Chapter 107 Chapter 3 The father in the mouth

However, I never expected that now it was my father's turn to cry for me. It has been two years since his mother passed away, and he never knew the loneliness in this step of life.Whenever he was at home, he always "opened his mouth when he came to eat, and stretched out his hands when he came to wear clothes." His mother took care of him for decades. On the morning of his death, he was still instructing the maid to cook at noon.After leaving him alone, I tried everything possible to beg him, coax him, and even lie to him to move in with me, but he insisted on not leaving Neihu's home.Ning Mei and I went back to Neihu to see him every two days, after class and get off work, but he would watch from the balcony facing the street from nine o'clock in the morning.

After my car accident, he didn’t see me back for many days, so he kept asking, my sister said, “I have something to go abroad for a meeting.” He said, “Didn’t she just come back from Germany?” After more than ten days, my sister had no choice but to say : "My sister fell and couldn't walk." He said: "I can go to see her..." After going on like this for a month, he suddenly had a stomach upset and was also sent to the Third Chief Internal Medicine Department.It's just downstairs in my ward.At that time, the cast had been removed from my upper body, and my left leg was still wrapped in plaster.I miss my sick father in my heart, and after a few days, I get permission from the doctor to visit him in his ward in a wheelchair.The lower body was covered with a sheet, so it was no longer the original mummy.I went into his ward and called my father, and he burst into tears and said, "What's wrong with you? How did you fall like this?"

He closed the floodgate of tears for forty years, broke through it, and could never close it again.This man, who is honored as "Old Iron", was never seen by the world in all the adversity. After that, when he was alive for more than a year, every time he saw his daughter who "retrieved a life" , just shed tears.He sometimes said: "In those years, when I went to the revolution, your mother took you and suffered a lot with me. For so many years, I didn't know how hard it was for her to support my family!" During his last years of solitude, reminiscences probably occupied his mind.He sometimes told me that his heart was always full of thousands of troops galloping, lamenting the ups and downs of China's destiny.After the Cultural Revolution gradually came to an end, news of many people and events came from various sources, allowing him to better understand the situation of the year from an overall perspective.For example, in 1981 when he was hospitalized in Rong Zong, Zhang Xueliang suddenly went to see him in the ward.Since they broke up in Hankou in 1935, seeing each other again for the first time in nearly half a century made him feel very uneasy.The heroic young men of those days were already eighty-two years old, and their hometowns were thousands of miles away, and their lives were full of ups and downs. Thousands of words can't be exhausted, and needless to say.I often ask myself, "If we could cooperate back then, what would Northeast China look like? What would China look like?" In fact, even if we can turn back time, cooperation is not easy.Zhang Xueliang inherited Fengjun territory at the age of 20. He had no thinking and judgment preparation, only knew about power, and impulsively and willfully caused the Xi'an Incident, which jeopardized the overall situation. Hundreds of thousands of Northeast Army were exiled in the pass, and lost the power to speak on the fate of Northeast China. , How did he cooperate with Qi Shiying, an idealist who insists on human dignity and democratic innovation? When they met that day, the only thing they shared was the memory of General Guo Songling.What Zhang Xueliang thought was General Guo's assistance to his power; what my father thought was that if Guo Jun won the battle of Juliuhe, the whole situation in Northeast China would be reformed, and the Japanese would not be allowed to enter and establish a puppet Manchukuo. Even if there was a Sino-Japanese war, After the victory of the war, the vast Northeast will not be left to the Soviet Union, Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong, Du Jinming, Lin Biao, these people from the far south to fight and fight to determine the fate! Although these regrets have been returned to the world, But it still tortured him for the rest of his life.

At dinner, my sister and I always poured him a glass of wine.He shed tears every time he picked up the wine glass, and intermittently talked about the events of the year: he was defeated in a situation that was obviously not supposed to be defeated, and he lost such a big Northeast.In those years, all the comrades who followed me wholeheartedly in the three eastern provinces to fight against Japan behind the enemy lines for more than ten years all died in vain.They hoped that the successful center would take care of their orphans and widows, but it was all in vain.Those who did not come out, and very few survived in the hands of the Communist Party. Those people were all patriotic intellectuals. If they did not go to the revolution, they could have adapted to survival.I was the one who harmed them, I was the one who was sorry for them! These words, he said over and over again, tormented his last days.

After his mother passed away, he spoke less and was almost silent, as if he had rushed into the Yakou Sea from the turbulent Juliu River. On the left side of the Eluanbi Lighthouse at the extreme southern tip of Taiwan, there is a small bay called the Yakou Sea. The surging waves of the Pacific Ocean rushed into this bay, as if they had disappeared without a sound of raging waves.Just like Shakespeare's famous line.A person's life is "full of voice and anger, meaningless." He is speechless for a long time, and sometimes he sits alone on the balcony and looks at the way we came.Autumn days are getting shorter, I went back to sit with him, and I read Keats's "Ode to Autumn" which he also loved.

What about the song of spring? .Where is the sound of spring? Forget about it, you have your own music too. He asked again, where are the stupid bees? We are the stupid bees who think that as long as the flowers are still blooming, the warm summer days will never end.The poet remembered that autumn, "Swallows whirled and flew under the autumn crossbow."He said that he spent too little time in his hometown in his life, and he still remembered that there were many swallows making nests under the roof of the tile-roofed houses in the villa, and he always looked forward to their return in spring.

On the afternoon of Father's Day in August 1987, he reluctantly got up from the bed and sat on the wicker chair beside the bed.He died suddenly.Quietly let go of all the ideals, struggles, and pain of loss in this life.We buried his ashes next to his mother, facing the firmament of the Pacific Ocean.On this island where they have lived for forty years, there is no snow in winter, and the summer is hot and humid. The sun shines fiercely on the stone seat where they buried their bones. It was such an easy task to sort through their relics, my mother never had a single piece of jewelry or anything of value in her life.There is a small broken suitcase in her cabinet, which contains some old photos that she would not throw away from Nanjing to Chongqing, demobilized and returned to Peiping, and then came to Taiwan (I don’t have a single photo from my childhood), and there are eight beds on the top floor Cotton quilts, I know that after she moved to Neihu, she often went to a traditional cotton quilt shop in Changsha Street, Taipei, and ordered all kinds of thick and thin quilts. Invited." In fact, all the people she entertained are gone, the revolutionaries, those who resisted the Japanese, those who guarded the Shanhaiguan Pass, those who fought in Taierzhuang, those who fought for the Burma Road, the villagers who fled, and the wandering youths...all passed by.I left her two quilts, which have been covered in the winter of Lishui Street for more than ten years, and the era of traditional hand-blown quilts has passed.

It was even easier to pack my father's belongings. After he left the Kuomintang in 1954, he was always followed by someone in prison. Before and after Uncle Lei Zhen was arrested in 1960, he had burned all correspondence and manuscripts so as not to hurt his friends.He did not leave any letters for many years. In the drawer of his desk, I only saw a few letters from Zhang Qun for breaking diplomatic relations with Japan, a letter from Aso Kazuko, the daughter of Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida, thanking my father for going to Japan to express condolences; and a wooden box It contained the red furoshiki from Yoshida’s funeral, with four lines of Chinese poems on it; and the birthday cards of kittens and bears sent to them by his grandchildren: a diary was found in the bedroom: “Philosophy Series” he bought from Germany Twenty volumes (1920 edition hardcover): The complete set of Twenty-Four Gengs purchased in Shanghai that year has been on his bookshelf.After my mother died, we didn't know what to do to dry the books for him. At this time, they were eaten by termites, and only the first half of the page and the cover remained.

After both parents passed away, I struggled amid layers of sense of loss, unable to swim in the sea of ​​his tears, and my blood inherited his wandering tears.In the summer of the second year, I retired early from National Taiwan University. After the car accident, I returned to the lecture hall and maintained my teaching style. It was exhausting to stand for two hours. After class, I carried books and test papers and other materials, and walked from the Faculty of Arts to the gate. It was so hot that I couldn't walk home when I couldn't stop the ancestral car at the intersection of Xinsheng South Road.This is the time for me to sit down, think and write.