Calligraphy Shen Peng Selected from the National Art Museum of China's "Beauty in Cultivation" New Year Exhibition
In the late 1940s, when I was in high school at Nanjing Middle School in my hometown, I came to a teacher in his twenties, Li Gengxu, who was active in thought and loved literature and art. Once in class, there was a phonograph on the teaching desk, which was a new thing. The students walked to the front to watch, surprised and delighted.
Then, Teacher Li put on a few songs, and the one that impressed me the most was "Teach Me How not to Miss Her". I quickly memorized the lyrics of the tune, recited them in my mind, looked for the score, and went home to sing alone. I like that this song contains a variety of complex feelings, deep love and light sadness intersect, with a variety of tones, time and space changes. At that time, like everyone else, I interpreted it in love songs.
There are many sports enthusiasts in our class, especially football. I didn't like sports, but the illness and weakness I had brought since childhood caused a lot of physical and mental pain. On the sports field, I am often a bystander, a weak person. I used to take advantage of the fact that people were not paying attention to the "single parallel bars" to do some pull-up and turn over movements to improve physical strength, but it was difficult to persevere.
My interests are in literature and art. Find Gu Mingyuan and Xue Juntao to initiate "Dawning", write prose after class, and read new poems and grammatical poems. Many of the students in the class liked harmonica and organized performances, which was not to my interest - I thought it was "customary" and preferred to play the flute and flute. Many years later in Beijing, the accordion and dulcimer in the unit were not patronized, and they became my "patented products", and I played and played them when I had a little free time, and no one ever pointed them out. There is also an old-fashioned Czech accordion that does not use keys, but uses "buttons", which I have never seen anywhere else.
I love singing. When I graduated from junior high school, listening to Cao Peng's conductor in the senior class singing Nie Er's "Graduation Song", I was filled with tears, and I immediately remembered all the lyrics and songs, and I still don't forget it. I've been in choruses, but more often than not, I'm at home singing my favorite songs, barely able to teach myself according to the sheet music.
When I graduated from high school, I held a theatrical event, and I took the podium and sang my favorite "Teach Me How not to Miss Her." At the time, it was a bold move. I didn't hesitate to take the podium, because I had attended english speeches and Mandarin speeches before, and they were among the best. And this song singing love, in the relatively closed environment at that time, I was a little shy at that age. Finally, the obsession with music and the love of poetry made me sing "There are some clouds floating in the sky..." Until the end of "dead trees", "wildfires" and "remnants", to change the tune, it is more and more difficult to sing, but it also enhances the excitement. Chen Shounan, a proud protégé of a music teacher in the same class, thought that my "timbre" was good - what is timbre, it should be the color and tone of the sound! I learned books and paintings from an early age, and I vaguely realized that their delicate relationship with music was of great benefit to later calligraphy creation. The fusion between poetry, books, paintings, and music is hidden in the depths of the subconscious, and when it is put into creation and performance, it naturally rises to the level of consciousness. Huai Su's "Self-Narration" has "Huai Su did not know from the beginning of the clouds" is.
As the years passed, my interest in "Teach Me How not to Miss Her" did not diminish, and I occasionally sang on stage in the activities of the Youth League, but more of a silent recitation and silent singing alone, slowly expanding and deepening the understanding of this famous song -
Well-meaning people remind me not to mistake "she" for "him" when writing. "Teach Me How Not to Want Her" is written by Liu Bannong and composed by Zhao Yuanren. In 1920, the two were in The United Kingdom and the United States, and they both had deep roots in Sinology and the cultivation of Western culture. Liu Bannong, a pioneer of the May Fourth New Culture Movement, promoted the reform of the vernacular language. Liu Bannong's "she" is not only a representation of women, but also has many meanings.
"She" is of course inseparable from love. The first part of the "Book of Poetry" pours out love, simple and unpretentious. Love is the most precious, is the most sincere expression of human nature, the most beautiful realm. "Teach Me How Not to Want Her" closely combines with nature, with love for the scenery, lyrical scenery, four paragraphs including "heaven", "underground", "moonlight", "ocean", "falling flowers", "fish", "swallows", "dead trees", "wildfires", "remnants"... The passage of the four seasons runs through. "The Man of Heaven and Earth, the Anti-Journey of All Things; the Man of Time, the Passer-by of Hundred Generations" (Li Bai), the great sigh shared by ancient and modern times has been expressed by countless poets from different angles. To Liu Bannong, in order to think of "her", put himself in the infinite coordinates of time and space, and integrate with the whole nature.
"Teach Me How Not to Miss Her" is even more expressive of missing the motherland. The author was far away from the ocean, infected by european winds and rains, when the ancient motherland ushered in the May Fourth Movement that broke with feudalism, and introduced Mr. De (democracy) and Mr. Sai (science), full of new vitality. "Teach Me How Not to Want Her" is permeated with a strong patriotic spirit in the grand historical context - we hope that "she" will prosper, so that every citizen can maintain an independent personality, carry forward humanity, and respect the individuality that should be... It still has important implications today. The "she" that the ancestors missed transcended time and space and was eternal.
Nostalgia for the motherland, how can you leave your hometown? It is not conceivable that a person who loves the country will not love the place where he was born and grew up, and every inch of land in his hometown, every grass and tree, a mountain and a water, a brick and a tile, all affect the heart of the wanderer, and every minute and second of his life in his hometown has become the standard of the mercury column in his memory. That eternal love, with its incomparably rich and complex content, seeps into the depths of the soul from various angles with the passage of time. But don't forget that love and hate are often accompanied, and that the hateful and hateful things encountered in life are not forgotten for a long time, precisely because love is deep and sincere.
"Red orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, color dies when I am born" – I wrote these two sentences when I began to write the "Self-Description" group of poems. The day of my birth was the same month of the same year that Japan launched the "918" war of aggression, and as the years grew, I felt more and more how unbearable life was. ...... We fled, the whole family huddled on a small wooden boat to cross the Yangtze River, we walked on foot, and our parents wore large cloth bags, which were all our household necessities. The roar above our heads was the low flying of the sun flag-painted aircraft. There are ravines and mud under our feet, and there are refugees like us who are struggling to walk on the road, some are too sleepy and fall down, maybe permanently...
At that time, I first dropped out of school in Shanghai, then entered Xinghua Primary School for two and a half years, entered Pudong Middle School for one year of junior high school, and then returned to my hometown to enter the second year of Nanjing Middle School, until I graduated from high school and sang "Teach Me How Not to Miss Her".
Taught me how not to miss her – five years at Nanjing Middle School was a very important part of my life. I really learned what teenagers at that age should learn. I'm good at literature. Physics and mathematics, which are not well learned, still play a role until now, and what I have learned is not so much a bit of knowledge as a mathematical "thinking", participating in literature and art, and every time I have gained, I feel that it is endlessly happy.
My classmates and I had our own advantages, but when it came to Japanese lessons, we all resented it from the bottom of our hearts. Fifty-one pseudonyms, unable to remember, refusing to hammer into the brain. The Foreign Japanese teacher forced us to recite it. Can't do it, hit the board. The poor teacher's homeland had long since been ruled by the Japanese invaders.
In middle school, in addition to cultural knowledge, the most valuable thing I learned was patriotism. Some teachers mentioned the three northeastern provinces in class, and wept while talking, which made us deeply infected as students. There is an old teacher Chen Changyan who teaches Chinese language classes, and he has a good foundation in Chinese studies and has a humorous personality. When I returned to class, I entered the classroom without uttering a word, wrote two big words on the blackboard with my back to my back: "Pro-Day", and then said slowly: The sun in winter is very warm, and the sun is hot in summer... Does the big letters on the chalkboard refer to natural phenomena or what? What we want to answer, how to write this essay, let each person think for himself, and it does not hurt to hand in the white paper. Walking on the street, encountering ghost troops, whether individual or a small group, we all hid far away and pretended not to see. Every day, I passed from my home in Yanqiao through Takahashi and Middle Street to Nanjing Middle School, going back and forth twice each (lunchtime) and living a monotonous life.
The hometown has an ancient city wall, and at the end of the gate to the south city there are four big characters: "The State of Loyalty and Righteousness", such a great honor was obtained by more than 200,000 innocent people resisting more than 300,000 Qing soldiers at the end of the Ming Dynasty. The death-defying struggle lasted eighty-one days. I have seen the missing and mutilated scene of the four big characters of "Loyal and Righteous State", and I am distressed by it, how much we need to let generations of people understand history - loving our hometown is inseparable from the understanding of local history!
At that time, there was still a time when it was impossible to get out of the gates of the "loyal state". My family has relatives who live outside the South City and have always had the habit of visiting each other. Under the four big characters suddenly came the ghost army guarding the door, you have to go out, first search. Most people in the past are used to packing with old cloth, which contains various daily necessities, which must be automatically opened and checked one by one. Even more heinous is the bow to the devilish soldiers. If you encounter a ghost that is slightly unsatisfactory, you will be scolded by him. In our own land, we are subjected to such insults that today's young people cannot imagine. As you can see on the video, don't think it's just a literary work. To forget is to betray!
Our family would rather be locked up in the "land of loyalty." Not going out of town was my father's best choice. Whenever there is a festival, the heart of missing relatives and friends is particularly urgent, but it is more important to maintain personality and maintain the dignity of the hometown. The patriotic and homeland-loving heart of the adolescent years was cultivated in the fierce national contradictions.
After that, I returned to Jiangyin from Nanchang Jiangxi Normal University, stayed a little, and then took a small fire wheel from Jiangyin to Wuxi, and then transferred from Wuxi to Shanghai. After two more days and two nights by train, fate placed me at Beijing's Qianmen Station, next to Tiananmen Square — it was October 1, 1949, near noon, the epoch-making founding ceremony had just been held, and a group of our students from the south approached Tiananmen, listening to the continuous salute in the air, looking around at the crowds bustling around, everything was so fresh and strange, full of vitality. yes! We are at the heart of the national core. A truck staggered and pulled us to the famous scenic spot of Xiangshan – this is where I want to stay for a long time!
After staying down, I suddenly had a thought: I am getting farther and farther away from my hometown, a thousand kilometers! I was just eighteen years old at the time, and I never went out like this except to Go to Nanchang. I thought from Beijing to the south, through the Yellow River, and then to the Yangtze River, not far from the east coast, next to the Yangtze River Delta, the People's Liberation Army crossed the river on April 21, 1949, from Jiangyin in the east to Jiujiang in the west. Then I thought of the Huangshan Fortress Fort, The Xingguo Pagoda, Junshan, The Street, the South Street, the Middle Street, the Weir Bridge, the City Wall, the Moat, the Stadium, and the shops and houses with carved beams and paintings in Jiangyin...
My hometown has infinite charm, talking to people about the eighty-first day of the late Ming Dynasty, talking about Wu Guojiza, Xu Xiake, Liu Bannong and other three brothers, which immediately aroused the shock and admiration of the other party. When I meet friends who have traveled to Jiangyin and visited, I talk about the delicious anchovy, knife fish, and puffer fish "Yangtze River Three Fresh", I always talk about the good cultural environment of Jiangyin, clean and hygienic, fresh air, clean water quality, and the people are willing to receive foreign guests, tough and soft. Being a Jiangyin person has a sense of happiness, whether it is a long-term stay in Jiangyin or someone like me who sang "Teach Me How not to Miss Her" at the end of high school to bid farewell to her hometown, will love her in many ways and in all directions, embrace her, miss her, and carry forward all her beautiful things... It is unique, twelve times won the "China's comprehensive well-off top ten demonstration counties and cities", won the honorary title of "national civilized city" and "national sanitary city", known as "China's first manufacturing county". This city, which accounts for one-tenth of the country's land, has a unique history of time and space.
Teach me how not to want her - with twelve points of loyalty, I salute the Seongnam Elementary School and Nanjing Middle School that have taught me all-round development of morality, intellect, body and beauty. Seongnam Elementary School is close to my grandmother's house where I lived as a child. The 138-year long history of Nanjing Middle School is rare in the country, with talents at home and abroad, and is a highlight of Jiangyin cultural education. It wasn't until the 1980s that I learned that Seongnam Elementary School was the first primary school in the county that my maternal grandfather, Wang Yidan, sold his family property. Wang Yidan's brother Wang Xinnong served as the principal of Nanjing Middle School (then shanghai private Shulan Middle School) during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. As a result, my feelings for my alma mater are deeply infused with a deep affection.
Because I love her so much, I will always remember the injustices and humiliations she has suffered. The lovely hometown has long been listed as the "richest man" in the country. The song "Teach Me How Not to Miss Her" will always echo in my heart.
Mid-October 2020
Author:Shen Peng
Edit: Ma Xiaohua