Chapter 45 Postscript to the 1977 reprint

It was my work forty-six years ago.Over the past forty-six years, I have written several prefaces, epilogues and essays, talking about my own views on this work at different times, mostly talking about the creation process and the author's thoughts and feelings at that time, and rarely talking about the shortcomings of the novel and its negative effects. I have been writing for twenty years in the semi-feudal and semi-colonial society of old China, and have written several million words of works, many of which are bad and relatively bad.Even my best works are nothing more than a medical certificate issued by an unskilled doctor, seeing some problems in the old society but not being able to prescribe a cure for them.Thirty or forty years ago, readers wrote to me, asking for a way out, but I kept crying and groaning in my works, causing the characters in the novel to die in despair, and letting the long cold night hang over the hearts of readers.More than once I have heard people say that they liked my work at first, but soon they were going to move on, and they couldn't find what they wanted in my novels, so they had to leave them and move on.That's what happened in the past.As for today, it is more obvious that my works have fulfilled their historical task, and it may be better for readers to forget them.

The People's Literature Publishing House asked me for my opinion on this reprint, and I agreed, because I thought this way: Letting the readers meet again may help people understand some situations in feudal society.In my work, it is a realistic novel. The characters in the book are all loved or hated by me, and some scenes in the book have been seen or experienced by myself.I could not have written this novel without the first nineteen years of my life.I said: "I don't write novels just to be a writer, it's my past life that forces me to pick up a pen." I write like digging the grave of memories.As a child, I was often forced to witness lovely young lives being ruined and tragically ended.When I wrote the novel, it seemed that I was suffering together with these young people, struggling under the claws of the devil.My personal likes and dislikes in the novel are too deep.Of course a novel like this has flaws of one sort or another.I admit: my anti-feudalism was not thorough, I did not grasp the key issues, I did not expose the cruel exploitation of the peasants by the landlord class, I gave too much sympathy to the characters I criticized, and sometimes I changed because of personal feelings. The reality of life...wait, wait.Today's readers will make their own judgments about my novel published in 1931, so I don't need to repeat it here.In this reprint, except for a few typos, I have not made any new changes.

Ba Jin August 9, 1977