On the first day of the Spring Festival, a notification suddenly popped up on my phone from the “Yue Zheng Yi” app, which felt quite strange. The last time I received a notification during the Spring Festival was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, instructing us to cancel our holidays and return to work immediately. I thought it might be another emergency, but upon opening the notification, I found it was an obituary. It stated that Comrade Deng had passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack on New Year’s Eve after returning to his room to sleep after dinner. Upon receiving this news, I was momentarily stunned.
First Meeting with Old Deng
When I first transferred to my current unit in 2014, I was still a naive young man. At that time, another colleague from Meizhou joined the unit with me. Since we were both from out of town and unfamiliar with the area, we often went out together after work, and one of our main activities was playing badminton.
When our section chief heard that we two newcomers wanted to play badminton, he suggested we go to the next office and ask Old Deng about the venue.
This wasn’t my first time meeting Old Deng, as the personnel officer had taken us around to introduce us to all the colleagues in each office when we first joined. However, it was more of a cursory introduction to the office names, and I couldn’t remember the specific people. It wasn’t until I went to Old Deng’s office to ask about badminton that I truly began my first interaction with him.
At that time, Old Deng was warm, kind, and full of vigor, exuding the demeanor of a seasoned public security officer. After briefly understanding our intentions, Old Deng immediately sent us the address of the badminton hall and told us to just mention our unit’s name when we arrived, and we wouldn’t have to pay.
Old Deng was a key member of the unit’s labor union at the time, and we initially thought the badminton venue was a designated activity spot paid for by the union. However, after playing a few times, we discovered that Old Deng had prepaid for the venue out of his own pocket. Upon learning this, we went to thank him and tried to reimburse him for the previous sessions, but he firmly refused; a colleague nearing retirement joked that Old Deng was “not short of money,” and we should feel free to use his venue.
Becoming Neighbors
In 2015, I bought an apartment near the unit. At that time, the occupancy rate of the entire community was less than one-tenth, and the indoor parking lot was not yet for sale, only available for rent. With fewer cars, most residents parked directly at the community entrance, making it very convenient to get into their cars shortly after exiting the elevator.
During that period, I was deeply impressed by the license plates of two cars at the community entrance: a black Mercedes GLC with a Hong Kong license plate, whose six letters resembled my name, and a black Accord with the license plate number 007.
Later, I found out that both cars belonged to Old Deng. The Hong Kong-plated Mercedes was reportedly bought by his sister, and his wife usually drove it, while he drove the Accord to and from work.
From that year on, Old Deng and I became neighbors for ten years, living in the same building, with him above the 25th floor and me below the 20th. Additionally, my parents, like his father, also lived in the same building, just on different floors.
Unfortunately, I never visited his home. We often crossed paths in the elevator and at the entrance, and over the years, our family members became familiar with each other. He often played with my two children in the elevator, and my mother, who was a group leader for “Duo Duo Grocery” on Pinduoduo, frequently delivered groceries to his home.
Rural Poverty Alleviation
In 2016, our unit began targeted poverty alleviation in a remote mountain village in Yunfu, Guangdong. Once, when visiting impoverished households, Old Deng and I went together. On the way, he told me many stories about the unit.
I wasn’t particularly interested in the unit’s past events. However, I was always curious about the anxiety and compassion he showed during our visits to the impoverished households, which seemed somewhat inconsistent with my previous perception of him.
I had once thought that Old Deng came from a relatively affluent family and that his participation in poverty alleviation in mountainous areas would be just a superficial formality. But to my surprise, he genuinely delved into each household, patiently listening and carefully helping them.
Especially in a household impoverished due to intellectual disability, despite the messy and dirty living conditions and the warning from the village cadre about potential violent tendencies, he still showed full humility and responsibility, patiently engaging in conversation with them, trying to guide them to express their true thoughts in the simplest terms.
Later, I learned that Old Deng’s family had not always been well-off and that the political turmoil they experienced had a significant impact on their future choices.
Daughter Studying Abroad
In 2017, a new leader joined our unit. At that time, the leader’s daughter was in her third year at a university in Australia. It was only by chance that I learned Old Deng’s daughter was also in Australia.
Since our unit had few people, most of us often sat at the same table for breakfast and lunch. During these meals, I asked Old Deng several times about his daughter studying alone abroad. Each time, he spoke highly of her, mentioning how she took the bus to school alone in elementary school and traveled by boat to relatives in Hong Kong during middle school, showing strong independence.
However, since both of them had only one daughter, I never quite understood this approach.
In 2019, I didn’t return to Hunan for the New Year. During the Spring Festival, I visited the aforementioned leader’s home to pay a New Year’s visit. I deeply felt his melancholy; the couple lived in a villa, with no third person entering the house for long periods. The items were placed casually, and meals were prepared haphazardly, creating a sense of emptiness. Especially after his wife fell seriously ill, requiring him to shuttle back and forth between Guangzhou and Foshan, while their daughter in Australia was in a critical period of her career and couldn’t return to take care of her, I watched him grow haggard and aged. I never knew Old Deng’s thoughts on this matter, but from some indirect reactions, perhaps Old Deng also had similar regrets.
Veteran of the Anti-Japanese War
In 2018, my parents-in-law lived with me. Due to my father-in-law’s high blood pressure and years of hemiplegia from a stroke, my mother-in-law often pushed him out to sunbathe in the community. It was during these sunbathing sessions that they unexpectedly met a 90-year-old veteran of the Anti-Japanese War who also came out daily to sunbathe.
I later found out that this veteran was Old Deng’s father.
At that time, my father-in-law was nearly 80, already with white hair. Due to his poor health, he looked very old, but in fact, he was more than ten years younger than Old Deng’s father.
In fact, by 2025, Old Deng’s father was about to celebrate his 100th birthday. During the period after Old Deng’s death, his father was kept in the dark by his other children, unaware that Old Deng had passed away.
It’s hard to imagine what would happen when this veteran, who had joined the Nationalist Government’s Youth Expeditionary Army in Chongqing, learned the news. Previously, Old Deng visited him almost every day, but now, the carefully crafted lie that Old Deng had gone to Australia to visit his daughter would likely not last long in the face of the wise old man.
Loss of Position
During the 2019 national institutional reform, our unit was greatly impacted, with many positions and roles being abolished, and Old Deng also lost his leadership position in the process.
Given Old Deng’s seniority, he could have easily transferred to another unit to retain a leadership position. In fact, most people chose to do so that year, with many colleagues in leadership positions transferring out to continue their roles.
Only Old Deng and another colleague nearing retirement voluntarily stayed, taking non-leadership positions.
I wasn’t surprised by his choice. Old Deng had always been indifferent to personal gains and losses, especially in work-related matters.
House Demolition
In 2020, influenced by the Qinling villa incident, a similar issue arose in our area. On a piece of mountain land sold by the town government in the 1990s, over a hundred villas were built. Most of these villas were built by individuals who had bought the land, and many had obtained permits. Old Deng had also bought a piece of land during this period to build a house, intending it as his retirement home.
However, under political pressure, even though individuals had paid normal costs and obtained seemingly legal procedures, these villas became worthless because the land itself had not been rezoned for commercial and residential use.
During the forced demolition, Old Deng’s two-story house was the first to be demolished in our area.
Although Old Deng didn’t express any opposition upon learning about this, we all knew that this incident had indeed been a significant blow to him.
After a lifetime of hard work, just wanting a place to retire, investing so much effort and emotion, only to end up with nothing. It’s truly a regret.
Electric Car
In 2021, Old Deng sold his Accord and bought a GAC Aion electric car. Thus, Old Deng became the first in our unit to “eat the crab” of electric vehicles.
He often encouraged us younger colleagues to buy electric cars whenever he had the chance, praising new energy and new technologies.
At that time, due to objective conditions, our community couldn’t install private charging piles, so we had to go a few hundred meters to the Southern Power Grid charging pile at the nearby sports center or return to the unit’s internal Southern Power Grid charging pile. But Old Deng still enjoyed it.
Last year, when I rode in Old Deng’s car, I found that this car, bought less than four years ago, had already been driven over 100,000 kilometers by him.
In recent years, his most frequent route was between Foshan and Heyuan, mainly to build a new house in his hometown in Heyuan.
Although the house was nominally built by three brothers, in practice, Old Deng was the one mainly handling everything, from the drawings to the decoration and furniture selection.
Health Practices
In recent years, if anyone in our unit had the highest expertise in health practices, it was undoubtedly Old Deng.
Regarding Old Deng’s health practices, I personally observed three aspects that deeply impressed me.
First, his love for sports. I often saw him going out for a run when I took my children to school before 7 a.m. After work, I also saw him carrying a badminton bag out to play, day after day. In recent years, I rarely saw him driving to and from work, choosing instead to walk.
Second, his light diet. When eating in the canteen with us, Old Deng always had the lightest taste. For example, with Cantonese rice noodles, we would drench them in soy sauce, but he would only add a few drops. In past gatherings, I also noticed that he had little interest in rich meats, preferring plain boiled vegetables.
Third, his extreme self-discipline. When I once asked about his sleep schedule, I found out that he usually went to bed by 9 p.m. and got up at 7 a.m. to exercise, truly a model for us young people to envy. Over the past ten years, I’ve seen Old Deng’s physique remain almost unchanged, always around 120 pounds, with no belly fat and a very fit body.
Revolutionary Spirit
Over the years of interaction, I felt that Old Deng, as his name suggested, had a strong spirit of self-revolution, hating evil and being clear about public and private matters.
In daily work, what he complained about most was when a task was too “leftist.” From my superficial understanding of Old Deng’s early life experiences, I seemed to understand the possible reasons for this character.
Especially after learning that his father had joined the Nationalist Government’s army, which might have caused the entire family to suffer indelible scars in the 1960s and 1970s, it confirmed that a grain of sand from the times falling on an individual’s head indeed becomes a mountain.
Fortunately, their entire family eventually managed to walk out and move forward through various coincidences.
But some of the methods they used to move forward now seem somewhat out of sync with the times.
May Old Deng rest in peace!
Today is the first day back at work after the Lunar New Year. In Guangdong, it’s customary for married colleagues to give red envelopes to unmarried ones on the first day, wishing each other a prosperous start to the year. But due to Old Deng’s passing, our unit collectively canceled this activity this year. It’s also a sign of respect for Old Deng!