Mr. Song Feijun is a physicist who studies optics, and he is also the eldest grandson of Feng Zikai. In the middle of last year, at the suggestion of his friend Lin Song, a teacher of the department of Chinese at Peking University, he recalled the "classroom" tradition of his grandfather Feng Zikai's family that he had experienced more than half a century ago, and wrote down the story of learning poetry around his grandfather, which was collected into two elegant volumes of "Feng Zi Kai Family School".
Feng Zikai reads a newspaper with his grandson Song Feijun (right) and his youngest son, Feng Xinmei (left). Song Feijun was in the second year of junior high school.
Last Saturday, I went to visit Mr. Song at his house. The access control system of the building where he lives looks very convenient, directly embedded with buttons marked with the number of each house, no need to enter manually, only to press, the owner of the house is aware of the arrival of the guest, remote control to open the door. But I didn't use it —when I pulled out my phone and wanted to check the house number again, the door suddenly opened silently, and Mr. Song stood by the door holding his hand, wearing a pair of thin-rimmed glasses, thin and gentle, just not wearing a suit, but wearing a home gray sweater, which made him more like a familiar elder. He smiled kindly and said, "I just saw you pass by the window, looking at the same as the WeChat avatar, thinking that you are coming." He spoke with a soft southern accent.
When we entered the house, we understood: Mr. Song's study window was facing the road outside, the desk was under the window, and he had just sat at the desk reading a book. The book was still spread out on the table in an open posture, estimated from the thickness, about half of it read, and the pages were printed with tables and mathematical and physical formulas. Just a few minutes before our agreed time, he was still buried in it. I remembered that when I asked for an interview on WeChat before, he said that "recently scientific research has been busy a little", it seems that it is not "a little". I secretly calculated that he was born in 1942, he was almost eighty years old, and he was in a trance about whether he had miscalculated.
It was not until later when I saw his article "Grandpa Feng Zikai Encouraged Me to Study Physics" that I realized that seizing the time to study and study has long been Song Feijun's habit from when he was a student, which largely comes from Grandpa Feng Zikai's sincere exhortation to him that "the golden year does not come again, it is difficult to get another morning, in time to work hard, and the years do not treat people". He grew up to be 18 years old around his grandfather, and in his upbringing, cultural nourishment and even life choices, his grandfather was like a wise guide.
Over the years, Song Feijun has told the story of his grandfather on many occasions, and the artist style is wonderfully parallel to his own status as a scientist. Just like in the study, the whole bookshelf behind him is clear and properly divided into three parts vertically: on the far left is the complete works, cartoons, and translations of Grandpa Feng Zikai, in the middle are literary history books, and on the far right are physics books. The subtitle of "Feng Zi Kai Jia Shu Class" is "Grandpa taught me to learn poetry", in fact, what is recorded in the book is the life of three generations from Feng Zi Kai to Song Feijun, who are connected by poetry. Fengjia's family education is full of time-spanning, artistic warmth, and decades later, not only Can Song Feijun still be able to speak casually, but it is enough for ordinary readers of our descendants to yearn for it, as if they can still privately shu a few points from it.
Feng Zi Kai Jia Shu Class by Song Feijun East China Normal University Press
/"Sun and Moon In the Sun and Moon Building"/
In 1938, in order to avoid the Japanese Kou, Feng Zikai and his family came to Guilin from the "Yuanyuan Hall" in Shimen Bay, Tongxiang, Zhejiang. At the invitation of Zhu Kezhen, president of Zhejiang University, he moved to Yishan, Guangxi (present-day Yizhou District) early the following year to serve as a faculty member of Zhejiang University, which moved west to here, teaching art education and art appreciation. After that, he continued to move with Zhejiang University to Zunyi, Guizhou.
Although Feng Zikai wrote an article jokingly calling it an "artistic escape", he actually took a large family of people to the tops and downs and went through countless hardships. Unexpectedly, but harvested a windfall in a war. Worried about the impact on their children's studies during the escape, Feng Zikai invited two young people who had just graduated from Zhejiang University to tutor them in science and English, one of whom was a biology graduate named Song Mufa. Soon, Song Mufa and Feng Linxian, the second lady of the Feng family (later renamed Feng Wanyin), fell in love and married. Perhaps because the reunion and happy events in the war were too rare, on September 7, 1941, when the wedding was held in the Chengdu Sichuan Restaurant in Zunyi, Shengyou Ruyun, historian Zhang Qiyun, physicist Shu Xingbei and other scholars and celebrities attended, and the witness was the mathematician Su Buqing, who was a friend of Feng Zikai and a fellow countryman of Song Mufa.
On Qingming Day in 1942, the young couple's first child was born. The new life born in the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression brought great joy to the family. Feng Zikai, who had gone to Chongqing as a professor at the National Art College, gave his son-in-law Song Mufa the name of the newborn "Fei Jun": the Qingming Dynasty was called "Fang Fei Festival", the King of Fang Fei, "containing the meaning of ordinary greatness". Among Feng Zikai's seven children (of which the third daughter Feng Ningxin was the daughter of Feng Zikai's third sister Feng Feng), Feng Lin was the first to marry and have children, so Song Feijun became the "first" of Feng Zikai's grandchildren, and the other younger siblings were born after the end of the War of Resistance, and they were much younger than him. Song Feijun is only four years younger than Feng Zikai's youngest son, Feng Xinmei, and has also made jokes of "in the future, I will be as old as my uncle and call you daddy", which caused Grandpa to draw a funny family caricature.
In May 1942, when Song Feijun was full moon, Feng Zikai gladly painted this "full moon portrait" for his grandson.
After the end of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in 1946, Feng Zikai and his family returned from Chongqing to their hometown of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, first settling in Hangzhou and then moving to Shanghai. Located in the apartment of Changle Village on South Shaanxi Road, the balcony skylight can see the sun rising and the moon setting, and Feng Zikai named it "Sun and Moon Tower". Song Feijun' primary and secondary schools were in Shanghai, and he lived with his grandfather for a long time until he was admitted to the physics department of Peking University at the age of 18 and went to Beijing to study. During this period, like his mother, uncles and aunts, he also had the privilege of experiencing Feng Zikai's unique "lessons". "Lesson" is not a noun, but a verb structure, just like Song Feijun often notes in English here "teaching the kids", "lesson" is a verb. Feng Zikai attaches great importance to the education of his children, personally teaching his children at home, from children to grandchildren, which constitutes a unique family education tradition. "Jia Shu" teaches two courses, English and Ancient Chinese, English to study Lincoln's Declaration of Independence, etc., and ancient Chinese is to teach ancient poetry. When Song Feijun was a child, he had seen his grandfather give lessons to his aunt Feng Yiyin and his brother-in-law Feng Xinmei, and when he was in the fourth grade of primary school, it was finally his turn.
Song Feijun recalled that at that time, he would go back to his grandfather's house every Saturday for one night and then go back on Sunday night. Before Grandpa went to class, he first asked him to memorize the poems he had learned last week, and then teach a new lesson. Each time I taught twenty or thirty poems and one ancient text, I first learned the "Nineteen Ancient Poems", memorized the "Line and Line" and "Roundabout Morning Glory", and then gradually expanded, including the Book of Poetry, Mencius, and the Ancient Literature Guanzhi. Her mother, Feng Wanyin, was engaged in middle school Chinese teaching, teaching her grandfather as a teaching assistant, and usually teaching Song Feijun to learn poetry. What impressed him deeply was that when he studied the Tang and Song dynasties, the "teaching material" used was the manuscript "Baixiang Dictionary" (selected words compiled by Shu Menglan in the Qing Dynasty), which was also a version copied by his mother and sisters due to the scattered collection of books during the War of Resistance, and it was still used by his grandchildren to study. Interestingly, the dictionary contains Li Hou lord's words "Broken Line" missed a sentence "Fengge Longlou Lian Xiao Han, Yushu Qiongzhi as a smoke lotus", the copied mother and sister-in-law have been leaking, and even Song Feijun also followed the wrong back in the future, and only found out many years later.
From the senior grade of primary school to the end of high school, in seven or eight years, according to Song Feijun's estimation, there were about a thousand poems learned. The brother-in-law Feng Xin was much more than him, and it was said that he could recite two thousand pieces. From a formal point of view, "class" and formal class are no different, the amount of homework is really not small, but the children do not feel bored or heavy burden, because Feng Zikai is really interesting and tight, "with the grandfather to learn poetry is fun." Grandpa often chanted poems while sketching a vivid little painting next to him. Song Feijun remembered that once when du Fu's "painting the province recognizes the spring wind and the face, and the ring is in the air to return to the night and moon soul", Grandpa sketched a girl, with a fluttering belt and a variety of accessories, as if jingling in the ear. The picture floats, and he remembers the poem very well from then on.
Feng Zikai's painting of the young daughter Feng Yiyin and the young son Feng Xinmei reading and translating in the "Sun Moon Building".
As Feng Zikai once wrote in the article, "I think that the poetry of the ancients is very rarely cute in its entirety, and what I love is often a paragraph in one piece, or one sentence." This sentence I satirize is insufficient, often copy him on a small note, glued to the right, at any time to appreciate", his love and appreciation of poetry, is freehand and interested. The same is true when "lessons", he does not seem to care what era the author is, or whether he is famous, as long as there is a pictorial meaning and a story in the poem, through the allusions of the poem, he tells the children about Yue Fei Yang's family general, and also talks about ZhaiZi without words; it is not like the school language class, word by word, to explain the words word by word, but to point out the fun and mood in the poem, which is Tao Yuanming's style of "good reading does not seek to understand".
Although it is interesting to learn, after learning, Feng Zikai must also ask to memorize it. Song Feijun said that Grandpa's proposition is that different ages have different understandings of poetry, and it doesn't matter if they don't understand it now, first recite it, and will naturally understand in the future, "just like Li Shangyin's poems, when they grow up and fall in love, they will naturally understand." This is contrary to the concept of many people "understanding and then memorizing". Song Feijun said that his Chinese teacher in junior high school did not agree with this, asked who said it, and learned that it was Feng Zikai's words, and the teacher was silent. Come to think of it, the master always has his reasoning.
/ Poetry for a lifetime /
Compared with school education, Song Feijun feels that the most special point of Grandpa Feng Zikai's teaching of poetry is "non-utilitarian" - the school lets the memorization of ancient poems for examinations and diplomas, but Grandpa's "lessons" are vivid and pleasant, and what is cultivated for children is an aesthetic taste and cultural accomplishment, a kind of "richness of the emotional world". Japanese scholar Kojiro Yoshikawa said that Toyoko kai is "the artist who most resembles an artist", and his education of his children is also pure and artistic, and the seven children have become talents, although they are not specialized in classical literature in the future, but poetry has always been the fun and sustenance in their lives.
Under the traditional cultivation of "lessons", the feng family's children have profound achievements in ancient literature. When Song Feijun was a child in Shanghai, her grandfather, aunt and brother-in-law lived in the "Sun Moon Building", and every weekend and New Year's Day, other children also came back, and when they got together, poetry games naturally became an important activity of this big family. The most commonly played is Fengjia's original "Flying Flower Order", the gameplay is quite interesting: everyone wants a poem for someone to guess, the guesser can ask questions randomly, and when the person who asks answers, he must say a poem containing the words in the poem in order. This game can be played in all kinds of bits and pieces, waiting for a car, drinking tea, boating, anytime, anywhere, is a portable pastime. The only requirement is that there must be a certain accumulation of poetry, but this is not difficult for the Feng family. Song Feijun remembers that one day the whole family visited the City God Temple, and when they ate at a restaurant at noon, they sat idly after ordering food, and the game began again. The guesser this time was uncle Feng Huazhan, and the poem agreed upon by everyone was "Nine Mile Mountain Front Battle Ground", which is a folk song quoted in "Water Margin". When the uncle returned, the first person to ask questions was his nephew Song Feijun, who had to answer with a verse with the word "nine". After asking the three people, just after talking about "mountain", the uncle blurted out "Nine Mile Mountain Front Battle Ground" without thinking, and everyone was amazed. This was the fastest guess of the answer in Song Feijun's impression, so the memory was the most profound. Feng Huazhan is the "Zhan Zhan" depicted in Feng Zikai's children's cartoons, and the cute child on the painting was already teaching in the English Department of Fudan University at that time, and his ancient Literary skills were quite profound. In addition, there is also a often played "Lansheng Map", which is somewhat similar to the poetry version of "Monopoly", which is a rather elegant toy. When the family members played the "lyricist", or played the "beauty", or played the "fisher father", when the line stopped on the chessboard, Song Feijun remembered that grandpa often sat next to him, or drank wine to watch the children and grandchildren's entertainment, or recited poems and walked around the room.
Like many modern Chinese literati between the old and the new, Feng Zikai wrote good vernacular prose and had a deep traditional literary foundation, with fine literature, painting, and music, but Song Feijun told me that before my grandfather died in 1975, what he said to his brother-in-law Feng Xinmei was poetry. "Poetry accompanied Grandpa all his life." From the fragments recorded in the "Feng Zi Kai Family School Lesson", it is easy to feel the gentle "companionship" of poetry to Feng Zi Kai, which transcends knowledge or cultivation, has long been melted into the bones, and is the echo of different generations of personnel in reality - during the War of Resistance and Escape, Feng Zi Kai taught his children and grandchildren Yue Fei", "Man Jiang Hong" and the Southern Song Dynasty Xu Junbao's wife's "Man Ting Fang Han Shang Prosperous"; and by 1944, the war that lasted for seven years entered the counter-offensive stage, and in the Mid-Autumn Festival of that year, Feng Zi kai, who lived in Shapingba, Chongqing, was drunk. Waking up and parodying the songwriter Jiang Jie's "He Groom and Binghou Yu Wu" at the end of the Southern Song Dynasty as another poem, "He Groom", he swept away the original Chinese meaning of breaking the gloom, optimistically predicted that "there are tens of millions of planes coming to Japan, sweeping away the riots in the Central Plains, and returning me to the rivers and mountains"; moreover, in daily life, cats, crickets, crabs, piles and piles of things can lead him to casually recite two poems and paint a picture. When he is "in class", he does not force children to clarify the meaning of each word, but lets them experience the companionship of poetry to life, such an experience that travels through ancient and modern times and is related to themselves.
Feng Zikai painted Su Manshu's poem: "Spring rain building head shakuhachi, when to look at the Zhejiang tide." The mangshoe was uncovered and stepped across the cherry blossom bridge. ”
Jiangnan scenery is beautiful, rich in palms, Feng Zikai often takes the whole family to travel together, Nanjing, Lushan, Yangzhou, Taihu, wherever they go, everyone will chant ancient poems about here, not for competition, but very much like the daily literary lifestyle of ancient literati. Sometimes, even if it is completely exciting, it comes with pleasure. Song Feijun often likes to talk about the story of "Zhejiang Tide", that is, when he was in his first year of high school, one day he was studying with his grandfather Su Manshu's poem "Benshi Poetry Spring Rain", and Grandpa repeatedly recited "Spring Rain Building Head Shakuhachi, when to look at Zhejiang Tide" on the balcony of the "Sun and Moon Building", and suddenly asked as if he remembered something: "When is the tide of the Qiantang River?" Knowing that it was next Thursday, he decided to go to Haining to see the tide. Song Feijun's Fuxing Middle School is a key middle school in Shanghai, and the school generally does not allow personal leave, let alone go out to play, but Feng Zikai happily signed a fake note for his grandson. The class teacher asked the principal, and the principal saw that it was Feng Zikai who signed and made an exception to allow the leave. When Haining watched the tide, on the occasion of the future tide, seeing that there were still fishing people in the river, Grandpa casually recited Li Yi's "Jiangnan Qu": "Marry Qu Tang Jia, and take the wrong concubine period in the dynasty." Early know the tide has faith, marry and make the tide. After more than sixty years, Song Feijun still remembers that scene clearly, along with two poems, and has been remembered until now.
Today, Song Feijun has become an old gentleman older than his grandfather, and when he made an appointment to visit him, he told me to confirm it the night before because he had a "poor memory." But when talking face to face, the poems that he memorized with his grandfather when he was a teenager still remembered clearly, and he could still recite the whole text casually- "I have a very good memory." He told me that he had been given general anesthesia for surgery more than a decade ago, and on the first night after the operation, he suddenly thought about it when he was alone, worried that general anesthesia would not affect the brain, but lying there, he could not calculate mathematics to verify. He suddenly had a stroke of genius and memorized the "Long Hate Song", from beginning to end, without a word. So he was relieved, "It's all right." "Long Hate Song" was memorized when he was a child, and it is a long time since then, but the memory is still so strong that it is involved in the composition of his "long-term memory". Many years later, alone, he once again realized that the poem was "very beautifully written" and remembered the scene of reciting the poem next to his grandfather.
/ Interested to do well /
By this year's Qingming Festival, Mr. Song Feijun will turn 80 years old, but he still has not stopped to rest, and he is still busy every second. At present, he is a visiting researcher or consultant in three scientific research institutions, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and guides young scholars to do research. The main research is an important software, he told me, "foreign engaged in 30 years, China has just developed, the time is not long, but because I used to do international business, foreign research and development when I was there as a visiting scholar, and long-term engaged in the application of the software, then do something, do something." But he is relieved to say that progress is relatively fast. I suddenly remembered what he wrote in the book, when he was encouraged to study physics many years ago, his grandfather Feng Zikai once said to him, "Physics is not easy to learn, but those who have ambitions can do it."
Most of the children of the Feng family followed Feng Zikai and took the road of art, language and culture, but as the eldest grandson, Song Feijun took a different path and took the road of science and engineering. It was Grandpa Feng Zikai himself who guided him. Song Feijun's grades in school were quite excellent, his interests were wide, he liked literature under the influence of his family, his math and science scores were good, he also liked to draw, and wanted to learn art, so when he was divided into arts and sciences, he made difficulties and thought about it left and right. On the eve of registration, he went to his grandfather for advice. To this day, he still remembers that his grandfather was still taking a cup of tea as usual, pacing back and forth on the balcony, and chanting Wen Tingjun's poem: "Whoever takes the boat to find Fan Li, the five lakes smoke and water forget the machine." In the house, Song Feijun, who was facing the first major life choice, could not "forget the opportunity". He poured out his heart full of distress to his grandfather, Feng Zikai listened but did not think much about it, and quickly expressed his opinion: "Our family learns a lot of literature, art, and foreign languages, your math and science scores are so good, and you like astronomy, I think it is better to go to The North University Physics." Not only the selection of science, but also the "Physics of Peking University", so clear, although it is only a suggestion, but Song Feijun, who was hesitating at the time, listened, the balance in his heart tilted, and the chess pieces had a settled direction. During the college entrance examination, his first choice really filled in the physics department of Peking University and was finally successfully admitted.
In the world of physics, this incident has become a famous anecdote. "Physics" magazine once asked Song Feijun to write this story, and he wrote an article entitled "Grandpa Feng Zikai Encouraged Me to Study Physics". Many friends watched it, and they were very curious about why Feng Zikai, as a master of art, would encourage his grandson to abandon literature and take a path that seemed more difficult, and Song Feijun himself felt that the choice of this life path was quite accidental- "If I didn't go to my grandfather that night, I would probably go to the Academy of Fine Arts to become a painter, right?" He often pondered these delicate moments of life, looking for signposts for answers in the previous growth fragments.
More than forty years ago, Feng Zikai also experienced such a night as an "important threshold". At that time, he was studying at the Hangzhou First Normal School, and Li Shutong served as the school's art and music teacher, and among the many students, he took advantage of Feng Zikai's artistic talent and guided him to take the artistic path when he came to hand in his homework one night. Feng Zikai said: "Since this night, I have made up my mind to study painting and dedicate my life to art, and I have not changed my mind until now. However, Grandpa once told Song Feijun that in fact, he had studied all subjects very well and was very interested in geometry, but after he was determined to dedicate himself to art, he gave up other courses. The lives of the grandchildren are like intertextuality, so some people speculate that it is because life is only once, you can't choose two roads at the same time, Feng Zikai took this one, and he wanted his grandson to try the "unchosen road"? For Song Feijun, this is indeed like a mystery, but he has always known clearly that Grandpa never plans the life of his children, and as he traces back further, he realizes more and more that Grandpa's suggestions did not arise on a whim, but planted seeds from a longer time ago.
When Song Feijun and his classmates made their own telescopes to look at the stars in high school, Feng Zikai painted this small painting for him.
As Feng Zikai said, Song Feijun "likes astronomy", which has been since junior high school. He often went to the "Sun Moon Building" to tell his grandfather, aunt and brother-in-law the story of the stars, and his grandfather also told many poems about the stars by the way. In the first year of high school, Song Feijun and a few classmates made a simple telescope with the lens they found in the flea market, and they did not expect to be able to see jupiter's moons, Saturn's rings, and so on. He excitedly told his grandfather that Feng Zikai was very interested in listening to it, and also specially painted a picture: "Homemade telescope, the sky looks at Mars, look carefully, he travels every year." Looking back on this small matter, Song Feijun suddenly realized that Grandpa's attention and maintenance of his strengths and interests had actually begun early - at the same time, he was also surprised to have an unexpected discovery: it turned out that Grandpa himself was also a real astronomy enthusiast! After graduating from the Department of Physics of Peking University in 1966, Song Feijun has been engaged in optical engineering research and optical instrument manufacturing for many years, making instruments that are many times more precise than the "homemade telescope" of that year, but the simple and cute little painting is always like a key to open the door.
People love the wonderful family cartoons drawn by Feng Zikai, and the fun comes from his careful observation of each of his children. Feng Zikai likes children, has been engaged in education all his life, has a quite in-depth and unique thinking about education, and has drawn a series of satirical cartoons about education, opposing the model of shaping children according to a unified model. Before Song Feijun himself was aware of it, Grandpa had an insight into what he liked in his heart. Song Feijun experienced her grandfather's thoughts, "He never plans for the child, but it does not mean that he does not care, he is carefully observing and pondering the child's strengths and hobbies." He realized from his own growth path that only by doing what he likes and is good at can he do well. "Years later, in his own family education, Song Feijun also continued to resolutely implement this educational concept - his two daughters, who were not interested in mathematics, but they both followed in the footsteps of their great-grandfather, loved music and engaged in related work from an early age." Not a single one of them has studied mathematics, physics and chemistry! Song Feijun laughed, but "force them to learn, it is definitely not good to learn, only if they are interested can they do well and be happy."
When he was young, he was able to grow up in Shuxiang Mendi and received a lot of influence from an early age, and Song Feijun felt that he was very lucky. In addition to poetry, he also studied painting with his grandfather for several years since he was a child, and also learned Huqin with Ni Qiuping, the violinist of Peking Opera master Mei Lanfang, and is still accompanying peking opera clubs in Peking University. These many literary and artistic hobbies, in their spare time, nourished him and constituted his "colorful spiritual world". At the end of last year, the last of the second generation of the Feng family, the little aunt Feng Yiyin, passed away, and fewer and fewer people had experienced the "lessons", which made Song Feijun suddenly feel some urgency. As the oldest of the third generation and the longest with his grandfather, he felt obligated to write these stories down. Although the times have passed and masters are rare, which has become a family tradition that is difficult to replicate, Song Feijun still sincerely hopes that these "parenting" stories can give some reference to today's parents - perhaps, another way to teach children to learn can be used to create another pleasant and comfortable family education atmosphere.