When we went to Chengdu, we visited our uncles and parents' friends in Chengdu, to see these healthy elderly people who were about ninety years old, and to chat with them, which was also our responsibility as juniors.
My mother has four brothers and sisters, she has an older sister on the top, two younger brothers on the bottom, the eldest sister and the younger brother have died, and the uncle is two years younger than my mother, and she is 88 years old this year.
The uncle graduated from high school in the year of the liberation of Chengdu, joined the army and entered Tibet, and later changed careers and has been working in the Sichuan-Tibet region for forty years. He worked for more than twenty years in Litang County, the county seat where the internet celebrities punch cards in the western Sichuan Plateau and the highest county in the world, and when he worked in the county public security bureau, he participated in the suppression of bandits in Tibet, and also worked in several other departments of the county government, he served as the county magistrate of Litang County, and later transferred to Kangding, where he served as the director of the Planning Commission in Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture until the end of the 1980s, when he retired to his hometown in Chengdu, where he was an outstanding Han leading cadre in the Sichuan-Tibet region.
Since his retirement, he has been serving as the director of the Chengdu office of the China Tibet Aid Foundation and the second honorary director (the first is the director of the Provincial Nationalities Committee). He has great leadership ability and personality charm, enjoys high prestige in the minority areas of Sichuan Province, and is well received by Han and Tibetan cadres, many Tibetans regard him as a close friend, and those religious celebrities and living Buddhas in Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture are his friends.
In the 1970s, I and my sister went to Litang and Kangding once for winter and summer vacations, and our brothers and sisters were the closest to my uncle among the relatives of my mother's family.
The eighty-eight-year-old uncle is now in good health, with a clear mind and freedom of movement, and can still go to the market to buy vegetables and take the bus to the street. Last year I was able to go out on a bike and swim in the pool with my granddaughter...
My brother and sister chatted with him at my uncle's house in Chengdu for three or four hours, and he didn't take a nap to rest, and at night he took a taxi with us to go out to eat.
The content of the chat with the uncle was mainly about the past history of the mother Zang family.
We reported to him what they had seen and heard when they went to Changxing, Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, a month ago, and their uncle, his son, and our cousin were excited as they listened, saying that they would also go back to their ancestral hometown to see and walk.
My uncle told us that my mother, uncle and their grandfather's father came to Chengdu from Zhejiang during the Qing Dynasty's Tianping Heavenly Kingdom, and gave The Governor of Chuan, Ding Baozhen, the master of the execution room (equivalent to the secretary general of the current provincial government), and later got married and started a family, he took root in Chengdu, he had three boys, these three sons grew up to marry and give birth to three boys, one of these nine uncles and cousins has my mother, the father of my brother and sister, that is, my brother and sister's grandfather. This is a branch of the Changxing Zang surname in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, which migrated to Chengdu, Sichuan, and has since developed to this day.
The uncle went on to say that his grandfather was one of the most famous social sages in Chengdu at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the People's Republic, and they were some very elegant and exquisite cultural people, tasting tea and discussing taoism, playing with piano, chess, calligraphy and painting, and playing with antiques. It is very famous in Chengdu.
The uncle said that the former residence of the famous writer Ba Jin Chengdu was near the Zang family, and their Li family had a relationship with our Zang family and his unclear relationship.
I had heard my mother tell me before that the famous conductor Zheng Xiaoying's family was not far behind the Zang family, and Zheng Xiaoying and my sister and my mother were good friends when they were young.
This time in Chengdu, I went to the "Dongmen City Well", because The famous Internet celebrity and gourmet Uncle Ping in Chengdu entertained me here to drink tea and eat Sichuan cuisine.
This is a group of old Chengdu buildings, which is the location of the former residence of Li Robber, so I visited the former residence of Li Robber.
The former residence of Li Haoren is an old building from the Republic of China period, and seeing all this evokes my memory.
In the early days of the Republic of China, my mother's Zang family once had four such mansions in Fangzheng East Street in Chengdu, and after liberation, two of the old buildings were still in use. When I was in middle school after the 1970s, every winter and summer vacation I would have to return to Chengdu from Xi'an to visit my grandmother, aunt and uncle, and when I returned to Chengdu, my grandmother's house would live in the hall house of the old house. However, in the mid-1980s, it was demolished and built into a residential building, and over the years I heard that there were demolition and development projects there again.
My sister and I also went to the dormitory area of Southwest Jiaotong University to visit my parents' ninety-two-year-old Uncle Su and ninety-year-old Aunt Guo.
My parents and their two sons were the best classmates in Sichuan University, and the two families have been friends for seventy years, including the current generation of our juniors.
Uncle Su was four or five years younger than my father, also from the Department of Civil Engineering, and was my father's younger brother, who was a comrade-in-arms of the Sichuan University Underground Party as my father. The old man is ninety-two years old, very healthy, and can go out fishing.
My wife, Aunt Guo, and my mother were the best classmates in the chemical engineering department of Sichuan University Institute of Engineering, and they were close friends like girlfriends.
Over the years, every time I went to Chengdu, I had to go to their house to visit the second elder for the old mother, and this time I came with my sister again, and we heard the old man talking about the past.
Our brother and sister also went to visit a good friend of our parents' university in Sichuan, Aunt Huang Guifang, who is 92 years old this year.
Aunt Huang was my father's comrade-in-arms of the Sichuan Underground Party before liberation, the first secretary of the Youth League Committee of Sichuan University after liberation, and was cordially received by Chairman Mao in Beijing in the 1950s.
Aunt Huang's parents also live in Chengdu Fangzheng East Street, and my grandfather's family is a neighbor, the two families are familiar with each other for generations, Aunt Huang's daughter in the 1970s in Xi'an school, work, often come to my house to move around, and my brothers and sisters are very familiar.
This time we went to visit Aunt Huang and she was very happy, taking the hand of our brother and sister to tell the past. There I also met Aunt Huang's younger brother, an eighty-year-old man who was very excited when he heard that I was a descendant of the Zang family, recalling the past of the two families in the early years and the friendship with several of my uncles, and in the chat we knew that their family and the Ba Jin and their Li family also had a relationship.
Aunt Huang is ninety-two years old, in addition to the inconvenience of her legs and feet, her health is very good, and in the first two years, her children took her abroad in a wheelchair to Russia, Hong Kong and Macao and Europe, and she specifically wanted to visit Marx's cemetery.
A few years ago, Huang Guifang, the 88-year-old secretary of the first Youth League Committee of Sichuan University, also gave a keynote speech on "The Communist Youth League of Sichuan University before and after the founding of New China - My 10 Years in the Communist Youth League" to teachers and students at Sichuan University. Huang Guifang, who was full of silver hair, took the stage with the support of the staff, combined with her own experience, told the moving deeds of Sichuan University students who actively participated in the patriotic democracy movement during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the War of Liberation, and presented the modern history of Sichuan University with vivid and vivid stories.
Listening to her daughter tell us, Aunt Huang is still working hard and thinking about writing some heavy articles. Ninety-two years old, can still be so and so, our brother and sister are really happy for her!
On my last day in Chengdu, I came to the door of the old campus of Sichuan University near the Nine Eyes Bridge. The plan was to revisit the place where I had been, I hadn't been here for more than twenty years, and then I went inside to see, after all, this was where my father and mother went to college.
When Chengdu was liberated, my father transferred from the underground party of Sichuan University to the Eighteenth Army, and led most of the fresh graduates of Sichuan to join the advance troops into Tibet, opening up the Sichuan-Tibet Highway Line (now National Highway 318) for the large troops to enter Tibet.
As one of the first graduates of Sichuan University in New China, my mother entered the workplace from here.
I also want to go to Chongqing University as I did a few days ago, and then enter Sichuan University to look for my parents' past footprints, but I am very sorry that due to the prevention and control of the epidemic, all outsiders are not allowed to enter.
It has been recorded on the Internet:
In 1948, National Sichuan University had 6 colleges, 25 departments, more than 10 specialized courses, and two research institutes in arts, science, law, engineering, agriculture, and teacher training. The school has a total of 981 teaching staff, including 166 full-time professors, and a total of 6405 graduate students and undergraduate students, accounting for more than 2/3 of the number of college students in the province, which was the largest higher education institution in China at that time.
On December 7, 1949, the Kuomintang government committed the horrific "12.7" massacre, in which 36 political prisoners were secretly executed in chengdu. More than a dozen of them are teachers and students at Sichuan University.
From the early 1970s, I often returned to Chengdu and often came to Sichuan University.
My father had a group of Dazhou nationals in Chengdu, and they were classmates and close friends since they were young, and they joined the revolution together in the 1930s and 1940s, and engaged in underground work in universities in Chongqing and Chengdu respectively. After liberation, except for a few people who were transferred to Beijing to work, most of them stayed in Chengdu to work, and later served as leaders in provincial and municipal governments and departments, and some worked in schools such as Sichuan University and Southwest Minzu University. After liberation, my parents maintained close contact with them, often moving around, during the Cultural Revolution, my family was sent from a certain department of the Central Committee of Beijing to Xi'an, and the distance with Chengdu was closer, and there were more contacts and movements, including the exchanges between children. When I returned to Chengdu at that time, I often went to the homes of my uncles and aunts in the Campus of Sichuan University.
Visiting the elders is the main task of our trip to Chengdu, of course, I still have some relatives in Chengdu, some old friends, some comrades-in-arms who used to be soldiers in the army, and even beijing brothers who bought houses and pensions in Chengdu.
There are too many people to visit chengdu, so the time schedule for each return to Chengdu will be tight, and this time it is expected.
Now retired, it seems that Chengdu I should come back often!