Old fisherman, one reel rod,
Leans on hillside, water bank bend.
Small boat comes and goes without cares.
Seagulls lightly dot the ripples from far off,
Reeds gently bend days grow cold.
High song one stanza starts at dusk,
In a blink, waves with golden shadows;
Lift the head, moon rise to mountain east.
1934 - age 33 continued
These were exported to Europe and America for ingredients and were a manufactured from raw agricultural product, so it was an important business. From the point of view of the investors, these businesses needed to have good management, they needed to have lots of regulation and good systems for quality control. In order for the businesses to expand, they had to set up the systems to include capitol and raw material supply chain and labor payment and all kinds of expenses. Some materials had to be imported, so in this way with the exchange rate of foreign currencies, the profit is related to these things as well as taxes and shipping. Many factors are out of the control of the company. If the structure isn't tight or the wrong manager is in place, then profit decreases. Even if there is profit, sometimes it wouldn't benefit the investor.
Lihuan has been established for several years but hadn't made much profit. Mr Hu, the majority stockholder, assigned me to audit this company. On March 29, representing Mr Hu, I went from Shanghai to Nanjing. When I arrived at Nanjing, I went to a little hotel. In the morning, I went to their office on 14 Sanbu Street for a formal audit. At 11 AM, a staff member accompanied me to visit the factory. The factory building was quite modern and occupied a fairly large space. Inside the factory, there were many freezers. At that time, there were more than one hundred female workers, and many technical people working on the egg separation and freezing process. I checked their books, reports, and their receipts. Their accounting system was pretty bad, so I quickly found problem points. At noon time, I had lunch in the factory. In the afternoon, one of the workers went the hotel to fetch my luggage and moved me to their factory accommodations. From then on, I spent several days working on the audit. After several days of careful examination, I came to the same conclusion that I originally speculated that their pain points were all of weak accounting. So I returned to Mr Hu and suggested that he give up his stocks as I saw no future returns. Mr Hu sold his stock to someone else.
After the birth of Shudong, following the custom, we made a lot of red eggs and sent them to our friends and relatives.* We invited our relatives over for 1 month manyue dinner. We had lots of friends and relatives in Shanghai. Because of the number of people, we knew if we invited everyone to dinner, we couldn't afford it. Diqing and my income only covered our daily expenses and we had little left for savings. Since we got married in Nanjing, after we returned to Shanghai, we should have invited our friends and relatives in Shanghai for a reception. Because we could not afford it, we did not extend invitations. Diqing always felt regret about this. I always comforted her by saying, "If we do the right thing and are upright, our friends and relatives will understand. We don't need to an invitation to dinner to prove that." More than a year had passed since our wedding and people did understand. But, Shudong being our first born son, a lot of people sent gifts to celebrate. So if we still don't invite them it would be bad form. Just at the middle of our tricky dilemma and worries, all of a sudden, we got some money sent to us. The one who sent the money was a friend who lived in the same apartment as I did in Tokyo, a Hubei countryman, named Gao Wenyuen. Mr Gao had studied music in Japan and was pretty well established. After he came back to China, some people hired him and for several years he had some savings. When we were in Tokyo living together, I sometimes loaned my roommates money but didn't ask for repayment. After he returned to China, we hadn't had any contact. When he sent the money, he did not include a note saying why, I assume it was repayment. He didn't include his address so I couldn't write him to ask. So this is a loose end I have always pondered. Because of this money, we were able to invite friends and relatives over for manyue dinner at 8 Tier Bridge, the top floor of the YMCA restaurant.
We the Qus, at the beginning of the Ming dynasty, in order to escape the rioting, moved from Anhui to Huangmei (Hubei). Over several hundred years, our main thing was working fields and studying. We passed this one from generation to generation. At the end of the Ming dynasty, there were four role models who arose in the family. Their names were Qu Cen, Qu Zhousi, Qu Jia, Qu Han. These are my distant ancestors. Qu Cen was called Huan. Qu Zhousi was called Zhenglu; Qu Jia had filial piety (xiaozi) and was called Zhenglu; Qu Han also had filial piety and was called Huan. For four generations, their good character was so evident it gave our family a sense of nobility. Not only did it bring some glory to the family, it brought a good name to the family. Recently, we had our townsmen from Huangmei, Mr Mei Dongzu, he's very good in Chinese literature. He wanted to compile a book called Famous Scholars of the Generations. I have another townsmen, Den Shuqing. He asked me to provide information and research material about these four role models. Because of Mr Mei and Mr Den, I feel I need to do some research and collect and compile some information about these four people as if this my calling and duty. So I asked my brother Ciling to go to the Huangmei archive and collect our Qu family tree for me to research and organize. I did that and I wrote an article titled "Research material about these four Qu ancestors." In 1980, I compiled a volume of my writings and the four ancestors was the first article in that book.
*My mom commented that if it's a boy there are more eggs and if it's a girl, there are fewer. "But that's ok, it's only eggs."
