The first work published in newspapers and periodicals was in 1974, before the end of the "Cultural Revolution", 50 years ago.
Looking back, my mother was a great help and influence on me when my initial writing, including establishing some basic understanding of life. My mother was a kind, humble woman who did not compete with others, and was even able to be submissive. She was born in a family of handicraft owners, my maternal grandfather was a carpenter, and his brain was more flexible, and he came down from Pudong Countryside in Shanghai to Hangzhou, and his business gradually expanded, and he was able to independently contract some construction projects of a certain scale. Later, when the Anti-Japanese War broke out, my grandfather fled with his three daughters. The mother was his second daughter. During the flight, my mother's sister was killed by the Japanese invaders. My mother went to high school in Guangfeng County, Jiangxi Province, where she met my father, and soon fell in love and got married. Shortly after the founding of the People's Republic of China, she and her father, who graduated from the National Central University (now Nanjing University), majored in aircraft engines, and came to Yangzhou, where the Northern Jiangsu Administration was located at that time. In 1952, my father was transferred from the Agriculture and Forestry Department of the Northern Jiangsu Administration to establish the first university in Yangzhou at that time: Northern Jiangsu Agricultural College, and prepared to establish the Department of Agricultural Machinery. My mother started working as a reference clerk in the newly built college library. In the years that followed, my second sister, me, younger brother and sister were born one after another, and the more intensive childbearing caused my mother's body to be relatively thin. In the early sixties, my mother was persuaded to leave her position in the library and to teach in a rural elementary school in the suburbs. The mother is honest and usually doesn't talk much, and although she feels aggrieved by such an arrangement, she still obeys unconditionally. In the following years, she was transferred to Jiangdu County Experimental Primary School, which is more than 20 kilometers away from Yangzhou City, and Jiangdu County Zhanggang Middle School, which is further away.
My mother had a good foundation in English when she was studying, and stayed in Zhang Gang Middle School for nearly ten years, mainly engaged in high school English teaching. It was also during those years that I followed my mother to live in that rural middle school for a long or short time. At that time, I was already in middle school in Yangzhou City, but because the school was relatively loose in the management of students during the "Cultural Revolution", I asked the teacher for a leave, and no one would ask if I didn't go to school for ten days or eight days. My mother was alone in a village school dozens of miles away, and every night, the school without walls was really as silent as death. My lonely mother sometimes brought me with me to have companionship.
In the morning, my mother and I went to the school room to make porridge, which was packed in an enamel jar printed with Chairman Mao's quotations and brought back to the dormitory. The porridge was very thick, and my mother told me that there was edible soda in it. The chef surnamed Wang, who often showed a very liking look when he saw me, my mother asked me to call him Uncle Wang, he smiled and called me the third son (I was the third in the family, my mother told him), and from time to time he would praise me in front of my mother. For breakfast, in addition to porridge and steamed buns, you can sometimes eat steamed buns filled with flower rolls or pickles. I feel very warm when I can sit and eat with my mother face to face every day, and the morning sun shines through the window and shines on my and my mother's faces.
Zhanggang is a small town, but it has a bit of history. The old street has a not very long mackerel-paved road lined with a number of shops of all kinds. What I remember more is that there is a sluice gate at the east end of the town, and some merchants selling fish and shrimp and other aquatic products shout their business on the bridge next to the sluice. My mother would sometimes buy vegetables or fish and shrimp and make them on a kerosene stove in the dormitory to improve our mother's and son's meals on Sundays. Twice my brother and I went to my mother's place, it seemed like summer, and we used the other teachers' children to catch frogs in the school pond with small homemade steel forks, running and croaking, and having a great time.
Some Sundays, my mother and I went back to our home in Yangzhou. I can take a car from Zhang Gangzhen to Jiangdu, but in order to save some money, my mother sometimes takes me on a small road, walking about seven or eight miles to reach Jiangdu long-distance station; Then take a car for more than an hour to get to Yangzhou. Every time I walked with my mother, I looked at the crops in the fields along the way, bees and butterflies flying around in the rape fields, and the farmers carrying farm tools walking on the ridges or working in the fields. Sometimes, when I was sweating from running, my mother would stop and take out the King Kong Qi bought from the small shop in the town from the wicker basket that I would carry every time I came home, and let me rest before leaving.
I noticed that my mother taught at the school, was very polite to other teachers, and would take the initiative to greet anyone she met on campus. During the Cultural Revolution, the headmistress named Wang Shuyuan was punished by her students for cutting her hair into "yin and yang heads" and punishing her for cleaning up the school. Every time her mother met her on the road, she never deliberately avoided her, but called her Principal Wang without any scruples.
I remember that under the background of that time, under the influence of the "theory of the uselessness of reading", most of the students were so-so in English classes and refused to learn, and my mother tried desperately to raise her voice in class and taught very hard. Despite the poor discipline in the classroom, the mother never seems to scold the students. A few years later, my mother died of illness in Yangzhou, and her students rushed to our home to mourn, talking about my mother's hard work in the classroom in those years, and repeatedly apologized to us, saying that when I grew up, especially after work, I gradually understood how great Teacher Sun (my mother's surname was Sun) was willing to teach students like that in that era.
By the time I started high school, I was just in time for the so-called "resurgence of revisionist education," and the school was focusing on teaching, and students with good grades were often praised by teachers. Looking back, at that stage, I knew that I had worked hard in my studies, and my writing had improved significantly, and I would take the initiative to write some essays with my own propositions in addition to the essays assigned by the teacher. I showed these small essays to my mother, who was always happy to say that they were very well written, and she also brought my extracurricular composition book to her school, and asked Ms. Zhang Songqing, who was the director of teaching at the time, and Mr. Fan Mingguo, the leader of the high school Chinese group, to show them and let them guide them. I remember once I watched the North Korean movie "The Flower Girl" and wrote a poem of dozens of lines with my feelings, and both teachers corrected the poem very carefully and gave me a very uplifting evaluation. I think my mother's actions played an important role in my later development of a more conscious love for writing, including a kind of self-confidence.
My mother and the rural middle school where she lived did give me a lot of lifelong benefits when I was growing up and developing as a teenager. In the days when I lived with her, my mother's kindness, kindness, peace with encounters, sincerity in getting along with others, respect for people, thrift and diligence in daily life, and self-satisfaction in the face of material abundance, these upward and beautiful spiritual qualities have become the basic elements of my lifelong hard work and self-fulfillment. In the past 50 years, I have been writing outside of work, and although the focus and genre of writing have changed in different eras, there is one tone that has remained the same for me, and that is that I always pay attention to the people and things around me. They are either my colleagues at work or friends who have the same hobbies; It's more of a variety of ordinary people who meet in the vast sea of people. I try to get to know them, get close to them, and keep a faithful record of their lives. I value the little bit of light and warmth in the fireworks in the world, and those touching moments will be fixed in my pen. I take pleasure in it and try to use these sketches to reach as many people as possible around me.
My mother passed away as early as 1998 at the end of the last century, but Zhang Gang Middle School, where she once worked, has always remained in my memory so vividly and truly because of my mother. Not long ago, I made a special trip to this school, where it is difficult to find the old relics, and sent some of the books I have published over the years to the teachers and students there, and I want to remember my dear mother in this way, and also to express a sense of gratitude for this land that has a special meaning to me.
On the night of January 9, 2024, he was in the inpatient ward of Nanjing Zhongda Hospital
About the Author
Wang Huiqi was born in Yangzhou and now lives in Nanjing. He is a member of the Chinese Writers Association and has published more than 20 personal works. He used to be the vice president of Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House and the director of the book editing and publishing center of Xinhua Press Media Group.