Time slice

Author: Yu Feng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1997-01-01
Features: This reminds one of the paintings he created half a century ago, depicting the laborers at the bottom selling their hard work, the sorrowful wives, and the emaciated children, all with such large black eyes. As widely recognized, his paintings resemble those of the famous Spanish artist George Grosz, using bold and fluid lines like steel wires to capture the social reality hidden beneath the glittering lights and wine of Shanghai in that era. At that time, he couldn’t hear the music from the dance halls but only the agonized groans of these distorted (as he depicted them) people. However, this genius has not continued his creative work in recent decades, preferring not to hear the loud slogans. Today, at the age of eighty, the laughter and joy of his old friends seem to have taken him back to the 1930s. She told me that in that year, she and Dafu took their two-year-old son Long'er (Dafu's only son, who died at the age of five) back to Shanghai from Anqing Law College after leaving their jobs. At that time, Guo Moruo had just brought his Japanese wife Anna to live in Shanghai, and there was also Cheng Fangwu, who worried about Dafu’s unemployment. In reality, none of them had a steady income; they relied on a little stipend from the publisher of Ta Dong Bookstore to support the Creation Society. However, the three of them often gathered together, laughing and joking heartily despite their poverty.
One day, about a dozen people squeezed into a small front room at Guo Moruo’s residence on Hahon Road, Minhou South Lane, asking her to help prepare a meal. Cheng Fangwu had brought a large piece of preserved meat from Hunan, but the Japanese wife couldn’t cook it. So, the third sister went into the kitchen, but she couldn’t communicate with the Japanese wife about salt and oil, so Guo Moruo had to run back and forth to translate. The third sister smiled and said, “Do you know what they were eating? Nothing! They bought dozens of eggs and asked me to fry them one by one. The preserved meat was steamed, sliced into pieces, and each person grabbed a piece with their hands!” She said she found it amusing at the time, having never seen such a meal before. She spoke with a laugh that shook her whole body. That scene from over fifty years ago felt as if it had happened just yesterday, and her gaunt, pale face flushed with laughter.
There is a precious photograph: Qi Baishi sitting in the middle, holding a flute horizontally with both hands, as if playing, his eyes narrowed into a single line. A group of female guests leaned forward to watch him, some laughing, others clapping. It was at the home of Huang Qixiang, whose wife, Guo Xiuyi, was a disciple of Qi Baishi and studied painting under him. That day, Fengxia, Zuguang, and I were there, and there might have been another of his disciples, Hu Jieqing. The old master was delighted, and someone handed him a short flute. He sang four lines of a folk song in his Hunan dialect:
“A girl of seventy-seven,
Four years to make it eighty-one,
Singing a ditty is hard to open her mouth,
With teeth, she blows the short flute.”
This made the group of female guests laugh joyfully. Just then, someone took a camera and clicked a photo. Thirty years later, when I was in Xiangtan, Hunan, the hometown of Qi Baishi, his grandson Qi Fola told me that his grandfather not only played the flute on a cow’s back in his youth but also learned to play the huqin later, always loving music. With the skill of a woodcarver, he once meticulously crafted a bamboo flute, inlaid with shell patterns, with both ends carved from white ox horns about an inch long, adorned with colorful ribbons. Every evening before dinner, he would play it, and its melodious and resonant sound could be heard by neighbors far and wide.