Monday, 18 January

Thirteenth day of the twelth lunar month

I got up early. Liu Furuo (劉芙若) came and we talked about the Sino-Soviet relationship. He was very unhappy with the CCP. He certainly thinks like this as he is a native of Shanxi.

The little girl’s infant teeth are coming through; she has a temperature and she yelled for her mother. This made me extremely sad. It was so nice that Long Renrui often comes to look after her. It is hard to get a good friend like her. It was not until 1.00 in the afternoon that the old car dispatched by the Ministry of Foreign Affair arrived, and I immediately took it to go to the Jiangsu hospital. This time Fanny was in Room 2, where she was previously when giving birth to the little girl. I talked to her for one and a half hours and she burst into tears. Me too. The deeper one’s love is, the bigger the suffering. This is what we mean by the parallelism of happiness and sadness. As Buddha said, sadness comes from happiness, the bigger the happiness, and the deeper the sadness. Now I believe it firmly. In the future, I have to be careful about starting a relationship. As for my wife, since we have had no feelings of love since our marriage, it was she who took the initiative to separate; I did not feel any pain. As for Song Qiongfang (宋瓊芳)[1], there was no great love between us from the start. As for Fanny, the situation was totally different. I could feel her love for me was from the utmost honesty. When we met, my conditions were not good, and she experienced many difficulties after leaving home. Love came easily from mutual pity. We have been together for more than two years. I knew she was easy-going, frugal and tolerable to hardship. She transmuted her respect for me to love. And I loved her too. It was quite true that love endured to eternity as we respected mutually. When the car returned and passed through Dushiqiao, I was not courageous enough to see my daughter at home for fear that I would cry. When Tianjuan got down from the car, he appeared to be in tears too. He has followed me since he was young; I treat him as if he is one of my children. He was sad and I felt sad too. Human beings are animals of emotion, and saints of our country put it as the centre of culture and politics. This is really supreme when compared with any ideologies of western philosophers and political theoreticians.

The car which the Ministry of Foreign Affairs dispatched is an old Ford. When it passed Fenghuangchang, it broke down. We tried to continue with the journey but we had to stop and repair repeatedly. At 7.00 p.m. when we arrived at the far end of Jingangpo, we could not pour petrol through the pipe. Luckily the young driver was so clever; he took the risk of using a small can to fill the carburetter, and to lie on top of the car engine to fill the carburetter from time to time.  We stopped six or seven times before we arrived at Geleshan. I had supper with Zhang Xiaozhi (張孝植) and Chen Yangchu (陳仰初) at a small restaurant. I phoned President Sun’s home and asked for his car to fetch us. When we arrived at the hotel it was already 10.00 in the evening.

[1] Fu Bingchang’s concubine.