In the Footsteps of My Father (2)

Serial Number Two -

Dancing teenager jumped through the gate

Bao Xia/Wen

On March 29, 1938, my father, Bao Jiakui, was born into a family of high-ranking intellectuals at No. 7 Baojia Hutong, Liuzhuang Street, Hexi District, Tianjin, Hebei Province. At that time, Tianjin was a place with a developed economy and culture in the country, with factories with large chimneys, shops one after another, horn-honking cars, and crowded buildings. When his father was a teenager, he received a good education in Tianjin. His father's archives clearly record that from 1944 to 1947, he studied at Zhongping Primary School in the sixth district of Tianjin; from 1947 to July 1952, he studied in the fourth primary school of the sixth district of Tianjin; from 1952 to 1955, he studied at the Tianjin No. 4 Middle School and joined the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association; from July 1955 to January 23, 1956, he studied at the Tianjin People's Broadcasting School (as a sports committee member).

When he was a teenager, his father was smart and studious, versatile, proficient in basketball, volleyball, softball (i.e., baseball), table tennis sticks, and badminton, especially basketball, good jumping ability, smooth dribbling, and three-point shooting. Father kicked the shuttlecock left and right feet well coordinated, and the pattern was renovated. His father wrote a good hand (brush characters, pen characters, chalk characters, fine art characters), a good painting, and was the Prince Charming that female students relished.

Fathers are rigorous and rational. At that time, my father was burdened with the historical problems of my grandfather, and never revealed my family lineage to others, but it was only when we became an adult and the country rehabilitated the intellectuals with political problems that my father showed a long-lost smile and told us about the things in our ancestors.

My grandfather, Bao Hongxiang, graduated from Tianjin Institute of Technology and Business School in 1937, when the college was run by the French, and now it is Tianjin Foreign Language Institute. He was young and talented, coupled with his proficiency in several Chinese, and was assigned to work in the finance department of the Tianjin Changlu Salt Affairs Bureau. In 1937, the "July 7 Incident" broke out, and the Changluyan District was occupied by the Japanese army, and the patriotic and enthusiastic college students like their grandfathers lurked together to carry out underground anti-Japanese activities. The cruel and bloody anti-Japanese underground struggle was not over, and in 1942, Grandpa became ill with sullenness, lost his well-paid and decent job, and gradually entered a difficult situation.

Grandma Liu Wen, a native of Xiqing, Tianjin, is a woman from a wealthy vegetable farmer family, beautiful, capable, resolute, and assertive. When he got married, his grandfather did not graduate from college, and his financial resources mainly depended on the support of his grandfather (grandfather's brother, who was a businessman) and his family.

In July 1955, my father graduated from junior high school and helped his grandfather to do some small business while studying at the Tianjin Broadcasting School.

(To be continued)

(Special thanks to Alumni Chen Xuefeng for revising this article!) ）