Chapter 3 Chapter 1 The Beginning of Life

I was born on the Lantern Festival in 1924. In my hometown of Liaoning, the weather is often minus 2, 30 or even 40 degrees Celsius.My mother was sick during pregnancy, so I was a birth defect baby.After birth, he was weak and sickly. When he was about to turn one year old, he had a fever one day, and the high fever persisted.My mother was sitting on a kang that was warm from the stove fire in the northeast, hugging me and refusing to let go.A relative who came to our house for the festival said to her: "This head is dead and almost out of breath. Why are you holding her? Let her go!" My mother just didn't let her go and kept crying.It was past midnight, and my grandmother said, "Okay, call a long-term worker, ride a horse to the town, find a doctor who can ride a horse, and see if he can save this guy's life?" The long-term worker arrived about ten miles away. In this town, I found a doctor who could ride a horse and was willing to come to our village in the middle of the night when it was minus 20 or 30 degrees.When he entered the manor, I took my life back.The mother hugged the dead child who refused to let go, and turned into a living child, full of vitality throughout his life.

In that era, the mortality rate of newborn babies was about 40 percent according to statistics. My life was like a small oil lamp in the wind, my mother's care, and the "nobles" surrounded by these "nobles" surrounded me like a lampshade. It keeps out the wind so that it cannot go out. Soon, the doctor came to our village to treat patients again.My mother took me to see him and said, "You rescued this child. Her father is studying in Germany and hasn't given her a name yet. Please give her a name to commemorate this fate!" The doctor named it for me. The name "Bangyuan" gave me double blessings at the beginning of my life.

When I grew up, I knew that this name came from "A Gentleman Grows Together": "Your son is clear and beautiful, and his face is also beautiful. He looks like a man, and the state is also beautiful." A few years ago, a reader sent me a photocopy of the page from In the Song Dynasty Fan Chengda's "Minghu Anthology", there is actually a paragraph: "Qi Bangyuan, a virtuous woman...." How honored and terrified I am to have the same name and surname as a virtuous woman hundreds of years ago!Having struggled half my life between family and career in the new world, I often think of the doctor in my hometown in the mountain village. I really hope that he knows that I have worked hard to live up to the generous blessing he gave me in that era when women's lives were worthless.