Li Ao (right) and Cao Jingxing gather at the Taiwan Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo in the summer of 2010 (all photos in this article are provided by the author)
Less than a month after Li Ao's death, all kinds of discussion on the Internet have gradually dissipated, and now it is possible to write some posthumous texts.
The last time I saw him was just after New Year's Day in 2014, when I accompanied a few friends from Shanghai Duoyunxuan to visit. During the hot conversation, he wanted to send me a book, so he casually drew two copies from the bookshelf and took out a pen to leave a note. Turning to the title page of the book "You Stupid, You Stupid", he had just written the names of my wife and me, paused a little hesitantly, and a trace of cunning flashed in his eyes. I would smile and say, "No problem, we think we're stupid", but he went on to write a line "Stupid refers to him" and dropped Li Ao. This is li ao's playful side, delicate side.
"You Stupid, You Stupid" is the title of the last article in this collection. The first photo before the book is titled "Gao Xinjiang is dead!" It was he who stood in front of the tomb of his best friend and looked down at the inscription, which was a bit desolate and lonely. The cemetery was windy offshore, and Li Ao looked thin and thin under his coat. The first article in the book is Li Ao's 2001 "Sending Gao Xin Xinjiang back to the mainland", the first sentence of which talks about life and death.
When I first visited Li Ao in 1997, I was introduced by Mr. Gao. Earlier, I worked for Asia Weekly, a subsidiary of the Ming Pao Group in Hong Kong, where Mr. Gao was the group's editor-in-chief and my boss. He has the reputation of Taiwan's "first person on paper", because of decades of continuous struggle, pioneering and hard work in literature and media, and enthusiastically supporting newcomers and helping friends, including Li Ao. Gao's friendship with Li Ao was extraordinary, and Li Ao and Hu Yinmeng hurriedly married and dragged him to witness the marriage. Li Ao was proud of the world and cursed countless people, but he was "respectful and confidant" to Gao.
Mr. Gao did not succeed in going to Beijing to help Hong Kong businessmen run a new magazine, and although he was in a happy mood like a floating cloud and wild crane, he was seriously ill and did not examine himself. One day he went back to Taiwan to have lunch with Li Ao, Li Ao found that his face was very bad, Li Ao accompanied Mr. Gao to Hexin Hospital the next day, brought 100,000 yuan (NT$) in cash, and went to Hexin Hospital Li Ao put the money on the counter and said: "Please take him into custody." "Unfortunately it was too late. Li Ao said: Two hours before Mr. Gao's death, "I was with him." After his friend left, Li Ao took out NT$700,000 (about 150,000 yuan) to buy him a cemetery, which is where the photo mentioned above was taken. Chen Wenxi, a close female friend of Li Ao, said, "Li Ao himself was not rich at that time." Hong Kong friend Ma Jiahui wrote: "Behind the money, it cannot but be said that there is a blood and a heroic bone."
In fact, Li Ao's escort of Gao Xinjiang to the hospital is just a copy of his own being sent to the hospital by a friend to save his life a few years ago. In 2001, I went to Li Ao's Taipei study and found that he had just undergone surgery and became a "fearless man", with a white hoop belt wide around his waist. In my opinion, Li Ao was originally "medically illiterate", some time ago he felt uncomfortable, saw the doctor twice said that he had a cold, prescribed medicine and sent home. Two days later, a friend who opened a hospital visited, and when they met, they scolded" and scolded, "Your eyes are yellow, see your ghost's cold!" "Immediately he was put on the operating table of his hospital, and four small holes were punched in his abdomen to remove the necrotic gallbladder."
By the time we met, he had grown much whiter and more energetic than before, and even the "loss of courage" had become the scenery of his mouth. But I still feel some changes in him. That year, Li Aoliu was unfavorable, and his 92-year-old mother died a few months before he fell ill. Li Ao's filial mother bought a house for her mother to live in upstairs, and she was afraid that something would happen and installed a probe to keep her under constant supervision. His mother left and made him think of his own death, "I have always regarded my mother as a wall between me and the king of Yama, and now there is no wall." He was more worried about his two young children, especially after a serious illness. The sick girl went to visit and asked, "What if you die?" Let the 66-year-old Li Ao be alert to think more about the future of his children. Fortunately, God has lived seventeen or eight more years, watching the child grow up and see the world, and live a good life.
When he mentioned the child that day, Li Ao immediately became soft. He told me that a friend came to see him the other day, and halfway through the conversation, the phone rang, and he answered it with a sincere face and kept nodding "yes", which made the friend feel strange. He explained that it was his youngest daughter Xingshi who questioned her and suspected that her father had stolen a piece of her chocolate. I asked, "Did you steal it?" He replied sweetly, "Yes!" ”
The reward for the care of children is that there is still a family companion at the end of life. In August last year, Li Ao's son, Li Jie, sent a photo of him picking Li Ao out of the hospital, "the best birthday gift I've received in 25 years: a father who has recovered his health." Li Jie made a V-shaped gesture, but his father in a wheelchair reversed the gesture - after watching the movie "Darkest Hour", you should understand what he means. Old naughty boy!
In September 2005, Li Ao recorded "Lu Yu has a date" in Beijing
Phoenix Satellite TV and Li Ao began in July 1999 when the "Yang Lan Studio" column went to Taiwan to shoot. Yang Lan's three-hour interview with Li Ao in Taipei's Dongfeng Street study room allowed mainland audiences to see the living Li Ao who "sounded like a woman" for the first time. Perhaps it is also because of the first time to face the female host of the mainland background, Li Ao talked about the ancient and the modern witty, which can be described as a rare wonderful. Li Ao spoke a slightly northeastern Beijing dialect, and with a bit of a big tongue, he kept quoting scriptures and always asking, "Do you know what I mean?" "Later, I spent several days listening to the recording and rearranging the transcript of the interview, which was very hard. After the publication of Hong Kong's Asia Weekly, Li Ao included the full text in his collection of essays, "Brainwashing Your Brain, Pinching His Neck."
In the following years, my colleagues and I interviewed Li Ao many times. I remember that one afternoon in June 2000, my colleague Zeng Haoyi and I knocked on the door of his study and found that he was running a fever and was a little weak; and there was no water in the house, and there was no drinking. We turned around and went downstairs to the supermarket to bring him two large buckets of clean water back, and after a while he was full of energy and said to us in the camera. I've also seen how he treats media and journalists he doesn't like, asking how long he plans to do news, and if it's three minutes, he'll only talk for three minutes, so that people can't delete his original words.
He has always looked at us differently, and the relationship has become closer and closer, and in 2004, he finally launched "Li Ao Has Something to Say", and did 735 episodes in less than three years. Now that I am over seventy years old, I can appreciate the hardships of an old man of about seventy years old who goes to the studio every week to record a program for several hours in a row. Not to mention that he is usually afraid of cold and easy to sweat, and every time he records a program, he has to soak several clothes and change his underwear several times. But he is also the "best guest for people" in the eyes of his colleagues in Taipei, and he is very kind to everyone, including the cleaning and parking lot doorman, and will send them red envelopes for the New Year.
Li Ao's nearly two-decade cooperation with Phoenix Satellite TV peaked on his trip back to his hometown in the fall of 2005. I had long persuaded him to go back to the mainland to see, but he had been stubborn, saying that he did not have to travel around the world to know the world, and the next he said that he would rather keep the memories of the old times without being destroyed. Once I joked with him that he was going to be knocked down with ecstasy, put in sacks and thrown on a smuggling ship, smuggled to Beijing and left on the doorstep of his daughter Li Wen. In fact, I know that the real reason is that he is afraid of flying, thinking that flying now is still as bumpy as many years ago. Later, when he finally boarded the plane to fly through Hong Kong to Beijing, he realized that the current plane was so smooth and spacious, especially the first class he was sitting on.
Li Ao gave three speeches at Peking University, Tsinghua University and Fudan, and he attached great importance to it and made many preparations. Mr. Liu Changle mentioned in an article in tribute to Li Ao that in order to prepare for the speech at Fudan University in Shanghai, Li Ao slept all night until dawn. When Li Ao returned to his hometown, I watched and listened all the way, and the most impressive scene was his reunion with his classmates in Beijing elementary school. It was the second day of his speech at Peking University, and in the morning Chen Luyu "asked" to record two episodes of the program, in my opinion, it was the most wonderful program since the launch of "Lu Yu has a date", especially watching them fight with each other is very enjoyable. This was followed by a luncheon at Diaoyutai, which hosted more than a dozen old classmates.
Because Li Aolu came back late from the program, I greeted these old people of the same age as him on his behalf with Zeng Zimoxian, and listened to many interesting and ugly things about his childhood. As soon as Li Ao entered the door, we had to test his self-proclaimed unparalleled brain to see if he could call out the names of a few old classmates. Unexpectedly, he actually recognized more than half of them, and he hadn't seen each other for more than fifty years!
In August 2017, Li Jie received his father Li Ao from the hospital
Li Ao is particularly nostalgic. In Beijing, he went to visit his former teacher and gave a thousand dollars in red envelopes on one knee and hands. In front of his old classmates, he became more honest than ever, and his words were much less. Later, I wrote a paragraph: "That day Li Ao insisted that he was not qualified to speak in front of his old classmates; when they took pictures together, he refused to stand in the middle no matter what. He gave each old classmate a famous gold pen and a copy of his book, each of which was signed in front of the classmates and solemnly handed over. At this time, Li Ao was very traditional, very nostalgic, very emotional, very Lin Daiyu. ”
But the old naughty boy is still the old naughty boy. When he was about to leave Shanghai, he suddenly mentioned a foul sentence from Shanghai and asked me to help him "correct the tone". I didn't expect that after he went back, he actually used it to scold people in the program, but fortunately the tone was still not in place, and it is estimated that no one except me understood what he said, otherwise it must have violated the Hong Kong Television and Broadcasting Ordinance.
Li Ao and I are both pigs, the age difference is one round, when we meet, we talk no big or small, and there is no taboo in joking. His most unconvincing thing was that my father Cao Juren published 40 million words in his lifetime, and he couldn't catch up but always said".
The last impression of that meeting four years ago was that he had a lunch lunch with a friend from Shanghai, insisted on being a guest, and pulled out a thick blue thousand yuan bill from his pocket. Then he showed off his other personal equipment, small cameras, knives, and anti-wolf shock devices, so that people did not dare to hit him. I watched from the sidelines and could only smile bitterly.
Dealing with Li Ao often had to smile bitterly. I remember once saying to him with a bitter smile: "You Master Li are highly skilled, daring to flip and fight on the one-wood bridge, but the people who followed you to the bridge did not get it right and fell into the water." I don't know if he could listen to this sentence, but he couldn't ask him anything anymore today. Li Ao is gone, everything is commented on, I wonder if he will smile bitterly in another world?
Source 丨Wenhui PEN Will WeChat public account
Author 丨 Cao Jingxing
WeChat editor 丨 rice fan sauce
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