Chapter 44 Appendix III

{{talk to readers}} There are many novelists who like to put what they want to say to the readers completely in the works, but there are also some who are willing to express their opinions outside the works.I'm probably in the latter category.In each collection of my novels or short stories I have a "preface" or "postscript" written by myself.Some readers who prefer me do not dislike my nagging.Some people who cared about the fate of the characters in the novel even kindly wrote letters to inquire about their whereabouts.Take this book I wrote 26 years ago as an example. Today, there are still letters from readers asking me to introduce them to correspond with the person in the book. They need to know that the person in the book can live until now and see the light of New China. .Over the past twenty-six years, readers have often sent letters pointing out that Juehui in the book is the author. It is useless for me to explain repeatedly. I also received such a letter yesterday.The main reason is that readers want this person to live among them and share today's happiness with them.

The kindness of the readers moved me, but also pained me.I don't feel sorry for Juehui. I know how many "Juehuis" have lived to this day and are enthusiastically working for the cause of socialist construction in New China.However, Juexin can't see the sunshine today, and can't make his young life emit a little light and heat, but it makes me very sad.Juexin is not only a person in the book, he is also a real person, he is my eldest brother.Twenty-six years ago I was writing in Shanghai, and I had just written the sixth chapter when the telegram reporting his suicide came.You can imagine what kind of mood I was in when I finished writing this novel.

I stated very early on that I am not a calm author. I do not write novels just to be a writer. It is my past life that forces me to pick up a pen.I also said: "The characters in the book are all I have loved and I have hated. Many scenes are I have seen or experienced personally." Indeed, when I write, I seem to be talking to some people. Suffer together, struggle together under the claws of the devil.I laugh and weep with those lovely young lives.I wrote down word by word, as if I were digging the grave of my memory, and I saw again all that had stirred my heart in the past.Ever since I was a child, I have often seen lovely young lives destroyed to tragic ends.At that time my heart ached with love, but at the same time it was filled with hatred and curses.I had the feeling that Juehui felt before the spirit of his dead cousin (Mei), and I even said what Juehui said in front of his brother: "Let them make sacrifices once." I finished writing at the end of 1931, and I had the opportunity to express my resentment against the unreasonable feudal family system.So I boldly said in a "Preface" written in 1937: "I want to call out my Jaccuse "I accuse" to this dying system." I also said that the feudal family system will inevitably collapse. This belief inspired me to write the history of this big feudal family, to write the story of the joys and sorrows of this feudal big family of the landlord class that is collapsing.I call this story the Torrent Trilogy, and it will be followed by two sequels: and .

I can say that I am familiar with the characters and lives I describe because I spent the first nineteen years of my life in the kind of family I met and loved and loved. I hated it.However, I am not writing the history of my own family, I am writing the history of bureaucratic landowner families in general.Chengdu in the Western Sichuan Basin was a city where such families gathered at that time.In this kind of family, the elder generation was an official of the former Qing Dynasty, and the younger generation lived a luxurious and idle life on the property of their father or grandfather, but the younger generation wanted to break out of this "ivory prison".In the situation where warlords big and small ruled areas and small wars started and stopped intermittently, the older generation hoped that the Qing Dynasty would be restored; To use their own hands to build a new life, they even have the idea of ​​"atonement for the ancestors".Today the older generation is dead; the younger generation doesn't even have the ability to maintain their own lives; some of the younger generation shed their own blood for the Chinese revolution, and some have become workers in the construction of a new China.However, in 1920 to 1921 (this is the era of the 1920s), although the May 4th Movement had already occurred, and the patriotic upsurge made the blood of most Chinese youths boil, the Gao family was still an era when the grandfather ruled the entire family. .Mrs. Gao is the monarch of feudal rule.He also had the whole of the old ethics as the theoretical basis for his rule.He was my grandfather, and a grandfather in some of my relatives' families.The economic power is in his hands. He earns so much land rent every year that he can support a whole family, so the whole family has to listen to him.The power to deal with the life and death of young people is also in his hands.He thinks that money can solve all problems, he never imagined that young people have souls.He lived on land rent, but he didn't even know how the peasants lived.Even when the warlords levied tyrannical taxes and levied grain taxes for several years a year, his income could still make the whole family rich and comfortable.He believes that this family is invincible.He thought his sons would follow his example and his grandchildren follow his path.He didn't know that his money would only degenerate the souls of his sons, and his despotism would only drive his grandsons to the road of revolution.He didn't even know that he was digging the family's grave with his own hands.He created this family business, and he came to destroy it.At most, he can only realize the good dream of four generations living under one roof (some extended families may last up to five generations).Not only my grandfather, but all Mrs. Gao walked this way.They want to see a harmonious family, but there are many strife, struggle and tragedy hidden under the peaceful surface.How many young lives there suffered, struggled and finally inevitably perished.But the childish and daring rebels rushed out after all, they found a new world, and at the same time brought a little fresh air to the old family that was about to suffocate.

My grandfather, stubborn as he was, was not unintelligent, and he died disillusioned, lonely, empty.My second uncle managed to maintain the family business left by his grandfather with an upright attitude for several years, and finally left the world with a feeling of helplessness and desolation.Afterwards, the house was sold, and the people dispersed, and the dead died, and they walked away.When I returned to Chengdu in 1941, my fifth uncle died poor and sick in prison as a "thief".After he spent everything he got from his grandfather and everything his wife brought him, he had no face to see his wife and children again, so he became a homeless vagabond.I didn't write about the other side of this person in the novel: he has a handsome appearance, can write poetry and prose, and he might show his talent in another era.But the environment of the old feudal family killed his vitality, he can only do things that harm others and himself.For him, I later wrote a novella titled "The Garden of Rest".

As I said before, Juexin is my elder brother.He is the person I love the most in my life.I often think this way: If I had written it earlier, he might have seen the abyss lying in front of him, and he might not have fallen into it.But it was too late.My novel had just begun to be serialized in Shanghai's "Times" when he committed suicide by taking poison in Chengdu.Fourteen years later my other brother died of illness in Shanghai.The three of us, like Juexin, Juemin, and Juehui, have three different personalities, so we also have three different endings.I have said several times that the life of the past ten years has weighed on my heart like a nightmare.This nightmare has ruthlessly destroyed the souls of many young people of the same generation.I almost became one of the victims too.However "Childish" and "Bold" saved me.I may be like Jue Hui in this regard.Relying on a simple belief, I walked towards a goal with great strides: I want to be my own master; I want to do what others don't allow me to do.I have published several shallow and plagiarized articles in the journals I run.I cannot say that there has been a mature thought.But I firmly remember Danton's words: "Bold, bold, and always bold!" These three boldnesses had an unexpected effect in that environment and helped me get a preliminary liberation.It was his "boldness" that Juehui was able to escape from the collapsing family and find a new world of his own; however, Juehin was ruined alive by "the doctrine of bowing" and "the doctrine of non-resistance".

Some readers care about the heroines in the novel: Ruijue, Mei, Mingfeng, and Qin, and hope to know more about them.The four of them represent four different personalities, and they also have two different endings.Rui Jue's personality is different from that of my sister-in-law. Although my sister-in-law was forced to move to a hut outside the city to give birth after my grandfather died, she did not die there as tragically as Rui Jue.I also had a cousin who was as old as Mei. She had a good relationship with my eldest brother.She often came to our house to play, and everyone in our generation, both male and female, liked her.We all hoped that she could become our sister-in-law, but later we heard that my aunt was not willing to "kiss and kiss" (she herself has had enough of the pain of kissing and kissing, and my third aunt is the daughter of my aunt's husband's family), so This pair of lovers cannot become a family.Four or five years later, my cousin became a house-filling young lady of a wealthy family.In the next ten years or so, she gave birth to a large group of children. When I saw her again in Chengdu in 1942, she had become a ridiculously fat woman who loved money like her life.There used to be a girl named Cuifeng in our family. I don’t have any memories about her. I only remember one thing: we had a distant relative who asked someone to talk to her and asked her to be his concubine. She firmly rejected her opinion.Although she didn't fall in love with any young master, she would rather marry a poor husband later.Her personality is different from Mingfeng's, and she is a girl who "sends rice".The so-called "extraordinary meal" is to use labor in exchange for her food and housing.She still has the right to be her own master.Her uncle was our old footman.He didn't abuse her.So she is luckier than Mingfeng, and doesn't need to find her home in the lake.

When I write about Mei, Ruijue, and Mingfeng, my heart is full of sympathy and grief.I'm glad I put my feelings into my novels.On behalf of the many young women who have made needless sacrifices, I cry out: "Wrong!" Indeed, my grief and indignation were too great.I remember when I was a child of five or six years old, I found an illustrated book of "Biography of Martyrs" in my sister's room.The lower column is a picture, and the upper column is a word.When I was a child, I rarely saw picture books at home.So I treasure this well-worn thread-bound book.I flipped through the pages.It was full of beautiful women in ancient costumes.Some cut off their own hands with knives, some burned to death in the fire, some floated on the water, and some stabbed themselves in the throat with scissors.There was also a young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself on a tall building.Those are horrible stories!Why does such a fate fall exclusively on women?I do not understand!I asked my two sisters, and they said it was "Biography of Martyrs".Every young girl should read such a book.I still don't understand.I asked my mother.She said that she was a virtuous woman of all ages.I begged her to explain it to me.She told me: It was a widow, because a strange man took her hand, and she cut off her own hand in front of that man; Come on, she couldn't go out of the palace alone to show her face, so she was willing to burn to death in the palace.Why should women, especially young women, endure all kinds of pain and even sacrifice their lives for those ridiculous outdated concepts and artificial ethics?Why should the bloody "Biography of a Martyr" be regarded as a role model for women?Even my mother couldn't convince me.I don't believe in that horrible "reason" full of blood.Even if others are for it, I am against it.Soon this "reason" was overthrown by the revolution of 1911. After "Biography of Martyrs" was broken by me, it was difficult to find a second copy even in our family.But our house still has that bloody smell in the air.In the early years of the Republic of China, a cousin of mine had the "feat" of holding a memorial tablet and getting married.Needless to say, she was fascinated by reading "The Story of a Martyr", and she was willing to observe the festival for her deceased fiancé whom she had never met, and dreamed that someone would erect a chastity archway for her.Even after the May 4th Movement, Peking University had begun to recruit girls, but the three female students who cut their braids could not stand up in Chengdu and had to flee to Shanghai or Beijing.Not to mention, my sisters and sisters don't enjoy human rights.In 1923, my third older sister was carried to a strange house in a sedan chair, where she worked as a house-filling wife and endured torture from her parents-in-law. She died lonely in the hospital a year later.Her ending is the same as that of Loh in it.The long letter from Juexin reporting the news of Hui's death was rewritten from the letter my elder brother wrote to me.It is said that my youngest uncle (who is not in my novel) was planning to send an elegiac couplet: "I have nothing to say when I am dying, but I can think about it in life." Her husband threw her coffin in the nunnery, and he was busy. She was the groom for the third time with lanterns and festoons, and later my elder brother paid for her burial.

I can't bear to dig up the grave of my memories.I don't know how many heartbreaking and painful histories are buried there. Yet out of our family's dark night, Jean appeared.It was the shadow of a cousin of mine whom I had additionally injected with the blood of the few new women I had met at the time.During the first two or three years I left home, she was likely to be a woman like Jean.She enthusiastically read a lot of books and periodicals that spread new ideas, and my third brother sat with her for two hours every night to read and talk.But then her mother had a falling out with my stepmother, and soon she and her mother moved out of the mansion.Although we lived on the same street, we never had the chance to see each other.The third brother also passed many letters with her.On the morning when our brothers left Chengdu, we went to her home once, and finally got to see her once.This is the scene I wrote at the end of the novel.But the environment treated this lovely girl poorly.No one helped her escape from the cage like Shuying.She was imprisoned in an ancient temple-like home by her parents using emotion as iron bars, and even a strange man couldn't see her.Some people said that after her mother died, her father was reluctant to spend a sum of money to marry her daughter, and deliberately let her stay at home and refused to find a husband for her.When I returned to Chengdu in 1942 and saw her, she had become an "old woman" with "weak bones and broken bones".In fact, she is only one year older than me.In the novel, I borrowed two lines from her later poems, which were uttered by Mei: "The past is vaguely like a dream, and it all comes to my heart with the wind and rain." Her little sharpness was finally worn down by "family prison life" Cleaned up.She became an eccentric old maid who couldn't leave the house until she died.Not even a single person sympathized with her.Only the thirty or forty mu of land that was allocated from her father's inheritance was left to her two brothers.I have used so many words to talk about this novel I wrote when I was twenty-seven, and this repeated explanation may help today's readers understand the author's mood at that time.

I recently re-read it and I'm still thrilled.I like this novel myself, because it tells me at least one thing: youth is a beautiful thing. I always remember: youth is a beautiful thing.And it's been a constant source of inspiration for me. Ba Jin June 1957