In the city of Taicang, Suzhou, there is such a tombstone, which reads: "She is an outstanding citizen of the world, and a permanent Chinese."
The person under the tombstone is named Wu Jianxiong, so what kind of story does she have, and why does she say that she is a "citizen of the world" and at the same time emphasize "eternal Chinese"?
In 1912, Wu Jianxiong was born in Shuxiangmendi, Liuhe Town, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, his father was named Wu Zhongyi, the founder of the Mingde Girls' School at that time.
At that time, a woman's talentlessness was moral, and thanks to her father's help and ideas, Wu Jianxiong successfully entered the school and received the latest education.
At the age of 11, Wu Jianxiong was successfully admitted to Suzhou Second Girls' Normal School, and his results in school for 4 years have been very good. Eventually, she graduated with honors and became an elementary school teacher.
According to normal circumstances, Wu Jianxiong would dedicate her life to the field of "teaching and educating people", however, with the help of her father, her life has changed.
Without my father's help, I might still be teaching in a primary school somewhere in China...
At that time, Wu Zhongyi was very supportive of his daughter's further education, and later, through a year's efforts, Wu Jianxiong was admitted to the mathematics major of Central University.
It is worth mentioning that during their studies at the Central University, Wu Jianxiong and Hu Shi also had a relationship of "affection and etiquette".
The beginning of the relationship between the two needs to be traced back to the era of Wu Jianxiong Middle School. At that time, Hu Shi was a well-known new cultural thinker, and Wu Jianxiong was his "fan" and had read his works many times in "New Youth".
By chance, Hu Shi was invited by the principal of the Girls' Normal School to give a speech, and since then, Wu Jianxiong has developed an inexplicable liking for Hu Shi, but Hu Shi does not know who she is.
After being admitted to Central University, Wu Jianxiong was a student, and Hu Shi became her teacher. In order to make a good impression on Hu Shi, Wu Jianxiong has been studying very hard, especially in literature.
During an exam, Wu Jianxiong's test paper made Hu Shi overjoyed, Hu Shi: "I have never seen a person analyze the history of the Qing Dynasty so thoroughly..."
Since then, Wu Jianxiong and Hu Shi have become familiar with each other, and the two often have telephone calls and letters, and it is inevitable that they will fall in love after a long time. However, perhaps the two could not cross "some kind of chasm", so they have not been able to come together.
Although love can not be obtained, but the relationship between the two has always been there, even if Wu Jianxiong later went to the United States, her communication with Hu Shi has never been broken.
In 1962, Hu Shi died, Wu Jianxiong rushed to Hu Shi's side from afar, and when he saw his body, the tears couldn't stop flowing down, and his body trembled unceasingly...
Then again, during his studies at Chuo University, Wu Jianxiong originally studied mathematics. However, by chance, she was exposed to some knowledge of physics.
X-rays, electronics, radioactivity, etc. deeply attracted Wu Jianxiong, and the deeds of Roentgen, Becquerel and Curie also encouraged her, and since then Wu Jianxiong has fallen in love with this field and transferred to the Department of Physics a year later.
It has to be said that Wu Jianxiong has a super talent in the field of physics, and in just two or three years, his physical attainment has reached a very high level.
Shortly after graduating from Central University, Wu Jianxiong entered the Academia Sinica, and two years later studied in the United States, entering the California, Berkeley, where he studied under the giants of physics lawrence, Segre, Oppenheimer and others.
In this school, Wu Jianxiong also met his lifelong lover Yuan Jialuo. Yuan Jiaxiao is the grandson of Yuan Shikai, whose father is Yuan Kewen, known as the "Fourth Prince of the Republic of China", and the family lineage is quite prominent.
Unfortunately, for various reasons, the Yuan family has no much influence and wealth in Yuan Jialuo's generation, and Yuan Jialuo himself is also a physical intellectual.
Alone in a foreign country for strangers, every festive season to think of relatives, in addition, Wu Jianxiong and Yuan Jiaqiu are still students of the same school and the same department, and over time the two have a good feeling.
In 1942, after five or six years of love, the two officially entered the palace of marriage and became husband and wife.
For this marriage, Wu Jianxiong once said such a sentence: "I have a husband who is very considerate of me..." It can be seen from this sentence that Yuan Jiaqiu is very supportive of Wu Jianxiong's physical career.
Perhaps it is precisely because of this that Wu Jianxiong was able to shine dazzlingly in the field of physics, not only becoming the "mother of the atomic bomb", but also verifying the "non-conservation law of the universe".
During his time at the University of California, Wu Jianxiong studied the most advanced physical knowledge - atomic nuclei, and conducted a lot of research on "uranium fission" and achieved many important results.
After graduating, Wu became a lecturer at the University of California and later became a teacher at Princeton University. By then, World War II had come to an end, and the U.S. atomic bomb program was on the agenda.
In 1944, Wu was invited by the Manhattan Project to become an engineer in the program, and she had not yet become an American citizen.
It is worth mentioning that when studying the atomic bomb, there is a project that is very difficult to solve, and many scientists have no way to start, it is Wu Jianxiong who finally overcomes this difficulty through day and night calculations and experiments.
Later, when the atomic bomb exploded, many scientists called Wu Jianxiong the "mother of the atomic bomb", and this name alone was enough to prove how high Wu Jianxiong's ability was.
In addition to the atomic bomb, Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao won the Nobel Prize for the "non-conservation law of the universe", which also has a certain relationship with Wu Jianxiong.
In 1956, although Yang Zhenning and Li Zhengdao questioned the "law of conservation", they could not draw conclusions through experiments, because the difficulty of the experiment was too high, and many scientists were unwilling to waste that time.
Under such circumstances, Wu Jianxiong gave up the opportunity to return to China and threw himself into the study of this idea, and finally proved this conjecture with experiments.
Later, when the Nobel Prize was nominated, there was no Wu Jianxiong in the list. At the end of her life, she said regretfully:
My job was neglected for some reason and hurt me deeply..."
Regardless of the truth of the matter, Wu Jianxiong proved a sentence with his own ability: "Who said that women are inferior to men." In 1984, Wu Jianxiong returned from the United States and returned to his long-lost motherland.
At that time, Wu Jianxiong was 72 years old, and when she returned to Suzhou, she donated a huge amount of $250,000 to her hometown to fund the construction of her hometown.
Later, she became an academician of China's Academy of Sciences and contributed to the development of China. It is worth mentioning that his husband Yuan Jiaqiu also set up an education fund for the scientific research of the motherland.
In the early years, when Premier Zhou met With Wu Jianxiong, she once said of her: "The pride of our Chinese, the pride of the Chinese people all over the world..."
At the same time, when evaluating Yuan Jialuo, Premier Zhou said: "You Yuan family, you have really made progress from generation to generation..."
In 1997, Wu Jianxiong died of illness, and before she died, she asked to be buried in her hometown of Suzhou. Afterwards, Yuan Jialuo brought back her ashes.
Today, there is a tombstone next to the Ziwei Pavilion of Mingde Senior High School in Taicang City, Suzhou, and the tombstone reads: "She is an outstanding citizen of the world, and a Chinese forever."