我的童年记忆可以追溯到大约4岁左右，因为我清楚地记得我的第二个妹妹是在我们家楼上出生的。那时，我第一次清楚地看到了我父亲的模样。我记得他从高淳县带回了许多板栗，还有风干的野鸡，那野鸡拖着漂亮的长长的野鸡翎让我终身难忘。那个时候，他从高淳县调回了武进县，从那时起，他就和我们住在一起。一开始，我有些害怕他，感觉有点陌生。
在我小的时候，我被认为是一个神童，因为我3岁的时候就在一次群众大会上背诵了毛主席的三篇文章《愚公移山》、《为人民服务》和《纪念白求恩》。我至今仍然记得《为人民服务》中有关张思德的那一段。当时正值文化大革命，各种大会广播中都在重复这些内容，由此，我机械地记住了这些。当然，也许我确实有一些语言天赋，因为在1981年我进入西北工业大学读书，第一个学期就参加了全校英语竞赛，我是一年级中唯一进前50名的，排在第22位。事实上，我在班里是英语最好的，也许现在仍然是。目前，我担任惠特曼大学的图书馆馆长，每天处理大量的文本应用，并担任多个英语期刊的审稿人，发表了数十篇英语论文。对我来说，写作和审稿都是轻松的任务。
我从小就很敏感。介绍我父母结婚的吕老师是个喜欢说闲话的女人，她喜欢和城里的一个老师一起说我妈妈的坏话。每当我从家里吃完午饭走到学校（七八分钟的路程，学校就在我们村边上）进了幼儿园，他们就好像警觉起来，立刻停止了交谈。但我妈妈总是让我尊重吕老师，因为她是我干妈的嫂子，我干爹是吕老师的丈夫的弟弟。我的干妈是一个特别善良的妇女，她生了5个孩子，2男3女，他们的孩子们也特别好，我都是叫他们哥哥姐姐。特别是最小的干姐姐，总是带我去割草，或者叫我去玩牌。我干妈家都是农村户口，有很多自留地，每天早上，他们就会送一大篮子的青菜或者萝卜等蔬菜给我们家。我们是从小吃他们的菜长大的。他们家还养猪，每年杀猪后都要送一大块肉给我们。每年大年夜都是叫我去他们家过，因为他们家有肉吃，特别是做得很好的猪头肉。吕老师的丈夫也是很和蔼的一个老头，我们叫他无锡爸爸，他是市里印刷厂的老技师，平时住在市里的宿舍里，只有周末才回乡下。我干爹干哥哥们还经常帮我家挑水，那时候都是饮用河水，直到七十年代村里才挖了两口井。农忙的时候还帮我家割麦子，尽管我家只有一点点自留地。我干妈现在还健在，已经92岁了。
我的堂伯父，也就是我爸爸的堂兄，也有5个孩子，4个女儿1个儿子。我的堂姐堂哥们也都很善良，他们称我的奶奶为"奶奶"，我称他们的爷爷（我爷爷的二哥）为"爷爷"。我上幼儿园的时候基本上每天都是我隔壁的三堂姐带我去的。两家的院子之间隔着一堵矮墙。我堂伯家也都是农村户口，所以他们种了很多蔬菜，也常常把一大篮子蔬菜放在矮墙上送给我们吃。因为我爸爸身体不好，而我妈妈甚至舍不得买每斤三分钱的西红柿，所以我们在生活上一直靠左邻右舍的帮助，特别是日常所需的蔬菜。我堂伯的儿子也算是争气，他在乡下读北港中学，居然在1980年考上了西安冶金建筑大学。他学的是冶金，在毕业后分配到扬州一家钢铁厂工作。
我上的是常州市最好的学校——常州中学。1981年的高考，我考了468分，按照那个时候的分数，足以进入北大或者清华。我之所以选择西北工业大学有具体原因，这里就不多说了。另外，我语文考试拿了90分，作文占总分的60%（100分），也就是60分。作文的题目是"毁树容易种树难"。也许是因为我平时的语文成绩一直很好，我写作文还算顺利，用比喻的方式把国家比作一棵大树，烈士们为共和国而献身。"四人帮"则被比作寄生虫，侵蚀和破坏这棵大树。意图表达得很清晰，政治上是正确的。再加上我漂亮的楷书，作文几乎拿了满分。其他40分中，有20分是古文，也是我的一项强项。我从小就在读《古文观止》，这本书是文革后我家仅存的几本线装书之一，所以我能认出繁体字，是自学的。1981年的常州高考，我同学张雷的语文成绩只有60多分。张雷在当时也是我的好朋友，现在是英国华威大学的经济学教授和四川大学等大学的特聘教授。
在童年的记忆里，亲戚们也都很友好。舅舅阿姨们经常帮助我们。年底的时候，舅舅阿姨家会杀猪，小表弟小表妹们会给我们送肉。我大姨夫在菜市场工作，每年我表姐都会步行好几里地给我们送豆腐和其他豆制品。。
我们在童年的时光里过得非常朴素。我一双袜子能穿好几年。我穿的外套是用我妈妈的旧衣服改的，经过改剪才合身。全家的鞋都是我妈妈用布做底的。尽管我们在经济上很拮据，但我们在家庭中和睦相处。有时，我们的父母会争吵，看到他们打架我们会感到害怕。在我们心里，我们总是站在我们妈妈那一边。但我父亲脾气很大，如果事情不顺他的意，他会变得很倔强。
我爸给我规定了每天用毛笔写一百个汉字的规矩。他给了我一本九宫格的字帖。可惜由于缺乏指导，我并没有掌握，只是盲目地练习而没有抓住字形的本质。我父亲精通书法，自1948年起就是农工民主党的党员。在解放战争时期，他曾是第20军文工团的成员，主要负责写标语。他参加过一些重要的战役，比如渡江战役和解放上海。
夏天的时候，我们会坐在木板上，他会给我们讲孙悟空的故事，或者他在地下情报工作中的经历。在抗日战争中，他曾参与过情报的传递。那时，他还是个高中生，经常穿梭于茅山新四军基地和常州之间传递情报。有时，他甚至得步行到像松江（上海附近）和苏北的地方传递信息。
值得一提的是，在南方地区，一个常见的消暑方式是拿掉门板，放在前院或庭院的两个长凳上，做成一个临时的床。在讲故事的时候，我堂伯家和附近的家庭的孩子们会聚在一起。有时，甚至邻里的成年人也会过来听他讲故事。我父亲不仅会讲故事，还经常叙述一些科学家如杨振宁和李政道的经历。根据我父亲的讲述，他原计划高中毕业后出国留学，打算向上海的富有的舅妈借钱。然而，地下党组织告诉他，全国解放即将到来。因此，他被派到中共华中地区地委干部学校进一步学习。完成学业后，他被分配加入了第20军政治部的文工团。
和他一起去进华中地委干部学校的年轻人还有胡平等，胡平出身雇农家庭，属于根正苗红，胡平还做过福建省委书记。但我爸爸出身不好，因为我爷爷是国名党下级军官，生死不明。加上我爸爸被捕过两次，所以我爸爸一直生活经历坎坷，从来没有得到过提拔。
我爸爸他参加完土改后，在县法院做书记员，可在镇压反革命运动后就被调到了税务局。起因是因为法院判处常州的国名党中统特务头子居一死刑。为此我爸曾经半夜到法院庭长家里去为居一求情。因为我爸在做地下工作时候经常和居一来往，而且是结拜兄弟，我爸利用这层关系搞到很多有价值的情报，因此居一也算对革命有功。我爸有次被国民党其他特务拘捕，居一曾经利用自己的身份偷偷放了我爸。但是居一最后还是被人民政府镇压枪毙了。这件事情可见我爸的政治幼稚性。
后来我爸就因此被调出了法院，被调到税务局工作。尽管如此，他也没有后悔，每月把有限的薪水支援居一的遗孀和孩子，每月都给10元钱。居一的孩子们都把我爸爸叫做舅舅。我爸因此事搭上了自己的政治前途，但他从来没有后悔过，他是一个有情有义的男子汉。
我爸在五十年代中期感染了肺结核，因此他决定辞掉公职，那时候辞掉工作可以换一笔钱，换到钱后他到上海去接受治疗。在上海期间，他住在杨浦区他表姐家里，凑巧当时的杨浦区委书记是我爸在20军政治部的老上级，在我爸康复后，这位老领导推荐我爸去上了江苏农学院读大学。这就是我爸早期的经历。
他的辞职给他后来晚年申请离休待遇带来了很大的不便和差别。如果不辞职，他可以享受抗战时期老干部的待遇。但他中途辞职了，公职生涯不连续。好在他48年加入的农工民主党是铁的事实，所以最后还是给了他解放时期参加革命的老干部待遇离休。这些都是后话。
我爸爸的故事有时是反反复复的，所以我到现在仍然记忆犹新。每当听完我爸爸吹牛，我们也早就进入了梦乡。
My childhood memories go back to around age 4 as I clearly remember my second sister being born upstairs in our house. That's when I saw my father clearly for the first time. I remember that he brought back a lot of chestnuts and dried pheasants from Gaochun County. The pheasants had beautiful long pheasant feathers that I will never forget. At that time, he was transferred back to Wujin County from Gaochun County, and since then, he has been living with us. At first, I was a little scared of him and felt a little strange.
When I was young, I was considered a child prodigy because I recited three of Chairman Mao's articles "The Foolish Old Man Moves Mountains", "Serving the People" and "In Memory of Bethune" at a mass meeting when I was 3 years old. I still remember the paragraph about Zhang Side in "Serving the People". It was the time of the Cultural Revolution, and these contents were repeated in various conference broadcasts, so I memorized them mechanically. Of course, maybe I do have some language talent, because in 1981 I entered Northwestern Polytechnical University and participated in the school-wide English competition in my first semester. I was the only one in the top 50 in my first grade, ranking 22nd. In fact, I was the best English speaker in the class and probably still am. Currently, I serve as the Librarian at Whitman University, where I handle a large number of text applications every day. I serve as a reviewer for several English-language journals and have published dozens of English-language papers. For me, both writing and reviewing are easy tasks.
I have been very sensitive since I was a child. The teacher Lu who introduced my parents to get married was a woman who liked to gossip. She liked to speak ill of my mother with a teacher in the city. Whenever I walked from home to school after lunch (a seven-eight-minute walk, the school is on the edge of our village) and entered the kindergarten, they seemed to be alert and immediately stopped talking. But my mother always told me to respect Teacher Lu because she is my godmother’s sister-in-law and my godfather is the younger brother of Teacher Lu’s husband. My godmother is a very kind-hearted woman. She gave birth to 5 children, 2 boys and 3 girls. Their children are also very good. I always call them brother and sister. Especially the youngest god-sister, she always takes me to mow the grass or asks me to play cards. My godmother’s family has a rural registered permanent residence and has a lot of private land. Every morning, they will send a large basket of green vegetables, radishes and other vegetables to our family. We grew up eating their food. Their family also raises pigs, and every year after killing the pigs, they give us a large piece of meat. Every New Year's Eve, they ask me to spend time at their house because they have meat, especially well-cooked pork head meat. Teacher Lu’s husband is also a very kind old man. We call him Wuxi Dad. He is an old technician at the city’s printing factory. He usually lives in a dormitory in the city and only returns to the countryside on weekends. My godfather and brothers often helped my family carry water. At that time, we all drank river water. It was not until the 1970s that two wells were dug in the village. When the farming season is busy, I help my family cut wheat, even though my family only has a little private land. My godmother is still alive and well, she is 92 years old.
My father's cousin also has 5 children, 4 daughters and 1 son. My cousins are also very kind. They call my grandma "grandma" and I call their grandpa (my grandpa's second brother) "grandpa". When I was in kindergarten, my third cousin next door took me there almost every day. There is a low wall between the two courtyards. My cousin’s family also has a rural registered permanent residence, so they grow a lot of vegetables and often put a big basket of vegetables on the low wall for us to eat. Because my father is in poor health and my mother is reluctant to even buy tomatoes that cost three cents per catty, we have always relied on the help of neighbors in our daily lives, especially the vegetables we need every day. My cousin's son is also quite successful. He studied at Beigang Middle School in the countryside and actually got admitted to Xi'an Metallurgical and Architecture University in 1980. He studied metallurgy and was assigned to work in a steel factory in Yangzhou after graduation.
I went to Changzhou Middle School, the best school in Changzhou City. In the college entrance examination in 1981, I scored 468 points. According to the score at that time, it was enough to enter Peking University or Tsinghua University. There are specific reasons why I chose Northwestern Polytechnical University, which I won’t go into here. In addition, I scored 90 points in the Chinese language test, and the composition accounted for 60% of the total score (100 points), which is 60 points. The title of the essay is "It's easy to destroy trees but hard to plant them." Maybe it’s because my usual Chinese scores have always been very good, and my writing went smoothly. I used metaphors to compare the country to a big tree, and the martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the Republic. The "Gang of Four" was compared to parasites, eroding and destroying this big tree. The intent was clear and politically correct. Coupled with my beautiful regular script, my composition almost got full marks. Among the other 40 points, 20 points are for classical Chinese, which is also one of my strengths. I have been reading "Guwen Guanzhi" since I was a child. This book is one of the few thread-bound books left in my family after the Cultural Revolution, so I can recognize traditional Chinese characters and learned it by myself. In the Changzhou College Entrance Examination in 1981, my classmate Zhang Lei’s Chinese score was only over 60 points. Zhang Lei was also a good friend of mine at the time. He is now a professor of economics at the University of Warwick in the UK and a distinguished professor at Sichuan University and other universities.
In my childhood memories, relatives are also very friendly. Uncles and aunts often help us. At the end of the year, my uncle and aunt’s family would kill pigs, and my cousins would give us meat. My eldest uncle works in a vegetable market, and every year my cousin walks several miles to deliver tofu and other soy products to us. .
We lived very simply during our childhood. A pair of socks lasts me years. The coat I wore was made from my mother's old clothes and cut to fit. My mother’s shoes for the whole family were made with cloth soles. Even though we were struggling financially, we lived in harmony as a family. Sometimes our parents argue and we get scared when we see them fighting. In our hearts, we always side with our mom. But my father had a very bad temper and would become very stubborn if things didn't go his way.
My dad set a rule for me to write a hundred Chinese characters with a brush every day. He gave me a copybook with a nine-square grid. Unfortunately, due to lack of guidance, I did not master it and just practiced blindly without grasping the essence of the glyphs. My father was proficient in calligraphy and had been a member of the Peasants' and Workers' Democratic Party since 1948. During the War of Liberation, he was a member of the 20th Army Art Troupe and was mainly responsible for writing slogans. He participated in some important battles, such as the Battle of Crossing the Yangtze River and the liberation of Shanghai.
In the summer, we would sit on the wooden board and he would tell us stories about Sun Wukong or his experiences in underground intelligence work. During the Anti-Japanese War, he participated in the transmission of intelligence. At that time, he was still a high school student and often shuttled between Maoshan New Fourth Army Base and Changzhou to deliver intelligence. Sometimes, he even had to walk to places like Songjiang (near Shanghai) and Northern Jiangsu to deliver messages.
It is worth mentioning that in the south, a common way to cool down is to remove the door panels and place them on two benches in the front yard or courtyard to make a temporary bed. During story time, children from my cousin’s family and nearby families would gather together. Sometimes even adults from the neighborhood would come and listen to his stories. My father not only tells stories, but also often recounts the experiences of scientists such as Yang Chenning and Li Zhengdao. According to my father’s story, he originally planned to study abroad after graduating from high school and planned to borrow money from his wealthy aunt in Shanghai. However, the underground party organization told him that national liberation was coming. Therefore, he was sent to the Central China Prefectural Committee Cadre School for further study. After completing his studies, he was assigned to join the art troupe of the Political Department of the 20th Army.
Among the young people who went to the Central China Prefectural Committee Cadre School with him were Hu Ping. Hu Ping was born in a family of farm laborers and belonged to Genzheng Miaohong. Hu Ping also served as Secretary of the Fujian Provincial Party Committee. But my father’s background was not good, because my grandfather was a junior officer of the Kuomintang Party, and his life and death are unknown. In addition, my father was arrested twice, so my father has always experienced ups and downs in life and has never been promoted.
After my father participated in the land reform, he worked as a clerk in the county court, but after suppressing the counter-revolutionary movement, he was transferred to the tax bureau. The reason was that the court sentenced Ju Yi, the leader of the Central Unification Secret Service of the Kuomintang Party in Changzhou, to death. For this reason, my father once went to the court president's house in the middle of the night to plead for Juyi. Because my dad often interacted with Ju Yi when he was working underground, and they were sworn brothers. My dad used this relationship to get a lot of valuable information, so Ju Yi can be considered a contributor to the revolution. My father was once arrested by other agents of the Kuomintang. Ju Yi used his identity to secretly release my father. But Juyi was eventually suppressed and shot by the people's government. This incident shows my father’s political naivety.
Later, my father was transferred out of the court because of this and was transferred to work in the tax bureau. Despite this, he has no regrets and uses his limited salary to support the widow and children of the first family, giving him 10 yuan every month. The children in Juyi all call my dad uncle. My father's political future was hampered by this incident, but he has never regretted it. He is a man of love and justice.
My father was infected with tuberculosis in the mid-1950s, so he decided to quit his job. At that time, he could exchange his job for some money. After getting the money, he went to Shanghai for treatment. While he was in Shanghai, he lived at his cousin's house in Yangpu District. It happened that the secretary of the Yangpu District Party Committee at the time was my dad's old superior in the Political Department of the 20th Army. After my dad recovered, the old leader recommended that my dad go to Jiangsu Agricultural University. College and university. This was my dad’s early experience.
His resignation brought great inconvenience and difference to his subsequent application for retirement benefits in his later years. If he does not resign, he can enjoy the treatment of a veteran cadre during the Anti-Japanese War. But he resigned midway and his public career was discontinuous. Fortunately, the fact that he joined the Peasants and Workers Democratic Party in 1948 was an ironclad fact, so he was finally given the retirement benefits that a veteran cadre who participated in the revolution during the liberation period received. These are all things for later.
My dad’s stories are sometimes repetitive, so they are still fresh in my mind. Whenever we listen to my dad bragging, we fall asleep long ago.
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