1. My childhood life
I was born on January 13, 1903, into a peasant family in Nanyue Temple, on the banks of the Shangxi River in Shimen County, Hunan Province.
My father's name was Zheng Dingqiong, who also made a living by farming in the fields, but after middle age, he suffered from back disease and was overwhelmed by physical labor, so he had to hand over the fields to one or two helpers in the family to cultivate. However, perhaps because he became a monk halfway, his skill in cutting clothes has not been very good. My mother, Chen Yingjiao, was also a farmer. She is a traditional Chinese old-fashioned working woman, kind, hardworking and frugal. I heard that on the day she gave birth to one of my sisters, she was still working at the kitchen stove before giving birth. From the time she married my father until her death, my mother hardly lived a day of peace and comfort, and she worked hard all her life.
Among my siblings, I was the last in line. The eldest brother, Zheng Tongguo (cousin Qin Nong), is 14 years older than me. In addition, there are three sisters: Zheng Xianmei, Zheng Zhimei, and Zheng Jinmei.
Shimen is located in the mountainous area of northwest Hunan Province, adjacent to Linli, Taoyuan, Cili, Dayong and other counties. The area is densely forested, rich in products, and the scenery is also very beautiful. However, due to inconvenient transportation and closed environment, some agricultural and sideline products, such as tung oil, tea, chestnut, bamboo and rattan products and minerals, are difficult to be transported in large quantities. In addition, the cultivated fields are barren, there are frequent floods and droughts, and the government is exploiting them heavily, and the life of the rural people is very hard, and it is not easy for ordinary peasants to work hard for a year to barely make ends meet.
At that time, my family had six or seven ancestral old houses and nearly 30 acres of land. When the year is good, you can harvest forty or fifty stone of grain (according to local standards, each stone valley is equivalent to about 110 city catties). This is also a well-off family in the countryside, but the whole family only has food and clothing.
When I was born, my mother was 43 years old, and due to malnutrition, she was frail and sickly, and she had no milk at all, so she had to feed me a batter made from rice flour. So until I was in my twenties, I was very thin and sick. It was the long-term military life that gradually strengthened the body.
As far back as I can remember, my family is getting worse and worse, my parents and my children are wearing homemade coarse old clothes, and most of our daily meals are mixed with shredded sweet potatoes and brown rice. It was only during the Lunar New Year that my mother quietly stuffed us with a few New Year's money, which we could use to buy some firecrackers, maltose and other things. When the year was a little better, my mother would occasionally tear a few feet of foreign cloth and sew us a new coat and make a new pair of shoes, which would make us very happy.
Chinese New Year is a big event in the countryside. As soon as the wax moon enters every year, people with slightly better families begin to be busy grinding tofu, making glutinous rice cakes, killing pigs and chickens, smoking bacon, or going to nearby market towns to purchase New Year's goods, etc., a lively atmosphere. People who have been working abroad are also returning to their hometowns to reunite with their families. During this period, it is undoubtedly the most lively time for us carefree children, not only can we put on new clothes, eat meat, snacks and sweets that are usually difficult to eat, but also take advantage of the adults to prepare for the New Year, and play around to our heart's content. On Chinese New Year's Eve, our whole family sat around for the sumptuous meal of the year. Before the meal, it is customary for the father to say a few words. His "speech" is very simple, every year it is like this: "Someday the time will run, and the morning and twilight will be like the New Year." To this day, I remember these two sentences very clearly. After the New Year's dinner, our children hurriedly ran outside the house to set off firecrackers. In the middle of the night, I went with the elders to the ancestral grave to worship the ancestors. After the ancestor worship ceremony, the more daring boys run around the hillside with lanterns to play hide and seek, so that they will not feel sleepy all night playing. The next day is the first day of the Lunar New Year, and we have to kowtow to the elders of the clan with the adults in the morning. Kowtow is naturally not in vain, no matter which house you go to, the host will inevitably entertain you for dinner, or give some snacks and other things to eat. This kind of happy and lively days will not end until the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. Therefore, when I was a child, I always looked forward to the Chinese New Year, because only the Chinese New Year is the most joyful day of the year.
My father was a man of great importance in traditional etiquette, who was strict and upright, and had a very stubborn temperament. He hated prostitution and gambling the most, and he would interfere when he found out that there was such a thing in the clan, so the younger generations and young people in the clan were very afraid of him. He is also very strict with his children, and he usually has a straight face in front of us, and he rarely smiles. However, what made my father different from the rural peasants at that time was that he was more open-minded. He himself had studied in a private school for two years, and he was familiar with literature and ink, and he also liked to read. He believed that people can only make a profit if they study, so despite the family's financial constraints, he still saved money and did everything possible to provide for my brother and me to study, hoping that after we finished our studies, we could go out to do things and glorify our ancestors. In this way, my elder brother Zheng Tongguo completed the "Preparatory Department for Studying Abroad" in the Yuelu Mountains of Hunan, and then went to Japan to study, but unfortunately he was forced to drop out of school soon after the Qing government canceled official fees, and then returned to his hometown to teach. However, the patriarchal mentality is still quite serious. For example, he is very attentive to the cultural education of his two sons, while the other three daughters are very sloppy. Although the lack of economic conditions is one of the reasons, in fact, he thinks that girls are useless at all, and he has to pay a large amount of dowry when he grows up and marries, not to mention it, where is he willing to spend money for girls to study? By the way, my father named my last two sisters "Zhimei" and "Dumei" respectively, which means "stop" and "end", which shows that he did not want to have more daughters. In fact, this kind of feudal thinking was common in the minds of the peasants at that time, not only the father, so the drowning of female babies in the countryside at that time was not uncommon.
Since I was 6 years old, my father began to teach me to read himself. My enlightenment readings were originally "The Three Character Classic" and "Thousand Character Text", and later I read "The Analects" and other books. Every day after breakfast, my father sat down at the table and shouted, "Son, come and read!" When I heard this, I hurried cautiously to him, and stood with my hands down, for if I delayed a little I would be scolded. My father taught me to read the text aloud by himself, and then taught me to recognize and write the new words in the book one by one. After repeating this several times, he told me to write and read silently, while he smoked a hookah, closed his eyes, and called me over for questioning after a while. When I was young, I was not very talented, and the Chinese characters in the book were very strange, and the meaning was more difficult to understand, so it was inevitably quite difficult to learn. My father's attitude was very strict, and whenever he was not satisfied with my learning, he would take the bamboo strips that had been placed on the table and smack me on the head a few times. At that time, reading was far from a pleasant thing for me, and I was trembling every day of studying. At the end, my father waved his hand and said, "All right, that's all for today!" "I rushed out of the house to play as if I had received an amnesty. At that time, I was too young to understand my father's painstaking efforts in any way.
When I was 8 years old, my father sent me to a private school in the countryside. Mr. is one of my own brothers, and he has a good foundation in Chinese studies. He was very strict with his students, but he didn't hit people as often as his father, and when he was angry, he would at most reprimand the naughty child a few times, and occasionally hit the hand with a ring ruler. Maybe it was because I already had some cultural foundation around my father, or maybe the private school teacher was not as strict as my father, but I felt a lot more relaxed about studying at the private school, and I became a little more interested in studying. In the past two years, I have read the "Four Books", "The Book of Songs", "Zuo Chuan" and other books, some of which I can still recite in paragraphs, these old Chinese studies, which are full of traditional Chinese Confucianism and feudal etiquette, have had a great impact on my later life.
In the autumn of that year, the revolutionaries rebelled in Wuchang, which led to the abdication of the Qing emperor and the end of more than 2,000 years of feudal rule in China, which became known as the Xinhai Revolution. At that time, I was too young to understand the profound historical significance of this great revolution. However, since my elder brother Zheng Tongguo had been studying abroad and had been to Japan, he had accepted many new ideas, and whenever he returned home to save his relatives, he inevitably had to tell his family and neighbors about the Qing government's betrayal and misrepresentation of the country, and that Mr. Sun Yat-sen led the League to make a revolution. When it comes to anger, it is often impassioned and tearful. I don't know everything about what my brother said. But at that time, my brother was a university scholar in my eyes, and I believed everything he said, especially when he said some new terms, such as "democracy" and "republic", which made me find it very interesting. At that time, I admired Mr. Sun Yat-sen very much, thinking that he must be the same as Guan Yunchang and Zhao Zilong in the novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", a tall and big hero with high skills. In short, due to the influence of my brother, I had begun to imprint in my young mind the idea that the Qing emperor was not good, and that the imperial system must be overthrown and the Republic of China must be established in order for China to have hope. In this sense, my brother was undoubtedly an enlightened teacher in my politics.
I had just turned 10 years old, and a new elementary school had been opened in the countryside, and my father was very happy when he heard the news, and hurriedly sent me to school. Unexpectedly, this school is in name only. There is only one teacher in the school, and this teacher knows almost nothing about arithmetic, music, physical education, etc., except for knowing some Chinese languages, and the most ridiculous thing is that he can't even figure out the scoring rules for arithmetic homework, and only knows how to give students with poor homework scores 60 points, and good grades score 100 points. For those students with extremely poor grades, he originally wanted to score 10 points, but somehow he added two zeros to the end of 1, and it became 100 points, making the grades good or bad, full of jokes. As for music, physical education, etc., it seems that there were no courses at all in my memory. This year has almost gone by in vain. Later, when my father finally learned about the teaching situation in this school, he beat his chest angrily, scolded the teachers for misleading people, and immediately sent me back to the private school to study.
2. Teenagers studying and joining the army for the first time
I studied in a private school for another three years, and it was not until the spring of 1917 that my father, persuaded by my brother, decided to send me to the primary school affiliated to Shimen Middle School in Shimen County. This elementary school is a three-year school with a Western-style curriculum. At that time, I was 14 years old, so I had to go straight into the second grade. But I can't take any other courses except for the basics of Bahasa Malaysia. In particular, arithmetic was so low that I couldn't understand what the teacher taught in class. In the end, I couldn't, so I had to work hard, get up early and go to bed late every day, and study and practice repeatedly according to the guidance of teachers and classmates until I got through each topic. The hard work paid off, and in the second year, my arithmetic grades were very good among my classmates, and other homework was catching up one after another.
When I first came to Shimen County to study, my brother who was the principal of Shimen Middle School was responsible for all the expenses. Later, my brother was recruited to Lin Dexuan's army as Lin's secretary, so he could not regularly support me (at that time, Shimen was not yet able to communicate with the outside world). Therefore, the financial burden of providing for my education fell on my father in the countryside. However, at that time, the situation of my family continued to deteriorate, the crops in the field failed year after year, and my mother often visited Langzhong because of her illness, which made it difficult for me to make ends meet, so that my school expenses became a problem. Once, when I came home from summer vacation, I saw my father frowning and sighing all day long trying to make ends meet. When school was about to start, my father never mentioned my tuition. Although I was anxious, looking at his gloomy face, where did I dare to mention this? In the end, my mother borrowed 4 pieces of koyo from nowhere and secretly stuffed them for me. Relying on these 4 pieces of Guangyang, I saved money and used it for a long time, but in the end I ran out, so I had no choice but to borrow it from rich classmates. At that time, the weather was getting colder, and I didn't have a change of cotton clothes yet, but I had to hold on to it in order to continue studying. One day, I had a cousin Zheng Kanghou (about 10 years older than me) who was the county magistrate in Changde, passing by Shimen County and coming to see me. Seeing that I was only wearing a shabby gown, shivering incessantly in the cold wind, the boss in my heart couldn't bear it, so he immediately took out 20 pieces of Guangyang and asked me to accept it again and again. With this money, I was able to get through the storm. Later, when my brother learned about this from others, he was very sad, and from then on, he tried in every possible way to pay my education fees on time, fearing that I would be embarrassed financially again.
At the end of the year when I went to Shimen County to study, there was a sudden disturbance in Xiangxi, and the trouble became more and more serious, causing the people to live in peace. Once, a group of bandits actually broke into the county seat, killed the county magistrate, and kidnapped the detained bandits. After several years, there was no more stable days in the Shimen area.
It was in this winter (1917) that my father arranged for me to marry a peasant girl from a neighboring township, Qin La'e. In fact, the marriage was made more than two years ago, and my father has always regarded it as a matter of his heart, wishing that I would get married as soon as possible. I was too young to know what it was like to get married and marry a wife, so I had everything up to my parents. I remember that not long before the marriage, my father came to my father-in-law's house as a guest, and I was staying at my aunt's house on vacation. My aunt's house was next to the deep water, and there was a small boat tied to the river at the door for ferrying. I was bored, so I jumped on the boat with a few children, untied the cables, and wandered around the river. After a while, the boat shook violently for some reason, and I didn't stand still, and I plunged into the river with a thud. The ship's mates were terrified and shouted for help while desperately pulling me up. But my water quality is not good, and the river water is cold and biting, I can't climb up after several struggles, and my body is a little numb, and I gradually lose consciousness. At this time, someone passed by and heard the cries of the children on the boat, so they salvaged me in time. When I returned to my aunt's house, while the family was busy baking and changing my clothes and pouring me hot ginger soup, my father sent someone to ask me to immediately visit my mother-in-law (my father-in-law had passed away at that time). My aunt was angry and wanted to send him away, but the man refused to say anything, and repeatedly said that my father ordered me to go anyway. My aunt had to scold him, and finally took him away. It turned out that according to the customs of Xiangxi, the son-in-law should visit Yue's house in person on the eve of the wedding and stay for a few days to show solemnity. My father was a very religious person, so he naturally took these things very seriously.
When I went to Yue's house a few days later, I received another false alarm. On the first night I arrived at my father-in-law's house, my mother-in-law was very happy and prepared a lot of food and drinks. Because of my young age, I didn't have much to drink, and I couldn't support it after only two small drinks, so I rested early. About midnight, I was suddenly awakened by a noise outside the house, and I got up and looked out sleepily, and I was so frightened that I was frightened. I saw more than a dozen big men holding spears and knives standing outside the courtyard, drinking to order my mother-in-law's family to open the door. I realized that it was a bandit robbery, and I panicked and didn't know what to do. After a while, seven or eight bandits had broken down the door and drove my mother-in-law's family to the hall with me. Stand over there, and I'll kill him if he moves!" "Where do we dare to move? They all stood obediently. The rest of the bandits took the opportunity to rush into the inner room, robbed the Qin family's dowry of several boxes in the room, and then left. In my horror, I found a girl beside me who I had never seen in my mother-in-law's house, and thought that this must be my future wife, and the girl also noticed that I was watching her, and quickly buried her head deeply behind my mother-in-law. According to the old etiquette, the marriage of young men and women is entirely on the orders of their parents, and the matchmaker is not allowed to meet until the day of the wedding chapel. But the two of us met for the first time under such circumstances, which is really ridiculous.
Later, I heard that this robbery was actually done by people from my Yue family in collusion with outsiders, and the purpose was only to take advantage of the marriage of the daughter of the Qin family to loot some property, so I did not intend to hurt anyone, which can be regarded as a great luck in misfortune.
When I married Qin, I had just turned 15 years old, and Qin was 23 years old, a full eight years older than me. This would seem unthinkable to young people today, but it was quite common in rural Hunan at that time. For the elders in the family, marrying an older daughter-in-law can not only increase the labor force, but also add more imports as soon as possible, isn't it a good thing?
However, after I got married to Qin, we had a very good relationship with each other. She was of similar temperament to her mother, diligent and modest, and we never blushed each other until her death in 1930.
In the spring of 1918, the bandits were still in trouble, and another military disaster was added. Lin Dexuan, Wang Zibin and other units of the Hunan local army fought for territory in Xiangxi, and the local situation was chaotic, and the school was forced to suspend classes. In the autumn, the situation eased a little, the school reopened, and I was able to continue my studies at Shimen Middle School.
The following year, the epoch-making May Fourth Movement broke out. The failure of China's diplomacy at the "Paris Peace Conference" aroused the strong dissatisfaction and anger of the people of the whole country against the traitorous acts of the Beiyang warlord government, and tens of thousands of students, workers, and citizens set off a huge anti-imperialist patriotic movement in Beijing and all parts of the country.
Although Shimen County is located in a remote mountainous area, it was also deeply influenced and shocked by this great patriotic revolutionary movement. Under the propaganda and agitation of some patriotic teachers, the students of Shimen Middle School were the first to respond and took to the streets to demonstrate. At that time, the spearhead of the struggle was mainly the Beiyang warlord government and Japanese imperialism, and my classmates and I marched in the county almost every day to publicize the boycott of Japanese goods, and formed an inspection team to check the Japanese goods in various stores. When they saw us patriotic students, they nodded their heads one by one and were very respectful, and we collected all the Japanese goods handed in and checked by the merchants, and burned them in public in the market. This movement lasted vigorously in Shimen County for a long time before gradually subsided.
The May Fourth Movement was the first baptism of revolution in my life, and it aroused and cultivated my simple patriotic enthusiasm and belief, which had a great impact on my later experience. From this moment on, I began to realize bitterly that China was in danger of extinction and extinction with foreign powers, warlords fighting at home, a ruined country, and political corruption. As a hot-blooded young man, he should be determined to save the country and relieve the people from hanging. However, my thoughts on how to save the country and the people are extremely simple and naïve. I feel that the key to China's weakness lies in its weak armament, and that in the future, if we want to resist the bullying and abuse of foreign powers and eliminate all kinds of warlord forces, we must have strong force. Based on this understanding, I began to have a strong desire to quit school and join the army.
Two years have passed in the blink of an eye. One day, someone came back from Changsha, the provincial capital, and said that Zhao Hengti, the overseer of Hunan, was going to hold a Hunan Army Martial Arts Hall in Changsha and was planning to recruit students. I was overjoyed by this news, and hurriedly asked someone to inquire about the news in Changsha and prepare to apply for the examination. It was also a coincidence that Tang Rongyang (a native of Shimen), the town guard of Lizhou who led his troops stationed in the western Hunan area at that time, intended to select a group of students from Shimen Middle School to enter the lecture hall for training, so that they could serve as the backbone of his army in the future, so he asked for permission to set up an examination room in Shimen County to recruit students. In my opinion, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I rushed to take the exam. On the day of the exam, Tang Jingde (from Shimen), the brigade commander stationed in Shimen County, personally served as the chief examiner. There are a lot of people taking the test. Most of them were students from Shimen Middle School and officers and soldiers of the Tang Department. The title of the exam is a passage from Zilu in the Analects: "The country of a thousand times is also for it, and it is compared to three years, so that you can be brave and know the way." "I can't remember how I wrote this essay at the time, but after the exams, I was accepted very quickly. I was so happy that I didn't bother to say goodbye to my family, so I followed some people from the army to Changsha to report for duty.
When I arrived in the provincial capital, the situation changed unexpectedly. At this time, Zhao Hengti sent troops to attack Wang Zhanyuan, the overseer of Hubei, but was defeated by Wang, and the Hunan army ripped back to Hunan, burning and looting on a large scale, and the discipline was ruined. Some local armies also seized the opportunity to fight again, causing the whole province of Hunan to be devastated. Under such circumstances, the Army Lecture Hall will naturally not be able to open. I waited in Changsha for nearly two months, and finally saw that there was no hope. And the entanglement around him was exhausted, and then he returned to the stone gate dejectedly. Fortunately, when I left, I still kept my student registration in Shimen Middle School, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to read the book when I went back.
In the early summer of 1922, when I was studying at school, my family sent me an urgent letter saying that my mother was seriously ill and asked me to go back to cook as soon as possible. I was so anxious to hear the news that I asked the school authorities for leave and walked home overnight. When I returned home, I saw that my mother was extremely ill, her face was as pale as paper, her whole body was swollen, and she couldn't stop panting. When she saw me come back, my mother only called "Mi'er"! I kept coughing violently, and I couldn't speak anymore, and I couldn't help but cry like rain, hugging my mother and crying bitterly. Two days later, my eldest brother hurried back from out of town. We took turns serving soup and medicine at my mother's bed all day long, hoping for her recovery. However, despite our best efforts, my mother's condition continued to deteriorate. Knowing that she was going to be sick, my mother struggled to summon us children to the bed and explained what had happened one by one. In addition to asking us to honor our father in the future and live in harmony with each other, she also specially told my brother and I to study hard and do things, to be honest and honest, and not to be greedy and forgetful, and to disappoint our ancestors. These last words of my mother have indeed become the motto of my life.
Around mid-June of that year, my mother finally died at the age of 63. Like countless rural working women of the same era, my mother was kind, simple and hardworking, but she never got rid of the poverty and hardships of life all her life.
Two months later, I graduated from Shimen High School. Since my mother had just passed away, I didn't have the heart to continue my studies, so I returned home. At the beginning of the following year, I was hired by the nearby Moshi Primary School to teach geography and English for half a year. In the summer, I felt that it was not possible to stay in my hometown for a long time, so I decided to study in Changsha. At that time, my brother was working in Changsha, his income was higher than in the past, and the family's financial situation had improved, so my father, brother and wife all agreed with my idea. So, I packed up my simple bags, brought some coils, said goodbye to my father, wife and children, and came to Changsha alone.
When I arrived in Changsha, I first settled down in a small hotel in the city, then went to see my brother, and then I noticed the admissions notices posted by various schools on the street. In the evening, I read the newspaper to find out the school's admissions, and I thought that it would be better to go to those vocational schools because I couldn't afford to apply for a bachelor's degree because my family's financial situation was too far. First, the cost is much less, and secondly, you can learn the same specialty in a relatively short period of time so that you can make a living on your own. So I first applied for an industrial college, but I didn't get in. I was not discouraged, and then I applied for a commercial college (the predecessor of present-day Hunan University), and this time I was accepted. It was not my wish to study and run a business, but for the sake of my future livelihood, I have no choice at this time.
At that time, the price of goods in Changsha was quite cheap, and for 3 yuan a month, you could find a place to eat and live near the school. If you are willing to pay four or five pieces of Guangyang, then the food and accommodation conditions are quite good. Because my brother pays for my studies, I am very frugal, and I only cover 3 yuan of Guangyang for one month's room and board. Even so, it was much better than when I was studying at Shimen, so I was quite content.
In this way, I lived and studied in Changsha for more than half a year.
[Zheng Dongguo, January 13, 1903 - January 27, 1991, the name Guiting, was born in Shimen County, Changde City, Hunan Province. Graduated from the first phase of the Whampoa Military Academy. He participated in the Eastern Expedition and the Northern Expedition, and was one of the first Kuomintang generals to participate in the War of Resistance against Japan, and a lieutenant general of the National Revolutionary Army. In 1933, he led his troops to participate in the Great Wall Gubeikou Anti-Japanese War, and after the "77 Incident", he successively led his troops to participate in the Battle of Baoding, the Great Victory of Taierzhuang, the Battle of Wuhan, the Great Victory of Kunlun Pass, the Battle of Western Hubei, the Second Battle of Changsha and other battles. In 1943, he was transferred to the commander of the New First Army of the Chinese Army in India, and led his troops to recover northern Burma and promote his prestige abroad; He returned to China in 1945 and successively served as deputy commander of the Third Front Army, deputy commander-in-chief of the Northeast Security, and acting commander-in-chief, and in 1948, at an important moment in the Liaoshen Campaign, he broke away from the Kuomintang camp. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, he successively served as a counselor of the Ministry of Water Resources of the People's Republic of China, a member of the National Defense Commission, a member of the 3rd and 4th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a member of the 5th and 6th Standing Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, a vice chairman of the 5th, 6th, and 7th Central Committee of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang, and vice president of the Whampoa Alumni Association. 】