Beauty Fighter Centenarian

Du Hui, 98 years old

16-year-old Du Hui

Student years

Guo Xiaochuan and Du Hui

Du Hui and son Guo Xiaolin

Family of seven ◎ Guo Xiaohui

Editor's note: March 28 is the death day of the famous poet Guo Xiaochuan's wife, Du Hui. Guo Xiaochuan and Du Hui's second daughter Guo Xiaohui wrote affectionately, remembering their mother's life.

Three years ago today, on March 28, 2019, my mother passed away at the age of 99 years and 21 days at the age of 99 years old and 21 days old at Beijing Songtang Care Hospital. Her body, in accordance with her repeated instructions during her lifetime, was donated to Capital Medical University.

She was born in a family of scholars, joined the party in high school, went to Yan'an alone, and fell in love with Guo Xiaochuan

Her mother's original name was Deng Huijun, born on March 7, 1920 in Dengjia Alley, Chengguan Town, Changshou County, Sichuan Province, where a family of 50 or 60 people lived in a compound. Her father, Deng Shilin, graduated from the Railway School in the late Qing Dynasty, and after returning home, he first served as a teacher and principal of a women's school in Changshou County, and then worked as a clerk in the Wanxian Construction Bureau and Chongqing Tianfu Coal Mine. Her mother, Tang Lang, was bedridden for many years until she died of illness before she was 8 years old. Her father loved her and let her go, and she was naughty and stubborn from an early age, like a "son of a horse" (tomboy).

After her mother's death, she went to Fengdu County to live with her aunt Andi Zijun's family, attended junior high school in the county's private school of suitable girls, and received some national democratic revolution and communist enlightenment education. However, the Sichuan Provincial Department of Education rejected all the progressive schools and did not issue graduation certificates to the whole class, so the mother had to be admitted to a church school chengdu Huaying Girls' High School with the same academic strength, but this school forbade all words and deeds to resist Japan and save the dead. Her mother openly refused to sing the Bible and pray every day, and also led the way to the street market to collect donations to support the Suiyuan War of Resistance, and was expelled from the school.

After the outbreak of the All-out War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, she was admitted to the Chengdu Provincial Girls' High School, where she joined the Anti-Japanese Salvation Propaganda Team, participated in street lectures, sold anti-war publications, cut hair to collect donations, sewed cold clothes before support, and received military training for wartime students during the winter vacation. She joined the Communist Party of China on March 14, 1939.

When she was in her second year of high school, she knew that it was difficult for female students to find employment after graduation, and it was not desirable to marry someone as a concubine, so she wanted to go to the front line to fight devils, or go to Yan'an to study at the newly founded China Women's University. Through the arrangements of the party organization, she rushed to Yan'an alone in the late autumn of 1939, first changing her name to "Du Hui", and sewing the party's introduction letter, a small half-inch paper roll sealed with wax, into the seam of the armpit of her coat, taking a truck transporting medicinal materials to Baoji City, Shaanxi Province, and then taking a train to the Eighth Route Army Office in Xi'an Qixianzhuang. On the same day, I saw old man Wu Yuzhang, old man Lin Boqu and Wang Ming. He then went to Yan'an and studied at China Women's University and Northwest Public School for nearly six years.

After arriving in Yan'an, the beautiful and proud mother decided not to find the powerful, not to be an appendage of men, nor to be introduced by kind people, to seek or wait for equal love herself. She accepted her father, Guo Xiaochuan, who said that the young poet who had been a soldier of the Eighth Route Army for several years was "elegant in conversation, talented in nature, and deep in feelings", and the poetry became the "red thread of the soul" of the two men. Her father also loved her bravery, "spark of thought" and "edges" in character.

Simple marriage room, strange gifts, tempered in trials, born in war

After more than a year of love, in the Spring Festival of 1943, they held a simple and festive wedding: the father used yellow clay to pile a pair of sofas in the cave and spread old sheepskin, and the mother pasted the happy link written by the elderly Wu Yuzhang, "Du Lin deeply planted in the fern, small water for the river" to the wall, which is the new house. The room brought a large ocean iron barrel red date mung bean porridge, which was the wedding feast. The quilt of the newlyweds entering the cave is the big map of the world of fine white cloth that Wu Lao used to use the old and should be eliminated, which is a precious gift!

Just after the honeymoon, the mother was mistakenly suspected of being a "spy" during the expanded trial campaign. She stood firm in the facts, refused to falsely confess her "crime", and was imprisoned in the cave for more than two years. During this time, she always believed in the revolution and believed in the party, and her attitude changed from initial resistance to cooperating with censorship, and she took a cold shower and exercised every day until she regained her freedom in August 1945. She went to Northwest College to visit her classmates and wrote in her parting words: "We must not stay, we must take a big step, break through the atmosphere of self-existence, abandon the narrow sense of personal superiority, and wear away the edges and corners of those exposed performances!" We have endured and succumbed to the baptism of a truly new class, and we have begun to grow. ”

In her later years, she wrote in a Yan'an commemorative book: "Yan'an, great mother!" I threw myself at you with fire-like feelings! You tempered me with a fire-like test! Real gold needs to be refined by fire! Dear Mother, you have made me purer and stronger. ”

In the autumn and winter of 1945, my parents were successively sent to work in My father's hometown of Dongfengning County, Rehe Province, where my father was the first county magistrate of the Communist Party and my mother was the director of the county women's federation. A southern girl went to the poor north, slept in cold kang, ate millet and mixed noodles, and wore saltwater wild garlic.

In the autumn of 1946, when the Kuomintang entered Rehe, my father went to Rexi to carry out guerrilla warfare, and my mother, who was eight months pregnant, rode in an ox cart with her family, traveled night and night, and retreated to the northeast. The road was bumpy and bumpy, and she rolled off the bullock cart and fell into a pit, and the rut of the car rolled over her crotch, nearly injuring the fetus. In Linxi County, Inner Mongolia, my mother gave birth to my brother, who worked alone with her children during the war and had to avoid the plague. My father insisted on suppressing bandits and the agrarian revolution in the case of 14 district squads in 15 districts and the killing of dozens of cadres and fighters, and was surrounded by the enemy twice, and survived. When the parents are reunited for a long time, the child is already one year and seven months old. The father said, "I didn't expect the children to be so old!" Based on this arduous experience, my father composed a long narrative poem "Hymn of Snow".

In the summer of 1948, my mother began to engage in party propaganda work, first working in the Rehe Mass Daily. On the day of the liberation of Tianjin, parents and sons entered Tianjin one after another. After working for Tianjin Daily for half a year, they were transferred to Wuhan to work in the Propaganda Department of the Central And Southern Bureau.

In 1950, her mother published a search notice in Chongqing Daily, and only then did she find her stepmother and several younger siblings. At this time, her father had been killed by cancer three years ago due to poverty and illness.

I think of my father, my mother died of illness at the age of 16 and a half, and I left home to join the army before I was 18 years old. The old father and his adopted daughter lived a miserable life in Beiping, longing for thoughts, and for 12 years there was no news, until in the spring of 1949, my father took his wife and son and went home to save his relatives. This period is bitter, as evidenced by his father's essay "Three Diaries of Returning Home". The experiences of their parents represent the fate of many people in their two generations.

In the spring of 1953, my parents were transferred back to Beijing and first worked in the Central Propaganda Department. In 1958, my mother worked at Guangming Daily until she left, working first as an editor, a reporter, and then a librarian.

The beautiful mother gradually lost her grace and tenderness, and her strange behavior made people cry and laugh

When the mother is a young girl, she is beautiful but not self-aware, and when she is young, she is beautiful, self-loving, brave and strong. Beautiful and healthy in middle age, well-proportioned, not tall, often wearing half-heeled shoes, there is a kind of elegance in simplicity. The first to wear a skirt in the summer, there is a pale blue-gray skirt worn for many years. She would change her own clothes and sew herself collarless and sleeveless silk Braji.

In the fifties and sixties, she was a mother of three children. Every day at work, my aunt and aunt have me at home doing housework and taking care of the children. The family lives in the East Cross Courtyard in a courtyard near Wangfujing in Beijing, and has a good life, flowers and plants in the yard, and there are pigeons, parrots, rabbits and other small animals. His father worked (for seven or eight years in the China Writers Association, as secretary general of the Writers Association and deputy secretary of the party group, and later transferred to the People's Daily as a reporter) was extremely busy, working during the day and writing at night. Mothers were often the first readers of father's poems. They were passionately in love. In their spare time, they would take our three children swimming, skating or going to the park. My father often took pictures and developed photos in the small backyard with a date tree, leaving many beautiful moments.

Since the 1960s, her mother's maverick and unwilling nature to be bound has not changed, and she has fired cannons at meetings several times and said "wrong" things, resulting in her being criticized for many years, suppressed and demoted. Her gentle motherhood is fading, but she is more scrappy under political pressure. Fighting ourselves - the so-called "criticism and self-criticism", reform and reform; fighting the family, afraid that we will make mistakes and sensitive to discovering loopholes, eager to correct "mistakes", and even on the line, interfering, criticizing and preaching. She became difficult to communicate, lacking understanding and loving-kindness, like a tightly wound machine. This spirit of struggle has hurt my father and alienated us.

Although she can also cook on fire and take needles and threads, she always feels that she emphasizes books and newspapers more than chai, rice, oil and salt, more thoughts than life, principles rather than family affection, less fireworks in the world, and children's love is not long.

In life, she is also innovative, different from ordinary people. In those years, she would saw the isolation board of the wardrobe into two pieces of case board, would let us eat shabu lamb dipped in salad dressing, would listen to a message and move the bed from east to west to north and south on the same day, would say that there was a suspicion of "exploitation" and dismissed the hourly workers invited by her father due to illness, would dump the sherry that I had so hard to pickle, would forbid us to eat pine blossom eggs, ginger, etc., would put plastic bags on the bottles and cans in the kitchen, would see oil stars in the pot after frying and shout... Her eccentricities make us cry and laugh, as if she had extended the blind and unquestionable object of faith from the political realm to the scope of life, from newspaper editorials to pseudo-nutrition books and pseudo-health books—carefully studied with red pens, followed and pushed to extremes.

In those years, I tried to be silent in front of her, even avoiding her closeness and touch. After I was transferred back to Beijing from Henan, I chose to teach at Chinese Min University in the suburbs, squeezing into office accommodation and not wanting to go home.

In the ten years before her father's death, she was caring for him but could not understand the "heart". During her father's trial under house arrest in Tuanbowa, she visited several times, and as soon as she got out of the car, she dismantled the bedding, cleaned the room, cleaned the dust, cigarette butts, medicine bottles and full of pages on the table, which was jokingly called "starting a circle". She tried to do ideological work for her father and repeatedly persuaded her, but she did not speculate and could not communicate, causing her father to stay away. Nine months before my father's death, they didn't correspond — in contrast, in the fifties and sixties, they had hundreds of passionate love letters!

But her love for her father was consistent, and she said in her later years that "I have had the happiest and happiest love in my life." She was 56 years old when her father died early in 1976, and for more than forty years she never had any emotional wavering, but collected, preserved and sorted out her father's manuscripts and a large number of related materials day after day. She donated most of her father's manuscripts to the Museum of Modern Chinese Literature. She supported her hometown Fengning County and Chengde City to set up the "Guo Xiaochuan Research Association" and published books. The people of Fengshan Town, her hometown, still remember sitting on a small bench all day at the age of 60 or 70, writing picture descriptions one by one, and organizing an exhibition of her father's life for "Guo Xiaochuan's Former Residence".

Still independent and stubborn, while common sense, affection and motherhood are gradually returning

Since 1998, I have been collating and researching my father's manuscripts (such as participating in the collation and editing of the Complete Works of Guo Xiaochuan, writing a doctoral dissertation in political science based on my father's experience as a basic material, and writing "Guo Xiaochuan's Pictorial Biography" - two sets of "Guo Xiaochuan Memorial Anthology" edited by my brother Guo Xiaolin, entitled "One Person and One Era"), and later participated in the 90th, 95th and centenary commemorations of my father. For more than twenty years, I have become closer and closer to my parents' generation and have become more and more understanding of my mother. They actually have strong faith and great feelings. They look down on life and death, but they believe in the future. She was an old revolutionary who had believed in communism all her life; she was a good person, a lifelong believer in people.

When I think of my mother, I think of a beautiful, tough, independent, stubborn, stubborn little old lady, and in her old age, I added kindness.

In 2002, my 82-year-old mother ended living alone and lived with our brothers and sisters for nineteen years. With the progress and development of all aspects of the mainland, the mother continues to study and study, the family takes care of each other and cares for each other, and her common sense, family affection and motherhood gradually return. She once refused to spend the New Year with her family. One day on the first day of the Chinese New Year, my brother-in-law came to the family with dumpling skins, good dumpling fillings, and mixed cold vegetables, but my mother said: "We don't want that set in the revolutionary family!" Later, she gradually accepted and later even looked forward to the harmonious and beautiful atmosphere of her children and grandchildren. She is willing to play mahjong with her family, but she is never allowed to use money, even if it is a dime to win or lose!

The mother remained independent and stubborn. She doesn't rely on others or turn to people for help, and always feels that she can overcome any hardships and hardships. She would go to the National Art Museum of China alone to see the exhibition, bring some dry food for lunch, and see that she would go home in the afternoon, even if her legs hurt and her waist was sore. Once, after visiting the exhibition, she brought back two sketches of the heads painted by yuan ye, which had her beautiful and powerful inscription: "I am a rare healthy old man, willing to provide services for painters for free!" ——89-year-old Du Hui". When her back hurts, she doesn't let anyone help, even if she moves for half an hour before she gets out of bed. When she got sick, we put an electric bell on her bedside, but she used it twice!

My mother loved sports all her life, and she worked as a basketball and volleyball team leader in middle school, took cold water baths for many years, rode bicycles until she was in her 80s, and swam until she was in her 90s. The white hair is bright without dyeing, the skin is firm and elastic, and the body is natural and healthy without fat powder or clothing. Nearly 69 years old, she rode her Hungarian-made 28 Kun car to Tianjin Hundred Flowers Literary and Art Publishing House to read the sample of "Guo Xiaochuan's Family Book Selection", traveled more than 200 kilometers in three days, and also wrote a newsletter, reporting that the "Sanyuanchun Halal Restaurant" in Yangcun, Wuqing County, provided free tea for farmers, warm service, and was praised by the leaders of Tianjin Municipality, and instructed to carry out activities to improve service quality in the commercial system.

My mother did not eat too much in her life, did not eat greedily, had less oil and salt, and more fresh vegetables. She would put her rations into a bowl and stop when she was finished, never moving her chopsticks, even if she attended a sumptuous meal. She would skim off all the oil stars, throw away all the fat, and eat the aromatic and tasteless soup as long as it was good for the body.

The mother was not rich, generous, and had few ideas of propriety. With money, he never saved for himself, and every New Year's Day he gave candy to postmen, sanitation workers, property workers and garden workers in nearby parks. In the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, the 88-year-old took out two celebrity calligraphy paintings in her collection - Wu Guanzhong's painting and Zhao Puchu's characters, pulled a small car by bus to Rongbaozhai for auction, and the auction proceeds of nearly one million yuan were donated to the disaster area.

Mother has faith, one believes that the distant ideal world will surely come; two believe in the party and leaders; three believe in herself, believe that she can overcome any difficulties, and live longer and more wonderfully than those who have straightened her out!

My mother is optimistic and cheerful, and always feels that life will get better and better every day, and the traffic in Beijing will become smoother and smoother every day.

Mother's mind is simple, the door is always open, the door and window are never closed. She believes in people and would rather be deceived than guard against people. In the early 1960s, a man posing as the adopted son of a general in the People's Liberation Army went around Beijing and swindled my mother out of 400 kilograms of food stamps and a Laika camera that my father bought back from the Soviet Union. Later, the public security officer informed my family that this person was a Qinghai labor reform prisoner, but he could not get his things back. Mothers do not remember revenge, do not remember hatred. What has passed is the past, and there will be no entanglement and anxiety about it.

Mother is not without temper, she is spontaneous and improvised, occasionally angry, and forgets when she is finished. One year during the Mid-Autumn Festival, our family gathered, played poker after dinner, my mother would not, I couldn't understand it when I saw it, I couldn't hear it clearly, I was in a hurry for half a day, and finally I couldn't help it, and I blew us all apart!

The mother is getting older, more and more like an old child who does not obey "discipline". In the spring, when the neighbors pick up toon trees, she wants to interfere: "You are not allowed to destroy public property!" "The neighbors had no problem with her, the long-lived old lady with a high voice in her ears, so they had to complain to me." To go for a walk, she specially picked the path up and down the hill, and did not allow anyone to help her, claiming to be "for exercise"; walking unsteadily, and let the caregiver be far away from her, pretending that she did not have a nurse.

In order to get me to sleep for a while, she struggled to catch her breath

Mother lived to be a hundred years old! Her departure leaves me with the least amount of regret than my other deceased relatives— my aunt, my father, and my daughter—because I served her in her old age until I was old. Reason told me not to be sad, but my relatives traveled far away, heaven and man were eternally separated, and they broke their bones and connected their hearts!

The most unforgettable two months before her death, on the night of the second day of the Chinese New Year, I heard the news that my sister came from "my mother is not good", stayed up all night, prayed and waited for the dawn, took the earliest train back from Tianjin, and went straight to Songtang Care Hospital. Seeing that my mother was weak, weak, panting, a large wound on the surface of her foot that had not healed, and a hoarse sound was still coming from her throat, as if she was struggling to breathe. I smiled as hard as I could in her face, turned around and burst into tears, afraid to close my eyes all night long, extremely worried.

The room was new, the toilet and water pipe were far away, and the cold air was directly fed when the door was opened. The nurse was also replaced and did not take care of it at night. I didn't know where to go for help, so I had to suffer minute by minute, waiting for the doctor to come to the morning shift. In the middle of the night, I lay on the bed opposite my mother and looked at her, my head at her feet, and I could notice it if she moved or made a little noise. Together for a few minutes, I laid a pillow for her, changed her diaper, stroked her back, and adjusted the height of the bed so that she could be more comfortable. Suddenly, I fell asleep, i don't know if I slept for a few minutes or ten minutes, and suddenly woke up, and I was shocked to see that the guardrail next to my mother's bed was not erected.

When I got up and turned on the light, my mother did not make a sound, motionless, and her left hand grasped the guardrail next to the bed, not letting it make a creaking sound. It turned out that my mother was hurting me, and just to let me sleep for a while, she had a hard time holding her breath!

Mom, mom who is nearly 100 years old! Destiny is like a gossamer mother! For the sake of your daughter, what kind of grievances have you endured! Mom, thinking of this night always makes me wet with tears...

Recently, I sorted out my mother's manuscript and found that she had left two pages like this at the age of 95, which read:

Initial draft will Du Hui December 4, 2015

[I'm] an old Communist, an absolute atheist

1. After death, there is no need to take the initiative to notify any relatives and friends, and it is enough to slowly inform them later, and no ceremony will be held.

2. The remains are sent to the hospital for autopsy and medical aid.

3. The ashes are buried in the ground, trees can be planted, and a photo of the parents can be left at home.

4. Membership dues are paid at the time of death.

5. For decades, I have deeply felt the care and care of the party and government of Guangming Daily.

6. The children have always been very filial, very caring, caring for me, I am very happy and satisfied. thank!

7. Thank you to all the comrades and friends who care about me!

8. I went to see Marx with love and a smile. I am proud that I have never said a word in my life, and I have never coveted a penny of money in my life...

The manuscript seems to be unfinished, and the afterglow is endless, floating through the sky.

2022.3.7 Second Draft of Mom's Birthday

2022.3.257 drafts

Photo courtesy of Guo Xiaohui