Some people say, "A grain of ash of the times, falling on a person's head, is a mountain." So what if the times didn't fall a grain of ash, but a sandstorm?
Xu Yanji, the daughter of the famous writer and scholar Xu Dishan, told her life experience in her memoir "I Am the Daughter of the Peanut", which truly reflects how cruel that era was.
◎ lost his father at a young age, and was displaced with his mother during the war
Xu Yanji was born in Beiping on January 13, 1933, when his father Xu Dishan was a professor at Yenching University. When he was two years old, his family moved to Hong Kong. When he was 8 years old, his father died of a heart attack due to overwork due to overwork and other work such as organizing anti-Japanese and national salvation causes; In the same year, when the Japanese occupied Hong Kong, she and her brother fled to the mainland with their mother, and since then they have been in exile and wandering from place to place.
▲ Xu Yanji is in Hong Kong with her father, mother and brother
In this way, until 1946, after the end of World War II, the family finally settled in Nanjing and finally settled down. In a blink of an eye, in 1955, at the age of 22, she married her college classmate Wu Furong and spent less than 3 years of happiness, but the gears of fate suddenly reversed again, and a "sandstorm" of the times suddenly hit......
◎ Stillborn, forced to divorce, imprisoned for six years, and re-education through labor for five years
In January 1958, a nationwide campaign was launched, and Xu Yanji was expelled from public office. At this time, she was already pregnant, and had no choice but to return to Nanjing, but the fetus was stillborn. She was arrested in July of the same year, and five months later, her husband filed for divorce, which she did not agree to, but when the verdict came down, she had to accept it.
She was sentenced to six years in prison. In prison, she behaved well and was given the opportunity to reduce her sentence by one year, but in the end she transferred this "meritorious quota" to another fellow inmate with a longer sentence. She was released from prison in 1964, but she still wore a "hat", and she did not want to involve her mother, so she chose to "work" in a women's prison, and so on for another five years.
◎In the turbulent years, he lived in the countryside and married an illiterate old peasant
In 1969, when China and the Soviet Union turned against each other and prepared for a nuclear war crisis, Xu Yanji was "evacuated" to an extremely remote and impoverished mountain village in Hebei Province. Here, she worked hard for a year, which was not as much as the work of a pig, and she couldn't survive at all, so she had to look for her brother who had not seen her far away in rural Shaanxi for 17 years.
▲Xu Yanji and her husband Wei Zhaoqing
Fortunately, her brother was found by her, she wanted to stay with her brother and remarry, she no longer had any luxury, she just asked the other party for good character. In this way, through her brother's matchmaking, she finally married Wei Zhaoqing, an old farmer who was 10 years older than herself, divorced with a baby, and illiterate. At this time, she could no longer bear the ravages of fate, and she cried..... But in the end, she endured everything.
◎ A person's tragedy, the silhouette of an era
In 1979, after living with her farmer husband for eight years, Xu Yanji was finally rehabilitated. The moment she got the notice, she couldn't help but cry again, "What is this? She couldn't understand why fate played such a trick on her.
Two years later, she returned to Nanjing with her husband, and she still did not abandon the old peasant. In her view, marriage "is a contract, even without love." "This old man didn't hurt her or abandon her in the past, and now she didn't want to break his heart.
In 2006, after the death of her farmer husband, Xu Yanji looked back on her bumpy life and wrote a book in 6 years, which was published at the age of 80, and the book was "I am the daughter of the peanut". The following year, the book was selected as one of the top ten best books in Sina China, and the award citation was: "An embarrassing personal oral history, the drift of small people in the big era, provides an irreplaceable, rich and true footnote for the century-old history of a nation." ”
Three months after the publication of this book, on January 13, 2014, Xu Yanji completed her bumpy and tortuous life, which happened to be her 81st birthday.
▲In 1939, 6-year-old Xu Yanji
It's hard to imagine how brave a person must be to face a bumpy and tragic life like hers? How strong does a person have to be to be as kind as she is to live a life of kindness after all the hardships she has endured? The answers are all in this book, "I Am the Daughter of the Peanut", a good book worth reading in one sitting, and a good book worth savoring slowly. From the author's life experience of nearly 100 years, you can see a real and almost cruel history of 20th century China.