1932: The price of fish

Fisherman on the River by Song dynasty Fan Zhongyen

On the river, people come and go,
Everyone loves the taste of bass;
You see one slip of a boat,
To and fro in the wind and waves. 

Fan Zhongyen was a governor and was famous for saying, "I am ahead of all in concerns of state affairs; as for pleasure, I am behind all."

1932 - age 31 continued

I thought, to solve this problem, to form farmer co-ops. These co-ops, since they are organizations, can help farmers spend money and buy their necessary merchandise. As a co-op, the capital sum is greater than any individual's. This helps with purchasing, transportation, and expenses. They can lower their price when they buy and raise the price when they sell. They can save the farmers a lot of money and headache and give them a lot of convenience. Besides these, the department of agriculture had new methods of fertilization, irrigation, breeding technology and advances to make the farmers' lives richer and better. Mr Wu made lots of surveys of these organizations and returned to Guangxi, China very satisfied.

The director of YMCA, Mr Zhang Qinjian, was a hard worker and fervently wanted to serve people. Besides his job at the YMCA, he also wanted to improve the education of the children of the overseas Chinese. He established an overseas school and was the principal. He wanted me to teach at the school. I viewed this as a benefit to the Chinese society here and also I was and continue to be a patriot, so I happily accepted and volunteered to work without pay. In December of this year, Mr. Zhang had to go on a business trip for a week and he asked me to cover his principal's job. I gladly agreed to this. Mr Zhang, besides running a school, also partnered with several Japanese friends to open a Chinese restaurant called Beijing Pagoda. I went there a lot because it was low-priced and served foods with a hometown taste. [In July 1970, I was in Taipei at the time, and received a phone call from a friend, Mr Zhu. He had recently gone to China as an American citizen and met Mr Zhang's two daughters in Hankou. Both of them wrote letters asking Mr Zhu to send them to me. In the letters, they wrote to say Mr Zhang had died the year before and that they didn't know what had happened to Beijing Pagoda because Mr Zhang had returned to China in a hurry. (Note: "worldly things foggy mystifying, where to start writing? where to end?" an emotional statement indicating how out of our control life is and how we grow nostalgic especially when someone dies.)]