As a child, my mother often told me stories about my father's childhood. His father was born in a small county in Hunan in 1927. When he was very young, his mother died of illness. His father was killed when he was less than three years old, and his uncle and aunt raised him. Our home was in an old red revolutionary area of CCP. In the 1930s, the “Beat the local despots and redistribute the land" movement had to be terrifying. My grandfather was a lacquer and was also a small leader of the local Red Soviet Regime. His father-in-law's family was relatively wealthy and belonged to a large family. One day, when the land reform team confiscated the property of his father-in-law's house, he told the land reform team that his parents-in-law were very good people, honest landlords, and he should leave something more for him. Unexpectedly, his plea would lead to murder, and someone soon told him that someone in the land reform team said he was a traitor and wanted to kill him, and persuaded him to hide outside. So, he went to hide at a friend's house. After three days, he felt that the matter might be over, and went back home quietly. That night, a Red Guard member surnamed Wang brought a few people to arrest him, took him outside, and killed him under a big camphor tree in front of the house. A few days later, I heard that this man surnamed Wang was also killed by others. During the Cultural Revolution, this incident brought a lot of trouble to my father. He visited many elders who knew about this incident to ask for evidence, investigated the truth of this incident, and hoped to get rid of the entanglement of this incident. Later, my father thought it was a private vendetta and let it go.

My father's uncle was also a lacquer maker; his family was well off and he had no children of his own. He was nice to my father and sent him to school. After my father finished primary school, he insisted on studying traditional old books with a good friend of his, instead of going to middle school, and his uncle could not control him. In this way, he studied for a year and never went to school again. He often mentioned this matter later, if he had gone to middle school or university at that time, his future might have been different. At the age of fifteen, my father apprenticed to a nearby food store and worked there for a few years. After liberation in 1949, he passed the exam and started his accounting career. When I was a child, I often heard my father tell the story of his taking an accounting training class. He always told us with a smile that he never did abacus homework, but every time he took the exam, he got full marks. When I was in elementary school, I also wanted to learn from my father not to do homework. Thus, this method didn't work for me. Every time I didn't review, I didn't do my homework, and I didn't do well in exams.

My father is smart and capable. He likes reading very much. He has strong working ability. His abacus skills can be said to be fast and accurate. He is also a famous senior accountant in our county. When I was a child, I often heard stories from my mother about the county finance bureau sending my father to the regional and provincial finance departments to review difficult accounts. He has retrieved a lot of money from the higher-level financial department for our county finance bureau many times. Because of his excellent work, he was promoted to the deputy section chief of the rural department of the county finance bureau when he was in his twenties, and his salary was quickly upgraded to 57 yuan per month. In a small county town in the 1950s, a young man in his thirties earned a monthly salary of 57 yuan, which was already very high.

In 1958, the Great Leap Forward movement swept across the country, and our county also launched a campaign to catch up with the United Kingdom than the United States, and smelt steel. Almost all the iron pots, copper braziers and kettles in our house had been used by the neighborhood committee to make steel. Soon, the government was going to build an agricultural machinery factory. Our ancestral house with thirteen rooms was demolished by the local government in three days and three nights, and then a factory workshop was built. Our family was forced to move to a very small and short house, and the family of six lived in the short and small house for a long time. Later, we moved to the dormitory of the old post and telecommunications bureau for two years. Around 1962, the government implemented a policy to compensate for some confiscated private real estate. Although our family was only a small handicraft painter before 1949 liberation, the county government believed that my family was too wealthy to be compensated. My father was not convinced by this, so he wrote a report to the Hunan provincial government. Thus, the provincial government judged my house demolition as wrongful demolition, overturned the decision of the county government, and asked the county government to vindicate and pay compensation. In 1964, our family received compensation for half the workshop, which was about more than 200 square meters, which was equivalent to one-third of the old house. In this way, our family moved back to the place where the old house was. Since the other half of the house was a forge workshop, all the machine sounds were deafening from morning to night, and sometimes we couldn't sleep until midnight. Although our family got this due compensation, my father also offended his leadership because of this. He was considered by his superiors to be disobedient to the leadership and complacent. His job was also transferred from the Finance Bureau to the County Commercial Bureau, and he had since stopped be promoted in working. Until he retired at the age of sixty, he was still at the sub-department level, and his salary never rose again. Since the location of our house was next to the main street of the city, some units of business units always hit the idea of ??it. During the Cultural Revolution, the factory rebels came to our house many times to make trouble and mess with the house. Later, they forcibly occupied a quarter of our house. In 1983, under pressure from the government, my father finally sold the house to the County Materials Bureau at a low price of 27,000 yuan. After that, we moved to a dormitory of less than 60 square meters in my father’s company, and the living environment was very poor. My mother was very angry at my father's handling of the property, complaining all the time, and the two often argued about it.

My father was an amiable and easy-to-communicate person, but he was very strict with our brothers and sisters. Every morning at five or six o’clock, before the sun rises, he would wake up our brothers and sisters and arrange for different housework, washing up, etc. Bowl, swept the floor, read, took my brother and I to the river to fetch water. Sometimes, on Sundays, we were to a nearby winery to drag the lees of the lees home for cooking, or help my mother go to the river to do laundry and made dry vegetables. When we grew up a little, my brother and I were responsible for some of the heavy work at home. My mother was very busy with housework and usually didn't care about us. The three of us were afraid of my father. As long as he was at home, we all behaved very well. After dinner, we always sat around a square table and did our homework under dim kerosene lamps. When I was a kid, I was playful and didn't like to study. My dad sometimes goes out at night, and every time he goes out, I also went out to play with other children. Whenever I sneaked out of the house, I always heard my sister's loud voice behind me, "Ming-Ya-Zi is out to play again". Dad sometimes got angry and beat us and asked us to kneel on the ground. My sister and brother were very obedient and they would kneel down very quickly. But I was stubborn and refused to kneel down. Even after kneeling sometimes, I would stand up quickly. My father was so angry that his face was red, and the more he beat me. Sometimes my mother would come to intercede and persuade my father not to beat me again. After I grew up, I once heard my father told my mother that the children already grew up, he would never beat them again. Later, he stopped hitting us, and he rarely lost his temper with us. Sometimes, when we upset him, he communicated with us patiently and reasoned with us. When my sister and I reminisced about the past, my sister always laughed at me and said, "When we were beaten when we were young, our father asked us to kneel down, and we all knelt down quickly. You just didn't kneel. You kneel down, and stand up again, so you were beaten. most".

When we were young, my father asked our three sisters and brothers to learn abacus. My sister and brother were very serious and learned very quickly. They could add, subtract, multiply and divide abacus. When I was a little older, my father also began to teach me to learn abacus, but I had no interest at all, and I was not serious and focused, no matter how he taught me, I could not learn well. I always made mistakes and miscalculate the wrong number. My father was very patient and still sit next to me and taught me hand in hand. Occasionally, I could add six hundred and six correctly once or twice. My father would be very happy and say you did good job.

In June 1966, Mao Zedong launched the Cultural Revolution, and all schools began to close classes to start the revolution. Movement after movement, many people were arrested and criticized by the Red Guard rebels, wearing high hats and parading through the streets. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, my father was not affected. One day, a meeting of 10,000 people was held in our county seat. After the meeting, there was a parade around the city. Our house was facing the road, which was the only way for the parade. We all stood at the door to watch the excitement. We suddenly found out that my father was also grabbed, with a big sign hanging around his neck, three feet long and two feet high, with the words "Handicraft Capitalist, Class Heteropolar Li Qixaing".  My father, with high myopia glasses, expressionless and helpless, he looked at us as we walked. We were all very surprised and had a hard time accepting what we saw. How could a good and honest man like our father suddenly become a bad guy? After the parade, Father soon returned home, we all looked at him, he said angrily, "fucking, these guys really bad". My sister has been crying sadly, and my father asked us with a helpless smile if we saw him on the street? He comforted us that it didn't matter, so many people were paraded through the streets. Soon after, my father was locked up in the unit and was not allowed to go home. He wrote reflections every day. One day, my brother fished a big Chinese soft shell turtle, and my mother cooked a big bowl of turtle fish soup for my father. He said it was delicious.  Later, my father was sent to the May-Seventh-Cadre-School far away from the county seat for labor reform, and he seldom returned home. He stayed there for three years. After a long period of years, one day, he was finally released and returned to work in his original unit. However, the good times did not last long, and then he was persuaded to return home without a job.

After my father returned home, he and my mother started bouncing cotton to support the family, and then worked as an accountant in a street carton factory for two years. At that time, the cotton machine was manpower, and one foot had to constantly move the pedal up and down to drive the machine. If you step on it for 20 minutes, you will be sweating profusely, which was very hard work. My dad liked to study. All the faults of the flower machine were repaired and maintained by himself. He also bought an old motor, designed it by himself, converted the bounce cotton machine into an electric one, and made a fan to install behind the machine.  This greatly reduced the labor intensity of my mother bouncing cotton. After the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, the country's policy changed again. Many state cadres who had been dismissed were rehabilitated. My father also resumed his original position and was assigned to work in the Township and Township Enterprise Bureau until his retirement.

During the Cultural Revolution, the movement of Intellectual Youth go to the Mountains and the Countryside was a nightmare for many families at that time. My sister was sent to the countryside after graduating from junior high school at the age of 16. She stayed the countryside for eight years. Because our father was the target of criticism, every time she had the opportunity to recruit workers and returned to the city, she was turned away. The reason was that our family had failed the political review of government.  My brother was also sent to a local farm after he graduated from high school, but he was lucky, and after staying for less than three years, he joined a factory as an electrician. I should say that it was the luckiest. Per the policy at the time, if a family had three children, after two children were sent to the countryside, the third child could stay in the city. Therefore, after I graduated from high school at 16 years old, I was not sent to the countryside. At that time, many young people were unemployed, and even it was very difficult to find a temporary job, especially children like us who could not pass the family political review. So, I did nothing every day, playing around, playing basketball, swimming, sometimes participating in training games, and occasionally helping my mother bouncing cotton. I was idle at home, which was also a headache for my father. He hoped that I would be able to support myself in the future. He always patiently persuaded me not to waste time on playing, but to learn mathematics, physics and chemistry, especially mathematics and English. He often said to me that with English, you could study abroad and learn computer science. My father's words was like an ear wind. What was a computer, I had never even heard of it. No matter what my father said, I still played every day. Sometimes, when my father was annoying me, I told him that I couldn't even find a job, so how could I go to study abroad? What was the use of learning English? At this time, my father always said that you would see, whether you need to have knowledge or not in the future.

Mao Zedong died in 1976, and China ended the catastrophe of the 10-year Cultural Revolution. In July of the following year, it announced the restoration of the college entrance examination system for college admissions. When I went to invite my friends to play, they all told me that they couldn't go to play, but to review and prepare for the college entrance examination. After a while, I also had the idea of taking the college entrance examination, but I really had no confidence at all. Because, from elementary school to high school, I had never studied seriously. Every day was political study, doing labor, and digging air-raid shelters. Besides, it had been more than four years since I graduated from high school, and I had almost forgotten the little bit of physics and chemistry taught in school. However, I finally decided to try my luck. My father was very happy to hear that I was going to take the college entrance examination. He looked for review material questions for me everywhere. At that time, there was no copier, so all the materials had to be written down by hand. He spent a lot of time, sometimes copying the review materials until late at night. I remember when my friend and I went to the Education Commission to fill out the school application, and just about to go out, my father stopped me, he told me that your sports are very good, if you apply for the sports academy, you would be admitted. I didn't have the idea of studying PE at first, but after my father's reminder, I felt that it was also very good, so I filled in the PE volunteer. I prepared carefully for more than two months and studied for more than ten hours a day. My father sighed and said, "I have never seen this child read books so seriously." In 1977, the college entrance examination was held in October. That year, more than 300 people in our county took the physical education professional examination. I was the only sports undergraduate student admitted. In fact, my grades in the college entrance examination that year were not good. I just passed the test. If I didn't apply for the sports college with my father's suggestion, I would definitely not be able to get into the university, and I might miss the university for the rest of my life. Moreover, the admission rate for the college entrance examination that year was particularly low, only 4.7% nationwide. In the same year, my brother was also admitted to a top military academy. Moreover, the two universities we studied in were in the same city. The four years of university also enabled my brother and I to have more communication and understanding. My parents were very happy this year. Two sons went to college and my sister got married.

After I went to college, my father wrote to me every week to communicate. From 1986 to 1989, there were many student movements on college campuses. My father always told me not to participate in political movements in his letters. I understand his worries very well. Political movements in China were a disaster for many people, which were life-threatening and frightening. During our college years, although the family's finances were not very good, our parents did their best to support us and provided us with the basic expenses for our study every month. When I was a graduate student in 1985, my parents also sponsored me to buy a tape recorder for learning English. Later, I used this recorder to listen to the Voice of America every day for listening and speaking training until I came to the United States.

My father maintained the good habit of loving learning and studying hard all his life. He also developed a unique abacus multiplication and division method. He told me that his abacus multiplication and division formulas were simpler and easier to learn than regular operations. A few years before his retirement, he also spent a lot of time studying Chen, Jingrun's famous Goldbach conjecture, and sent his research articles to the Beijing Mathematical Research Journal, of course, to no avail. Out of curiosity, I googled my father's name, and I could still find his article published in the 1959 Financial Biweekly and 1989 in the "Rural Financial Accounting" magazine. My father was very frugal all his life, and he was never willing to buy things for himself. He often told us to be hard and simple. He also liked to smoke and drink when he was young. Sometimes, when a friend helped him buy good tobacco leaves from Chenzhou, Hunan, he told my brother and I to help him make cigarettes with a small wooden cigarette maker. However, my father never allowed our children to smoke, drink, play cards, and play chess. He said that doing these things is not good for health and wastes time. All, our three siblings do not have these hobbies. When my father was about forty years old, the doctor advised him to quit smoking and drinking. He was very self-controlled and quit when he said quit.

After my father retired, his health began to deteriorate. He suffered from an incurable disease and was often hospitalized. He was entangled by the disease for three or four years, which was very painful. One day, I received a call from my brother-in-law, who told my father that he was dying and wanted me to go home immediately. When I arrived at the hospital, it was past five in the afternoon and I saw my father lying on the bed with an oxygen tube in his nose, very weak. After a while, he saw me and called me softly. I hurriedly approached him and said, Dad, do you have anything to tell me? He shook his head. Soon, I found that he seemed to be dying. I quickly hold his head in my arm, and my mother rushed to call the doctor. When the doctor came in, my father had left peacefully and was sixty-four years old.

Two years after my father's death, in 1993, I got on a flight to the United States and started my American dream. At that time, I was catching up with the computer revolution in the United States. I studied hard for a few years. After completing my graduate degree in computer science, I quickly found a job as a software engineer. I have been working for more than 20 years now. Looking back on the journey I have traveled; I am very impressed with the uniqueness of my father's vision. His hope for me "to learn English, to study abroad, and to do computer work" has completely come true 20 years later. I often share these wonderful stories with my wife and my children. I am so lucky and very grateful for the grace of my parents and the teachings of my father. Dad, I love you!