In the wilderness of time, we are full of joy to welcome the arrival of new life, and inevitably have to face the disappearance of "old" life, but as the poet Zang Kejia said, "Some people are dead, he is still alive", the body will always have the day of death, but the spirit will always exist. Just like Guo Yonghuai, the only scientist who was posthumously awarded the "Two Bombs Founder" as a martyr, their family lives in the hearts of the Chinese people.
Single-mindedly returning home
Nowadays, with the rapid development of China in economic, cultural and other aspects, more and more international students choose to return to China to build a country. Sixty or seventy years ago, when China was still in ruins and waiting to be rebuilt, there were groups of scientists who returned to the motherland without hesitation, such as Qian Xuesen and Guo Yonghuai.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Guo Yonghuai was born in an ordinary rural family in Shandong, and his parents saved money to provide him with education, fortunately, Guo Yonghuai was very competitive, and his academic performance from childhood to adulthood was very good. In 1931, Guo Yonghuai became acquainted with his mentor Gu Jinghui, and under the recommendation of his teacher, in 1933, Guo Yonghuai was admitted to the Physics Department of Peking University, and he studied hard and laid a solid foundation of physics knowledge during this period.
In 1940, Guo Yonghuai obtained a quota for publicly-funded study abroad, went to the University of Toronto in Canada to study, and a year later, transferred to the California State Institute of Technology in the United States for further study, under the master von Carmen, and thus he and his brother Qian Xuesen became lifelong friends. Guo Yonghuai's achievements in physics, mechanics and other aspects are not inferior to Qian Xuesen, in 1947, only 36 years old, Guo Yonghuai was hired to teach at Cornell University, which can be said to have a bright future.
In the United States, Guo Yonghuai, like Qian Xuesen, is a researcher in cutting-edge national defense technology and has received attention from the United States, but when the news of the founding of New China came, both of them could not wait to return to China. After 5 years of long waiting, Qian Xuesen finally returned to the motherland that he had in mind, and seeing that Qian Xuesen had returned to China, Guo Yonghuai could not sit still, and he began to find ways to plan to return to China.
In fact, at that time, many people advised Guo Yonghuai not to return to China, after all, staying in the United States, with good living conditions, high-paying and decent careers, and children can also receive a good education, but Guo Yonghuai still resolutely decided to return to China, for which he did not hesitate to burn the data manuscript he had studied for many years. You must know that those materials are the most core research results, but Guo Yonghuai knows even more that the United States will not allow him to return to China with these materials. In this way, breaking through many obstacles, in 1956, Guo Yonghuai's family finally got a ticket to return to China.
Contribute with all your heart
After Guo Yonghuai returned to China, he was warmly received by the chairman and the premier, he did not put forward any material requirements, but asked to put into work immediately, in this way, Guo Yonghuai served as the deputy director of the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and together with Qian Xuesen and Qian Weichang, he promoted the development of the Institute of Mechanics step by step. In 1959, when China and the Soviet Union had a feud, the Soviet Union stopped its technical assistance to China, and China was in urgent need of national defense construction such as atomic bombs, so these scientists began an extremely difficult journey.
At that time, Qian Sanqiang personally found Guo Yonghuai and invited him to participate in the research and development of the atomic bomb, and Guo Yonghuai talked with him for several hours, after which he was appointed vice president of the Ninth Academy of Sciences, responsible for the theoretical exploration and development of the atomic bomb. As we have seen in various articles, film and television dramas, Guo Yonghuai and this group of scientists signed a confidentiality agreement to stay away from their families and go to the desert to conduct these studies.
Guo Yonghuai's base is located at an altitude of nearly 4,000 meters above sea level, the air is thin, basically even birds can not be seen, living materials are very scarce, coupled with lack of oxygen and high reaction, many researchers are malnourished, but they have to insist on long-term research work every day. At that time, Guo Yonghuai, who was just 50 years old, was already full of white hair and looked very old. But it is under the efforts of this group of people that China has developed the first atomic bomb and the first hydrogen bomb, but the research work is still continuing, and Guo Yonghuai has not stopped the pace under his feet.
A hero will never be missed
Fast forward to 1968, one day in December, two months after immersing himself in the experiment, Guo Yonghuai found a major breakthrough, he was overjoyed, with relevant information overnight flight to Beijing, but when about to land at the Beijing airport, the plane suddenly imbalanced, less than 10 seconds, quickly fell, Guo Yonghuai left forever. When people found him, they saw his body and the guards hugging each other tightly, and in the middle of them there was a briefcase containing top-secret documents, intact, and at the last moment of his life, Guo Yonghuai was still thinking about documents and thinking about the country, and his departure was the loss of our entire country.
Guo Yonghuai gave everything for his beloved motherland, and his family also contributed a lot. Guo Yonghuai's only daughter, Guo Qin, because of her father's determination to return to China that year, her fate has also undergone earth-shaking changes. Because her father carried out secret missions, she was basically with her mother after the age of 5, because of the "cultural wave", she went to Inner Mongolia before graduating from junior high school, and became an intellectual youth who "went to the mountains and went to the countryside".
Ten years of catastrophe, she has experienced the death of her father, her mother was isolated and censored, in the most important decade of her life, she was lonely and lonely, enduring the separation from her family. After the end of the turbulent period, Guo Qin returned to the United States, but her life in the United States without an academic qualification was extremely difficult, and it is difficult to say that all this was not the sacrifice she made as Guo Yonghuai's child, in 1994, Guo Qin fell seriously ill in the United States, and died in Beijing two years later at the age of 45.
When Guo Yonghuai died, his wife Li Pei was still under political scrutiny, and she had to endure the grief of her husband's death, but also face layers of organizational interrogation, and also lost contact with her daughter, but despite this, this strong woman survived. When Guo Yonghuai secretly went to a different place, it was Li Pei who supported their home, she sent Guo Yonghuai away, sent away her daughter Guo Qin, but even so, after sorting out her mood, she resolutely threw herself into the teaching career.
Mr. Li Pei is known as the "mother of Chinese applied linguistics", when she returned to China with her husband, she served in the University of Science and Technology of China, and later served as the director of the Foreign Language Department of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and now many academicians and scholars who are active in the front line have been her students, and she has cultivated a large number of outstanding talents for China in applied linguistics.
In 2008, Mr. Li Pei donated all his savings of 600,000 yuan to the University of Science and Technology of China and the Institute of Mechanics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences free of charge to supplement the "Guo Yonghuai Scholarship", without any ceremony, without any publicity, three years ago, Li Pei died of illness in Beijing at the age of 99, this time their family of three can finally be reunited.
In that special era, many scientists made great sacrifices like Guo Yonghuai, but Guo Yonghuai was the only scientist who won the "Two Bombs and One Star" medal as a martyr, whether it was his wife Li Pei or his daughter Guo Qin, they, like Guo Yonghuai, made sacrifices that were difficult for others to achieve. It is difficult to imagine that two high-achieving students who graduated from a well-known university, their daughters did not even graduate from junior high school, if Guo Yonghuai did not return to China that year, perhaps the fate of their family would be different, and because of this, they felt the greatness of their family even more. Time is rushing like water, and countless people are lost in the dust of history, but Guo Yonghuai's family is really worth remembering and remembering with a lifetime.