"Hello Mom! Du, Hello Mr. Du! On July 28, 1971, yang Zhenning, a returned scientist, met his wife Du Zhili's father, Du Yuming, for the first time, and he hesitated to say such a sentence. Premier Zhou, who was beside him, smiled and said, "Your name is not right, Mr. Du, you should be called your father-in-law." Everyone immediately burst out laughing, and the atmosphere was happy.
However, these three words of "Mr. Du" really should not be spoken by Yang Zhenning, a well-educated person. After all, the two are a son-in-law relationship, even if he is nervous, he will not be so out of shape. In fact, there was always a faint worry in his heart at that time. As for what to worry about, we still have to tell you.
Yang Zhenning is a native of Hefei, Anhui Province, and his family is a standard scholarly family. His father, Yang Wuzhi, was a famous professor of mathematics; his mother, Luo Menghua, although an old-fashioned woman, was also literate and hyphenated. In the year when Yang Zhenning was four years old, his mother began to teach him to read, but he did not expect that this child was too smart, and he could read more than three thousand in less than a year. His mother couldn't see that she could teach him, so she helped him ask a serious gentleman to teach him Mandarin. Later, his father Yang Wuzhi felt that his son was a good piece of jade, so he took Yang Zhenning to Xiamen to study when he was 6 years old. Soon Yang Wuzhi was hired at Tsinghua University, and Yang Zhenning went to Beijing with his father to study.
Although Yang Wuzhi has always been inclined to let Yang Zhenning learn literature, his science talent cannot be buried in any way. By the time he was in middle school, he was able to ask his father some advanced mathematical problems. Originally, this trend of "inheriting the father's business" was already very obvious, but there were unexpected storms in the sky, in 1937, the outbreak of the War of Resistance Against Japan, the fall of Beijing, Yang Wuzhi and many other professors, first established a temporary university in Changsha, and later moved the school to Kunming, establishing the famous Southwest United University in history. Yang Zhenning also went with his father, but his studies have not fallen. In 1938, Yang Zhenning participated in the first college entrance examination after the beginning of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and was successfully admitted to the Department of Physics of Southwest United University.
In the following years, Yang Zhenning has been studying hard in the school, from students to graduate students, step by step. In August 1944, Yang Zhenning became the only Chinese student majoring in physics to study in the United States at that time. However, according to the regulations of the Ministry of Education, he also has to have a one-year retention period. This year, he could only continue his further studies while giving substitute classes at the Unidad Affiliated Middle School. During this time, he met a girl named Du Zhili. At this time, Du Zhili was still a little girl, and the relationship between the two was also an ordinary teacher-student relationship.
In 1945, Yang Zhenning entered the University of Chicago to study as he wished, and continued to forge his academic level. Three years later, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Another year later, he entered the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. This year, two major events happened around Yang Zhenning: one was that he met his lifelong best friend and partner Li Zhengdao, and the other was that he met the other half of his life. On Christmas Day, Yang Zhenning happened to meet his former student Du Zhili in a restaurant, and the two sparked a spark of love.
For the relationship between the two, Du Zhili is very calm. She told Yang Zhenning that her father was Du Yuming, a senior Kuomintang general. Originally, Du Yuming was going to come to the United States for medical treatment, but due to the tight civil war, he was forcibly left at home by Chiang Kai-shek. After the defeat at the Battle of Huaihai, Du became a prisoner of war and later a war criminal, serving a prison sentence in China. His mother, Cao Xiuqing, lives in Taiwan with her younger siblings, and the situation is like house arrest. Coming from such a fragmented family, it is difficult to have a normal life in the future. Yang Zhenning did not care about this, he believed that Du Zhili was the other half of his life. So after a year of dating, the two had a wedding.
After the marriage of the two, life is indeed caught in a kind of internal and external contradictions. In his career, Yang Zhenning can be described as smooth sailing. Together with Lee Jung-do, he established a new physical system that won the approval of the world's scientific community. In 1957, the two jointly proposed the "cosmological non-conservation theory", for which they won the Nobel Prize. In their personal lives, Yang Zhenning and Du Zhili are also very happy, emotionally harmonious, and have their own next generation. But in the external family environment, Yang Zhenning is facing tremendous pressure.
On the one hand, the pressure comes from his father Yang Wuzhi. The reason why Yang Wuzhi originally let his son choose to study physics and sent him to the United States for further study was that he wanted his son to be used by the country after completing his studies. However, after the combination of Yang Zhenning and Du Zhili, they had to consider the wishes of the Taiwan side, so they have always been ambiguous in their attitude toward returning to China. In 1964, Yang Zhenning chose to become an American citizen in order to save his wife's younger siblings. This move deeply hurt his father Yang Wuzhi, and since then, the family letter has almost been severed, and the relationship between father and son has dropped to a freezing point.
On the other hand, the pressure comes from Du Zhili's side. Du Yuming, because of his good attitude toward reform in Chinese mainland, angered Chiang Kai-shek and directly stopped the living support of Cao Xiuqing's family. Du Yuming's eldest son committed suicide because of the lack of tuition fees. Even so, Chiang Kai-shek's supervision of Cao Xiuqing's family was still very strict. After Yang Zhenning won the Nobel Prize, Cao Xiuqing fled Taiwan on the pretext of "persuading her son-in-law to serve the party-state" and came to the United States to reunite with her daughter. In 1963, Cao Xiuqing transferred from Geneva to Moscow, and then returned to China to reunite with her husband, who had been pardoned. But her other children remain in Taiwan. This situation forced Yang Zhenning and his wife to be extremely careful in their daily words and deeds.
Fast forward to 1971. This year, relations between Chinese mainland and Taiwan have tended to ease, and the antagonistic attitudes of China and the United States have also improved. Many overseas Chinese working in the United States saw the opportunity and wanted to return to their home countries. Yang Zhenning was no exception, writing to his father, Yang Wuzhi, asking about "returning to China to visit relatives". Yang Wuzhi was very appreciative of his son's attitude and directly reported the news to the State Council. Since Yang Zhenning was a physicist all over the world, the Party Central Committee welcomed his return, and even Premier Zhou personally arranged this matter, and said that he and Chairman Mao would personally meet him.
Receiving feedback from his father, Yang Zhenning and his wife Du Zhili immediately set off for Paris to apply for a visa, preparing to return home from here. Under the care of Premier Zhou, the visa was processed very smoothly and at a speed beyond imagination. Yang Zhenning was extremely excited to take the visa, and after 26 years, he finally set foot on the land of the motherland again.
On July 28, 1971, Premier Zhou hosted a banquet for Yang Zhenning's family. At this banquet, Yang Zhenning met Du Yuming for the first time.
When the family was reunited, Yang Zhenning was excited in his heart, and he also wanted to call Du Yuming "Daddy" from the bottom of his heart. However, the denial of Chiang Kai-shek's six relatives has deeply hurt him and even affected his understanding of the attitude of the Party Central Committee. Even though he had been in China for a while, he had contact with many people and learned about the policies of the Party Central Committee. But the fear of politics left him feeling uneasy. He didn't know what the consequences of calling out "Daddy" would be for himself, for his wife and the father-in-law who had just met. So after some psychological struggle, he chose to call Du Yuming "Mr. Du", which is both in line with etiquette and can maintain a certain distance.
After listening to the son-in-law's sentence "Mr. Du", Du Yuming's face changed instantly. Seeing that a happy banquet was about to fail, Premier Zhou hurried to play the round and correct Yang Zhenning's mistake. And Premier Zhou's words also made Yang Zhenning let go of the burden in his heart and respectfully shouted "Daddy". Du Yuming smiled happily this time, and talked to his son-in-law and his relatives about the wine.
Shortly thereafter, Yang returned to the United States. Since then, in addition to his own academic research, he has also devoted himself to the improvement of Sino-US relations and to cultivating talents for the motherland. Throughout his teaching career, he has trained a total of 10 academician-level talents for the motherland. With the deepening of reform and opening up, China has entered a new era and once again stood tall among the nations of the world. On April 1, 2015, Yang Zhenning also voluntarily renounced his U.S. citizenship and became a Chinese citizen again. In February 2017, Yang Zhenning became an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and continued to contribute to the development of physics in China.