Chapter 250 About Men (Part 2)

Three my little uncle My little uncle, Mr. Yang Ziyu, is the son of my maternal uncle, Mr. Yang Songyan.My uncle had three daughters, and when he had a son in his later years, he was named Xige, although my three aunts were not named Fu, Lu, and Shou!We all call him Uncle Xi.He is our favorite little elder.He never gets bored with children, and he loves to tell stories with great relish, as if he gets the greatest happiness from telling stories. When he was studying at Tangshan Road and Mine School, he went to Yantai for vacation in summer, and our family became lively at this time.He likes to drink, and his mother will prepare a bottle of Shaoxing and some good food for him every night.Father was the fastest to eat. He still followed the habit of the Naval Academy decades ago, finished his meal within three minutes, and stood up from the table.But Uncle Xi still sips and eats slowly, and always flips a piece of bamboo shoot, cauliflower, or peanut over and over, and doesn't put down the chopsticks right away.The mother had to sit at the table with him.He was in the best mood after drinking, so we who were waiting at the table coaxed around and asked him to tell a story.Looking back now, he always started with jokes or ghost stories, and finally told some stories about the Tongmenghui’s propaganda to overthrow the Qing court.He went back to school during the full vacation, and often wrote us letters and sent us poems.I remember that he has a song "Climbing the Great Wall": King Qin's strategy is bad, Huairou is as good as the way , which was written after his marriage, is very short and written in the tone of his lover.When I was in middle school, he was doing railway survey work, and he always set off from Beijing, so he often came to Beijing.

As soon as he left Beijing, I was in charge of sending him Beijing newspapers to Pingxiang, Jiangxi and other places.During the survey, he often sent poems about the scenery on the way. I only remember one or two sentences, such as a thin cow turning water into a strange stone. When he was waiting for the task in Beijing, he paid great attention to my study.He also seems to intend to train me to be a "talented woman".He encouraged me to learn to write, bought me a lot of copybooks, and said that I should learn "Yan" first, and then transfer to "Liu" and "Zhao".

He bought me a lot of paints and drawing books, and persuaded me to learn painting.He also bought a very elegant chessboard and black and white chess pieces, and taught me how to play Go, saying that "Go is not difficult to play, as long as you can leave an undead hole, you can't lose."He also gave me an organ, so when I first entered Bayman High School, I also paid for piano lessons.But I quit school after only three weeks, because I got a headache when I saw the sheet music for fingering exercises.In short, I am a restless child who can't sit still, and I don't have music and art cells in my body!There is no karmic relationship with piano, chess, calligraphy, and painting.Of the many collections of poetry that Uncle Xi bought for me, I dislike Poetry Collection of Female Disciples in Suiyuan the most, but I am fascinated by Gong Dingan, Huang Zhongze and Nalan Chengde.

In the early 1920s, Uncle Xi went back to work in the Construction Department of Fujian, and I also entered the university. We were both busy, and communication became sparse and gradually cut off.In short, he "cultivated" the most and "gained" the least on me. I failed him, because he didn't worry so much about his nephews or even his own son! There should be an interlude here.In 1911, when our family returned to our hometown in Fuzhou, Uncle Xi had already gone back before us.He must have participated in the campaign to recover Fujian.I just feel that he and his friends—all those people who came to my house in Beijing and had long conversations in my father’s study—seem to be very busy, and rarely make fun of us when they come to my house.Sometimes I passed by the door of the "Tongmenghui"—I forgot what it was, it was probably not far from our house—and I often saw him sitting in the hall and talking with many people.Both he and my father were very dissatisfied with Peng Shousong, the governor of Fujian at that time, saying that it was "changing the soup but not the medicine".I remember that when my father had nothing to do at that time, he used the tune of the folk song "Geng Jian Ji" to compose several songs satirizing Peng Shousong.

When Uncle Xi came, he sang and played with us. He said it was "Exhaust!" I don't remember a single word of these songs. Incomplete.This song is based on the story of "the people of Qi have a wife and a concubine..." in the Lilou chapter of "Mencius". They sang "weeping in shame".The tune is very good, I can't forget it after listening to it!This song was sung by my wife: ×××××every family planted willows, it’s time to leave the east gate during the Qingming Festival. The second song was sung by my concubine, and the mood was much better!What did you say "Last night before the lights, thin (?) treading shoes".When I mentioned "Gengjian Sacrifice", many memories of me learning to sing Fujian songs in my hometown came to my heart.March 3, 1985