Father's last tears
Ding Fan
When I was six years old, I knew dozens of traditional Chinese characters, and I went to elementary school without knowing it. At that time, I fell in love with villain books, held comic books all day long, read pictures and read quickly, stronger than my classmates, and began to read novels in the third grade. At first, I read short and medium stories, and then I became obsessed with novels.
At that time, my primary school homework was simple, and it didn't hurt to be biased, and my grades were reasonable. I was beaten by my father, often because I was out in trouble, such as fighting, such as shooting street lamps and door lamps in the compound with a slingshot, such as going out with a group of playmates and fighting with children on the street.
My father beat me in a different way than the other workers and peasants in the compound, he didn't say a word, he stepped forward suddenly, kicked me in the ass, and whispered a childhood hometown: I will kill you! I endured the severe pain, did not say a word, and my eyes were full of anger and resentment. When the accident was punished, in the family building, from the windows of the neighbors, there were loud scolding and reprimands from the fathers, the whipping of the belts, and the miserable and miserable ghosts and wolf howls of the playmates, which converged into a high-pitched symphony of pathos.
This kind of beating incident happens once a week and a half a month, which makes my hatred and resentment towards my father even worse, and what makes me especially puzzled is that, contrary to the "violence" against me, he is in the organ school, and when he sees other people smiling and greeting, even my classmates come to my house, he is very warm and caring, and he is called Mr. Yes. I gradually guessed that this way of venting his anger was his special perverted psychology of maintaining the dignity of an intellectual, and my silence was out of the instinctive resistance of a stubborn naughty boy, but I also invisibly cooperated to maintain his dignity.
When I was in middle school, I read novels, and he didn't object to them, and sometimes he even agreed to let me go to the library in the compound to borrow novels. Later, during the winter and summer vacations, I borrowed novels under the quilts and mats, and at night, I read them under the quilt with a flashlight, and the full moon was seen by the moonlight. That book "Bitter Cauliflower" was read overnight in the moonlight, and the eyes with 2.0 vision were quickly read into 400 degrees of myopia. Doesn't my father know about these things of secretly reading idle books and not doing homework?
Actually, I know that my father also has the same interests as me, because he also has novels and biographies and other reading materials on his bedside from time to time. During the day, when he went to work, I rushed to read. I remember that the book "Sanjia Lane" that had just been published was put under his pillow, and when he was about to go to work, he warned me that this book is not for children, you can't read it. But the more he said this, the more curious I became, and as soon as he went out, I began to read without even knowing that my father had come home, until the black leather shoes kicked hard on my ass that I woke up from the story of revolution and love. Similarly, when he issued a stronger and more serious warning about the three volumes of "Dream of the Red Chamber", I had to give up the desire to read it secretly, and it was not until I went to the countryside to cut the queue that I read through the three volumes of "Dream of the Red Chamber" with a preface by He Qifang. And Pu Yi's book "The First Half of My Life", he didn't warn me. It turned out that my father was also a person who loved to read pillow books, and after going to the countryside, I read Li Qingzhao's poem "The pillow poems and books are in a good place, and the scenery in front of the door is good in the rain", which is a portrayal. What touched me was that when I was a teenager who resented my father, this habit on the pillow became a scenery in the rain, cutting and cutting, and the arrangement was messy.
When I was in middle school, I indulged in reading a lot of modern and contemporary Chinese novels, including Soviet novels and other European and American novels, such as "How Steel is Made", "The Gadfly", "Notre Dame de Paris", "Les Miserables", etc. Even in class, when books are read in a drawer, the teacher's lectures are completely unheard. As a result, my math and foreign language scores dropped sharply, and in the final exam of the second year of junior high school, my math score was 58 points, and I hung a red lantern, but fortunately, I got the first place in the class (tie) in my composition.
Once, I touched my red and swollen buttocks, and a sense of shame arose, remembering the situation when Lin Daojing wandered on the beach in "Song of Youth" and wanted to commit suicide by throwing herself into the sea, and the desire to get out of the family also became my wish, and this subconscious was hidden deep in my heart.
In 1964, my father joined the "Four Cleansing" work team organized by the provincial party committee and went to Nantong to dig the port; as early as 1958, my mother was sent from the provincial supply and marketing cooperatives to the meat factory in Sanchahe, Nanjing, and took my eldest brother to live in Xiaguan and only came back once a week; my grandfather went to my uncle's house in Beijing; I stayed at home alone with my younger brother, and although I worked hard to pick up the burden of housework, I also gained full freedom, which was the highlight of my happiness when I got out of the control of my parents.
The good times didn't last long, and within a year, my parents came home, and everything was the same, but I found that my father's mood was even lower. A few nights as he sat at his desk and smoked cigarette after cigarette, the smoke from the east room through the toilet and kitchen to the west room made me feel strange. The next day, while he was at work, I secretly went to the East House and found a stack of materials from the place where he had hidden idle books under his pillow. The eye-catching big characters on the cover, "Surrender to the Proletariat", immediately thundered me. From this material, I learned that the family composition he filled in was a big capitalist and a big landowner, and he himself was a college student. To this day, I still vividly remember many shocking words on those materials, especially the detailed record of his graduation from the Department of Social Economics of Fu Jen University in 1943, and his move west to study in the Department of Economics of the Law School of National Northwest University, and after graduating in 1946, he went to work in the Shanghai Aftercare Management Institute. On the CCP side, it is under the jurisdiction of a sub-bureau and a local committee of the East China Bureau of the Communist Party of China, and the higher-level directly subordinate unit is the Jiangsu Provincial Party Committee.
Due to the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, my father dropped out of Fu Jen University in 1943 and transferred to Northwest University, graduating in 1946
After 1946, he worked in the Shanghai Aftermath Management Institute, after 1949, he worked in the supply and marketing cooperatives of the Southern Jiangsu Administration, in 1955 he worked in the supply and marketing cooperatives of Jiangsu Province, and in 1957, he studied at the cadre school of the National Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives, and was received by Chairman Mao Zedong and the main leaders of the state when he graduated
The mystery seems to have been revealed, no wonder after 1949, my father was graded to the official level, but for 30 years, the cadres around him have been promoted one by one, but my father's rank has not moved at all, and he has not been promoted to the next level. We all thought that it was because of our family background, so whenever we filled in the family composition, we could only fill in "revolutionary cadre" like a thief, and "businessman" in the grandfather's column. In fact, the real mystery was revealed after the death of his father.
After reading this "surrender document", I began to be really sensible and began to care about national affairs, because it was related to the future fate of our family and myself. At first, my father told me to go out and not listen to the adults, so I would hide at the door and eavesdrop, or stay in the house for a while I was reserving the guests' tea. Later, when I became an "auditor", my father repeatedly told me that what adults said should not be passed on.
The advent of the revolutionary era has given us unprecedented freedom, and at the moment when everyone is in danger, the parents have lowered their figures, and even the high-ranking families of workers and peasants have no sound to use force, because they have all become "capitalist roaders", and the revolution has made us stubborn teenagers revolutionaries. The beating and scolding in the family building gradually disappeared, and was replaced by the sound of the whole family reciting the supreme instructions "ask for instructions in the morning and report in the evening".
One day, my father brought home a stack of four-foot white paper and asked me to copy a draft drafted by the revolutionary organization of their unit into a big-character poster with a brush. I was full of suspicions, and many of them were college graduates, so why did they have to let me, a hairy boy of fourteen, copy it? I suspect that none of them wanted to be seen as their own handwriting, so they asked me, the man who had been writing for half a month, to copy it. I was flattered that my father had spoken to me kindly for the first time in his life. After copying, his father's eyes showed unconcealable satisfaction. The next day, the people in the compound were all looking at this big-character poster, they were all guessing whose handwriting it was, and everyone had different opinions, and finally came to the conclusion that it must have been written by an old guy, because most of them were traditional characters, and the calligraphy was not bad. My father came home with a visibly smug smile on his face, the only highest spiritual reward I had received as a teenager.
Finally, in the revolutionary era, I waited for the movement of "going to the mountains and going to the countryside" to leave the family, and before the Supreme Directive was issued, I walked out of the family like the May Fourth Youth and took the initiative to go to the vast world. The temptation of naïve romance and freedom makes me yearn for the future. What I never expected was that a painful process followed one after another, which made me undergo a purgatory-like test in this social university of life, only to know that in such a revolutionary melting pot, as Lu Xun said, there was no bread and cream, more filth and blood.
Coincidentally, in 1969, a year after joining the queue, the Central Committee issued "Order No. 1" to disperse all the cadres in various places in order to prevent the revisionist Soviet Union from starting a war. So, my father defected from the Provincial Wuqi Cadre School in Qiaotou Town, Jurong, Zhenjiang, to the children of the queue, and together with a group of "paid cadres", he came to the water town where I joined the queue. Am I back in my father's arms, or am my fathers back in my arms?
In the cold winter, the cold wind came in from the cracks in the mud wall, but we couldn't stop the enthusiasm of talking all night, and finally, the proverb of "many years of father and son becoming brothers" was reproduced in the real scene in the days of our common suffering, talking about life, talking about politics, and talking about the future. Under the kerosene lamp, we also read the world's famous books that I borrowed from other educated youths and exchanged reading experiences. Reading pillow books at night in a grass house has become our daily spiritual meal, and what I regret the most is that I didn't let this person who used to study in a church school help me with English tutoring.
A photo of me with my parents and brother when I was three years old
On a cold winter and snowy night, we drank a little wine, lay on our respective beds, and listened to him tell the secret meaning of the names of our three brothers: In 1950, my father, like many intellectuals, was full of reverence and hope for the party and the country, hoping to build New China into a strong and peaceful country, so he gave my brother a name that meant peace. In 1952, when I was born, at the time of the "three anti and five anti" movement, he and the director of the supply and marketing cooperative of the Southern Jiangsu Public Office in Changmen, Suzhou, were isolated and examined as a "big tiger", and later the review conclusion was characterized as an unjust, false and wrongful case. Since then, his personality has changed dramatically, and he has become a taciturn person. Therefore, in 1956, when he "made a big noise", he didn't say a word, and successfully escaped a catastrophe.
In 1973, when Deng Xiaoping made a comeback and resumed the college entrance examination for the first time, my father found me a lot of revision materials and tutored me in mathematics. Soon, I mastered the solution of one-dimensional quadratic equations, and I was not interested in mathematics when I was in junior high school. However, when the Zhang Tiesheng incident broke out that year, coupled with my grandfather's composition problems, I became an outcast, and I didn't even have the opportunity to take the exam. This year, my father went to the provincial business school in Yangzhou. The following year, under the recommendation of all the members of the production team according to the handprints, I finally had a chance to take the exam, and it was precisely in the exam questions of that year that there was one of the most difficult problems of one-dimensional quadratic equations, and I quickly solved the problem smoothly with the formula substitution method, not to mention the composition, because I was already a correspondent of the commune at that time, just like the subordinate members of the county creative team today. From the moment I got the test papers, I was not nervous, even if the female intellectuals from Shanghai who were sitting next to me fainted after seeing the test papers and were carried out of the examination room on a stretcher, it did not distract me from the exam in the slightest. The test scores were not announced in the end, but the old commune language teacher who invigilated the exam spread the information that I was the highest score, especially the perfect score for the essay. I wrote to my father, who encouraged me to enroll in a liberal arts school. At that time, there was only one place in the liberal arts department of Fudan Journalism, and I chose this choice without hesitation. Unexpectedly, the secretary of the commune committee and the director of the Educated Youth Office came to me for consultation, and he said: In terms of conditions, you are the most suitable for this major, but the nephew of the commune secretary also chose this major, so I can only wronged you to go to the chemistry department of Yangzhou Normal University. I said, I don't know anything about chemistry. In desperation, I called my father, and he only said one sentence categorically: Thirty-six plans are the best. After getting the admission notice, I submitted the report of transferring to Yangzhou Normal College as soon as possible, which was really an endless road, and I entered the Chinese Department as I wished, and the student number was the last in the class, No. 37.
I went to Yangzhou and was reunited with my father. It was only half an hour's walk from Yangzhou Normal School to the Provincial Business School, and in those years, we talked about not only life, politics, society and personnel issues, but also problems of my development and future. I applied to join the party at school, but I was repeatedly recommended and was not approved, the branch secretary is my brother in the same dormitory, no need to ask, I know that it is a problem of family origin, and my father applied for the same fate as the party many times back then.
After the hopelessness of staying at the university, I thanked the female director of the Chinese Department of Yangzhou Institute of Education for selecting me, a flawed graduate, from many personnel files. The father of the "revolutionary cadre" was not a member of the Communist Party, and it was an obstacle to his application for party membership after 1949, and it also became a barrier for our brothers to apply for party membership in that era. But the mystery that my father and we have never been able to solve is that the family composition did not stop my uncle from joining the Communist Party in 1949, and as a top student of the Department of Water Conservancy of Peiyang University, he successfully entered the top level of the Ministry of Water and Power.
In 1977, my father was transferred back to the province. From 1978 to 1979, I went to Master Nan to study with Ye Ziming and Dong Jian. This year I published my first essay in the Literary Review. I called my father, who was on a business trip, and he said, "Good, good, good!" and when he got home, he took out five or six copies of the Literary Review magazine from his handbag. He said, "I bought all the issues of the Literary Review magazine in the post office of the big city." I took the magazine with tears in my eyes, and I couldn't say a word.
Father's handwriting from 1979
In 1982, I discussed with my father and went to Yantai Erma Road to see the dozen or so old houses where he lived as a child. Unexpectedly, in late January of the following year, he was diagnosed with cancer. That day, I cried bitterly in the corridor of the ward of the cancer hospital, and my brother and I in Nanjing took turns to accompany him for 83 days, sleeping on the side of the bed every day. At that time, when his wife was pregnant and in labor, my father was still intermittently asking on March 17, when he was dying, had the child been born?
That night, I rushed to Bayi Hospital, my wife was already in the delivery room, and the nurse said that it might not be until the second half of the night, so I asked me to give a name. In the anxiety of these days, I have already thought of the name, because this child is late, the man takes the word "late", and the woman imitates the father who used homophony to express a kind of commemoration. I immediately returned to the cancer hospital and stayed up all night, hoping that my baby would be born sooner.
In the morning, my mother and younger brother came to change shifts, and I didn't even have time to eat breakfast, so I rushed to the maternity ward of Bayi Hospital. Looking at my daughter who was hugged, I stared speechlessly for a long time, tears rolling in my eyes, and I felt both relieved and regretful. It would be nice if you could carry your daughter to her father's bed and let him take a look! Later, the mothers in the same ward with their wives were all talking about whether your husband's face was not good-looking, and whether he was patriarchal. How can they understand my mood at this moment? As everyone knows, I rushed to the tumor hospital to report to my father while he was still conscious, because my father said that three generations of our family are men, and our daughter is good. When I leaned into my father's ear and told him the news, he could no longer utter coherent words, only spat out the word "good," and two lines of tears flowed down his bony cheeks.
Three days later, he said goodbye to us at about 10 p.m. on March 21, 1983.
In 1984, Hu Yaobang made an important decision to clean up some unnecessary materials in his personal files across the country. A brother who managed my father's file told me that there was a record in my father's file: In 1946, when he was working in the Shanghai Aftermath Management Center, both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party pulled him into the party, and he said, "A gentleman is not a party!" These four words were defined by a certain leader of the party organization at that time, and he approved six words: This person cannot be reused! This mystery has finally been revealed! This is something that my father never thought of again; no matter how hard he tried at that time, no matter how hard we tried, we could not join the Communist Party.
And the more dramatic ending is that on December 9 of this year, when I was still editing "The Complete Works of Mao Dun" with Mr. Ye Ziming at the People's Literature Publishing House, the party committee of the school approved me to become a probationary party member when I had not written an ideological report to the party organization for many years. Glory, joy, sorrow? I have nothing to say at my father's grave.
My father was born on February 12, 1922, died early at the age of 61, today is his centennial birthday, reflecting on his life, he was not great in life, not glorious in death, and even a little aggrieved, but the spiritual wealth he left me is precious.
On February 12, 2022, tears were written in Nandaiwaen
Revised on December 18, 2023 in Nandaiwaen
About the Author
Ding Fan, born in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province in 1952, is a professor at Nanjing University. Since 1979, he has published more than 500 papers and more than 10 collections of essays, more than 200 essays and more than 10 collections of essays, and edited more than 100 textbooks and monographs with more than 10 million words.