Chapter 5 "Live or die"

About fifteen or sixteen years ago, I was deceived by the Revolutionary Party. They say: revolution is necessary!You see, how unwilling the Han people are to be slaves, how much they want to recover day and night, this wish is still engraved in our hearts even now.Just to give an example,—they say—when Han people died, they put their braids on top of the coffin, just like the Ming Dynasty system.Life and death do not come down, how tragic and worthy of sympathy. In recent years, however, my superstition has cracked.I saw many people on obituaries, most of them were neither martyrs nor survivors, and had nothing to do with the Qing Dynasty; or they had eaten the "lu" of the Republic of China.And when they died, they were either "Qingfeng Chaoyi Dafu" or "Qingfeng Gongren" [3], and they all went to the underworld where they knelt and kowtowed nine times.

I no longer believed in the words of the Revolutionary Party.I thought: Everything else is a lie, it’s just that the Han people have a strange temper of “life and death do not surrender”, but it is true. May 5th EE [1] This article was originally published in the "Miscellaneous Feelings" column of Beijing "Morning News Supplement" on May 6, 1921, signed by Feng Sheng. 〔2〕"Life and death do not surrender" This is a saying in the late Qing Dynasty when propaganda was against the Qing Dynasty. "The article said: "Our nation still has a breath, and this heart will never die.... Ordinary citizens are succumbed to poisonous flames and cannot be free. , still saying that it is not strictly forbidden, but as for the funeral of the dead, wear the clothes of the family, so that they will not be buried, but to see the ancestors in the ground, the festival is more painful, and the situation is especially miserable." [3] Chao Yi Dafu was originally the title of a fourth-rank civil official in the Qing Dynasty.Gongren, originally the title of the wife of a fourth-rank official.