Distant father
What are the special feelings about the identity of "Du Yuesheng's son", frankly speaking, I don't seem to have thought about this problem. In the early days, when I went out to do things, no one knew me, and I didn't meet people who knew me very often, so I didn't feel anything special. However, since I started collecting ancient coins, more and more people know my identity, and many people will be surprised, because people think that I am a person with a complicated family background and cannot have such a hobby. My background is not something I can choose, and I can't escape this fate.
Actually, when I was a kid, I spent very little time with my father. After my mother married my father, she lived in the old mansion on Wah Ge Zhen Road with her first three ladies, as we called "Mrs. Front Building", "Mrs. Second Floor" and "Mrs. Third Floor". The old mansion is not a place we go to, and it is not very impressive.
After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, my father left Shanghai first and went to Chongqing via Hong Kong. In my memory, our family rarely eats rice, and we mainly eat pasta, and I have maintained this habit until now. We had a hard time during that time. I was only a few years old at the time, and my father was a little worried about us. At that time, there were a lot of political kidnappings in Shanghai, and if the Japanese or the puppet government kidnapped me and threatened him to return to Shanghai quickly, wouldn't it be very troublesome? But we were young at the time, and we didn't have anywhere to go, just to go to school, or to go out for a walk. At that time, I liked to visit Shanghai Sima Road, which is now Fuzhou Road, and there were bookstores there, and I liked to visit bookstores. It's a pity that these places are now demolished.
It wasn't until two years before the victory of the Anti-Japanese War that my mother took us to Chongqing to reunite with my father. Because my father's business and industry were in Shanghai, after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, my father returned to Shanghai, first temporarily staying in the current Jin Jiang Hotel, and we stayed at another friend's house, and we were still separated from each other. At that time, I didn't think that my father's identity was anything special, and I felt that everything was natural.
So, I really lived with my father, that is, after we arrived in Hong Kong in 1949, but we didn't have much contact with my father at that time. Usually I go to school early, come back from school, go to bed after eating, call "father" when we meet, and then walk away. Usually we eat separately, my sister and my mother are on one table, and my father and my group are on the other.
My father has always been very serious in front of us, and it feels very distant to me, so I have never established a sense of closeness with him. On the one hand, my father is very busy and cannot contact us often, on the other hand, in my father's concept, the eldest son of the main house is always the eldest son in the Du family, so the eldest brother and sister-in-law come forward to entertain the family. However, my sister is the eldest daughter, so she is closer to her father. In the past, when an important guest came to the house, the father would also ask his sister to come back from school to accompany the guest's daughter.
Just like what you see in movies and novels, in such a big family, open and secret battles between each other are indispensable. My mother is the fourth wife, she is not very scheming, but in any of the Du family's wives, if she is not careful, she will be defeated. Each wife has some staff officers around them to give them advice, how to compete for favor, how to seize power. Mother also has a lot of counselors. Once on my father's birthday, several wives discussed in advance and decided that everyone would wear the same color and style of cheongsam on that day, so that everyone would be equal. When the mother came back, she asked the staff officer what to do about it—if she agreed to their terms, then she would be the fourth wife after all, and she would be at the back of the line, and she would not be able to show her status, and if she did not agree, the others would definitely count her down. The two staff officers said: You promise to come down first, and you will do whatever they say, and the mother will act according to the plan, but she secretly prepared another set. At the beginning of the birthday party, she came out wearing the same clothes as the other wives, but within a few minutes, she immediately went to change one. In this way, she stood out among the crowd. There are many more such things, which our mother told us after we moved to Taiwan.
Mrs. Qianlou died very early, and among the remaining four wives, the relationship between the mother and Meng Xiaodong was the best, and the other two ladies struggled day and night. The mother of the third brother and the fourth brother quarreled with the mother of the second brother before taking their two sons to United Kingdom for a long time.
In the Du family, the struggle between brothers is also very strong. My father had eleven children, and I was the seventh of them, but because I was young and didn't live together, I wasn't involved in any of them. My father wanted to cultivate his eldest brother Du Weifan, but in fact he was a dou. My eldest brother likes to drink, and my father often scolds him: You treat me on my behalf, but you are drunk as soon as the guest arrives, how can you represent me? But the successor of the Du family has always been him, and his father's concept has never changed, so in the will he left, the eldest son and the eldest grandson have one more inheritance, and the others are equally divided - but these things have also become a back of old China.
Jianghu career
Because I didn't have any concept of my father and family since I was a child, I didn't feel the need to deliberately understand anything. I learned more about many old things about my father after I arrived in Taiwan. My father had a brother named Gu Jiatang when he fought the world in the early days, and we moved to Taiwan to live next door to him, and many things were told to me by Gu Jiatang himself. For example, hiding opium cigarettes and grabbing the dock, Mr. Gu feels that he is very proud. At that time, it was untrue to say that my father went out to fight, but in fact, it was all done by Gu Jiatang, Ye Zhuoshan, and Ma Xiangsheng, who were called the "Little Eight Shares Party". However, he did do a lot of things in his early years, such as grabbing cigarette pipes, and at that time grabbing cigarette pipes was something related to gangs.
Du Yuesheng
When my father was young, he liked to gamble for money, to what extent? He also went out to gamble on the night he married his first wife, when he needed money for his brother. I was hoping to win a little bit in gambling, but I didn't expect to lose all of it, so I took all the clothes that Mrs. Qianlou wore to get married. Another time he gambled in the bathhouse, gambling so much that he even lost all his clothes, and in the end it was Huang Jinrong's wife who rescued him with his clothes, and there were still many such ridiculous things when he was young.
My father came from a poor background, my grandparents died at an early age, and he was orphaned at an early age and later worked as a helper in a fruit shop to earn a living. I think the reason why my father was able to stand out was because of his righteousness. In Chinese society at that time, the word "righteousness" was very important. He was generous, he gave money when people had no money, and he scattered his wealth when his brother had no money. My father had a lot of customers, some of them had their own jobs, and some of them depended on our family for food. For example, the people in Hengshe (note: Du Yuesheng's organization founded in 1932) all worship my father as a husband, and each of them has their own business, which is to build a relationship. They didn't have a strict organization, but my father picked the people. When these people worship my father as a husband, they still have this smell of rivers and lakes and gang habits. I haven't seen them join the gang, and in public, they're like ordinary banquets, eating together, talking and laughing. In fact, my father has never been the richest person in Shanghai, but he feels that he is the most famous, and he can control some things in Shanghai. One of my father's concepts is not to be an official, and people like him who have been in the rivers and lakes for a long time pay attention to making relationships with all parties. He knew a lot of people in the concession, for example, the highest police officer and translator in the patrol room of the French Concession at that time, named Zhang Yishu, ordinary people didn't know this person, and his father was a very good friend with him, so others asked his father to greet him when they had anything. I know Zhang Yishu's daughter, now in United States, almost ninety years old.
It is a historical fact to say that my father is the "boss of the Qinghong Gang", but I don't quite agree with calling my father the boss of the gang. The Qinghong Gang is a very special product of the extraordinary period. The official Qinghong Gang is not to fight and kill, that is, to do business you have to "help", if you are not in the "help" at that time, you have no protectors, and you don't want to mix in Shanghai. In addition, gambling and smoking were also a social norm at the time. In the old mansion, when a good guest comes to the house, the first thing is to smoke first, which seems to be a rule. But in terms of the current social concept, this is a crime. I know that my father is a very complex character, and I don't want to defend him for anything, but I just feel that I should look at him in the historical conditions of the time.
Now many people like to put their father together with Huang Jinrong and Zhang Xiaolin, and call them the "three tycoons of Shanghai". I have seen both Huang Jinrong and Zhang Xiaolin. I don't have a deep impression of Huang Jinrong, when I met him, he was probably in his sixties, and people still called him Boss Huang at that time, and he was still very majestic. His father's relationship with Huang Jinrong turned out to be a bit complicated. Huang Jinrong made a fortune early, because in the early days in the gang, he was very high, while my father was very low. But Huang Jinrong was not very famous in the 30s, and his father far surpassed him, and he was a little jealous of my father, so he was reluctant to come and go. But on the surface, everyone is still very kind, sending things to each other during the New Year's holiday.
In comparison, Zhang Xiaolin is a martial artist, and some people say that he is Zhang Fei. I had more opportunities to meet Zhang Xiaolin, because when I was a child, Zhang Xiaolin's wife liked me very much, and my father passed me on to him and recognized him as my godfather. I still have an impression of the day Zhang Xiaolin was killed, but I was only seven years old at the time, and I didn't know anything and didn't understand why someone wanted to assassinate him. I just feel that my godfather is dead, something big has happened, and the surroundings are very lively, so hurry up and take a look. Zhang Xiaolin was shot dead by his own bodyguard Lin Huaibu, who at that time confessed that he had a conflict with Zhang Xiaolin, which later turned out to be planned by Dai Li behind the scenes, because Zhang Xiaolin was pulled by the Japanese to the post of puppet chairman of Zhejiang Province. When Zhang Xiaolin died, his father was in Chongqing, and he neither expressed his position nor sent a message of condolence, in fact, he completely understood what was going on. He had also dissuaded Zhang Xiaolin before, but to no avail, Dai Li wanted to kill Zhang Xiaolin, and his father had no choice. I believe that Dai Li had consulted him in advance, but on the one hand, it was brotherly love, and on the other hand, it was the general righteousness of the nation, and he was not easy to express his position.
A multi-faceted father
Many people's impression of their father comes from those TV series in Shanghai, thinking that they live a life of swords and swords all day long. Of course, the TV series must be filmed like this, otherwise no one will watch it.
Xu Zhucheng, editor-in-chief of "Wen Wei Po", had met his father back then, and also wrote a "Biography of Du Yuesheng", Xu Zhucheng said in the article that he thought that a tycoon-like person like Du Yuesheng, even if he did not have red eyebrows and green eyes, should always be a reckless martial artist, but after meeting, he was just a slender old man with a blue complexion, who looked powerless, and there was little foul language often said by "white-faced people" in his speech. My father is a weak person, I heard my mother say that when my father first married her, he also liked to wear diamonds, because Shanghai is called "white-faced people" outside, and white-faced men like to wear diamonds, as if it is a kind of identity. His mother told him that men in the high-class society did not wear diamonds, and his habit was changed little by little. My father wore a long shirt for many years, and even at home, the collar button was tightly fastened. However, before the Anti-Japanese War, Chiang Kai-shek gave him the title of major general, and he took a photo of the only one in his life wearing a military uniform.
When my father was a child, his family was poor and he did not receive much education, so his education was very important to us, and we must receive the best education as far as possible. The Du family's tutoring is very strict, especially for boys. Once the eldest brother skipped the exam and was slapped twice by him. At home, the father's harshness is carried out specifically through the mother. Once, my sister failed to do well in the English test, and her mother beat her ten times.
My father has always had a yearning for literati and respects them. He befriended many cultural celebrities, and many literati became his personal lawyers or guests. Zhang Taiyan and his father had a very good personal relationship, in 1930 his father bought 50 acres of land in his hometown and built the "Du Family Ancestral Hall", Zhang Taiyan not only compiled a family tree for the Du family, but also wrote a thousand words of "Gaoqiao Du Family Ancestral Hall". On the day when the Du family ancestral hall was built, dignitaries including Chiang Kai-shek, Songhu garrison commander Xiong Shihui, and Shanghai Mayor Zhang Qun all presented plaques, and the scene was very large.
Zhang Shizhao was the chief of education, and later worked as a barrister in Shanghai, so they had more contacts at that time. Zhang Shizhao is his father's personal lawyer and counselor. A long time ago, Mao Zedong wanted to send many Communist Party members to Paris, and found Zhang Shizhao for help, and Zhang Shizhao came to my father to ask for money.
My father also likes to be old, and when he was in Chongqing, Zhang Shizhao and my family lived upstairs and downstairs in the same building. Zhang Shizhao has his own small study, I polish his ink every day, and he will teach me to write after polishing. Later, when I came to Hong Kong, Mrs. Yin also gave me the inkstone used by Zhang Shizhao.
After his father was developed, he asked others to do some things on the rivers and lakes, and kept a little distance from his early brothers, and he was more about doing some public welfare and charity. Whenever a disaster occurs, my father will come forward to organize relief.
Every Spring Festival is a big deal in Du's house, because people in Shanghai know that they will not go back empty-handed to Mr. Du for the New Year. So I remember that at that time, when the New Year was approaching, my father asked his subordinates to transfer money to the family in several banks, and rice, rice was not a problem, because Wan Molin, the housekeeper of the old mansion, was from the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, so no matter how many Mi Wan Molin could bring it. At that time, there was a queue to come to the old mansion to pay New Year's greetings, including many poor people and beggars, as long as they came to the gate to pay New Year's greetings to Mr. Du, they could always share dividends.
His father's hometown is Gaoqiao, Pudong, Shanghai, and every summer he has to buy a large number of "sha potion" and "Zhuge marching scatter" from the pharmacy, send them to Gaoqiao, and give them free of charge from door to door, a move that has persisted for many years. I still remember when I was a child, I went to my hometown in Pudong once, and I rowed there, and Pudong was still a wasteland at that time, like Pudong now. Now the Du family ancestral hall is gone, and there seems to be a small house, where a certain unit of the Air Force is stationed, and everything else is gone.
No matter what he said about his father, one thing is universal: he has never wavered in the general interests of the nation. My father's anti-Japanese stance has never changed, and I think this has something to do with the gang, because the older generation of people in the gang hated the Japanese, and many ideas in the gang were passed down. But the main thing is that my father has a very strong sense of "Chinese", so he hates Japanese very much.
At the beginning of the Anti-Japanese War, my father, in the name of the vice president of the Red Cross Society of China, united with all walks of life in Shanghai to organize an ambulance team. Even after his father evacuated to Chongqing, many of the materials or relief items donated from overseas were received by my father and shipped to the mainland. He assigned many people to do underground work in the Japanese-occupied area of Shanghai, secretly helping the Nationalist government, such as Wan Molin and Xu Caichen, who was a Japan expert. When Gao Zongwu and Tao Xisheng wanted to escape from Wang Jingwei's camp, Chiang Kai-shek asked Wan Molin to help them secretly through my father. When Japan surrendered, the Nationalist government wanted to take over Shanghai, and my father did a lot to stabilize Shanghai.
Inside and outside politics
After the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War, his father moved to Chongqing, and his relationship with the people in the early gang gradually became estranged, and on the contrary, he became closer to Chiang Kai-shek. When his father was in Chongqing, he was very close to Dai Li, and the so-called proximity was to help Dai Li do underground work in Shanghai, and also to use his connections in Shanghai, mainly economically, to help the Nationalist Government resist Japan.
The relationship between Chiang Kai-shek and his father is, frankly speaking, a use, because Chiang Kai-shek has never been able to control Shanghai, so he wants to use his father's relationship in Shanghai to achieve indirect control, and his father is not an official, it doesn't matter what Chiang Kai-shek does to him, so this kind of use is also unilateral use.
Not long after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, there was a rift in the relationship between my father and Chiang Kai-shek. There were many people in Shanghai who couldn't get along with my father, and Wu Tiecheng, the commander of the garrison, also grabbed his pigtails everywhere. It may have been in Chiang Kai-shek's opinion, at that time he no longer needed to control Shanghai through my father. In order to save the financial crisis, Chiang Kai-shek sent Chiang Ching-kuo to Shanghai to implement currency reform, issued gold yuan bills, and demanded that the people exchange all their fiat currency, gold and silver into gold yuan bills. The third brother, Du Weiping, did not fully comply and was arrested by Chiang Ching-kuo for the crime of speculation. After the third brother was arrested, there were rumors that Chiang Ching-kuo was going to shoot him, but his father didn't say anything, just said: "I have eight sons, it doesn't matter if I shoot one." I believe that when he said this, he could still feel the coldness of the world. They may have some scruples about the Du family, and the third brother was released after being sentenced to six months. I heard that someone told Mrs. Jiang that if he really shot my third brother, I don't know what will happen in the future.
After we arrived in Taiwan, we had a good relationship with the Chiang family. My mother had to visit Chiang's house every week, and my mother's approach was not to maintain the relationship between the two families, because Chiang Kai-shek liked to listen to operas, but after losing the mainland, it was not easy to go in and out of Taiwan to listen to operas in public, so Mrs. Chiang often took my mother and a few other people to the official residence to sing operas, and went every week. Later, she was also baptized into Christianity, and worshipped with Mrs. Chiang every week, and her mother was religious because of Mrs. Chiang, except for her, all the Du family believed in Buddhism, so her mother's religion was completely political.
Over the years, there have been articles one after another, talking about my father's help to the Communist Party in Shanghai. For example, in 1947, my father accepted Jin Shan as a "Guanshan disciple" -- in the gang, the identities of "Kaishan disciple" and "Guanshan disciple" are the most special, and I think my father is clear about Jinshan's identity as a Communist Party member. My father took care of him, giving him 500 yuan a month and giving him a garden house on Xue Huali Road (now Jianguo Middle Road). Now everyone also knows that Yang Du joined the Communist Party in his later years. During the Anti-Japanese War, at the request of Pan Hannian, he also imported 1,000 pairs of gas masks from foreign countries and presented them to the Eighth Route Army. Zhou Enlai's younger brother also had a close relationship with his father, and if he came to the old mansion, everyone had to avoid it, because everyone knew that they were going to talk about things.
Now many young people will ask me this question: Was your father oriented towards the Kuomintang or the Communist Party? If you ask like this, you won't know my father. My father has always helped with both sides, and he will not offend anyone. Both parties are fighting for him, and he is also looking for his own space.
In the spring of 1949, when the Kuomintang and the Communist Party were about to split the winner, perhaps considering his father's influence, both sides lobbied him through their own channels to win him. But in the end, my father chose Hong Kong. I believe that my father knows very well in his heart that his position all his life is not to be an official, what can he do when he goes to Taiwan? And even if he went to Taiwan, the Kuomintang would not treat him well. On the mainland side, how could a new regime after the liberation of Shanghai tolerate the existence of gangs? He understands this very well, so he can only stay in Hong Kong.
When he arrived in Hong Kong, he was always reluctant to express more views on politics, and he told his most trusted protégé, Lu Jingshi, that the two parties were brothers, so why should they fight back and forth? My father still looked at politics from the point of view of gangs, he saw it too simply, politics was definitely much more complicated than gangs. The gang has the rules of the gang, re-promises, and never allows betrayal, and the father obviously cannot understand the rules of the game for politicians.
Old things at sea
My father loved Peking Opera, and the two wives he married later, my mother and Meng Xiaodong, were both Peking Opera actors. My maternal grandmother's name is Xiao Lanying, and Xiao Lanying, along with En Xiaofeng and Li Guifen, are the most accomplished of the first generation of Peking Opera actresses in China. Li Guifen is Lu Yan's mother, I call her aunt, we are very close to Lu Yan's family, and she often lives in our house when she is in Shanghai. Her mother's name is Yao Yulan, she was born as a singer, and she still sang opera after marrying her father, but most of them were charity performances or church meetings.
My father also had a good relationship with the Peking Opera industry, and no matter how famous Peking Opera performers came to Shanghai, they would go to my father. He often invited guests to dinner, and when he was happy, he would sing a few words during the meal.
Father and Mei Lanfang have known each other for a long time, and Boss Mei comes to visit him every time he comes to Shanghai. The relationship between Mei Lanfang and my father, and the relationship between my father and Meng Xiaodong should be talked about separately. My father married Meng Xiaodong as his wife after Mei and Meng separated.
Because they are both Peking Opera actors, Meng Xiaodong has been close to my mother and grandmother for a long time. After Meng Xiaodong left Mei Lanfang for a period of time, he got acquainted with his father and officially had a relationship in the 40s. Mother treats Meng Xiaodong as her own and doesn't mind. Their relationship was good and bad, sometimes they would quarrel, and she would go back to Beijing when she was angry, and she would be fine again after a few months. During that time, Meng Xiaodong's letters to my mother I still keep, the letters are all about life, my mother sometimes sends money to her, she has a group of friends in Beijing who often come to Shanghai, like the Wu family and the Zhu family, they are all big families, and they are very familiar with each other.
I guess my father has had a crush on Meng Xiaodong for a long time. On the one hand, she sings very well, and from the current point of view, she can also be called an artist. On the other hand, Meng Xiaodong is more scheming and very good at pleasing his father, and often tells jokes in front of my father to make him happy. In addition to Mandarin, Meng Xiaodong also speaks Shanghainese very well, and her father may communicate with her more smoothly. Unlike my mother, who had been married to my father for so many years, she could hardly speak Shanghainese, and later my wife often asked my mother how she could communicate with my father, and my mother replied, "He can understand me, but I can't understand him." "
Mei Lanfang and Meng Xiaodong's breakup is not so simple, and it may involve many very complex issues. My mother would sometimes tell us some things about their separation, and my mother knew that Meng Xiaodong must have conditions for leaving Mei Lanfang, and the conditions could be harsh. My mother can't get used to it, because they are all from singing and opera, and she sympathizes with Meng Xiaodong to some extent. But what this condition is, only Mei Lanfang, Fu Zhifang and Meng Xiaodong know. Mei Baojiu didn't know, and Xu Jichuan didn't know either-when I went to see Xu Lao in 1983, I mentioned this matter, but he didn't know. I think there may be conditions for Fu Zhifang to restrict Meng Xiaodong's performance on stage as a condition for their separation, but this is just speculation and cannot be confirmed. So later, I heard that Zhang Ziyi was planning to shoot Meng Xiaodong's biography, but the Mei family did not agree, because it might involve a more delicate relationship. I don't think the movie "Mei Lanfang" will have too much to do with this relationship.
The relationship between his father and Mei Lanfang was not affected because of Meng Xiaodong. In 1947, on my father's 60th birthday, the China Grand Theatre in Shanghai organized a ten-day meeting. Mei Lanfang and Meng Xiaodong both went to Shanghai to perform, but they did not share the stage - the big axis of ten days, Mei Lanfang accounted for eight days, and Meng Xiaodong accounted for two days, avoiding the embarrassment of meeting. Meng Xiaodong didn't mention Mei Lanfang after that, and after liberation, his father had little contact with Mei Lanfang.
Meng Xiaodong and Du Yuesheng
I think Meng Xiaodong still has feelings for my father, otherwise she wouldn't have come to Hong Kong with her father. When her father married her a year before his death, he gave her a name, otherwise how could he divide the property in the will? Apart from our family, there weren't many people who attended the wedding that day, and everyone had a meal together and took a few photos. Photographs of the wedding are still in the Shanghai History Museum, and one of them is a photo of me with Ma Lianliang, Wan Molin and Meng Xiaodong's disciple Qian Peirong. On the day of the wedding, Meng Xiaodong was very happy, and his father, who had been ill for a long time, was also rarely in good spirits, and he accompanied the guests with illness. This marriage doesn't matter who fulfills whom, there is affection between them, my father has always valued her artistic achievements, Meng Xiaodong also admires my father very much, her marriage with her father is not a repayment, nor is it a helpless choice. In addition, my mother was also in the matchmaking, so it was easier to walk together. The books that are published now, like "The Biography of Meng Xiaodong, the Winter Emperor of Liyuan", tell how my father was with Meng Xiaodong, and the set they said was unreliable.
After Meng Xiaodong married her father, we called her "Mommy" and called our mother Niangniang. Usually, Meng Xiaodong called my mother my sister, before she and her father became husband and wife, because they were both Peking Opera actors, they had a good relationship. The relationship between Meng Xiaodong and his mother is good and bad, and there are sometimes many things between them.
Meng Xiaodong
Meng Xiaodong was very beautiful when she was young, she used to smoke a lot, but this did not affect her singing skills. Meng Xiaodong's personality is relatively lonely and arrogant, in her later years in Hong Kong and Taiwan, she never sang, not even singing, the last cappella was sung to Zhang Daqian in Hong Kong, because Zhang Daqian likes to listen to her plays, which is a big face. Although she didn't sing much later, she was still very prestigious, and my wife once asked Meng Xiaodong: "Are you still ready to sing?" Meng Xiaodong replied: "What about Huqin?" "Yes, how can you sing without a huqin, the last person to play the huqin for her was Wang Ruizhi, who also passed away.
In 1952, my mother and I first went to Taiwan, and Meng Xiaodong stayed in Hong Kong alone until 1967, when he also arrived in Taiwan. After Meng Xiaodong arrived in Taiwan, her life was dull, and she rented a house by herself and lived alone. She adopted a child in Beiping in her early years, and it was rumored that she was pregnant with Mei Lanfang's child. Meng Xiaodong had a good life in his later years. She didn't have much financial resources, she just lived on the money my father left her and the money she earned back then, and she didn't have a lot of needs for money, she just hoped that friends would come to her every day, like my wife and second sister to play cards with her, and she would be content. Meng Xiaodong is very close to us and treats us as his own children. We were also very good to her. Every day there were people in her house, and my mother went every day.
The book "The Biography of Meng Xiaodong" that came out a few years ago said that she had ten disciples, but there was no such thing at all. Several people often go to Meng Xiaodong's house to chat and talk about dramas. Her personality is like this: she must not offend anyone, so if you run to her and ask her "Teacher Meng, how do I sing", her answer will always be "good". Meng Xiaodong suddenly fell ill and passed away. None of them actually worshiped Meng Xiaodong, so after Meng Xiaodong died, they discussed: Let's just kowtow in the mourning hall. Many people came to the mourning hall to kowtow to Meng Xiaodong that day, they were all disciples? So the so-called "Ten Disciples" is actually a big joke.
Meng Xiaodong died in Taiwan in 1977. Frankly speaking, I don't particularly pay attention to the movie "Mei Lanfang". I think that if it is made strictly according to historical facts, then this movie will definitely not be able to be filmed, it can only be half factual and half fictional. I'm more interested in the portrait of Meng Xiaodong played by Zhang Ziyi.
Each floats away
On May 1, 1949, my father and my family left Shanghai, and in Hong Kong we stayed at 18 Kennedy Terrace, which was chosen for him by a friend, which became the last Du Mansion. Many people went to Hong Kong with our family, and those people have followed him for many years, and they can also be said to be people who have fought the world since childhood. Counting, there are more than 100 people. The problems of these people's lives in Hong Kong have always been my father's heart disease.
His father's property was mainly real estate left in Shanghai, and there was very little cash, so after arriving in Hong Kong, the family's total cash was only 100,000 US dollars, which he deposited with Song Ziwen's younger brother Song Ziliang in the early days. At that time, my father originally wanted to go to United States from Hong Kong, but there were nearly 30 people in the family, and the $100,000 was not enough for the visa fee, so my father finally gave up the idea of going to United States. In fact, if he went to United States, Song Ziliang would also help him, but he still did not take this step in the end, on the one hand, for face, on the other hand, he has been undecided.
Shortly before his father died, one day, he asked his sister to bring him an envelope in the safe. My father likes and believes in my sister very much, and the key to the safe is in her hands. There were a lot of slips in the envelope, which turned out to be IOUs written by someone else. My father tore up all the IOUs. He said, "I don't want you to go around asking for debts when I die." He knows that many people who ask him to borrow money have run from the mainland to Hong Kong, and they don't have much money, and those IOUs can't be repaid, and they can't force others to repay the money as the Du family, and I still have Wan Molin's IOUs. One of them had an IOU with an IOU of 500 gold bars on it, which was not the highest.
So at that time, he was in a very bad mood and uncertain, and his father's poor health later was also related to this. He already had asthma, but it became more serious, and the more doctors asked for it, the more he took the medicine, but his body did not improve. After a few months, he laughed at himself and said, "Now I take medicine as food, and rice as medicine!" "
My father rarely went out in Hong Kong, and there were guests at home every day. He also corresponded with those people in the Kuomintang in the past, like Wang Xinheng. Perhaps due to his father's influence in Shanghai during those years, the Kuomintang and the Communist Party have been doing his work through various channels since 1949. After the liberation of the mainland, Zhang Shizhao came to Hong Kong several times and lived in our house. But my father saw politics very clearly, and he was not offended on either side.
On the afternoon of August 16, 1951, his father died in Hong Kong at the age of 63, and the eldest son and each wife were given $10,000 each, and the rest were divided among several thousand dollars each.
After my father passed away, we went to Taiwan, because at that time Lu Jingshi went to Taiwan to be a "legislator", and later Gu Jiatang also passed, and after my father died, the people who used to interact with my father still took good care of us. The kind of relationship between them may also be difficult for people in modern society to understand.
When his father died, he instructed that the bones be transported back to Shanghai and buried in his hometown of Pudong Gaoqiao. After he left, his mother transported his coffin to Taiwan. I thought that I would be buried in the mainland soon, so I never buried it, but later I saw that it was getting more and more difficult to return to my hometown, and I was finally buried in Xizhi, Taipei. Half a century has passed in the blink of an eye, and there are only a few left in the second generation of the Du family, scattered all over the world, and there is no contact with each other. My sister is still abroad, she is also in her eighties, and we are far away, and we only see each other once in a few years. It was my father's wish to go back to my hometown in Shanghai for burial, and it was a very sensitive matter, not that I wanted to accommodate it. There are traditional superstitious ideas, but there are also political considerations. Either way, I hope this matter is best resolved in my generation. If our generation can't do it, the next generation will be even more remote, they have lived abroad since they were young, and they don't have the slightest concept of family.
In the early days of reform and opening up, I returned to the mainland and wanted to invest and do business in Inner Mongolia. Once, Lu Jingshi asked me to bring a letter to Zhu Xuefan, chairman of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang, who was both protégés of his father in his early years, but later they each followed different political parties. I think the content of the letter is also an attempt to find some solution to cross-strait relations that have been frozen for many years. I believe that Chiang Ching-kuo was aware of Lu Jingshi's move. I also forwarded the letter to Zhu Xuefan, but soon Lu Jingshi died, and a few years later, Chiang Ching-kuo also died, and the matter was never mentioned again.
Now there are many books by Du Yuesheng on the market, including the official history and the wild history. Occasionally I flip through a few times, but no more interest. In my opinion, there is no book that will write a real Du Yuesheng, my father was involved in many confidential matters between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, but he did not tell our family about these things. It is more difficult to confirm the father's affairs, and it is difficult to write about political issues. As for myself, when I was young, I didn't realize that I wanted to know about the history of the Du family, but now that I want to know about it, many important people have passed away. When I came back in 1979, I met my bookkeeper in Shanghai, his name was Huang Guodong, who was reluctant to go to Hong Kong with us, and was willing to stay in Shanghai to see our house, but was later sent to Qinghai for many years. If the political atmosphere at that time had been as relaxed as it is today, Mr. Bookkeeper would have been able to tell a lot of things, but he did not dare to say anything at that time. He also passed away a few years ago. Only a few of his students knew more about his father's affairs, Lu Jingshi, Wan Molin, etc., but they didn't leave many memories. Some things may forever remain a mystery.
[Du Weishan (December 16, 1933-March 7, 2020), the youngest son of Du Yuesheng, ranked seventh. Well-known collector and expert on ancient coins. He has won the Shanghai Magnolia Award. 】