Chapter 5 my hometown

I was born on October 5, 1900 (the twelfth day of the eighth month in the gengzi year of the lunar calendar), and I left my hometown, Fuzhou, Fujian, seven months later.But Fuzhou will always be my hometown in my heart, because it is the hometown of my parents.The extremely trivial yet extremely touching stories I heard from my parents were all set in Fuzhou. My mother said: I was born in Luang Pu Camp in Fuzhou City.Our big family lived in the house rented by my grandfather. There was a pond in the courtyard. At that time, there were often floods in Fuzhou. When the flood was high, the goldfish in the pond would swim into our house.

My grandfather, Mr. Xie Zixiu (Luan En), was a schoolteacher and taught apprentices at the Daonan Temple in the city.He is the first person in our Xie family who can read and write.I remember that when I was eleven years old (1911), when I returned to Fuzhou from Yantai, Shandong, I saw a thin family tree with red seals on my grandfather's bookshelf.The first ancestor was Duke Changwu, followed by Duke Shunyun, Duke Yida, and then my grandfather.The above seems to say that our Xie family moved from Jiangxi and is the descendant of Xie An in the Jin Dynasty.But on a quiet winter night, when my grandfather and I were alone, he suddenly touched my head and said, "You are the first girl in our Xie family to officially go to school. You must study hard." Having said that, he started to talk about our poor family background!It turned out that my great-grandfather Yi Dagong was a poor peasant in Hengling Township, Changle County, Fujian Province. Due to natural disasters, he fled to Fuzhou City to learn to be a tailor.

This is the same as the first generation of Chinese who are all over the world. They are all forced by natural disasters and man-made disasters in the motherland. Razor (haircutting) started, but my great-grandfather didn't escape that far! At that time, tailors had three festivals a year, namely Spring Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, and Mid-Autumn Festival, before they could go to other people's homes to ask for accounts.During the Spring Festival of this year, when my great-grandfather went to someone to ask for money, he was reprimanded because he could not read. He returned home empty-handed and dejected. When the great-grandmother, who was waiting for the rice to cook, heard the sad news, she was silent for a while. , I walked out with tears in my eyes and didn't come in for a long time.When great-grandfather went out to see, it turned out that she had hanged herself on a tree in the corner!He quickly rescued her, and the two of them hugged their heads and cried loudly; the pair of young peasants knelt down in the cold wind and swore to God: In the future, as if a son was blessed by God, and they worked hard, they would also let him read and write. It is good to keep accounts for my father and ask for accounts.But since then my great-grandmother gave birth to four daughters in a row, and only a boy came to the fifth child, which was still difficult.This rare boy is my grandfather, Mr. Xie Zixiu, who was nicknamed "Dade".

This story left a deep impression on me, and my feelings are also great!If my grandfather was a big tree, his second generation would be the branches, and we would all be the dense leaves on the branches; the leaves fall back to the roots, and our roots are deeply rooted in the fields of Hengling Township, Fujian.I was not born in the "Wuyi Mendi", but a descendant of an illiterate peasant tailor who was bullied.My great-grandfather's four daughters, my grand-aunts, were deprived of the right to read and write simply because they were girls!When I told this unexpected story to one of my cousins, he was very unhappy and asked me who I heard it from?When I told him that this was what my grandfather told me, he remained silent for a long time, and only after a while quietly told me not to tell this story to others.At the moment, I am very dissatisfied with his "forgetting his origin" and "lightning farmers"!Since then, I no longer abide by the habit of our Xie family to write their hometown.The place of origin I write on any form is no longer "Fujian Minhou" where my grandfather "entered school", but "Fujian Changle" to express my disagreement!

In my whole life, until today, I have only stayed in Fuzhou for more than two years, not to mention Hengling Township in Changle County. But I remember that when we were in Fuzhou between 1911 and 1912, some elders from Hengling Township came to invite my father to go back.They said that Hengling Township was small and was always bullied. Now that there is an officer in the clan, he should bring a few soldiers back to show off.Father respectfully said: He can go back to worship his ancestors, but he has no soldiers, and it is impossible to lead them there. I still remember the meeting gift that the elders gave my father a red paper bag, which was a hundred silver dimes, worth ten silver dollars together.

Father returned the red paper packet, and went to Hengling Township with the elders to worship the ancestors.Around 1920, I wrote a short story called "Returning to the Native" in Beijing's "Morning News", which was about this story.Now this clipping is nowhere to be found. From the conversation between my grandfather and my father, I learned that Hengling Township is extremely poor.Generations of farmers have worked hard on the fields and lived a life of ignorance and poverty. Only by being sold as "actors" can they escape from their homeland.When I saw the "meeting gift" made up of a hundred silver coins, I thought of the poor peasants I was familiar with in Jingou Village, Dongshan, Yantai, Shandong Province, and I felt an indescribable sadness in my heart. taste!

I love my grandfather very much, and he loves me very much, firstly because I am not at home often, and secondly because although I often read books, I never mess up his books and put them back in their original place after reading them.When I returned to Fuzhou in 1911, I was always around him.At that time, our family lived in "the back of Wanxing Tongshi Store at the entrance of Yangqiao Lane, Nanhou Street, Fuzhou City".This address is still very familiar and friendly to me when I write it, because since I can write, my parents often urge me to write letters to my grandfather, and I have to write the envelope myself.The house is huge and houses four of our extended family.My grandfather and us live on both sides of the hall. The front and back rooms on our side live in our family of six. In the front and back rooms of my grandfather, he is the only one with a room full of books. Once I came to my paradise, I would go in and read books whenever I had time.

Among the books I have read, the ones that left the deepest impression on me are the notebook novels written by Yuan Mei (Zicai) of the Qing Dynasty, and the thread-bound French masterpiece "La Traviata's Legacy" translated by my grandfather's old friend Lin Shu (Qin Nan). .This was the beginning of my search for "Lin's translated novels" in the future, and it can also be said that it was the beginning of my pursuit of reading Western literary works. Our house has several yards, but it’s not like the courtyards of the “siheyuan” in the north. It’s just that there is a rectangular “patio” in front of a row or a house, and each “patio” has a Well, this is almost a characteristic of houses in Fuzhou.In this big house, apart from the living room, there are guest rooms and study rooms.Almost all halls, living rooms, and study rooms are pasted or hung with calligraphy and paintings on the pillars and walls.There is a long couplet written on red paper on the pillar in the hall of the main room. I only remember the last sentence of the first couplet, which is "Jiangzuo Fengliu pushes Xie Fu". remember it!But there are indeed many very good and memorable ones among these hanging banners, such as the couplets in the east courtyard hall where my uncle and parents lived, which are:

The scenery, the moon, and the mind are like the grandfather's own writing on the upper floor of the guest room in the west courtyard: These two couplets of contentment, contentment, insufficiency, promising, and fuwei have given me a profound ideological education.Banners written by my grandfather himself are everywhere.I only remember two lines from the poem about planting flowers in Daonan Temple: Red, purple, blue, white, green, and yellow are in the aisle of the Wisteria Bookstore in the West Court. There is also a pair of couplets given to my grandfather by my grandfather Yang Weibao (Song Yan):

The words "Zhijun's body is back withered" are both mellow and powerful!I like this pair very much, because "Uninhibited Horse" praised his nephew, my father, and "After Wither" praised his old friend, my grandfather! From "Unruly Horse", I should talk about my father Xie Baozhang (Mirror).He is my grandfather's third son.My two uncles both inherited my grandfather's profession and became schoolteachers.When my father was seventeen years old, Mr. Yan Fu (Youling), a friend of my grandfather, came back to Fuzhou to recruit naval students. He saw my father and thought that this young man could "take a pen and serve in the army", so he gave my father a salary. There is a poem title, which is "the moon is bright when it reaches the mid-autumn equinox", and there is also a stereotyped title.Dad did it all.In a poor schoolteacher's home, it would be a good thing to have a child who could serve as a "soldier" and get paid, so my father put on a padded gown made of two long gowns and half a catty of cotton from his uncles. , followed Mr. Yan to the Naval Academy in Zizhulin, Tianjin, and became a driving student.

My father probably never studied in England, but as a young officer on a cruiser, he has been to several countries, such as England and Japan.I remember that he once said to us angrily: "At that time, China was so majestic that it didn't even have a national anthem! We went to the UK to receive the warships purchased by China. During the reception ceremony, they even played a folk song "Mom is so Confused" as the national anthem of China. Look! " In the Sino-Japanese Naval Battle of Sino-Japanese War, my father was the second gunner on the "Weiyuan" ship and participated in the naval battle.The warship was later sunk at Weihaiwei.Father swam to Liugong Island and returned to Fuzhou from there. My mother often told me about that period of worrying life.My mother, Yang Fuci, her parents died when she was fourteen years old. She lived with her uncle, Mr. Song Yan, and married into Xie's family when she was nineteen.Her marriage was arranged when she was nine years old when my grandfather and my grandfather wrote poems and essays.After getting married, the young couple had a very good relationship, because my father lived at sea for a long time, "will leave less and leave more", so they corresponded frequently and sang a lot of poems.I only remember three sentences from a poem written by my father: What is the purpose of this body to learn from the morning glory? After the Sino-Japanese War broke out, because there were a lot of Fuzhou people in the navy and many people were killed in battle, so on the street where we live, today this house has a door couplet with white paper on it, and tomorrow it will be another house with a white paper door couplet on it.Mother felt that this pair of white door couplets would one day be pasted on the door of our house!She secretly bought a box of opium cream and hid it on her body, planning to take poison and kill herself once she got the news of her father's death.Seeing my mother's silent and sad expression, my grandfather asked my two cousins ​​to stay by my mother's side day and night.Someone in the family even went to the temple to ask for a lottery for my mother. The words on the signer were: I am afraid of being lonely in the hall. Mother put away the signed paper in doubt.After a few days, sure enough, on a moonlit night, I heard someone knocking on the door. When my mother hurried to open the door, I saw my father who had come back under the moonlight!Mother said: "At that time, your father's face was only as wide as two fingers!" Since then, the young couple have only stayed together for a few months after six or seven years of separation.At that time, my mother and her three sisters-in-law each took turns cooking for the big family for ten days, and my father helped my mother chop wood, light a fire, and fetch water. Soon, General Sa Dingming (Zhen Bing), a famous naval officer, sent a telegram calling my father out. In 1912, when I was in Fuzhou, I was admitted to the preparatory course of Fuzhou Women's Normal School, and lived school life for the first time. In the first few days, I was still very uncomfortable and secretly shed tears for a long time, but I never told anyone that I was afraid that those elders in the big family who did not approve of girls going to school would come out and persuade me to drop out of school!But I quickly made many good classmates. So far, I can still recite the names of more than a dozen classmates in the order that the teacher rolls their names at work.The address of the Fuzhou female teacher is in Huaxiang in the city. It is a large old mansion. I remember that there is a small pond next to our classroom, and plantains are planted beside the pond.There is also a large pond in the school, and there is a stone bridge on the pond, connecting the two pavilions.Our principal is Ms. Fang Junying, sister of Mr. Fang Shengdong, one of the 72 Huanghuagang martyrs.Our composition teacher is Mr. Lin Buying.When I was about to leave the female teacher, there was also a Japanese female teacher who taught gymnastics, surnamed Ishii, I don't remember her name.I only studied in this school for three semesters. After the founding of the Republic of China, the Minister of the Navy, Huang Zhongying (Zan Hou), sent another telegram calling my father out.Soon, our whole family arrived in Beijing. My memories of my hometown can only be written here. For more than ten years, I have not written so freely!My memories are like the first melting spring water, overflowing and torrenting.Over the past ten years, I have lost sleep, and "the morning pillow and the heart are clear." These memories always make people happy and melancholy come back repeatedly in my heart.The pictures or words in these scenes have never been seen or heard by my younger brothers. Even if they have seen or heard them, they will not remember and understand them, let alone my second and third generations.I sometimes think that if I don't write these down, these pictures and texts will disappear with my imprinted mind in the future.Is this a pity?But at the same time, I thought, these are personal things, and it might be better not to stay or be forgotten.These two ideas have contradicted me for many years. In the winter of 1936, I was in London, England. At the invitation of the British female writer Virginia Woolf (Virginia Woolf), I went to drink tea at her home.From the fog in London, Chinese and British novels and poems, we have been talking about the abdication of the British king at that time and the Xi'an Incident in China.She suddenly said to me: "You should write an autobiography." I shook my head and smiled and said: "We Chinese do not have the habit of writing autobiography, and there is nothing to write about myself." She said: "I am not I want you to write about yourself, but I want you to use yourself as a clue to connect some local social phenomena, even if it is about some personal things, it can also be used as historical materials for future generations." I didn't say anything at the time, and the conversation changed went elsewhere. It has been forty-three years since the incident, and in retrospect today, I feel that her words are also reasonable. "Liberate your mind a little more", I wrote these pictures and words that repeatedly appeared in my mind on paper freely and freely. I remember that half a century ago, when I was writing "The Past" (one), I wrote these few sentences on it: Move these past events to a blank paper——search on the edition when recalling up! These words are still applicable today.After moving these pictures and words onto the white paper, I felt much more relaxed! February 11, 1979