung between the two houses to separate them. In the middle of the night, Hua Luogeng's youngest son wet the bed, and he could get all the way to Wen's house.When the rainy day comes, the two children put together washbasins, gargle jars, rice bowls, and urine cans to catch the rainwater from the roof and downstairs.Hua Luogeng once wrote a seven-character poem describing the life of the two families: "It is not just that the two families share the same ups and downs. The archaeology of Budong and the calculation of Buxi, professional differences have the same heart and hatred."