Text/Bohua
Lin Huiyin, who was praised by Mr. Hu Shi as "China's generation of talented women", is one of the women who has attracted the most spiritual attention in modern China. Combining talent, beauty, and wisdom, an intellectual woman with an open mind, but like Lin Daiyu in "Dream of Red Mansions", although she is peerless and talented, she suffered from illness all her life, and finally died young, leaving too many poignant regrets in this world, which has attracted the sighs and sighs of many people. Lin Huiyin was born in an era of fierce collision and blending of Chinese and Western cultures.
Born in a famous family, as a trendsetter of the times, she has fully accepted the influence of Chinese and Western civilizations. This makes her a gorgeous rainbow, and she has changed the traditional Chinese lifestyle of women like a soft vine in the past, and must rely on a tree like a man to survive. In a patriarchal society, she has grown into a tree as tall as an excellent man, with her own wisdom and strong inner world, she measures with her feet, writes with her heart, and works with her sick body, no matter what kind of men she faces, she doesn't have to be attached, and uses the charm of her independent personality to win their love and respect.
The women of the world are beautiful and colorful. She is the only one, but she is as beautiful as poetry. In the feudal society of more than 2,000 years, women had no status, and most of them, regardless of their talents, could not escape the fate of becoming male dolls. With the decline of the feudal dynasty and the infiltration of European wind and rain, the atmosphere of modern civilization penetrated into ancient China, so that Chinese people of insight had the honor to go abroad and feel the influence of the fresh wind of civilization. Lin Huiyin, who was born in a famous family, under the careful care of his enlightened father Lin Changmin, followed his father's footsteps since he was a child, bid farewell to the beautiful Yanyu Jiangnan, and began the migration of life.
Along the way, from the soft south of the Yangtze River to the vast north, from conservative China to open Europe and the United States, the scope of travel was so wide that ordinary people at that time could not do it. This kind of migration is not only a kind of displacement, but a kind of self-exile that conforms to the times, and it is also a life experience. It's the age of chasing dreams, how can you be too quiet and waste time. In the bumps along the way, she not only broadened her horizons of life, enriched her life experience, but also experienced her own self-clean, maverick will and character, the perfect combination of strength and beauty, style and reason, thus leaving a good story of her own in modern Chinese history, so that future generations have endless aftertaste.
Lin Huiyin is a native of Min County, Fujian Province, and was born in a family of eunuchs. His grandfather Lin Xiaosui was a Jinshi in the late Qing Dynasty, and his father Lin Changmin once served as the chief justice of Beiyang. Lin Huiyin was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province in 1904 and lived with his parents. At the age of 8, he moved to Shanghai, and in 1916, his family moved to Beijing to study at Beijing Peihua Girls' High School. In April 1924, he traveled to Europe with his father. While in London, her landlord was a female architect, who influenced her to pursue an architectural career.
It was also during this period that he met Xu Zhimo, a famous poet in the history of modern Chinese literature. Influenced by this great poet who was romantic by nature, he developed a strong interest in literature, especially poetry. His natural beauty and extraordinary artistic talent also made the great poet who was already famous at that time fall in love with it, and threw an olive branch of love to this beautiful girl who was just beginning to fall in love, and the two had a confusing love affair here, which triggered all kinds of conjectures in later generations. But in the second year, Lin Changmin, who became a year-old friend with Xu Zhimo, brought his daughter back to China, and the relationship between the two was terminated at once. After returning to China, she was still arranged by her father to continue her studies at Peihua Girls' High School.
In 1923, he began to participate in the Crescent Society organized by Xu Zhimo, Hu Shi and others in Beijing, and began literary activities. In June 1924, Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng went to the United States to study architecture at the same time. Since the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania did not admit female students at that time, she enrolled in the School of Fine Arts, where she still took courses in the Department of Architecture. In the summer of 1927, after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts, he entered the Yale School of Drama to study stage design Xi. In the spring of 1928, he married Liang Sicheng. In August, the husband and wife returned to China together. From 1930 to 1945, the couple traveled to 15 provinces and more than 200 counties in China to inspect and map ancient buildings in various places.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China, Lin Huiyin served as a professor in the Department of Architecture of Tsinghua University and a director of the Architectural Society of China. He participated in the design of the National Emblem of the People's Republic of China and the design of the monument of the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square, and rescued and transformed the traditional cloisonné craft, making great contributions to the nation and the country. In the spring of 1955, a severe lung disease ended Lin Huiyin's life prematurely. A generation of talented women, although their lives are short, the stories they leave to this world are extremely intriguing.
Throughout Lin Huiyin's life, this peerless intellectual woman has made all the men around her look at her with admiration. As a father, Lin Changmin said to Xu Zhimo proudly: "Being the father of a genius daughter is not an easy blessing, you have to lower your family rank and first seek to understand friendship." At that time, Lin Huiyin had just turned 16 years old, but her conversation and understanding had surpassed her age, and it was not only Lin Changmin who was forced to lower her family in the face of her beauty and intelligence, but even Xu Zhimo did not care that he was a friend of Lin Huiyin's father, and he already had a wife and children in China, so he openly divorced and pursued this little girl who had just graduated from middle school.
This public case is known to women and children because of the intervention of film and television, novels, and literary historians, and has attracted various opinions from people. What is not well known is that before Xu Zhimo pursued Lin Huiyin, he and Lin Changmin introduced each other as confidants, and also played a game of exchanging "love letters". In the correspondence, Xu Zhimo pretended to be a married woman, and Lin Changmin pretended to be a married man, and the two parties assumed that they were in love with each other in this unfree situation. In this bizarre way, two old intellectuals who have received a study abroad education describe their love world and political aspirations that yearn for freedom but are in prison. Xu Zhimo wrote a colorful short story "Spring Marks", in which the protagonist "Yi" is based on Lin Changmin.
Lin Huiyin didn't choose Xu Zhimo in the end, she and Liang Sicheng met and fell in love under the arrangement of their elders. Liang Qichao had high hopes for his eldest son, personally selected the candidate for his future daughter-in-law, and treated Lin Hui like his own daughter after losing his father. The two families arranged to send them to the United States for further study as soon as Liang Sicheng graduated from Tsinghua University. The two children often looked forward to the future together, and Lin Huiyin told Liang Sicheng that she planned to study Xi architecture in the future.
Liang Sicheng was surprised, he never thought that a weak girl would learn to build a house: "architecture?" he asked rhetorically, "Do you mean house?" Lin Huiyin laughed, and there was an asymmetrical dimple on the left cheek of her face: "More precisely, it should be architecture!" Liang Sicheng, a giant of modern Chinese architecture, admitted in his later years that he first chose to study Xi architecture only for Lin Huiyin. I didn't even know what architecture was. Liang Sicheng exists in history with a variety of important identities, but the core identity throughout his life is first and foremost a gentle man who cares for his wife, but anyone who has seen the Liang couple will admit that they are a loving couple.
In 1923, during a student demonstration, Liang Sicheng was hit by the car of the warlord Jin Yongyan, leaving him disabled for life. This made Liang Sicheng's mother extremely dissatisfied, she thought that Sicheng was lying in bed with an injury, untidy clothes, everyone should lower their eyebrows and avoid it carefully, a young lady from an official eunuch family has not yet been hired, how can she be so disrespectful of the system?
But as the future father-in-law Liang Qichao admired Lin Huiyin even more, and the old man proudly wrote to his eldest daughter Liang Sishun: "The old man has good eyesight!" This reformist school therefore gave birth to his concept of marriage: the father pays attention to the observation, looks at a person, and then introduces it to the child, and finally the child decides, "This is really an ideal marriage system." "This marriage really shows people how loose a marriage can be, and how strong it can be at the same time. In Lin Huiyin's short life journey, she has read countless people, and finally promised to be Liang Sicheng's partner. But in addition to Liang Sicheng, there are two others who love her deeply, one is Xu Zhimo mentioned above.
Although Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin are married, Xu Zhimo is still a friend and moves closely and frequently with the two. Unfortunately, in order to listen to Lin Huiyin's academic lecture in Beiping, the most famous poet in the history of modern Chinese literature died in a plane crash from Nanjing in 1931 aboard the "Jinan". The other is Jin Yuelin, a famous Chinese logician and professor of philosophy at Peking University. Throughout his life, he was Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng's best friend. They have lived together for most of their lives, living next to each other, drinking and eating together, sharing joys and sorrows. Liang Sicheng encountered any academic problems, often consulted Jin Yuelin, quarreled with Lin Huiyin, and also moved out of Jin Yuelin to evaluate and mediate, after Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng both died, Jin Yuelin also lived with Liang Sicheng's son, Liang Congjie treated his father like his own father, accompanied this great philosopher who was never married for Lin Huiyin and had no descendants to complete the last journey of his life.
From a letter written by Lin Huiyin to his friend Fei Weimei (Fairbank's wife), it can be seen that the intimacy and tacit understanding of the three of them. At that time, it was the most difficult time of the Anti-Japanese War, Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng lived in Lizhuang, living in difficulty, poor and sick, Jin Yuelin came to visit them in Lizhuang as soon as he had a holiday, and celebrated the New Year with them, Lin Huiyin listened to the Japanese bombers flying over the sky, and wrote in the letter: "Sicheng is a chronic man, willing to do only one thing at a time, and is not good at handling miscellaneous housework. But the miscellaneous things came at him like the trains that arrived at Grand Central in New York at any given time. I may still be the stationmaster, but he is the station! I may be run over, but he never will. Lao Jin (who is on vacation here) is such a passer-by, he either comes to see off passengers or pick up people, slightly interfering with traffic, but always making the station more interesting and the stationmaster happier. ”
After Lin Huiyin finished writing the letter, he handed it to Liang Sicheng and Jin Yuelin to read, and asked them if they could add anything, so we saw the next paragraph written by Jin Yuelin: "In front of the stationmaster and the station where the station was typing, the passengers were at a loss and at a loss except for watching the trains passing by. I've passed by Grand Central Terminal many times and never met the stationmaster. But here, I really saw both the station and the stationmaster.
Otherwise, I'm likely to confuse the two of them. After Jin Yuelin finished writing, Liang Sicheng took the letter and posted: "Now it's the turn of the station: its main girders are seriously tilted due to poor construction, and the ugly steel plate brackets designed and constructed by Union Hospital have been severely worn out after seven years of service, (Note: Liang Sicheng has been wearing a steel vest specially made for him by Union Hospital due to a car accident with a spine injury), and it seems that the busy wartime traffic passing below me has shaken my foundation. "The letter was written on thin, yellow, inferior paper, unsegmented, with extremely small words, without any headlines, and even the extra half of the page was cut off in order to save paper and postage. The letter made Mr. and Mrs. Fairbank, who were far away in Washington, laugh for a long time, and then sad for a long time.
Liang Sicheng once boasted: "People say that 'the wife is the good of others, and the article is their own good', but I think that 'the wife is their own good, and the article is the good of the wife.'" Lin Huiyin's talent is multifaceted, since her girlhood, she has been a well-known poet, while translating Western literature, writing plays, publishing novels, after studying architecture, she also made many achievements in design and surveying, and completed many architectural works with Liang Sicheng.
Although wearing a narrow-fitting cheongsam, frail and sickly, but she climbed up the dome of the ancient building but it was not an obstacle at all, Jin Yuelin went to their house, often saw Lin Huiyin and Liang Sicheng climbing on the roof of their house, practicing basic skills for field surveying and mapping, Lao Jin immediately made a pair of hidden head couplets: "Liang Shang gentleman; Beauty under the forest. The surnames of the couple are embedded, the last sentence makes fun of Liang Sicheng, and the next sentence flatters Lin Huiyin. Liang Sicheng was very happy, but Lin Huiyin didn't think so at all, "It's really annoying, what beauty is not beautiful, it seems that a woman has nothing to do, just worthy of decoration!" In the famous salon in her living room, she is the protagonist of any conversation with laughter and Confucianism, even if she is seriously ill, she lies on the sofa and talks about poetry and philosophy with the guests.
Xiao Qian, one of the former salon guests, recalled: "When she spoke, others could hardly interject. Not to mention Mr. Shen (Shen Congwen) and me, even Liang Sicheng and Jin Yuelin just sat on the sofa and smacked their pipes, nodding their heads again and again. Hui Yin's talkative is by no means the gossip of a married woman, but often a learned, insightful, sharp and quick criticism. I often thought to myself what a wonderful book it would be if this young lady could be like Dr. Johnson in England in the 18th century, and there was a Boswell by her side, who wrote down all her witty and witty words! Although this statement is somewhat absolute, it is not true, but it has indeed been extremely verified by Lin Huiyin.
During Lin Huiyin's stay in Beijing, a group of outstanding men in modern Chinese history often sat around the home of No. 3 Zongbu Hutong in Beijing, and the stars came to listen to Lin Huiyin's speech as the hostess of the salon. His unique insights and witty remarks have attracted the applause of these men from time to time. Beautiful and beautiful appearance, extraordinary conversation, conquered these men who often visited the guest room, so much so that they became regular customers here. How much men like Lin Huiyin, how much women will reject her. At that time, the well-known Bingxin in the literary world was unbearable, and she was jealous, and published "Our Wife's Living Room" to ridicule Lin Huiyin, Lin Huiyin did not show weakness, and she returned from the Shanxi inspection and gave Bingxin a bottle of good Shanxi old vinegar. This left an interesting story in the Chinese literary world.
It's a pity that Lin Huiyin herself admits that she is an "excited person", her mood is moody, like an electrified cloud, "she only does things with momentary inspiration and a stroke of genius", so she did not leave many works. Her wisdom and wisdom are more often a kind of legend, which circulates in the oral writings of cultural celebrities who have seen her intelligence. War, illness, political movements, and poor and trivial family life deprived her of a lot of creative energy, so aside from her famous "scandals", at the academic level, people usually only know her as the designer of the national emblem and the active protector of Beijing's ancient buildings, while ignoring her inner richer talent.
Tortured by lung disease for half her life, she finally left the world that brought her too many fantasies and suffered too much pain on a drunken night in 1955. Luckier than Liang Sicheng, she escaped the "unprecedented" ten-year catastrophe that later swept the country, and did not suffer from the inhumane human disaster. Her husband personally designed a tombstone for her, and a white marble wreath designed for the People's Heroes Monument was moved from the monument to the people's heroes. Her confidant Jin Yuelin formed a funeral committee for her and took care of the aftermath. Life is like this, what more can a husband ask for?
Her tombstone reads: Tomb of architect Lin Huiyin. Life is like the splendor of summer flowers, and death is like the quiet beauty of autumn leaves. Fifty-one years of life, although short, but the beauty of a life makes ordinary ordinary people feel ashamed. Live, pursue beautiful dreams, die, and be as tired as a bluebird. The life of a generation of talented women has come to a peaceful curtain call, and the curtain call in her favorite April in the world has become a poignant swan song in the world
Submission email: [email protected]