Meeting Suichang was a belated salute to the friendship of our parents.
Yang Yiping and Zhang resisted
Suichang is located in the northwest of Lishui District, Zhejiang Province, surrounded by mountains and streams.
Suichang is my father's hometown, and my father, Yang Keyang, was born in 1914 to a farming family in the mountain ravine northwest of Suichang. In his youth, in order to resist Japan and save the country, he went out of the mountains, and together with thousands of enthusiastic young people, threw himself into the torrent of the times, went to the mountains of western Zhejiang to carry out anti-Japanese activities, ran newspapers and wrote articles and engaged in woodcuts, and after 1949, became an excellent printmaking artist.
In 2018, the Suichang County Government built the "Yang Keyang Memorial Hall" and invited the youzixiang xian who was in the field to return to Suichang to attend the opening ceremony of the memorial hall. As the daughter of Yang Keyang, I am also busy with this, hoping that more people will understand the revolutionary history and art history of Suichang.
I thought of asking my good friend and writer Zhang Kangkang.
Yang Yiping and Zhang Kangkang took a group photo at the Yang Keyang Memorial Hall
Why resistance? Why did you have to invite her to Suichang?
Because her mother Zhu Weixian was an old friend of my father. In early 1939, the young Zhu Xiaoling (Zhu Weixian) and the young Yang Jiachang (Yang Keyang) met in Hecun Village, a small village in the foothills of The tianmu Mountains in Lin'an. At that time, Yang Jiachang was the editor of the "Nationalities Daily", and Zhu Xiaoling was a progressive literary youth who actively submitted articles, from a small town in the Hangjiahu Plain, and went to study behind Tianmu Mountain. They share common ideals and communicate with each other with concern. By 1940, the situation of cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party was broken, the National Daily was forcibly reorganized by the Nationalist government, and my father's CCP membership was exposed and forced to leave the newspaper, and they lost contact with each other for a while. But in her mind, Yang Jiachang has always been a kind and respectable big brother. It wasn't until the 1950s that they had contact again. Later, my father was treated unfairly politically, her family's life was affected, and my father reached out to help many times.
In the passage of time, the older generation's family friendship miraculously continued between me and the resistance. Father's Suichang, like an ancient covered bridge, from this side of the Oujiang River to the other side, connects the friendship of the two generations.
Zhang Kangkang stopped in front of Yang Keyang's prints to admire
I met Kang Kang in 1967, she was 17 years old, I was 18 years old, just in time for the cardamom years of youth. She came from Hangzhou to Shanghai to "da tandem" and found my father's art publishing house, and my father took her home. I am similar in age to her, she loves literature, I like music, literature brings us a lot of common topics. In 1969, I went to the countryside to Changshuihe Farm in Bei'an, Heilongjiang Province, she went to a farm near Jiamusi, we began to communicate frequently, warming each other in the cold and long winter, I copied a good old song sheet for her, and she also wrote a program for our farm propaganda team. Later, we went to school and returned to the city, and settled down in Shanghai and Beijing. Many years later, I was moved when The Resistance told me that she had kept a hundred and ten letters between us. After my father's death in 2010, Kang Kang also wrote a commemorative article entitled "Uncle Yang and the Publishing House".
But at the opening ceremony of that year, the resistance could not come to Suichang because of something, and she said in regret: When there is a suitable opportunity, I will go to Suichang, I will go to Suichang for my mother, and you and I must meet in Suichang.
Meet Suichang – it must be Suichang, it is a belated salute to the friendship of our parents.
Unexpectedly, resistance and resistance must be trustworthy. At the end of November 2021, I received a call from the anti-resistance Beijing, saying that she would have the opportunity to participate in the cultural poverty alleviation research near Suichang, and took this opportunity to decide to visit my father's memorial hall in Suichang, but our common wish. Although I was troubled with trivial matters, I immediately and gladly agreed to accompany her.
At the beginning of December, we arrived in Suichang one after another and embraced happily in this beautiful mountain city in western Zhejiang. A few years have passed, the mountains and forests of Suichang have become more and more lush, and the open new city has begun to take shape.
Visit the Tang Xianzu Memorial Hall
After coming to Suichang, while chatting with Ji Qin, a friend of the County Literary Association, she learned that in the young life of the anti-resistance mother, there were two men she regarded as the guide of the revolution, both of whom were related to Suichang. At the end of the 1930s, in order to find the anti-Japanese team, Jia Qi wandered from Wuhan to western Zhejiang to carry out anti-Japanese propaganda activities in the Jinhua Anti-Japanese Volunteer Brigade and met Zhu Xiaoling. After the drama team was forced to disband, he and she decided to go north to find the Northeast Anti-Japanese Coalition Army, but they were both arrested on the way. Jia Qi was whistleblowed and exposed as an underground party member, and was eventually secretly shot and sacrificed at Tianmu Mountain, becoming the eternal pain of Zhu Xiaoling's life. In the archives of Suichang County, the trajectory of Jia Qi's activities in Suichang around 1940 is still preserved, and he joined the CCP in Suichang and published many progressive articles in the Suichang Morning Post.
Young Yang Jiachang jiaqi Zhu Xiaoling, in the area of JinhuaHuashui, has left traces and marks of youthful blood.
This was an unexpected bonus from our trip – the towering mountains of Suichang are witnesses to the great shores of history.
Zhang Kangkang donated a book to the Yang Keyang Memorial Hall
Due to the epidemic, some of our activities scheduled for Suichang, such as visiting the printmaking inheritance school, Suichang County Experimental Primary School (which is also my father's alma mater), meeting with readers, and holding discussions with literary youth, were cancelled, and only visited the Yang Keyang Memorial Hall and the Tang Xianzu Memorial Hall, and went to the Xinhua Bookstore in the county town. In the video materials of the Yang Keyang Memorial Hall, Kang Kang found that her mother had made a special trip to Shanghai to attend my father's birthday, and the two of them, as well as her father and my father, returned to the old site of the "National Daily" in Lin'an Crane Village in their old age.
Therefore, I and the resistance will inevitably meet in Suichang, and we have a century of relationship with Suichang. That night, I had a long conversation in the room with Kang. Fathers came out of the depths of the mountains to seek ideals and build a beautiful society. As their descendants, this trip is done, and we have a pact that no matter how dirty the world is, we must insist on being a righteous and kind person.
Yang Yiping and Zhang Kangkang bid farewell at Suichang Railway Station
Time was hurried, my friend suichang and I sent the resistance to the station, and the old friend of more than fifty years said goodbye. I detoured to my father's birthplace, the village of Jushukou, which was far away from the county seat and hidden in a deep mountain depression, and returned to Shanghai from the Jiangshan Railway Station. Along the way, cars circled on the mountain road, looking out the window at the rolling and majestic mountains, I couldn't help but sigh. Watching the sunset loom behind the vast mountains, I look forward to the sun tomorrow. (Yang Yiping)