Family --- would like to give this document to my dearest family

Last week, a girlfriend from a distant university sent a WeChat message saying: "The school wants to write a paper on family history, do we have a family history with the surname Zhou?" The wife joked in the WeChat group: "Your surname is three generations of farmers in the Zhou family, where is there any family history." In addition to his shame, he couldn't help but sigh. So I had the idea of writing about my parents' family as a way to dedicate it to my dearest family.

In the early years, I heard my grandmother say that before the liberation, our family had fled the Central Plains to ask for food and settle down here. Although we are not famous and prestigious families, we are all ordinary people's families. Whether ordinary or great, but a good home style subtly affects us. I think that no matter what kind of social environment we are in, the simple family style of tenacity, hard work, integrity, kindness, and tolerance has never been lacking. It affects us throughout our lives and affects generations. Since ancient times, Chinese has attached importance to family affection and the inheritance of family style.

Our Zhou family, since our great-grandfather, has been three generations of poor peasants. Great-grandfather and grandmother gave birth to my grandfather and second grandfather and four aunts. A few people, life is full of poverty. Before liberation, soldiers fled from the Central Plains to the Vicuña Lake and the Grand Canal in northern Jiangsu Province. After the liberation of New China, he stayed in the local area and settled down.

As the saying goes, relying on mountains to eat mountains, relying on water to draft water. Backed by Vicuña Lake and the Grand Canal, the land is fertile and full of fish and shrimp. In his spare time, my great-grandfather built a small fish boat and woven nets to catch fish. The family is happy and harmonious, and the days are stable. The simple folk customs and harmonious neighborhood relations have allowed our lonely Zhou family to be in the village and not be bullied by others. Later, Grandpa's brothers and sisters all got married, and the family was under great financial pressure. Great-grandfather built more than 10 tons of wooden boats to transport goods along the Grand Canal south, across the Yangtze River, to the city of southern Jiangsu. For a long time, it was stationed at the Xiaguan Wharf in Nanjing.

Later, after leaving home for too long, my hometown was deserted. My great-grandfather asked my grandfather to go back to his hometown to marry my grandmother, and gave birth to 6 of my father's brothers and sisters. He continued to fish and cultivate the land, while the second grandfather stayed in Nanjing to develop.

After returning to his hometown in northern Jiangsu, he encountered the Cultural Revolution. Because of the solidity of the family, my grandfather was beaten into the "black five categories". Fishing gear was confiscated and furniture confiscated. Destitute, life is very difficult. By the early 1970s, my father had married my mother through a matchmaker. Before and after the reform and opening up, five of our sisters and brothers were born. The family lives tightly, and they have to go to school and eat and wear. In 1978, the spring breeze of reform and opening up blew to the lake. The village divides the land and demarcates the land boundaries. Allow self-employment to develop and encourage individual entrepreneurship. So my parents returned to their old business, took a fishing boat, and weaved fishing nets to catch fish and shrimp in the lake and river.

By the early 1990s, cement shipyards had emerged along the Grand Canal. At that time, there were fewer vehicles and the roads were in poor condition. Transportation is still transported by cement ships, one is that the transportation price is low, and the other is that there are many goods transported at one time. So the parents discussed, sold the fishing boat and fishing gear, borrowed 2,000 yuan from relatives, and went to the shipyard to build a 15-ton cement boat to run for transportation. At that time, the average worker's monthly salary was only 30 yuan, and 2,000 yuan was a huge amount.

With the deepening of reform and opening up, the market is invigorated, and more and more goods need to be transported by ships. In the year of Qianxi, cement ships have large safety hazards and small tonnage, which can no longer meet the market demand, and steel ships have been successively put into the market. My parents also made a lot of money, so they built a 500-ton steel boat to run the transport. When my parents got older, they gave my brother the task of sailing the boat. The younger brother later showed that the ship was too small, and with the strength of the whole family, he built a 3,000-ton steel ship. The farthest run to the Three Gorges Dam, running back and forth along the Yangtze River Canal, is still in operation. Generations of hard work to run a small family, eat bitterly, suffer only their own suffering.

My father's education level is not high, and he did not graduate from primary school, but he has always paid attention to the study and cultivation of our four brothers. Since childhood, we have been allowed to memorize the Three Character Sutra: "At the beginning of man, nature is good, sex is close, and habits are far away..." In enlightenment education, let us understand etiquette and morality. Compared to the kindness of the father, the mother was too strict and often reprimanded us. Once you find mischievous, you must be mixed with sticks. Mother's harshness is justified, she is afraid that when our four brothers become adults, the family will not be harmonious and will take a detour. A few years ago, her mother first bought a house in the city for her eldest brother who was ready to get married, and then successively bought houses for the remaining three sons. Since then, the family has settled in the city. Children were also born one after another and went to school in the city. This is a great blessing for an ordinary peasant family living in China. Both older brothers also had their own careers, and I was later admitted to the civil service and went to the provincial city, and my younger brother inherited his father's business and was still running boats. Now my parents are dying, and they take their children to school at their brother's house in the city. The next generation is also very competitive, the eldest nephew was admitted to the University of Melbourne in Australia, my daughter was admitted to the Ocean University, the niece of the third brother's family became a teacher and doctor, and the nephew of the younger brother's family has just been admitted to the university. Whenever he encountered his neighbors, his father smiled and closed his mouth, and everyone said that the next generation of the Zhou family had come out. Our education of children has also been inherited from our fathers and has always inherited a good family style, that is, diligence, kindness, diligence and honesty.

It is precisely because we have witnessed the poverty and backwardness of the countryside that our fathers and fathers have made our younger generations study hard, thus changing their destiny, moving from the countryside to the city, and achieving a higher level of life.

We can't choose our parents and families, but our parents and relatives act as ferrymen for us, ferrying us to the other shore, to the other shore of happiness and light. It should be said that through their own efforts, our father's generation has let our generation go out of the countryside. Only when we show good family style and family rules at the level of inheritance can future generations remember the regrets of previous generations and understand the meaning of existence in this utilitarian and rational society. Thus we know where we have come from and where we are going.