1939, Kunming, Southwest United Congress.
In the classroom made of loess and thatch, there was a fierce quarrel.
"Snap!"
The teacher, dressed in a lake white robe, closed the book, casually rolled it up, and pointed to the students who had just argued with him.
"Stop! It is not easy for you to convince me, and I am not easy to convince you," he said suddenly, "and I can't even convince my wife, although the spirit of democracy lies in persuasion." ”
These words made the students laugh loudly, and they had long forgotten the "academic dispute" of Fang Cai.
After saying that, he also glanced at Wang Zengqi, who was deserting, and sighed heavily.
And the reason why he didn't want to see Wang Zengqi was simple - Xiao Wang didn't like to take notes in class.
This teacher who insisted on taking notes was Zhu Ziqing.
He was born in the last days of a feudal dynasty, and rested on the eve of the dawn of a new era, in the battle of obscurity and awakening, walking through half a century.
"Spring", "Hurry", "Lotus Pond Moonlight", "Back Shadow", this man who is favored by language teaching materials, is a clear lotus that will never wither in the Chinese literary world.
Today is his death day.
01
The childhood that has been washed away by the great water is only a thin shadow
Zhu Ziqing was born on November 22, 1898, to a family of eunuchs in Donghai, Jiangsu Province.
His grandfather Zhu Zeyu served as an inquisitor of Donghai County for more than ten years during the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty.
At the age of five, he and his mother moved to Yangzhou with their father Zhu Hongjun and settled in the ancient city.
The sound of pulp is far away, the lights and shadows are enough, and the river that flows slowly carries his childhood time.
His father has been extremely strict with him since he was a child, often with a straight face, not smiling, the mother is gentle, but in the matter of educating children, she does not have much say.
Private school in the day, picking up lights at night, the beauty of traditional Chinese literature has since planted seeds in his heart.
But he was only a child after all.
When he tried to replay the tape of his childhood, a subtle and complicated feeling always came to mind.
He once said: "The memory of childhood is only a thin shadow, like being washed by a great water, lonely to a terrible extent." ”
He looked like a standard literati.
Cold, introverted, knowledgeable, but lonely.
At the age of eighteen, Zhu Ziqing became a student at Peking University, majoring in philosophy.
During his studies, he also took the time to get married and cultivated with his own green plum bamboo horse Wu Zhongqian.
Wu Zhongqian was the only daughter of Wu Weisan, a famous doctor in Yangzhou, and was engaged to Zhu Ziqing at the age of fourteen, although it was the fate of his parents, the two had a good relationship.
Young hair, in addition to husband and wife, but also confidant.
In 1920, Zhu Ziqing graduated early from the Philosophy Department of Peking University and began a twenty-year teaching career.
02
The secret after "Back Shadow": Father, I hated you
"I'll buy a few oranges and you'll be here, don't move around."
"I'm your dad!"
This famous meme, which is all the rage on the Internet, comes from Zhu Ziqing's essay "Back Shadow".
In addition to ridicule, the deep father-son relationship in this has touched countless people.
He climbed up with both hands and shrank his feet upwards; his fat body leaned slightly to the left, showing the appearance of effort. Then I saw his back, and my tears quickly flowed down. ”
We often say that fatherly love is like a mountain, and as we grow up day by day, the mountain becomes shorter and shorter, becoming a hill, a mound, and eventually a spring mud, forever nourishing the life of the next generation.
But between parents and children, love is not all, and sometimes there is "hate".
In fact, Zhu Ziqing and his father almost broke up.
"Back Shadow" was written in 1925, when Zhu Ziqing was already a professor in the Department of Chinese of Peking University, but the scene described in the text occurred in 1917, when his father sent him to Peking University to study.
"That winter, my grandmother died, and my father's messenger was handed over, and it was a day of misfortune."
Why did my grandmother die? Why did the father's messenger hand it over?
Behind all this, only because a woman is doing something wrong.
We often say that when men have money, they become bad, and Zhu Hongjun is no exception.
After the founding of the Republic of China, although monogamy was advocated, it was not difficult for rich and powerful men to marry their aunts.
Zhu Hongjun's hobby is precisely to marry his aunt's wife.
At that time, not long after Zhu Hongjun arrived in Xuzhou, he found an aunt and prepared to enter the door on a selected day.
But what he didn't expect was that his serious original wife had not yet spoken, and another aunt surnamed Pan took the lead in making trouble.
When this Pan Shi saw that he was recruiting a new person, he immediately cried and made trouble and hanged himself, and for a time the city was full of wind and rain, and the lace tabloids were flying all over the sky, and what was written on it was the ugly deeds of Zhu Hongjun.
What's more, because of this "lace news", the fact that he had embezzled public funds was also shaken out.
In this way, Zhu Hongjun lost his official position.
And Zhu Ziqing's old grandmother, when she heard that her son had lost his life and lost his official position, was so angry that she actually gave up.
At that time, Zhu Ziqing must have complained about his father in his heart.
But the real "hate" is because of his wife.
"He was shocked and sad, and naturally he couldn't help himself. In the middle, it is natural to be outside; family trifles often touch his anger. He treated me differently. ”
After Zhu Hongjun lost his official position, he never found any good errands, felt that the evening scenery was desolate, and with the guilt of his old mother, he gradually became irritable and irritable.
Zhu Ziqing was fine, studying outside, and the time spent with his father was short, but his wife, Wu Zhongqian, served his in-laws at home and raised children, and inevitably had to be angry with his father-in-law.
Wu Zhongqian was meek and humble, and often had a smile on her face, but this annoyed her old-fashioned and irritable father-in-law.
Zhu Hongjun believes that it is because of her daughter-in-law that she began to be unlucky, and she was so unlucky, but she was still laughing.
If you want to add to your sins, there is no excuse for it.
Wu Zhongqian was aggrieved in his heart, but he could not rebel, and as the days went on, he really became unsympathetic.
When Zhu Ziqing realized it, he was already beyond remorse.
"You ask me why I don't like to laugh now, how can I laugh now... You were fine at home, when you weren't home, I was lonely... I can't cry at the moment, I can't laugh when I laugh, you teach me to laugh, and I can't laugh. ”
Originally, the two small families have always had a good relationship, although they gather less and leave more, they always understand each other.
Although this matter was not Zhu Ziqing's fault, when he was wronged, his wife inevitably complained that he had not been home for a long time, leaving himself alone to bear the pain, and gradually, he also had a little cold.
Since then, Zhu Ziqing, who has been affected for no reason, finally broke out and became more and more estranged from his father.
Until 1925, Zhu Hongjun wrote a letter to him, mentioning that he was afraid that time was running out.
In the face of life and death, what is the deep hatred between father and son?
Father, mother. It's never a perfect word.
They may have a bad personality, they may not be able to do so, or they may have inadvertently hurt their children.
But their love, there is no doubt about it.
Zhu Ziqing finally remembered the oranges at the train station eight years ago, as well as his father's rickety body.
So I took up my pen and wrote "Back Shadow".
In the text, he looks at his father's back, and in reality, it is actually his father who silently bids farewell to his back.
Long Yingtai said that the so-called parents and children only mean that your fate with him is that you are constantly watching his back in this life and this life, and he silently tells you with his back shadow that there is no need to chase.
03
Do cicadas bark or not at night? This is a question worth pondering
In August 1931, Zhu Ziqing went abroad for further study, and in July 1932, he returned to China and served as the head of the Department of Chinese Literature at Tsinghua University, where he discussed with Wen Yiduo and others.
On an ordinary moonlit night, in the quiet Tsinghua campus, Zhu Ziqing could not sleep.
In 1927, after the advent of "Lotus Pond Moonlight", it caused a lot of sensations in the literary world because of its beautiful and timeless writing.
Zhu Ziqing has also received many letters from readers, most of which are praise and flattery.
Just when he was about to look any further, one of the letters caught his attention.
"Cicadas don't bark at night."
Seeing this, he immediately frowned and turned out his own manuscript.
It turned out that in the "Lotus Pond Moonlight", there was such a description: "There are also one or two lights leaking in the cracks of the trees, listless, and the eyes of sleepy people." At this time, the most lively thing is the sound of cicadas in the trees and frogs in the water..."
In order to accurately argue whether the cicadas bark or not at night, Zhu Ziqing asked everyone on the campus.
But most of the answers he got were that cicadas didn't bark at night.
Then, he specifically consulted the entomologist Mr. Liu Chongle.
Mr. Liu has no personal experience with this, but he did not pretend to be authoritative and casually answered, but consulted a lot of books.
A few days later, he pointed to a fragment of a book and said to Zhu Ziqing: "Finally found it!" You see! ”
Originally, the book wrote that on ordinary nights, the cicada does not bark, but on the night of a month, someone clearly hears it calling.
However, due to the lack of authority of the book and repeated consideration, Zhu Ziqing said in a reply letter to the reader that in the future, when the article is republished, he will delete the sentence about "the sound of cicadas on the night of the moon".
For a year or two he never forgot about it, so he often went out at night and listened among the trees.
Kung Fu ignored the people who had a heart, and really let him hear it.
As early as thousands of years ago, Wang Anshi also described it in "Ge Xiyi":
The moon is missing, and a light is extinguished to illuminate the autumn bed.
The sick body is most aware of the wind and dew early, and the dream does not know the length of the landscape.
When I sat down, I sang generously, and looked at the heavens and the earth desolate.
The cicadas are more chaotic to the ears of pedestrians, and they are hugging the leaves of the sparse trees and half yellow.
Only then was he relieved. In the end, the sentence "The sound of cicadas on the night of the moon" was not deleted.
Later generations have commented that Zhu Ziqing's prose is valuable in a "true" word.
Not only is the emotion sincere, but the details of the content will not be "true" because of the pile of words.
I really think so.
And when he finally let go of the doubts in his heart and was ready to share them with his beloved wife, he suddenly remembered that she had remained in the moonlight forever.
The wife was in the house patting the leap child, humming the sleeping song in a confused way. I quietly put on my coat and took it out.
The "wife" mentioned at the beginning of "Lotus Pond Moonlight" is his hair-tied wife, Wu Zhongqian.
In 1929, due to tuberculosis, Wu Zhongqian bitterly bid farewell to her husband and children, ending her toiling life.
She was only thirty-one years old.
Since her death, Zhu Ziqing has not spent a single day without thinking about it.
The Scythians are gone, but the living live on.
The days always go by.
A year later, he married his second wife, Chen Zhuyin.
Chen Zhuyin had received a new-style education and was a disciple of Qi Baishi, and there was more affection between the two of them, and their love did not have a trace of impurity.
Until Zhu Ziqing died of illness, she was always with him.
04
Who would rather die than receive American food, who says that it is useless to be a bookworm?
After the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Zhu Ziqing, who was teaching at Tsinghua University, moved to Kunming with the school and continued to teach at the Southwest United University, serving as the head of the Department of Chinese Literature.
During those difficult years, together with thousands of patriotic intellectuals, he used knowledge to ignite the fire and illuminate the road to study.
Wang Zengqi, Mu Dan, Du Yunxie and others had all listened to his lessons.
China is full of gunfire, precarious Chinese, and not a day has passed since it abandoned our culture.
Stepping on the flag dyed red with blood, they survived to the victory of the Anti-Japanese Resistance.
But the sky was still not light.
The darkness before dawn is still long.
In 1945, the Kuomintang launched a civil war, and Zhu Ziqing's friends Li Gongpu and Wen Yiduo were killed one after another.
After several years of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the long and tortuous road, the young man who had been chanting the wind and the moon had long since transformed into a revolutionary democratic fighter.
Under the constant struggle against hunger and civil war, his body collapsed day by day.
Li Jianwu recalled Zhu Ziqing when he said: "I was a student of the first class when Mr. Zhu was teaching at Tsinghua University, and I read the first-grade Chinese language, and his Chinese scrolls and old style poems were all changed by him. He is a word-by-word change, not perfunctory. Later, I changed to the Department of Foreign Languages, and he agreed. He was originally white and fat, talking and laughing, and during the War of Resistance, people also lost weight and bent their waists. ”
In June 1948, Zhu Ziqing, who was terminally ill but had no money to be treated, resolutely signed his name on the document "Declaration on Protesting the US Policy toward Japan and Refusing to Receive Flour Aided by the United States."
In early August of the same year, Zhu Ziqing's condition worsened, and after half a month in the hospital, he died at the age of fifty.
Before dying, he also told his family in a weak voice: "One thing to remember, I signed the document rejecting American flour, and our family can't buy American flour in the future!" ”
Some people say that Zhu Ziqing starved to death because he did not receive relief grain from the United States.
In fact, such a statement is inaccurate, and what really crushed him was uremia caused by gastric perforation.
But even so, this noble plot is undeniable.
Poverty and illness are compounded, and they do not lose their modesty.
I think, literati style bones, exactly so.
After the founding of New China, Mao Zedong wrote the article "Farewell, Situ Leiden", and he commented on Zhu Ziqing as follows:
"We Chinese have backbones... Zhu Ziqing was seriously ill and would rather starve to death than receive relief grain from the United States... We should write many odes to Wen Yi and Zhu Ziqing, who show the heroism of our nation. ”
A hero is not only used to describe a soldier who goes into battle to kill the enemy, he can also be a student, a peddler, a woman, and an ordinary person in ordinary life with the righteousness of his family and country.
People's Daily once commented: Heroes are ordinary people who have a great heart.
He wrote "Spring", "Hurry", wrote about the moon, the lotus pond, the flowers, the stream.
Some people say that he is arrogant, some people praise him for his beauty, some people say that he piles up words, and some people read the beauty of all things.
As a man of letters, he was not perfect.
As a warrior, he deserves admiration.
To this day, he has been gone for a full 73 years.
Hopefully, on a summer night, when you look at the moon, you'll think of the young man who was looking at the same moon as you decades ago.
His name is Zhu Ziqing.