r/nanjing • u/Mysterious-Rent1124 • 8h ago
[Chapter 1] From age 3 to 6 (1959-1961), I lived in a government kindergarten INSIDE Sun Yat-sen’s office in Nanjing Presidential Palace
From 1959 to 1961, from age 3 to 6, I lived inside the Nanjing Presidential Palace.
Not just me - our entire government kindergarten lived in the row of houses that included President Sun Yat-sen's office. The building was built in the early Republic of China, with bricks from the old Nanjing City Wall. It was President Sun's office. He handled national affairs and led the newly founded Republic here. Later, when President Chiang Kai-shek became president, he built a new office building to the west of it.
My little bed was in the big open room on the second floor. In the center was a stove for boiling water, surrounded by small beds. That was our kindergarten. During the day it was an office and a kindergarten. At night, it was our home. My bed was right behind President Sun's big desk.
In 1959, my father was an official of the Jiangsu Provincial Government, my mother was a doctor at the Jiangsu Provincial People's Hospital. Our family lived in a small grey-brick Republican-era house in Yanggongjing, Daxinggong, Nanjing.
Shortly after the Spring Festival, I had just turned three, my father took me into the Presidential Palace, where the provincial government was located. Our kindergarten was in the West Garden, by the Taiping Lake.
My father's colleague, Uncle Qi Luhou, a kind and amiable old man, picked us up by bicycle every week. Every time he dropped me at the boathouse by Taiping Lake in the West Garden, he had to go back to work in the Executive Yuan building in the east. Every time, I walked reluctantly towards the kindergarten building, looking back every three steps, watching Uncle Qi's kind smile and his waving hand. Six days later, he would pick me up at the door of the small building, and I would jump into his arms with joy.
At that time, we entered and left the Presidential Palace through the middle gate of the main entrance. Whenever we saw the soldiers with rifles standing guard at the gate, we children were full of admiration. Sometimes, when the kindergarten line came to the main gate, the teacher would negotiate with the soldiers and let each small hand touch the submachine gun. The red pillars of the front hall, the Taiping Lake in the West Garden, and President Sun's office left me with memories that will never fade in my life.
My father was born in northern Jiangsu. For generations, his family were peasants who lived by renting land. By my grandfather's generation, he suffered because he was illiterate, so he wanted his youngest and smartest child to study and become a cultured person. My grandfather dug out the silver dollars hidden in the mud wall. This money was saved by generations of hard work, who could not bear to eat or wear well. Generation after generation of my ancestors longed to save enough money to buy their own land. For a farmer, the greatest wish for generations is to own his own land.
During a flood in northern Jiangsu, my grandfather's second brother fled the famine and went to Jiangnan, the land of fish and rice. After hard work, his family stayed on the land outside Guanghuamen in Nanjing, living a life half vegetable farmer and half vegetable vendor. My grandfather keenly realized that staying in his hometown and farming his own land might not lead to a good life. Inspired by his second brother's experience, my grandfather thought more ahead. His youngest son would no longer be a farmer, but a city man.
My grandfather took out all the family's hope - the money saved for generations to buy land. He sent my father to a private school, and then to Wangji Middle School in Siyang, Jiangsu. My grandfather set a great ambition for my father: after studying well, he would no longer be a suffering farmer, but go to Nanjing to join his second uncle, work as a shop clerk who could do accounting in the city, and become a city person. In my grandfather's view, being able to do manual labor and also do accounting was being both civil and martial; becoming a clerk who could do accounting meant becoming a city person.
In the year he graduated from junior high school, my father was fifteen years old. The village Party branch secretary secretly recruited him into the Communist Party. The branch secretary told my father that a knowledgeable person like him, if he was willing to join the National Revolutionary Army's New Fourth Army after graduation, would not only have an official position but also money. For a child from a poor family, these words were a huge temptation. Soon after graduating from junior high school, under the guidance of the village branch secretary, he secretly joined the New Fourth Army without telling his parents. A young man educated in the traditional Four Books and Five Classics, he muddle-headedly joined the anti-traditional revolutionary army.
In the army, my father was given an officer rank equivalent to a platoon leader; but the promise of money was pure fiction. At that time, the Nationalist Government gave one soldier's pay, and the Communists used it to support several soldiers. My father became a clerk in a company of the New Fourth Army. Company Commander Zhang Lin was an old fellow villager from a neighboring village. The company headquarters had only the two of them as officers and a few soldiers. After my father joined the army, my grandmother Mrs. Hu had no news of her youngest son and cried all day. Soon, my father was shot in the leg in a battle with the Japanese army, but it was mistakenly reported that he had died in battle. My grandmother heard the news and, in extreme grief, passed away soon after.
At that time, transportation in northern Jiangsu was very inconvenient, with many ditches and rivers. More than twenty years later, when I was in middle school, my father took me to look for the stations of his New Fourth Army company and the Japanese army. The Chinese and Japanese stations were interlocked. My father sighed that the distance was so close that it was no wonder the Japanese often raided them. At that time, the troops had to sleep fully clothed, and at the slightest sign of trouble they had to prepare to fight.
My father recalled that one night, the Japanese army had quietly surrounded the village. At that time bullets were scarce, he threw a grenade and took the opportunity to jump out from the thatched roof and break through into the cornfield behind the house to escape. At that time, the movies I saw were all about the New Fourth Army chasing the Japanese devils. So I asked puzzled, why didn't you chase the Japanese? My father showed a bewildered look, and after a long while he replied, that's bullshit and bragging, the Japanese are not so easy to chase. He sighed that first, the protection of those ditches and rivers, and second, being able to hide and run well and escape, being able to survive in such an environment was already very good.
At that time, my father's New Fourth Army unit was a front-line combat unit. They did not eat well, dress warmly, or sleep soundly, and had to eat earthworms and wild vegetables out of necessity, and their clothes were patched. The Japanese often raided them, they often fought with the Japanese army, and there were always casualties. Because this New Fourth Army unit was in a dangerous situation, with a hard material life and a lack of medical care and medicine, many comrades left the unit and fled back to their hometowns.
On a Sunday in my childhood, a farmer in dirty and torn clothes found my home in Yanggongjing, Nanjing. He said he was once my father's comrade-in-arms in the New Fourth Army, but my family didn't believe him and wouldn't let him into the yard. At that time my father almost always worked overtime in the provincial government on weekends, so it was not until my father talked to this man on the phone and asked the family to give him a bath and food that we believed this comrade covered in lice.
From 1959 to 1962, during the Great Famine in China, many people starved to death, and there was a lack of clothing and food in the countryside. This former comrade-in-arms' family was in a state of cold and hunger. He was my father's comrade-in-arms. When my father joined the army, they had not known each other for long. This old soldier really could no longer endure the hard life and frequent fighting in the army, so he left the New Fourth Army on the pretext of recovering from an injury and went home, and never returned to the unit. Because he had no money for a car, he walked hundreds of miles, begging all the way to Nanjing, hoping to get help from his old comrade-in-arms.
At that time, when someone from his hometown came, the first thing before entering the house was to take off all the clothes on his body and put them into a large pot for the nanny to boil, to prevent the spread of lice and fleas. After this former comrade changed his clothes, his family took him to the kitchen to eat. There was no need to stir-fry or cook at all. Hunger robbed people of their dignity. When he saw the leftover rice and lard in my house, he pounced on it. He was so hungry that half a pot of rice and a jar of lard in the kitchen were eaten clean in an instant.
My father's hard days in the New Fourth Army lasted until Japan announced its surrender. After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, my father's New Fourth Army unit was divided into two groups, one to the Northeast and one to Shandong. Commander Zhang Lin was in the group going to the Northeast Field Army, and my father was in the group going to the Shandong Field Army. Before departing for the Northeast, Zhang Lin, with deep comradeship, rode a horse in the middle of the night to my father's station and woke up my sleeping father. Zhang Lin, who was the company instructor at the time, offered my father the position of battalion instructor and asked him to go with him alone. My father, due to various concerns and reluctant to be far away from his hometown, thought it over and did not agree.
After that, my father moved with his troops to Lunan and Jiaodong Peninsula in Shandong, and was incorporated into the Shandong Field Army. After the troops assembled, conditions improved, he could eat his fill, have warm winter clothes, and sleep soundly. Later, the Shandong Field Army was merged into the East China Field Army. Thus, Commander Zhang Lin and my father belonged to two different major field armies. The political commissar of Zhang Lin's column in the East China Field Army (later Minister of Coal Industry) and the director of the political department (later Secretary of the Jiangsu Provincial Party Committee) Peng Chong, were all my father's superiors during this period. One year, my father's buddy Commander Zhang Lin came to my house, and after drinking, talked about the hard years, recalled his comrades who died in battle, and shed tears in emotion.