In 2009, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the founding of New China, China selected 100 Chinese that have touched the founding of New China.
Xing Yanzi is one of them, although the young people now are not very familiar with her, but if you ask about the elders of the "post-60s" and "post-70s", she was even more popular than the current first-line superstars.
On the cover of state-level newspapers and periodicals such as "People's Daily" and "China Youth Daily" many times, the famous Guo Moruo tailored "Xing Yanzi Song" for her and accepted Chairman Mao's reception many times.
What made an ordinary intellectual youth become a big star of national civilization, and with the passage of time, what kind of life is the original "big star" living now?
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > country girls back to the country</h1>
Xing Yanzi was born in Tianjin in 1941, when the country was still in the war of resistance against Japan, there were wars everywhere, and the city was particularly chaotic, so her parents sent her to the countryside and let her grandfather take care of her.
When she was eight years old, the founding of New China, all aspects of society were restored to order, at that time her father was already the deputy director of the Tianjin North China Enamel Factory, her mother was also working in a sewing factory, the family was relatively well-off, in order to give her a better learning and living environment, her parents took her from the countryside to the city.
Little Swallow, who has just arrived in the city, still has a lot of unaccustomed to the city, although it is far more prosperous than the countryside, she can buy beautiful small clothes and eat delicious snacks, but she also misses the little friends who play together in the countryside, and the grandfather who always smiles kindly at herself.
Xing Yanzi
Soon, Xiao Yanzi's father arranged for her to attend the Tianjin Railway Bureau Workers' Children Primary School, where she met new friends and integrated into the new big collective.
Xing Yanzi in the school has far more hard work than her peers, often other children go out to play, she is still studying in the classroom, so she has also achieved excellent results, which makes her parents proud.
Although she is very happy in the city, she still has not forgotten her grandfather in the countryside, who is getting older, the elderly are nostalgic, and they are not willing to move to the city to live.
At that time, Xing Yanzi, who was only 12 years old, took the initiative to ask her father to go back to the countryside and go back to take care of her elderly grandfather, at that time, due to her parents' busy work, she really could not find time to take care of the elderly, and seeing that her daughter was so filial, she agreed to her request to go home and study.
After four years, Xing Yanzi once again returned to the land where she was raised, studying in a local primary school, and accompanying her grandfather at home when she was not in school, doing her filial piety.
Three years later, she was admitted to the Agricultural Middle School with excellent results, and because she was more than thirty kilometers away from home, she had to say goodbye to her hometown again, bid farewell to her grandfather, and embarked on the road to study.
In agricultural middle schools, in addition to learning theoretical knowledge in class, it is also necessary to participate in agricultural work, three days a week, which is also to apply what they have learned and enhance their learning ability.
This is still difficult for many children from the city, but for Xing Yanzi, who grew up in the countryside, everything is familiar with it, and she is more diligent than her senior classmates in the farm work.
In 1958, Xing Yanzi graduated from agricultural middle school, which was already a good academic qualification for junior high school at that time, and she could also find a relatively comfortable job by relying on this degree.
However, for Xing Yanzi, life in the city is not what she wants after all, and she has always had a plan for her life in her heart.
As early as 1955, she was very interested in Chairman Mao's call that "all intellectuals can go to the countryside, where there is a vast space, and there will be great achievements.", plus she had originally lived in the countryside since she was a child, becoming the first generation of educated peasants in New China, and the ideal of building a new countryside in the motherland was buried in her heart at that time.
In July 1958, Xing Yanzi persuaded her parents who wanted to stay in Tianjin to return to Sijiazhuang Village alone, this time no longer as a child, but as a rural builder.
Girls in the countryside return to the countryside, although familiar, but the change of identity is still a lot of unaccustomed places.
The village party secretary saw that she was a little girl and arranged for her to go to the commune canteen to cook, where the little girl had the experience of making a big pot of rice, looking at the cauldron that was about to be high was inevitably worried.
One day, the master fu on the stove left for a while, and the boiled porridge was boiled and spilled directly out of the pot, causing Xing Yanzi to shout in a hurry: "Come on people!" Come on people! Porridge is going to run! ”。
Fortunately, the teacher Fu quickly ran back, otherwise the bottom of the pot would have been burned through.
People in the village have always felt that this little girl who took the initiative to go to the countryside to build a new countryside will sooner or later go back to the city and stay in the countryside for a short time, but no one expected that this little girl was not only rooted in the countryside, but also became a model for learning in the country.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > the swallows to work hard</h1>
At a time when Xing Yanzi mastered the various techniques of rural life step by step, in 1959, three years of serious difficulties came, and the output of grain and grain and sideline products in the country was greatly reduced.
Because many strong laborers had to go to steelmaking, digging coal, and repairing reservoirs at that time, only 8 male laborers could do farm work in the village.
In order to ensure production and not let everyone go hungry, Xing Yanzi began to find ways to mobilize female comrades to work.
Because all along, many women who get married and have children will not come out to farm and have children at home, and all Xing Yanzi has to do is to mobilize them as well.
The first thing to solve is the problem of the child, if the mother goes out to work, the child is not managed is a problem, Xing Yanzi as a knowledge youth, through the organization of kindergartens, on the one hand can teach children to read and write, on the other hand is also easy to manage.
The liberated mothers began to follow Xing Yanzi to set up a "commando team" to produce self-help, at first there were only seven people, and slowly, more and more people joined the team, up to 17 or 8 people at most.
The most difficult thing to reclaim wasteland is saline-alkali land, but there is a large number of saline-alkali land in Sijiazhuang Village, the seedling emergence rate is extremely low, the seedlings that were originally good, after the rain, the alkaline salt in the land dissolved into the water, and the seedlings were completely destroyed, which is nothing less than worse for the villages that are already short of labor.
In order to solve this problem, the female comrades of the commando team organized by Xing Yanzi used various methods to treat the saline-alkali land, and the first method was the most primitive method: lifting the field.
The so-called lifting of the field is to raise the planted field, even if it rains, the water will go to the low ditch, will not endanger the land, but this method is too inefficient, one is the consumption of human resources, there are not many people, but also all women, the strength is not so big to open a day can not open much, the second is an acre of land with the method of lifting the field, only sixty or seventy percent can be used, the loss is too large.
Xing Yanzi used the knowledge she learned during her studies and consulted the experts in the county to summarize the methods of Lasha field management, straw field management, autumn ploughing and winter irrigation, etc., and led the female comrades to use advanced technology to manage the field.
In the first year, they reclaimed 560 acres of wasteland to sow wheat the following spring.
As a result, due to the cold weather, the fertilizer knots were frozen as hard as stones, and if this problem could not be solved, the sowing would become a bubble.
At that time, Xing Yanzi was about to cry, the fruits of hard work were all gone, not only was his confidence hit, but the bigger problem was that everyone's rations would be gone in the coming year.
The village party secretary saw her anxiety and told her that the success of the revolution did not happen overnight, that it was not terrible to encounter difficulties and failures, and that it was terrible to be defeated by difficulties.
This remark greatly inspired Xing Yanzi, and after consulting the old farmers, in order to ensure the sowing, they crushed the fertilizer lumps with stones.
There were few livestock in the team, only to pull the pots by themselves, and their shoulders were swollen, so they took off their scarves and put them on the mat to continue drying, and when it was snowy, they slipped and fell easily, so they used the branches as crutches.
In this way, relying on the most primitive method, the soldiers of the Xing Yanzi Action Team worked hard for 10 days and rolled 560 acres of land 8 times, laying a solid foundation for the spring ploughing and sowing in the coming year.
After a period of hard work, slowly, before it could only produce tens of pounds of land per acre, it could produce 100 pounds, 200 pounds, to the back of 500 pounds, 600 pounds can be achieved, Xing Yanzi led the commando members to control a large area of barren land into a harvest land.
During the three years of serious difficulties, when most of the people in the country were seriously threatened by hunger, Sijiazhuang Village, in addition to being self-sufficient, could still have spare energy to hand over to the state, and it had to be said that Xing Yanzi led the team to create a miracle.
Xing Yanzi not only led the women to govern the fields, but in fact, she did not idle all year round.
After the autumn harvest, Xing Yanzi began to organize everyone to make fishing nets, buckets, and take them to the town to sell and supplement the family.
In the winter, the women were led to fish, and at that time the winter was even colder than it is now, and the lake had a thick layer of ice.
Xing Yanzi led the members of the commando team, smashed the ice surface with a wooden cone, sprinkled the fishing net and began to fish.
In this way, they fished during the day and did handicraft work at night, and this winter earned a total of more than 3,000 yuan, which can be said to be a huge amount of money for a small village, laying a solid foundation for life in the coming year.
Perhaps Xing Yanzi herself did not expect that she had just arrived in the village for a year or two, and she would be able to make such excellent achievements, not only in the county, but also in the province, until it reached the national level, which had major media reports and set off a wave of "all people learning swallows".
In that more difficult period, everyone needed the power of such an example to lead everyone through the difficulties, Xing Yanzi himself said:
"Mainly because I publicized relatively early, so everyone has a deep memory of me, in fact, there are many examples behind me, the publicity may not be so much, at that time I was also quite ignorant, I used to feel that idols were dong Cunrui, Huang Jiguang such heroes, I did not expect me to become a hero?"
At the time when the "learning swallow" trend was the most enthusiastic, she could receive three or four sacks every time she received a letter, and the simple Xing Yanzi actually wanted to reply to the letter one by one every time, but she really did not have so much time to be busy with production, and could only reply to part of the letter.
Later, through the opportunity to go out as a model to go out to comfort, she can meet with her vast number of "fans", most of whom are primary and junior high school students with the same pure heart, and many people actively participate in "going to the mountains and going to the countryside" after being influenced by her, injecting new blood into the construction of the countryside in the motherland.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > not forgetting the original intention to cultivate people</h1>
In the following ten years, Xing Yanzi was received by Chairman Mao five times, Premier Zhou received more than a dozen times, and she also began to gradually take on the leadership work, solving problems for more peasant brothers and sisters and improving their lives.
But no matter what position she held, even during her tenure as secretary of the Tianjin Municipal Party Committee, she never asked for a single salary from the state, she was a leader when she went to work, she was still a farmer after work, and when she was strapped for money, she had to go to collect firewood with her husband.
If you think that she is just a person who is willing to work hard and work, then you are wrong, as one of the first intellectual youths to go to the countryside, after the practice of polishing the theoretical knowledge learned, Xing Yanzi can also be called a peasant scholar.
When she was a leader in various units, she always paid attention to going down to the grass-roots level, respecting science, and repeatedly stressed to cadres that they should do more investigations, speak with data, and speak with facts.
The "Report on the Water Pollution Problem of tianjin North Canal" and the "Report on protecting the water from pollution of fengchan river" completed by her can be said to be a clear stream in the context of attaching importance to development and neglecting environmental protection in the 1990s.
After the investigation of these two topics, Xing Yanzi deeply realized the seriousness of the pollution of the people's living environment.
In 1994, at her initiative, 13 kilometers of water channels were laid in Beichen District so that the people could drink clean tap water.
In 2000, the North Canal Renovation Project was officially launched, and in September 2001, the project was completed and won the Chinese Environment Demonstration Award, all of which are inseparable from the contribution made by Xing Yanzi.
At the end of 2001, Xing Yanzi officially retired, and after a lifetime of hard work, she also reached the time to feel the joy of heaven at home.
After retirement, Xing Yanzi's main job is to accompany her wife and bring her grandchildren, due to busy work, the two people gather less and leave more, and her husband actually has serious angina, but in order to fear that she is worried, she endures it herself, until one day she fainted on the road in pain before she was found.
Now that they are idle, the two people also have more time to get along, which can also make up for some regrets when they were young.
In addition to spending time with her family, Xing Yanzi also has more time to develop her hobbies, she joined the Yangge team, participated in the university for the elderly, contacted painting, calligraphy, and lived a comfortable life for the elderly.
For many interviews, labor model sharing meetings, she will actively participate in physical and time permitting, she wants to share her strength with the new generation, so that everyone has enough fighting spirit to build the motherland.
But for various business activities, she is not sensitive, she does not want to turn her past experience into a profit-making capital, so she rejected all advertising, endorsements and other things.
On the contrary, if there is a school that wants her to write inscriptions, inscriptions, and motivate students, she always thinks seriously, writes, and sends them back.
In 2019, she won the title of "the most beautiful strivers", and in an interview with Party Building, she said:
"I have only always firmly obeyed the party's command and followed the party, honor is given by the party and the people, it should be cherished, but we must not be proud and complacent."
The image of the old Communist Party member who is old and strong jumps on the paper.
Xing Yanzi is very enthusiastic about public welfare, she said that as an old man, she can only make limited contributions to society, and can only do her best to support disaster resistance and reconstruction and help the people in the disaster area.
Last year's new crown epidemic, the elderly Xing Lao also actively donated 10,000 yuan to do his part for the compatriots in the disaster area and the frontline medical staff.
Time flies, from youth to old age, from going to the countryside to knowing young people to retired cadres, what has changed is identity, but what has not changed is the original intention of serving the people.
This spirit of serving the country with one heart and being indifferent to fame and fortune is worth learning and paying tribute to every young person we have now.