Shi Keqing's Path to Mastery

Shi Keqing was a farmer who learned masonry from the village elders. Later, he went to the city to find work, striving hard and continually learning from new masters, until he earned the title of Master of Arts and Crafts. His mother, Ran Ni Nina, had once been a nun. After leaving the convent, she married his father and worked as an elementary school teacher. Shi Keqing once followed his father to the city, but in 1960, when work at the construction site was suspended, his parents took their two children back to the village. Before starting school, Shi Keqing began learning to draw designs for stone carvings and to carve stone. During school holidays in middle school, he worked at the village's stone-carving factory. In June 1981, while working in the mountains with his mother, he rescued a young woman. She later became his wife, taking the name Ran Liya, and gave birth to their daughter, Fu Liner, and son, Fu Cong. At the end of 1986, he went to the city for work and studied jade carving under Shen Guoqiang, who had returned from Beijing. He also studied gongbi painting with Lan Jingbei. In 1992, he became an Arts and Crafts Artist. In 1995, he went to work at a stone-carving factory in Guangdong, where he earned the titles of Senior Arts and Crafts Artist and Master of Arts and Crafts. There, he met a factory worker named Lü Xinjuan, who looked very much like his wife. His mother died in 2003, and Shi Keqing returned to his hometown. His wife died in April 2004. In August, Lü Xinjuan came to the village and married him, adopting the name Ran Liya and getting a new ID card. In the fall of 2005, his wife developed mental problems and villagers thought she was intellectually disabled and mute, but she later recovered. By 2068, she had passed the age of one hundred and was still alive.