Note: From the perspective of when this was written, this was the very first piece in my Morning Glory at Noon nostalgia series — the one that started it all. Looking back, those "dragon gate" moments — the college entrance exam and the graduate school exam — were truly the pivotal turns of fate in life. When I visited home recently, both my elder brother and my senior colleague told me the same thing: the life trajectories of our generation were largely sealed at the moment we faced the dragon gate. That's deeply unfair, because so many classmates' talents and potential could never be fully measured by an exam-oriented education system. But that is how society ranks people — essentially the same imperial examination system in modern form. Opportunities and resources ultimately fell to the fortunate few who leaped through the dragon gate. It fills one with sighs.

The year I graduated, like everyone else, I took the graduate school entrance exam, applying to the English and American Literature program in the Foreign Languages Department of Nanjing University. I failed miserably. How could the education we received compare to Nanjing University's? Later, at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a female classmate from Suzhou — a Nanjing University Foreign Languages graduate from the class of '77 — told me that the exam that year had been extraordinarily difficult. The number of applicants was enormous, and most people's scores were unbelievably low. My very first attempt had run into a brick wall. That year, only one person from our class passed: a Shanghai classmate, who went to the Foreign Languages Department of Anhui University.

After graduation, I was assigned to teach at Fanchang High School, a county near my hometown. Two lessons I learned there: First, I wasn't suited for teaching — especially the younger grades and the "slow classes." I simply couldn't maintain order; I had no way to handle the mischievous kids. Walking into that classroom felt like marching to the execution ground. (Teaching the honors classes or high school was better — the students respected me more, and I felt good about it.) Second, I worried constantly that over time, if I lost control, something inappropriate might develop between me and a female student. Perhaps it was biological — girls in junior high easily develop crushes on young male teachers, and if the teacher can't keep his bearings, it's easy to cross the line. Fanchang High School had a precedent, and it ended tragically: the teacher and student both jumped from a high building, and the teacher's skull was shattered.

The only way out was the graduate school exam. So I took the application handbook and flipped through it back and forth, until I discovered that the Institute of Linguistics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences had a program in Machine Translation with very particular requirements: two foreign languages, linguistics, advanced mathematics, discrete mathematics, politics, and a comprehensive exam. I felt this might work — I could play to my strengths and avoid my weaknesses. After all, in our era, practically no one who knew mathematics also knew two foreign languages, and it was rare for someone proficient in languages to be able to handle mathematics. I had studied advanced mathematics, but I'd never heard of discrete mathematics. I asked around — everyone had a different interpretation, and I was just as confused as before. As for what machine translation even was, that was equally mysterious. So I went to consult a teacher who taught math and science at Nanling No. 2 Middle School. This teacher was unusual — he loved to read, was broadly knowledgeable, and had his own independent opinions. He said with great confidence: "This is a good field — it's an interdisciplinary area where it's easy to make contributions. The subject itself is practical, and it has a future." His insight convinced me, and I locked in my direction.

That year, I still didn't pass — the main culprit was the "comprehensive exam." The Institute of Linguistics had borrowed the exam paper from Peking University's Chinese Department, pulling questions from every subfield: "In what year was Chairman Mao's 'Talks at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art' published?" and so on — thoroughly mean-spirited, with non-Chinese-major students at an obvious disadvantage. It seemed like discrete mathematics also did me in. But Beijing still sent someone to Fanchang to conduct a background investigation on me, which proved I had come close. This gave me tremendous confidence — at least I wasn't groping in the dark anymore. It also confirmed that my strategy of playing to my strengths had been right. Otherwise, in all of China, why would they have bothered investigating me after I failed? Clearly, more people had done worse than me. (Later I learned this was indeed the case — that year, not a single person met the program's threshold, which is why they recruited again the following year.)

The second year, I prepared for the battle again. The preparation was still grueling, but the goal was now crystal clear. My father borrowed a quiet little room from a neighbor for me and gave strict orders that no one was to disturb me. Beyond working through exercise book after exercise book of mathematics, for the humanities subjects I recorded myself explaining key concepts and listened to the tapes over and over, day and night. What is historical comparative linguistics? What are componential analysis and structural analysis? What is transformational-generative grammar? What is the difference between deep structure and surface structure? On and on. When I got tired of studying, I would often walk out to the fields beyond the old town wall and gaze at the endless, brilliant yellow rapeseed flowers, breathing in the fresh air. Many times I ran into my father on the road. He would say: "Good to take a walk, rest your brain a bit." His eyes were full of approval and encouragement.

The exam was to be taken at a testing center in the neighboring county. My father saw me off at the bus station. Just before I boarded, the weather began to turn cold and the wind picked up. Dad took off his woolen Zhongshan suit — his finest jacket — and draped it over my shoulders. From the bus window, I saw him waving in the cold wind. That is the image etched in my memory: the turning back at the bend in the road. At the exam center in Xuancheng County, I stayed in a shabby guesthouse. Three straight days of exams — when I came out after each session, I was utterly drained, on the verge of tears. On the evening after the exams, I went to the movie theater, and there I found a place to vent. They were showing two Chinese short films, artistically mediocre, but at least they had a touch of tragedy. And so, following the plot, I cried from beginning to end. I wept until the sky went down and the earth spun — but it felt so, so good, as if I had released emotions that had been bottled up for a very long time.

Good things come with complications. The registered letter with my interview notice got lost at the post office. The mail carrier knew it was lost (there was a record) and knew I was the recipient, but he tried to bluff his way through and never notified me. It was only thanks to Secretary Liu at the Institute of Linguistics, who was meticulous and responsible, that she placed a long-distance call to my middle school.  Communications back then were nothing like today — that long-distance call took an entire morning to get through. Secretary Liu told our principal that today was supposed to be my interview day, and where was I? Seeing that I lived far away in the mountains, she said they could reschedule, but I absolutely must come to Beijing for the interview as soon as possible. Later, when the negligent mail carrier realized his failure had been exposed, he asked acquaintances to plead with us to go easy on him and not hold him accountable. We did go easy — but he should know: that one moment of negligence nearly destroyed my future. The severity of what he did was no different from murder for profit.

The Beijing interview was urgently pressing, so my father decided to escort me the whole way. Train cars in those days were like cattle cars from the 1930s — packed to the brim, thick with cigarette smoke. With my father at my side looking after me, getting food and drink, I was able to immerse myself in the study materials I had brought, preparing for the final sprint.

After the interview, I felt good about it and breathed a sigh of relief. Neither my father nor I had ever been to the capital before; our spirits were extraordinarily high, and we threw ourselves into visiting several famous sights without pause. At Tiananmen Square, we even bought a simple camera and took a photo.

At the ticket office in front of Qianmen, we stood in a long line to buy tour bus tickets for the Great Wall. The young woman in front of us was willowy and poised, graceful in manner, and she spoke standard Mandarin. She explained the differences between the various tour buses — the air-conditioned luxury coaches versus the ordinary public-transit-style buses. I was completely captivated by her elegance, and thought to myself: who cares about luxury or ordinary, as long as I can be on the same bus as her. Unfortunately, when we boarded later, I didn't see her, and a sense of loss settled in my heart. Despite that disappointment, seeing the Great Wall for the first time still overwhelmed me with its grandeur. Climbing up, exhausted and parched, Dad brought out the beer he had bought along the way and we drank it together. That was my first time drinking beer. I found the taste bizarre and hard to swallow, but I was too thirsty to be picky, so I used beer in place of water, all the while gazing into the distance at the Wall stretching to the horizon, with nothing but vastness as far as the eye could see.

Seeing that graduate school was looking promising for me, Dad was in especially good spirits. He told me: we still have money left over — let's fly back! In those days, this was an extravagant luxury beyond imagination. I had never even ridden in a car before, and now I was jumping straight to an airplane — I was beside myself with excitement. Unfortunately, the plane tickets were sold out. I never did get to fly, but the euphoria my father and I shared on that trip is something I can never forget.

Then came those months after receiving the acceptance letter — like months of walking on clouds. It was an indescribably wonderful feeling. Never in my life had I experienced such lightness and joy, such freedom from worry. I genuinely didn't know how to express the happiness, so I simply went climbing mountains by myself, from one peak to the next, letting the thorns tear my skin and draw blood, savoring the stinging thrill. For days on end, I climbed every day until I couldn't move anymore. In September I entered Beijing, my mood matching Li Bai's poem: "Laughing up at the sky, I strode out the door — how could I be one of those who live among the weeds?" (Li Bai, "Farewell to My Children at Nanling as I Enter the Capital").

For a middle-school teacher from a small southern mountain town, the graduate school exam truly was the only path to changing one's destiny. These dramatic ups and downs, these extraordinary experiences and emotions — they were all proportionate to the exam's importance. But looking back, having an exam determine your entire life necessarily requires luck, and luck doesn't always hold. At the time, perhaps I didn't notice the peculiarity of this particular program and its specific requirements; perhaps the program had already filled its quota in previous years and would not have recruited again. If Secretary Liu at the Institute of Linguistics hadn't been so dedicated, I might well have stayed forever in that small town. On the other hand, life cannot be measured solely by so-called career success — it should be assessed holistically, by quality of life and each person's own satisfaction with living. As long as basic needs are met, it's very difficult to judge from the surface whether a life is good or bad. They say that for a considerable stretch of time in China, farmers in the Northeast lived the most contented lives, free of pressure — because the land was vast and fertile, even extensive cultivation yielded decent returns, and they could fully enjoy the idyllic life of "ten acres of land, two oxen, a wife and children, and a warm kang bed." On a global scale, life satisfaction is reportedly highest in relatively poor India (where religion plays a major spiritual role), while the most miserable life experience is in Japan. A Japanese friend of mine, who once worked at a machine translation company, told me that despite the good salary, it was an inhuman existence: she watched as several colleagues had mental breakdowns, and some committed suicide. She later went to Australia for graduate studies — she became a poor student, but felt as if she had escaped from a sea of suffering.

Written on May 28, 2004, in Buffalo, USA

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朝华午拾 · 我的考研经历

【立委按】从写作时间上看，这是我《朝华午拾》怀旧系列的第一篇，从此一发不可收。回想起来，人的一生，高考和考研的"跳龙门"确实是命运的根本转机。最近探亲，老哥和师姐都跟我说，同辈人后来的生活道路，大多在冲刺龙门的那一刻就注定了。这很不公平，因为很多同学所具有的才干和潜力，应试教育是不能全面衡量的。但是，社会就是这样来鉴别的，本质上还是科举制度。机会和资源最终落在少数幸运的跃过龙门的同学身上，让人不胜唏嘘。

毕业那年，跟大家一样，考研究生，报南京大学外语系英美文学专业。一败涂地。我们的教育怎么能跟南大比。后来到社科院，有一个苏州女同学就是南大外语系77级，她告诉我，那一年研究生考试奇难，报名人数特多，大多成绩低得不可思议。我第一次尝试就碰了个硬钉子。那一年，我们班级就考上一个，上海男生，去了安徽大学外语系。

毕业后分到离家不远的邻县繁昌中学教书，有两点体会：首先，我不适应教书，尤其是低年级和程度差的班级（"坏班"），主要是压不住阵，没有办法对付调皮的孩子，上课跟上刑场似的。（教重点班或者高中课还好，学生比较佩服和尊重我，感觉良好。）其次，老当心时间长了，控制不好，会和女学生发展出不合适的关系或感情纠葛。也许是生理原因，女生在初中很容易仰慕年轻男教师，这时候，如果男教师把握不住，就容易犯错误。繁昌中学曾有先例，结果很悲惨，师生双双跳楼，男教师肝脑涂地。

唯一的出路是考研究生。于是，拿来报考手册，翻来翻去，发现中国社科院语言研究所有一门机器翻译专业，要求很特别：考两门外语，语言学，高等数学，离散数学，政治和综合考试。觉得有戏，可以扬长避短，毕竟在我们的年代，会数学的人还懂两门外语，几乎没有，而会外语可以考数学的人也难得。我学过高等数学，只是没有听说过离散数学，问了一些人，各有各的理解，也是一头雾水。至于机器翻译是个什么玩意儿，也高深莫测，就去请教在南陵二中教数理的一位老师。这位老师与众不同，爱读书，很通达，有自己的见解。他非常肯定地说，"这个专业好，是个交叉学科，容易出成就。学科本身很实用，有前景。"他这一番洞见，使我坚定了主攻方向。

这一次考研，仍然不中，主要坏在"综合考试"：语言所借用北京大学中文系的试卷，从中文系各科抽选题目，考什么毛主席《在延安文艺座谈会上的讲话》发表在哪一年，等等，缺德透了，非中文系的人明摆着吃亏。好象"离散数学"也栽了。但是北京还是派人到繁昌对我做了外调，证明我已经擦边。这给了我很大信心，至少不是在黑暗中摸索了。也知道我的扬长避短的策略是对的，不然，偌大的中国，为什么我考栽了还有幸被外调呢？很显然，更多的人考的还不如我（后来知道确实如此，那一届该专业一个也没有达标，这才有下一年接着再招）。

第二年再战，准备仍然辛苦，但目标很明确。父亲从邻居处借了一个清静的小屋给我，明令任何人不得打扰。我除了数学习题一本本地做，对于文科，就把一些关键概念的解说录下音来，不分昼夜反反复复地听。什么是历史比较语言学，什么是成分分析法和结构分析法，什么是转换生成语法，表层结构和深层结构的区别，等等等等。复习累了，我常到城墙头外的田地去看黄灿灿一望无际的油菜花，透透新鲜的空气。好多次都在路上遇到父亲，跟我说："去散散步好，休息一下大腿"。目光里满是赞许和鼓励。

考研要去邻县的考场。父亲送我到车站，临上车前，天气有点转凉，开始刮风了。父亲把自己的呢子中山装脱下（呢子服算是父亲最高级的外套了），给我披上。在车上看到父亲在冷风中挥手，这就是刻印在我脑海里的拐弯处的回头。到邻县宣城考场，住在一个简陋的招待所，一连考三天，下场后精疲力竭，直想哭。晚上钻进电影院，可找到发泄场所了。演的是两个国产短片，艺术水平很一般，但是好在有一点悲剧意味，于是跟着剧情，从头哭到尾，直哭得天昏地暗，但是非常非常痛快，好象把积压了很久的情绪释放出来了。

好事多磨。我的面试通知（挂号信）在邮局丢了，邮递员明知丢了（有记录），也知道我是收信人，却想蒙混过关，并不通知我。多亏语言所秘书刘老师办事严谨负责，给我的中学挂了长途（一辈子感激刘老师！）。当年的通讯可不像现在，这个长途挂了一上午才通。刘老师告诉我们校长，今天应该是我面试的日子，怎么不见人。看我山高路远，可以再作安排，但务请火速来京面试。后来，失职的邮递员看见事情败露，托熟人请求我们高抬贵手，不要追究他的责任。贵手倒是高抬了，但他可知道，这一失职可不当紧，差点断送了我的前程，其严重程度无异于谋财害命。

北京面试催得急，父亲决定全程护送。当年的火车厢象30年代的闷罐车，人满为患，烟雾弥漫。有爸爸在身边照顾，弄吃弄喝，我一路上得以一心扑在随身携带的复习资料上，准备最后的冲刺。

面试完，感觉良好，松了口气。父亲和我都是第一次来首都，兴致特别高，马不停蹄地游玩几个著名景点，在天安门前还买了一个简易相机留了影。我们在前门前的售票处，排长队买去长城的旅游车票。排在我们前面的是个女生，亭亭玉立，落落大方，说一口普通话。她跟我们解释不同旅游车的区别，带空调的豪华车和公车一样的普通车等等。我被她的风度迷住了，心里想，管他豪华普通，能跟她同车就好。可惜，后来上车没有看见她，心里失落落的。尽管有缺憾，第一次玩长城，还是被它的气势所震撼。爬上长城，又累又渴，父亲拿出在路上买的啤酒我们一块喝。这是我第一次喝啤酒，觉得味道很怪，难以下咽，无奈太渴，只好以酒代水，一边极目远眺，看长城内外，惟余莽莽。

父亲看我读研有望，心情特别好，跟我说，带的钱还剩不少，我们坐飞机回去！这在当年是极大的奢侈，我那时侯连轿车都没有坐过，一步登天去坐飞机，兴奋莫名。不巧的是，飞机票卖完了。飞机没坐上，但那次旅行，父亲和我的欣快情绪，难以忘怀。

再后来就是接到录取通知后的几个月腾云驾雾的日子，那真是一种不可言传的美妙感受。一辈子从来没有过如此的轻松愉快，无忧无虑。真的不知道怎样表达喜悦，干脆一个人爬山，从一个山头到另一个山头，任由荆棘刺破皮肤，滴着鲜血，享受火辣辣的快意。连续几天，每天爬山到不能动为止。九月进京，心情同李白："仰天大笑出门去，我辈岂是蓬蒿人"（李白·《南陵 别儿童入京》）。

对于一个南方山城的中学教师来说，考研确实是改变命运的唯一途径。这些跌宕起伏，非凡的经历和感受，跟考研的重要性是相称的。但是，回想起来，考试定终身必然需要运气，而运气并不总有。当时也许没有注意到这个特别的专业和特别的要求，也许该专业前几年已经招到了，不再招生，如果语言所的刘秘书工作不是那样尽心尽力，我很可能永远留在那个小城里。另一方面，生活也不能仅仅看所谓事业有成，应该总体来看生活质量和各人的自我生活满意程度。在确保温饱的前提下，很难从表面评价人生的好坏。据说，在中国相当一段时间，东北农民，活得最滋润，没有压力。因为土地肥沃广大，广种薄收也有不错的所得，可尽情享受"十亩地，两头牛，老婆孩子热炕头"的世外桃源生活。在世界范围，据报道生活满意度最高的是比较贫穷的印度（宗教起了很大的精神作用），而生活感受最差的是日本。我的一名日本朋友，以前在一家机器翻译公司工作过，告诉我，尽管薪水好，却是非人的日子：她眼看几个同事有的精神跨了，有的自杀了。她后来去澳大利亚读研究生，成了穷学生，却有跳出苦海的感觉。

记于2004年五月28，美国水牛城

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From 朝华午拾 / Morning Glory at Noon. Original Chinese: 我的考研经历.

Just after the Mid-Autumn Festival, our eldest sister passed on the sad news: Master Liu Zhuo, my foundational mentor and a guiding light of our generation, had passed away at the age of 89.

🎬 In Memoriam: Mentor Liu Zhuo, 2022 (Video)

Forty years ago, I filled in “Machine Translation”（MT） on my graduate school application to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. My heart was full of awe and a sense of mystery. When I first entered the field, I worked on foreign-to-Chinese machine translation. I never dared to touch Chinese-to-foreign translation — Chinese grammar was so resistant to formalization, it felt impossibly difficult.

Machine translation is the oldest application area in natural language processing（NLP）, dating back to the early 1950s. It has carried the youth and dreams of 啊couple of generations, Chinese and foreign alike — including my own younger years. Today, the dream has become reality. Embedded machine translation is everywhere, a smartphone app that ordinary people summon at will and dismiss just as easily, quietly serving hundreds of millions of users every moment of every day. My daughter uses it to study Chinese, to study Spanish, and to browse Japanese anime websites — she uses it so much that she takes it completely for granted, treating machine translation as an entitlement. Only when a translation goes hilariously wrong does she notice its existence, occasionally mocking it: “So dumb.” But machine translation never complains and never tires. For my daughter’s generation, machine translation has become a natural part of life. While I am full of its history and lore, I don’t really know how to tell her these stories. Through snippets of my scattered words, she seems to dimly sense that machine translation holds a special meaning in her father’s life, but I still can’t recount those tales with the same fluency and fondness I would share with a peer, conveying the weight and sanctity that machine translation carries in my heart. This is more than just an ordinary generation gap — it’s the gulf created by the leapfrog advance of technology, giving two generations fundamentally different perspectives. There’s comfort in that, and also a pang of wistfulness.

My personal observation is that two kinds of people especially appreciate and show patience toward machine translation. One is the older generation of web users who don’t know foreign languages — suddenly the whole world’s internet has opened up to them, with the joy of the blind regaining sight. The other kind is fossil-level veterans like me, who have built machine translation systems themselves and know firsthand how hard it is, and therefore feel compelled to cheer every breakthrough. In recent years, the neural machine translation revolution has elevated MT to genuinely expert-level quality — translations are now fluent and natural, completely free of the stiffness and “machine flavor” of the pre-neural era. One could say that humanity’s thousand-year dream of breaking down language barriers for free communication is being realized before our very eyes. (With the breakthrough in Large Language Model (LLM), the linguistic Tower of Babel for AI has been built.)

Looking back, I consider it a gift from heaven when a student of natural language processing begins their career with symbolic machine translation. This kind of practitioner no longer exists in the new generation — they have all kinds of low-code platforms and resources at their disposal. If you were forced to build rule-based machine translation without any platform support, you suffered, but you were also blessed. You had to build everything from scratch: dictionaries, sentence segmentation (tokenization), part-of-speech tagging, phrasal chunking, SVO syntax and logical semantics. You also had to handle bilingual structural transfer, word sense disambiguation, and finally target-language generation — including morphological generation, re-ordering, and rhetorical smoothing. In short, from linguistic analysis to bilingual transfer to language generation, you had to cover every aspect completely. Without a platform or a domain-specific language, using only general-purpose programming languages as we did for our master’s theses — COBOL, ALGOL, BASIC, even assembly — it was like being tempered in Laozi’s Eight Trigrams Furnace. You couldn’t help but emerge with piercing, flame-tested eyes. Today’s computational linguistics graduate students, by contrast, casually download a software package and zero in on a single subtask — word segmentation, sentiment classification, word sense disambiguation — and even when they do full MT, they never need to touch that many layers and low-level details (Note: this was written pre-LLM days: as we know, after LLM burst into existence, LLM eats up not only MT but also the entire NLP). By a fortunate twist of fate, I received the baptism of early machine translation, studying under the Two Liu's — the founding fathers of Chinese machine translation. This has been a lifelong treasure, and it has also steeled my resolve to “carry forward the lost learning of past sages,” passing the torch of symbolic NLP to the next generation.

A photograph with mentor Liu Zhuo and Sister Aiping, taken before I left for overseas in 1991.

I cannot forget those years after earning my master’s degree, when I stayed at the Institute of Linguistics and worked alongside Sister Aiping under Teacher Liu Zhuo’s leadership, developing every step of the JFY machine translation system. Prof. Liu personally designed a domain-specific NLP language to implement JFY, from the interpreter to the controller, from expert dictionaries (idiosyncratic rules) to sentence-pattern transfer (general rules) — the entire system architecture and pipeline. This project condensed decades of design principles and algorithms from MT research and exploration. Prof Liu had a remarkable skill: without any debugging tools, he could locate system problems purely through intense mental concentration. Often, when the system had a bug, Prof Liu couldn’t sleep at night — the program would turn around and around in his head. Many times he would catch the bug in the middle of the night and rush to the computer the next morning to test his fix; the problem would usually be solved. Sometimes the bug was too deeply hidden to untangle mentally, so Sister Aiping and I would help him with “manual stepping” — literally step-by-step tracing — which could take several days of meticulous work before we discovered the logical flaw. The joy we felt then was like winning a battle. Software engineers today would probably find it hard to imagine how one could code a system in a development environment with no debugging tools at all, but that is precisely how Prof Liu led us, grinding it out day by day.

I found Prof Liu Zhuo’s papers quite a headache to read back then. But his papers were packed with substance — like the dried bean curd of Ma’anshan, tough but rewarding to chew on. I’ve lost count of how many times I read them. He is the old gentleman who commanded deep respect in the field, and with good reason — he had the hard currency of real achievements. Yet more than half of the people who admired him couldn’t understand a word he was saying. It was a curious phenomenon: partly because Prof Liu was not particularly good at popular science communication, and partly because he genuinely had little time, nor any interest in trivialities.

In 2013, I was invited to give a talk on big data NLP at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prof.  Liu Zhuo was hospitalized at the time for surgery, and Sister Aiping took me to visit him. I was relieved to see him in good spirits and recovering well after the operation. We chatted about the past and present of NLP. The fine-grained, robust pattern-matching analysis methods that Prof Liu had pioneered years ago remain effective tools in many scenarios where annotated data is scarce, and they still have a role to play in the big data era. Times have changed — today’s computing hardware and software have been upgraded from shotguns to cannons, making it possible to run NLP across hundreds of millions of documents. At scale, everything changes. Miracles happen through quantitative transformation, and we are both creating and witnessing such miracles. And none of this would have been possible without the nurturing and teaching of my mentor all those years ago.

I told Prof Liu that in the age of big data, we can leverage cloud computing — renting hundreds of virtual machines to process vast amounts of data in parallel, performing deep syntactic parsing on hundreds of millions of documents, and extracting and mining public opinion. Such a scale was unimaginable in the old days. Precisely because of the natural information redundancy in big data and the processing capacity that comes with scale, the quality of the intelligence we extract — in terms of both precision and coverage — has dramatically improved from the user’s perspective. Problems that once seemed intractable, such as capturing the motivations behind public opinion and answering why and how questions, have now achieved practical breakthroughs.

Like Prometheus bringing fire from the gods, my other mentor Prof Liu Yongquan returned from the Soviet Academy of Sciences with the sacred knowledge of machine translation. He was a generous and kind elder, and his wife was warm and gracious. On holidays, they would invite students to their home for dinner. Prof Liu would call and say, “Come on over. Do you know how to slaughter a chicken? I’ve got live ones at home.” But his lecturing style was another matter — his tone was extraordinarily slow and drawn out, with an old Beijing accent. Often he would utter the first half of a sentence, then pause for a long while before continuing. In the afternoon, when drowsiness was setting in, I’d pinch my thigh countless times just to stay awake through one class. There were only two students, sitting around the small table in his home, with sunlight slanting in through the window — nodding off would have been utterly unacceptable.

In machine translation class, Prof Liu Yongquan trained us to do manual annotation of structural transfer, using a tag system they had invented themselves called “intermediary components” to label sentences. It was a bit like drawing syntax trees in grammar class — take some complex English sentences and annotate them in such a way that a machine could simulate the process. Once the annotation was done, the translation was essentially there. For example, the concise and practical intermediary component tag [Pre-Prep-Attr-B] — a four-element label — indicated that this prepositional phrase should be fronted in translation, that it was an attributive modifier, and that it was at the B layer. This simple, even crude labeling was the intermediate representation for foreign-to-Chinese MT transfer back then. We tested it on many complex sentences, and remarkably, it handled most of them — the resulting English-to-Chinese translations were quite readable. This was the most innovative invention of my two advisors. The intermediary component analysis method was a source-to-target correlation analysis designed specifically for machine translation, essentially solving the internal representation problem for foreign-to-Chinese translation. This system, distilled from extensive hands-on practice, was something of a magical invention — it looked like nothing more than a limited set of four-element label combinations, yet it could handle the vast majority of sentence translation needs. The four elements boiled down to traditional subject-predicate-object-attributive-adverbial-complement analysis, plus identification of the important prepositional phrase chunk and two kinds of word-order adjustment strategy labels (A and B). Transfer is the link between analysis and generation, and the four-element tags captured exactly the information transfer required — the result being that a relatively simple interpretation and execution algorithm could handle the generation of many complex sentences. In terms of output readability, it was quite effective, at least for foreign-to-Chinese translation. Of course, this system only represented the most critical transfer information, and as an MT intermediate representation it was still overly concise. It worked well in many foreign-to-Chinese scenarios, which actually had much to do with the inherent flexibility of Chinese grammar — applied to generation in other languages, it might fall short. For instance, word-order adjustment information was reduced to just two layers (A and B) in alternation — this greatly simplified the complexity of linguistic structure, but some translations came out less than smooth. With this in mind, in my master’s thesis I made some critical revisions to the tag set, adding more dimensions of information. I had worried that my advisors might take offense at my freely modifying the gold standard they had painstakingly developed, but after submitting the draft of my thesis, both advisors expressed approval. Prof Liu Zhuo even specifically said that he agreed with my criticism that the intermediary component system was overly simplistic.

Among Prof Liu Yongquan’s many teachings, one left the deepest impression on me. In the annotation training process, most of the time I could handle it with ease. Coming from an English major background, we had always excelled at drawing structural trees — this kind of annotation was like child’s play. But occasionally I’d get stuck and turn to Prof Liu for help. He never gave me the answer directly. He would only say: “If you can’t deconstruct it, how does a person understand and translate it?” Strictly speaking, there are certainly cases where human cognitive processes are hard to algorithmicize within a transparent symbolic logic framework. That a person can translate doesn’t mean they can articulate clearly how a machine should do it. But I still feel that this one piece of guidance has benefited me for life. It was a philosophical awakening about cognition, urging us to think about how to formalize human cognitive processes. Even when full formalization proves impossible, it helps us see where the bottleneck lies — common sense, domain knowledge, or something else entirely? This worldview has stayed with me all my life. It is, in essence, a philosophy of symbolic transparency that opposes the mystification of intelligence.

Studying design philosophy, machine translation principles, linguistic fieldwork, and the fine-grained analysis and command of language phenomena under Prof Liu Yongquan — my entire master’s program felt like being bathed in a spring breeze. Prof Liu Zhuo’s guidance was more concrete. In every innovative exploration of early machine translation, he was always at the forefront — separating data from program logic, advancing from fixed-table rule processing to defining a domain-specific language for expressive rules that enabled free-form rule writing, introducing ontology knowledge bases that encoded implicit common sense, and developing techniques for the separation and interaction of idiosyncratic and general rules. Across this entire series of key technological innovations along the symbolic rule-based path, Prof Liu Zhuo was both pioneer and implementer. After earning my master’s degree, I stayed for five years in Prof Liu Zhuo’s research lab, learning algorithms from him and coding a new-generation translation system based on expert dictionaries. I also followed Prof Liu in collaborating with Zhongguancun to productize our carefully designed laboratory system. This process of closely shadowing a master, transforming a research prototype all the way into a practical product — this was the golden experience that benefited me most in my entire life.

Eight years of research and development under the guidance of the Two Liu's became a lifelong treasure. When heaven does not change, the Way does not change; when heaven changes, the Way still does not change. I went abroad, gained a veneer of overseas polish, broadened my horizons, and came to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches. But certain core ideas in language processing transcend time and space. I am proud to be a torchbearer of the Two Lius’ legacy.

🎬 Memorial Video | Memorial Video 2

Rest in peace, great master. May the old gentleman’s journey onward be a smooth one!

Finalized on September 12, 2022

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《朝华之十四：随恩师入行》

中秋刚过，大姐传过来不幸的消息：一代宗师，启蒙导师刘俢先生驾鹤西去，享年89岁。

🎬 缅怀恩师刘俢老师纪念册，2022

40年前，我在社科院硕士报考专业上填写“机器翻译”四个大字，内心充满了敬畏和神秘感。刚入行的时候做的是外汉机器翻译，一直不大敢碰汉外，原因是汉语语法不好形式化，感觉太难了。

机器翻译是自然语言处理领域历史最悠久的应用方向，从上个世纪50年代初发辛，承载了中外几代不知道多少人的青春和梦想，也包括青年时代的立委。如今，梦想化为现实，嵌入式机器翻译无孔不入，已经成为普罗大众手中招之即来挥之即去的手机应用，每时每刻在默默服务着亿万用户。女儿学汉语用它，学西班牙语用它，去日本动漫网页也用它，用到对它熟视无睹，把机器翻译视为理所当然。只在翻译错得离谱的时候才意识到它的存在，不时报以嘲讽：真笨。可机器翻译呢，虚怀若谷，任劳任怨。对于已经天然成为女儿这代人生活一部分的机器翻译，我满腹机器翻译的历史和掌故，却不知如何给她叙说。耳濡目染，她从我断续的话语中似乎隐隐觉得机器翻译对于她父亲的一生具有特别的意义，可是我还是无法象对同辈人那样婉婉道来，如数家珍，传达机器翻译在我心中所蕴含的那份厚重和神圣。这不仅仅是一般意义上的代沟，是技术的跨越式发展造成了两代人迏然不同的视角，让人欣慰更感慨。

我个人的观察是，有两种人会特别欣赏并宽待机器翻译。一种是不识外文的老一代网人，终于全世界的网络对他/她开放了，有盲人重见光明的喜悦。另一种是立委这样的机器翻译化石级元老，因为做过，知其艰辛，不得不为技术突破鼓与呼。近年神经机器翻译的革命，让机器翻译真正达到专家的水平，译文通顺流畅，完全摆脱前神经时代的生硬和“机器味儿”。可以说，人类破除语言壁垒实现自由交流的千年梦想正在我们眼前实现。人工智能的语言巴别塔已然建立。

回想起来，学自然语言的人如果入行做的就是符号机器翻译，那是上天的赐福。新一辈这种人没有了，有各种低代码平台资源可以利用。如果你在没有平台支持下被逼着去做规则机器翻译，你受苦了，也有福了。你必须从头开始做辞典、做断句分词、做词性标注、做短语组块、做 SVO 句法和逻辑语义，你还要做双语结构转换、词义消歧（Word Sense Disambiguation，WSD），最后还有目标语的生成，包括形态生成、调序，修辞意义上的一些平滑。总之，从语言分析、双语转换、语言生成，方方面面你必须全部做到。如果没有平台，没有专用语言，像我们做硕士论文那会儿不得不用通用计算机语言（COBOL，ALGOL，BASIC，甚至汇编）做，那就是在太上老君八卦炉里炼，没得不炼成火眼金睛。现在的计算语言学硕士博士呢，动不动就下载一个软件包，瞧准一个子任务，橘如分词，橘如情感分类，橘如WSD，哪怕就是做整个MT， 也不用涉及那么多的层次模块和底层细节。机缘巧合，有幸受到早期机器翻译的洗礼，师从中国机器翻译之父二刘老师，这既是我一辈子的宝贵财富，也坚定了我“为往圣继绝学”的志向，传承符号NLP的薪火。

1991 年出国前与刘俢导师和爱平大姐合影留念

不能忘记当年硕士毕业留语言研究所，与爱平大姐一起，在刘俢老师的带领下，研发JFY型机器翻译系统的每一步。刘老师亲自设计一套NLP专用语言，用于实现JFY型机器翻译，从解释器到控制器，从专家辞典（个性规则）到句型转换（共性规则）的系统架构和流程。这个项目凝结了几十年MT研究探索的设计思想和算法。刘老师有一个绝技，就是不借用任何工具，可以凭着自己苦思兩想找到系统问题的所在。常常是，系统有一个“虫子”（bug），刘老师晚上就睡不着，程序就在脑子里绕，常常是半夜捉住了bug，第二天迫不急待上机试验，问题往往得到解决。也有隐藏太深的 bug，头脑绕不出来，于是大姐和我就帮着刘老师“人工串图”（就是人工step-through的一种说法），有时候要一步步串好几天才发现逻辑漏洪，那种高兴，跟打了一场胜仗似的。如今的软件工程师大概很难想象在没有任何纠错工具的开发环境下，怎样编码系统，可当年刘老师带领我们就是这么磨出来的。

我当年读刘俢老师的论文就很头大。可是他那论文多是干货，跟马鞍山采石干子似的，耐嚼。当年读了多少遍自己都忘记了。老先生在业内备受景仰，毕竟有硬通货。可是当年景仰他的人，一多半根本看不懂他在说什么。这是一个很奇特的现象，一半是老先生不善于科学普及，另一半也许是老先生确实没有多少时间，也不屑于鸡毛蒂皮。

2013年，我应邀在科学院做大数据NLP的演讲。刘俢老师当时因手术住院，大姐带我去医院探视。看到刘老师术后精神蛮好，恢复不错，感到宽慰。我们闲谈了一些NLP的过去和现在，刘老师当年开创的一套模式匹配的精细鲁棒的分析方法，在很多缺乏标注的场景中依然是有效的工具，可以在大数据时代发挥作用。今非昔比，如今的计算机软硬件鸟枪换炮，使得NLP在亿万文档上施行。大了就不一样了，奇迹在量变中发生，我们正在创造和见证这种奇迹。而这一切都离不开恩师当年的栽培和教诲。

我跟刘老师说，如今大数据了，我们可以利用云计算，租用几百台虚拟机，对海量数据进行并行处理，对上亿的文档做深层语法解析，抽取挖掘舆情。这样的规模是当年不敢想象的。正因为有大数据天然的信息冐余及其规模化的处理能力，我们挖掘的情报质量，从用户体验上看，无论精度还是广度都得到了的大幅度提高。以前看上去无解的难题，橘如捕抓舆情动因，回答why和how这样的问题，如今都取得了实用性的突破。

像普罗米修斯一般从苏联科学院取得机器翻译真经的刘涌泉老师是一位宽厚的长者，师娘和蔼可亲。逢年过节请学生到家里吃饭，刘老师打来电话，说：你们过来吧，会宰鸡么？我家有活鸡。不过，刘老师上课语调特平缓悠长，老北京的腔调，常常是前半句话出口，停顿好久，才接上下文。下午正犯困呢，一堂课下来，我把大腿援了无数次。一共就两个学生，围着他家小桌子坐着，阳光从窗户斜射过来，打瞌睡成何体统。

机器翻译课上，刘涌泉老师训练我们来做结构转换的手工标注，用他们自己创立的“中介成分”标签给句子标注。有点像语法课上画树，弄些复杂的英语句子，说你们的标注， 必须是机器可以模拟处理的。标注完了，翻译也就差不离了。橘如，简明实用的中介成分 【前介定B】 这个四元组标签，说的是这个介词短语翻译的时候要前置，它是定语，处于 B 层。这种简单甚至简鄙的标注就是当年的外汉MT转换的中间标记。我们试验过很多复杂的句子，居然大体都可以对付，英汉翻译出来相当可读。这是我的两位导师当年最具有创新意义的发明创造。中介成分分析法是专门为机器翻译设计的从源语到目标语的相关分析法，基本上解决了外译汉的内部表示问题。这套大量实践总结出来的中介成分体系当时可算是个神奇的发明，看上去只是一套组合有限的四元组标签集合，却能够对付绝大多数句子的翻译需求。四元组说起来就是传统的主谓宾定犹补成分分析，外加重要组块PP的标识以及两种调整词序的策略标注。转换是分析和生成的绎带，四元组体现了转换所需要的信息，结果是只要编写一个相对简单的解释执行算法，就可以应对很多复杂句子的生成。论译文可读性，至少在外译汉场景还是很管用的。当然，这套体系只是表示了最紧要的转换信息，作为MT中间表示，还是显得太过简洁。在外汉的很多场景验证有效，其实与中文文法弾性大的特性有关，用于其他语言的生成就可能捉襟见肘。例如调整词序的信息只归纳为两层（A、B）的交错，好处是它大大简化了语言结构的复杂性，但有些翻译结果就显得不是很顺畅。鉴于此，我在我的硕士项目中，对这套标注集做了一些批评改造，增加了更多元的信息。本来还担心导师会怪罪对他们探索总结的黄金标准肆意改变，但论文初稿提交后，两位导师都表示认可。刘俢老师还特别表示，他同意我对中介成分体系失之简鄙的批评。

刘涌泉老师的教诲中，有一条我印象最深。在做标注培训的过程中，我多数时候是手到牺来。我们英语系出身的人从来就擅长画结构树，做这种标注跟玩似的。但做多了也会有卡壳的时候，于是请教刘老师。刘老师没有给答案，只是说：解构不出来，那人是怎么理解和翻译的呢？严格地说，当然有案例，人的认知过程很难在符号逻辑的透明框架中算法化。人能翻译，不见得可以能讲清楚让机器如何翻译。但是我还是觉得他这句教导使我终身受益。因为这是一种认知哲学的唤醒，促使我们琢磨人的认知过程如何形式化。哪怕不能完全形式化，也让我们明白卡在哪一个环节，常识、专业知识、还是缺了什么？这种世界观跟了我一辈子，它实际上是一种反对智能神秘化的符号透明哲学。

跟刘涌泉老师学哲学，学机器翻译原理，学语言田野工作，学习对于语言现象的精细解析和把握，整个硕士阶段感觉是如沐春风。刘俢老师的教导则更为具体，在早期机器翻译的每个创新探索中总是一马当先，例如把数据和程序分开的策略改变，从规则的固定表格模式处理推进到定义规则特定语言，赋能规则的自由书写，还有引入隐含常识的ontology知识库，以及个性与共性分离与交互技术，等等。这一系列符号规则路线的关键技术创新方面，刘俢老师都是先驱和实现者。硕士毕业后留在刘俢老师的研究室五年，跟他学算法，编码新一代基于专家辞典的翻译系统。也跟着刘老师与中关村合作，把精心设计的实验室系统产品化了。这个近距离跟随大师从研究原型一路转化为实用产品的过程，是我一辈子受益最大的黄金经历。

在二刘老师指导下的八年研发，成为我一生的宝贵财富。天不变，道不变；天变了，道亦不变。留洋了，镀金了，眼界开阔了，对不同方法的优劣比较了解了。但语言处理里面的一些核心思想可以超越时空。我以二刘老师的传人而骄做。

🎬 纪念视频 | 纪念视频二

大师千古，祝他老人家一路走好！

定稿于2022年九月12日

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From 《朝华午披》. Original Chinese: 《朝华之十四：随恩师入行》.

Teacher Wang Zhihuan was my benefactor and mentor. During my undergraduate years, when qualified instructors were scarce, we were fortunate to have Miss Wang join the faculty.

I still remember a joke from my university days. Once, Miss Wang had a bad cold and came to class despite it, sneezing uncontrollably. Unable to help herself, she muttered under her breath, "Such nuisance!" Sitting in the front row, I softly replied, "It's really not a new-sance. It's an old 'sance'. You've caught cold for days now."  Miss Wang finally couldn't help but laugh. Some classmates who heard it laughed along; those who didn't were baffled.

Many years ago, I received from Miss Wang a copy of the bilingual Chinese-English poetry anthology she had compiled and translated, A Collection of Patriotic Lyric Poems, Ancient and Modern. Busy with work, I carried it with me and read a few poems whenever I had a spare moment, finding them quite distinctive. The anthology was compiled and published after she had survived nineteen years of unjust imprisonment, in her twilight years past sixty and seventy. Her translations are faithful to the spirit, language, and cadence of the originals — flowing and musical, demonstrating the profound mastery of this venerable teacher. The selection ranges from Qu Yuan in antiquity down to the Tiananmen Poems. Alongside well-known masterpieces, there are also lesser-known works she was particularly fond of — more obscure but rich in poetic sentiment, such as Shi Hanke's "Questioning the Stone Man." Running through it all is a somber, deep-felt concern for the nation and its people, inseparable, I suspect, from her own life experience.

After the anthology was published, I told Miss Wang: now that we are in the Internet age, I could create a Teacher's Collected Works column online to introduce her poetry and other writings. She was pleased, but also had misgivings about copyright. As a first attempt, she suggested we could begin by introducing her "Verses from the Ashes." She wrote:

Wei,

Hello!

Is there a way, whatever, any such,
in all the world existing, to unlade,
unlock, unlatch, enliven by a touch
magical the long-lonely weighed-
down soul, that, waking like an apple tree
frost-fettered, now reviving, trembling,
with wind and rain rollicking in glee,
it brightens to a loveliness of spring?
Yes, there is one, one only, one alone –
not love uncomprehending, singeing, blind,
self-happy-seeking; but there is a known
way, thing, fine thing, consoling, gracious, kind –
What? Sympathy! Reverberating wide
and wider, when the asking is replied.

This is a sonnet written sixty years ago by a university junior, which was once highly praised by several professors of English literature from the five Christian universities then gathered in Chengdu. Then, in 1967, before an assembly of female prisoners at the labor reform farm, it was committed to the flames — along with my other original works, translations, personal letters, photographs, and everything else — reduced to ashes in a single blaze. This time, when you read aloud over a transoceanic phone call Yang Zhenning's revised version of Weng Fan's English poem, it unexpectedly touched a nerve in me that had grown nearly numb, jolting me awake: both of us were Chinese university students (albeit in vastly different times, spaces, and circumstances) attempting to express poetic feeling in English — and yet how vastly different our two fates have been, to the point of such extremes! At the same time, small stories connected to my university poetry-writing days came vividly back to life in my mind. So I thought, if I could recall some verses still worth reading, they might be of interest. I racked what remains of my brain — already moderately eroded by dementia — and after several days of effort, miraculously retrieved from vanished ashes a few charred, shattered pages of verse. The above is the only poem I was able to reconstruct in its entirety. At the same time, I thought I would follow the current fashion of "poetry with illustrations" by pairing it with related little stories, serving as "sketches."

In 1942, I transferred into the English Department of Jinling Women's College. By then, Jinling, Yenching, Nanjing, and Cheeloo — four Christian universities — had successively relocated to the spacious campus of West China Union University in Chengdu. English majors from any of these schools could attend specialized courses offered by English professors from any of the institutions — "resource sharing," as we would say today. The courses "Introduction to English Poetry" taught by Dr. William P. Fenn, chair of the Nanjing University English Department, and "Modern Poetry" taught by Yenching professor Grace Boynton were both brilliantly taught. This ignited the impulse to write poetry that had been stirring in me since middle school — a "foolhardy audacity" — and, modeling my work on the linguistic styles of poets I particularly loved, I gradually wrote several dozen poems in my spare time. Later, I selected sixteen sonnets as my graduation thesis (with Dr. Fenn as my advisor), which surprisingly attracted the attention of many foreign faculty members across the West China campus.

However, "everything is hardest at the beginning." One small episode remains vivid and evergreen in my memory. Besides teaching "Modern Poetry," Miss Boynton also offered an English composition course. One day in 1943, after class, I approached her with a few of my poems and asked for her guidance. She accepted them with a smile, then said, unhurriedly and gently: "Oh dear, it's already an accomplishment if you Chinese students can write a decent English sentence — and now you're writing poetry!" But since the pages were already in her hands, I could hardly ask for them back. And so my "maiden works" entered her reading gaze. The next time we met after class, Miss Boynton's attitude had completely transformed — she offered a few words of delighted appraisal. After that, she invited me once or twice to her cottage for afternoon tea, to chat and talk about poetry. In composition class, she would often read my prose aloud to the entire class. Later, words of excessive praise for my work — which was in fact quite immature, especially in meter and rhyme — circulated among the foreign faculty at West China, remarks like "She'll burst into print any time"…

What I could never have imagined was that this would turn out to be the only period of original English poetry writing in my entire life! As for "bursting into print" (or rather, struggling into print), at least where English poetry was concerned, that would not come until a full half-century later — after enduring nineteen years as a prisoner, and at last living to see the wrongs of the past set right. That is to say, it came with the publication of the Collection of Patriotic Lyric Poems Ancient and Modern that you helped introduce online.

In raising this topic again today, I am doing no more than revisiting, in these waning years of little to commend, one of the relatively pleasant stretches of my adult life, and offering to an amateur poetry enthusiast such as yourself a few anecdotes of life in the old Christian university.

Wang Zhihuan
February 10, 2005, Beijing

That summer at the teachers' college, I would often have breakfast with Miss Wang and listen to her recount the hardships and legends of her life. What she missed most was her university days and the English poems she wrote then — at the time, she was outstanding, brimming with talent, and highly regarded by the foreign professors and President Wu Yifang. The poem above was a fragment she recalled and recorded for me back then. I still remember Miss Wang explaining the line "He sits and reads the pool" to me — she said that "sits" is a short vowel and "reads" is a long vowel, and their interplay gives the line its rise and fall. She even mimed the expression of a bird studying the pond with rapt attention, as a demonstration of the line.

Another of Missx Wang's early poems, a fragment:

"The Kingfisher"

He is a flame of emerald,
With a shining ruby breast,
Of all things most beautiful,
By Mother Nature drest;
Inhabits the deep woodland green,
By some water calm and cool,
And on a wayward stretching bough,
He sits and reads the pool.

Then darts he like a light'ning flash
With winning fleeting grace,
Dips his winglets in the pool,
And wrinkles its halcyon face.

Then the flame of emerald
Has vanished out of sight.

After Miss Wang was rehabilitated, she was reassigned to Beijing and spent her remaining years in the cramped dormitory apartment assigned to her by her old work unit, Xinhua News Agency. Small though it was, it was in the heart of Beijing — the downstairs restaurant was quite good, and it was close to the market and the subway. When I used to visit her, she would always send me to the market to buy some vegetarian chicken and to the Xinhua canteen to pick up some staples, and we would have dinner together. No matter how much humiliation and resentment she had endured at Xinhua, it was her final anchorage — the last manifestation of "the superiority of socialism." This was especially true for a retired veteran cadre who had made her way to Yan'an, a woman with no family by her side.

During my time in Beijing, several ladies in my Esperanto circle grew quite close to her at one point and offered help in daily matters, but in the end, her suspicious nature drove them away. Her paranoia and mistrust were likely the scars of many years of prison life — she suspected nearly everyone around her, and this determined the loneliness of her final years. When she later hired hourly help, she was always suspicious and excessively critical, with the result that her own life suffered all the more. Once, when she was hospitalized, she suspected the hospital of scheming against her, of possibly doing her harm, and insisted on being discharged before she had recovered. Her deepest grievance centered on the sister-in-law of Chen Qixia, who had been some kind of leader at Xinhua. Before the Ding-Chen Anti-Party Clique incident, Miss Wang had once raised criticisms of Chen — criticisms that were, to some degree, exploited, though Miss Wang maintained she had nothing to do with the Ding-Chen political affair. She believed the Chen family bore a grudge (indeed, Chen Qixia's later self-defense statement did accuse Miss Wang's criticisms of being one of the triggers), and she was convinced this sister-in-law had been making life difficult for her ever since — directly leading to her later suicide attempt, her "defection" (seeking out her father in Hong Kong), and ultimately ten years of imprisonment followed by nearly twenty years of inhuman existence in labor reform farms. This old score was branded too deeply into her heart, so much so that even after returning to Xinhua, she still suspected people there of persecuting her. I said to her, "Your adversaries are all dead — who are you afraid of anymore?" She replied, "Just because they're dead doesn't mean their faction has been purged." If she was going to think that way, living every step in fear, of course life would not be easy. A few days after returning from the hospital, she would insist that someone had gone through her belongings and that objects had been stolen. And so it went — every time I visited her, she would pour out her grievances at length, and I could only listen.

In her later years, although Miss Wang did not write memoirs or an autobiography, for a couple of years she did find something meaningful to occupy herself with: translating classical Chinese poetry into English. This was her forte. She truly spent years polishing a single sword, committing everything to heart. After completing the translations, she spent several more years struggling to get them published — in the process seeking help from elders such as Chen Baichen and Ye Junjian, and even contacting American writers and UNESCO. In the end, the book was published, and it did leave its mark in the field of poetry translation. After this achievement, however, she became constantly worried that someone would infringe upon her copyright, that someone would steal her work. She could not understand that stealing the work was simply impossible — there was, after all, an official publication. As for copyright, poetry translation is a money-losing enterprise; there is no motive for infringement. (To be honest, if piracy helped with additional print runs and wider distribution, wouldn't that be a good thing?) But she could not take in these arguments. And so, in my interactions with Miss Wang, I could basically only listen — only agree or chuckle along. I could not speak my mind. If I expressed a different view, it would arouse her suspicion.

— Recorded on September 22, 2006

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朝华午拾之十三：灰烬中的诗篇

王知还老师是我的恩师。本科阶段，师资紧缺，幸亏有王老师的加入。

还记得在我大学时期的一个笑话。有一次，王老师重感冒，带病上课，打喷嚏不止，忍不住小声咕哝道："Such nuisance！" 我坐前排，轻声回应道: "It's really not a new-sance. It's an old 'sance'. You have caught cold for days now." （顺便一提，在西方，别人打喷嚏时最合适的话应该是，"Bless you!"）王老师终于忍俊不住笑了。同学中有听到的跟着笑, 有没听见的觉得莫名其妙。

多年前，我曾收到我的英文老师王知还寄赠的她选编翻译的汉英对照诗集《古今爱国抒情诗词选》。因为工作繁忙，便随身携带，有空阅读几首，觉得颇有特色。诗集编译出版于她从19年冤狱幸存出来、于花甲古稀衰迈之年。译作忠实于原作的精神、语言、气韵，琅琅上口，表现出她老人家的深厚功力。编选的范围上自屈原，下迄《天安门诗抄》。除去脍炙人口的名篇之外，也不乏她情有独钟的，较冷僻，但诗意浓郁的，比如释函可的"问石人"等篇什。贯穿始终的是一种沉郁的忧国忧民情怀，这大概与她本人的经历是密不可分的吧。

译作出版以后，我跟王老师说：现在是网络时代，我可以在网上开办一个《老师文集》专栏，介绍您的诗作和其他作品。她很高兴，但也有顾虑，怕侵权。作为第一次尝试，她提到可以从介绍她的《灰烬中的诗篇》开始。她写道：

立委：你好！

Is there a way, whatever, any such,
in all the world existing, to unlade,
unlock, unlatch, enliven by a touch
magical the long-lonely weighed-
down soul, that, waking like an apple tree
frost-fettered, now reviving, trembling,
with wind and rain rollicking in glee,
it brightens to a loveliness of spring?
Yes, there is one, one only, one alone –
not love uncomprehending, singeing, blind,
self-happy-seeking; but there is a known
way, thing, fine thing, consoling, gracious, kind –
What? Sympathy! Reverberating wide
and wider, when the asking is replied.

这是６０年前一个大三学生创作的"十四行"（sonnet，又译《商籁体》），曾被当时聚集于成都的五所教会大学几位英国文学教授所激赏。而后，１９６７年，在劳改农场的女犯面前，和我的其他原作和译作，以及私人信件、照片等等，统统在点燃的火苗中灰飞烟灭。这一次，你在越洋电话中，为我朗读扬振宁校改过的翁帆英文诗，不竟触动了我一根接近麻木的神经，令我猛醒：同为中国大学生（尽管是在迥异的时空和境遇中）用英文尝试表达诗情，二者的命运何其悬殊一至于此！同时，与我大学时期写诗相关的一些小故事，也鲜活地再现脑际。于是，我想，只要想起一些尚有可读性的诗句，可能会引起兴趣。便绞尽已被痴呆症中度侵蚀的脑汁，集数日之努力，竟从消失了的灰烬中，又神奇地拣回几片焦黑的破碎诗页。上列是唯一能完整地复述出来的一首。同时，也想学着时下流行的"诗配画"的风气，以相关的小故事，权当"速写"，与之相配。

１９４２年，我插班进入金女大英文系。当时，金女大、燕京、南京、齐鲁四所教会大学，已先后迁至位于成都的华西大学宽阔的校园内。各校英文系的学生都可选听任何一校英文教授开的专业课，"资源共享"。南大英文系主任 Dr. William P. Fenn 开的"英诗概论"和燕大教授 Grace Boynton 开的"现代诗歌"课（注：２００３年１１月３日《中华读书报》所载章开沅的"教会大学在中国"文中，曾评价并引用过 Fenn 的言论。Boynton 的名字也曾在几年前"博览群书"某文中被提起过），都讲授得十分精彩。这就引发了我自中学始即跃跃欲试的"大胆妄为"的写诗冲动，照着我特别喜爱的一些诗的语言风格，"依样画葫芦"，课余逐渐写了几十首。后来，精选出１６首十四行，作为我的毕业论文（Dr. Fenn 就是我的导师），居然引起华西大校园中许多外籍教师的瞩目。

不过，"万事开头难"。一个小插曲至今留在记忆中，鲜活常青。Miss Boynton 除教"现代诗歌"外，还开过英文作文课。１９４３年某日，下课后我拿着自己的几首诗请她指教。她微笑着接过去，却不紧不慢、温和地说："呀，你们中国学生能把英文句子写通就不错了，还写诗呀！"但诗页既已递到她手，我也不便再要回来。这样，我的"处女作"，就进入了她的审读视线。再次课余见面，Boynton 态度大变，她惊喜地评说了两三句。此后，她曾邀请我到她独居的小楼去喝过一二次午茶，谈天、说诗。作文课上，她常向全班朗读我写的散文。再后，华西大各校外籍教师中曾传来过对我实际上很幼稚（尤其在意韵方面）的作品的溢美之辞，比如说，"She'll burst into print any time"……

想不到的是：那竟成了我此生仅有的一段原创性英文诗写作的实践了！至于"burst into print" (应该说, struggle into print) ，至少在有关英诗方面，那是在整整半个世纪以后，当陪衬"运动员"和沦为囚犯１９载、最终幸逢拨乱反正以后的事了。－－也就是你帮忙上网介绍的那本《古今爱国抒情诗词选》的出版之时的事了。

今天重提这个话题，不过是在乏善可陈的衰迈余年里，重温一下成年以后少有的较为舒畅的岁月，并为你这样的业余诗歌爱好者，提供旧时教会学校生活的一点逸闻罢了。

王知还
２００５年二月十日，北京

当年暑假在师院，我常跟王老师一起吃早饭，听她谈她一生的坎坷和传奇。她最怀念的是大学时代和她大学时代所写的英诗，当时出类拔萃，才气横溢，极受外籍教授和校长吴贻芳的器重。这一篇小诗就是当年她给我回忆记录下来的片断。还记得王老师跟我讲解诗句"He sits and reads the pool"时，说sits是短元音，reads是长元音，相互配合使得诗句抑扬顿挫。并做出鸟儿神情专著盯着池塘的神态，作为此句的演示。

王知还老师早期的另一首诗（片段）：

"The Kingfisher"

He is a flame of emerald,
With a shining ruby breast,
Of all things most beautiful,
By Mother Nature drest;
Inhabits the deep woodland green,
By some water calm and cool,
And on a wayward stretching bough,
He sits and reads the pool.

Then darts he like a light'ning flash
With winning fleeting grace,
Dips his winglets in the pool,
And wrinkles its halcyon face.

Then the flame of emerald
Has vanished out of sight.

王老师平反以后落实政策回到北京，在原单位新华社分配的窄小宿舍里，度过了余生。房子虽然不大，但那是北京的心脏地带，楼下餐厅很不错，离菜市场和地铁都很近。以前去看她，总是差我去菜市场买一些素鸡，去新华社食堂买一些主食一起吃晚饭。无论她在新华社曾有多少屈辱和怨恨，新华社是她最后的归宿，这是"社会主义优越性"的最后体现了。对于一个投奔延安的离休老干部，一个身边没有任何亲人的她，更是如此。

在北京的时候，我的世界语朋友圈子中很有几位女士曾一度跟她走得近，也在生活方面提供了一些帮助，但最终还是由于她的多疑，疏远了。她的多疑和猜忌可能是很多年的牢狱生活的苦难造成的，她几乎怀疑过身边每一个人，这就决定了她最后岁月的孤苦。后来请钟点工，她也总在怀疑，太过挑剔，结果自己的生活就更加受苦。其间生病住院，她也怀疑医院有阴谋，会谋害她，身体没复原就坚持出院。她最大的心病是陈企霞的弟媳，当年是新华社的什么头儿。由于丁陈被打入反党集团之前，王老师曾经提过陈的意见（这些意见多少被利用了，虽然王老师坚持她与丁陈政治事件无关），她觉得陈家怀恨在心（后来看到陈企霞自辩词，确实指控了王老师的意见是导火索之一），所以王老师觉得这个弟媳一直给她穿小鞋，直接导致了她后来的自杀和"叛逃"（去香港找父亲）等事件，最终是10年徒刑，近20年劳改农场的非人生活。这笔旧账在她心中烙印太深，以至于后来回到新华社，她还总在怀疑新华社有人在迫害她。我说，你的对手都死光了，你还怕谁呢？她说，死了并不等于其党羽都清除了。她要这样想，步步惊心，日子自然不好过。她住院几天回来，就坚持说她的东西被人翻过，有物件被偷。诸如此类，每次我去看她，她都要唠叨很多，我也只能听着。

王老师晚年虽然没写回忆或自传，有两年还是找到了一件有意思的事情做，就是翻译中国古典诗词到英文，这是她的长项。那真是几年磨一剑，烂熟于心。翻译完，为了出版折腾了好几年，其间找过陈白尘、叶君健等老人帮忙，也曾联系美国作家和联合国科教文。最终是出版了，也确实在诗歌翻译领域留下了印记。这项成果之后，她就老在怀疑有人要侵犯她的版权，盗窃她的成果。她不明白，盗窃成果是根本不可能的事情，因为有正式出版物在。至于版权，诗歌翻译是赔本的买卖，没有侵权的动机（说老实话，要是有盗版帮助加印分销，流传更广，不是更好么）。但这些道理她是听不进去的。所以，跟王老师交往，基本上只能听，只能附和或打哈哈，不能说。说了不同看法，就会引起她的疑心。

记于2006年九月二十二记

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From 朝华午拾 (Morning Glory, Afternoon Harvest). Original Chinese: 《朝华之十三: 灰烬中的诗篇》.

The Deskmate

I first saw her at the oral exam venue. In the first post-Cultural Revolution college entrance exam for the Class of '77, I had added optional English as a bonus subject and needed to take an oral test after passing the preliminary screening. My father accompanied me by bus from our county town to the oral exam site in W City. She appeared like a Lin Daiyu who had descended from heaven (she was actually a year older than me), and my eyes lit up. Rarely had I seen such a delicate young lady, shyly murmuring with her father as they made last-minute preparations. My father struck up a conversation, hoping to pick up some exam tips for me, and learned that her father was a university professor who happened to be a colleague of my father's old classmate. The girl's father said, "Keep up with the political climate — learn to express everyday political phrases in English, like Chairman Hua's 'Grasp the key link and run the country well.'"

I silently recited the newly-learned "Grasp the key link and run the country well," and thus stumbled into the oral exam room. The examiner, as it turned out, didn't ask anything political — just simple questions about my age and hometown, then had me read aloud a passage about Dr. Bethune. After reading, I was asked to retell it. Boldly, I managed three or five sentences:

Dr. Bai-qiu-en is an old friend of China and Chinese people. He is a communist party member in Canada. He came to China in 1939 to support our anti-Japanese war.

After leaving the exam room, I eagerly searched with my eyes for that girl, but alas, she had vanished like a fading fragrance on the wind, leaving not a trace behind.

Such is the way of the world — you encounter a stunning young girl by chance, are struck as if by a celestial being, and cannot let go for a long time. But the sea of humanity is vast, and you are in different places; there is no possibility of meeting again, only sighs of lament. I deeply envied that celestial girl for having a professor father to carefully nurture her, thinking that surely she would become the campus belle of the Beijing Foreign Studies University or Shanghai International Studies University the following year.

But sometimes life is stranger than fiction — she actually became my classmate, coming to our then-obscure teachers' college. When I saw her on campus during new student orientation, I literally couldn't believe my eyes. When I discovered she was in my class, I was overjoyed. Later, because I was the youngest in the class and she was the youngest among the seven girls, by what stroke of fortune I know not, we ended up as deskmates, sitting side by side for four years. Though we never brushed ears or temples together, her subtle fragrance would drift over, her soft breathing within earshot — a mere mortal like me had long lost all sense of where I was.

Unlike prestigious universities with their many electives, our school's curriculum was rigid — the entire class was always bound together, in the same classroom, taking the same courses, almost like a vocational school. This arrangement gave us fixed seats. I was very fortunate — my deskmate, the Seventh Fairy, sat in the first row with me, the Sixth Fairy behind me, and the Fifth Fairy next to me.

We were the first cohort after the Cultural Revolution, with diverse backgrounds and wide age gaps, yet all carried the old-fashioned habits of a bygone era. Apart from grinding away at our books, the class had absolutely no social life or entertainment. Boys and girls rarely even spoke to each other; everyone was a good student of the late Chairman Mao, consciously restraining themselves and observing propriety. Mind you, this was a group of people aged 18 to 30 in the prime of their youth, yet not a single couple formed in our class. Not until near graduation did a few older guys start looking for partners elsewhere, and even they didn't dare set their sights on the Seven Fairies. Only one bohemian talent from the Chinese Department seemed always trying to cozy up to her, calling her "my Little Rabbit Merry," but even he couldn't find an opening.

My secret admiration for the Seventh Fairy — so near at hand yet as distant as the horizon — accompanied my entire university life. My old notes, poetry manuscripts, along with the four lengthy novels I had written, were all unfortunately lost during my wandering relocations.

— Written on September 22, 2006

Postscript: The poetry manuscript "Ode to the Goddess" from those years was lost during a move, but it did not "turn to dust and vanish." I had printed a copy for my elder brother, and to my surprise, he has kept it to this day.

---

Ode to the Goddess

(October 1, 1980, Night)

On Self-Cultivation
Man is no plant or tree — how can he be without feeling?
Flesh-and-blood beings — who does not admire excellence?
The modest, gentle maiden — a gentleman's worthy courtship.
The graceful fairy maiden — our generation's dream companion.
Love her, yearn for her — but never defile her.
Admire her, revere her — yet none know my heart!
None know my heart — my heart unseen.
Thinking of her, my heart breaks — tears fall like sleet.

Heart
Your heart, my heart — this heart, that heart.
I exhaust my heart's strength — seeking my soul's companion.
Those who have come from afar — are not the ones who know my heart.
The heart that knows is not distant — it resides in the Goddess.
Should the Goddess depart — perhaps my heart may rest.

Untitled
You climb the eastern peak — how could my west reach you?
Jade lost within the village — what is there but to grieve!
Learning without end — poetry without form.
People without constancy — hearts without wound!

Reverie
Night — already two o'clock,
Near and far, a few dreamlike eyes.
Some green, some yellow,
Flickering — flickering.

The dark-violet vault,
Its outlines faintly traced.
Bearing the cold air,
The spirit of night strokes my face.

All is silent —
Yet I detect a sound:
A buzzing, like bees —
— It is my winged reverie.

In my reverie, she —
Near yet distant.
Whispered words honeyed,
Dimpled smiles shallow.

Dream of the Earthquake
What — the earth trembles slightly,
Could it be an earthquake, visiting while people sleep?
I throw down my pen and leap out the window,
Suddenly remembering she's still inside.

Like black lightning,
I charge back in.
— Alas! She escapes safely,
Yet I suffer a fatal blow.

Thank God!
I die content.
My spirit seems to hear,
Her weeping for me.

Beneath the Nine Springs, I smile in peace:
One perfect goddess,
Is worth how many
Mere mortals like me? Amen!

---

The Hometown Girl

Through a university alumni network reunion, I reconnected with an old classmate working in Shanghai. This was my iron buddy, who back in the day had quietly won over a female classmate from the Mathematics Department, becoming one of the rare outstanding individuals in our class who successfully "abducted" a fellow university student. During the New Year, I called to wish him well; he had gone back to his hometown, and only his wife from the Math Department was home. As we chatted, my sister-in-law asked: "How is your young hometown girl doing now? Back then, we all thought you two would surely end up together."

I said, "I was close to this hometown girl for nearly two years and felt very comfortable with her, but we never really entered into a romance. I'm embarrassed to say we've lost contact for many years — I don't know where she is now. I once heard she was assigned to H City after graduation."

My sister-in-law sighed: "She was not destined for such fortune." I told her: "Perhaps I was the one without the fortune. She was truly a wonderful girl — so easy to be with, and she knew how to care for others." My sister-in-law concluded: "In the end, it comes down to fate not being enough." I asked: "Though we spent a lot of time together, we were never in a romantic relationship. You were in the Math Department Class of '77, and she was in the Chinese Department Class of '80 — how did you know about us?" She replied: "Our school wasn't that big, and all the girls' dorms were in one building — how could I not know? That hometown girl of yours would often come to our room and talk about you. I even heard about your trip to Zhenfeng Pagoda together. We all thought you two were a sure thing."

This was a plain yet poignant connection, drifting somewhere between love and friendship. No passionate whispers, no clinging devotion, no grand drama or wild swings — just quiet understanding, warmth, and genuine care for each other. To this day, I still don't understand why this relationship withered without cause. Perhaps, deep down, I believed love should shake the heavens, that it must be romantic — and so I lacked the appreciation and commitment for this calm, harmonious affection, letting it drift away like water.

The Hometown Girl was a classmate of my younger sister, not strikingly beautiful but pleasant to look at — the kind of girl who makes you feel comfortable and want to be near. She was probably the only true fellow-towns person I had at our school, coming from the same county seat. She had known I was at this school for a long time but was too shy to properly acknowledge me as a fellow-towns person. Later, she told me that every time she waited in the cafeteria line, she would see me holding a little notebook, reciting words to myself as if no one else existed. Back then, we often had to wait in long queues, and I suppose I was always using those moments to memorize vocabulary.

I was a bit of an oddball at school, and my young hometown girl looked up to me somewhat. In those days, I was writing novels with burning passion, and she became my earliest and most devoted reader. Under the cover of being fellow townspeople, our interactions from the very start were natural — not furtive and secretive like so many boys and girls of that era. When spring arrived, we would play frisbee on the grassy field in front of the dormitory, thoroughly enjoying ourselves without worry of gossip. When her birthday or mine came around, we would arrange to go out to Zhenfeng Pagoda by the river to explore; when tired, we'd go to a restaurant to toast each other, drinking a little wine, returning to campus with flushed cheeks. Only at the campus gate would we realize that walking back together, faces rosy and half-tipsy, might create a poor impression. So we would part ways there, each returning to our own dorms separately.

I remember one winter break — the ground was frozen, snow everywhere. We arranged to take the long-distance bus together from Anqing back home, a seven-to-eight-hour journey, bumping and swaying. I suffered terribly from motion sickness. During a midway rest stop, the Hometown Girl said to me: "Let's race — see who reaches that telephone pole first!" How could I let myself be outrun by her? I ran with all my might. She laughed playfully — she wasn't truly racing me, just trying to distract me from the nausea. Then we had a brief snowball fight. Back on the bus, I indeed felt much better. During holidays, when we returned from home bringing local specialties, we always shared them. She asked me to help her buy a brick-sized cassette recorder, and we often listened to Teresa Teng's tapes together, singing "The Moon Represents My Heart." Yet we never explicitly acknowledged a romantic relationship, never had intimate gestures. Still, we were happy to spend time in each other's company. Having a fellow-towns person of the opposite sex who cared for each other — a warmth suffused everything.

Days passed quietly like this, feeling full and content. Looking back on those two years, the closest physical contact we ever had was, I think, the occasional, half-intentional holding of hands. Then came graduation, and I took the exam to stay on at the university as a teacher. I passed the written test but was eliminated in the oral exam — they said my spoken English had an accent. Among the qualified candidates, I was the only one who received merely a "Pass" in the oral test, while the requirement for staying on was "Good" or above. I felt deeply wronged. When I asked her out, I couldn't hold back my tears. She was somewhat at a loss, silently accompanying me through that heartbreaking night.

Hometown Girl — are you well?

— Written on March 8, 2007

Postscript: Thanks to the Internet and the help of classmates, after 25 years of separation, I have finally reconnected with the Hometown Girl. I learned that she has achieved outstanding success in her career, and I am truly happy for her.

Li Wei:

Hello!

Having read "The Hometown Girl," I feel as if I've returned to our university days. The youth of bygone years, the striving spirit — all have come floating back before my eyes.

Knowing that you are doing well now, I am sincerely happy for you.

I will visit your blog often to read your beautiful essays.

I look forward to more of your writing.

— April 26, 2007

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《朝华之十一: 青春恋曲》

同桌的她

第一次见到她是在口试的考场。文革以后第一届77级高考，我加试了英语，初选后需要口试。父亲陪我乘车从县城赶到W市的口试考场。她的出现有如天上掉下来的林妹妹（她其实长我一岁），让我眼睛一亮。很少见如此娇嫩的少女，羞答答地随着她父亲嘀嘀咕咕做临场前的最后准备。我父亲于是搭讪，想为我寻求一些应试技巧，得知这位父亲是大学教授，恰好跟我父亲的老同学是同事。女孩父亲说，要紧跟形势，学用英语说日常政治用语，比如华主席提出的"抓纲治国"：
Grasp the key link and run the country well
我默念着刚学到的"抓纲治国"，就这样糊里糊涂进了口试考场。考官倒没有问什么政治，只是简单问问年龄籍贯，然后让我朗读一段白求恩大夫的故事，念完后要求复述出来。我大胆复述了三五句：
Dr. Bai-qiu-en is an old friend of China and Chinese people. He is a communist party member in Canada. He came to China in 1939 to support our anti-Japanese war.
出考场后，赶紧拿眼睛去寻那个女孩，可惜早已香消影逝，随风而去，不留一丝芳踪。

世界上的事情常常是这样，在一个偶然场合，邂逅一妙龄女郎，惊为天人，久久不能释怀。可人海茫茫，又身处两地，绝无再见的可能，徒增感喟而已。非常羡慕这个天仙一样的女孩有个教授爸爸精心培养，心想来年北外或者上外的校花非她莫属了。

但是，生活也有比小说还巧的时候，她居然成为我的同窗，来到当时不入流的师范。新生入校的时候在校园见到她，简直不敢相信自己的眼睛。及至发现她原来是同班同学，大喜过望。再后来，因为我全班最小，她在班上七个女生中也最小，不知修得什么福分，居然同桌相邻。虽无耳鬓厮磨，却有幽香袭人，娇喘入闻，凡夫俗子的我早已不知身在何处了。

跟名校有很多选修课不同，我们这种学校课程很死板，全班同学总是绑在一起，在同一个教室，上同一组课，跟中专似的。这样的情形使得我们都有固定的座位。我很幸运，我和同桌的七仙女在第一排，六仙女在我身后，五仙女在我隔壁。

我们是文革后第一届，同学背景各异，年龄相差也大，但都免不了前朝遗少陋习。全班同学除了死读书外，根本没有社交和娱乐。男女生也极少谈话，个个是先帝毛主席的好学生，自觉克己复礼，非礼勿视。须知大家都是18-30岁正当年啊，班上居然没有一对谈恋爱的，直到临毕业才有几个年长的哥们开始四外寻找对象，也没敢打七仙女的主意。只有一个中文系的嬉皮才子似乎总想跟她套瓷，称她为 my Little Rabbit Merry，但也无从下手。

对近在咫尺远在天边的七仙女的暗恋伴随了我的大学生活。当年的笔记、诗稿，连同我写的四大本小说，都不幸在流浪搬迁途中丢失。
记于2006年九月二十二记

后记：当年的诗稿《女神赞》已在搬家途中丢失，但并没有"灰飞烟灭"。曾打印留给哥哥一份，没想到他居然保留至今。

---

女神赞

（一九八零年十月一日夜）

好修篇
人非草木, 安能无情? 血肉之体, 孰不慕英?
窈窕淑女, 君子好逑。娉婷仙姑, 吾侪梦俦。
爱之恋之, 莫之污兮。仰之敬之, 莫我知兮!
莫我知兮, 心弗见兮。念之肠断, 涕若霰兮。

心
尔心吾心, 此心彼心。竭心力兮, 寻吾知音。
迢迢迩来, 非吾知心。其心非远, 在彼女神。
____女神逝兮, 或可安心.

无题
尔东陟兮, 岂吾西及? 里亡玉兮, 惟可悲夫!
学无己兮, 诗无体兮。人无常兮, 心无伤兮!

耽想
夜, 己经两点,
远近几只梦的眼。
有绿色的, 有黄色的,
一闪、一闪。

乌青的穹隆,
轮廓略显。
挟着寒气,
夜神抚我脸。

万籁俱寂,
我却听出了音响:
嗡嗡嗡, 象蜜蜂,
___是我生双翼的耽想。

耽想中的她,
亲近又遥远.
细语蜜蜜,
笑窝浅浅。

望震
怎么, 大地颤微,
敢不是地震来临, 乘着人们熟睡?
我丢下诗笔跳出窗外,
蓦然记起她还在房内。

象黑色的闪电,
我猛冲进去.
__alas!她安然脱险,
我却遭了致命一击。

感谢上帝!
我满意地死去.
魂灵似乎正听到,
她在为我哭泣。

九泉之下我微笑安心:
一个完美的女神,
要抵得多少
我这样的凡人, Amem!

---

老乡妹妹

大学同学联络网聚，我跟在上海工作的老同学联系上了。这是我的铁哥们儿，当年不声不响搞定了一位数学系的女同学，成为我班少有的两个成功"拐骗"了大学同学的出类拔萃人士。过年打电话拜年，他回老家了，只有数学系的太太在家，聊起来，嫂子问我：你的小老乡现在怎么样？当年我们以为你们应该也成一对了呢。

我说，我和这个老乡妹妹交往了近两年，感到很自在，但没有真正进入恋爱啊。很惭愧，已经失去联系很多年了，不知道她现在在哪里，以前听说她毕业分到H城了。

嫂子叹口气：她是没有福分。我告诉嫂子：可能是我没有福分吧。她人真地很好，让人很舒服，也懂得体贴人。嫂子最后说：说到底还是缘分不够。我问：我们虽然交往很多，但并没有恋爱关系。你是数学系77级，她是中文系80级，你怎么知道我们的关系呢？嫂子说：咱们学校不大，女生宿舍都在一个楼，怎么不知道？你那老乡妹妹还常到我们寝室来谈起你，你们一块到振风塔游玩的事，我也听她说了呢。我们都以为你们肯定能成。

这是一段平淡而又令人回味的交往，游于爱情与友情之间。没有卿卿我我，厮守缠绵，没有轰轰烈烈，大起大伏，有的只是默契温馨，和真心地相互关心体贴。我到现在也不明白，这种关系为什么无疾而终。也许骨子里就认为爱情应该惊天动地，追求浪漫，所以对平实和谐的感情，少了一份珍惜和执着，任其如水流去。

老乡妹妹是我妹妹的同级同学，算不上很漂亮，但受看，是让人舒服愿意接近的那种女孩子。她大概是我们学校唯一一个真正的老乡了，来自同一个县城。她早就知道我在这个学校，一直腼腆没好意思认我这个老乡。后来，她告诉我，她每次在食堂排队时，就看到我手里拿着一个小本本，旁若无人地念念有词。我们当年，常常需要排很长的队，我大概总是利用这个当口在背单词吧。

我在学校有点各别，小老乡对我有些仰视。我当年写小说写得热火朝天，她成为最早最忠实的一个读者。借着老乡的名义，我们一开始交往，就很自然，不象当年很多男生女生那样鬼鬼祟祟。春天来了，我们就在宿舍门前的操场绿地上玩飞碟，很是开心，也不怕人闲话。她的或我的生日到了，我们就约好出去，到江边振风塔上游玩，玩累了下餐馆互相祝福，也喝点葡萄酒，脸色红红地回到校园。到了校园门口，才意识到两人脸色潮红半醉微醺地一块儿回校，影响不好。这才分开，先后各自回自己的宿舍。

记得有一年寒假到了，冰天雪地。我们约好乘坐长途汽车一道从安庆回家，七八个小时车程晃晃荡荡，我晕车的厉害。老乡妹妹在中途停车时，跟我说，我们赛跑，看谁先到前面的电线杆谁赢。我哪好意思落在她后面，拼命跑起来。她嘻嘻哈哈，并不真地跟我比赛，只是想分散我的注意力。接着又打了一会儿雪仗，上车再行，果然感觉好多了。假期回校从家里带来特产，我们总是分享。她托我帮她买了一台砖式录音机，我们常常一起听邓丽君的盒带，唱月亮代表我的心，可就是从来没有挑明恋爱关系，也没有亲热举动，但还是愿意在一起消磨时光。有个异性老乡互相关爱，有一种温暖在弥漫。

日子就这样平平淡淡地过去，感觉很充实。交往两年，仔细想起来，好像最亲密的接触就是有意无意地拉拉手。直到我毕业参加留校考试，笔试通过，却在口试时候被刷下来了，说我英语口语带口音，在达标的候选人中是唯一一个口语得"及格"的，而留校人员口试必须"良"或以上。我感觉很委屈，约她出来时，忍不住哭了。她有点手足无措，默默陪我度过了那个伤心之夜。

老乡妹妹，你还好吗？
记于2007年三月八日

后记：感谢互联网和同学的帮助，在分别25年后终于联系上老乡妹妹。得知她事业有成出类拔萃，很替她高兴。

立委：
你好！
看过"老乡妹妹"一文，仿佛又回到了大学时代。曾经的青春年少、曾经的努力奋进又一一浮现在眼前。
知道你现在很好，由衷地为你高兴。
我会经常上你的博客，阅读你的美文。
期待你有更多的文章。
—— 2007年4月26日

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From 朝华午拾. Original Chinese: 《朝华之十一: 青春恋曲》.

The old team leader, who had welcomed us into U Village with gongs and drums, was the one closest to us. He loved managing every affair, large or small, and naturally assumed the role of guardian to the educated youth. When we arrived, the old team leader's extended family was at its zenith: five children — three sons and two daughters — thriving and prosperous. His wife ran the household tirelessly, never complaining, always warm-hearted toward others. Their eldest son, Shanhu, was practically one of our brothers. Slightly older than me, he was even shorter and slighter of build — there may have been some developmental issue — but he was no slouch at farm work. A full laborer, he served as the team's work-point recorder. Shanhu had returned to the fields after finishing primary school and, as the firstborn son, shared the family's heavy burdens alongside his militia-sister. Three breadwinners, plus two younger brothers who gathered manure, herded ducks, and did odd jobs after school — the family earned work points in abundance. This family's flourishing, combined with the old team leader's prestige, rivaled the household of the bald-headed team leader with his four “golden blossoms” (sisters); these two families were the most prominent among the village's sixty or seventy households. The old team leader's home was our home too — we felt as much at ease there as in our own. Everyone in the family was warm-hearted, including the youngest, a six-year-old girl who would wave her arms and jump for joy the moment we arrived. Whenever they cooked something special, the old team leader would call us over. The auntie never complained, always attending to us with a quiet smile as we ate and drank.

Shanhu was lively and sincere, close to us educated youth as a true brother, helping us in countless ways. He always carried his work-point ledger — a notebook full of his scrawls, the point records legible only to himself. I have seen many people with bad handwriting, and my own hand is wretched enough, but to write Chinese characters as ugly, misshapen, and indecipherable as his was a real achievement. After I left U Village for university, we kept in touch. Every letter from him required a long struggle of deciphering before I could make out eight or nine parts in ten. At the end of every letter he would draw little symbols — two hands clasped tight, or a heart with a line attached — a simple, heartfelt wish that our friendship endure forever.

The old team leader was a figure of great prestige in the village — lean, dark-skinned, with a pointed chin, robust of frame, his laughter and talk ringing like a great bell. We never quite knew when he had become team leader, or when he yielded the post to the bald little team leader. What we did know was that he was a veteran, literate and well-traveled, the true heart of U Village. Our arrival thrilled him beyond measure. He bustled about, making arrangements with meticulous care. There was only one thing I found rather comical, inwardly resistant to but never daring to show it: the old team leader, with clockwork regularity, organized weekly political study sessions for us that lasted deep into the night. On these occasions, he would shoo every family member, young and old, out of the house, brighten the kerosene lamp without a thought for the oil it consumed. Deadly serious, sitting ramrod straight, he wore an expression of profound contemplation. I remember him leading us through the Critique of the Gotha Programme, reading word by word with the air of a professor — though he never offered any commentary of his own. As for Marxism-Leninism, I had only dabbled in "political economy" during middle school and understood little of the other works. The things I couldn't grasp, he didn't grasp either — after all, he had only a primary-school education. I often wondered what was going through his mind. Why such fervor for those abstruse Marxist-Leninist texts, and why that perpetual air of deep thought? Back then I saw myself as a mere kid, and the old team leader was a respected, authoritative elder, our pillar of support — even when doubts stirred within me, I never dared question him. These study sessions continued until the day I left U Village.

The old team leader had a magnetic singing voice, tinged with a touch of world-weariness, deeply affecting. I remember the weeding season in the flooded paddies — warm sunshine, emerald-green seedlings, gentle spring breezes. The old team leader would weed and sing in measured cadence, his voice rising and falling like a boatman's chantey, carried by the wind in wave after wave, lingering long in the air. What a scene of color and sound, of harmony and reverie — an idyllic vision of agrarian life.

Many years passed, but the old team leader's song remained lodged in my memory, though I never discovered its origin. Then last year, a new song on my daughter's iPod seized me instantly. It wasn't, of course, the old team leader's song, but its tonal essence bore an uncanny resemblance — it resurrected a long-buried melody in my heart. Whenever the song plays, the old team leader's face and figure reappear before me, along with the clear breezes and gentle sun of those open fields, the simple, unhurried scenes of rural life and labor. I asked my daughter what the piece was. She looked at me as if I were a total bumpkin: "It's Akon — 'Don't Matter,' the song that took the world by storm." This African-American song, released in 2007, quickly dominated the airwaves, holding the number-one spot for two straight weeks. I was amazed — and astonished — that across thousands of mountains and rivers, a mysterious, ancient Chinese folk tune could resonate so perfectly with an African-American song. I could even glimpse in Akon himself the shadow of the old team leader — dark, lean, and capable.

When I returned to the village after graduating from university, the old team leader had already passed away — cancer had taken his life. His daughter had married far away; word came back that her husband was jailed for gambling. The second son had died of hepatitis when treatment came too late. The auntie, battered by blow after blow, had aged into silence. Gone was the laughter from that household; only Shanhu held it together, nearly thirty and still unmarried. When I brought it up, he would give a bitter smile and say there was no hurry — he had to put his younger siblings through school first; his own affairs could wait. My heart sank, heavy with grief at the capriciousness of fate: that once flourishing household, first robbed of its pillar, then ravaged by one misfortune after another, now so desolate. The song buried in my memory grew more achingly bittersweet with the weight of time.

The past drifts like smoke. The day before yesterday, revisiting old haunts, I ran into Sis II— now surrounded by children and grandchildren.

I have only now sorted out the relationships: it turns out the old team leader and the new team leader were the two great intermarried clans of the village. The old team leader, who welcomed us three educated youth with gongs and drums, had two siblings — his younger sister was the barefoot doctor who housed us in those early days and looked after us then. The old team leader's younger brother married the new team leader's second sister (whom I called Sis II). The photograph is their family portrait. The homes of the old team leader and his siblings all stand not far from this pond. Beside the pond was the vegetable plot allotted to us educated youth.

Returning to the old place, I encountered Sis II at the village entrance. She said, "Wei was always the scholarly one — he knew English and was forever at home listening to English radio broadcasts." That was me, having brought my family's transistor radio to the countryside to catch the English-language lecture programs on Anhui and Jiangsu provincial radio. Somehow, during the Cultural Revolution, some official must have approved it, because many provinces launched English radio courses — a rare opportunity for foreign-language study in those years. Sis II told me the third and youngest sisters are both doing well now. Sis III lives nearby, just in town. The youngest works out of town.

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朝华午拾 · 第10章：插队山村（下）

敲锣打鼓把我们迎进村的老队长跟我们走得最近。事无巨细，他都爱来管，自然充当了知青监管人的角色。我们插队的时候，正是老队长大家庭最鼎盛的时期：五个孩子，三男二女，人丁兴旺。老伴操持家务，任劳任怨，对人热情有加。大儿子山虎算我们哥们，比我略长，但长得比我还矮小一大截，似乎发育有问题，但干活并不赖，是个整劳力，担任队里的记分员。山虎小学毕业就回乡种田，作为长子，与女民兵姐姐一起，帮助父亲分担家庭重负。三个劳力，加上两个弟弟拾粪、放鸭，放学做点零工，一家人挣足了工分。这个家庭的红火兴旺，加上老队长的威信，可与家有四朵金花的光头队长一比，这两大家是村子里六七十户人家里面的显赫人家。老队长的家也是我们的家，在他家里我们感觉在自己家一样地自在。一家都是热心人，包括最小的六岁女儿，我们一来，就手舞足蹈，欢呼雀跃。家里做了好吃的，老队长就把我们叫去。大娘从不抱怨，总是笑吟吟默默在一旁伺候我们吃喝。

山虎很活跃，实诚热心，跟我们知青亲如兄弟，给了我们很多帮助。他总是随身带着他的记分簿，满本子是他的涂鸦，只有他自己能看懂的那些工分记录。我见过不少字写得差的人，我自己也一手烂字，可把汉字写到他那样难看，那样奇形怪状，不可辨认，还真不容易。我离开尤村上大学期间，我们一直保持着联系，每次读他的信都要辨认老半天才能猜八九不离十。他每封信尾总是画点图示，两只手紧握啊，或者一颗心系上一条线，朴素地表示他对我们友谊地久天长的祝愿。

老队长是村里德高望重的人物，他清瘦黝黑，尖小巴，身子骨健朗，谈笑如洪钟。他哪年当的队长，哪年让位给光头小队长，我们不很清楚。只知道老队长是退伍军人，识文断字，见多识广，是尤村的核心。我们的到来，老队长异常兴奋。他跑前跑后，张罗安排，滴水不漏。只有一件事，我感觉有些滑稽，内心有抵触，却不敢流露：老队长雷打不动，每周要组织我们政治学习和座谈一次，一学就是一夜。每当这个时候，老队长就把家里的大小孩子统统驱离，把煤油灯点得亮亮的，一点不心疼熬油。他不苟言笑，正襟危坐，特别严肃深思的样子。记得他组织学习《哥达纲领批判》，一字一板地阅读，那样子很象个教授，可从来也没见他有自己的讲解。对于马列，我只在中学迷恋过"政治经济学"，对于其他著作不是很懂。我听不明白的，他其实也不懂，毕竟他也就小学毕业的文化程度。当时我就好奇，他心里在想什么。为什么对那些深奥难懂的马列原著那么热衷，而且总摆出若有所思的样子。我当年自觉是个小毛孩，老队长是可敬有威的长者，是我们的依靠，即便心里有疑惑，也从不敢追问。这样的学习一直持续到我离开尤村。

老队长唱歌富有磁性，略带沧桑，很有魅力。记得在水田薅草的时节，暖洋洋的阳光，绿油油的禾苗，春风和煦。老队长一边薅草，一边张池有度地唱起歌来。听上去有点象船工号子，声音高高低低的，随着风，一波一波袭来，抑扬悠长，不绝如缕。那是怎样一种有声有色，和谐无间，引人遐想的农耕图景啊。

很多年过去，老队长的歌声却一直留在我的记忆中，虽然我从未搞清这首歌的来历。直到去年，女儿的 iPod 新增的一首歌，一下子把我抓住了。这歌当然不是老队长的歌，可曲调内蕴与老队长的歌神似，是它复活了我心中掩埋已久的歌。每当歌声响起，老队长的面容身影，广阔天地的清风和日，单纯悠长的田家生活和劳动的场景，就在我眼前浮现。 我问女儿这是什么曲子。女儿一副我是土老冒的惊讶，这是 Akon 啊，那首红透半边天的歌曲 don't matter 啊。这首黑人歌曲2007年一出品，很快在电台热播，连续两周居于排行榜首。我惊喜，也感到诧异，远隔千山万水，神秘古老的中国民间小调居然与带有美国非裔色彩的黑人歌曲如此契合。甚至我在 Akon 本人身上也隐约看到黑瘦干练的老队长的身影。

我大学毕业的时候曾回村探望，那时老队长已经离开人世，是癌症夺走了他的生命。女儿远嫁，传回的消息是女婿赌博被抓进了局子，二儿子肝炎治疗不及时丢了性命。大娘经受这种种打击，显得衰老无语。家庭再也没有了欢声笑语，只有山虎撑着这个家，快30的人了一直未娶媳妇。谈起来，他总是苦苦一笑，说不急，先把弟妹上学供出来，自己的事可以放一放。我的心沉沉的，感伤世事无常，那么鼎盛兴旺的大家先失了顶梁柱，复遭种种不幸，如今如此零落。那记忆深处的歌声在我心中也更加增添了些许沧桑的苦涩和无奈。

补记（2019年三月23日）

往事如烟：前天寻访旧地，遇到了插队时姐妹花中的二姐，如今是子孙绕膝了。

现在才梳理清关系，原来老队长和新队长是村子里联姻的两大旺族。敲锣打鼓欢迎我们三位知青入乡的老队长一共兄妹仨，妹妹是赤脚医生，是我们的东家，当年也对我们很照顾。老队长的弟弟娶了新队长的二妹（我叫二姐）。照片就是他们的全家福。老队长和他姐弟三家都在这个池塘边不远。池塘边还有分给我们知青的菜地。 重返旧地在村口巧遇二姐。二姐说，维当年就是学问人，会英语，老在家听英语广播。那是我把家里的晶体管收音机，带到乡下，为了听安徽台和江苏台的英语广播讲座。文革年代不知道哪位领导批准的 很多省开办了电台的英语讲座，是当年难得的外语学习机会了。二姐告诉我，三妹小妹如今日子都还不错。三妹不远，就在镇上。小妹在外地做工。

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From 朝华午拾. Original Chinese: 插队山村.

The story of being sent down to the countryside feels impossibly distant to me now, as if from another life. That is precisely why I have long wanted to write about it yet always felt my heart was willing but my strength insufficient. Even so, fragments of those years keep churning in my mind. Though they cannot be woven into a continuous narrative, these memory shards are etched into the deepest recesses of my mind. The "Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages" movement was our generation's rite of passage.

I was among the very last cohort sent down after the Cultural Revolution, catching the very tail end. At the time I did not meet the age requirement and could have remained in the city by policy. But the reality then was that staying in the city and waiting for job assignments often meant permanent unemployment — unlike being sent down, where after a few years you might be called back for factory work or even college (as a so-called worker-peasant-soldier student). Besides, under the influence of the era's ethos, those who stayed behind seemed somehow lesser than those who went. I had a close classmate, an only son, who stayed in the city. When we met afterward, he no longer carried himself with the same proud bearing we sent-down youth had.

The Three Brothers of U Village

The place I was sent to was a remote mountain village in southern Anhui called U Village, just beside the town. Three of us were sent to this village together. Brother Chen came from a family of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners — steady and honest, he brought half a trunk full of medical books. Brother Yu was the son of a demobilized soldier veteran, a bit of a slacker with a devil-may-care attitude. I brought along Bo Bing's Concise English Grammar and a transistor AM radio, hoping to keep up with the radio Broadcast English lessons. The moment the three of us got off the bus at the town, Old Party Secretary of U Village led a crowd banging drums and gongs to welcome us in. We were temporarily housed in the home of a commune barefoot doctor for two months. Later the village used the state resettlement allowance issued for the three of us to build three large, warehouse-like rooms — drafty as could be — and only then were we properly settled.

The first month we ate "assigned meals," rotating through every household day by day. The farmers were mostly simple and hospitable. On the day we ate at a given home, the host would usually prepare more dishes than usual. Still, circumstances varied from household to household, and the food was hit-or-miss — some meals were truly hard to swallow. But fearing we'd be mocked as soft city kids, we could only grit our teeth and eat. The worst part wasn't the quality of the food but the hygiene. One evening, as dusk was falling, I pushed open a door to go to dinner and my hand landed on something sticky. Back home, the three of us compared notes and realized it was either snot or phlegm residue. We were all sick to our stomachs.

Eventually the three of us decided to cook for ourselves, dividing up the chores. I still remember rising at dawn to carry water from the pond — my slender frame utterly mismatched with the water buckets — shivering in the early spring chill. Still, cooking for ourselves was far more satisfying. Every day as we worked, we looked forward eagerly to getting off early and enjoying our own dinner. The most common and most delicious dish was salted pork braised with soybeans. The salted pork was sent by my parents to improve our diet. Each time I'd cut off a small piece of fatty meat and slowly render it over the fire — those glistening, oil-soaked soft soybeans were simply irresistible. The soybeans and charcoal were both rations allocated to us educated youth by the production team. I'd fill a small clay pot with soybeans, fatty pork, and water, set it on the charcoal before heading out to work, and by the time we returned, fragrance would fill the air.

Such delicacies could not last, of course. So we started growing our own vegetables. Taking the path of least resistance, we chose the easiest thing to grow and planted two big patches of cucumbers. Cucumbers, once they start producing, are unstoppable — we were drowning in them. No matter how many we picked and ate, we could not keep up with their growth. We'd snack on them raw throughout the day, then make cucumber soup or stir-fried cucumber at night, until the very thought of them made us want to vomit. This left quite an aftershock. For a very long time, I regarded cucumbers as the lowliest of vegetables — fine for an occasional raw nibble, but never as a proper dish. Yet as the years turned, somewhere in my wandering life overseas, cucumbers suddenly became precious. My wife and daughter both love them. Those English cucumbers from heated greenhouses, two or three dollars apiece, have become a staple in our home. Sometimes when there aren't enough vegetables and I worry my daughter isn't getting balanced nutrition, I'll wash a cucumber for her, and she always munches it contentedly, never tiring of it.

Cucumbers indeed don't make great dishes, but if you happen to have eggs, they work well either stir-fried or in soup. On their own they are no proper dish at all — nothing to go with rice. Eggs were extremely precious. We didn't raise chickens so we naturally had no eggs, and we couldn't bear to buy them either. Later someone in the village borrowed money from us educated youth in an emergency but couldn't pay it back, so they scrounged some eggs from under their hens to repay us — that's how we finally got a taste of them. One day the bald team leader came to inspect, saw our cucumber patch, and gave us a ferocious scolding. "You lazy bums, who told you to grow cucumbers? You haven't planted a single proper vegetable — what the hell are you going to eat?" By "proper vegetables" he meant peppers and eggplants — the kind that, with just a bit of rapeseed oil and without eggs or meat, could be made mouth-wateringly delicious. But tending those was no easy task. Besides watering, you had to fertilize — ideally with manure diluted in water, which made things grow best.

When we could no longer stomach cucumbers, with nothing else good to eat, we turned to stir-fried sweet potatoes. This trick, I should say, was taught to me by the village cowherd boy. This cowherd was a sharp one; ever since we educated youth arrived, he always found excuses to hang around. He was the one who told me sweet potatoes could be cooked as a dish, prepared just like stir-fried shredded potatoes. Sweet potatoes were our staple ration, so we had no shortage of them. We tried shredding and stir-frying them with oil and salt, and the result was much more palatable with rice than cucumbers had been. One difference from potatoes, though: the heat had to be just right — overcook them and they'd turn to mush, which was no good at all.

From the cowherd boy I also learned to ride an ox. The old ox may have looked clumsy, but its gait was steady and sure, every step deliberate. At first, looking down at the narrow paths along the field ridges, I kept thinking the ox would slip and topple into the ditch or paddy at any moment — but the old ox never made a mistake. The cowherd let out a shout, and the ox obediently leaned forward and lowered its horns. With the cowherd's help and encouragement, I stepped onto the horns and swung myself onto the ox's back, then began my trembling, fearful ride. The biggest impression was how uncomfortable it was — the ox's spine was all creaking bone, with no flesh to speak of, nothing but hardness against my backside. It was nothing like the idyllic joy of a shepherd boy riding an ox that I had imagined.

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Working the Land with the Female Militia

Not long after being sent down, we hit the "Double Rush" — the frantic harvest of early rice and planting of late rice. It truly worked people to the point of collapse. The Double Rush was the prime season for earning work points — double points were given, sometimes even triple — for over twenty straight days, rising before dawn and returning only at midnight. Even the strongest men would be flattened before getting a half-day's rest. The People's Commune's deployment of double work points — this disguised bourgeois "material incentive" — was brutally effective. No matter how exhausted, no one dared slack off. If you feared the exhaustion and showed up less, those work points would be earned by someone else, and when accounts were settled at year's end, your share of rice, sweet potatoes, and fragrant oil would be correspondingly reduced. In truth, the wool comes from the sheep's back — every year the production team's total harvest was a fixed quantity. Giving out more or fewer work points was simply a method of redistributing wealth. If they had relied purely on the peasants' socialist zeal, keeping the Double Rush at the same work-point rate as usual, the total work points would drop, the unit price per point would rise, and the material incentive that drove such frantic effort would be gone. Who says economics had no use in the "one big, two public" People's Commune?

The production team took care of us city kids by giving us higher work-point ratings. So the three of us educated youth were each assigned seven and a half points — the equivalent of a woman's full-labor rating — which included two hours of early-morning work before breakfast. Without that it would have been only six and a half. That year, ten work points were worth 0.65 yuan. I worked among the women for over half a year, and at the year-end settlement, I earned back all my grain rations plus half a bed's space of sweet potatoes and four or five jin of fragrant oil.

The full-labor women were mostly young unmarried girls or recently married wives, every one of them a skilled hand at farm work. The dozen or so young women of U Village in their prime had formed a "Female Militia Squad" — restless and spirited, their activities had been lively and impressive, once quite famous in the area. By the time I arrived, however, they had already passed their peak, since most of the core members had reached marriageable age, with matchmakers near and far making the rounds, and collective activities could no longer continue. Even so, growing up together with the female militia in the vast world of fields and sky still carried a certain revolutionary romanticism that was intoxicating and exciting. It took away more than half the hardship of farm labor.

Our village head was shrewd but hot-tempered, and bald to boot — I both feared and disliked him. Yet his family's four sisters were each as lovely as flowers. I never recall meeting the eldest; she must have already married out. The second and third sisters were both mainstays of the Female Militia Squad. The youngest, just fourteen or fifteen, had fair, tender skin and blushed whenever she saw anyone; she worked in a commune-run workshop. The second sister — I called her Sis II — had just married the younger brother of our village's Old Team Leader, a tall, handsome young man with a slightly reckless air. It was a love match, making her the luckiest among the girls. Not long after my arrival, Sis II was assigned to thresh grain on the drying ground rather than working in the paddies. I worked alongside her — just the two of us on the threshing ground — and she always looked after me. That was when I first developed the habit of letting my thoughts wander, until one day I noticed her belly growing larger and only then realized she was different from the other militia girls: she was already a married woman. Later, working in the paddies with Sis III and a group of young women, pulling weeds with rakes to keep the paddies clear, Sis III was always encroaching on my territory, reaching her rake over to help me. Without her help I probably couldn't have managed even half the pace. I kept scolding her: "No trespassing!" She would only smile and say nothing, continuing as she pleased. Sis III was very pretty, slightly plump, sturdy like an Iron Girl, but perceptive and considerate — her temperament was gentler than Xue Baochai's. She was the one I was most fond of. At the time a matchmaker was arranging her marriage. Not long after I left the village she was married off. When I heard the news, a deep unease settled in my heart.

To me, all these farm girls were celestial maidens. Raised in such harsh conditions from childhood, they were nonetheless each in the full bloom of youth, spirited and valiant, yet never losing the simple kindness and crystalline intelligence of country girls. I felt no local man was worthy of them. They themselves tried to resist fate and the matchmakers, but in the end, one by one, they all married away and vanished into the sea of humanity.

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朝华午拾·第十章：插队山村（一）

插队的故事对我是太久远了，恍如隔世。这也是我一直想写，却感觉心有余而力不足的原因。虽然如此，插队的片断却不时在心中翻腾。虽然连不成篇，这些记忆残片却是刻印在脑海最深处的。上山下乡是我们这辈人的成年礼。

我是文革后最后一批插队的，算是赶上了末班车。当时年龄不达标，按照政策可以留城，可是当年的情形是，留城待业常常是永久失业，不象插队，几年之后，还有上调招工或者升学（工农兵学员）的前途。另外就是，由于时代风尚的影响，留城的好像比下乡的矮人一截似的。我有一位同班好友，独子，留城以后，见面说话就没有我们下乡知青那样器宇轩昂。

尤村三兄弟

我插队的地方是比较偏远的皖南山区，叫尤村，就在镇子旁边。当时一起下到这个村子去的一共三位，陈兄是中医世家，人很老成憨实，带来了大半箱子医书。俞兄是退伍军人的子弟，有点吊儿郎当玩世不恭的样子。我随身携带的是薄冰《简明英语语法》和一台晶体管中波收音机，希望还能继续电台《广播英语》的学习。我们三人从镇上一下车，就被尤村的老书记带领一伙人敲锣打鼓迎到了村里，暂时安置在一位公社赤脚医生的家里，住了两个月。后来村子利用国家发给我们三人的安家费，盖了三大间仓库一样透风凉的屋子，我们才算独立安家落户。

第一个月是挨户吃"派饭"，每天各家各户轮流转。农民大多朴实好客。我们吃饭的那天，东家往往要比平时多预备一些菜肴。可是，各家家境不同，伙食还是参差不齐，有些确实难以下咽，但又怕人笑话知青娇气，只好硬着头皮吃。最糟糕的不是伙食的质量，而是卫生状况。有一天天擦黑，推门去晚餐，手上黏黏糊糊摸了一手，回来后我们几个一合计，发现不是鼻涕就是浓痰的残迹，都恶心得要吐。

后来决定哥仨自己开伙，分工合作。还记得清晨起来到河塘担水，身子骨瘦小的我与水桶不成比例，在早春的冷风中瑟瑟发抖。不过，自己开伙还是受用多了，每天干活就满心盼望早早收工去享用自己的晚餐。最常做也最美味的菜肴是咸肉炖黄豆。咸肉是父母捎来改善伙食的，每次割一小块肥肉，慢火烧化，那泛着油光的软黄豆实在太诱人了。黄豆和木炭都是队里照顾知青配给的，弄个小瓦罐盛上黄豆、肥肉和水，上工前置于炭火上，收工回来就四香飘溢。

这样的美味当然不能长久。于是自己种菜。我们图省事，挑最容易的菜，种了两大片黄瓜。黄瓜这玩意儿，一旦结起来，就不得了，瓜满为患。怎么摘怎么吃也赛不过它生长的速度。平时没事就摘了生吃，到了晚上再做黄瓜汤，或者炒黄瓜，直吃得想吐。这个后遗症不小。很久很久，我都把黄瓜当作最贱的菜，偶然生吃一点可以，从来不拿它当菜。可是斗转星移，不知流浪海外的何年何月，黄瓜忽然金贵起来。太太和女儿都爱吃。暖房子里面出来的英国黄瓜，每根两三块美元，一样成为我们家的必备。有时伙食中蔬菜量不够，怕孩子营养不平衡，就洗根黄瓜给她，她总是美滋滋地啃它，从不厌烦。

黄瓜确实不好做菜，但要是赶上了鸡蛋，炒菜也好，做汤也好，都不错。单做就不成菜，不下饭。鸡蛋是非常珍贵的，我们不养鸡自然没有鸡蛋，也舍不得买。后来还是村子里有人从我们知青这里借钱急用，可又没有钱还，就从鸡屁股下抠出一些鸡蛋来偿还我们，我们才有了些口福。有一天秃头队长来巡视，看见我们的黄瓜地，就狠狠剋了我们一顿。说，你们这帮懒虫，谁让你们种黄瓜来着，一点正经菜也不种，你吃个屁。他所谓正经菜，是指辣椒茄子一类，那样的菜只要有点菜籽油，不用鸡蛋不用肉，就可以做得让人垂涎欲滴。可是拾叨起来不容易，除了浇水，还要施肥，最好是粪兑水浇了才好长。

黄瓜吃腻了，后来没的好吃，改吃炒山芋（北方叫红薯）。这一招说来还是村里那个放牛娃教给我的。这个放牛娃很机灵，自从我们知青来了，就总找机会来套瓷。是他告诉我，山芋也一样可以做菜，就跟炒土豆丝一样做法。山芋是口粮，我们不缺，于是我们尝试切丝红炒，添上油盐，做出来比黄瓜好吃下饭多了。不过，有一条与土豆丝不同，炒菜的火候一定要适可而止，否则烂成糊就不好吃了。

从放牛娃那里学会了骑牛。别看老牛笨乎乎的，走起路来却非常稳妥实在，一步一个脚印。起初我看田埂头的羊肠小道，老觉得那老牛一不小心就会折到沟渠或水田里，其实老牛从不出差错。放牛娃吆喝一声，那老牛就乖乖地倾前身，低下犄角，我在牛娃的帮助和鼓励下，蹬着牛角，翻身上了牛背，开始胆战心惊的骑牛前行。骑牛的最大感受是不舒服，那老牛的脊背咯咯吱吱的，感觉不到皮肉，满屁股都是骨头，根本不象我以前想像中的牧童骑牛之乐。

与女民兵并肩修地球

下放不久赶上了"双抢"（抢收早稻，抢种晚稻），真地把人往死里累。双抢是一年挣工分的好季节，给双份工分，有时甚至给三倍，连续20多天，天不亮起床，到半夜才回，再壮的汉子都要累趴下才能休息半天。人民公社给双倍工分这种变相的资产阶级的"物质刺激"很厉害，不管多累，人都不敢懈怠。你怕累少上工，工就给别人赚去了，到年底分红，你分的稻谷、红薯和香油也相应减少了。其实，羊毛出在羊身上，每年生产队的收成是一个定数，工分多给少给不过是一种财富再分配的方式而已。如果单纯依靠农民的社会主义干劲，双抢跟平时同等工分数，工分总量下来了，单位工分的价格提高了，就没有物质刺激出来的积极性了。谁说经济学在一大二公的人民公社没有用处？

生产队照顾城里娃，工分给高些。于是给我们三个知青各开七分半工，相当于一个妇女全劳力的工分，包括早饭前上早工两个小时，否则只有六分半。那年十分工值RMB0.65元。我在妇女堆里干了半年多，年底分红，赚回了所有的口粮，外带半床红薯和四五斤香油。

妇女全劳力多是年轻的姑娘或媳妇，个个都是干农活的好手。尤村的十几位风华正茂的姑娘组成了一个"女民兵班"，不甘寂寞，活动有声有色，曾名噪一时。不过到我去的时候，已经式微，因为其中的骨干大都到了嫁人的年纪，近亲远媒各处张罗，集体活动不能继续。尽管如此，跟女民兵在广阔天地一道成长，在当时是充满了革命浪漫主义的色彩的，让人沉迷和兴奋。干农活的辛苦也去了大半。

我们村村长人很精明，但脾气暴躁，又是光头，让我既怕又厌。倒是他家四个姐妹一个个如花似玉，大妹妹记不得见过，应该是外嫁了。二妹三妹都是女民兵班的主力，小妹妹刚14-15岁，皮肤白嫩，见人脸红，在社办一个作坊里做工。二妹（我叫二姐）刚嫁给本村老队长的弟弟，一个高个帅气的小伙子，感觉有些愣头青的样子。自由恋爱的，算是姑娘们中最幸运的了。刚去不久，这位二妹被照顾在场上打谷，没有下水田。我跟她一起干活，场上就两个人，总是她照顾我。从那时就落下了心猿意马的毛病，直到有一天发现她肚子越来越大，才意识到她跟其他民兵姑娘不同，原来是媳妇级的了。后来跟三妹及一帮姑娘媳妇一道，在田里薅草（就是用耙子在水田里把杂草掀翻，不让杂草长出来），三妹总是侵犯我的领地，把她的耙子探过来帮我。没有她帮忙，我大概一半的速度也赶不上。我老指责她，"不许侵犯"，她总笑而不答，我行我素。三妹模样很好，稍微有些胖，很壮实，象个铁姑娘，但善解人意，脾气性情好得赛过薛宝钗，是我最心仪的。当时媒婆正在给她提亲，我离开村子不久，她就嫁了，听到消息后心里很不是滋味。

这些农家女在我看来都是仙女。从小在那样的艰苦环境中，却一个个风华正茂，英姿飒爽，而且不失农家女的善良朴实和冰雪聪明。我觉得当地没人配得上她们，她们自己也企图跟命运和媒人抗争，不过最后都一个个嫁走了，消没在人海中。

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From Morning Glory at Noon (朝华午拾) series. Original Chinese: 朝华之十: 插队山村.

Youthful Memories 

Sometime around 1974 or 1975, probably in our third year of junior high, the school organized us for military training — a long-distance march of over a hundred li on foot to visit Yunling and Maolin in southern Anhui, the former sites of the New Fourth Army. I was on the weaker side, and that grueling trek nearly did me in. I had never walked so far in my life, and the road seemed to stretch on without end. The line of students stretched for several li. Limping along, I counted every utility pole as I dragged myself forward, one by one. Finally, a classmate reported that our destination was in sight — just that hill up ahead. I summoned my last reserves of courage. But as the saying goes, the mountain that looks close can run a horse to death — even though it appeared right before us, we still walked for another hour or two, not arriving until nearly dark.

After dinner, the school settled us into a large auditorium to rest. The moment I sat down, I collapsed completely and, to my own amazement, could not get up again. Without even washing my feet, I was helped by classmates onto a makeshift bed and fell asleep fully dressed. The next morning, not a single muscle or bone in my body was free of pain, though I could just barely stand.

Rough as it was, life on the march still felt fresh and exciting. What I remember most vividly was visiting the New Fourth Army exhibition, pressed close to a female classmate — and the pounding heartbeat, the bewildered confusion that came with it.

In our era, an invisible line separated boys and girls, and they rarely mingled on campus. Still, as the academic monitor, I did have work-related contact with the female class president and the League branch secretary through class committee activities, and we held each other in good regard. Though academic subjects were no longer the school's main business, by force of habit, students who did well in their studies still drew natural admiration. But both girls were two years older than me, and they felt more like older sisters. The class president was a tomboy with a dark complexion and a brisk, no-nonsense manner — easy to get along with. The League secretary was poised and graceful, capable and seasoned yet quiet and refined. On my way to swim in the Houqiao River outside town, I would pass her house, and she was always sitting in the doorway knitting, her bearing serene and elegant. She would greet me with open ease whenever she saw me, but I always felt awkward and tongue-tied, never knowing how to respond.

Mark Twain's adventures contain a brilliant description of a boy's first stirrings of romantic feeling — how a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy will pull out every trick he knows to catch the attention of the girl he fancies. Chinese kids matured later, and the strict separation of the sexes meant that the spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. Yet out on the march, boys and girls grew closer than they ever would on campus — and that was precisely the most thrilling part of those work-study-military training programs. On the second day, while touring the New Fourth Army exhibition, I somehow found myself paired with the League secretary. She was slightly taller than me, standing right behind, pressed close — I could feel the warmth of her breath near my ear. The two of us lingered at the back, studying and discussing each photograph and artifact with great care. In perfect unspoken accord, we advanced step by step, our bodies brushing together — sometimes deliberately, sometimes by chance. My heart itched like ants crawling over it, but I steeled myself to stay composed and never dared look back at her.

I was 14 that year. The Recluse of West Hill composed a poem:

What is field march training like?
A racing horse, a distant hill — a tender soldier's ordeal.
The aim of learning war is not war alone —
Li Wei's heart takes flight, caught in clouds and rain.

The summer jobs popular in those days were another occasion for boys and girls to meet. In high school, I went to work as an "assistant" at a rural grain station, where I met a girl who captured my heart. The mindset of a callow youth is a subtle thing. I had become obsessed with Dream of the Red Chamber, reading it five or six times, and I launched into animated discussions of the novel with her — I talked until the sky went dark and the earth spun, and talked the girl into a daze as well. Our friends, a little jealous, nicknamed me "Brother Red" and her "Sister Red" behind our backs. It was an entirely innocent friendship — we chatted for a whole summer and never even held hands. When summer ended and it was nearly time to leave, the ache in my heart was beyond words. That year there were earthquake scares and makeshift quake shelters were built everywhere, and I found myself hoping the earthquake would come soon. I thought: if the earthquake hits, wouldn't it be wonderful? Everyone would gather in that enormous community shelter and live a kind of commune life, and I would have the chance to keep talking about Dream of the Red Chamber with her, day and night, without pause.

Since the hoped-for earthquake never arrived, I had to leave the town grain station at summer's end and return to my home in the county seat. The day before I left, I was downcast and reluctant, but utterly helpless. Near the grain station flowed a small river, crystal-clear to the bottom, where we would frolic every evening. That last evening, as I played in the water one final time, who should appear but "Sister Red" at the riverbank, come to wash clothes. We had already said our goodbyes during the day, so her arrival felt like a lifeline — I wanted to seize this last moment, but had no idea how. So, heedless of what teasing I might invite from my friends, I slowly sidled up to her to make small talk. She, being young and naive, had no notion of what was in my heart and answered as casually as if nothing were amiss. Years later, she told me it was fortunate I hadn't confessed my feelings — by her understanding at the time, any middle-school student involved in romance was nothing short of a hooligan. Had I recklessly declared my love, I might well have been scolded roundly.

When she rose to leave, I panicked. I stood up, bare-chested, water still dripping from my shorts, and found some excuse — I no longer remember what — to follow her back to the grain station. She walked ahead and I followed behind, wanting to strike up a conversation but not knowing where to begin, acutely aware that someone might be watching and mocking me. To hide my embarrassment, I walked half-bent at the waist, every step of that arduous journey awkward and self-conscious, and in the end, I couldn't even muster the courage to call out to her one last time. And so we parted.

That was the summer of 1976. I was a high school sophomore, 16 years old.

Back home, I still thought of her constantly, as if in a dream. Two or three months later, I had just woken from an afternoon nap, still groggy, when she appeared at my door. I had been thinking of her that very morning, and now here she was in the afternoon — I could scarcely believe it and secretly pinched myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming. She had come to visit her aunt in the county seat (who also worked at our hospital) and thought to look me up for a chat. She even borrowed two books and promised her aunt would return them. What an innocent country girl — she had no concept of the boundaries between boys and girls, while my heart already held a hundred rabbits leaping at once.

As Li Shangyin wrote: "This feeling might become a memory to be cherished — if only I had not been so bewildered at the time."

— Written on February 19, 2007 (the second day of the Lunar New Year)

I had a classmate from Suzhou — a girl of delicate, ethereal beauty — who gave me a taste of the magic of the Suzhou dialect. How beautiful it sounded. What a pity she so rarely spoke her hometown tongue.

Once, by coincidence, we arranged to visit the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall together. Standing in the long queue, I asked her to teach me a little Suzhou dialect — the kind that makes you melt when you hear it.

Though she seemed almost too frail to withstand a breeze, she was a girl of genuine talent.

Last night, I went to visit this "younger school sister" of mine. We had only just reconnected after twenty years apart. Before meeting, I told her I had aged and that she probably wouldn't recognize me on the street. Her voice hadn't changed — still as lovely as ever. She said, "We've all grown old. When I went back to China and saw my university classmates, I couldn't believe it."

Yet when we met, she was still so slender and petite, untouched by the years, and she insisted I hadn't changed much either. We listened to old songs together, ate hot pot, and sighed at how life passes like a dream. Her boyfriend from back then, now her husband, still remembered the favors I had done him: I had helped him copy the Chinese operating system CCDOS and the Chinese version of WordStar (in those days, nobody had any notion of software copyright — the developers at the Academy of Sciences' Computing Institute who created CCDOS had no idea how to make money from an operating system). What's more, I was on especially good terms with Teacher Han, who ran the computer lab — when she wasn't around, she authorized me to manage the lab for her (which housed a single IBM PC-XT), and she even gave me a private room next to it. The young couple back then would get the key from me to enter the lab and play games all night, all under my protection.

The feeling of seeing an old classmate again is truly wonderful. After I returned, I sent her an email:

"We are now in an age when memories and life mix together all the time. Time flies. Life is short. Moments are treasured. Thanks are given."

She felt the same as our generation does, and replied:

"We were very happy to have you over. Old friends take on new significance as we age. The other day, as we could hear Christmas carols in the air, I was telling my son those were the first English songs I learned to sing at college. Guess what he had to say? 'Mom, when your memories exceed your ambitions, you know you're going downhill.' Gosh, he's brutally honest with me. Now I have to hide the fact that I keep thinking back in time, refuse to be on the downhill yet."

— Written: a forgotten month, 2006

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青涩少年记事 & 吴语软侬20年

上个世纪74-75年左右，大概是初三的时候，学校组织我们学军，长途拉练，步行100多里路，去皖南新四军旧址云岭和茂林参观。我比较弱小，那次长途跋涉，真把我坑苦了，一辈子也没有走过这么远的路程，似乎没有尽头。学生队伍前后拉了好几里路长。我一瘸一拐，一根一根电线杆数着往前挪动。终于，有同学报信说，目的地已经在望，就是前面的那座小山。于是，鼓作最后的勇气。可望山跑死马，看着就在眼前的山，还是走了一两个小时，直到天快黑了才赶到。

吃罢晚饭，学校把我们安排在一个大礼堂里面休息。一屁股坐下去，就瘫软在地，居然再也起不来了。脚也没洗，在同学帮助下，挪到临时搭起的铺子和衣睡下。第二天早上，全身没有一块筋骨不疼，勉强可以站立。

虽然很狼狈，对于拉练在外的生活还是感到新鲜兴奋。特别难忘的是参观新四军事迹展览时和女同学耳鬓厮磨的经历，连带当时的心跳和惶惑。

我们那个年代，男女生有一条无形的界限，在校园很少交往。不过，我是学习委员，在班委会活动中还是跟女班长和女团支书有工作往来，彼此印象都不错。尽管文化课已经不是学校主业，大概是惯性，学习好的同学还是自然受到青睐。不过她们都比我大两岁，感觉是姐姐一样的形象。女班长是个假小子，面色黝黑，作风泼辣，相处很愉快。团支书端庄秀气，能干老练而不失文静。我平时到城外后桥河去游泳，每次经过她家门前，总见她在门口坐着织毛衣，仪态娴雅。她见到我也总落落大方地招呼一声，可我总自我感觉灰溜溜的，不知如何回应。

小男孩情窦初开的表现，记得在马克吐温的历险记里有精彩描述，说的是十二、三岁的男孩，总是使出全身解数吸引心仪女生的注意。国人晚熟，男女界限也分明，只能是心有余而力不足。可拉练在外，男女生就比较亲近起来，不象在校园那样拘束，这是当年学工学农学军最让人兴奋的地方。第二天参观新四军展览，不知怎的，跟团支书混在一起。她个头比我略高，站在身后，挨得很近，耳边是她温热的气息。我们两个人拉在最后，仔细切磋揣摩那些展示的图片和实物。两人很默契，一步一步向前挪动，有意无意身子碰到一起。我心痒如蚁，强作镇定，不敢回视。

那一年我14岁。西皮居士有诗云：

野营拉练知何似？跑马望山苦嫩兵。 学军之意不惟军，立委心飞云雨情。

当年流行的暑假打工，也是少男少女接触的场合。高中时我去了一家农村粮站当"协助员"， 遇到一个心仪女生。青涩少年的心态很微妙。我当年看《红楼梦》入迷，看了五六遍，就跟她侃红楼梦，直侃得天昏地暗，把那女孩也侃晕了。小伙伴们在旁多少有些嫉妒，背后给我起外号叫"红大哥"，叫那个女孩"红大嫂"。那真是纯洁地交往，侃了一夏天，连手都没有拉过。暑假结束快要离开的时候，心里那份难受，就甭提了。当年闹地震，到处搭防震棚，我当时就盼望地震早点来到。心里想，地震一来，该多好，大家就都集中到那个硕大的防震棚里面过共产主义生活，我也就有机会跟那个女孩不分昼夜地继续侃红楼梦了。

由于盼望的地震没有来临，暑假结束我不得不离开小镇粮站回县城的家。回家前一天，郁闷不舍，可又无可奈何。粮站附近有一条小河，清澈见底，是我们每日傍晚戏耍的所在。那天傍晚最后一次玩水，没想到"红大嫂"也来到河边洗衣。白天已经说过再见了，她这一来，我感觉是看到救命稻草，想抓住这最后一刻，可不知如何是好。于是，我不顾同伴可能的取笑，慢慢蹭到她面前搭讪。这个妞也怪，少不更事，根本不懂人家的心事，没事人一样答话。多年以后她告诉我，当时我幸亏没有挑破，按照当年她的认识水平，任何中学生谈恋爱都是流氓行为。倘若我冒失示爱，保不准会臭骂我一顿。

后来她起身要回，我急了，站起来，光着膀子，短裤衩滴着水，不知找了个什么借口，就跟着她回粮站。她在前面走，我跟在后面，想答茬也不知从何说起，老觉得有人在盯着取笑我。为了遮掩，我只好半弯着腰，枝枝杈杈地走完这段艰难的路程，最后连再招呼她一声的勇气也没有了，就此别离。

那是1976年的暑假，我高二，16岁。

回到家，还做梦一样时时想着她。两三个月后，一天下午睡午觉刚醒，懵懵懂懂的，她居然登门来访。早上还在想她，下午真来了，简直不敢相信，暗自掐自己，发现不是做梦。原来她到县城姑姑（也是我们医院的）家来，想起来找我聊一聊，还借了两本书，答应看完让她姑姑还我。这真是个淳朴的乡镇姑娘，根本没有男女界限的概念，而我的心里却早已揣了100只兔子。

李商隐有诗："此情可待成追忆，只是当时已惘然"。

记于2007年二月十九日（阴历大年初二）

我有个女同学是苏州人，人长得秀气轻灵，让我见识了苏州话的魔力，真是好听。可惜的是，她很少说家乡话。

有一次赶巧，约好一起去看毛主席纪念堂，排着长长的队，我就请她教我点苏州话，听了让人发酥那种。

虽然弱不禁风的样子，这可是个才女。

昨天晚上去拜访这位"表师妹"。刚联系上，分开已经20年了。见面前我说我老了，要是在街上碰到大概认不出来了。她的声音未变，还是那样动听，说："我们都老了。上次回国见大学同学，简直无法相信。"

可是，见面一看，她还是那样纤弱小巧，岁月无痕，她坚持说我也无大变化。我们一起听着老歌，吃着火锅，感叹人生如梦。她当年的男友，现在的丈夫，还记得我的好处：当年我帮助他拷贝中文软件CCDOS 和 汉化的 WordStar 帮了忙（当年根本不懂软件还有版权一说，CDDOS的开发者科学院计算所根本不知道如何从操作系统上赚钱）。另外，当年我跟机房韩老师关系特好，她不在的时候，由我管理机房（只有一台IBM-PC-XT），还给我在机房旁边配了一个单间。同学夫妇当年从我处拿钥匙进机房通宵玩游戏，全仗我的掩护。

老同学见面的感觉真好。回来后我发了个伊妹儿：

"We are now in an age when memories and life mix together all the time. Time flies. Life is short. Moments are treasured. Thanks are given."

同辈人感受相同，她回道：

"We were very happy to have you over. Old friends take on new significance as we age. The other day, as we could hear Christmas carols in the air, I was telling my son those were the first English songs I learned to sing at college. Guess what he had to say? "Mom, when your memories exceed your ambitions, you know you're going downhill." Gosh, he's brutally honest with me. Now I have to hide the fact that I keep thinking back in time, refuse to be on the downhill yet."

记于2006年忘月

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From Morning Glory at Noon (朝华午拾). Original Chinese: 《朝华之九: 青涩少年》.

Morning Glory at Noon — Ch.9: A Callow Youth (Part 1) 

Spring Feelings 

My "first love" was a girl like the elder-sister Bao Chai. Strictly speaking, it doesn't count as love — most would agree that love must be mutual. A one-sided childhood crush isn't love; if you drew a dependency tree diagram, it would be an asymmetrical relation. But during the Cultural Revolution years, if you excluded unrequited infatuations, those qualified to speak of first love were remarkably few — perhaps less than five percent, roughly the same proportion as “class enemies”. Most of them were the so-called "bad kids" branded as young hooligans. We revolutionary students, representing ninety-five percent of the youth population, disdained such pursuits. Of course, those people eventually got married when they grew older, but the kind of courtship aimed at finding a revolutionary partner bore little resemblance to "first love" — even less relevant than a secret crush, so let's not speak of it.

Yet Mao Zedong Thought could not govern secret crushes and the stirrings of spring. My crush first sprouted in the first grade, when I was six years old, precisely in 1966 when the Great Revolution erupted. That year our entire family followed our parents from the county seat down to Hewan, a small town, to support the founding and building of a rural clinic. In this remote town surrounded by mountains on all sides, the Little Red Guard rebellion was just as vigorous, determined to overthrow the school's capitalist-roader authorities. Too young to participate in this revolution, I occasionally played the role of paste-bucket carrier, helping the older brothers and sisters put up big-character posters. Since the revolution didn't have much use for me, there was room in my childish heart for petit-bourgeois tenderness, and it all began with the arrival of Elder Sister Bao.

Elder Sister Bao was brought over by a neighbor auntie, who said she was the daughter of a cousin from the county seat, coming to the countryside for a few days' visit. The first time I saw her, it was less Elder Sister Bao than a Sister Lin who had fallen from heaven. But she truly was two years older than me, and unmistakably carried the poise of an elder sister. Elder Sister Bao looked nothing like the snot-nosed, timid country girls around us — you could tell at a glance she was a city child. She wore her hair in little braids, delicate and elegant, well-mannered and poised, and what amazed most was her many talents. When the auntie asked her to recite Chairman Mao's quotations, she rattled off "Serve the People" in flawless standard Mandarin, word for word. Then the auntie asked her to perform a model opera piece, and she sang a passage as Grandma Sha, with perfect feeling and flavor. I was transfixed. At this point, it still couldn't be called love — you could only say that such an enchanting girl planted the seed of love in a six-year-old brat's heart. Like countless life encounters, Elder Sister Bao soon returned to the county seat. Although my older brother's rebel organization, the "Dagger Squad," was growing and striking out, with the campus revolution raging full force, the small town in my heart returned to stillness, undisturbed.

A year later, our whole family moved back to the county hospital, just in time for the real, bloody factional fighting. The county elementary school had more days off than on. By the time the armed struggle subsided and the nation was all red, with the various revolutionary factions in great unity, we muddled our way up to third grade. I've searched my memory, and for the life of me I can't recall how I reunited with Elder Sister Bao at school. It's a bit of a regret, but that's how life is. In any case, one unknown day, I suddenly discovered that Elder Sister Bao was right there beside me, in the same class. She clearly didn't remember me at all, and from the moment I recognized her until we later went on to middle school together, I never once mentioned that we had met in the small town. Though countless times the words reached the tip of my tongue, I swallowed them back in the end. That meeting in the small town had made me look up to Elder Sister Bao, and it was this reverence that kept me from ever having the courage to bring up our earlier encounter. To tell or not to tell, that is a question — over this I fretted and hesitated more than Hamlet ever did. Eight years passed, until I left home for university, and in the end I never spoke of that earlier connection.

Among the girls of the county seat, Elder Sister Bao wasn't actually that beautiful, but she was lively and outgoing, wrote with a bold hand like a boy's, and her artistic talent was universally recognized. Her specialty was playing elderly female roles. During the school's field training marches, around the campfire, it was always she who would sing a cappella as Grandma Sha or Grandma Li — she was truly the star of the propaganda troupe. In fifth grade, when the school organized the propaganda team to stage the full-length "The Red Lantern," she was naturally the only choice for Grandma Li. During open auditions, I got into the cast because word had it I could recite all eight model operas backward and forward, but the director soon discovered that while I could deliver every line, aria, and percussion cue in one seamless flow, I was simply not a performer — no voice, no stage presence. As a makeweight, I was assigned to play a walk-on, Japanese Soldier A, with not a single line in the entire play, merely kicking over a chair or table when I came on. The cast had three stars: a dashing boy playing Li Yuhe, Elder Sister Bao as Grandma Li, and a petite girl as Tiemei. These three not only commanded everyone's attention but also enjoyed special treatment during rehearsals, receiving all kinds of perks that made others envious. Playing a walk-on was somewhat discouraging, but at least I could observe Elder Sister Bao and little Sister Tiemei up close, sometimes holding their coats or bringing them water, earning a "thank you" that felt rather wonderful. This was the only time in my life I ever joined a theater production, and many years later, when I occasionally look in the mirror, I still can't shake the unsightly face of Japanese Soldier A.

My infatuation with Elder Sister Bao grew slowly and stubbornly, spanning my entire elementary and middle school years, but it was an absolute secret buried deep in my heart. Male and female classmates were separated as if by the Chu River and Han border; the distance between Japanese Soldier A and Grandma Li was vaster still — I wouldn't have dared dream of reaching so high. But then in middle school, we enjoyed a little over a year of good times known as the "Revisionist Resurgence," when teachers, parents, and students all began to value academic study once again. Students who did well in their lessons saw their social status soar. As study monitor and math class representative, I began to distinguish myself. My writing was read aloud as model compositions. The homeroom teacher, who also taught math, assigned me to lecture from the podium during self-study periods, tutoring classmates, and even let me grade homework and quizzes — I became something of a little teacher, swelling with pride. Elder Sister Bao, along with the female class president and the female Party secretary, were all on the class committee with me, and we began to interact. The distance between us gradually narrowed; she was now just a step away. Even so, I could only bury my feelings for Elder Sister Bao deep in my heart, until one day I nearly gave myself away. It was during the school sports meet. Seeing her watching the high jump finals, I drifted over to watch her. The universe floated away with the wind; the cheers sounded like voices from another world, flickering in and out. I sank into my own world, studying that face — not stunning, yet I could never look at it enough — acutely aware of my own guilty thoughts, and utterly brazen. Just then, she seemed to sense something and glanced back at me. That one look was sharper than a needle. I felt my secret pierced, found nowhere to hide, and fled in panic. For months afterward, I avoided her, never daring to meet her eyes even once.

By the time I took the college entrance exam in 1977, out of over two hundred classmates in our grade, only three were admitted to undergraduate programs in the first round. My brother and I occupied two of those seats. Classmates streamed to our home to offer congratulations. She came too, giving me a small notebook. On the first page she wrote: "Fly, favored child of heaven!" — a bold, sweeping hand, ethereal as if touched by the immortals.

— Written on October 10, 2013

Disappointed Sunshine 

From elementary school through middle school, I was always a class officer — either study monitor or vice class president. After holding office so long, I took it for granted. When I entered high school, two schools merged, and a batch of students from No. 2 Middle School joined us. The new homeroom teacher was a bald old man — whether I had somehow offended him or he simply hadn't studied my record, the result was that he decided to exclude me from the class committee (the equivalent of the Politburo Standing Committee or senior management) and gave me the title of group leader (roughly equivalent to an alternate Politburo member or a supervisor at the grassroots). A class had four group leaders, each responsible for collecting homework from their group, but unable to participate in class committee decisions unless a major matter called for an "expanded standing committee meeting." At the time, I truly felt the sky was falling. The gloom of adolescent disappointment was something I couldn't share with anyone. Disheartened and listless, with no outlet, I turned somewhat cynical. Now I understand — politics is exhausting. No wonder those who flounder in officialdom seem so anguished.

In this time of political difficulty, one warm remark has stayed with me, never forgotten. There was a new female classmate from No. 2 Middle School, with two thick, dark braids, a poised and graceful manner, and a brilliant smile. She was the newly elected arts and culture committee member of our class, able to sing and dance, and all the boys liked her. Somehow, she sensed my disappointment and said to me: "It's all my fault, I'm the one to blame. I took your slot." To this day I have no idea why she said this — that by becoming the arts committee member, she had taken my place on the class committee. The study monitor position was held by a brat from No. 2 who was decent at Chinese; but the vice president post, an honorary role, could certainly have accommodated a six-term veteran like me if I had been admitted. Yet it was the homeroom teacher's dictatorship — whether I made the cut was entirely his call. In any case, that she could say such a thing truly moved me, especially coming from a girl of such sunny disposition whom everyone adored. She had a wonderful temperament, perceptive and empathetic, putting people at ease. Several later interactions only deepened this good impression.

Once, coming downstairs from the second-floor classroom, I casually spat — and to my horror, it landed right on her sleeve as she happened to be at the bottom of the stairs. In those days, nearly everyone spat wherever they pleased, and no one thought it a bad habit. But spitting on a female classmate's clothes — I was mortified beyond words. Yet she wasn't the least bit annoyed, simply wiped it off herself, and walked past me with the same smiling nod, as if nothing had happened. This small incident made her image towering and luminous in my mind — in my heart, she was like a saint.

— Written on December 7, 2008

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朝华午拾 · 第九章：青涩少年（上）

春情

我的“初恋”是一位宝姐姐样的女孩儿。严格地说，不算恋，一般以为，“恋”必须是双向的。初次暗恋不算“恋”，画成树形图的话那是依从关系，不对等。不过，在文化革命年代，如果排除单相思，有资格谈初恋的怕是所剩不多了，大概不到5%，与阶级敌人的比例相当，主要分子多是被称为小流氓的“坏孩子”。占少年人口95%的我们革命学生不屑此道。当然，这些人岁数大了也还是结婚了，但为了结婚找革命伴侣的那种交往，与“初恋”意趣相去甚远，比暗恋更文不对题，不提也罢。

可毛泽东思想管不住暗恋和春情。我的暗恋萌芽于小学一年级，当时我六岁，正是大革命爆发的1966年。那年我们全家随父母从县城下放到何湾小镇，支持乡镇医院的开创和建设。在这个四面环山的偏远小镇，红小兵造反运动一样有声有色，要打倒学校走资本主义道路的当权派。这场革命，我太小无从介入，但也时而扮演那提浆糊桶的角色，帮助大哥哥大姐姐贴大字报。既然革命没多少我的事儿，童心中就有了小资温情的空间，这一切应该从“宝姐姐”的到来谈起。

宝姐姐是邻居阿姨带过来的，说是县城表姐的女儿，来乡下玩几天。第一次见她，与其说是宝姐姐，不如说是天上掉下来一个林妹妹。但她确实大我两岁，而且显然有小姐姐的范儿。宝姐姐长得与身边拖着鼻涕怯生生的乡镇小姑娘完全不同，一看就是城里人。梳着小辫儿，清秀端庄，乖巧大方，最让人赞叹的是她的多才多艺。阿姨让她背毛主席语录，她就伶牙俐齿用标准的普通话背诵《为人民服务》，一字不拉。阿姨又让她表演一段样板戏，她就唱了一段沙奶奶，有滋有味。我看得呆了。事到此，还不能算恋，只能说这样可人的女孩儿，让六岁的小屁孩儿心里种下了恋的萌芽。与无数人生邂逅一样，不久，宝姐姐就回县城了。虽然我老哥发起的造反组织“匕首小分队”成立壮大，不断出击，校园革命正如火如荼，但我心中的小镇却重归平静，不起波澜。

一年后，我们全家回到县城医院，正赶上真刀真枪的武斗岁月。县城小学停课多于上课，等武斗消停，全国山河一片红，各派革命大团结的时候，我们也糊里糊涂地升到了三年级。我搜索记忆，无论如何也想不起来如何与宝姐姐在学校重逢的了。这多少有些遗憾，但生活就是这样。总之，不知何年何月何日，我突然发现宝姐姐就在身边，与我同班。她显然完全不记得我了，而我从认出她那一刻起，直到后来一起上了中学，一直也没有跟她提起我们曾经相识于小镇。虽然很多次话到了口边，终于还是咽回去了。小镇上的邂逅让我对宝姐姐仰视，是这种仰视使得我一直没勇气提起我们以前曾经相遇。To tell or not to tell, that is a question, 为此比哈姆雷特还苦恼犹疑。一去就是八年，直到离乡上大学，终于未曾提起这段前缘。

在县城的女孩子中，宝姐姐其实并没有那么漂亮，但她活泼大方，写得一手男孩子一般的好字，文艺天赋是公认的。她最拿手的是老旦。学校组织拉练野营在外，围着篝火，清唱沙奶奶李奶奶的准是她，算是宣传队的腕儿了。五年级的时候，学校组织宣传队排演整场的《红灯记》，她自然是李奶奶的不二人选。海选时，我由于据传可以把八个样板戏倒背如流，也进了剧组，可导演老师很快发现我虽然道白唱段连锣鼓歌门儿均能一气呵成倒背如流，但实在不是文艺人，要嗓子没嗓子，要扮相没扮相。滥竽充数被指派跑龙套，扮鬼子甲，整台戏没一句台词，就是上场踢翻一两桌椅而已。剧组的明星有三：一个英气袭人的小子扮的李玉和，宝姐姐扮的李奶奶，还有一个小巧女孩儿演铁梅。这三位不仅千人瞩目，而且在排练中吃小灶，有种种优惠，让人羡慕。跑龙套多少有些让我气馁，但好在可以近距离观察宝姐姐和铁梅小妹妹演戏，有时给她们拿个衣服，递个水什么的，博得一声谢谢，感觉颇不赖。这是我一辈子唯一一次参加剧组，后来很多年以后，我偶然照镜子看自己，依然不改鬼子甲的不雅面相。

对宝姐姐的痴迷缓慢而倔强地增长，涵盖了我整个的小学和初中时代，但那是一个深藏心底的绝对秘密。男女同学楚河汉界，鬼子甲与李奶奶间更有天壤之遥，做梦也不敢高攀。可是到了初中，赶上了一年多“修正主义回潮”的好时光，一时间老师、家长和同学都开始重视文化课的学习。功课好的同学，社会地位就扶摇直上。我作为学习委员和数学课代表，开始在班级崭露头角。我写的东西作为范文被朗诵。班主任兼数学老师指派我每天自习课时间，上讲台讲解习题，辅导同学，还放手让我批改作业和测验题，俨然成了小老师，令我春风得意。宝姐姐、还有女班长和女支书和我都是班委会成员，开始有了接触。两人的距离逐步拉近，伊人只在一步之遥。尽管如此，我对宝姐姐的恋慕也只能深藏心底，直到有一天差点露馅儿。那是学校举行运动会的时候，见到她在观看跳高决赛，我也围过来观看她。宇宙随风飘去，欢呼声有如天外来音，时隐时现。我沉浸在自己的世界里，端详着这张并不艳丽却总也看不够的脸，自我感觉心怀鬼胎，而且放肆。就在这时候，她似有察觉，下意识地与我对视一眼，这一眼比针刺还厉害。我感觉天机被戳穿，无地以自容，赶紧仓皇逃离。此后的几个月，我总躲着她，从来不敢正眼瞧她一次。

到我77年考大学的时候，全年级200多同学，第一批只考取本科三人，我家兄弟占据两席，同学纷纷登门祝贺。她也来了，送我一个小笔记本，开篇写道：飞翔吧，天之骄子！龙飞凤舞，飘逸似有仙气。

记于2013年10月10日

失意阳光

从小学到初中，一直是班干部，不是学习委员就是副班长。这官当长了，就觉得理所当然。升高中，两个学校合并，加入了一批“二中”的人。新班主任是个秃老头，不知道哪里得罪了他，还是他没有研究我的履历，总之是他决定把我排除在班委会（相当于政治局常委或高管）之外，给了我一个小组长的头衔（相当于政治局候补委员或基层管理人员）。一个班有四个小组长，管本组收作业，但不能参与班委会决策，除非遇到大事召集“常委扩大会议”，才介入决策过程。当时真觉得天要塌了。少年失意的心情无法跟任何人叙说，心灰意懒，无所排解，转而很有些玩世不恭的样子。现在理解了，搞政治是很辛苦的，难怪见官场不顺的人显得那么痛苦。

在这仕途艰难之时，有一句温暖的话，让我至今感怀不忘。有一位二中新来的女同学，梳着两条又粗又黑的长辫子，为人落落大方，笑容很灿烂。她就是我们班新当选的文娱委员，能唱会跳，男生都很喜欢她。不知怎么，她察觉了我的失意，跟我说：“都怪我，都是我不好。是我占了你指标。” 我至今也不知道她怎么会有这样的说法，觉得是她当了文娱委员，把我的班委会入围指标占用了。学习委员的位置是二中来的一个语文不错的臭小子占据的，倒是副班长这个虚职，如果我入围，应该可以安置我这样的六朝元老。可是那是班主任独裁的体制，入围与否他老人家说了算。无论如何，她能这样说话，真地让我感激得很，尤其是出自这样一个性格阳光和人见人爱的女孩。她的性情特别好，善解人意，让人舒服。后来几次交往也加深了这种好印象。

有一次从二楼教室下楼，我随口一啐，没想到她正好在楼梯口，不偏不倚落在她袖口上。当年不懂五讲四美，几乎人人都随地吐痰，并不觉得是恶习。可口水吐到了女同学身上，还是羞得我无地自容。可她一点不恼，自己擦去，一样笑吟吟地从身边点头走过，好像什么事也没发生。这件小事使女孩的形象高大光辉起来，在我心目中有如圣女。

记于2008年12月7日

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From 朝华午拾: Morning Glory at Noon. Original Chinese: 《朝华之九: 青涩少年》.

Morning Glory at Noon — Ch.8: Bits of Morning Glory (Part 2)

"Never Forget Class Struggle"

I remember it was around 1970, when I was in fourth or fifth grade. Our teacher led us to visit a "Class Struggle Exhibition Hall" to give students a living education. The exhibition hall had explanatory panels, diagrams, and physical objects, all designed to make us feel that class struggle was right beside us — something that needed to be talked about every year, every month, every day.

The first thing we saw was a landlord's "heaven-changing ledger." It was an old land deed that had been dug out from a landlord's cellar. Keeping the deed, naturally, meant he was waiting for the day heaven would change so he could settle accounts with the poor and lower-middle peasants. The guide's script said this old landlord, who normally nodded and bowed before everyone, was in fact old and crafty, his crimes deserving of death ten thousand times over.

There was also the diary of a so-called "rightist who slipped through the net." The commentary said this outwardly respectable teacher had a dark psyche. The several thick volumes of diaries seized from his home were filled with the cloying, decadent sentiments of the bourgeoisie — the diary recorded the author's experiences of romantic love. Even more despicable, it contained poems longing for the Kuomintang reactionaries. The item on display was a poem titled "Yearning for the Sea." What I saw was a lyrical prose poem in elegant handwriting. The parts I vaguely remember went something like: "Oh sea, my homeland, my destination, my longing, my hope!" The entire piece revolved around the theme of the sea. The guide's script asked: why would this rightist who slipped through the net so nauseatingly extol the sea? Obviously, he was yearning for the Kuomintang bandits across the sea in Taiwan, hoping they would launch a counterattack on the mainland. At the time, none of us doubted that the sea in "Yearning for the Sea" symbolized the unnameable Kuomintang. He was one of the "Stinking Ninth Category" of intellectuals, with bourgeois sentiments — surely he was dissatisfied with reality, and his class nature determined that he yearned for the Kuomintang reactionaries. Wasn't this the kind of ill-concealed intention that everyone could see?

The most explosive item in the exhibition was the material of an active counter-revolutionary case: a draft party platform for an underground counter-revolutionary organization called the "Democratic Justice Party." The two principal culprits — the party's chairman and vice-chairman — had just been sentenced to death at a public trial, paraded through the streets, and publicly shot. The party's platform was to overthrow the Communist Party and establish democratic politics. This was, of course, a heinous and unforgivable heresy — nothing less than execution would satisfy the people's righteous anger.

On the day of the annual public sentencing, under a blazing sun, our small county town in the mountains of southern Anhui buzzed with a festival-like excitement. The public trial was held at the town's largest athletic field, grandly known as "Zhongshan Park." Several thousand people packed the field so tightly not a drop of water could seep through. The criminals, heads shaved and heavy placards hanging from their necks, were escorted onto the stage. After sentencing, the placards of those condemned to death were marked with a red cross before the parade through the streets. What interested everyone most was the death penalty — the kind of event that could thrill a crowd. Seven or eight criminals were sentenced to death on the spot, including the two young counter-revolutionaries, several murderers, and a production team leader convicted of "seriously undermining the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside campaign" — a crime that referred to using one's position to rape or seduce young women sent down to the countryside. Each time a death sentence was announced, two burly men behind the condemned man on stage would force his head down and stuff something into his mouth to prevent him from struggling at the last moment or shouting counter-revolutionary slogans. The death-row prisoners' varied reactions were a major spectacle. Some collapsed into a heap on the ground and had to be kicked and dragged before they could just barely kneel onstage for the public shaming. Others struggled with all their might — their heads forced down, then raised again. It was said that these were the type most likely to shout counter-revolutionary slogans if not gagged.

After the public sentencing concluded, the parade through the streets began. Four or five criminals were pressed against the front railing of each truck as it slowly rolled down the county's main street. Nearly everyone who could leave their home came out. Those who hadn't made it to the field to watch the trial live had long since staked out good spots along the main street near their homes, waiting for the parade convoy. The young people, bursting with energy and excitement, simply followed alongside the trucks. The clever ones brought bicycles so they could catch up with the best part — the execution scene. Although these were public executions and onlookers were tolerated, the execution site was kept secret, presumably to prevent overcrowding that might interfere with official business. Executions were generally carried out within an hour after the parade. Based on past experience, there were two or three likely execution sites about ten li outside town, and people were stationed at each one, waiting like the proverbial farmer who saw a rabbit dash into a tree stump and decided to wait there for the next one. I was not so clever. Carried along by the crowd, I rushed east then west, and by the time I finally made it to the scene, there was nothing but heads upon heads — the proceedings were already over. People formed circles, listening to those who had witnessed the execution with their own eyes describe every detail. After the execution, a medical examiner in a white coat would verify the death on site and sign the death report. Later, a rumor spread that the dictatorship authorities demanded that the families of executed counter-revolutionaries pay for the cost of the bullet. At the time, we thought this was perfectly reasonable. A bullet might not be worth much, but this was a just punishment for the counter-revolutionary's family.

Many years later, I still wonder whether a thirst for blood is rooted in human nature. How else to explain the excitement and frenzy of the spectators at the execution ground? There was a saying back then: the revolutionary masses' day of carnival is the class enemy's day of suffering.

Speaking of bloodthirst, I'm reminded of La Espero ("The Hope"), by L.L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. This poem became the anthem of Esperantists worldwide — their "Internationale." I once had my master's machine translation project translate this song into English and Chinese:

(099) LA ESPERO : ESPERANTISTA HIMNO ( POEMO FAR ZAMENHOF ) .

(100) EN LA MONDON VENIS NOVA SENTO ,
TRA LA MONDO IRAS FORTA VOKO ;
(101) PER FLUGILOJ DE FACILA VENTO ,
NUN DE LOKO FLUGU GHI AL LOKO .

(102) NE AL GLAVO SANGONSOIFANTA ,
GHI LA HOMAN TIRAS FAMILION ;
(103) AL LA MOND' ETERNE MILITANTA ,
GHI PROMESAS SANKTAN HARMONION .

(099) THE HOPE : ESPERANTIST'S HYMN ( POEM BY ZAMENHOF ) .

(100) INTO THE WORLD CAME NEW FEELING ,
OVER THE WORLD GOES STRONG VOICE ;
(101) BY WINGS OF EASY WIND ,
NOW FROM PLACE LET IT FLY TO PLACE .
(102) NOT TO SWORD BLOODTHIRSTY ,
IT PULLS THE MAN FAMILY ;
(103) TO THE WORLD EVER FIGHTING ,
IT PROMISES SACRED HARMONY .

(099) 希望: 世界语者的颂歌 (柴门霍夫所作的诗歌)。

(100) 新感觉来到了世界,
有力的声音走遍世界;
(101) 用顺风的翅膀,
现在让它从一个地方飞到另一个地方吧。

(102) 它不把人的家庭
引到渴血的刀剑;
(103) 向永远战争着的世界,
它允诺神圣的和谐。

— Written on May 18, 2006

Homespun and Factory Cloth

When I was a child, in the 1960s and 1970s, I still wore clothes made of tubu — "homespun" cloth. This was fabric hand-woven by farmers, bought and then sent to the dyeing workshop to be dyed blue or black. It was coarse, not sturdy, and tore easily, so you had to patch it to wear it for long. There were no patterns, of course. The dyeing workshop was like a giant bathhouse, thick with steam. The dyed cloth bled color badly, often staining other clothes black.

Later, in the late 1960s, state-supplied machine-woven khaki fabric — which required ration coupons — began to appear. It was much nicer-looking and sturdier. Since it required coupons, homespun didn't immediately exit the market. Still later, synthetic fabrics like diqueliang (Dacron) and nylon began arriving. I remember the first time my parents bought Dacron cloth to make shirts for us brothers — around 1970 — I flatly refused to wear it, thinking it was too revisionist, so shiny, like what a bourgeois young master would wear. From childhood we were taught to learn from Lei Feng's example of hard work and plain living: "three years new, three years old, another three years of mending." Wearing nylon socks for the first time also felt too extravagant, yet they felt wonderfully comfortable once on. (Only later did I discover they weren't breathable and caused foot odor.)

Synthetic fabrics became popular in the 1970s. Their greatest advantage was durability — Grandma no longer had to spend the whole year mending the family's clothes, shoes, and socks. Around that time, Japan began exporting a chemical fertilizer called "Urea," and the farmer brethren discovered that the fertilizer sacks were excellent synthetic fabric. They eagerly turned urea sacks into bed sheets and blankets — and they worked surprisingly well. The only drawback was the giant Chinese characters reading "UREA" that accompanied people into their dreams every night. Later, when reading about the history of DuPont's invention of nylon in the 1930s, I learned that American GIs in places like the Philippines used nylon goods as gifts to woo local girls — enormously popular.

By the late 1970s, you could still occasionally see homespun cloth, but as the price of factory cloth fell and ration coupons were abolished after the Cultural Revolution, homespun simply couldn't compete.

How times change. Today in the West, handmade products of pure cotton, pure linen, or pure silk have become fashionable — things only bourgeois young ladies and gentlemen can afford, while the impoverished proletariat must make do with cheap, shiny, durable synthetics. My online friend Xiaoshan tells me that homespun-style products are now quite expensive. There's a children's clothing brand called Hanna Andersson that touts its "organic cotton" and charges a premium for it. At Whole Foods, a shirt of the most ordinary linen design sells for nearly two hundred dollars. Xiaoshan says: "I think clothes made from handwoven cloth — rough cotton shirts, casual pants, women's skirts — would be absolutely cool. No one else would be wearing the same thing as you." What was once an unavoidable hardship has now become a trend.

— Written in October 2011

The Art of Arguing

One of the pleasures of being online is watching the "old-timers" argue. Old-timers don't like to argue, but once they get going, their sharpness never loses its humor, and you often can't help but laugh. Some of the young folks' arguments, on the other hand, leave much to be desired — foul language, zero technical content, let alone humor — worse than a fishwife's street brawl. The times have changed, heaven and earth have turned upside down, yet the quality of arguing has not improved. Maybe I'm just a cranky old man, but I always feel today's young people can hardly reach the "self-oblivious" realm of arguing that we attained back in our day. Old ginger is still the spiciest. Yesterday, online, I saw our elder brother talking nonsense — probably a bit drunk. I couldn't resist jumping in with a jab, fully expecting him to come after me. Unexpectedly, the old fellow was quite receptive, humbly accepting my opinion, and ended with: "Looks like I'll have to argue with myself now." Brilliant — now that's a realm! When arguing reaches such a state, it truly does justice to the brothers and sisters gathered around to watch. In my youth I was even more extreme — I argued so hard I actually changed my sex. Such self-oblivious passion could truly move heaven and earth and make ghosts weep.

I've loved to pick arguments since I was little — from elementary school through college, it never stopped. In elementary school I was a shrimp, not really able to get a word in edgewise. Still, having been through the revolutionary baptism of the Great Cultural Revolution, I especially loved going to the streets to listen to the young Red Guard debaters, and I admired the masters of debate with all my heart.

I remember in high school, during one of our "Learn from the Peasants" sessions, we were all staying at a farm when a great debate erupted in the dormitory one night: "Are humans animals?" Having thoroughly studied Marxism-Leninism, I knew that humans are the sum total of social relations, that humans use tools, and that this is the fundamental characteristic distinguishing humans from animals — and so on. I thought anyone who insisted that humans are animals must have water in their brain — practically mentally deficient. Armed with truth, righteous and stern, I never imagined my opponent would also be a fiercely competitive type who simply would not admit error. I was absolutely furious. Wave after wave, the debate went on the entire night. By daybreak, I already felt my breath failing, no longer knowing what I was shouting, still less able to hear what the other side was saying. Like holding a position, I felt the moment I let up, the enemy would seize the opening and pour in.

The next day, the debate finally stopped — not for any other reason, but because I had completely lost my voice. My throat was congested and inflamed, the pain unbearable. Classmates suggested I gargle with salt water, but it didn't help. For an entire week, I became a mute. Later, when I finally regained my voice — no one could have guessed — I had gone from a male voice to a female voice. Not the kind of pleasant, melodious female voice, mind you, but one closer to the old witch in Disney's Snow White.

I've loved music all my life. When I hear something that moves me, I can't help but sing along — I have to let it out to feel fully satisfied. I quickly discovered that my satisfaction was built on other people's suffering. Fortunately, I'm fairly self-aware. I voluntarily keep my distance from karaoke and only occasionally let loose at home. I'm deeply grateful to my wife and daughter, who are quite tolerant. "As long as we see you're happy," they say.

Now, whenever I'm on the phone and the other person says, "Yes, Madam," I'm reminded of my youthful, headstrong days.

— Written on December 11, 2008

Work-Study

Work-study during summer vacation was already popular when I was in middle school. My first job was helping sell pears at the collective supply-and-marketing co-op, at one yuan a day. The old clerk criticized me for being too honest, saying you had to size up the customer and shortchange them appropriately. Roughly speaking, for a jin the customer asked for, giving them eight liang was about right — and you had to make the scale beam look high, so the customer felt satisfied. This kind of petty swindling was the norm in a small-time collective enterprise like the supply-and-marketing co-op. I found that most customers were easy to fool; only a few were sticklers. If you got caught, you just pretended it was an honest mistake, smiled and made it right. That was my first lesson in life. Looking back, the old masters who taught me to shortchange customers were fundamentally good people, yet they carried out these deceptions as if they were perfectly natural and justified.

Later I worked twice as a "helper" at a rural grain depot, always doing the least skilled work, called daicang — leading peasants who had just had their grain weighed to the designated spot in the designated warehouse. I also helped the warehouse keeper shuffle the grain around. Grain in storage had to be regularly turned — the bottom brought up, the top sent down — to prevent mildew. This was fairly exhausting work. The air inside the warehouse was foul, thick with dust and haze.

My work-study experience after going abroad was following the herd during my studies in the UK — working in a restaurant, still doing the least skilled job of washing dishes. Weekend shifts ran from 4 p.m. to one or two in the morning, at fifteen pounds a shift. By the time I got home, I was falling apart. Anyone who has washed dishes in a restaurant will never again believe in restaurant hygiene, especially on weekends. Sometimes the water in the dishwashing sink wouldn't be changed the entire evening. When it got too dirty, you'd just pour in massive amounts of detergent until it was full of foam, then wipe things glossy with a dry cloth. It wasn't that we were lazy — we simply had no choice. Dirty dishes came flooding in like a mountain; there was no time to change the water. Some restaurants had dish-drying machines with a sanitizing cycle, which made things relatively more hygienic.

— Written on October 1, 2011

The Art of Drinking Beer

Twice in my life I have had beer that was unforgettable — truly fine brew. The first time was in 1989, when I went to Munich, Germany for a conference (see "Morning Glory at Noon: A Journey to Europe"). The conference organizers took us to the outskirts of the city for an outdoor beer festival. Before this, I had scarcely touched alcohol, but Munich's draft beer — such wonderful taste, and not intoxicating either — captivated me instantly. I also loved the atmosphere: beer mugs the size of buckets, and the meat that accompanied the drinking — roasted whole or half pigs and sheep — you couldn't ask for anything more magnificent. The utensils used to cut the meat were like the great swords our ancestors once swung at the Japanese devils' heads. You held out your plate and one swing of the blade sent two jin of meat onto it. Half-tipsy, half-dreaming, I was always reminded of the heroes of Mount Liang, weighing out silver by the scale and drinking wine by the bowl. On that midsummer night, fair-skinned girls in brightly colored, elaborately layered traditional dress wove through the crowd, all smiles. What night was this? I no longer knew where I was.

The second time was a few years ago in Hokkaido, also for a conference. An old Japanese friend took me to an antique-style beer house, where we savored Sapporo beer alongside simple snacks like boiled edamame. Sapporo is famous for two things: beer and king crab. Sapporo's dark draft was dry, mellow, and refreshing. Two large mugs down, I returned to the hotel with blurry, drunken eyes. Undressing and collapsing onto the bed, I felt my body floating upward, as if I'd just come out of a sauna — steaming all over, vapors rising, as though every impurity in my body was being purged. An indescribable sensation, as if about to take flight — "drifting as though having left the world behind, sprouting wings and ascending to the immortals."

A friend once asked: how exactly do you beer drinkers get a buzz out of it? My answer is: it's far more than a buzz — drinking beer is conducive to world peace. Every time I reach a mild tipsiness, I feel that all people are my family. Mild tipsiness, that floating sensation, is the optimal state. Li Bai, the great immortal poet of the Tang Dynasty, probably composed his timeless masterpieces like "Drinking Alone Under the Moon" in precisely this state:

A jug of wine among the flowers,
I drink alone, no friend close by.
I raise my cup to invite the moon,
Who with my shadow makes us three.
The moon, alas, knows not to drink;
My shadow follows me in vain.
With moon and shadow, friends for now,
Let's seize the joy before spring ends.

— Written in October 2011

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朝华午拾 · 第八章：朝华点滴（下）

"千万不要忘记阶级斗争"

记得大概是1970年左右，小学四五年级的时候，老师带领我们参观一个"阶级斗争展览馆"，对学生进行活生生的教育。展览馆里面有讲解、图示和实物，让我们感觉到阶级斗争就在身边，需要年年讲，月月讲，天天讲。

首先看到的是地主份子的变天账。这是从一家地主家地窖里面搜查出来的老地契。保留地契，当然是想变天，将来好对贫下中农反攻倒算。讲解词说，这个老地主，平时见人点头哈腰，其实是老奸巨猾，罪该万死。

还有另外一份"漏网右派"的日记。解说词说，这个道貌岸然的教师，心理阴暗，查抄出来的几大本日记，充满了卿卿我我的资产阶级腐朽没落的情调（日记记录了当事人的恋爱感受），更可恶的是还有向往国民党反动派的诗词。展出的部分就是这样一首题目叫做"海恋"的诗歌。我看到的是字迹娟秀的一首抒情散文诗，隐约记得的部分有，大海啊，我的故乡，我的归宿，我的向往，我的盼望！通篇就是大海这个主题。解说词说，漏网右派为什么如此肉麻地讴歌大海呢？很显然，他是向往大海那边的台湾国民党蒋匪，盼望他们反攻大陆。当年我们毫不怀疑《海恋》作者的大海象征着不能明说的国民党。他是臭老九，又有资产阶级情调，肯定对现实不满，阶级本性决定他向往国民党反动派。这难道不是「 司马昭之心」路人皆知么？

展品中最具有爆炸力的是一份现行反革命的材料，地下反革命组织"民主正义党"的党纲草案。两名主犯就是前不久公审宣判死刑被游街示众、当众枪毙的该党的主席和副主席。党纲宗旨是推翻共产党，建立民主政治。这当然是十恶不赦的异端，罪大恶极，不杀不足以平民愤。

一年一度的公审那天烈日炎炎，我们这个皖南山区的小县城，象过节一样热闹。公审在本城最大的操场（号称"中山公园"）举行。几千人把操场挤得水泄不通。罪犯们剃光头，挂着大牌子被押上来，死刑犯的牌子上在宣判后游街时被划上红叉。大家最感兴趣的还是死刑这种可以给公众带来兴奋的事件。有七八个罪犯被当场宣判死刑，其中包括那两个年轻的现行反革命，还有其他杀人犯和一个严重破坏上山下乡的生产队长（破坏上山下乡罪是指利用职权强奸或诱奸下乡女青年）。每当宣判一个死刑，台上那个死刑犯就被身后两个彪形大汉摁住头颅，并往口中塞进物件，防止他们临死挣扎，呼喊反动口号。死刑犯表现各异，是一大看点。有的软瘫在地上，需要连踢带拉，才能勉强跪在台上示众。也有的竭力挣扎，头摁下去，又抬起来。说是这种人如果不封口，最可能呼喊反动口号。

公审大会结束后，是游街示众，每辆卡车前端押四五个罪犯，缓缓从县城大街上通过。全城能出来的人几乎都出来了，没有机会来操场看公审实况的，早早在家附近大街边上找好位置等待游街的车队。对于精力充沛、兴奋莫名的年轻人，干脆随着车队前行。有聪明的带上自行车，好赶上最精彩的执行枪毙的现场。虽然是公开处决，允许围观，但枪毙现场保密。大概是怕人满为患，影响公务。一般在游街以后一小时内执行枪决。根据以往经验，城外十里地左右，有两三个最可能的行刑现场，各处都有人守株待兔。我比较笨，随着人流东赶西赶，最后好不容易来到现场，除了人头还是人头，而且过程已经结束。人们围成一圈一圈，听亲眼目睹枪决现场的人描述每一个细节。行刑之后，有穿白大褂的法医现场验尸，签署死亡报告。后来有传言，说专政机构要求向被枪毙的反革命分子家属收取子弹费。我们当时觉得理所当然，子弹虽然不值钱，但这是对反革命家属的正当惩罚。

很多年过去，我一直怀疑，嗜血是否源于人的本性，否则如何解释行刑场上看客的兴奋和疯狂呢。当年就有这么个说法，革命群众的狂欢之日，就是阶级敌人的受难之时。

提到嗜血，想起世界语创始人Zamenhof的《希望之歌》。这首诗歌成为全世界世界语者的《国际歌》，我曾经在我的硕士机器翻译项目中把这首歌自动翻译为英语和中文：

(099) LA ESPERO : ESPERANTISTA HIMNO ( POEMO FAR ZAMENHOF ) .

(100) EN LA MONDON VENIS NOVA SENTO ,
TRA LA MONDO IRAS FORTA VOKO ;
(101) PER FLUGILOJ DE FACILA VENTO ,
NUN DE LOKO FLUGU GHI AL LOKO .

(102) NE AL GLAVO SANGONSOIFANTA ,
GHI LA HOMAN TIRAS FAMILION ;
(103) AL LA MOND' ETERNE MILITANTA ,
GHI PROMESAS SANKTAN HARMONION .

(099) THE HOPE : ESPERANTIST'S HYMN ( POEM BY ZAMENHOF ) .

(100) INTO THE WORLD CAME NEW FEELING ,
OVER THE WORLD GOES STRONG VOICE ;
(101) BY WINGS OF EASY WIND ,
NOW FROM PLACE LET IT FLY TO PLACE .
(102) NOT TO SWORD BLOODTHIRSTY ,
IT PULLS THE MAN FAMILY ;
(103) TO THE WORLD EVER FIGHTING ,
IT PROMISES SACRED HARMONY .

(099) 希望: 世界语者的颂歌 (柴门霍夫所作的诗歌)。

(100) 新感觉来到了世界,
有力的声音走遍世界;
(101) 用顺风的翅膀,
现在让它从一个地方飞到另一个地方吧。

(102) 它不把人的家庭
引到渴血的刀剑;
(103) 向永远战争着的世界,
它允诺神圣的和谐。

记于2006年5月18日

土布洋布

我小时候，1960－1970年代，还穿"土布"衣服，"土布"是农民手工纺织的，买回家，送进染坊去染成蓝色或者黑色。很粗糙，不结实，容易破，所以要补补丁才能穿久。当然没有花样。染坊象个大澡堂，热气熏天。染出来的布掉色得厉害，往往把其他衣服也带黑了。

后来，60年代后期，开始有需要布票的国家供应的机织咔叽布，漂亮结实多了。由于需要布票，所以土布没有立刻退出市场。再后来，化纤制品"的确良"和尼龙开始来了。记得第一次父母给我们兄弟买的确良做衬衫，大约是1970年左右，我坚决拒绝穿，觉得这太修正主义了，那么光亮，象资产阶级少爷。我们从小觉得要学习雷锋艰苦朴素，新三年，旧三年，缝缝补补又三年。第一次穿尼龙袜子也觉得太奢侈，可是感觉穿上以后，特别舒服。（后来才发现不透气，有臭脚的毛病。）

化纤制品的流行是1970年代，最大优点是结实，奶奶再也不用一年到头给全家缝补衣服鞋袜了。当时开始进口日本化肥"尿素"，农民兄弟发现化肥袋子是很好的化纤制品，就纷纷拿尿素袋子做床单和被子用，还真好使。就是袋子上的硕大的汉字"尿素"每天伴随着人进入梦乡。后来，读30年代 DuPont 发明尼龙的历史，说美国大兵当年到菲律宾等处，就以尼龙制品作为礼物在当地泡妞，极受欢迎。

70年代末，偶然还看见有土布，但是因为洋布价格下降，文革后布票又取消了，土布就无法竞争了。

斗转星移，时事变迁，如今在西方，纯棉、纯麻或者纯丝的手工制品开始时髦，只有资产阶级小姐少爷才穿得起，而贫苦的无产阶级只能将就使用便宜、光鲜又结实的化纤制品了。网友小闪告诉我，现在"土布"制品可贵着呢，有一种品牌的童装HANNA ANDERSSON号称用"土布"（organic cotton）把价格提上去。WHOLEFOODS里卖的衣服，一件最普通样式的麻布上衣就卖近两百刀。小闪说：俺觉得自己织的布做粗布衬衫，休闲裤，女裙绝对cool，没人跟你穿一样的。过去无奈的事情现在变成时髦了。

记于2011年10月

掐架的境界

上网的好处之一是看"老人"掐架。老人不爱掐架，一旦掐起来，锋芒里不失幽默，常令人忍俊不住。不过，有些小年轻的掐架却不敢恭维，污言秽语，没有一点技术含量，更谈不上幽默，比泼妇骂街还不如。时代变迁，天翻地覆，可是掐架的水平却不见长。也许我是九斤老夫，总觉得现在的年轻人很难达到我们当年掐架的"忘我"境界。生姜还是老的辣，昨天在网上看到老大哥胡言乱语，许是喝多了，忍不住上去抢白他一句，自以为他要跟我急了，没料他老兄还很服气，虚心接受我的意见，最后来一句："看来我得自己和自己掐了"，绝啊，那是什么境界！掐架要是掐到这种境界，才不愧待围观的众兄弟姐妹们。我年轻时更绝，掐架甚至能掐到改变了性别，其忘我热忱，可谓惊天地，泣鬼神。

我从小就特别爱抬杠，从中小学到大学，一直如此。小学阶段我是班上小不点儿，不大插得上嘴。可还是经过了大革命的战斗洗礼，特别爱到大街上听小将们大辩论，对辩论高手佩服得五体投地。

记得是上高中的时候，有一次学农，大家住在农场，晚上在寝室爆发了一场"人是不是动物"的大争论。我因为熟读马列，知道人是社会关系的总和，人会使用工具，这是人区别于动物的根本性特征，等等。觉得坚持人是动物的同学，脑子被灌水了，简直是弱智。我真理在握，义正词严，没想到对手也是一个争强好胜的主儿，就是死不认错。简直气坏了，于是一浪高过一浪，辩论了整整一夜。到快天亮的时候，我已经感觉气接不上来，也不知道自己在嚷些什么，更听不进对方在说什么。象坚守阵地一样，感觉一旦松懈，敌人就会乘虚而入。

第二天终于停止争论了，不是为了别的，而是我完全失声了，嗓子充血，疼痛难忍。同学建议我用盐水漱口，也不管用。整整一个礼拜，我成了哑巴。后来好不容易恢复发声了，谁也想不到，我竟然从男声变成了女声－不是那种悦耳动听的女声，而是比较接近迪斯尼动画片"白雪公主"里面那个老妖婆的声音。

我一辈子爱好音乐，听到高兴处，忍不住要随曲而歌, 抒发一下才痛快。很快发现，我的痛快是建立在别人的痛苦之上。还好，我比较自觉，自觉与卡拉OK保持距离，只是偶而在家里抒发，很感激太太和女儿，她们比较谅解，说看到你高兴就好。

如今，每当我打电话听到对方跟我说："Yes, Madam"，我就想起我当年的年轻好胜来。

记于2008年12月11日

勤工俭学

中学生暑假勤工俭学，当年就很时兴。开始是去集体供销社帮助卖梨子，每日一元工钱。老店员批评我太老实，说要看顾客，适当克扣才好。大体是一斤，给八两就不错了，还要看上去，秤杆高高的，让顾客高兴。这种小的坑蒙拐骗，在小本生意作为集体企业的供销社，是常态。发现大部分顾客很容易上当，只有少数较真的。露馅了，就假装不小心弄错了，陪笑脸补足摆平。这是在生活中学的第一课。回想起来，传授责令我们克扣斤两的老师傅也都是善良的人，但是做起这些事情却理所当然天经地义的样子。

后来做了两次农村粮站的"协助员"，一直做其中最没有技术的活，叫"代仓"，就是领着农民把过完磅的稻子带到指定仓库的指定位置。平时也帮忙仓库保管员倒腾仓库。粮食在仓库要定期来回倒腾，底下的翻上来，上面的翻下去，防止霉变。这个活比较累人。仓库里面空气污浊，尘土飞扬，灰雾蒙蒙的感觉。

出国以后的勤工俭学是在英国留学时候随大流，去餐馆打工，仍然是最没有技术含量的洗碗工作。周末从下午4点干到夜里一两点，工钱是15英镑，回到家散架了一般。凡是干过洗碗工的人，再也不会相信餐馆的卫生，特别是周末。有时候洗碗池子的水一个晚上不换，实在太脏了，就使劲往里面倒洗涤剂，满是泡沫，用干布一抹就光洁起来。不是我们偷懒，实在没有办法，脏碗象山一样涌来，根本没有换水的时间。有的餐馆有烘碗机，多了一道消毒工序，才相对比较卫生一些。

记于 2011年10月1日

喝啤酒的境界

我一辈子有两次喝啤酒，难以忘怀，好酒啊。第一次是1989年，去德国慕尼黑开会（见《朝华午拾：欧洲之行》）。大会把我们拉到一个郊区，参加一个室外的啤酒节狂欢。此前，我几乎不沾酒，可是慕尼黑的生啤酒，口感真好，也不醉人，一下子就迷上了。也很喜欢那个场景，啤酒杯子海大，那助酒的肉食，是烤熟的或整条或半条的猪啊羊啊，别提有多大气。切割肉食的用具，跟当年向鬼子头上砍去的大刀似的，你端过盘子去，一刀就是两斤肉下来。微醉微醺之间，总使我联想起梁山好汉大秤分金银，大碗吃酒肉的痛快。仲夏之夜，有身着艳丽繁缛的传统民族服装的白人姑娘在身边穿来穿去，笑容可掬。今夕何夕，不知身在何处。

第二次喝啤酒，是前几年到北海道，也是开会。跟日本老朋友到一个古色古香的啤酒屋，就着煮毛豆之类的特色小菜，品尝扎幌啤酒。扎幌两大宝：啤酒和大毛蟹。扎幌的黑生啤，干醇爽口。两大杯啤酒下肚，醉眼迷蒙地回到旅馆。脱衣上床，感觉人直往上飘，象刚从桑那浴出来一样，全身蒸腾，呼呼地向上冒气，仿佛要把身体里面所有杂质清理尽净。不可言传的感受，好像要飞起来，"飘飘乎如遗世独立，羽化而登仙"。

有朋友问：你们喝啤酒的, 倒底是怎么喝出快感的？我的回答是，岂止是快感，喝啤酒有利于世界和平。每次喝到微醉时，感觉所有人都是亲人。以微醉为度，飘飘欲仙是最佳状态，唐代大诗仙李太白大概就是在这个状态下写出他的《月下独酌》等千古名作的：

花间一壶酒，独酌无相亲。
举杯邀明月，对影成三人。
月既不解饮，影徒随我身。
暂伴月将影，行乐须及春。

记于2011年10月

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From 朝华午拾. Original Chinese: 朝华之八: 朝华点滴.

 

After middle age, old memories drift through the mind like scattered fragments, yet they refuse to coalesce into a complete picture. In the ocean of memory, every wavelet carries sweetness and bitterness, surging and swirling without order.

My ten years of primary and secondary school coincided exactly with the ten years of the Cultural Revolution. Our studies were neglected, our foundations weak. Out of more than 200 students across four classes in our grade, only seven or eight managed to leap through the dragon gate of the college entrance exam (including junior colleges). The rest slowly found employment in local factories, replacing retired parents or being recruited. In terms of educational advancement, our generation was sacrificed to the times.

The aftershocks of the Great Revolution's factional fighting persisted all the way to our primary school graduation. As soon as classroom windows were fitted with glass, they would be shattered; in winter we had to cover them with plastic film or pasted newspaper to block the wind. The brightest period came during what was called the "bourgeois line resurgence" (our first and second years of junior high), when good students like us were particularly valued. As a subject representative, entrusted by teachers, I would stand at the podium during morning self-study sessions to lead the whole class through exercises — this cultivated a confidence in handling public occasions.

Among our middle school classmates was a small group of "aristocrats" — children of military families sent down with the 127th Military Preparedness Hospital. Four students from the 127th came to our class, all girls, each more beautiful than the last. These "modern sisters" from the army compound stood in sharp contrast to us local kids. They spoke standard Mandarin, were dazzlingly clever, and carried themselves with grace. One of them, a fair-skinned girl called Z, had a gentle disposition and could answer teachers' questions with eloquence and poise — the envy of everyone. When Z raised her hand to answer the teacher's question about Ye Ting's poem "The Door Through Which One Enters and Exits Is Tightly Locked," she spoke with assurance and concluded: "We revolutionaries must have our own integrity. We would rather rot in prison than beg to 'crawl out through the dog's hole.'" Z's performance earned the fervent praise of our Shanghai-born female teacher, who appointed her Chinese language subject representative.

I remember in the first semester of ninth grade attending a tearful testimony by Basang, a Tibetan former serf who had been "liberated" (and later became vice-chairman of the Tibetan Autonomous Region Revolutionary Committee), denouncing the evils of Tibet's slave system before liberation. He described torture methods like flaying people alive and gouging out eyeballs — it made our hair stand on end. That was the most successful class education lesson of those years. Every student's heart ached with shared grief and righteous fury. Even the most mischievous troublemakers in class were moved, united in common hatred.

That year, our "learning from the peasants" program sent us to a mountain village to live and eat with farmers for two weeks. At night, boys and girls sat together on floor mats playing cards; since it was cold, everyone shared the same quilt, which felt especially thrilling. At school there were strict boundaries between boys and girls, but away from campus these rules relaxed. The hazy mutual curiosity and attraction between teenage boys and girls found its fullest expression during that time.

Every morning we rose early and braved the cold to wash our faces by the river — the water was bone-piercingly icy, our hands could barely open. I remember racing a male classmate to cut rice in the fields. We cut faster and faster until my sickle sliced off the tip of my little finger — so much blood, and it took two or three months to slowly grow back new flesh. The mountain nights were pitch black, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. We often got lost, and with dogs barking everywhere, there was a real sense of terror — yet also great excitement. When I return to China and see today's children, burdened with heavy backpacks, pushed to their limits for the college entrance exam, I naturally think of how we spent our days — learning from the peasants, the workers, and the army, always roaming outdoors. I remember one evening when our intern teacher led us to a hillside near the chemical fertilizer plant for a field exercise (learning from the army). Under a bright moon and scattered stars, we used pine branches as camouflage, ambushing the enemy, confusing the enemy — looking back, it all feels impossibly romantic. There was also the long-distance march to the former New Fourth Army site at Maolin; we walked an entire day, as if the road would never end. I was slight and frail, nearly collapsing from exhaustion. Yet the ecstasy when we finally arrived remains vivid to this day. Later, for "learning from the workers," we entered a walking-tractor factory, where I learned lathe work under a beautiful female master in work clothes — I was utterly captivated by her gallant poise.

In the second semester of ninth grade, the political climate veered further left. Over the next two years of high school, academic classes existed in name only; learning from the peasants, workers, and army consumed ever more of our time. During high school, everyone had to learn a "revolutionary skill." I chose to learn how to operate a walking tractor. Many classmates chose the acupuncture skills of the "barefoot doctor." Day after day they'd hold a needle and jab it into their own wrists. The quick learners soon dared to cover their wrists and heads with silver needles — a terrifying sight.

Those were the days of promoting revolutionary "newborn things." Reports appeared of PLA medical personnel using traditional Chinese acupuncture to cure deaf-mute patients — miracles of iron trees blooming and the mute speaking. The first words most of the mute spoke were invariably "Long live Chairman Mao." In the documentary films of the time, you could see the touching scenes of the formerly mute, tears streaming down their faces, thanking their beloved People's Liberation Army. Soon came more happy tidings: acupuncture anesthesia had been successfully tested, and compared to conventional anesthesia, it had the advantage of no side effects. Radio stations began broadcasting revolutionary songs praising the tiny silver needle, and for a time the needle was touted as something almost miraculous.

Barefoot doctors, sunflowers blooming, putting down roots across the vast land…
The thousand-year iron tree is about to bloom… the deaf-mute daughter is about to speak.
The east wind brings warmth, red flags reflect the rosy clouds — Chairman Mao has sent his dear PLA soldiers to my home.
A tiny silver needle in hand — spring thunder explodes in the silent world…
Grateful for Chairman Mao's boundless kindness.

Amid this fervor, one of my classmates happened to need an appendectomy and it was performed entirely under acupuncture anesthesia. I will never forget the horrific account he later gave me of his suffering. He still believed acupuncture anesthesia might work, explaining that it probably varied from person to person — it simply didn't work for him. He said that at first, the silver needles in his ears distracted him from the surgery, but soon the pain in his abdomen became unbearable. He howled like a pig or sheep being slaughtered through the entire procedure; no amount of heart-rending screaming made any difference. The story made my hair stand on end.

— Written on October 12, 2006

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The North Wind Blows

An old friend online recommended I watch the sent-down youth drama The North Wind Blows. Fragments of memories from the Great Revolution era drifted back — hazy and disjointed, yet among them were scenes of startling clarity and sounds of transcendent beauty.

I was about seven, during the fiercest period of factional fighting between the "Criticism United Headquarters" and the "Sweep the Black Line" factions in our county town. Gunshots were heard nightly. The two factions held separate territories, each with its own strongholds. At its worst, machine guns and even mortars were deployed. Beyond the command headquarters, each organization had departments for logistics, security, medical care, arts and culture, internal liaison, and foreign affairs, each performing its designated function — it was like a communist utopia in miniature, where the masses' ingenuity found full expression.

The Criticism faction's headquarters was set up inside the building materials factory on the east side of town. My impression is of concrete pipes everywhere — perfect for children playing hide-and-seek. The faction's commander-in-chief was Uncle P, our neighbor — tall and imposing, in military uniform, with a pistol holstered on each hip, radiating an intimidating authority. They said he was an expert marksman. And then one night, something went wrong. The story goes that he was out on night patrol when a dark figure appeared ahead. Commander P shouted, "Password!" The figure stammered something unintelligible. The password was wrong, and the commander, thinking it was an enemy scout sneaking up, fired a single shot and dropped him. Only later was it discovered that it was one of their own — young, inexperienced, and inarticulate, he became a wrongful death in the blink of an eye.

As factional skirmishes grew more frequent, casualties mounted and often couldn't receive timely medical care. The county hospital was in the Sweep faction's territory on the west side of town. To strengthen the Criticism faction's medical capacity, Commander P summoned my parents to help establish a mobile field operating theater. He dispatched operatives to secretly infiltrate our home and relocate our entire family to the Criticism faction's headquarters, where we were treated with the utmost courtesy. From then on, we began our life within this revolutionary commune.

My father's memoir records this:

"One evening, a 'plainclothes female fighter' from the Criticism faction burst through our back door straight into my inner room. From the sole of her shoe she extracted a slip of paper — a handwritten order from Commander P, demanding I rush immediately to the headquarters to 'save a life.' It was, of course, a 'heavenly command.' Heaven's command could not be defied; saving a life brooked no delay; and self-preservation left no alternative. I set out at once. But our home was deep in Sweep faction territory — how could hostile forces tolerate such an act? My journey that night was an adventure in itself. Fortunately, the moment I stepped outside, a plainclothes escort detail was there to guard against ambush, and we reached our destination at top speed."

I remember how bitterly cold that winter was — I still shiver thinking about it. One day, a few of us children were playing outside until our hands and feet were swollen and red from the cold. Both our parents were too busy working to look after us. Eventually an older sister led us into a small room with a charcoal brazier. I couldn't wait to huddle close to the fire, stretching out my red, swollen hands and feet. I never imagined that frozen limbs, suddenly exposed to warmth, would produce an unbearable, bone-deep itching — as if ten thousand arrows were piercing the heart. Later, when I read Tracks in the Snowy Forest, I felt a deep resonance. The book explained that frostbitten hands and feet must never be warmed up immediately. First you must slowly massage them with snow, wait until the blood circulates and the fingers can move again, and only then gradually increase the temperature.

As New Year approached, the Revolutionary Propaganda Team under the Arts and Culture Department rehearsed The White-Haired Girl in the assembly hall — my favorite place to be. The propaganda team was full of talent. A full-scale production, scene by scene, polished to perfection — it was the cultural feast of the revolutionary era, an inexhaustible delight. The young man playing Dachun was a family acquaintance, a strikingly handsome fellow. In the corner of the stage, a sister with a voice like a lark provided vocal accompaniment. She wore a military uniform — valiant yet alluring — and held a grass-green megaphone shaped like an army trumpet, singing "The North Wind Blows, the Snowflakes Drift." This song was already the most artistic and humane gem of the revolutionary era, and that female voice — pure beyond purity, drifting out from the megaphone — was so transcendentally beautiful it moved the soul. In my young heart, I always believed that such heavenly music could not possibly be a human voice; it must be the magic of that wondrous megaphone. For a long time afterwards, I regarded the megaphone as a box that could turn stone into gold. The image of that uniformed girl holding the army megaphone, accompanied by the melody of the north wind and drifting snowflakes, settled deep in my consciousness — the ultimate aesthetic experience. The "North Wind Blows" in the ocean of my heart is perfect, irreplaceable. Guo Lanying's original recording, distinctive as it is, feels rustic by comparison, not light or ethereal enough. I've sought out and compared many versions; only Zhu Fengbo's delicate voice comes close to my childhood memory.

— Written on New Year's Day, 2010

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朝华点滴（上）

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人过中年以后，陈年往事象碎片一样徘徊心头，可就是拼接不出完整的图画。在记忆的海洋里，每一朵浪花伴随甜蜜咸涩，聚散无序，翻腾萦回。

我的中小学十年，恰好与文化革命十年重合。学业荒废，同学基础都很薄弱，结果同级四个班200多学生，总共高考跳龙门成功者（包括大专）不过7－8个，其余同学大多在本地顶职、招工慢慢就业。就升学而言，我们这代是时代的牺牲品。

大革命武斗的余震一直影响到我们小学毕业。教室一有玻璃就被打碎，冬天只好用薄膜或糊报纸挡风。最风光的时候是所谓"资产阶级路线回潮"那阵（初一、初二），我们学习好的特别吃香。作为科代表，受到老师委托，在早自习课上上讲台当小老师，带领全班做习题，培养了应对场合的自信。

中学同学中有一小批"贵族"，随军队备战医院（127医院）下放来的子女。我们班一共来了四名127同学，全是女生，一个赛一个靓丽。部队大院出来的"洋姐儿"，与我们本地孩子形成对比。她们讲普通话，冰雪聪明，举止优雅。其中一位皮肤白嫩的女生Z，性格温善，回答老师问题出口成章，让人羡慕。Z举手回答老师关于《叶挺：为人进出的门紧锁着》的提问时，侃侃而谈，最后说， 我们革命者应该有自己的骨气，宁愿牢底坐穿，也不能祈求"从狗的洞子爬出"。Z的表现获得了上海女老师的激赏，指派为语文科代表。

记得初三上学期听过藏族翻身农奴巴桑（后来成为藏族自治区革命委员会副主任）的血泪报告，控诉解放前西藏奴隶制度的罪恶。提到活剥人皮、挖眼珠等酷刑，听得毛骨悚然。 那是当年最成功阶级教育课了，全班同学无不心痛如绞，满腔仇恨。甚至平时最调皮捣蛋的学生也都被感动了，同仇敌忾。

那年学农去一个山村跟农民同吃同住两周。晚上男女同学一起围坐在地铺上打牌，因为天冷，大家盖同一个被子，觉得特别兴奋。在学校有男女界限，人在外就放松一些。少男少女蒙蒙胧胧的相互好奇和吸引，在学农时表现得最充分。

每天清晨起床，冒着寒冷去河边洗脸，水凉刺骨，手展不开。记得在田里跟一位男同学比赛割稻。越割越快，镰刀把小手指头割掉了，流了好多血，两三个月才慢慢长回新肉。山村的夜晚那个天黑，伸手不见五指。经常迷路，加上狗叫，真有恐怖感，又感觉很刺激。我回国探亲看现在孩子，背着沉重的书包，为高考超负荷运转，就自然想到我们当年学工学农学军，整天在外面野。记得有一天晚上，实习老师带领我们去化肥厂附近的山坡上搞野营（学军）。月明星稀，用松树枝打掩护，偷袭敌人，迷惑敌人，现在想起来还是充满了浪漫。还有长途拉练到茂林新四军旧址，走了一整天，好像路永远没有尽头。我比较体弱瘦小，几乎累垮。可是到达目的地时候的狂喜，至今历历在目。后来学工进了手扶拖拉机厂，跟一个很漂亮穿工装的女师傅学车工，被她的飒爽英姿完全迷住了。

初三下学期，形势进一步转左，后来高中两年，文化课形同虚设，学农、学工、学军占了更多的时间。高中阶段，每个人都要学一门革命的本事，我的选学项目是开手扶拖拉机。不少同学选的是学习"赤脚医生"的针灸技能。整天拿一跟针，在自己手腕上扎下去。学的快的很快就敢把银针插满自己的手腕和脑部，看上去很吓人。

那是提倡革命"新生"事物的时代，于是有解放军医务人员，运用中医针灸治疗聋哑病人，使铁树开花哑巴说话的奇迹报道。多数哑巴开口说的第一句总是"毛主席万岁"。当时的专题纪录片，也能看到哑巴说话以后，热泪盈眶，感谢亲人解放军的动人场面。紧接着，又传来喜讯，针灸麻醉试验成功，比较传统麻醉，具有无副作用等优点。电台开始播送歌颂小小银针的革命歌曲，一时间银针被吹得神乎其神。

赤脚医生向阳花, 广阔天地把根扎……
千年铁树要开花……聋哑女儿要说话。
东风送暖红旗映彩霞，毛主席派来亲人解放军到了我的家。
小小银针手中拿，无声世界春雷炸……
感谢毛主席的恩情大。

在这样的热潮下，我的一个同学赶上阑尾炎需要手术，完全采用针灸麻醉。我永远不能忘记他事后对我描述其痛苦的惨状。他还是相信针麻可能有效，解释说可能因人而异，对于他是无效的。他说，刚开始时候，耳朵上插上银针，分散了对手术的注意力，但很快腹部的疼痛变得不可忍受。他象被宰割的猪羊般吼叫了整个过程，撕心裂肺也无济于事（可能是中途换成传统麻醉等于宣告针灸麻醉失败，当时的医生可能担当不起这个罪名）。说得我毛骨悚然。

—— 记于2006年十月12日

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北风那个吹

网上有老友推荐看知青电视剧《北风那个吹》，大革命时候的一些往事片段飘忽而来，断续朦胧之中，也有清晰明丽的场景和绝美动人的音响。

我大概七岁，是我们县城"批联部"和"扫黑线"两派武斗最激烈的时候，夜间常听到枪响。两派割据，各有自己的地盘和大本营。最严重的时候机关枪和迫击炮都用上了。组织内部除了司令部外，下面设有后勤、保卫、医疗、文艺、内联、外交等部门，各司其职，俨然是个共产社会大家庭，人民群众的才智得到充分发挥。

批派的大本营设在城东的建材厂里面。印象里面到处是水泥管道，很合适孩子躲猫猫用。批派总司令是邻居P叔叔，魁梧高大，着戎装，腰间左右别了两只手枪，威风逼人。据说他枪法很准，终于有一天晚上出事了。说是那天夜里出外巡视，前方闪现一个黑影，P司令喝到："口令！" 那小子支吾一声，口令不对，司令以为是敌方的探子摸过来，随手一枪，撂倒了对方。后来发现原来是自己人，年轻无经验，口齿不清，一不小心就做了冤死鬼。

当时两派常有武斗摩擦，死伤人渐多，常不能得到及时救护。县医院在城西扫派的地盘上，P司令为了加强批派的医疗力量，请我父母出山，帮助建立战时流动手术台。他派手下秘密潜入我家，把我们全家转移到批派大本营，礼遇有加，从此我们开始了革命大家庭里面的生活。

老爸的回忆录里对此有记载：

一天傍晚时分，"批"派一个"便衣女战士"从我家后门直冲我内室，从鞋底里抠出一张纸条，是该派P司令的手令，让我火速赶去大本营"救人"。当然是"天命"了。天命不可违抗，二则救人不得迟疑，再则保己也无二选，立马出家。可我家是"扫"派阵地，敌对双方，哪能包容此举。所以我的这一出诊，也是一次冒险。好在一出门，就有"便衣"一队护卫，以防堵截，火速抵达目的地。

记得那年冬天真冷啊，现在想起来还打寒颤。有一天我们几个孩子在外手脚都冻红肿了，爸爸妈妈都忙着工作，顾不上我们。后来是一个大姐姐把我们领到一间生了炭火盆的小屋子去。我迫不及待挨近火盆取暖，把红肿的手脚伸上去，没想到，冰冻的四肢乍一热和，从肉到皮，奇痒无比，万箭穿心。后来我看《林海雪原》，深有同感。里面说了，在冰天雪地冻伤的手脚切忌立即回暖，要先用雪漫漫搓揉，等冻僵的手脚血液循环，指头可以伸展了，然后才能慢慢增加温度。

新年快到了，文艺部下面的革命宣传队在礼堂彩排《白毛女》，是我最爱去的地方。宣传队能人很多，一台大戏从头到尾，一幕一幕，精益求精，是革命年代的文娱大餐，美不胜收。演大春的小伙子是我家熟人，很英俊漂亮的小伙子。舞台角落有一位百灵鸟一样的姐姐在伴唱，她穿着军装，英气又妩媚，手里拿着草绿色的象军喇叭一样的扬声器，清唱《北风那个吹，雪花那个飘》。这歌本来就是革命年代里最富有艺术性和人情味的极品，那女声纯而又纯，从喇叭飘出来，是那样超凡脱俗，打动人心。在我幼小的心灵里面，总以为这样的天籁非人声可为，许是那神奇的喇叭的魔力。那以后很久我一直把喇叭看成是点石成金的匣子。那位军衣少女手执军喇叭的形象，伴随着北风吹雪花飘的音乐声，积淀在心，成就美感体验的极至。我心海里的《北风吹》是最完美的，不可替代。郭兰英的原唱尽管很有特色，但显得土气，不够轻盈灵秀。寻觅对比过多种版本，就朱逢博的细腻嗓音，似乎与我儿时的记忆较为接近。

—— 记于2010年元旦

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From 朝华午拾 (Morning Glory at Noon). Original Chinese: 朝华点滴 & 北风那个吹.

 

My mother's death in middle age is the eternal ache in my heart. On Mother's Day 2005, I built an "Online Memorial Hall" for her, a place to anchor a grief that only deepens with time.

（Mom and me，1965）

She died of stomach cancer at 49. Those were the darkest days of my life — days I still cannot bear to look back upon. Mom had been overworked her entire life, which may well have contributed to her illness. By the time it was discovered, the cancer had already reached its late stage. She held on for three months, and then she was gone. Mother toiled all her life. After Grandmother passed away, the care of three children and all the housework fell on her shoulders alone. At work, the pressure was no lighter — as head of obstetrics and gynecology at the county hospital, she threw herself into consultations, surgeries, and family-planning campaigns until she was utterly spent. Just before she died, she passed the examination to earn the title of Attending Physician — among her medical-school classmates, she was one of the first to attain that intermediate rank.

Parents should never have to leave their children too soon. Even though I was already 24 when she passed, I simply could not accept this brutal reality. I was in graduate school in Beijing at the time; I wept in secret for an entire year. Parents are a child's sky. As a boy, I dreaded talking about death and it felt impossibly distant. Mother's passing taught me in a single instant how fragile life truly is. The day I learned of her cancer diagnosis was the darkest day of all: desperate, helpless — as if heaven and earth had changed color.

Mom was born in the fourth lunar month of 1935, into a farming family in a village about three kilometers from the historic town of Sanhe in Anhui — a remote spot at the junction of Shucheng, Feixi, and Lujiang counties. I remember visiting her hometown twice as a child with my parents, and what an ordeal it was. It felt like crossing a thousand mountains and rivers: by bus, across the Yangtze by ferry, by train, then a small steamer across Chao Lake to Sanhe, and finally another six li on foot to the village. That last stretch of walking felt as if the road would never end. Mom once told me that she walked that very road every day going back and forth to secondary school.

In winter, crossing Chao Lake on the steamer — there was no heating at all, no shelter, just hours adrift in the open. The wind howled through the lake passage; the cold bit into your bones. To this day, thinking of it makes me shiver. Winters back then were brutally cold, regularly dropping to minus seven or eight degrees Celsius; with the wind chill, it felt like minus twenty or thirty.

But once we reached the old home for the New Year, everything came alive. Uncles and aunts laid out a full welcome, with every kind of delicacy: salt-cured pork, salt-cured duck, pig tongue, pig ears. I remember one morning when there were five-spice tea eggs — so fragrant that after eating one I simply could not stop. I polished off eight in one go. I must have been only seven or eight. I ate myself sick, and for two whole days I could not touch food; the very sight of it made me retch.

My maternal grandparents had ten children — six boys and four girls. Mom was the seventh child, but the eldest daughter. Though they lived deep in the countryside, Grandfather and Grandmother were remarkably open-minded: all the boys stayed home to farm or run small businesses, yet they sent every single girl to school — no small feat in that era.

Grandmother was a woman of the old school, a master of household management and farming, who ran the family with a steady hand. Life was harmonious and thriving. Grandfather, a man of modest education and a merchant in Sanhe, came home on weekends to direct the farm work. They were the archetype of a hardworking peasant family maintaining a frugal, modest comfort. Through careful planning and tight saving, Grandfather purchased a plot of land just before Liberation (1949). The whole family labored from sunrise to sunset in the fields, dreaming of a modestly prosperous life. Two years later, the land reform labeled them "landlords," and the entire family lived under that shadow for over thirty years, enduring widespread social discrimination.

As a child, Mom attended a village private school for a few years, taught by an elderly distant cousin in the Confucian classical tradition. In 1950, she gained admission to Sanhe Secondary School. She walked to school and back every day with her cousin, covering fourteen li round-trip through wind, rain, frost, and snow — leaving before dawn, returning after dark. Lunch was dry rations she carried. Life was one of poverty and deprivation. Fortunately, Grandmother could make and mend shoes, and there was just enough food at home to stave off hunger — every other desire was surrendered.

（Mom was 20 years old）

She had to drop out for a year due to poverty, struggling all the way, but in 1954 she finally graduated. That year, catastrophic flooding struck her hometown, turning it into a vast sea. It was Fifth Uncle who poled a small wooden boat to send Mom (his sister) to the provincial capital to sit for exams and attend school. She enrolled in Hefei Medical School — a specialized secondary program (only seven from her school were admitted, and Mom was the only girl). It was the pivotal step of her life: food and lodging, all free of charge. In September 1957, upon graduation, she was assigned to Nanling County Hospital — the first physician ever appointed there directly from medical school. At last, Mom had walked out of that remote village to become a state cadre with her own income, meager as it was; she could finally support her own parents.

Mom bore three of us, each two years apart. According to Father, when she was six months pregnant with my elder brother, she and Father were dispatched by the hospital on a mobile medical tour through the countryside. She waddled along the ridges between rice paddies, her belly heavy, treating peasants for every ailment. The grueling work, brutal conditions, and poor nutrition caused her to go into labor prematurely — my brother was born on those very fields, nearly three months early. They say when he was born, his eyes were shut tight and he made no cry at all. Were it not for the medical team being right there, he could never have survived under those conditions.

By the time Mom had me, the "Three Years of Hardship" had begun — famine everywhere, corpses on the roadsides. Grandfather, Grandmother, and an aunt all starved to death in the old home villages during that time. (Eldest Uncle also fled the famine-stricken village and vanished without a trace.) Mom was desperately weak after giving birth. The hospital leadership, taking pity, specially approved "half a pig" for the new mother — that half pig, dripping brine, weighed just over two jin.

（Family portrait，1978）

In her career, Mom was a force of nature. She performed every kind of obstetric and gynecological surgery with mastery. She was the first in the entire prefecture to pioneer extraperitoneal cesarean section. She could complete a tubal ligation in an average of ten minutes. On family-planning campaigns to rural villages, she routinely performed seventy to eighty ligations a day, without a single error. She visited every production brigade in the county, relieving countless women of the pain of disease. Her extraordinary medical skill drew a constant stream of patients. Later, as head of both clinical and administrative operations in OB/GYN, she displayed remarkable leadership. Her warmth, competence, and tireless dedication earned her the deep respect of her colleagues and widespread prestige. In 1974, she was one of only three in the entire county promoted to the rank of Physician (one of the other two was my father). In 1981, she was one of only seven in the county promoted to Attending Physician (again, Father was another — all technical title evaluations in China had been suspended before then). Three days before her death, Mom and her department were simultaneously awarded Provincial Advanced Individual and Advanced Collective honors for family-planning work.

Mom was plagued by illness her entire life — gallstones and filariasis flared up constantly, tormenting her. She underwent two operations for gallstones alone. In October 1983, she began experiencing heartburn and vomiting, but she assumed it was just another gallstone episode. With the year-end family-planning drive in full swing, there was no time for a checkup; she simply gritted her teeth through the pain and worked around the clock. The relentless pace finally broke her on January 4, 1984. After completing an emergency surgery to stop a rural woman's postpartum hemorrhage, Mom collapsed beside the operating table — the pain so severe she could no longer stand.

She went down and could never rise again. Tests revealed late-stage stomach cancer. After she was bedridden, we found a slip of paper in the pocket of her coat, on which she had recorded her workload during those agonizing months. Reading it, we could not hold back our tears. Suffering from a fatal disease, enduring searing pain, Mom had completed a volume of work that would stagger any healthy person. The slip recorded the following:

January to November 1983, inpatient OB/GYN caseload — Hospitalizations: 1,829. Deliveries: 692. Difficult deliveries: 243. Home visits: 38. Emergency rescues: 108. Deaths: 7. Abortions: 799. Late-term abortions: 1,164. Tubal ligations: 466. IUD insertions: 144. IUD removals: 140. (The above excludes ligations performed on trips to communes. The department had only three doctors at the time.)

On March 29, Mom's condition suddenly worsened, and she went into shock. Father sent an urgent telegram to me in Beijing — I had just returned from home — telling me to come back immediately. I caught an express train and arrived home on the afternoon of the 31st. After 48 hours in a coma, when Mom saw me, her eyes miraculously opened, and her pupils began to follow my movements. During that time, her blood pressure and urination even returned to normal. At 9:30 that evening, Mom finally stopped breathing. She had left us forever — left the home she loved, left the work she cherished.

Later, people said that Mom had held on for two extra days just to see me one last time. In truth, on March 29, she already sensed the end was near. She refused to sleep, saying over and over to the family: "I must not sleep. I must not sleep. Once I sleep, I won't wake up again. I won't see you again."

Those words proved prophetic. She had saved countless women from the brink of death, but she could not save herself.

Following her dying wish, we buried Mom beside her mother our Grandma. Mom never had a single day of ease — her entire life was poverty, overwork, and a battle against illness. She struggled so hard to raise us children, and when at last we were grown, she could no longer receive our filial devotion.

Mom suffered too much. She worked herself to death.

At her memorial service, the three of us children wrote this elegy for our mother:

Busy at work, busy at home — busy for thirty years. Hardship for Husband, hardship for children — hardship for a lifetime.

This was the true portrait of Mom's life.

Thirty years forward, a visit to the old home in 2005. The Nanling hospital compound was the place where Mom and Dad raised us, toiling day and night. The old neighbors were still there; the ginkgo tree by our door was still in full leaf. The old house we had lived in, through thirty years of wind and rain, still stood. How much heart and soul Mom poured into that home. I remember, when she was gravely ill in the hospital, she told me she didn't want to stay in the ward — she wanted to go home. That wish could never be fulfilled in her lifetime. Only on the day of her funeral did we escort Mom's urn to pause one last time at the old home, to comfort her spirit in heaven. The back room of the old house was my brother's and my childhood den — on winter mornings, Mom would come early to light a charcoal brazier and warm our clothes before we got up. The old well in the yard bore witness to Mom hauling water day after day; the little bridge recorded her toil washing clothes. Wandering through the old places, searching for Mom's footprints and our childhood memories, I found myself speechless, choked with tears.

Forever remembering my dear mother.

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朝华午拾 · 第七章：永远怀念亲爱的妈妈

妈妈的中年早逝是我心头永远的痛。2005年母亲节，我为妈妈建立"网上纪念堂"，寄托日久弥深的哀思。

妈妈49岁患胃癌去世。这是我一辈子最伤心、不敢回首的日子。妈妈常年劳累过度，可能是诱发她癌症原因之一。发现时已经晚期，维持了三个月就不行了。妈妈一辈子操劳，外婆去世后，三个孩子，全部家务，都落在妈妈身上。工作上压力也不轻，担任县医院妇产科主任，出诊、手术、计划生育，把自己往死里累。去世前，还通过考试，获得主治医师职称，在她的医校同学中，是第一批获得中级职称的。

父母对于儿女，实在不能早走。尽管当年已经24岁了，还是不能接受这一残酷现实。我那时在北京上研究生，暗自哭了整整一年。父母是孩子的天。小时候很怕谈死，也觉得死亡很遥远。妈妈去世，一下子感受到生命的脆弱。听到妈妈癌症确诊消息的那一天，是最黑暗的一天：绝望无助，天地变色。

妈妈于一九三五年阴历四月出生于一个农民家庭，故乡离安徽著名古镇三河约三公里，是舒城、肥西、庐江三县交界处，较为偏僻。我小时候跟父母去三河老家探亲两次，可难哪。千山万水似的，乘汽车，过长江轮渡，转火车，再乘小轮穿过巢湖到三河镇，然后还要步行六里路到村子里。最后那步行，觉得路永远没有尽头。妈妈跟我说，她当年上中学就每天走这条路来回。

冬天在巢湖上坐小轮，完全没有取暖设施，无遮无挡地行驶大半天。湖面过堂风大，天寒地冻，那个冷冻彻骨，现在想起还打寒颤。那个年头冬天奇冷，经常零下7-8度，加上冷风，感觉零下几十度似的。

不过，到了老家过年就热闹了，舅舅姨姨全力款待，有各种美味：咸肉，咸鸭，猪舌条，猪耳朵。记得有一天早上有五香蛋，那个香，吃了还想吃，结果不能节制，一口气吃了8个。才7-8岁吧，真撑坏了。整整两天什么也不能吃，见食品就要吐。

外公外婆共有十个孩子，六男四女，母亲是老七，但是女孩中老大。外公外婆虽在偏僻农村生活，但思想开明，几个男孩都在家种田或做小生意，却把女孩全部送到学堂读书，在当时社会环境下，是十分不易的。

外婆是旧式家庭妇女，善于操持家务，熟悉农计，统率全家，安排日常生活，家庭和睦兴旺。外公为略具文化的士绅，在三河经商，周末回家支派农活，维持一个低水准的小康之家，是艰苦创业的农家典型。靠精打细算省吃俭用，外公在解放前夕买了一批土地。全家日出而作日落而息在田里耕种，梦想着过上小康生活。结果两年后办了个地主的成分，让整个家族成员三十多年生活在阴影中，倍受社会歧视。

妈妈小时候在本村上了几年私塾。私塾先生是位年长远房堂兄，以古文为主，是孔孟教学典型。1950年，妈妈考取了三河中学，与堂兄结伴走读上学，七里地远，风雨霜雪，早出晚归。经常是天亮前出发，天黑后回家，中午吃餐自带的干粮，过着衣食不全的困苦生活。好在外婆可以做鞋补纳，回家勉强充饥，其他一切奢求都舍去。中间贫困辍学一年，跌跌爬爬，终于，1954年毕业，家乡厄遇水灾，一片汪洋。是五舅撑着小木船，直送妹妹去省城考学和上学，省城合肥医校中专（妈妈所念的中校仅七人考出去，妈妈是唯一女生），迈出人生关键的一步。有吃有住，全部免费，捱至1957年9月，毕业分配到南陵县医院，妈妈是南陵县医院第一个由医校毕业分配来的医生。母亲终于从偏远的农村走出成为国家干部，有了自己的收入，虽然微薄但却能承担外公外婆的赡养。

妈妈共生我们兄妹三人，每个相隔两年。据老爸说，妈妈怀我哥六个月的时侯，和爸爸一起被单位派到乡镇农村巡回医疗，挺着大肚子在田埂上奔来奔去，为农民看病治病。由于过度劳累，条件太差和缺乏营养，母亲早产了。我哥提前近三个月，出生在田间。据说生下时，两眼紧闭，也不啼哭，如果不是在医疗队里，在那种条件下我哥是很难活过来的。到妈妈生我时，正逢"三年困难时期"，粮食匮乏，饿殍遍野。爷爷外公姑姑三人都是那个时候在老家活活饿死的（大舅也从农村老家逃荒走失，人间蒸发）。妈妈极度虚弱，领导开恩特批了"半头猪"给产妇，而那滴着盐水的半头猪总重二斤多。

在事业上，妈妈是个强者。她熟练地进行妇产科各项手术。妈妈率先在全地区首创腹膜外剖腹产术。妈妈替人结扎平均每例十分钟，去农村突击计划生育的时候，常常一天结扎七八十例，无一差错。母亲走遍了全县每个大队，为众多女性解除了疾病的痛苦。妈妈高超的医术使得求医者络绎不绝。妈妈后来担任妇产科业务和行政的领导，显示出很高的管理能力。妈妈的热情、干练和刻苦赢得了同事的尊敬，获得很高威望。七四年妈妈是全县首批晋升医师三人中的一个（三人中另一人是我老爸）。八一年妈妈又是全县首批晋升主治医师七人中的一个（七人中另一人也是我父亲，此前中国中断了所有技术职称评定工作）。临终前三天，妈妈与她科室同时获得省计划生育个人和集体先进的嘉奖。

妈妈疾病缠身，胆石症和丝虫病常常发作，折磨一生。仅胆石症就动过两次手术。八三年十月妈妈出现心口痛和呕吐，妈妈以为又是胆石病复发。因为年终计划生育突击工作繁忙，没有时间去检查，就忍着病痛，日以继夜。高强度工作终于使她在八四年元月四日病倒。在坚持完成一个农村妇女产后大出血急症手术后，母亲倒在手术台旁，剧烈疼痛让她无法站立。

妈妈倒下了，再也无法起床。经过检查，妈妈已到胃癌晚期。在她病倒后，我们从她外套口袋里找到一张纸条，上边记载看妈妈病痛这段时间的工作情况，看后不禁泪下。母亲拖着病身，忍着剧痛，完成了常人难以想像的工作。纸条记载如下：八三年一月至十一月妇产科住院部工作：住院1829人，生产692人，难产243人，出诊38次，抢救108次，死亡7人，人流799人，大月份人流1164人，结扎466人，上环144人，取环140人（以上不含到各公社计划生育结扎人数，妇产科当时仅有三个医生）。

妈妈三月二十九日病情加重，突然休克。爸爸急电刚刚返京的我速回，我乘特快三十一日下午回家。妈妈在昏迷四十八小时后，见到我时，眼睛奇迹地睁开了，眼珠也能随着我身影而转动，其间血压，泌尿均恢复正常。晚上九时三十分，妈妈终于停止了呼吸，永远离开了我们，离开了她留恋的这个家，离开了她热爱的工作。

后来有人说，妈妈为了等见上我一面，才多坚持了两天。其实在三月二十九日，妈妈己感觉不好，她坚持不睡觉，反复对家人说："我不能睡，我不能睡，一睡就不会再醒来了，就再也见不到你们了。"

这话果然验证了。她挽救过无数频临死亡的妇女，却不能挽救她自己。

根据妈妈生前遗愿，我们将妈妈安葬在外祖母身旁。妈妈为了我们，没有一天享受过，一生过着清贫劳累和与疾病作斗争的生活。好不容易把孩子拉扯大，她却再也享受不到我们的孝心。

妈妈太苦了，她是累死的。

我们子女三人在母亲追悼会上，为母亲写下了这段挽联：

在班上忙，在班下忙，忙了三十年 为爸爸苦，为子女苦，苦了一辈子

这是妈妈一生真实的写照。

时光倒流三十年，2005老家之行。南陵医院老家是妈妈爸爸辛苦养育我们长大的地方。老邻居仍在，家门口的白果树也依旧枝叶茂盛。我家当年居住的那间老屋，历经三十年风雨，伫立依旧。妈妈当年为这个家付出多少心血。还记得妈妈病重住院时跟我说，不想住病房，想早日回家，可这个愿望妈妈生前无法实现。直到送葬那天，我们才护送妈妈的骨灰盒最后一次在老家停留，安慰妈妈在天之灵。老家的后屋是我们兄弟当年的窝，妈妈冬天清早会过来生一盆火，把衣服烘热，好让我们起床。老家的老井记录了妈妈担水的操劳，老家的小桥刻印着妈妈洗衣的辛苦。重游旧地，寻找妈妈的足迹和我们儿时的记忆，竟无语凝噎。

永远怀念亲爱的妈妈！

记于2005年五月八日

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From 朝华午拾 (Morning Glory at Noon). Original Chinese: 永远怀念亲爱的妈妈.

Morning Glory, Noon Blossom — Chapter 6

In 2007, while on my way back to visit my alma mater in Vancouver, I received word that my father had suffered a sudden major hemorrhage and was hospitalized for emergency surgery. I was on the other side of the world — helpless, unable to be at his bedside, unable to face the storm together with him. I was consumed by guilt.

My father was the pillar of our family, a man who had weathered every storm life threw at him with remarkable grace. He worked tirelessly his entire life, never truly retiring, sustained by his robust constitution and unshakeable optimism.

Dad always looked remarkably young for his age. I remember when I was starting university, he insisted on escorting me all the way to Anqing. We were the Class of '77, the first cohort admitted after the Cultural Revolution — society had accumulated nearly a decade of aspiring college entrants, so the incoming students spanned a wide age range, including the "old high school graduates" from before the turmoil, some 10+ years my senior. Dad accompanied me to the campus clinic for the new-student physical examination. The nurse pointed at Dad and said to me: "One at a time — wait until he's done, then it's your turn." She had mistaken Dad for a freshman, my peer LOL. That was how youthful and spirited he appeared.

Four years later when I graduated, Dad still couldn't rest easy and chose to come to Anqing to pick me up. He stayed on campus for a week, spending his idle hours playing Chinese chess with my "subordinate" — my lower bunkmate Lao Ding, who always called me his "superior." This bunkmate was from the pre-Cultural Revolution cohort, born in 1949, the same year as New China was born. Watching from the sidelines, Dad — who had graduated in the 1950s — truly seemed like one of our classmates, as if he were simply another member of our generation.

With Dad taking care of everything, I didn't have to worry about a thing. He helped pack my luggage, and after bidding farewell to our classmates and teachers one by one, we said goodbye to Anqing, crossing the Yangtze to catch a long-distance bus home. The ferry was delayed, and a quick calculation told us we were cutting it dangerously close. Miss this bus, and we'd have to return to Anqing for another day. Without a word, Dad hoisted every piece of luggage onto his shoulders the moment we stepped off the ferry and sprinted toward the bus station, half a mile away — charging ahead like a young man. And there I was, a strapping 21-year-old, empty-handed, gasping for breath, left far behind by Dad.

Dad never had the chance to attend a full medical college — he studied at a vocational medical school — yet the heights he reached over four decades of surgical practice are achievements few can rival. His secret? Boldness paired with meticulous care, relentless practice, and an unyielding devotion to study. I remember as children, whenever we came home to find our parents gone, we would always head to the operating room. Dad worked over ten hours a day, and at home he would immediately bury himself in medical texts — I rarely saw him rest. Over the years his reputation spread far and wide, and patients came seeking his care in an unending stream. Even when the relatives of the surgery department head at the next higher level of hospital needed an operation, they would come looking for Dad — only his "knife" gave them true peace of mind.

Doctors were respected, but they were also poor. In the Mao era, wages and prices remained frozen for decades. Dad earned 46 yuan a month, Mother 43 — a family income of 89 yuan supporting six people (including my maternal grandmother), enough for subsistence but little else. Life was hard, but we never thought of it that way. To be honest, we never felt hardship — even though at every meal, a household of that size would have just one or two small dishes to share. Everyone was poor, after all, and plenty of people couldn't even get enough rice to eat, surviving on gruel or dried sweet potato. Father's real dilemma was: where could he find the money to buy books? Those hefty medical tomes — Surgery, Orthopedics, and the like — were frightfully expensive, yet absolutely essential for his work. Who could have guessed that many of those books were purchased with blood Dad sold in secret? Three hundred cc of plasma at a time, at 30 yuan per draw — money that ordinarily would have taken six months to scrape together. One time Mom found out and was furious. Dad was so lean; she feared selling blood would ruin his health. But Dad would always say: the human body has its own hematopoietic mechanism — losing a little blood does no harm. And yet, what other option was there? No matter how refined his surgical skill, it couldn't be converted into cash. I remember that for a missed-meal allowance during surgery, the subsidy was just twenty cents — or sometimes they would provide a free bowl of shredded-pork noodle soup instead, which our parents couldn't bear to eat themselves and would bring home for us children.

Every era has its own way of living. Still, the thought of a celebrated physician, a man who pursued surgical excellence with unrelenting dedication, having no means to own medical books except by selling his own blood — such a thing, in all of history and across all nations, could probably only have happened under Mao. But I cannot say Father missed his era. Measured by professional fulfillment and spiritual satisfaction, that particular time and its particular circumstances gave Dad a rare canvas on which to work. A county-level hospital was like a blank sheet of paper, facing an endless stream of rural patients — people who had always lacked access to medical care and who possessed no financial means. Most such patients, if a county hospital could not treat them, would simply be left to live or die at heaven's mercy. Dad was one of the hospital's founders; he had full autonomy, and as much energy as he could muster translated directly into work — for decades, he performed several surgeries almost every day. I once knew a young rural doctor who, unable to find an outlet for his abilities, grew weary of medicine and switched to studying English education. Yet when the topic of Father's surgical skill came up, he was full of admiration: "Do you know? Your father is the most remarkable surgeon in the world. He can perform major operations that many provincial-level hospitals haven't even begun to offer." He explained some cases to me, which I didn't fully understand, but I knew in my heart that Dad was forever surpassing himself, climbing toward ever more complex surgeries. Later, when I asked Dad about it — which difficult operations he still wanted to attempt but couldn't — he said he had basically done everything within reach, but certain procedures, like microsurgery and limb reattachment, required equipment far beyond what a county hospital could provide. That, he could only regret.

Unlike the old bureaucratic establishments where "without money, don't bother entering," back then even impoverished farmers could afford surgery at the grassroots hospitals. As I recall, minor operations (like appendectomies) cost less than 10 yuan, mid-level operations (gastrectomies and the like) a few dozen yuan, and major procedures (heart, brain) just over a hundred. Of course, scraping together even that sum wasn't easy, but most families managed — by tightening their belts or selling the family pots and pans. The truly destitute could apply for assistance at the civil affairs bureau. This aspect of the pre-reform era deserves recognition. The fundamental reason for such low fees, naturally, was rock-bottom costs: doctors were state cadres on fixed salaries, with no additional expenditures.

Speaking of surgery — my own body bears one of Father's "masterpieces." When I was about ten years old, one morning shortly after breakfast, my stomach suddenly began hurting intensely. Dad came to examine me, pressed on my lower right abdomen, and asked if it hurt. "A lot," I said. He suddenly withdrew his hand, and a searing pain shot through me — tears streamed down my face. Father told me this was called "rebound tenderness," the classic sign of acute appendicitis, and said to prepare for surgery. Before noon he was helping me into the operating room. Having grown up watching operations, I knew an appendectomy was minor surgery and I wasn't afraid at all. But when it actually came time to get on the operating table, I absolutely tried to refuse. I mainly suspected a misdiagnosis — that I'd be cut open for nothing. I'd been perfectly fine that morning, had drunk half a bowl of congee, and I often had stomachaches anyway. This time, without any blood tests or other examinations — just a touch of my abdomen — and that was the diagnosis? The outcome, of course, proved my worries unfounded: the removed appendix was swollen like a little carrot, and because the surgery had been timely, it hadn't yet suppurated. Many surgeons refuse to operate on their own family members, fearing they'll be too tense. But Dad didn't trust anyone else and naturally performed the surgery himself, with Mom assisting at his side.

Normally, using conventional spinal or epidural anesthesia would have allowed a relaxed, unhurried procedure, but Dad, wanting to minimize post-operative reactions, insisted on using only local anesthesia. I could clearly perceive every step of the operation. Most appendectomy incisions are several inches long, but Dad made an opening barely an inch or two on my abdomen — so small that after closing, it required only two stitches, just enough to admit a single finger. What's more, unlike most incisions, Dad used a transverse cut, which added considerably to the surgical difficulty. Dad explained that a transverse cut follows the natural grain of the abdominal muscles, so the scar would be barely visible after healing (he was right — I've seen the scars from vertical incisions, which remain thick, red, and prominent long after healing, sitting there quite unsightly). The operation was a complete success: I went home the same day, and by the next day I could get out of bed and walk about gently. That said, there was a stretch during the surgery that truly hurt — I cried and wailed, which put enormous pressure on Dad. That was when he inserted his finger to try to capture the inflamed appendix. Hardly my fault — an inflamed appendix hurts even when you don't touch it. Fortunately, the pain didn't last long before Dad seized hold of it and quickly administered another dose of anesthetic. Later, Dad admitted that despite all his care, the incision point was slightly off, causing me more suffering than necessary. Being slightly off was no big deal; he could have simply enlarged the incision to compensate. But Dad insisted on the smallest possible opening, unwilling to leave me with a permanent large scar. I told this story to my daughter, and when she found my nearly invisible scar, she exclaimed: "Grandpa did a terrific job!" From then on, whenever her stomach hurt, she would cry out in alarm, suspecting appendicitis, and wouldn't rest until I checked that there was no "rebound tenderness." She even said that if she ever got appendicitis, she'd fly back to find her grandpa — she didn't trust American doctors: how many operations could they possibly have done? Grandpa had performed tens of thousands over his lifetime!

(Family Portrait, 1962)

Dad frequently made house calls to rural clinics and farmers' homes (as an obstetrics department head, Mom did the same). When an emergency demanded surgery, no matter the conditions, he would proceed. No electricity? Gather some flashlights, improvise, set up the operating table — saving the life came first. During the factional fighting of the Cultural Revolution in 1967, the two factions held their separate domains, with frequent clashes and occasional face-to-face combat. In the early days of street brawling, the weapons were still steel bars and cleavers; later they escalated to real firearms. The hospital was semi-paralyzed, located in territory controlled by the "Sweep Faction" — a radical mass organization calling itself the "Sweep the Black Line" group. Ideologically, Dad and Mom probably belonged to the moderate loyalist camp ("loyalist" meaning they opposed the purge of veteran cadres) and leaned toward the "Critique Faction" (the "Critique Alliance Group"), which had a loyalist tilt — though they took no part in its ideological or political activities. The Critique Faction's commander-in-chief had once been our neighbor, a strapping man. I remember that after assuming command, he wore a broad belt around his waist with a Mauser pistol holstered at his side — an image of martial splendor. It was this commander who quietly sent men to bring our entire family into the faction's headquarters; they urgently needed skilled medical hands to treat the wounded from the fighting. And so Dad set up a wartime surgical theatre — not unlike Dr. Norman Bethune's field hospital — and saved many lives.

In peacetime, the county hospital's white ambulance carried Dad, Mom, and our childhood to every corner of the county. When destinations were close, they would walk or bicycle to their patients. I remember when I was six or seven, our entire family moved to Hewan, a remote rural town, to support the village hospital for a year. Dad often bicycled out on night calls, sometimes taking me along. The sky was always so dark, and the route invariably passed through one or two cemeteries, the cold wind whistling overhead. Entering a village, we would hear dogs barking in waves. I would hide in Dad's arms on the front seat, often too frightened to open my eyes. After the treatment, beneath the dim glow of an oil lamp, the host would always cook two eggs in brown-sugar water and serve them steaming hot as a token of gratitude. Then, lighting the way with a flashlight, they would see us off — and I would be sound asleep long before we got home.

I was never very robust as a child, but at home I was sensible beyond my years — I would often volunteer to sweep the floor and wash the dishes. At school my grades were good, and I was the delight of my parents' hearts. At every major step of my life, from being sent down to the countryside to the oral examination for college entrance, from university registration to graduation and then graduate school interviews — until I was married and had a family of my own — Dad was always there, escorting and protecting me. Now that Dad had fallen ill, I was in a foreign land, unable even to bring him a cup of tea or water, unable to fulfill the most basic filial duties. Whenever I dwell on this, grief wells up from deep within.

But misfortune can turn into blessing. Dad's sudden illness led to early diagnosis and timely treatment, which was in his favor. What gives me comfort is that Dad received the best possible medical care, and most of the family was at his side looking after him. He recovered swiftly after the surgery, and the strength in his voice reassured everyone.

Dad is now semi-retired at home, still living modestly. He shows none of the signs of a man in his eighties — his life is orderly, his health robust, and he retains an eager curiosity for new things, handling a computer more adeptly than many young people. Beyond effortlessly consulting English-language medical literature, he has built up an English vocabulary over the years through extensive reading that rivals my own, even though I'm a "trained linguist." That his children have each found their own successful path is his greatest comfort. And the little stories of his grandchildren's growing up bring him abundant joy.

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爸爸保重

朝华午拾 · 第六章

2007年我正在回访温哥华母校的路上，得知老爸突然大出血住院，行大手术。我远在天边，爱莫能助。无从床前伺候，共同面对风雨，深感愧疚。

父亲是我们全家的主心骨，大风大浪闯过来，人生很精彩。父亲操劳一辈子，一直退而不休，仗的就是身体好和心态好。

父亲比同龄人显得年轻很多。记得我上大学的时候，父亲不放心，一路送我到安庆。我们77级是文革后第一届大学生，社会上积压了近10年的高考大军，所以新生的岁数相差很大，包括一批被文革耽误的老三届高中生，比我年长10岁左右。父亲陪我到学校医务处做新生体检，护士指着我跟父亲说：一个一个来，等他检查完了，你再来。她把父亲当作新生了，可见父亲的年轻精神。

四年以后我毕业了，父亲还是不放心，来安庆接我，在学院住了一周，没事就跟我的"老下级"（我的下铺，因此总叫我"老上级"）下象棋。老下级是老三届，49年生人，与新中国同岁。从旁观看，50年代就毕业的父亲真地象我们同学一样，仿佛我们中的一员。

有父亲照顾，我什么都不操心。父亲帮助把行李打包，我们与同学老师一一道别，就跟安庆说再见了，过江去赶长途公共汽车回家。轮渡误点了，一算时间非常紧张，一旦错过这班车，就不得不回安庆又耽搁一天。父亲二话不说，下了轮渡，把大小行李扛上，冲也似地往一两里外的汽车站赶，跟个小伙子一样。可怜我21岁正当年，空着手却气喘吁吁，被父亲远远抛在后面。

爸爸没有机会进入医学院，上的是医专，可他行医四十年所取得的成就，达到的高度，是常人难以企及的。靠的是，胆大心细，勤于实践，刻苦钻研。记得我们小时候，回家不见父母，总是到手术室去找。爸爸每天工作十多个小时，回家也是一头扎到医书里，很少见他休息。多年下来，名震四方，求医者络绎不绝。甚至上一级医院外科主任的亲属需要手术，也来找爸爸"这把刀"才觉得放心。

医生受人尊敬，但却是清贫的。在毛泽东时代，工资和物价均几十年不动。爸爸46元，妈妈43元，家庭收入89元一月，维持一家六口（加上外祖母）温饱，难有积余。生活苦点，倒也无所谓。其实我们从来也没有觉得苦，尽管每餐饭，一大家人才有一两碟小菜。反正大家都苦，还有很多人吃不饱饭，只能喝粥、吃红薯干呢。爸爸的难题是，到哪里去攒买书的钱呢？那些大厚本的专业书籍《外科学》、《骨科学》等，定价不菲，却是工作必不可少的。谁能想到，许多医书是爸爸瞒着家人卖血换来的。一次300cc血浆，当时的价格30元，这可是平时半年也难攒下的钱啊。有一次，妈妈发现以后非常生气。爸爸很清瘦，担心他卖血损害了身体。可爸爸总是说，人有造血机制，失点血无碍。不过，除此之外，还有别的办法么？医术再精湛，也变不了钱。记得手术误餐，当时的补贴也才两角，或者供应一碗免费肉丝面（爸爸妈妈舍不得吃，常常带回家给我们孩子吃）。

一个时代，一种活法。可是，一个享有盛誉、对医术精益求精的医生非卖血不能拥有医书，这样的事古今中外，大概也只有毛时代了。不能说，爸爸没有赶上好时代，从事业的追求和精神的满足看，那个特定的时代特定的条件，给爸爸一个难得的施展空间。基层县医院象一张白纸，面对的是源源不断的一向缺医少药、经济能力匮乏的农村患者。多数这样的患者基层医院不能救治，也就只好自生自灭，听天由命了。爸爸是医院的开创者之一，有充分自主权，有多大精力就有多少工作，几十年来几乎每天都有几台手术。我当年认识一位农村青年医生，由于不能施展，而厌倦行医，转报英文师专，当谈起爸爸的医术，却充满钦佩："你知道么？你爸爸是世界上最了不起的医生。许多省立大医院尚未开展或普及的大手术，你爸爸也能做。"他给我讲解一些案例，我也不懂，但是心里明白，爸爸一直在超越自己，向越来越复杂的手术攀登。后来，跟爸爸谈起来，还有哪些疑难手术，想做而做不成。爸爸说，能做的差不多都做了，但是有些手术，比如显微外科，断肢再植等，对于器械要求太高，县医院没有这种条件，只好遗憾了。

跟"有理无钱莫进来"的衙门不同，当年在基层医院贫苦农民也能开得起刀：印象中小手术（阑尾摘除等）收费不到10元，中等手术（胃切除等）收费几十元，大手术（心脏、脑等）也不过百元。当然，凑足这钱也不容易，但是为看病节衣缩食，或砸锅卖铁，多数人还是想出了办法。对于特困户，可以到民政局申请补助。改开前时代的这一点，还是值得称颂的。收费低廉的根本原因，当然是成本底：医生是国家干部，拿固定工资，没有额外支出。

说到手术，我的身上也留有爸爸的"杰作"。我十岁左右，有一天早饭不久，突然肚子疼得厉害。爸爸过来检查，按住右小腹，问疼不疼，我说，"很疼"。他突然把手抽回，我一阵剧痛，眼泪都出来了。爸爸告诉我，这叫"反跳痛"，是急性阑尾炎的典型症状，说准备开刀，不到中午就扶我进了手术室。从小看惯了开刀，知道阑尾摘除是小手术，我一点也不怕。可真要上手术台了，我却怎么也不愿意。主要是怀疑弄错了，白挨刀了。早上还是好好的，喝了半碗粥，我平时也常闹肚子疼，这次，也没有验血或做其他检查，摸摸小腹，就这样确诊了？结果自然是我多虑，割下的阑尾肿得象棵小胡萝卜头，因为手术及时，还没有化脓。不少外科大夫不给自己亲人开刀，怕太紧张。可爸爸不放心别人，理所当然亲自动手，妈妈在旁做助手。本来，如果使用常规腰麻或硬膜外麻醉，也可从容不迫，但爸爸为了术后反应小，坚持只使用局部麻醉，我能清楚知道手术的每一个过程。多数同类手术刀口总有几寸，可爸爸只给我开了一条一两公分的小口子（关腹后只缝了两针），刚够伸进一个手指。这还不算，跟多数刀口不同，爸爸用的是横切，这更增添了手术难度。爸爸说，横切符合人的腹部的自然纹路，愈合后刀疤不显（确实如此，我见过其他竖切手术的刀痕，愈合后很久仍然粗粗红红地立在那儿，很难看）。这次手术很成功，我当天回家，第二天就可下床轻微走动。不过，手术中有一阵确实很疼，我大哭大叫，给爸爸增加了很大压力。那是爸爸伸进手指试图捞取发炎的阑尾时。也不怪，阑尾发炎，不碰它尚且疼痛得很呢。好在疼得时间不长，爸爸就逮住了它，赶紧补上一针麻醉。后来，爸爸说，尽管费了心思，下刀之处还是略偏了点，使我多受了一些苦。偏一点没关系，如果把刀口加大点，也好办，可爸爸坚持尽可能小的口子，不愿意让我落下一个永久的大疤痕。我把这个故事讲给女儿听，她找到我的几乎看不见了的刀口，惊叹："Grandpa did a terrific job!"。从此，她肚子一疼，就大叫，怀疑得了阑尾炎，非让我检查发现没有"反跳痛"才安心。还说，她要是得了阑尾炎，就飞回去找爷爷，可信不过美国的大夫：他们才开过几个刀，我爷爷一辈子开刀何止成千上万！

爸爸常常出诊到农村医院和农民家中（作为妇产科主任，妈妈也一样）。遇到急诊需要手术，不管什么条件，也要进行。没有电，就集中一些手电筒，因陋就简，搭起手术台，救命要紧。文革武斗那年（1967年），两派割据，常有摩擦，亦有短兵相接的时候：初期街头械斗，用的还是钢钎菜刀之类，后期可用上了真枪真炮。医院处于半瘫痪状态，并且地处"扫派"（叫"扫黑线"，一激进派群众组织）掌控辖区。爸爸妈妈思想上大概属于温和保皇派（"保皇"即反对揪斗老干部），倾向有保皇色彩的"批派"（叫"批联部"），但并不参与其意识形态和政治生活。批派的总司令曾是我家的邻居叔叔，身材魁伟。印象中担任司令以后，他腰扎宽皮带，挎盒子枪，好不英武威风。是总司令派人悄悄把我们全家请到这一派的大本营里，他们急需医疗好手救治武斗中的伤员。于是爸爸搭起战时手术台，就跟白求恩的战地医院似的，也救了不少人的命。

和平岁月，县医院那辆白色救护车，载着爸爸妈妈和我们的童年跑遍了全县每一个角落。如果路近，也步行或骑自行车出诊。记得我六七岁的时候，全家去偏远乡镇河湾，支援农村医院一年。爸爸晚上经常骑车出诊，有时也带着我。天总是那样黑，也总要经过一两个墓地，头顶冷风飕飕。进入村子，总有此起彼伏的狗吠声。我躲在车前座爸爸怀中，常常不敢睁开眼睛。看完病，在昏黄的油灯下，主人总要用红糖水煮两个鸡蛋，热气腾腾端上来，款待我们。然后，照着手电，送我们上路，而我不等到家，就已经睡熟了。

我从小身体不大好，小时候在家很懂事的样子，常主动要求扫地洗碗，在学校成绩也好，很讨爸爸妈妈的欢心和疼爱。直到结婚成家前，我生活的每一大步，从下乡插队到高考口试，从大学报到到毕业离校再到研究生面试，都有父亲陪同呵护。如今父亲病倒了，我却远在异国他乡，不能端茶递水，略尽孝道。每念及此，不由得悲从中来。

坏事变好事，父亲这次急病倒下，对病情的早期诊断和及时治疗有利。得以宽心的是，父亲得到了最好的医疗条件，家人也多在身边照顾。父亲术后恢复很快，说话很有底气，全家人都松了口气。

爸爸现在半退休在家，依旧清贫。一点不象80多岁的老人，生活有条不紊，身体健康，仍保持对新事物的好学之心，电脑玩得比许多年轻人还熟。除了熟练查阅英文专业资料外，长年博文强识，普通词汇量跟我这英语"科班"出身的也有一比。子女各自发展，是他最大的安慰。孙儿辈的成长花絮，更给他带来欢乐。

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From 朝华午拾. Original Chinese: 爸爸保重.

Nearly half a century has passed since my grandmother left us, yet her gentle, kindly face still often comes to mind.

My parents, both doctors, were far too busy with their work. So when their first child was born, Grandmother came to help — and from that day forward, she looked after us three children for fifteen years, until the day she died. I'm told my elder brother was a restless infant. Grandma had to rock his cradle without a moment's pause, humming lullabies the whole time. If she nodded off for even a second and the rope to the cradle went slack, he would wail at the top of his lungs. She later said that child wore her out so thoroughly that she was still anxious when I arrived two years later. But to her surprise, I turned out to be a remarkably quiet baby — I never cried at all. The trouble with me was that I was pitifully frail, constantly falling ill. Every sickness brought vomiting, often with high fever. I had night blindness too, and worst of all, a rectal prolapse that made every trip to the toilet agonizing and messy. Grandma would have to carefully push the prolapse back in each time. She had given birth to ten children in her lifetime, more than half of whom had died young. Looking at me, she worried constantly that I wouldn't survive either. Fortunately, being born into a doctor's family meant I received prompt treatment whenever I fell ill, and with Grandma's devoted care, I slowly made it through my sickly childhood. A child blessed with a grandmother's care is a fortunate child. Grandma kept our home immaculate and orderly, with hot meals always ready. Our childhood was carefree, and our parents, freed from domestic worries, could pour themselves completely into their work, day and night.

Grandma was a woman of the old order — she had bound feet, had never been to school, spoke little, and possessed a gentle disposition. I never once saw her lose her temper. For over a decade, her life followed the same steady rhythm: she never left the house, diligent and unassuming, asking nothing of the world, and all our neighbors sang her praises. Every morning before dawn, Grandma would rise, wash, and dress herself with care — always neat and tidy as she began the day's work. Looking after the children, cooking, never a moment's rest. In her rare spare time, she would sit by the door and stitch shoe soles. She would paste together scraps of cloth, dry them in the sun, then sew them with endless stitches into firm, solid soles — every cloth shoe our whole family wore was made by her hands. After she passed, she left behind a large box of soles that we continued to wear for years, until eventually we began buying plastic-soled shoes instead.

Each month, my parents gave Grandma three yuan as pocket money for us children. She was tight-fisted with it — she had to make it last all three children to the end of the month. I remember I could coax two or three fen out of her each day, and I would often go to the street vendor to buy a small steaming hot sweet potato, then come home and share it with my little sister. I told this story to my daughter, and she loved it — she brings it up now and then with a laugh: "When you were my age, sweet potato was only two cents a piece, and you always asked Granny — that's my Great Granny — for two cents to buy one and share with my auntie GuGu, but never with my uncle DaBai."

I remember during the mass travel of the Cultural Revolution, my father and mother joined the tide and went to Shanghai and Hangzhou for over a week. When transportation broke down and they couldn't get home on time, Grandma was left alone with the three of us. Every day the loudspeakers in the street blared out chaotic news — it felt like the world was falling apart. In those days there was no way to get word of travelers' whereabouts, and the whole household waited with straining eyes. Grandma grew desperate and began to weep. When we children saw her crying, we all cried too — young and old alike, terrified of losing our anchor, weeping together in a heap. Even the neighbors wept with us.

The second year of the Cultural Revolution, because Grandma was classified as a "landlord" by origin, the hospital's Rebel faction ordered her to stand in the street every day, hanging a sign around her neck that read "Counter-Revolutionary Landlord Woman." Poor Grandma, trembling on her bound feet, forced to endure such humiliation. This left a deep wound on us children — we simply could not reconcile our kind, gentle grandma with the image of a hated landlord's wife. Fortunately, my parents sensed things were turning dangerous and quickly decided to send Grandma back to her home village to hide. They specially asked Uncle Xu, our family's most trusted friend and a three-generation "poor peasant", to escort her on the journey. When Uncle Xu returned, he told us that Grandma could not comprehend what was happening, and could not bear to leave the three grandchildren. Heartbroken and wronged, she wept the entire way. They traveled by bus, crossed a river by ferry, transferred to a train, then took a small steamer across Lake Chao — and finally had to walk ten li on foot to reach the village. That last walk took an entire day, and she nearly collapsed from exhaustion.

It was a blessing that Grandma was sent home when she was, because the situation soon deteriorated dramatically — armed factional fighting broke out. First, the young Red Guard factions — the "Criticize the Liaison Group" and the "Sweep Away the Black Line Group" — fought street battles with steel spikes and daggers. One clash took place right in front of our house. I remember we were terrified and fascinated at once. We children climbed up to the second story of one of the courtyard houses and watched through the street-facing window. I was timid; I only stole one glance — I saw the two sides facing off with steel pikes — then heard shouts of slogans and the sounds of combat. This was just the early phase of the armed struggle. Later, the two factions set up separate territories and began using real guns and cannons; we would often hear gunfire at night. Our whole family was secretly moved to the headquarters of the "Criticize the Liaison Group", and my parents became the core doctors at that faction's wartime hospital.

When the "Revolutionary Great Alliance" was formed and the factional fighting stopped, my mother brought Grandma back, and we resumed our daily life together. In the months Grandma had been gone, when we came home from school, the door was always locked. We wore keys around our necks and often had to go to the operating room to find our parents and wait until they finished surgery before we could go home. Only when Grandma returned did the house feel like a home again — life became settled and ordered.

Two photos capture this chapter in our family story. The first shows Grandma as I remember her — serene, dignified, in a traditional collar. The second is a family portrait from 1969: all of us, including Grandma and our young aunt, along with our dearest neighbors Mama He and Sister Xiaohui, gathered before the front door of our home.

I was thirteen when Grandmother developed oral cancer — a tumor the size of a goose egg swelled on her right cheek. When it first appeared, we children would often stroke it gently with our small hands, hoping it would slowly disappear. But the tumor only grew larger. Grandma herself said: "This is a poison tumor — I may not recover." In her final days, my uncle and cousin both came from the home village; it was my uncle who mainly tended her bedside. I heard Grandma murmur, "My children are all here now. It's time to go."

When Grandma died, the record said she was seventy-one, but her real age was probably sixty-nine. I remember she once told me she had added two years to her age, adopting my grandfather's age, as a way to remember him. My grandfather had died of starvation in the home village the year I was born, in 1960 — just like my paternal grandfather and my aunt on Dad's side, a victim of the Great Leap Forward. Grandmother never spoke of my grandfather's story, but you could see that she carried his memory with her, silently, in her heart, all those years.

— Written on September 22, 2007, on the eve of the Mid-Autumn Festival

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外婆的回忆

我的外婆去世已经快半个世纪年了，可她老人家的慈祥音容仍时常浮现在眼前。

作为医生的父母工作太忙，所以第一个孩子一出生外婆就来帮忙，从此看顾我们三个孩子15年，直到她去世。据说我哥哥小时候不老实，外婆只好摇着摇篮，哼着催眠曲，不敢稍有懈怠，有时候一个瞌睡过去，摇篮牵绳的手一停，他便大哭大闹。外婆说，这孩子带得太辛苦，到两年后我出生的时候，她还后怕。没想到，我小时候乖极了，从不哭闹。就是可怜兮兮的，老害病，每病必吐，常伴有高烧。还有夜盲症，最要命的是脱肛的毛病，每次如厕十分痛苦，一片狼藉，外婆要小心翼翼把脱肛顶回去。外婆一辈子生养过10个儿女，夭折过半，看我这样子，老担心我活不长。还好，因为是医生家庭，有病能及时处理，加上外婆的悉心照看，我慢慢度过了病孱的童年。有外婆照顾的孩子是幸福的，外婆总是把家整理得井井有条，热饭热菜，我们的童年无忧无虑，父母也因此可以没日没夜全力扑在工作上。

外婆是旧式妇女，小脚，没念过书，少言寡语，性情温和，从来没见过她发脾气。外婆的生活十几年如一日，足不出户，刻苦本分，与世无争，街坊邻居无不夸赞。每天一大早，天还没亮，外婆就起床，开始梳洗，她总是把自己收拾得干干净净，开始一天的劳作。看孩子，做饭菜，一刻不停。稍有空闲，她就坐在门前纳鞋底。她把碎布条用浆糊黏上晒干，一针一线纳成结结实实的鞋底，我们全家大小的布鞋都是她老人家做的。一直到她去世，留下的一大箱鞋底，我们还穿了好几年，后来才开始买塑料底的成品鞋穿。

父母每个月给外婆三块钱，作为我们孩子的零用钱。外婆手很紧，因为她要保证这零用钱维持三个孩子到月底。记得每天可以从外婆那里讨来两三分钱，我常常到街头买来一个热腾腾的小红薯头，回家跟小妹分享。这个故事我跟女儿讲，她很爱听，不时拿出来说笑一番：when you were my age, sweet patato was only two cents a piece and you always asked Granny, that is my Great Granny, for two cents to buy one and share with my antie GuGu, but never with my uncle DaBai.

记得文革初期大串联的时候，爸爸妈妈也随大流去上海杭州串联了一个多星期，由于交通堵塞不能按时回家。外婆带我们三个孩子在家，每天听高音喇叭传出各种消息，给人兵荒马乱的感觉。当年通讯不便，行踪无从打听，一家大小望眼欲穿久等父母不回。外婆急了，开始垂泪，我们孩子看见外婆哭了，也都哭了，一家老小怕失去依靠而哭成一团，连邻居也陪着掉泪。

文革第二年，外婆由于地主成分，被医院造反派勒令每天挂"反革命地主婆子"的牌子站街示众。可怜外婆小脚，哆哆嗦嗦，却要受此羞辱。这对我们孩子刺激很大，我们无论如何也无法把慈祥的外婆跟可恶的地主婆联系起来。还好，父母感觉形势不对，很快决定送外婆回乡下老家躲避，特地请我们家的至交三代老贫农的徐叔叔一路护送。徐叔叔回来说，外婆无法理解发生的一切，又舍不得三个孙儿，委屈伤心，走一路哭一路。乘汽车，过轮渡，转火车，再乘小轮穿过巢湖，最后要步行10里才到老家。最后那步行，走了一整天，人几乎瘫软。

幸亏送外婆回了老家，后来的情势越来越遭，武斗开始了。先是两派小将（"批联部"和"扫黑线"）拿钢钎匕首在街头械斗。有一场械斗就在我家门前，还记得我们又害怕又好奇，几个孩子爬到院子里一家的二楼上，透过临街的窗户观战。我胆子小，只瞄了一眼，看见双方手拿钢钎对峙的样子，然后听到口号声和厮杀声。这还是武斗初期，后来双方割据，拿起了真枪真炮，常常夜里听到枪响。我们全家也被秘密转移到批联部的司令部去了，我父母因此成了批派战时医院的核心医生。

革命大联合的时候，武斗停止，妈妈把外婆接回来了，我们恢复了跟外婆朝夕相处的日子。外婆没来的时候，我们放学回家，家里总是锁着门，我们脖子上挂着钥匙，常常要到手术室去找父母，等父母手术完回家。外婆来了，家才象个家，生活安定而有秩序。

全家包括外婆和老姨，以及邻居至友何妈妈小卉姐在家门前合影，1969

我13岁那年，外婆患口腔癌，右腮长出鹅蛋大一个瘤子。记得瘤子刚起的时候，我们经常用小手抚摸，希望它慢慢消失。可是，那瘤子还是越长越大，外婆自己也说：这是个毒瘤子，怕好不了了。外婆临终前，舅舅和表哥都从老家赶来，最后几天主要是舅舅在床前伺候。我听外婆喃喃说，儿女都在身边，该走了。

外婆去世那年说是71岁，可实际年龄应该是69。我记得外婆生前跟我说过，她虚报了两岁，用的是外公的年龄，为的是做个纪念。外公在我出生的1960年，在老家饿死，跟我爷爷和姑姑一样成为大跃进的殉葬品。外婆虽然从来没有提过外公的故事，可以看出她一直默默在心中纪念着他。

记于2007年九月二十二日中秋节前夕

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From 朝华午拾. Original Chinese: 《朝华之五：外婆的回忆》.

 

Morning Glory — Ch.3: The Little Red Guards

Before my career began, family and society shaped our character and worldview. 

**"Forever Be Chairman Mao's Little Red Guard"**

When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, I was in the first grade, six years old. More than half a century later, some memories remain as vivid as yesterday.

The three of us siblings, wearing our Little Red Guard armbands, photographed in December 1966.

When the campaign to topple Liu Shaoqi began, the first thing I noticed was Liu's official portrait pasted upside down on the street-facing wall, marked with a red cross. Soon after, more and more long banners appeared across the main street: "Burn Liu Shaoqi!" "Deep-fry Liu Shaoqi!" Then, as negative teaching material, they screened the documentary *Liu Shaoqi Visits Indonesia*. The female narration was syrupy sweet, addressing him as "Chairman Liu" and "Jakarta" in every other breath — to my ears, she sounded like a female spy. Her voice was constantly drowned out by the slogans erupting from the audience: "Down with Liu Shaoqi, Defend Chairman Mao!" "Smash the arch-traitor, arch-spy, arch-scab Liu Shaoqi to the ground and trample him underfoot, never to rise again!" Wang Guangmei on screen was dressed conspicuously well, fitting the standard definition of a bourgeois stinking woman. Later, I saw several living newspaper dramas lampooning Liu — his features caricatured into a long horse face, a high-bridged nose, the classic villain's profile. I also remember a living newspaper piece called *Burning Down the British Chargé d'Affaires Office*, which portrayed the Capital Red Guards, righteous in their fury at British imperialism, acting with militant resolve to set fire to the British Embassy — an act of collective heroism (in reality, this was an extremely serious diplomatic incident that caused Zhou Enlai immense trouble and lasting fallout). I still recall the stage effect when they set the fire: they seemed to hurl a torch into the embassy, followed by a loud bang and a plume of thick smoke. I was in the front row and choked on the smoke, coughing hard, and I was genuinely startled. The artistic creativity of the revolutionary masses, producing such vivid stage realism, left a deep imprint on the mind of a six-year-old me.

Around this time came the campaign to "Destroy the Four Old's" (old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits) and establish the Four New's. Every household voluntarily surrendered items suspected of being "Four Old's" — copper coins, bracelets, ornaments, even ceramic toys of cats and dogs — to be publicly destroyed. The stone lions beside the stone bridge were toppled into the ditch by the young Red Guards; since they couldn't be smashed, chisels were used to disfigure them. The influence spread far: by early 1967, a "Revolutionary Spring Festival" was mandated. Adults had no holiday — they must persist in "grasping revolution and promoting production" — while all New Year celebrations and entertainments were cancelled. Even the traditional four-corner red envelope money for children was voluntarily suspended.

Some elderly people, lifelong habits unbroken, still called matches "foreign fire" and iron nails "foreign nails." These old terms originated in the pre-revolutionary era when China could not even produce matches and nails domestically and had to import them. But by 1966, such old terms could bring trouble. I once saw a tiny-footed old woman totter into a small shop and ask for "foreign fire." The shop assistant replied coldly: "Don't have any." When the old woman pointed to the goods on the counter, the assistant erupted in fury.

Before armed struggle erupted, great debates — the weapon of literary struggle — became prevalent. Even elementary school students debated each other, often turning red in the face. I was too young to get a word in, but I loved listening. What they debated I mostly can't recall, except for one recurring topic: the dialectical relationship between family background and individual performance. The affirmative position was "Heroes beget heroes," while the opposition stressed "What matters is personal conduct." Both sides seemed righteous and indignant, both could quote Chairman Mao's quotations, both seemed to have good arguments. Later, my elder brother took the lead in forming a Little Red Guard revolutionary organization (with a fifth-grader serving as strategist behind the scenes), calling it the "Dagger Squad." Every grade had its representatives. Through this connection, I too was honorably swept up in the revolutionary movement — duties like carrying the paste bucket for the young fighters putting up big-character posters. I remember my brother and his comrades setting up a "Dagger Squad Office" at a table in the corridor of my father's hospital. The squad's most glorious exploit, the one I remember most clearly, was an assault on a school meeting. The squad learned that the school leadership was holding a faculty meeting at seven in the evening and decided on a surprise raid. I had the good fortune to follow my brother on this revolutionary action. I remember the meeting was in progress when the squad burst into the room, shouting: "What kind of black meeting are you holding here?" The leaders, seeing it was a bunch of children, didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and explained that this was a routine school affairs meeting. The squad leader declared: "Then we're attending too." Some leader apparently advised that a work meeting wasn't convenient for students. That set off an explosion. The young fighters, each more righteous than the last, delivered their rebuttals: We are Chairman Mao's Little Red Guards — if we don't attend, who will? You hold black meetings behind the backs of the revolutionary young fighters — how poisonous your intentions must be! Not only will we attend, we demand you honestly hand over all previous meeting records. If you dare not disclose your meeting records, you must have unspeakable criminal aims, and we will rebel against you. And so on. I remember the school leaders finally conceded, agreeing that young fighter representatives could attend all faculty meetings. I was as excited as everyone else, filled with the pride of this initial victory in struggle. Unfortunately, I suffered from night blindness at the time, and on the way back my vision went completely dark. An older girl from a higher grade held my hand and walked me home (my brother, as rebel leader, stayed behind to discuss the next phase of the struggle strategy). This revolutionary action enormously boosted the young fighters' morale and opened the prelude to rebellion against the elementary school leadership, soon followed by a flood of big-character posters exposing the schemes of the capitalist-roaders.

In the early days of the Great Revolution, the three of us siblings, led by our brother every day, would stand before the Precious Book platform for morning pledges and evening reports — earnest and ceremonial, and we kept it up for a long time.

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朝华午拾 · 红小兵

职业生涯之前，家庭和社会塑造了我们性格和世界观。父母是天，兄妹是我的依靠和牵挂。

"永做毛主席的红小兵"

一九六六年文革开始的时候，我在小学一年级，六岁。半个多世纪了，有些记忆依然清晰如昨。

兄妹仨臂佩红小兵袖章摄于文革1966年12月8日。

打倒刘少奇的时候，最先是看到临街墙上把刘主席的标准像倒贴过来，打上红叉。后来，看到越来越多的长幅标语在大街上，"火烧刘少奇"，"油炸刘少奇"。接着，作为反面教材，放映了纪录片《刘少奇访问印度尼西亚》，片子里面的女音讲解，甜腻腻的，一口一个刘主席和雅加达，当时听起来觉得象女特务，不断被场内此起彼伏的口号声淹没："打倒刘少奇，保卫毛主席！""把大叛徒、大内奸、大工贼刘少奇打翻在地，并踏上一只脚，叫他永世不得翻身！"电影上的王光美，打扮得很光鲜，符合资产阶级臭婆娘的标准定义。再后来，看到过几个批判刘少奇的活报剧，刘的形象被脸谱化，马脸，高鼻子，一副奸臣像。记得同时还有一个活报剧《火烧英国代办处》，演的是首都红卫兵，对英帝国主义义愤填膺，同仇敌忾，机智果断纵火焚烧英国大使馆的光荣业绩（这是一起非常严重的外交事件，给周恩来的工作带来很多麻烦和后遗症）。还记得，舞台上演纵火时的场面，好像是把火把往使馆内一扔，砰一声炸响，一股浓烟就冒出来，我在前排，呛得直咳嗽，也吓了一大跳。革命群众的艺术创造力所造成的舞台逼真效果，在一个六岁孩子幼小的心灵里刻下了深深的印记。

这前后的破"四旧"（旧思想、旧文化、旧风俗、旧习惯），立四新，我们各家各户主动把涉嫌四旧的物品，比如，铜钱、手镯、装饰品，甚至小猫小狗的瓷玩具，统统缴公销毁。石桥旁的石头狮子也被红卫兵小将推倒在河沟，因为实在砸不烂，就用凿子破相。影响所及，67年初要求"过革命化的春节"，大人没有节假，坚持抓革命、促生产，同时取消了所有过年的庆祝和消遣活动，连四角压岁钱也自觉停止发放了。

当时有些老人一辈子的习惯改不了，仍然称火柴为"洋火"，铁钉为"洋钉"等。老称呼源于旧中国日常生活品连火柴和铁钉都无力生产，需要进口。可是到了66年，这些旧称呼会带来麻烦。我就看到过小脚老太太颤颤巍巍到小卖店要买"洋火"，营业员冷冷一句："没有"。当老人指着柜台里面的商品，营业员就大发雷霆。

武斗开始之前，用于文斗的大辩论开始盛行，连小学生也互相辩论，往往争得面红耳赤。我太小插不上嘴，但是很愿意旁听。辩论什么大多记不清了，但是有一个题目是反复辩论过的：家庭出身和自我表现的辩证关系。正方的论点是"老子英雄儿好汉"，反方强调"重在个人表现"。感觉双方都义正词严，都懂得引用毛主席语录，似乎哪一方都很有道理。

后来，我哥哥领头成立红小兵革命组织（背后有个五年级的孩子做军师），叫"匕首小分队"，其中各年级都有代表。由于这层关系，我也光荣卷入革命运动，比如给贴大字报的小将提浆糊筒之类。我印象我哥哥一伙还在我父亲的医院走廊尽头，摆了张桌子，设立了"匕首小分队"办事处。小分队的光荣事迹记得最清楚的，是一次大闹会场的事件。小分队得知晚上七点学校领导开教务会议，于是决定来个突然袭击。我有幸跟着哥哥参加了这一革命行动。记得会议进行中，小分队一行冲进屋内，叫道："你们这是开的什么黑会？"领导看是一帮孩子，哭笑不得，解释说，这是例行的校务工作会议。分队头头说："那我们也要参加"。好像是某领导劝告说，工作会议，学生参加不方便。这一下炸了窝，小将们个个义正词严予以驳斥：我们是毛主席的红小兵，我们不参加谁参加？你们背着革命小将开黑会，用心何其毒也。我们不但要参加，还要你们老实交出以前会议的所有记录。你们不敢公开会议记录，就肯定有不可告人的罪恶目的，我们就要造你们的反。诸如此类。记得校领导最后让步，同意小将可以派代表参加所有校务会议。我跟大家一样兴奋，充满了斗争初步胜利的豪情。不过，倒霉的是我当时患有夜盲症，回来路上，两眼一片漆黑，是由一位高年级大姐姐，牵着我手送我回家的（哥哥作为造反派头头留下来商量下一步的斗争策略）。这次革命行动极大地鼓舞了小将的斗志，拉开了向小学领导造反的序幕，紧接着是铺天盖地的揭露走资派阴谋的大字报。

大革命初期，我们兄妹三每天在哥哥带领下，在宝书台前，早请示，晚汇报，煞有介事，坚持了很久。

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From 朝华午拾. Original Chinese: 《朝华之三: 红小兵》.

A Scholarly Family

Ever since Qu Yuan, Chinese literati have been fond of tracing their ancestry to illustrious roots — "descendant of Gaoyang the Divine Emperor" and such declarations — to signal their noble bloodlines. When I was compiling and editing A Collection of Master Li's Posthumous Writings: Prefaces, I came across this passage in the first piece, "Preface to the Li Family Genealogy," explaining the origin of the family name Li:

"The forerunners of the Li clan, surnamed Ying, traced their descent from Gaoyang of the Zhuanxu lineage. One descendant, Gao Yao, served as Grand Justice (Dali) under Emperor Yao, and the family adopted 'Li' (理, meaning 'principle' or 'justice') as their surname from the title. During the reign of King Zhou of Shang, a descendant named Li Zhen fled with his mother to the lost land of Yihou. Starving, they survived by eating plums (李, li) from the trees. To evade King Zhou's persecution, they changed their surname from 理 (Justice) to the homophonous 李 (Plum), and their descendants have borne this name ever since."

In my earlier, more perfunctory readings of the Posthumous Writings, I had mostly skipped Master Li's abstruse classical prose, drawn instead to the more accessible "modern writings" of my two granduncles in the appendix. As a result, I never registered this origin story. But my daughter once asked me: "Dad, you said our family name Li means plum — how come? Does that mean we Li family like plums in particular?" I had no idea whether the surname Li was actually connected to the fruit, so I dodged the question and told little Tiantian instead that statistically, Li had risen to become the most common surname in China — and perhaps the world. Even in our tiny Buffalo office there were two Uncle Li's — one of Korean descent. But eight hundred years ago, we were all one family.

Master Li's own account of this family history — the fall from officialdom, the change from 理 to 李, the "pointing at the tree and taking its name" — struck me as too sparse. So I searched online and found a fuller treatise, On Gao Yao, Blood Ancestor of the Li Surname. It turned out that the primogenitor Gao Yao served Emperor Yao and Shun as Grand Justice — a minister of incorruptible integrity, whose achievements in statecraft were so esteemed that Emperor Shun personally named him his successor. Even Confucius honored him as one of the Four Sages of antiquity. In ancient China, officials took their office titles as surnames, hence 理氏 (the Li of Justice). Tragically, Sage Gao Yao died before ascending the throne. Generations later, under the depraved King Zhou of Shang, a descendant named Li Zheng served as Grand Justice with the same upright character — and for his honesty, the debauched king had him executed. His wife Qihe fled with their young son Lizhen to the lost land of Yihou (in present-day Henan). Starving, they spotted fruit on a tree and ate to survive. Afraid of the king's pursuers, Lizhen dared not keep the surname 理. In gratitude for the "wood-seed" (muzi, 木子 — the character parts that combine to form 李) that saved them, he changed the family name to Li. From this seed, the Li lineage — the largest family name under heaven — branched and flourished across generations.

I told my daughter: not only do we come from a scholarly family, we are the direct descendants of Sage Gao Tao himself.

Master Li — Li Xiansheng, courtesy name Xuexiang — was my great-grandfather. A Collection of Master Li's Posthumous Writings, compiled in vernacular classical Chinese (also called "modern classical style"), gathers his surviving works — poems, lyrics, celebratory couplets, elegies, prefaces, and miscellaneous essays — transcribed by his disciples and privately published in the 1930s.

The Posthumous Writings also includes works by my two granduncles: elder granduncle Li Yingwen and younger granduncle Li Yinghui. My great-grandfather was exceptionally open-minded about education, selling off family land to send his sons (my granduncles) to study in Japan. My own grandfather (Li Yingqi, the second son), however, was kept at home to manage the family estate, forfeiting the chance for overseas education. It's said that every year, my grandfather would travel to Nanjing to remit money from land sales to his two brothers in Japan. In the early 1920s, the two granduncles returned with law and political science degrees from Meiji University — rare credentials for that era, and a springboard for significant careers. That their subsequent achievements remained relatively modest (disproportionate to their education) and confined to the local sphere, I attribute to three factors: first, the times were harsh, with China in ceaseless turmoil from war and upheaval throughout the early 20th century; second, my great-grandfather was indifferent to fame and fortune, urging his children to carry on the family mission of local education rather than venture into the wider world; third, both granduncles suffered from poor health — they lacked the physical constitution for "revolution." Elder Granduncle Yingwen was bedridden for years, and it was country life that gradually restored his health. Younger Granduncle Yinghui died tragically young. Yet their writings reveal open minds deeply engaged with the issues of their day. Besides rustic pastoral pieces like "Li Yingwen — Elegy for a Dead Dove," they also produced fiery patriotic works, such as "Li Yinghui — Manifesto of the Anti-Japanese Association (Modeled on the Denunciation of Empress Wu)" and "Li Yingwen — Preface for Wang Joining the Volunteer Army."

My grandfather died in the great famine of my birth year — a calamity that was three-tenths natural disaster, seven-tenths man-made catastrophe. Among the three brothers, only Elder Granduncle Yingwen was fortunate: he passed away peacefully at home in 1965, surrounded by every Li family descendant who had gathered for a grand funeral (see the family photograph below). I still remember each of us grandchildren, after the coffin was lowered, taking turns to scoop up a handful of yellow earth. As an enlightened gentry figure and a "united front target," Granduncle Yingwen had been treated with courtesy by the local government and was even elected as a county representative to the People's Congress, thus escaping the reach of political campaigns. That he departed this world the year before the Cultural Revolution began was an even greater stroke of fortune — otherwise, given the complexity of his personal history, he would have suffered terribly in that great upheaval. My maternal grandmother, who raised us through those years, was dragged out and struggled against during the Cultural Revolution, forced to wear a "Landlord Element" placard every day, subjected to humiliation that cast a lasting shadow over our childhood.

The above accounts for my "scholarly family" background — except that by my father's generation, the family fortune had seriously declined. Beset by foreign invasion and civil war, the country was in chaos, and life grew harder each day. My father often went hungry and cold as a child. In its heyday, the Li family's Chongshi Academy had enjoyed wide renown, its students scattered across the land like peaches and plums filling the world. Yet this decline proved a hidden blessing: when the Land Reform came, our family was classified as "Small-Scale Land Lessors" rather than one of the "Four Categories" (landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, and bad elements — later expanded to include "rightists" designated in 1957). This spared us, the younger generation, from the brunt of political persecution.

The matter of "Small-Scale Land Lessor" classification carried its own stories. When we were children, family class status was an all-important political label: children of "poor and lower-middle peasants" were considered born revolutionaries with "red roots and upright shoots," innately superior. Children of the "landlord, rich peasant, counter-revolutionary, bad element, and rightist" classes faced extreme social discrimination — denied opportunities for factory jobs, schooling, and more — and suffered constant bullying in daily life. I remember a girl in our elementary class who came from a landlord family; she cut such a pitiable figure, never able to hold her head up, yet classmates still taunted her relentlessly. In such an environment, we were all acutely sensitive about our family background. My own family situation was precarious: my mother was born into a landlord family — a pitiable sort of landlord, really; my maternal grandfather had saved every penny from a small business, denied himself fine food and clothing, tightened the whole family's belts, and poured everything into buying land in hopes of modest prosperity — and in return won a landlord label. This became a fiercely guarded family secret. Fortunately, a child's class status followed the father, so every time we filled out a form, the "family class" box read "Small-Scale Land Lessor." The problem was, for a long time, we had no idea what this obscure, tongue-twisting classification actually meant politically, which left us perpetually anxious. I remember classmates discussing our strange class label. One self-proclaimed authority declared: "Small-Scale Land Lessor — that means little landlord!" (It wasn't that far off, actually.) And with that, we were suddenly shoved into the camp of "class enemies," utterly mortified. My cousin suffered the same anxiety. Then one day, he announced triumphantly that, after deep research — studying Chairman Mao's works and relevant Party policy documents — he had discovered that "Small-Scale Land Lessor" was essentially equivalent to "Upper-Middle Peasant," which placed us squarely among the "united objects" of the revolutionary ranks. What's more, Chairman Mao himself came from an upper-middle-peasant family. These momentous findings brought us immense relief.

The old family home in Keshan — I visited it as a child, when my cousin led us up the mountain; it felt like the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit, remote and secluded. A few years ago, on a trip home to China, my brother drove us back there. It remains a forgotten corner to this day — a single mountain road, bumpy and dusty, narrowing to barely a car's width as you approach. My ancestors must have chosen this Jiangnan hillside deliberately, building their grand compound in a spirit of retreat from the world, carving out their own Peach Blossom Spring. My father's memoir, Decades Through Wind and Rain, contains a vivid description of the family school there:

A Glance Back at the Old Residence

A deep courtyard mansion, antique and elegant, nestled against the mountain and facing a stream, oriented east to west. Above the main gate, the couplet "The Nation's Grace, the Family's Joy / May Men Live Long, May Years Bring Harvest" stood steadfast through the seasons. The main quarters comprised five large rooms in the front row and five in the back, joined in the middle by three open-air courtyards flanked by two wings on either side. The three rows, each two stories high, formed an integrated whole. Upstairs, a continuous corridor circled the entire compound — a gallery on which one could stroll freely. To the left stood two "new rooms"; to the right and rear, a row of auxiliary quarters. The front courtyard, with its large and small gates, contained seven flower terraces, where pines and cypresses complemented one another, blossoms clustered in splendor, and fruit filled the air with fragrance. Among the flowers: plum, chrysanthemum, osmanthus, rose, briar, and sacred bamboo. Among the fruits: persimmon, peach, apricot, plum, and jujube. Every doorway was flanked by stone drums and lions; the courtyards were paved in marble. The bricks and tiles were custom-fired in the family's own kiln, of the highest quality; the timber, first-rate, was floated down the river from Jiangxi on rafts — a testament to the master-builder's meticulous vision. The upper floor of the main building served as classrooms and student dormitories; the lower floor and the "new rooms" were the family living quarters; the foot-house housed the wine-making workshop, kitchen, and firewood store.

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书香门第

中国文人自屈原始，就喜欢炫耀自己的祖上，"帝高阳之苗裔兮"云云，以示自己根正苗红，血统高贵。早年整理校对《李老夫子遗墨：序类》，第一篇"李氏创修宗谱序"也提到"李氏"的来源如下：

"按李氏之先，自嬴姓顓頊高阳氏曰皋陶者，为堯大理官，始为理氏，至殷紂时有曰利贞者，偕母逃难于伊候之墟，食李实以全生，复改理为李，子孙因以为氏焉。"

以前读《李老夫子遗墨》比较偷懒，基本跳过晦涩难懂的李老夫子正文，而对《遗墨附录》中更贴近近現代生活的两位叔爷的"时文"感兴趣，因此对这段"李氏"来源的掌故没有印象。女儿小时候问我："Dad, you said our family name Li means plum, how come? Does that mean we Li family like plums in particular?" 我当时不知道"李氏"跟李子到底有沒有关联，只好顾左右而言他，告诉甜甜，据最新统计，"李氏"似乎已经上升到中国的（可能也是世界上的）第一大姓，就連小小的水牛城辦公室就有兩位 Uncle Li's, 其中一位還是朝鮮族裔，但八百年前都是一家人哪。

李老夫子對祖上家道中落、改"理"為"李"、"指树为姓"的歷史，撰述失之簡陋。于是上網進一步搜尋資料，查得《李姓血祖皋陶并李姓考》。原來，李家的始祖皋陶在堯舜時代就任國家重臣"大理官"（司法部長），清明正則，功勛卓著，經邦緯國，英名蓋世，舜帝親立為接班人，甚至孔夫子也拜其为上古"四圣"之一。古人以官为氏，因称理氏。所惜圣皋陶帝業未举而病亡。至商紂王朝，圣皋陶的后代理征仍繼任理官，正直清廉，为荒淫昏庸的纣王所不容，终遭殺身之祸。于是，"理征的妻子契和氏带着幼子利贞逃了出来，奔于伊候之墟（今河南境内），饥饿不堪，见一树上结有果实，便采了来吃，母子得以活命，其后，利贞畏于纣王的追捕而不敢姓理，于是以'木子'救命之恩，改称李氏"。天下第一大姓李氏由此而宗派繁衍，生生不息。

我告訴女儿：咱們非但出身書香門第，還是大圣人皋陶的传人呢。

李老夫子（李咸昇，號學香）是我的曾祖父。《李老夫子遺墨》（現代文言，又稱"時文"）收集了其徒子徒孫傳抄的李老夫子遺作，包括詩詞歌賦、喜壽輓聯、序傳雜文等，由他的門生編輯成冊，內部發行於上個世紀三十年代。

《遗墨》還收錄了我的兩位叔爺（伯祖父李應文和叔祖父李應會）的作品。曾祖父非常開明，重視教育，不惜變賣田產送孩子（我的叔爺）去日本留學深造。但我的爺爺（李應期，行二）被曾祖父留下來幫助理家，失去了留學機會。據說，我爺爺當年每年去南京一趟，將家產變賣的銀子匯款到日本，供給兩個兄弟的學業。兩位叔爺上個世紀二十年代初分別獲得明治大學法學士和政學士學位歸國。在那個年代，有這樣教育背景的人才很難得，本可做一番大事業。他們後來的建樹不大（與其教育水平不成比例），影響止於本地，我猜想原因有三：一是年代不濟，中國自上世紀初開始，兵荒馬亂不斷；二是曾祖父淡泊名利，進而要求孩子們繼承父業，在家鄉興辦教育，而不是鼓勵孩子們出去闖天下；三是兩位叔爺身體都不大好，沒有"革命"的本錢：伯祖父久卧病榻，是鄉間生活使他休養生息，逐漸康復；叔祖父更是不幸，英年早逝。但是從他們所著文字，可以看出，他們思想開明，關註時事。除了鄉居閑篇如"李應文－哀死鴿文"外，也不乏豪情熱血之作，如"李應會－抗日會宣言（仿討武曌檄）"，"李應文－王君加入義勇軍序"。

我爺爺在我出生那年死於三分天災、七分人禍的大飢荒。三兄弟中，就數伯祖父李應文比較幸運，1965年在老家壽終正寢。李家所有晚輩全部到齊，舉行隆重葬禮（李家合影見下）。還記得我們孫兒輩，在棺柩落地後，每人輪流掬一捧黃土。伯祖父生前作為開明紳士和"統戰對象"，受到當地政府的禮遇，曾經當選為縣人大代表，幸免於政治運動的波及。仙逝於文革前一年，更是大幸，否則，以他歷史上的複雜經歷，大革命中少吃不了苦頭。一直看顧我們長大的外祖母在文革中，就被揪鬥，每日掛著"地主分子"的牌子，受盡羞辱，給我們幼小心靈蒙上陰影。

以上可算是我的"書香門第"背景。只不過，到我父親這一輩，由於國家內憂外患（抗日和內戰），連年戰亂，家道中落，生活日漸艱難。我父親小時候忍飢挨凍的事常有。想當年，李家"崇實學校"在當地可是富有盛名，桃李滿天下。不過，家道衰落倒成為一件好事：土改的时候，家庭由此被定為"小土地出租"，而不是"地主"、"富農"這樣的"四類分子"（指的是地主、富農、反革命、壞分子四類，後來又加上57年劃分的"右派"），使得我們後輩少受政治運動的衝擊。

說到家庭成分"小土地出租"，還有一些故事。在我們小時候，家庭成分是一個很重要的政治標簽："貧下中農"子弟被認為天生革命，"根正苗紅"，高人一等；而"地、富、反、壞、右"子弟受到極端的社會歧視，被剝奪很多機會（招工、上學等），而且日常生活中也常常受欺侮。還記得我們小學時班上有一個女生，家庭出生地主，很可憐的樣子，總是抬不起頭。就這樣，還常常有同學羞辱她。在這樣的環境裡，我們每個人對家庭出身自然很敏感。我家情況不是很妙，母親出身地主（是個可憐的土地主：外祖父做小生意賺了點錢，捨不得吃和穿，一家人勒緊褲腰帶，卯足勁置辦田產，以期小康，換來了一個地主帽子），成了我們的一個死守的秘密。好在子女家庭出身隨父，所以我們每次填表，家庭成分欄都是"小土地出租"。問題出在，很長一段時間，我們搞不清這個比較偏僻拗口的成分的政治含義，心裡不免惴惴。記得在班上，有幾個同學議論我家這個奇怪的出身，其中一個自作聰明地說："小土地出租，就是小地主"（其實這個理解不算離譜），一下子把我們推到"階級敵人"陣營，讓我們無地自容。我的堂兄也有同樣的煩惱。有一天，他很高興地宣佈，經過深入研究，學習毛主席著作和有關黨的政策文件，發現"小土地出租"大體相當於"上中農"，屬於革命隊伍的團結對象。而且黨的主席毛澤東也出身於上中農家庭。這些偉大發現使我們大大松了一口氣。

磕山老家，小时候去过，堂兄还领着爬山，感觉是个花果山，僻静偏远。几年前回国探亲，哥哥开车带我们又去了趟老家，至今仍是被遗忘的角落，一条山区小路，颠簸起伏，尘土飞扬。临近老家，山路狭窄到勉强可以过一辆车。当年，先辈择此江南山地而居，大兴土木，大约很有些躲避尘世，开辟桃园的想法。老爸的回忆录《风雨几春秋》中对老家的李家学堂有生动记述：

故居回眸

深宅大院，古色古香，依山面溪，坐东朝西。大门上"国恩家庆，人寿年丰"对联经年常在。正房是前后各五大间，中间一排由三个天井和两边二个厢房组成。这样前后三排，上下两层，构成一体。楼上形成环状贯通的走马楼，左边有两间"新屋"，右边及后面是一排裙屋。前面院子，有大小院门，院内七个花台，松柏相衬，花簇绵秀，果实飘香。花有梅、菊、桂、及玫瑰、蔷薇、天竹；果有柿、桃、杏、李、枣等。所有大门均有石鼓、石狮，天井是大理石铺成。建房的砖瓦是自家建窑特制，质量堪称上乘；木材取自江西，放排顺江而下，更是一流，足见主事者之匠心。正屋楼上是教学场所和学生宿舍，楼下和"新屋"是家人生活区，脚屋是酿酒作坊和厨房、柴库。

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From 朝华午拾 (Morning Flowers Collected at Dusk). Original Chinese: 《朝华之二：书香门第》.

For many young people, leaving one's homeland or staying behind can be an entangled, irresolvable contradiction — much like the dilemma in Qian Zhongshu's Fortress Besieged: those inside the walls gaze out at the dazzling world beyond; no matter how comfortable life within may be, they can never shake the regret of not having tasted the outside firsthand. Those who venture far, having endured every hardship, come at last to understand: homesickness cannot be filled with material things. That was exactly how I felt back then. After graduate school I dug in for five years — my work and life were on a steady upward climb, the future bright. Yet watching my classmates and friends leave for abroad one group after another, I felt an inexplicable emptiness. In the end I caught the last train out. But the sky over a foreign land was so strange — the constellations I knew from childhood summer nights, the fairy tales and daydreams that attended them, could never again be pieced together whole.

I recall those first days in England. Though I was already past thirty, though I'd come to Manchester alongside many friends, though I'd long since weathered in Beijing years of wandering far from home town — leaving my native land still carried an indescribable anguish: like a blade of grass torn out by the roots, battered by wind and rain, a vast bottomless emptiness and disorientation welling up within. At the start of term, in front of the student union building, every kind of student club was recruiting — bustling crowds, peals of laughter — yet I seemed to inhabit another dimension altogether, displaced from reality, unable to grasp the commotion around me, powerless to dispel a nameless melancholy.

Then came a decade of severance. Save for the companionship of Huaxia Wenzhai (China News Digest), and the occasional holiday phone calls or greeting cards to family, I had lost all contact with the motherland. Little did I know that this was precisely the decade in which China underwent its most earth-shaking transformation. Not until my first trip home in 2001 did I realize, with a jolt, that I had once again been displaced in time and space. Standing on the familiar yet alien streets of Beijing, watching the endless streams of people, I felt with an incurable certainty that this world no longer had anything to do with me. Was this the city that had left me so many warm memories? The Beijing I'd yearned for in my dreams now stood before me like a stranger! In the ancient capital I took such pride in, I could not understand the bustle around me, nor could I dispel that nameless melancholy.

Only my childhood hometown remains forever vivid in my mind, never fading. Thirty years have distilled the villages of southern Anhui into thick oil paints: golden yellow, fiery crimson. Endless fields of rapeseed flowers stretching to the horizon, and mountainsides aflame with azaleas in full bloom.

I have passed through countless cities and towns, witnessed many breathtaking scenes — the Gold Coast of Australia, the bays and forests of Vancouver, the autumn leaves of American national parks, and Niagara Falls in Buffalo — searching all the way, yet never finding rapeseed flowers and azaleas like those of home. Not until I returned to visit my family, catching the rapeseed bloom by chance, did I once again behold those patchwork fields of gold and breathe in the fragrance of the soil of home. I captured those golden expanses on video and stored them away, afraid they might slip away again.

Homesickness, like love, is an eternal theme of literature and art. From Li Bai's "Raising my head, I gaze at the bright moon; lowering it, I think of home," to Tao Yuanming's "Come Away Home"; from Chyi Yu's "Olive Tree" to Fei Xiang's "Clouds of Home"; from Ma Sicong's "Homesickness Melody" to the American folk song "Five Hundred Miles." In the still of night, in a foreign land, a gentle folk ballad flows like a quiet stream and soaks into my heart — it is the Kingston Trio singing "Five Hundred Miles," the shared melancholy of every wanderer under heaven.

Homesickness is an invisible net — where does the road of wandering end?

Written October 6, 2005, Buffalo

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乡愁是一张无形的网（下）

对于很多年轻人，去国和留守是一对纠缠不清的矛盾：《围城》内外，城内的人看外面的精彩世界，哪怕城里舒适顺遂，也终觉没有亲历外部生活的遗憾；远游的人历尽艰辛终于明白，乡愁无法用物质来填补。我当年就是这样心情。研究生毕业一扎就是五年，工作生活蒸蒸日上，前途一片光明，可看见身边的同学朋友一批批出国，心里觉得空落落的。终于赶上末班车，然而，异乡的天空却如此陌生，小时候夏夜乘凉所识的星空，连同当年的童话和遐想，从此再也无法拼接完整。

想起初到英国的情形：尽管已经三十出头，尽管有很多同学一起来到曼城，尽管此前早已经历过离开家乡在京城的多年飘荡，但远离故国仍然伴随着难以名状的痛苦：好像一棵连根拔掉的小草，任由风吹雨打，内心充满着深不见底的空荡和恍惚。学期伊始，学生会楼前各种学生自发的俱乐部正招兵买马，熙熙攘攘，一片欢声笑语，我却似乎处在另一个时空，与现实错置，不能理解身边的喧嚣，也无法排解莫名的惆怅。

继而是十年的隔绝：除了《华夏文摘》的陪伴，以及偶然逢年过节给家人电话贺卡问候以外，完全失去了和祖国的交流。殊不知，这正是中国翻天覆地的十年。直到2001年第一次回国探亲，才猛然发现又一次时空错置。站在熟悉又陌生的北京大街上，看着熙熙攘攘的人流，不可救药地感觉到，这个世界已然与我无关。这就是曾经留给我那么多温馨回忆的城市么？我梦牵魂萦的北京，如今形如陌路！在我引为自豪的故都，我不能理解身边的喧嚣，也无法排解莫名的惆怅。

只有我的童年故乡，在我的脑海永远鲜活，永不退色。三十年时光把皖南家乡化成了浓浓的油彩：金黄、火红。那是一望无际的油菜花，和漫山遍野的映山红。

走过无数城市乡镇，看到过许多摄人心魄的美景，澳大利亚的黄金海岸，温哥华的海湾和森林，美国国家公园的红叶和水牛城的尼亚拉加大瀑布，一路寻觅，可就是见不到家乡那样的油菜花和映山红。直到回国省亲，正赶上油菜花开的季节，才重温了田野的片片金黄，嗅到了家乡的土地芬芳。我把这片片金黄摄入录象镜头，收藏起来，生怕它再次丢失。

思乡与爱情一样，是文学艺术的永恒主题。从李白的"举头望明月，低头思故乡"到陶渊明的《归去来兮辞》，从齐豫的《橄榄树》到费翔的《故乡的云》，从马思聪的《思乡曲》到美国民歌《离家５００里》。夜阑人静，异国他乡，轻柔舒缓的民歌象涓涓流水，浸润着我的心，那是 Kingston Trio 演唱的《离家５００里》，全天下游子共同的怅惘。

乡愁是一张无形的网，流浪的路何处是尽头？

记于２００５年十月六日，水牛城

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From 《朝华午拾》. Original Chinese: 《乡愁是一张无形的网》.

最近，我大学时期的老同学、也是"老下级"（上下铺——他睡在我下铺，hence），老丁，回忆往事，在同学群里感慨道：

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【老丁原诗】毕业临别赠言

一九八一年十二月二十七日晚，安庆师范学院英语系师生在迎江寺小餐馆举行毕业聚会。会后回校，同学之间互相在日记本上签字留念。情之所致，即兴拙作分别签赠诸位同学留念：

同窗千日形与影，
别后东西难相逢。
学府同耕书山上，
天涯共航学海中。
战士何愁风霜烈，
园丁但求花木荣。
慧眼识得千里马，
奉献四化到底红。

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老下级先唱了，我这个小他十一岁的老上级岂能不和？因此上：

【和诗】

四十四载梦与踪，
鬓边风雪各西东。
当年共挤青春铺，
今日同看夕照红。

>

半生代码半生酒，
一路浮沉一路风。
莫道人间书卷老，
至今胸中有彩虹。

---

和罢，意犹未尽，因作文遥寄：

【遥寄丁兄】

忆昔辛酉岁杪，霜钟初动，雪意微侵。诸生会饮于迎江古寺之侧，小馆孤灯，杯酒纵横。时则皖水无声，振风塔影摇于寒月；长街将寂，少年意气犹腾。酒酣耳热，相与执手题襟，或悲或歌，竟不能已。

嗟乎！同窗数载，晨分灯火，夜共芸编。上铺下榻之间，笑谈曾惊邻舍；残灯破卷之际，壮怀每指青云。或听VOA于月下，或诵灵格风于霜晨。纸短情长，墨痕狼藉，而青春之气，已横绝一世矣。

未几而东西南北，各赴尘途。兄则振羽桐城，我亦飘蓬海角。或困顿于风波，或沉浮于名利；或折腰稻粱，或白首江湖。昔日青衿少年，而今霜侵两鬓；当年纵谈四海，间或插科打诨，而今各守孤城。人生忽忽，驹隙而已。每念旧游，如闻远钟。

然则世路虽艰，壮心未死。忆当年书山并辔，学海同舟，未尝不自许为天下奇士也。今虽老矣，犹幸肝胆未寒，灯火未灭。酒后谈AI之变，犹如当年纵论四化；夜深观天地新局，尚存击楫中流之志。

故今日援笔和君，不为雕章，只为故人。愿兄老骥伏枥，长怀千里之心；愿我辈残年未晚，犹作时代之客。异日若得重聚，再携浊酒，同话少年。彼时纵黄发满头，亦可大笑曰：

"当年书生意气，至今尚未凉也。"

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English Translation (archaic style)

Lao Ding's Original — Graduation Verses

On the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth month, in the year 1981, the faculty and students of the English Department of Anqing Normal College forgathered at a modest tavern beside the River-Welcoming Temple for our farewell revels. Returning thereafter to the college grounds, we inscribed parting words in one another's journals, as the spirit moved us. What follows are verses composed in that hour of exaltation, offered to my several schoolfellows:

A thousand days we shared one shadow, one form;
Now East and West divide us after this day.
Together we tilled the mountain of learning,
Together we sail the sea of scholarship.
What warrior feareth the biting frost?
The gardener asketh only that his blooms flourish.
Let the keen eye discern the thousand-*li* steed,
And in service of the Four Modernizations, burn ever crimson.

---

William's Reply — Forty-Four Years After

Forty-four winters of dreams and traces,
Frost at the temples, scattered East and West.
Once we crowded together on youth's narrow bunk;
Now we watch the same sunset glow from afar.

>

Half a life in code, half a life in wine;
A road of ups and downs, a road of wind.
Speak not of yellowing pages and aging scholars —
Still the rainbow beareth up within this breast.

---

A Letter Sent from Afar to Brother Ding

I recall the waning days of the xinyou year: the frost-bells had scarce begun to sound, and a whisper of snow hung in the air. We, the graduating class, gathered to drink beside the ancient River-Welcoming Temple — a lonely lamp in a humble tavern, cups raised without restraint. In that hour the Wan River lay silent, and the shadow of Zhenfeng Pagoda swayed upon the cold moon; the long avenue was soon to fall still, yet the ardour of youth still surged. Drink-warmed and flushed with feeling, we clasped hands and wrote upon one another's garments. Some wept, some sang, and none could bring themselves to cease.

Ah! For several years we shared the dawn-lamp and the midnight tome. From upper bunk to lower, our wild talk startled the neighbours; by flickering lamplight over tattered texts, our ambition reached for the blue clouds. Some nights we stole away to listen to the Voice of America beneath the moon; on frosty mornings we declaimed Linguaphone in its pure London accent. Paper was too short, feeling too long; our ink ran riot. But the spirit of youth had already bestrode the age.

Ere long we scattered to the four quarters, each upon his dusty road. You, brother, spread your wings at Tongcheng; I drifted like a thistledown to the ends of the sea. Some were broken on the rocks of fortune, some foundered in the currents of fame; some bowed for bread, some grew grey upon the rivers and lakes of the world. Then we were blue-robed youths; now frost invades our temples. Then we roamed the world in talk, full of jest and ribaldry; now each guards his solitary citadel. Life is as a horse glimpsed through a crack in the gate — a flicker and gone. Whenever I think upon those old wanderings, it is as though I hear a distant bell.

And yet the road of the world, though hard, hath not slain the heart. I remember how we rode stirrup to stirrup up the mountain of books, how we shared one vessel upon the sea of learning. Did we not then count ourselves among the remarkable spirits of the age? Though now grown old, we may yet rejoice that our gall hath not chilled, nor our lamp been extinguished. Over wine we discuss the transformations wrought by AI, even as once we debated the Four Modernizations; in the deep night we survey the new configurations of the world, still nursing the will to strike the oars in midstream.

Wherefore I take up the brush today to answer your verse — not for ornament's sake, but for an old friend's. May you, brother, like the aged steed in the stable, ever cherish the heart that would gallop a thousand li. May we, though late in our years, yet remain travellers in this age. If some distant day we gather again, let us bring our cloudy wine and speak once more of youth. Then, though our heads be full of white, we may yet laugh aloud and declare:

"The bookish ardour of those young days — even now, it hath not cooled."

---

Formatted by Tuya

by Li Wei (立委)

Roaming the World

In my personal semantic dictionary and knowledge graph, "wandering" (liulang) is a major node, with "drifting" and "waves" as its hypernyms. Its hyponyms branch out in lush profusion: sent-down youth, overseas re-settlement, leaping through the Dragon Gate — and leaping again — northward drift, plunging into the sea of commerce, westward drift, southward migration, and southward yet again. This is an honest map of my professional life. Behind these words and concepts lie surges of excitement and oceans of toil that perhaps only a visualization graph could hardly capture.

A life of undulating drift has been my constant companion. In 1976, I graduated high school just in time for the Cultural Revolution's final wave of shangshan xiaxiang — the "up to the mountains, down to the villages" campaign — and was sent to a mountain village in southern Anhui to be re-educated by "poor and lower-middle peasants". That was the starting point of my lifelong wandering. Looking back, it wasn't a bad beginning — a sixteen-year-old could feel more pride than sorrow. At the end of 1977, I caught the first nationwide college entrance exam in ten years and, against all odds, leapt through the Dragon Gate, becoming one of the historically celebrated Class of '77 (though we actually enrolled in February 1978). After graduation, I taught for a year, then leapt again — into graduate school in Beijing. That was an exhilarating northward drift, my joy on par with the crazy histry figure Fan Jin passing the imperial examinations. It was 1983, and I had the extraordinary fortune of studying under the founding fathers of Chinese NLP/MT, Professors Liu Yongquan and Liu Zhuo, pursuing a master's in machine translation — thus began my career.

In the four or five years after graduate school, I moonlighted in Zhongguancun, China's Silicon Valley, plunging into the sea of business high tech development. Though I could count myself among the earliest wave of xiahai entrepreneurs, I was only part-time and bore none of the risks full-timers faced. By then, the fever of going overseas — "foreign re-settlement," we called it — was raging. I couldn't resist the tide and caught the last train to Great Britain. But the early 1990s found the British Empire in decline: streets teeming with stray dogs, muggings rampant. One does not dwell in a dangerous state, so I drifted westward to the immigrant's Mecca — Canada, the land of maple leaves, flowers, and milk. A PhD, a daughter, a change of status, a job search — it was all wonderfully busy. Beautiful though Canada was, its job market was small. So southward I went, and collided headlong with America's dot-com boom. The United States truly is a wanderer's paradise: vast skies, boundless possibilities — the entrepreneurial journey began. As the grand entrepreneurial vision faded with the bursting bubble, I drifted south once more, finally sinking into the promised land of IT workers, unable to extricate myself — a place called Silicon Valley.

My career has roughly tracked the rhythm of NLP's gradual penetration into industry. The overarching theme: wandering, wandering, still wandering. Yet wherever I wandered, my heart for technological entrepreneurship never wavered. In my dictionary of wandering, something is missing, sensed only dimly. Tao Yuanming's "The Return" echoes in my ears from time to time: "My fields and gardens will run to waste — why not return?" To let leaves fall back to their roots, to start anew — perhaps that is the true destination of all wandering.

Written on March 23, 2013

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Homesickness Is an Invisible Net (Part I)

At the end of 2005, our nine-year-old daughter Tiantian was deeply upset by a discussion about leaving Buffalo. I tried to console her: "You know, when American newspapers rank the most livable cities, Buffalo is always in the bottom ten. Cities like San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Washington D.C., and San Diego — aren't they better than Buffalo?" It was true: Buffalo has long, brutal winters — they call it "Snow Capital" — leaving residents vulnerable to cold and illness. The water quality is poor and viruses are rampant. More importantly, there's no real industry, the economy is stagnant, the population shrinks year by year, and young people mostly head "south" at the first opportunity. But Tiantian wasn't buying it. With tears streaming, she said: "Who cares about this stupid rating. I have been living here for eight years and all my friends are here. Plus, I like snow."

Tiantian had lived here for as long as she could remember; Buffalo was, in her mind, the one and only irreplaceable hometown. I recall when she was five, we took her to Beijing for the first time to visit family. That first night at her grandmother's, everything was alien — no American cartoons on TV as she was used to. She cried and fussed, begging to go home — meaning, of course, her home in Buffalo. I told her this was home, her mother's home, but she simply couldn't accept it.

To prove Buffalo's virtues, Tiantian drew upon her limited knowledge to invent her own balance theory: Buffalo's famous lake-effect snow, she argued, counteracts the terrible greenhouse effect causing global warming. With an air of self-satisfied cleverness, she declared: "You see, the two effects balance each other. Nowhere else can balance the global warming as effectively as in Buffalo!" She could list a thousand reasons Buffalo was superior: "You got to admit, Buffalo is not bad. We have no earthquake like in San Francisco. No hurricane like in Florida. Our Christmas is always white."

Buffalo does have many acknowledged virtues, chief among them Niagara Falls — the so-called "Seventh Wonder of the World." The natural ecology around Buffalo is beautifully preserved: drive along the Niagara River from the falls and you pass through a gallery of fairy-tale scenery — one state park after another, ancient towering trees, rolling meadows. Yet aside from the Falls, these vast parks sit empty even on weekends; one can't help but feel the waste of such resources. Buffalo's downtown may be dilapidated and chaotic, but the suburban townships where most white-collar people actually live are like something out of a storybook — simple, honest folk, clean and safe streets, garden-like beauty. Buffalo's housing market is the least expensive in America: back then, just over a hundred thousand dollars could buy you a house with front and back yards (what in China they'd call a "villa"), the absolute price lower than in China's coastal cities! Two hundred thousand got you a luxury home, spacious to the point of embarrassment — a sum that wouldn't buy a corner of a house in New York or San Francisco. Life was cheap and convenient, with top-tier public schools, and extracurricular lessons — piano, sports — at half the coastal price. Not to mention a warm Chinese community and a bustling weekend Chinese school.

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朝华午拾 · 浪迹天涯与乡愁（上）

浪迹天涯

在属于我个人的语义词典和知识图谱里，"流浪"是一个很大的节点，它的上位是漂流和波浪。流浪的下位谓词枝繁叶盛，包括：插队，洋插队，跳龙门，再跳龙门，北漂，下海，西漂，南下，再南下。这也正是我职业生涯的真实写照。在这些语词概念的背后蕴含几多激动几多辛苦，也许只有可视化图谱知道。

多起伏的漂流生活伴随着我的一生。1976年高中毕业即赶上了文革最后一届上山下乡，插队皖南山区接受贫下中农的再教育，这是我一生流浪生活的起点。这个起点回想起来并不坏，16岁的孩子当时能感到的是自豪多于悲凉。1977年底赶上了文革10年后第一届大学生招考，居然跳了龙门，成为史上著名的77级生（其实是78年2月入学）。大学毕业后任教一年，再跳龙门考研成功，北上京城。这是一次欣快的北漂，当年的兴奋喜悦堪比范进中举。那是1983年，有幸师从中国NLP的开山鼻祖刘涌泉刘倬老师，主攻机器翻译硕士，这才入行。研究生毕业后四五年间，中关村兼职下海。虽然可算头几拨下海人士，因是兼职，并无其他下海人的风险。其时洋插队之风正甚，终于没有顶住潮流，赶了末班车来到大英帝国。90年代初正值大英没落，乱态丛生，路多野狗，抢劫之风甚行。危邦不居，因辗转由欧西漂，来到一代移民的"麦加"，满是鲜花与牛奶的枫叶之国加拿大。攻博添女，换身份，找工作，不亦忙乎。加国虽美，工作市场却不大。于是南下，竟一头撞上了美国网络大跃进。美利坚果然是流浪者的天堂，广阔天地，大有可为，开启创业之路。轰轰烈烈的创业宏图随着泡沫的破灭渐趋平淡，遂复南下，终于踏入IT民工的圣地不能自拔，人称硅谷。

我的生涯与NLP在工业界逐渐渗透的节奏是基本上一致的。整个一个主题就是，流浪，流浪，还在流浪。但无论流浪何方，技术创业之心不变。在我流浪的词典里，冥冥中似有所缺。陶渊明的《归去来辞》不时在耳边萦回，"田园将芜胡不归"。叶落归根，初创再搏，或为流浪的真正归宿。

记于2013年三月23日

乡愁是一张无形的网（上）

2005年底，因为讨论离开水牛城搬家的事，九岁的女儿甜甜非常伤感。我宽慰她说："你知道么？美国报纸排名最受欢迎的居住城市，水牛城是倒数的十个城市之一呀（最受欢迎的十大城市包括旧金山，波士顿，西雅图，华盛顿和圣地亚哥等），哪里不比水牛城强呀？" 确实，水牛城冬季漫长，人称"雪都"，极易受风寒侵袭。水质低劣，病毒流行。更主要的是，没有像样的工业，经济发展落后，人口逐年下降，年轻人一有机会大多"南下"寻求发展。可是，甜甜不以为然，流着眼泪说："Who cares about this stupid rating. I have been living here for eight years and all my friends are here. Plus, I like snow."

甜甜自记事起，就住在这里，水牛城自然是她心目中不可替代的唯一故乡。记得她五岁那年第一次带她回北京探亲，第一天晚上住在姥姥家，一切对她是那么陌生，没有她已经习惯的美国卡通电视，她满脸委屈地吵着闹着要回家——当然是回水牛城的家。我告诉她这就是家呀，是妈妈的家，她怎么也无法认同。

为了列举水牛城的好处，甜甜根据她有限的知识，自己独创了一种平衡理论：水牛城有著名的湖区效应，所以多雪，而地球正面临可怕的温室效应，导致全球变暖，她自作聪明地说，"You see, the two effects balance each other. Nowhere else can balance the global warming as effectively as in Buffalo!"。她还能举出一千条水牛城优越的理由："You got to admit, Buffalo is not bad. We have no earthquake like in San Francisco. No hurricane like in Florida. Our Christmas is always white."

水牛城确实有很多公认的好处，最著名的是拥有号称"世界第七大奇迹"的尼亚拉加大瀑布。水牛城周围原始生态保护很好：郊外从大瀑布开始，沿尼亚拉加河车行，宛如驶进仙境画廊，州立公园一个接一个，参天古树，连绵草地。不过，这里除大瀑布外，空旷的公园即便周末亦无人问津，让人真觉得可惜了这些资源。水牛城市中心虽然日渐衰落杂乱，人们聚居的郊区乡镇却有如童话世界，民风淳朴，整洁安全，环境优美如花园。水牛城房市全美最便宜，当年十万美元出头就可以买到前庭后院的 house（国内叫"别墅"），绝对价格低于国内沿海城市！二十万就是豪华大屋，宽敞奢侈得让人发愁，这个价钱在纽约、旧金山不够买一个房角。生活便宜也方便，有一流的公立学校，课外教育（学琴，学球等）的学费只是沿海城市的一半价钱。更不用说，还有温暖的华人社区和热闹的周末中文学校。

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From 朝华午拾. Original Chinese: 乡愁是一张无形的网.

Morning Glory and Afternoon Collection — Ch.1-2: A Brief Biography of Li Wei

by Li Wei (立委)

Life is short — trim off the beginning and the end, and you're left with perhaps thirty to fifty years. These can be divided into three stages: the career-building years (one's thirties), the mature years (one's forties), and the declining years (one's fifties and beyond). In Chinese custom, these stages are reflected in how one is addressed: Little Li (Xiao Li), Big Li (Da Li), and Old Li (Lao Li). But alas, I, Li Wei, leaped straight from Little Li to Old Li, never having the chance to savor the grandeur of my prime — a fact that has always left a faint ache in my heart.

Having skipped two grades between kindergarten and elementary school, I was always the youngest in my class. Born in the notorious hunger year besides, I was frail and undersized, often excused from PE with a doctor's note or sent home altogether — perpetually the little runt. Fortunately, as middle school began, a "revisionist resurgence" was underway: Mao had tasked Deng XP with cleaning up the Cultural Revolution's wreckage, and Deng in turn charged Zhou Rongxin, the education czar, with restoring order to the schools. The campus climate was renewed. Riding this tailwind, I began to distinguish myself. As class academic officer and math subject representative, I was assigned by the classroom tutoring teacher to mount the podium every morning during self-study period to demonstrate problem-solving strategies — practically a teaching assistant. But fair weather never lasts. The Gang of Four slandered Deng and calculated against him, and the Revolution faction regained the upper hand. The school descended into chaos. Academic classes were pushed to the background; "mass criticism" sessions became the main curriculum, supplemented with learning from workers, peasants, and soldiers on site. Unable to shine through academic subjects, I nevertheless lost no ground — in fact, my prominence only grew. For I was the master of polemical writing, having moved through the successive campaigns: Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius, Criticize Deng, Counter the Right-Deviationist Wind in education, and finally, Criticize the Gang of Four. At every assembly, large or small, whenever I spoke, my voice rose and fell with cadence and force, punctuated by wit and humor. I became a sensation on campus, celebrated far and wide. Some said I carried the legacy of Lu Xun — penetrating to the bone, yet always bringing forth the new from the old, a cascade of apt phrases. At open-air gatherings of a thousand people, the crowd was typically restless and disorderly, but the moment I stepped onto the platform, complete silence fell. They listened with rapt attention, and when I reached a punchline, laughter rippled through the audience. From this I forged a reckless courage and an immunity to stage fright — a gift that has served me all my life.

By the time I reached university — the prestigious Class of '77, the first cohort after the Cultural Revolution — I was still at the tail end, with classmates older than me by anywhere from one to over ten years. Among classmates we all called each other by name, except for my desk-mate, the youngest of the "Seven Fairies," who teasingly called me "Little Li Wei." It wasn't out of affection but rather to avoid suspicion — to demarcate clear boundaries. For four years we shared a desk, yet kept strictly apart — a Chu-Han divide, a clear line between Jing and Wei. The Seventh Fairy, naturally clever, used the pretext of being one year my senior to call me "Little Li Wei," thereby making our interactions, such as they were, officially above reproach.

Once the Seventh Fairy set this unfortunate precedent, the "Little" epithet stayed with me for years. Teaching middle school, I was called "Little Teacher Li" (age 22). In graduate school, I shuffled in and out of the computer lab, disheveled and unkempt, muttering to myself in "the world's language" (Esperanto), eventually becoming a campus joke (ages 23–26).

Caption: Full of youthful vigor and high spirits (1987).

After graduating from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and staying on at the institute, tales of Li Wei continued to circulate — mostly stories of love at first sight, a lightning marriage, chronic dishevelment, and the time I walked into a wall and had to apologize for it.

Caption: Li Wei directing machine translation system development at a Zhongguancun company (1988).

Thus I dug in at the research institute and the Zhongguancun company for five years (ages 26–31), honing skills akin to those of an old traditional Chinese doctor. My specialty was treating computers, taming their language functions. During this period, the fever for going abroad kept rising, spreading from Shanghai to Beijing. On every street corner, conversations inevitably turned to America, Japan, Britain, and Australia. Yet Li Wei and his "immediate superior" (my wife) ambled along in blissful ignorance, wrapped up in each other — like the old saying, "unaware of the Han dynasty, let alone the Wei and Jin". Not until every last classmate had departed did Little Li suddenly wake up. With grim resolve, he took the TOEFL exam and scrambled for the last train. As it happened, the Y.K. Pao Foundation was selecting promising talents, and through sheer luck, Little Li was chosen and dispatched to the Chengdu University of Science and Technology's overseas training center for half a year of preparation.

Who could have guessed that this would become the watershed between Little Li and Old Li. The talents gathered at the training center — men and women alike — were the best from every region and every field, divided into two groups: the one-year visiting scholars, mostly older, and the three-year doctoral scholarship recipients, mostly young rising stars. Li Wei, in the latter group, now found himself the senior. Every time there was an exam,  Wei inevitably took top honors, drawing a stream of talented men and women to his door with questions large and small. The sound of "Old Li" never ceased. Li Wei became a minor celebrity for a time, with a devoted following.

Caption: The talented men and women of the Chengdu University of Science and Technology Overseas Training Center (1990).

In the blink of an eye, Little Li had transformed into Old Li, basking in widespread esteem. As a foreign-language major, I should have been exempt from the English test. But the authorities, making no distinction, rounded everyone up and shipped us all to Chengdu, the "Land of Abundance" for centralized feeding. It wasn't just English — there were also policy training sessions. All my brothers and sisters worked conscientiously, scrambling to get ahead. Only Li Wei took it easy, spending his days indulging in Sichuan cuisine and lingering in teahouses and bars, much to the envy of his peers.

Though the title "Old Li" was coined in Chengdu, in my heart I didn't fully accept it. At that time my career was flourishing, at high noon — wide networks within the field and beyond. My associations were all with learned scholars; no common folk crossed my threshold. My advisor was a titan of the discipline, and I was his sole final protégé — his "closed-door disciple" (all the others having "betrayed" the motherland and fled to America). I was a "young" talent, a rising star, commanding the sidelong respect of my peers. On the eve of my departure from China, the national machine translation community held its annual gathering at the Fragrant Hills Guesthouse in Beijing. The highlight was a dinner conversation between my advisor and another giant of the field — what came to be known as the "Liu-Dong Dialogues" — throughout which Li Wei appeared repeatedly, furnishing his advisor with examples and explaining details. So influential was this that the assembled junior female scholars (mostly out-of-town graduate students newly entered into the field) flocked to Li Wei for guidance. Regrettably, with my mind so set on flying far away, I missed a golden opportunity to mentor these aspiring younger scholars.

After leaving the country, the years passed: from Britain to Canada, from Canada to America. Drifting and displaced, never knowing where I'd settle — my prime years flowing away like water. By the time of my eight-year tech start-up campaign in Buffalo (ages 37–45), my youth was gone, my prime had passed, and "Old Li" had become an honest name. Yet my ambition never waned. I redoubled my efforts, fighting on two fronts, and carved out a domain of my own.

Caption: Li Wei at his Buffalo office (2000).

Looking back, I can't help but sigh. My life — from youth to prime, precisely when my creative powers were at their peak and energy overflowing, with timing, place, and people all aligned — was cut in half by the long years of study abroad, everything reset to zero. Years later, after eight years of entrepreneurship, I returned to China to visit family. Amid clinking glasses at a hotel restaurant, I was enjoying a joyful reunion with family and relatives. During a brief pause in the feast, I strolled out onto the balcony to enjoy the cool air and take in the Beijing nightscape. There I happened upon an elegant young woman with a small child. Seeing my gray hair, she instructed the child: "Say hello to Grandpa." My blood pressure shot up, thunder crashed in my head, and all the wine in my belly turned to cold liquid, sliding down my spine.

Written on January 9, 2010.

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朝华午拾 · 第一章之二：立委小传

立委列传

立委者，不知何许人也。少而敏，长而异，行迹颇诡于常人。
其生也，岁在荒年，形羸而志劲。未及冠，已连越学级，故恒处群中之末，年最幼焉。
然幼而不弱，虽体弗胜力，而心不屈志。

及中学之初，时局稍靖。上整学政，下肃庠序。立委因之得志，
为学官所擢，日登讲席，剖析数理，旁若无人，俨然少师。
众或异之。

未几，风复骤变。政教反覆，文艺退处，群趋口舌。
立委遂弃算而执笔，纵横批判之场。
其辞激而不燥，其论峻而多趣。
凡大会所集，千人喧沸，及立委登台，则声寂如林。
及其词锋所至，笑声震野。
或曰：“有鲁迅之遗意焉。”

由是胆气既张，临众不惧，终其身不改。

既入大学，岁在七七之年。
同学或长十余岁，呼名无忌。
惟其同席一女，独称之曰“小立委”。
非亲也，实所以避嫌而自别。
四年同案，界若河汉。
“小”字遂附其名，不可去。

其后为师，人称“小李”；
又入机房，昼夜沉思，口诵异语，众以为狂。
然其志固在远方，不为俗议所移。

及壮岁，入社科之府，留而不去。
或以情结婚，或以拙致笑，或以直触壁。
然其技益进，主译机器之文，疗电脑之疾，如良医治顽症。
五年之间，术成而名隐。

是时也，四海骚然，言出国者如市。
立委独处一隅，与其所亲者，相对忘世。
不知潮起。

及同侪尽去，乃幡然悔悟。
遂赴成都，入出国之塾。
群英毕集，才俊云合。
分为二辈：长者为学者，少者为新秀。

立委在新秀之中，忽为其长。
试辄居首，众皆仰之。
有事无事，咸趋其门。
“老李”之名，由此而生。

然立委心未以为然。
其时事业方张，师承名宿，交游尽鸿儒。
去国之际，香山论道，群贤在席。
立委数为师发言，条分缕析，众皆侧目。
后学相从者众，而其志已决，遂弃之而去。

既出国门，流转英加美三地。
岁月忽忽，若水东逝。
本当盛年，乃为学途所系。

他乡数载，非益其有，乃重其始。
人生之书，中叶忽断。

及至水牛城八年，鬓已微霜。
然志气未衰，犹能并驱两途，自立一隅。

后归故国，与亲友宴。
酒酣，独步于台。
忽遇一妇，携子而行。
见立委，命其子曰：

“呼爷爷。”

一言既出，天地俱寂。
立委怔立，若遭霆击。
酒气尽消，寒意自脊而下。

乃知——
名之所加，非虚也；
岁之所夺，不可返也。

太史曰：
人之生也，或以年序其行，或以名乱其序。
立委少而老名，壮而学子，
行不由己，时为之也。

夫所谓“老李”者，
非老于岁，乃老于世。

嗟乎！
名先于人，人生其后；
时夺其年，志存其余。

观立委一生，
非不得其时，
乃时不得其全也

 

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From 朝华午拾 (Morning Glory and Afternoon Collection). Original Chinese: 乡愁是一张无形的网 (Nostalgia Is an Invisible Net).

Chapter 1: Homesickness is an Invisible Net

by Li Wei (立委)

Life comes but once, a river rushing to the sea that never returns. The distillation of a life transcends the life itself. Only when the migrating geese leave their call do you feel you haven't lived in vain. With accumulated experience, with inspiration stirring, with a serene mood and a pot of clear tea — what flows flowingly is not literary craft, but life itself: with its sorrows and joys, its sweat and blood.

Most things in this world follow predictable patterns. So do most human lives. But when an old hand looks back at his footprints, the ordinary parts tend to fade while the legendary ones stand out. And the legendary, by definition, defies belief. Yet what truly instructs us is often the legendary, not the routine. Morning Glory and Afternoon Collection is a legend. Some things in it, I scarcely believe myself. Take this, for example: raising 10 million dollars from the federal government and 11 million from investors within eight years around the turn of the century— fairly rare, right? But it happened, and it happened to us.

Another example: my elder brother's "rebellion" as a nine-year-old commander. I remembered the event, but in the first draft of Little Red Guards I did the math and thought it impossible, so I fudged it: "My brother was the representative of our second-grade class, one of the founders of the revolutionary organization." Later, after verifying with my father and brother, it turned out he WAS the commander, with a fourth-grade strategist as his adjutant. According to my father's account, our family was sent down to the countryside in 1965. Since there was no kindergarten there, I skipped straight from middle kindergarten into first grade elementary, sitting in the same class as my brother. After two months, I somehow advanced with the class to second grade (the plan was to hold me back in first, but the teacher said I was able to keep up). In '66 we were second-graders. School was suspended for the revolution, and the Little Red Guard was formed during that hiatus. The rebellion must have been in '66, because by '67 our family had left that small village town and returned to the county seat.

Morning Glory, Part One: Wandering Far Away

The very word wandering conjures the comic books of my childhood — Zhang Leping's Sanmao the Wanderer.

(to be continued)

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朝华午拾 · 第一章：乡愁是一张无形的网

人生只有一次，奔流到海不复还。人生的酿造超越了人生。雁过留声，才感觉没有白活。有积淀，来灵感，准备好心情与清茶。从容流淌的不是文思，而是生活，伴着哀怨喜乐，汗水与泪血。

世界上的事情，多数都是循规蹈矩的常规。人一辈子也大多如此。不过，老帮菜回头看自己的足迹，常规的部分容易忽视，传奇的部分就凸现出来。凡传奇，就不可信。可是能够有启示的，往往是传奇，而不是常规。《朝华午拾》就是传奇。有些事情，我自己都不敢相信。比如，8年内从政府拿到1000万，从投资人拿到1100万的成就，极罕见吧。可它发生了，就在我身上。

再如，老哥九岁当司令造反的事情，我是记得的，可是在《红小兵》初稿中，我一算岁数，觉得不可能，就含糊地写“我哥哥是我们二年级的代表，革命组织发起人之一”。后来跟老爸老哥核实，确实是司令，后面有个四年级的军师辅佐。根据老爸的记述，我家1965年下乡，因为乡下没有幼儿园，我从幼儿园中班，直接插班进入小学一年级，跟我哥哥同班。上了两个月，居然跟班升学到二年级（本来打算留在一年级，可老师说我能跟上）。66年我们在二年级，其间有停学闹革命，匕首小分队就是在停学时期成立的。造反应该在66年，因为67年我家就离开那个小镇回县城了。

朝华之一：流浪远方

写就“流浪”二字，想起小时候看过的《三毛流浪记》来。张乐平后无漫画，大师千古。

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From Morning Glory and Afternoon Collection（朝华午拾）. Original Chinese: 乡愁是一张无形的网.

by Li Wei (立委)

Why I Write Morning Glory and Afternoon Collection — Preface 2

After middle age, I grew fond of reminiscence. From time to time, seized by a mood, I would casually record the most unforgettable moments and feelings of my life — gathering fragments into a whole, publishing them online under the pen name 立委. This became "Morning Glory and Afternoon Collection".

"My Postgraduate Exam Experience" was the first piece in this nostalgic series, blogged on May 2, 2004, in Buffalo, New York. From there I couldn't stop, writing on and off for over a decade. Looking back, the college and postgraduate entrance exams — "leaping over the dragon gate" — truly were the fundamental turning points of destiny. On my first trip home after many years, both my elder brother and a senior schoolmate told me that for our generation, life's path was largely set the moment you either cleared or fell short of that gate. This is deeply unfair, because what standardized exams measure cannot begin to capture the talent and potential so many classmates possessed. Yet this is how society sorts us — an imperial examination system at its core, where academic excellence opens every door. Most opportunities and resources ultimately fall to the lucky few who cleared the dragon gate, leaving one to sigh at the opportunities in life.

A human life is like a dream — when you wake, nothing remains. Recording the most piercing moments, at least, freezes a frame of life. Life is brief. I didn't set out to write deliberately — I would simply record what came to mind, fearing that when I was truly old I would forget, as if I had never lived at all.

I began writing Morning Glory and Afternoon Collection to share with family, and later with those friends close enough to confide in. I have never deliberately elevated or embellished, but I know there is no absolute truth memories. What I call truth is only the truth of my memory, and memory is surely unreliable in places. Absolute truth is not necessarily more valuable — except when writing history — whereas "felt truth" is the stuff of literature. I have done my best to be truthful. Where something cannot be described truthfully, I would rather not write than knowingly fabricate. Some things I may only have the courage to write after retirement. What I choose to set down is real — not only for peace of mind, but in the hope of offering something to those who come after. But none of this is what matters most. What matters is using this unique way to connect with my father, my family, and those cherished friends — old buddies bound by common attention, care, concern, and fate — in a genuine exchange. I think to myself: without doing this, our usual conversations, trips home, and school reunions could never attain such depth. Separated for too long, people often find themselves with nowhere to begin. There are indeed things too precious, too sensitive, too delicate to share. But there is so much more that needs and can be shared — yet so many people rush through a lifetime without ever finding the occasion or the way.

Some time ago, talking about body and soul, I wondered: what is it that endures? At the very least, a person has thoughts, sensibility, and memory. If these are committed to words, it is as if something metaphysical is solidified and externalized. Though it cannot achieve immortality, at least it will not vanish with the body's going away. The ancients said: literary works endure across a thousand autumns. I have not thought that far — but sharing with family and friends is itself one of life's pleasures.

After I wrote Morning Glory and Afternoon Collection, my father began writing his own memoir, "Wind and Rain Through the Seasons", allowing us to understand more of his life. Every time I read about the famine year of 1960, and the life-and-death separation from my aunt — his younger sister — I cannot hold back tears. My elder brother also wrote "Riverside Chronicle" (later collected as "Small-Town Green Years"). His memory is more precise, his descriptions more delicate and vivid. Those "old stories" from the county town where we grew up, events that feel like a world away, come back to vivid life before our eyes.

This volume also collects a unique family heirloom — the surviving manuscript of my great-grandfather, "Remaining Ink of the Elder Li".

.

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朝华午拾 · 代序

我写朝华午拾——代序2

立委

人到中年之后，喜欢怀旧。有时候兴起，把自己一生中刻骨铭心的所历所感，随手记录下来，集腋成裘，以立委为名发表在互联网上，是为《朝华午拾》。《我的考研经历》是我《朝华午拾》怀旧系列的第一篇，博客记于2004年5月2日纽约州水牛城。从此一发不可收，断断续续写了十几年。回想起来，人的一生，高考和考研的"跳龙门"确实是命运的根本转机。第一次回国探亲，老哥和师姐都跟我说，同辈人后来的生活道路，大多在冲刺龙门的那一刻就注定了。这很不公平，因为很多同学所具有的才干和潜力，应试教育是不能全面衡量的。但是，社会就是这样来鉴别的，本质上还是科举制度，学而优则"仕"。多数机会和资源最终落在少数幸运地跃过龙门的同学身上，让人不胜唏嘘。

人的一生就跟梦一样，醒来什么也没留下。把最刻骨铭心的片段记录下来，至少把生活定格了一下。人生苦短，也不是刻意去写，想到了就记录下来，怕以后真老了，就记不得了，感觉白活了一样。

我写《朝华午拾》的起因是跟家人分享，后来也跟谈得来的朋友分享。从来没有刻意拔高或虚饰，但我知道，没有绝对的真实。所谓真实，也只是我记忆中的真实，而记忆肯定有不可靠之处。绝对真实不一定更有价值，除了写史以外，而感受的真实才有文学。我已经尽力真实，如果遇到无法真实描述的，我宁肯不写，也不刻意为虚。有些事大概要等到退休以后才有勇气。选择写出来的就是真实，不但求得心安，而且也希望给后来者以启发。但这些都不重要，重要的是，用这种独特的方式，跟老爸和家人，还有亲密好友，爱护、关心、有缘结识的老友，有一个交流。我想，我如果不这样，平时的谈话，回家探亲，还有同学聚会，都不可能深入和亲密。分开太久，人常常是这样，很多话无从谈起。确实有一些太过珍贵、太过敏感、太过微妙的，无法分享。可是还有更多的，是需要也可能分享的。但是很多人匆忙一辈子，就找不到一个机会或者方式。

前些时候谈肉体和灵魂，我就想，什么是永存的东西。至少人有思想、感性和回忆，如果诉诸文字，好像就把某种形而上的东西固化和外化出来。尽管不能不朽，却至少并不会随肉体消亡而逝去。所以，古人说，文章千古事。我倒没想千古那么远，但是，与亲友分享，亦是人生一乐。

我写《朝华午拾》后，我老爸开始写回忆录《风雨春秋》，让我们更多了解他这一辈子。每次读到60年荒年，我姑姑（爸爸妹妹）的生离死别，我就忍不住流泪。老哥汉阳一江水也写了《江城记事》（后结集为《小城青葱生活》）。他的记忆更加准确，描述也细腻。我们从小生活的县城所发生的那些恍如隔世的"城南旧事"，栩栩如生回到我们眼前。

本书还收集了家传孤本，我曾祖父的《李老夫子遺墨》。

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From Morning Glory and Afternoon Collection (朝华午拾) — a memoir series. Original Chinese text: 代序.