One day in the autumn of 1980, a silver plane flew from Beijing to Fujian. In the cabin, there sat an old man with white hair who was more than an old man, whose appearance was resolute and calm, but the thoughts in his heart were like a sea of clouds surging outside the cabin, rushing to thousands of miles away.
He is Lu Dingyi, former vice premier of the State Council and minister of central propaganda. In his early years, he served as the propaganda director of the General Political Department of the Red Army and the Eighth Route Army, the chief editor of The Liberation Daily, a revolutionary of the older generation of the CPC, and one of the founding fathers of New China. His articles "Old Mountain Boundary" and "Golden Fish Hook" were included in primary school Chinese textbooks and were popular to read.
His article was indeed good, and later helped him find his daughter. However, here is not the table for the time being, first of all, he said that he was going to go but a 46-year wish...
A peasant family in Kuitian Village, Changting County, Western Fujian Province, lives with a family of three: Fan Qibiao and his wife, and their son Fan Jiading. For many years, what puzzled Fan Jiading was that every New Year's Festival, his parents had to put an extra pair of dishes and chopsticks on the dinner table, and that position was always empty.
Finally, one day, the Fan family told their son the truth: he was not their own son, his mother was a female Red Army, and found the relics of their birth mother who had been treasured for many years and gave them to him. After a difficult journey, twists and turns, and waiting, with the help of insiders, Fan Jiading finally learned that his father was a highly respected national leader.
As the plane landed, the hands of Lu and Fan were tightly clasped together. Old Man Fan Qibiao said in a trembling voice, "Elder Lu, finally..., finally brought him to you, now it's time for him to change back to Lu's surname." ”
"No! In such difficult years, it is you who raised the child, you are his regenerative parents, the child will continue to stay with you, and the child's surname will not have to be changed. Under the humility of both sides, Lu Dingyi finally said that he changed the child's surname to "Lu Fan", representing that the child was a member of the two families.
The reunion after many years of separation must have a thousand thoughts, missing his son at the same time, but also thinking of the child's birth mother, Tang Yizhen, who has been sacrificed for many years; at the same time, he also misses another close relative. Elder Lu told his son: "You also have a sister who is 3 years older than you, and her whereabouts are still unknown!" ”
"Dad, since I still have a sister, what are you waiting for, let's find it quickly!" Lu Fan Jiading learned that there were still relatives alive and said eagerly.
"It's been decades since I've been looking for her, and if she's still here, she should be in her 50s..." Elder Lu said with emotion, his heart always calling: "Daughter, where are you?" ”
Perhaps he did not realize that in the neighboring province of Jiangxi, not far away, there was a woman who often cried sadly at the starry sky: "My fate is bitter, I was born without parents, no ah..."
One day in September 1987, a teacher named Lai Zhangsheng from the Department of Social Sciences of the Southern Metallurgical College came to the department's reference room as usual to read a book. In a book entitled "The Red Flag of the Wind Exhibition", he saw Lu Dingyi's article "Memories of the Martyr Tang Yizhen", which was written at the end of 1981. From this article, Lai Zhangsheng learned that Tang Yizhen was the deceased wife of Lu Lao, who joined the revolution at the age of 17 and died in Fujian during the Red Army.
The article also introduces the two children born to the martyr Tang Yizhen. The second is a son who has been found; the eldest is a daughter, who has been separated for 47 years and has not been heard from so far...
The more Lai Zhangsheng read, the more excited he became, because he knew that his mother belonged to the red army's separated children and had not yet found his biological parents. When he had finished reading the text, he could no longer hold back his mood and immediately wrote a letter to Elder Lu with his pen, in which he wrote:
“...... Your daughter is still missing, which reminds me of my country mother's life. My mother, who was also a child left behind before the Red Army's Long March, still does not know who her biological parents are. But judging by name, age, place of foster care, and time, my mother and your lost daughter YePing are probably the same person..."
In his letter, Lai Zhangsheng used four data to analyze the possibility that his mother was Lu Lao's daughter.
One is the name. The first thing that caught Lai Zhangsheng's attention was also the name, the name of the lost daughter mentioned in Lu Lao's article was "YePing", and Lai's mother Zhang Laidi's nickname was "Ye Ping", which was only dictated by Zhang Dewan, who had come to the orphan at that time, and no one knew which two words it was. Then, "Wild Ping" does not rule out the possibility of "Ye Ping".
The second is age. Lu Lao's article said that his daughter was born in 1931, and according to time, he should be 56 years old at this time. This age is exactly the same age as Lai's mother.
The third is the time of foster care. The foster care time described in Lu Lao's article was during the Long March, and the Long March of the Central Red Army began in October 1934; and Lai Zhangsheng remembered that when his grandmother was alive, he had said that his mother was brought by someone "when he was digging sweet potatoes", and the time of digging sweet potatoes in the local countryside was around November. In terms of vintage, Lai Zhangsheng knew that his mother was fostered when she was 3 years old, and she was born in 31 years, and it was exactly 1934 when she was sent, so the year was also right.
The fourth is the foster care location. Lu Lao's article is written as "foster care in Yandu", and Lai Zhangsheng's hometown in Yudu was written as "Yandu" before, and the location is also consistent.
Judging from the above four points, they may really be the same person!
So, is Lai Zhangsheng's mother really Lu Lao's daughter? After Lu Lao received Lai Zhangsheng's letter, his heart immediately tightened: Isn't this the same as the 1956 investigation? Was there any negligence in that investigation? He immediately invited Tang Yihui, the eighth sister of his deceased wife Tang Yizhen, to consult.
"Couldn't miss it again! That year, you asked me to verify that photo, and I said it wasn't quite like that. If she is really Ye Ping, it is that I have missed a sentence for 31 years! Old Man Tang Yihui said with tears on his face.
The elderly Tang Yihui is 74 years old, and she has been sad for most of her life because she can't find her sister's daughter. She will never forget that two brothers died in the river in search of her! The mother faces her portrait and reluctantly dies!
After Hearing this, Elder Lu immediately sent his son Lu Fanjiading, who was in Fujian, to Jiangxi to investigate and verify. The Jiangxi Provincial CPC Committee and the Jiangxi Provincial Government also attached great importance to this matter and sent a joint investigation team to Lai Zhangsheng's hometown with Lu Fanjiading. After a rigorous and meticulous investigation, the situation of that year and the anecdotes of several yin and yang errors over the years were finally sorted out...
Tang Yizhen was born in a progressive family of intellectuals, as early as the May Fourth Movement, the eldest brother Tang Yijing had close contacts with Dong Biwu and Yun Daiying, and the fifth brother Tang Yihe was influenced by the patriotic ideas of Wen Yiduo and was a staunch anti-imperialist and anti-feudal element. Influenced by her brother, she soon embarked on the revolutionary road.
In 1927, Tang Yizhen was sent by the party organization to study in the Soviet Union, which was the place of her dreams, but at this time she was only 18 years old, and her mother was suffering from viral dysentery and was unconscious for many days. She really couldn't bear to leave, but for the sake of the revolution, she had to endure the pain of parting. Before leaving, she knelt in front of her mother's bed, prayed three times, and left in tears. At that time, she did not expect that this walk would become a farewell!
While studying at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, Tang Yizhen met Lu Dingyi in the course of his struggle against Wang Ming and his gang, and they developed feelings from acquaintance to acquaintance, and soon became a revolutionary partner.
Later, she and Lu Dingyi returned to China one after another and went to work in the Central Soviet District, where they reunited and had a lovely daughter in 1931, named "Yeping" because she was born in Yeping, Ruijin, Jiangxi.
In October 1934, the Central Red Army began the 25,000-mile Long March that attracted worldwide attention. Originally, Tang Yizhen could have gone with the main Red Army, but she was pregnant again, her mobility was inconvenient, and according to the regulations at that time, she had to stay in the Central Soviet Region and persist in the struggle. So she had to be separated from her husband Lu Dingyi again; because of her mobility problems, she also had to be separated from her daughter "YePing".
Because of the Long March, many CCP leaders secretly left their children in this way. This is how Mao Zedong's son Xiao Mao was left, Liu Bao, the son of Liu Bojian, as well as the son of Lin Boqu and the son of Deng Zihui...
After the Long March of the Main Force of the Red Army, Tang Yizhen entrusted his 3-year-old daughter "Yeping" to a Red Army comrade named Zhang Dewan, asking him to take the child to the countryside outside Ruijin to find a foster care. Zhang Dewan, a native of Ji'an, Jiangxi, was unable to participate in the Long March because of illness. Later, Zhang Dewan handed over the child to a peasant family in Yudu.
At the moment of separation of flesh and bones, Tang Yizhen's heart was like a knife, looking at Zhang Dewan's figure carrying the child away, he couldn't help but burst into tears, but he was afraid of startling the child, and he couldn't help but be inseparable, so he could only bite his lip and try not to cry out loud...
After the separation, Tang Yizhen followed Mao Zeqin to break through to Fujian according to organizational arrangements and continued to carry out armed struggle. Under the frenzied encirclement and suppression of the Kuomintang army, Tang Yizhen dragged the body of Liujia, hid in Tibet, and finally gave birth to a boy in the home of the injured Red Army Fan Qibiao, that is, her second child, Lu Fan Jiading.
However, before his son reached the full moon, due to the urgency of the enemy situation, Tang Yizhen was forced to tearfully kiss Xiao Jiading, who was in his infancy, and returned to the team. After Tang Yizhen returned to the Red Army guerrilla group to which he belonged, he was soon surrounded by Kuomintang troops due to the disparity between the number of people.
In the process of breaking through, Tang Yizhen was unfortunately arrested, and then sought an opportunity to escape and was arrested again. The enemy became angry and tied her up and tortured her, and the leather whip and sticks rained down on her thin body, leaving no trace of Yin Red's blood on her body. In order to force her to confess, the enemy did not give her a mouthful of food or a bowl of water for two days and two nights, but she still refused to say a word. The angry enemy finally lost patience, so Tang Yizhen sacrificed on the execution ground, the scene at that time was extremely tragic, according to the witness Chen Liumao later described: "The knife will hurt when it is cut down, the blood and water are flying in the sky, and Sister Yizhen did not say a word... Sister Tang is a beauty! "The enemy never understood how this young female Red Army could be so strong, she was only 25 years old at the time!
Because Elder Lu participated in the Long March with the Central Red Army, he temporarily lost contact with his wife and children. During the Long March, he served as the propaganda director of the Red Army, and after the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japan, he served as the propaganda director of the General Political Department of the Eighth Route Army and the deputy director of the Field Political Department of the Forward Headquarters of the Eighth Route Army.
Although he was busy at work, he always remembered his wife and children who remained in the south, from climbing the snowy mountains and crossing the meadows to the bottom of the pagoda mountain in Yan'an, he had recalled the scene of life and death countless times, and asked himself countless times: "How is the righteous virginity, how is the child?" ......”
In 1937, he found out that his daughter Ye Ping was taken by a comrade from Tang Yizhen's original unit known as a "good mother" and fostered in a peasant family in Dudu. In the same year, before he went to the front line of the War of Resistance, he made a special trip to his father-in-law's house to inform him of the news and entrusted the Tang family to find it.
Tang Yizhen's eldest brother and fifth brother immediately set out to jiangxi to look for it, looking for it everywhere, disappointed again and again. The eldest brother Tang Yijing also followed his mother's wishes, imitating Tang Yizhen's appearance when she was a child, painted a portrait of a little girl with two small braids, treating her as an imaginary Ye Ping, and when he missed her heart, he cried out to the portrait sadly: "Child, where are you?" ”
Even more unfortunately, the two uncles who were looking for Yeping were later killed when they crossed the river because the boat overturned, and the hope of relying on the Tang family to find Yeping was terminated.
In 1943, Tang Yizhen's comrade-in-arms He Yi, who was also Mao Zeqin's wife, came to Yan'an from Jiangxi. From her mouth, Lu Dingyi was shocked to hear the bad news that Tang Yizhen had been heroic and righteous, and suddenly seemed to be heartbroken, and after more than half a month, he could not sleep all night, thinking of his beloved wife and missing children who had died, and his tears dried up. According to Lu Lao's later recollection: "From now on, no matter how great the joys and sorrows, I could not shed tears. ”
With the deep sorrow of losing his wife, Elder Lu became even more determined to find his children: he must find them, even if he breaks the iron shoes!
After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Feng Yuxiang's wife Li Dequan set up a wartime women's and child care and relief agency in Nanjing. After Lu Lao learned about it, he wrote a letter to Deng Yingchao of the Central Office in Nanjing, that is, the "dry grandmother" of his daughter Ye Ping, and entrusted her to ask Li Dequan to help find his daughter.
Unfortunately, not long after that, Chiang Kai-shek launched a civil war, and the wartime women's and child care and relief agencies were disbanded, and this line of searching for relatives could not be followed.
Let's talk about the Yeping side. Zhang Dewan, a soldier of the Red Army, according to Tang Yizhen's commission, took Xiaoyeping to Yudu, Jiangxi, and joined a local peasant family surnamed Lai. At the beginning, Zhang Dewan still lived in the village for a while, he treated Ye Ping very well, every day is inseparable, Ye Ping is very affectionate to call him "good mother", at that time the villagers were still very strange: how can this child be called a man mother? Mainly because Zhang Dewan played with Ye Ping all day long when Tang Yizhen was still alive, when Ye Ping was still very young, he was learning to speak with his teeth and teeth, and he could only speak simple "daddy" and "mom", so he called him "good mother".
Since Zhang Dewan was not a local, forced by the pressure of being checked by the homecoming group to check on the foreigners, he had to leave in tears, returned to his hometown of Ji'an, and entrusted Xiaoyeping to the Lai family before leaving. Since they did not know which two characters Ye Ping's name was, the Lai family pronounced it "Wild Ping" along the harmonics.
Three years later, when the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression began, the authorities stopped "suppressing the Communists", and Zhang Dewan came to Yudu to visit "Yeping". This time he only stayed at Lai's house for 3 days. During these 3 days, he and "Ye Ping" spent time together day and night, and had to feed her personally at each meal, although the little girl was already able to eat by herself. During the day, he always led "Ye Ping" and repeatedly said: "At that time, the good mother did not know whether she could return to her hometown alive, otherwise she would not have left you!" ”
After 3 days, Zhang Dewan left alone again, still not taking away "Ye Ping", perhaps he realized that his weak body might not last long. He never came again, because he died shortly after he returned, and he also took away the mystery of "Ye Ping's" life.
The children's clothes that "Ye Ping" brought with him when he first arrived were later burned down because of a fire.
Fortunately, the Lai family treated "Ye Ping" quite well, and regarded it as if it were their own. It's just that the family is poor, and the life is relatively difficult, "Ye Ping" has taken up the burden of life early, working all day, pulling pig grass, collecting firewood, and not reading a day of books. At the age of 9, "Ye Ping" apprenticed people and learned to make tiles, she slowly grew in strength in a hard life, she could lift 4 watts at a time, and grew up to become a capable peasant woman.
At the age of 19, he married Lai Pu'en, the son of the Lai family, and like every ordinary peasant woman, he had children and took care of the family. When she gave birth, according to local customs, the mother's family would bring eggs to see the daughter in labor, but no one came to see her, because she did not have a mother...
After the founding of New China, Lu Dingyi served as secretary of the Secretariat of the CPC Central Committee, director of propaganda of the CPC Central Committee, and vice premier of the State Council, and was busy with work; although he always had the idea of going to Jiangxi to look for his children, it was difficult to make the trip for a long time, so he entrusted the provinces of Fujian and Gansu to help. The relevant departments of the two provinces sorted out the relevant materials of the martyr Tang Yizhen, searched everywhere through visits, posted notices, and other means, and found several people suspected of Yeping, but after repeated comparisons, it was confirmed that none of them were his daughters.
In 1956, Lu Lao almost found the real "Ye Ping". At that time, when Lai Puen's unit, The Iron Mountain Tungsten Mine, reviewed the employee files, it was found that Lai Pu'en's resume did not fill in the information of his parents-in-law, and the political review was very strict at that time, and it was very serious to fill in the information incompletely. When Rapun was asked, he told him about his wife.
Guo Ruoshan, secretary of the party committee, is a demobilized military cadre, who is very sensitive to the matter of fostering children in the old Soviet area, and is also very serious in doing things.
Soon, the Propaganda Department of the Gannan District Party Committee was instructed by the Central Propaganda Department to send people to investigate and verify. This kind of investigation attaches the most importance to the original physical evidence, but because the family is poor, "Ye Ping" does not have photos of her childhood, and the clothes Tang Yizhen gave her were also burned by the fire that year, so she had to take a temporary photo of the time.
The investigation did not yield substantial evidence, and after the photo of "Ye Ping" was sent to Beijing, Lu Dingyi's sister-in-law, Tang Yihui, the eighth sister of Tang Yizhen, looked at it and felt that it was not very similar. This thread was shelved, and it turned out to be 31 years.
Until the foregoing, the Lu Fan family was scheduled to come to the Lai family again in 1987 according to his father's instructions. During the conversation with "Ye Ping", the investigation team members mentioned a question: What do you call Zhang Dewan? "Ye Ping" replied: "Good mother".
When Lu Fanjiading heard this, he was immediately excited: Lu Dingyi had told him that Ye Ping was handed over to a gay man named "Good Mother"!
After the investigation team left, they went to Zhang Dewan's hometown of Ji'an and learned that Zhang Dewan's three brothers had all joined the Red Army, and that Zhang Dewan was the eldest and had left no descendants; the second zhang Deqing died on the battlefield; the third Zhang Deming had a son named Zhang Yongji, and according to him, Zhang Dewan had told his family before he died that he had fostered the daughter of a comrade-in-arms in Du County.
Soon the Jiangxi provincial government came to the conclusion that "Ye Ping" was Lu Dingyi's daughter Ye Ping, who had been lost 53 years ago!
November 30, 1987, was a very ordinary day, but for the Lu Lao family, it was a very unusual day. The 81-year-old father and his 56-year-old daughter were finally reunited, and when they were separated, one was a young man in the middle of nowhere, the other was a baby waiting to be fed, and now they are all white-haired old people.
Before the meeting, the secretary had explained to Ye Ping that Lu Lao was older and did not cry when he met. She promised the secretary that she would only laugh and not cry. For this, she had been crying all night in her guest house room the night before!
However, after the meeting, looking at Lu Dingyi's kind and excited face, Ye Ping's stomach accumulated 53 years of tears, far from being finished because of the crying of the previous night, at this moment it overflowed again, tears gushed, accompanied by a call that was 53 years late: "Daddy! ”
Hearing this affectionate call, Elder Lu tightly held Ye Ping's hand, excited, and said: "Child, I have been looking for you for 53 years..." He refused the suggestion of doing a paternity test, because although Ye Ping's face was full of vicissitudes, he could still determine at a glance: she was his daughter!
Later, a reporter asked Ye Ping: Your father "lost" you, did you hate him?
Ye Ping said, "I don't hate, I hate what he did, at that time he wanted to go on a long march, and he had no way to do it, he didn't mean to lose me." Sometimes I think that if my father was a man named Huazi, not a big leader, I wouldn't be so bitter. But there is no way to sacrifice for the revolution, I know this, I understand. ”
Oh, yes! Before the Departure of the Long March, the Central Red Army made strict rules: no one was allowed to take children on the road, no matter how high the position. For the sake of the Long March and the revolution, how many Red Army and even senior cadres were separated from their children and their families. Later, some of them were found back, some of them were found after countless hardships, and some of them were still looking for them all their lives...