According to Chen Zude's autobiography "Beyond Self", it tells the inspirational story of the growth experience of Chinese Go master Chen Zude; you can understand his fighting spirit from it, and you can also understand the true meaning of life.
Painting: Shi Diansheng
Painter Shi Diansheng, a member of the China Artists Association, a national first-class artist, and a tutor of the Chinese Painting Creation Advanced Study Class of Beijing Normal University, now lives in Beijing. He studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Rongbaozhai Painting Academy. He has been selected for and won many awards for the five-year national art exhibition sponsored by the Ministry of Culture. Many works have been exhibited in the United States, Japan, South Korea, Singapore and other countries, and have been collected by many art institutions such as the National Art Museum of China and the Central Academy of Fine Arts.
"Ladder of Life"
In 1951, I was six years old. My father thought I was too young and began to teach my sister to play Go, and I could only sit in and listen. My sister was only seven years old at the time; she would rather play dolls than play chess.
I was not qualified to play chess with my father, so I played with my sister. My sister lost, so I let her have a few sons.
Playing Go has a maximum of twenty-five sons, until I let her twenty-five sons still lose, which made her angry and vowed never to play chess with me again.
My sister doesn't play chess with me, what should I do? Fortunately, my father decided to abandon my sister as a student and teach me. I officially learned chess from my dad when I was seven years old. Dad was my first enlightenment teacher.
Every time I played chess, Dad always sat on the couch and let me sit on a small canvas stool. At one point I couldn't help but say, "Dad, this is so unfair!" ”
Dad has a generous personality and a humorous and funny personality. He said: "I am higher than you, of course I have to sit on the big sofa." Later, whenever you win me, we will adjust the seats. I got serious: "Well, you have to count your words, and don't settle the account when you get there." ”
Two months later, I beat dad. The first sentence was, 'Dad, it's time for me to sit on the couch.' "Well, what you say counts." The big man's father sat down on the little canvas stool, and the poor little stool collapsed at once.
My father felt that I had some talent in playing Go, so he invited a middle school teacher who was a little higher than him, Teacher Zhou Jiren, to my house and taught me to play chess. Teacher Zhou became my second initiation teacher.
Teacher Zhou only played a game of chess with me and then stopped playing with me, and he felt that he should ask a famous teacher to teach me. Although he is a master of chess, Teacher Zhou has a discerning eye and has played an extremely important role in my life path.
Through Teacher Zhou's introduction, I met Mr. Gu Shuiru, a well-known national player in the chess industry, in Xiangyang Park. Mr. Gu became my third enlightenment teacher.
It was Sunday, and many chess fans came to hear the news. People both admired Mr. Gu's chess skills and were curious about the seven-year-old child, so there were more and more onlookers, three floors inside and three floors outside, surrounding us.
The game began, and Mr. Gu asked me to be seven. I stared at the chessboard with my eyes wide open, and used all my strength to capture the intention of Mr. Gu's every move. For me, the chessboard is the whole world, and everything else has receded, it doesn't exist.
Mr. Gu tested me with various tricks while smiling and nodding to the chess fans around him. Chess fans kept "spraying" me. Dad was extremely nervous, as if Mr. Gu was not testing me, but testing him.
The situation in the chess game is constantly changing, and Mr. Gu's superb chess skills have weakened my initial advantage little by little, but I still hold my ground and try to maintain the remaining advantage.
After a large part of the game, Mr. Gu suddenly slapped the table and said happily: "I accepted this child!" ”
Mr. Gu is enthusiastic about cultivating the next generation, and he likes children who can play chess and is willing to teach a few. But there were only two people who were really accepted as students by him: the first was Wu Qingyuan, who lived in Japan and dominated the Japanese chess world for more than 20 years, and the second was me.
Since I worshiped Gu Shuiru as a teacher, I have followed Mr. Gu almost every Sunday and all winter and summer vacations. At first, I was accompanied by my father; after a long time, he was relieved about me, so he let Mr. Gu take me around alone.
Mr. Gu was a national player, and at that time, he made a living from chess, and it was also out of helplessness to play chess for a fee. But he tutored students without even thinking about making money, he put a lot of effort into me, and often bought snacks for me.
Under Mr. Gu's meticulous cultivation, my chess skills have improved rapidly. When I was nine years old, Mr. Gu let my five sons play a round, and I won.
Mr. Gu sometimes introduces some foreign chess players to play against me, among which the most impressive is Mr. Guo Tisheng, who is famous in the chess world and dominates the north. He let me have four sons, down to the middle and I had the advantage. Mr. Guo said that he had lost, and he praised me several times.
In the year when I was ten years old, one day Mr. Gu said to me happily and mysteriously: "Zude, today Mayor Chen Yi wants to find your next plate."
Chen Yi's name is well known in Shanghai, and it is not unfamiliar to me as a child. He was the commander of the Third Field Army, the commander of the millions of troops. Playing chess with such a big man, I feel new, but also a little afraid.
Along the way, Mr. Gu repeatedly told me that when playing chess with the mayor, we should be polite and not really guns like usual, we should pay attention to a little measure, and we should not kill too fiercely.
When I came to Mayor Chen Yi's house, there were already many people in the reception room. There are several leading comrades in Shanghai, as well as several famous Go players. Mayor Chen Yi is not very tall, but his temperament is extraordinary, and there is a kind of handsomeness that seems to me that he is so tall.
Mayor Chen Yi saw me and smiled and said, "Little friend, what is your name?" "I was originally afraid of life, afraid of talking, and when I saw Mayor Chen Yi, I was even more afraid to move forward and could not speak." Mr. Gu said busily: "His name is Chen Zude. ”
"Chen Zude, let's compete first." Mayor Chen Yi said and smiled heartily, and the atmosphere in the hall was immediately enlivened. His laughter was contagious, and my nervousness relaxed a lot.
Sitting at the chessboard, I wasn't scared at all. As soon as I picked up the chess piece, Mr. Gu's thousands of instructions were also forgotten outside the nine clouds, and I did everything in my power to kill and slash, step by step.
Mayor Chen Yi had an open mind and a magnificent momentum, and in the face of my fierce offensive, he commanded ruozhi and calmly responded to the battle, and he had a very impressive general demeanor.
The chess posture was getting more and more tense, but it was anxious to spoil Mr. Gu who was on the side. He annoyed me that this little devil was too ignorant, and was afraid that I would win Mayor Chen Yi, so he made eyes at me, hoping that I would wake up.
I have never played chess politely, nor do I know how to be humble on the chessboard, or blindly fight. Mr. Gu was in a hurry, and later simply walked up to Mayor Chen Yi with several other masters to help him with his advice.
Mayor Chen Yi's chess skills were already quite clever, and now that he has the help of masters, he is like a tiger, and he will defeat me in a short time.
Mr. Gu and several chess players praised Mayor Chen Yi's chess skills. Mayor Chen Yi was happy: "It's not that I'm smart, it's my staff officer who's smart." If I, the commander, did not have a high counselor, I would have wrestled in front of this doll. ”
Mayor Chen Yi stroked my head and said, "The afterlife is terrible!" You have to learn from the elders, and you must be blue out of blue than blue. "Mayor Chen Yi is so kind and so personable, I already deeply love and worship him!"
It was time to eat, and Mayor Chen Yi pulled me to his side. What a blessing I feel!
In addition to playing chess, I also have a hobby – painting. When I was in middle school, I was faced with three forks in the road. One way to learn to paint, but there is no art school in Shanghai, unless you go to Beijing or Hangzhou. So small away from the family, parents really can't rest assured.
The other way is to learn chess while studying. When Mr. Li Jishen, Vice President of the People's Republic of China, learned that there was a child who played Go like me, he wrote to my parents, saying that there was a chess research society in Beijing and asked me to go to Beijing to study chess while studying. But also to stay away from your parents!
Both roads were eliminated, leaving only one way to go to school in place. After junior high school, homework began to be heavy, and there was a contradiction between playing chess and studying, and I had to make up my mind to give up one side. In the three years of junior high school, my chess skills did not improve at all.
In 1958, I was admitted to Shanghai Weiyu Middle School. It is said that the proportion of students from the bourgeoisie in this school is large, so we all moved to a shipyard on the banks of the Huangpu River in the first year of high school.
The life of part-time work and half-study is intense and hard, but I do not feel bitter, but I am attracted by the colorful life and feel endlessly fun. For me at fourteen, the shipyard was a spoiled world, and I fell in love with it.
Fate is sometimes like a joking old man, when I long to play chess, the objective conditions do not allow it; and when I am determined to give up playing chess, I have to go to the chess world. At the end of this year, the school received a notice from the Municipal Sports Committee asking me to participate in the Go training.
The sports committee repeatedly urged me, but I hesitated. Or my father, a Go enthusiast, personally ran to the factory and dragged me away.
Since then, I have been on the ladder of life, and I have begun that endless climb...
Chen Zude (1944.2.19~2012.11.1), male, Chinese Go professional nine-dan player. Shanghainese. He has successively served as the director of the Chess Sports Management Center of the General Administration of Sports, the president of the Chinese Chess Academy, the vice chairman and chairman of the China Weiqi Association, the director of the editorial board of the China Weiqi Yearbook, and an outstanding coach since the founding of New China. In 1963 and 1965, Chen Zude defeated The Japanese Masao Suganai and Tatsumi Iwata in Japan, respectively, becoming the first Chinese to defeat a Japanese nine-dan player in China. In 1980, he wrote his autobiography Beyond Himself in the fight against stomach cancer, inspiring a generation. On the evening of November 1, 2012, he died in Beijing due to ineffective treatment for pancreatic cancer. In addition to "Beyond Self", his works include "Xu Cheng Ten Rounds", "Huanglong Zhouhu", "Blood and Tears", "Xiangxia Battle Liang Cheng", "Past Zhou Ten Rounds" and so on.