Chapter 13 Chapter 11 Zhang Dafei, the story of a broken family

After my brother moved from Beiping to Nanjing with Zhongshan Middle School, he would take five or six classmates home every Saturday at noon.After dinner, they took the Jiangnan Railway back to Banqiao, and my brother stayed at home for the night. In her own happiness, the mother feels that every Northeast child without a home is her child.After moving south and during the eight years of the Anti-Japanese War, all Zhongshan students were homeless children, and almost everyone had a sad story. When Zhang Dafei first came to my house, no one paid attention to him.He sat quietly, seldom spoke, and did not take part in games.When eating, his mother always asked him to sit next to her and kept bringing him food.

Before that, I only knew that my father asked my brother to find a student named Zhang—his father was the police chief of Shenyang County at the beginning of the establishment of Manchukuo. Burned to death by pouring paint on the square. The elder brother finally found him among his classmates.He was three years older than my brother, did not participate in any extracurricular activities other than playing basketball, and rarely spoke to anyone.It was through the national pole vault player Fu Baolu (who was the idol of girls at the time) who graduated and played with him that year that he knew his background, and his brother found him.

On New Year's Eve that year, they stayed at school and the whole school made dumplings for the New Year.In the afternoon of the second day of junior high school, Zhang Dafei and his elder brother went back to my house.It started snowing outside that day, and it was cold, and there was a fire in the house, and sitting by the fire after dinner, his mother asked him about his departure from home. He said that after his father was burned to death and before the Japanese chased him down, his family fled in all directions; he and a younger brother and younger sister fled overnight to Yingkou to join his aunt, and entered a middle school run by a church, where there was morning prayer every morning. The meeting began with the "Lord's Prayer": "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be the name of the Father, and the will of the Father be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us our daily bread... .” Here he could appeal to a father for protection and love, so he believed in Christianity.

In the second year, Manchukuo was established, and Japan promoted imperial education. At the age of fifteen, he entered the customs alone and went to Peiping to join his uncle.I have been out of school for a year, and my uncle's house is not suitable for long-term living.At that time, there were many young people living in Northeast China living on the streets of Beiping and Tianjin, and in winter they often fell down on the street in the cold and hungry. One day, wandering around Baoguo Temple in extreme poverty, he saw a few tents set up in the yard, and a notice posted on the temple gate that "National Zhongshan Middle School" recruits exiled students from the Northeast.He passed the third grade of junior high school, and after entering the school, all the students received all public expenses for board and lodging, and since then he has a place to live.

The school's homework was very good, and I thought I had a future, but two years later, North China was already precarious under the pressure of Manchukuo from Japan, and Sun Yat-sen Middle School was forced to move south.When I left Beiping, I could only tell my homeless mother in my hometown that I would move south with the school, but I still couldn't hear from my mother when I arrived in Banqiao, Nanjing... I will always remember that cold night when I saw him wail with all the self-respect of an eighteen-year-old man in front of the warm fire in my house, telling the story of the family's destruction-and the story of a little boy who told me his father a few years ago. It is as miserable as the head hanging on the city gate.

Outside the window, a few small trees planted by my mother swayed in the wind and snow, bending almost to break.Since then, I have deeply remembered his name - after fleeing to Yingkou, he changed the auspicious name "Zhang Naichang" originally given by his parents to "Zhang Dafei". From then on, every Saturday afternoon, I would look forward to his melancholy and gentle smile among the noisy classmates of my brother.He likes to take my three-year-old eldest sister to play in the yard. Sometimes he helps my mother hold the infant second sister, and occasionally he will read my new book by the chair I often sit on.Once, he brought his own little gold-rimmed Bible to show my mother and me, saying it was the only thing we could rely on when we were away from home.I didn't understand it at the time, but after many years, I understood why there is a kind of peace and tranquility in his faint loneliness. I seem to have found another book that is profound and unresolved, which is very attractive, but he took it away with me .

In the early spring of that year, some small one-story houses were built outside the gate of Zhongshan Middle School, small houses with wooden frames and mud walls.Mom goes to live four or five days a week because she is pregnant again and she likes to live in the country again and grow vegetables every day.In addition, the family members of other teachers from Northeast China can comfort her real nostalgia even more. I also go to Banqiao every weekend, and I can run all over the mountains and fields, as if returning to my childhood before the age of six.Zhang Da came here very often. He liked to hug my two younger sisters and watch my mother do housework, but he still seldom spoke.

One day after lunch, my brother and seven or eight classmates said they were going to climb a small mountain not far away, Niu Shou Mountain.I looked at the mountain with envy for a long time, so I chased after it. When we started to descend the mountain at four o'clock in the afternoon, the wind suddenly blew up. I walked slower than they went down the mountain, gradually falling behind alone.My brother and those big boys had already run down the mountain, but I was still holding a small rock top in the middle of the mountain, in a dilemma.The mountain wind whistled sharply, and I began to cry in the cold wind and fear.At this time, I saw Zhang Dafei looking back at me at the pass of the mountain.

It was getting dark, but he turned around, climbed up the mountain, and led me down the mountain.When we arrived at the pass, he wrapped my 30-kilogram body in a student's cotton coat and said, "Don't cry, don't cry, just get to the main road." Aged marginal people rarely see. When I got home, my brother said to my mother: "I will never allow her to follow me again! It's such a small mountain, she goes up so slowly, can't come down, and cries every now and then, it's really annoying." In early summer, we moved back to Nanjing, and my mother was expecting to give birth.

Our whole life and the fate of China were soon changed, and I never had the fate to return to that little house. For decades, I have traveled all over the world. Whenever I look at those approachable hills, I always remember him looking back at me from the pass in the mountain wind.