天使的救贖·阿炳的妻子董催弟Salvation by an Angel · Dong Cuidi, Abing’s Wife
China’s Beethoven · Blind Musician AbingSalvation by an Angel · Dong Cuidi, Abing’s Wife
China’s Beethoven · Blind Musician Abing天使的救贖·阿炳的妻子董催弟
中國的貝多芬·瞎子阿炳

In the legendary life of Blind Abing—a life steeped in darkness, exile, and sorrow—his wife, Dong Cuidi, was the one great woman who never abandoned him, who gave him the warmth of human companionship, and who remained by his side until the end of his life.

After long years of hardship and loneliness as a street performer, Abing’s fate finally took its warmest turn in the 1930s: he met Dong Cuidi, the woman who would become his wife and share the rest of his life.

Dong Cuidi was neither a lady of a distinguished family nor someone who understood music. She was simply an ordinary rural woman from the lowest reaches of society, a woman whose own life had been equally marked by misfortune. Yet to Abing, struggling through loneliness, poverty, and darkness, her arrival was nothing less than the coming of an angel sent from heaven to save him. She became his support, his eyes, and his guardian.

According to household-registration records discovered in Wuxi, Dong Cuidi was born on January 18, 1889, making her four years older than Abing. Her ancestral home was Beiguo in Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province.

Before meeting Abing, she had once been married in the Jiangyin countryside. Her first husband died young from illness. In that deeply conservative age, a widowed rural woman was often scorned and rejected by both her husband’s family and her own.

To survive, she had no choice but to leave behind the children she had borne with her first husband and make her way alone to the prosperous city of Wuxi. There, she barely managed to support herself by working as a maid and domestic helper in wealthy households and by taking in needlework.

By the 1930s, Abing had already been blind for many years. He lived as a wandering street performer, never knowing where his next meal would come from. Through the introduction and matchmaking of kindhearted neighbors near Chong’an Temple, these two suffering souls—both cast aside by fate and struggling at the very bottom of society—came together and formally became husband and wife.

In the legendary life of Blind Abing—a life steeped in darkness, exile, and sorrow—his wife, Dong Cuidi, was the one great woman who never abandoned him, who gave him the warmth of human companionship, and who remained by his side until the end of his life.

After long years of hardship and loneliness as a street performer, Abing’s fate finally took its warmest turn in the 1930s: he met Dong Cuidi, the woman who would become his wife and share the rest of his life.

Dong Cuidi was neither a lady of a distinguished family nor someone who understood music. She was simply an ordinary rural woman from the lowest reaches of society, a woman whose own life had been equally marked by misfortune. Yet to Abing, struggling through loneliness, poverty, and darkness, her arrival was nothing less than the coming of an angel sent from heaven to save him. She became his support, his eyes, and his guardian.

According to household-registration records discovered in Wuxi, Dong Cuidi was born on January 18, 1889, making her four years older than Abing. Her ancestral home was Beiguo in Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province.

Before meeting Abing, she had once been married in the Jiangyin countryside. Her first husband died young from illness. In that deeply conservative age, a widowed rural woman was often scorned and rejected by both her husband’s family and her own.

To survive, she had no choice but to leave behind the children she had borne with her first husband and make her way alone to the prosperous city of Wuxi. There, she barely managed to support herself by working as a maid and domestic helper in wealthy households and by taking in needlework.

By the 1930s, Abing had already been blind for many years. He lived as a wandering street performer, never knowing where his next meal would come from. Through the introduction and matchmaking of kindhearted neighbors near Chong’an Temple, these two suffering souls—both cast aside by fate and struggling at the very bottom of society—came together and formally became husband and wife.

With Dong Cuidi in his life, Abing’s wandering existence, which had bordered on self-destruction, at last regained a faint breath of life and a touch of domestic warmth. As he performed around Chong’an Temple and throughout the streets of Wuxi, Dong became his indispensable support—and, even more importantly, his guardian.

Every afternoon and late into the night, the people of Wuxi would see the same scene: the small and frail Dong Cuidi walking beside the tall, blind Abing. With a pipa strapped to his back and an erhu in one hand, Abing rested his other hand on his wife’s shoulder and let her guide him along the stone-paved streets so characteristic of the old city.

Whenever Abing played music or performed narrative songs in public, Dong Cuidi quietly kept watch beside him. She looked after his belongings and carried a small bamboo tube in which she collected coins from teahouse patrons and other people gathered around to listen.

The streets of Wuxi in those days were plagued by hooligans and local bullies, particularly around Chong’an Temple, where Abing often performed. If some petty thief tried to steal his earnings because he was blind, or if a thug attempted to intimidate or assault him, the slight and diminutive Dong Cuidi would immediately rush forward. She would hurl abuse at the offender without the slightest hesitation and shield her husband with her own body.

Her fearless and uncompromising ferocity frightened away those cowardly bullies who preyed only upon the weak. With her own frail body, she made herself Abing’s guardian.

Abing had no money and could afford only a dilapidated little room with a leaking roof inside Sanshengge Taoist Temple on Library Road in Wuxi. After Dong Cuidi cleaned and arranged it, the room remained almost entirely bare, but at least it began to possess the warmth of human life. Abing could eat hot meals. The bedding on their bed, though old and worn, was at least clean. At last, amid all his suffering, Abing had a humble but warm and tidy home.

Under Dong Cuidi’s care, the black Taoist robe Abing always wore when performing remained spotless despite its age. Whenever it tore, she patiently mended it, stitch by stitch. Poor though he was, Abing still struggled to preserve the nobility of his soul. Because of Dong, he always went out to perform neatly and cleanly dressed, carrying even in poverty a dignity that no one could dismiss or despise.

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According to later accounts, Dong Cuidi had several children with her first husband, whose surname was Zhong; some records identify them as three daughters and two sons. Although necessity had forced her to leave them behind and seek a living alone in Wuxi, her children gradually came to understand their mother as they grew older. They neither forgot nor abandoned the unfortunate woman who had remarried.

After the War of Resistance Against Japan ended, Dong’s eldest daughter, Zhong Guifang, and her other children made several special journeys from their home in Jiangyin to Chong’an Temple in Wuxi to visit the elderly couple. In their eyes and in their hearts, the blind man in dark glasses, smelling of smoke and playing the erhu, was their stepfather.

Whenever they came, they brought rice grown in the countryside and chickens and ducks raised by their own families to help the impoverished couple survive. Through them, Abing, who never had biological children of his own, experienced once again the long-lost warmth of family life.

In the late 1940s, hoping to ease Abing’s sorrow at having no descendants, one of Dong Cuidi’s sons—Abing’s stepson—gave his daughter, born in 1944, to Abing and Dong as their granddaughter. The girl was later renamed Hua Qiudi. After Abing and Dong Cuidi died, she returned to her biological parents and resumed her original name, Zhong Qiudi.

Little Qiudi was about four years old when she was sent to live in the dilapidated room on Library Road. In her childhood memories, Grandpa Abing was blind and sometimes rather eccentric, but he showered his little granddaughter with affection.

After Qiudi came into his life, Abing would buy her candy before returning home whenever he earned money from performing in the streets, no matter how little he had made. Once home, he would feel his way toward the child who called him “Grandpa” and place the candy in her mouth. Through her, the lonely Abing rediscovered a joy and delight in life that he had not known for many years.

Dong Cuidi accompanied Abing through the final—and most difficult—decade and more of his life.

By the winter of 1950, years of exhaustion and worsening lung disease had left Abing bedridden. The household had run out of food and water, and their lives had reached a desperate impasse. Deprived of opium, upon which he had long been dependent, Abing could do nothing but convulse and struggle in agony on his sickbed. Dong Cuidi herself was already past sixty, her health broken by a lifetime of hardship. Their fragile household had finally reached the end of its strength.

On December 4, 1950, Abing died after coughing up blood, overwhelmed by poverty and illness. His life of suffering and sorrow had come to an end.

After Abing’s death, Dong Cuidi’s spirit collapsed completely, and she also lost the only support upon which her life had depended. Barely three months later, on March 27, 1951, this quiet, kind, and indomitable woman died alone from illness in that empty, dilapidated room.

Dong Cuidi knew nothing of Bach or Beethoven, nor did she know that the music her husband played would one day astonish the world. In the darkest and coldest years of the old society, she simply offered the plain goodness of an impoverished Chinese woman and the strength of her own frail body. For more than a decade, she served as Blind Abing’s indispensable eyes and guardian.

Without Dong Cuidi to guide and protect him in the streets, illness, hunger, and the cruelty of street life might have claimed Abing much earlier. Moon Reflected on Second Spring might never have survived to reach us today.

In 1983, the Wuxi municipal government rebuilt Abing’s tomb in Xihui Park at the foot of Huishan and reinterred his remains there.

Today, if you travel to Wuxi to pay your respects to Abing and stand before his imposing tomb, shaped like a musical stage, remembering this folk musician who endured a lifetime of suffering, you should also remember the ordinary woman who once held his hand and accompanied him through the storms of his final years—Dong Cuidi.

Abing transformed his suffering into music. Through her quiet, steadfast, and unadorned love, Dong Cuidi made certain that this musician who lived in darkness never entirely lost the warmth of the human world.

(To be continued)