In November 1948, the Battle of Huaihai, which shocked China and foreign countries, began.
A major in the Nationalist army named Xie Degui fled with four children with the defeated army, and in the chaos of the army, he lost the eldest child
The child's name was Xie Weicai, and he was 7 years old at the time. Xie Weicai did not know that it was Su Yu, the general he would later play, who commanded the Battle of Huaihai.
In the shelter, Xie Weicai told the PLA cadres that his family was in Jurong, Nanjing. The troops arranged for a demobilized prisoner to take Xie Weicai back to Jurong and gave them sufficient travel expenses. Unexpectedly, after the prisoner took Xie Weicai to Nanjing, he left Xie Weicai and ran away with the travel expenses.
A few months later, Nanjing was liberated, and Xie Weicai, who had wandered to Yiwu, was taken into custody by the People's Liberation Army.
On May 6, 1949, at the age of 8, Xie Weicai joined the Cultural and Industrial Corps of the Twelfth Army of the Second Field Army of the Chinese People's Liberation Army.
The cultural and labor troupe needed to march with the troops to fight, which was obviously inappropriate for an 8-year-old child, and Xie Weicai was transferred to the Peking Opera Team of the Twelfth Army of the Second Front.
Xie Weicai recalled his comfortable days in the second-line troops. Once, the Peking Opera team performed "Empty City Plan" with condolences, and he played the piano boy. Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi, two long singing voices, are too boring for a child, Zhuge Liang "stands in the city tower to watch the mountain view", he stands in the city tower and actually falls asleep, shaking.
The audience laughed loudly, he was suddenly awakened by laughter, and fell forward in ignorance, the funny thing was that he fell down and smashed a large piece of the paper paste wall, Zhuge Liang sat awkwardly on the wooden shelf and could not get off the stage, angrily brushed his sleeves away, and the stage was even more laughing forward and backward, and a scene was stirred up by him into a car accident scene.
Xie Wei knew that he had run into a disaster and was preparing to be scolded, but he did not expect that the head of the unit who was comforted just asked the Peking Opera team, "Why is this child so sleepy, is he not sleeping?" ”
Such a greeting to a wandering child said that it was motherly warmth, and Xie Weicai directly said that the army was my home, and I would not go anywhere.
The Korean War broke out in 1950. Xie Weicai participated in the Volunteer Army Peking Opera Troupe's condolence performance in the DPRK. One of the things that impressed him most in North Korea was that in February 1958, Premier Zhou Enlai led a government delegation to visit Korea, accompanied by General Su Yu, to negotiate with the Dprk side on the deployment of volunteer troops back to China. That time he saw Su Yu.
Su Yu enjoyed the prestige of a victorious general in our army, at that time he was the chief of the general staff of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, and most of the volunteer officers were veterans who had experienced the liberation war. Xie Weicai was the actor standing around the chief, and later he described Su Yu in his eyes as "dressed in the uniform of a general, although he is not tall, but his eyes are bright and heroic, and every sentence will be interrupted by the warm applause of the soldiers." ”
Su Yu's demeanor made seventeen-year-old Xie Weicai admire. He did not expect that this long-distance contact had become the only one in the history of Chinese cinema, and he was the only special actor who had seen the person being played himself.
After returning to China, Xie Weicai entered the Shandong Peking Opera Troupe, and the Shandong Peking Opera Troupe rehearsed "Surprise Attack white tiger troupe" He played Jin Dayong, because it was a dragon set, "Surprise Attack White Tiger Troupe" became a model drama and was made into a movie, and his name was not on the cast list.
Fast forward to 1989. The movie "Armageddon" informed him to audition, and the role was the general Su Yu. After putting on makeup, the makeup artist kept saying, "Like! It's like! But he also expressed concern - you are an "old revolutionary" in cloth who has not even been a squad leader, can you perform the style of an old man?
Xie Weicai studied almost all the materials about Su Yu, a "Famous General Su Yu", which he read no less than a dozen times. I copied all the photos of Su Yu that I could find, carefully pondered the spirit of General Su Yu's planning, and recalled the meeting when I was twelve years old over and over again.
After the release of "The Great Armageddon," the audience praised Su Yu like a flood of praise, and Ding Yu, an old subordinate of Su Yu and head of the Central Leading Group for Major Revolutionary Historical Themes, said: "I am Su Yu's subordinate, I understand him, you are like him, you have performed his style."
"Armageddon" made General Su Yu's temperament deeply penetrate into Xie Weicai's bones, to what extent did the two look like each other? Once Xie Weicai visited the home of Su Yu's wife, Chu Qing's eldest sister, and in order to show his admiration for the general, he wore a native cloth military uniform from the Liberation War. When the old staff of the eldest sister's family opened the door, they blurted out: "Big sister, the chief is back!" ”
Although this is because the old man's nostalgia for General Su has become a disease, it cannot be said that Su Yu, played by Xie Weicai, is almost chaotic.
In 1991, the "Battle of Huaihai" of "Armageddon" was released in Shanghai, a technician named Xie Weixing saw Xie Weicai, the more he looked at it, the more he felt like a long-lost brother, he deliberately went to see the cast again, and sure enough, xie Weicai. Xie Weixing's younger siblings contacted Xie Weicai through the Xinmin Evening News, and as soon as they announced their names, they were indeed long-lost relatives. Separated for more than forty years, the family was reunited because of "Su Yu".
Xie Weicai later said: "Is there really a fate or a mysterious force manipulating life?" Take me, for example, the Battle of Xuzhou, the general of Su Yu, separated me from my parents. But it was I who, decades later, showed the heroic style of General Su Yu on the screen. What's even more amazing is that by playing Su Yu in the movie "Armageddon", I found my brothers and sisters who had been lost for decades!...... Why are several major events and tragic events on the path of my personal life always closely associated with this well-known God? I don't believe in fate, but I talk about fate, and I think this is fate. "
On May 28, 2020, Xie Weicai passed away at the age of 79, playing General Su Yu for a lifetime, Xie Weicai has become the "living Su Yu" in the minds of the audience.