Interpretation of the father of the ** son Xie Fei.
His father, Xie Juezai, was a proletarian revolutionary of the older generation, one of the five elders of Yan'an, the founder of China's legal system, and served as Minister of the Interior of the People's Republic of China, President of the Supreme Court, and Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.
Therefore, I have been considered a "** child" since I was a child.
How much do I know about my father? It wasn't until I was old that I realized I didn't know much about him. 2014 was my father's 130th birthday, and he was 29 years older than my mother.
My mother, Wang Dingguo, gave birth to me when she was twenty-nine years old, so the age difference between me and my father is fifty-eight years. If we define a generation as twenty or twenty-five years, then my father and I lived over two generations, and the huge difference in time made communication between us more difficult.
When my father was still alive, most of our seven brothers and sisters (five boys and two girls) were schoolchildren, teenagers, or young adults; And when my father was old, he was at the time of "** Although I had graduated from college and stayed on to teach, due to frequent sports, I spent most of my time in the field, and I spent very little time with him.
In June 1971, when I returned to Beijing from the Baiyangdian Rural Cadre School in Baoding to get married, I was told that my father had died and that I needed to attend a funeral. In the "revolutionary atmosphere" of "sweeping away all bad habits" at that time, I remember that in the morgue of the Beijing Hospital, our family held a simple farewell ceremony for the remains, and Vice Chairman Dong Biwu, one of the "Five Elders of Yan'an" who was recuperating in the hospital, saw his old friend for the last time with the support of his son Liangxi.
His son is holding an elegiac couplet written by Dong Lao in his hand, which I still remember vividly: "Long March veteran, poet of the Cultural Revolution." ”
Time flies, and my father has been dead for forty-three years, and I am only beginning to really get to know him. When I was younger, I was so busy starting a business and starting a family that I didn't have enough time to get to know my father.
However, in my old age, I began to read books such as "The Biography of Xie Jueya" written by my mother, and gained an in-depth understanding of my father's thoughts, work, and life. Although it is more than 40 years late, "it is better to do it late than not to do it at all".
In the fifties of the last century, my father published a large number of ideological and cultural essays in his spare time, which were highly praised. He mentioned in the article "Love Your Parents" that the three major tasks in life are getting married, having children, and taking care of the elderly.
When your child needs to take care of you, you need to be ready too. Last year, I moved to my mother's house to spend time with the elderly and read my father's writings. Her mother is also an old Red Army, in good health, basically taking care of herself, and her greatest happiness is to have children by her side.
For the father, it is our responsibility to the younger generations to understand his life and thoughts. This prompted me to edit this book of "Xie Jueya's Family Letters", which collected more than 90 letters from my father to his family.
These letters are not only the footprints and joys and sorrows of our fathers, but also our responsibility and respect. Looking at these yellowed letters, I can't help but feel the beauty and greatness of the way of correspondence.
With the development of digital and network technology, the use of Weibo, WeChat, etc., we have lost the space and time to brew and express emotions. It is to be thought about whether this has brought progress or degradation to our human culture and sensibilities.
In the 60s of the 20th century, Xie Jueya, Dong Biwu and others inspected Fujian. Fortunately, we can organize and publish the letters of our predecessors, such as the long-selling "Letters of the Family of Zeng Guofan" and "The Letters of Fu Lei's Family", etc., from which we can understand their thoughts, emotions, lives, and even history and society.
Unfortunately, we have not been able to collect the letters that my father wrote to his parents when he was young. When his father was sixteen, his mother died; At the age of twenty-one, his father also died.
In addition to the parents, the main member of the family is the spouse. Now, we find some of my father's letters, most of which he wrote to the first two ladies. Interestingly, before the end of "**", our siblings knew almost nothing about our father's first wife, He Dunxiu.
It wasn't until through my father's diaries and letters, especially when I was filming the movie "Hunan Girl Xiao Xiao", that I returned to my father's former residence for the first time - Nan Fuchong in Duizi Village, Shatian Township, Ningxiang County, Hunan Province, that I saw Mrs. He's ** for the first time.
I know that in the 50s, she lived in Beijing with her youngest son, Xie Fang, until her death in 1967 at the age of 88. After editing and reading through my father's letters to Mrs. He from the 20s to the 40s, I gradually understood why my father was so careful to hide from our children, gradually realized the complexity of my father's family life brought about by the changes of the times, and finally realized the brilliance of my father's reason, warmth and humanity in dealing with family and marriage issues throughout his life.
The father's marriage to He Dunxiu was completely in line with the typical traditional marriage in rural old China. He Dunxiu was born in a family of traditional Chinese medicine, his father was a lifter, he was the first in the Qing Dynasty, and his family education was generous.
At that time, his father studied in a college near He's house, and He Dunxiu's cousin was a classmate and friend, and was invited to He's house to play many times.
His father was only fifteen years old when he got married, Mrs. Ho was nearly five years older than him, and his wife was four to five years older than her husband, which was the local custom at that time. In a letter dated September 8, 1939, his father wrote to Mrs. Ho, he recalled: "Forty-one years ago, in the autumn, I married you, and on that day, I don't remember who was singing 'Sending Son' in the room, and my grandfather pulled me in and said that it was a "big deal".
At that time, the "big event" was the "succession" of the family. During the first fifteen years of their life together, they had four boys and three daughters together. The marriage between my father and my mother, Wang Dingguo, was "organized".
In 1937, my father had left his hometown, his wife and children for more than ten years, and the Kuomintang and the Communist Party began to cooperate for the second time to jointly resist Japan.
After the defeat of the Western Route Army and the separation of many days, my mother found an organization in Zhangye and started the work of rescuing the scattered Red Army, and half a year later she also came to work in the Lanzhou office.
Later, my mother told the people who worked beside her (note, not directly with us children): At that time, the organization said that Xie Lao was old and needed someone to take care of him in life; To do the ** work of He Yaozu, then the chairman of Gansu Province of the Lanzhou Kuomintang and a fellow villager in Ningxiang, I needed someone with the status of a wife to come forward to assist, and I hoped that my mother and Xie Lao would become a couple.
The mother agreed, but after dinner and celebration in the evening, she let her into Xie Lao's bedroom, and she didn't do it. Her mother was born poor, she was a child daughter-in-law when she was a child, and she was illiterate, she said: "Let me take care of Xie Lao, I agree, why do we still sleep together?" ”
Others told her that when they became a husband and wife, they were husband and wife, she hesitated, saying that she hoped to give her time to think about it, she herself had a good friend named Zhang Jingbo when she was in the Four Front Army, and she was the guide for her to participate in the revolution.
Later, it was found out that the martyr Zhang Jingbo had died heroically in the Red Army's Western Expedition, and his mother agreed to the marriage.
In the modern era of "monogamy" and "love first and then marry", it is easy for us to misunderstand and even ridicule the phenomenon of "polygamy" in the old era, but ignore the historical and social background in which our parents lived.
When I carefully read my father's correspondence to the two wives over the past half century, I deeply felt the complex changes in the life forms and systems of the Chinese people over the past hundred years, and I was also moved by the beautiful national tradition of the Chinese people for thousands of years of "respecting each other as guests and cherishing family affection".
Taste the history and appreciate the master's brushstrokes - Xie Jueya's handwriting of letters.
The love and responsibility of parents: two marriages, three children, letters, friendship, a lifetime of companionship and care. Their stories tell us that the affection of husband and wife is the foundation of the family, and that affection and responsibility are equally important, tolerance and persistence go hand in hand, and that there is a win-win situation for both efforts and gains.
3. Raising children and grandchildren is the main content of the father's family letter. These letters and words show that our older generation is honest and upright, which is worth learning from.
Most of the letters to children are about learning and moral education. The father was very happy when he was old and had all his children, and he had infinite expectations.
In 1957, Xie Jueya and Wang Dingguo returned to their hometown of Ningxiang, Hunan, and took photos with relatives and friends. At that time, we were all elementary and middle school age children and teenagers, and most of them lived in schools.
So, my father used the weekends to teach us as a group. He asked his mother to tell us about the experience of being a child daughter-in-law, which made us remember the bittersweet memories; Invite Fan Shuzhen, a calligrapher, to teach you how to write calligraphy, and so on.
From time to time, he himself wrote to us collectively and asked the secretary to print out several copies and send them to the children. In the 60s, since the eldest son Xie Piao went to school in other places, his father wrote more and more letters to us, and he seized every opportunity to write letters, such as going to other places for meetings, recuperation, or when the children wrote letters and gifts to him, he cared for and taught his growing children in every detail.
The March 8, 1962, "Letter to the Children" is the longest and most abundantly written. He talked about the past and the present from the aspects of living, eating, and wearing, and taught us with his own and mother's experience: my family is a landlord, and I am a professional person, I only put on silk underwear when I arrived in Beijing, or someone gave it away, I didn't have a watch before, but now you wear silk underwear, wear a watch, Qiqi has no watch, and you may want it.
Leather shoes, I remember that in 1937 I went to Lanzhou to do ** work, and the government bought me a pair of leather shoes, and I went to Beijing to buy a second pair of leather shoes in order to receive foreign guests. I was almost seventy years old.
You've been wearing leather shoes since you were young, and you've worn more than one pair. It requires us to "look at the past and look at others" and "be lenient to others and be attentive to ourselves"; In life, "do it yourself" and "cherish things".
It is still touching and thought-provoking to read today. Time flies, many letters have been lost, and only ninety-seven letters have been collected in this collection. They convey a wealth of breadth and breadth and are by no means limited to the points I have mentioned above.
Throughout his life, Xie Juezai regarded writing letters as an important way of life. He corresponded not only with his family, but also with his colleagues and friends, and more than with the masses, readers, and young students whom he did not know at all.
In his correspondence, correspondence with the cadres of the Ministry of the Interior, the Supreme Court, and the Ningxiang County Party Committee is the most important part; Correspondence with readers of their articles, young people who have been transferred through newspapers and magazines, and elementary and junior high school students is not uncommon.
In November 1954, he took the initiative to write a letter to the cadres of Ningxiang County, whom he did not know, hoping to understand the situation and changes in his hometown through the letter, and since then he has become friends with them for many years, and asked them to announce to the public in his hometown: "Xie Juezai is willing to correspond with people!" ”
It is better to be a relative than a relative, in the father's heart, family affection, nostalgia, and people's affection are connected. Therefore, this book also contains 18 letters from him to grassroots cadres and friends in his hometown.
The book contains a total of 115 letters. Today, mankind has entered the "big network era", and Weibo, WeChat, and Weishuo are replacing traditional communication and communication methods.
The purpose of editing and publishing the book "Xie Jueya's Family Letter" is to preserve history and let modern people not forget the path that our predecessors have walked; When we read and play with these words and forms that are about to disappear, we will transform the thoughts, emotions, culture, and talents accumulated by our predecessors and human beings for a long time into new forms and new languages, and inherit and develop them forever.