Chapter 84 first quarter

I turned on the CD player and put in a theme song, and then my soul followed "Scent of Roses" to escape, followed in Zhang Ailing's footsteps, and came to the Los Angeles apartment. Zhang Ailing said that every man has at least two women in his life, one is his red rose and the other is a white rose. In fact, every woman has at least two men in her life, one is her poison and the other is her antidote. Now her two men are dead, leaving behind empty pill bottles.She used it to fill her with loneliness, depression, and world-weariness, and finally put it in herself, closed the bottle, and isolated herself from the world.

This interval is more than twenty years. Eileen Chang moved to Los Angeles in 1973, but has never left the city since then.In the twenty-two years of her remaining life, she moved countless times, claiming that she moved three times and burned one, and even lost her manuscript. What was she hiding? Her first residence in Los Angeles was the Kingsley apartment in East Hollywood, a long strip building, an old-fashioned bachelor apartment building, with a tall palm tree in front of the door.This address is about ten minutes by bus from the Hollywood landmark Chinese Theater. It is considered a downtown area, and it is similar to Eddington on Jing'an Temple Road in Shanghai back then.

The apartment was found by Johnson, who teaches at USC.As mentioned above, the two of them met at the seminar on the relationship between Chinese and Western literature at Indiana University in 1966. Johnson was a graduate student of Chinese and Western comparative literature at the university at that time. One of the "Three Boys" looking for errands.Although the errand was not found, the friendship was established from then on. When Zhang Ailing entrusted him to find a house for him, Zhuang devoted himself to the mission and found this quiet Kaisling apartment. Zhang Ailing was obviously very satisfied. She lived here for ten years, and wrote during this period but kept it hidden. After that, she devoted herself to the pile of old papers and completed the Mandarin and English translations of Wuyu novels, as well as Hongxue works.

On October 16, 1975, she said in a letter to Song Qi and Kuang Wenmei: "One of the motivations for rushing to write is that Zhu Xining wrote that he wrote my biography based on Hu Lancheng's words. I replied The text message said that I have tried my best to de-personalize (non-personalized) the reader’s impression of me in recent years, and I hope he will not write it. Of course it will not take effect. But more than half of the content of this novel is irrelevant.” Song Qi saw it and felt worried, so she hurriedly wrote to persuade her: "There is a ticking time bomb next to it: 'Rogue'. I don't know what kind of connection this person got. He went to teach at the Chinese Culture Institute in Taiwan and wrote his articles in capitals. People accused him of being a traitor, and the "Central Daily" came out to attack him, so he had to be dismissed, and he had to use a pseudonym to write articles. Once it was published, it was like sending a fat pig to the door, and he didn't take this opportunity to show off and write his own strange article Keep saying: Jiuli is Aileen, some places are true, some places have been changed, other places are slightly different from my memory, etc. I can imagine the feeling of complacency. One was almost drowned A person like this is what he can catch in the water, but in the end it drags you into the water, why bother?"

Because of these persuasions, Zhang Ailing did not publish the book in the end, and once wrote to Song Qi asking him to destroy the book, but Song Qi did not have it in the end, and only put it in a box.After both Zhang Ailing and Song Qi passed away one after another, in 2010, Song Yilang, Song Qi's son, joined forces with Ping Xintao to publish the manuscript. Looking at it now, we will inevitably make such an arithmetic comparison—Hu Lancheng wrote about eight women in his life, while Zhang Ailing wrote about her three men: Hu Lancheng, Sang Hu, and Lai Ya.They also break down love fantasies and idols, and Zhang does it more thoroughly than Hu.

When it was republished in Taiwan, Hu Lancheng wrote down all the embarrassments in his life. When everyone, such as Yu Guangzhong and Yi Shu, attacked him, Zhu Tianxin once said to Zhu Tianwen: "Actually, if he didn't write it, no one would know about it." what." ——Eileen Chang's is actually the same. Before reading Hu Lancheng's writing, I only knew that Zhang Ailing had spent a lot of money for him, and sent him a 300,000 yuan gold coupon after breaking up.However, I found out that Hu Lancheng had given her money more than once before, and the amount was quite large, and they were still single at that time...

The taste in this book is roundabout and honest, like Li Jiamu listening to music in Tubitang, and blowing it over through the sound of water, the charm is all in one; but it seems to tear down the fence, and the author and the reader meet each other and stare straight at each other. I saw it but I didn't know where to start, and I was speechless. Her love and pity for her younger brother, her deep sympathy for the nanny Hegan, and her love and admiration for her mother and aunt are all replaced by a slightly mean and cold-eyed line drawing, and she uses each detail to express her love and affection. It highlights the indifference of human nature, and magnifies the selfishness and indifference of the mother, aunt, younger brother, and He Gan.Fundamental human nature itself is selfish, and people living in such a big environment are all panicked, and their eyes are full of self-defense because of the uncertainty and insecurity of life-this is what we feel in this movie.

When it comes to love, it is especially cold.She even wrote embarrassingly about her own first kiss, describing it as "a square tongue sticking out of her lips, a dry cork, dry from talking too much"—and later he kissed him only lips.Several sex scenes are even more embarrassing. The book mentions that the fairy-like mother is actually promiscuous and has had multiple abortions; the pure and pure aunt had an affair with her cousin, and later dated a married colleague, and was healed with his help Buck teeth; Jiuli had a sexual relationship with Yanshan, she suspected she was pregnant due to late menstruation, went for a checkup, and found that her cervix was broken...

When I was reading, I wanted to hide my face several times, as if she took me into a luxuriously decorated room, and asked affectionately: "Isn't it beautiful? Look, I'll break it." Then she took a cold long spear The smoking gun calmly and mercilessly smashed all the splendor and splendor one by one, exposing the broken tiles behind the gilded wall, and then left. I sat and groaned in the midst of mourning, feeling her mood bitterly, then stood up, and carefully straightened the fallen statues and restored the furnishings in the house one by one. Although novels are not equal to autobiography, all of these may be fictional, but we cannot help but put them in the same place.Sometimes I wish Eileen Chang never wrote it, or that the book was really destroyed as she said.

In this way, what Zhang Manjuan thought when talking about Zhang Ailing's "Comparison Notes" in the interview: "I think there should be no Hu Lancheng. If I were Zhang Ailing, of course I would destroy his body and wipe out his traces, so I think it is completely possible. understand." Zhang Ailing wrote, wrote, and wrote, but she didn't publish it during her lifetime. It was not until the last year of her life that she sorted out the chaff and kept the essence, reorganized her life, and integrated "Contrast Notes", so that All the men in my life are absent.

——I think this is her truest intention. We are more familiar with Zhang Ailing's works in her later years, which is the same as the vernacular translation. The original name of the Wu language book was translated by Eileen Chang into two volumes, first into English and then into vernacular Chinese, respectively titled "Sea Flowers Bloom" and "Sea Flowers Fall", which is very unique. Eileen Chang's efforts are not only in translation, but also in analysis.For example, she wrote in the postscript: "Writing about such a group of people, from officials to shopkeepers and servants, even though they are not in the same circle, they may all eat flowers and wine at the same table. The proportion of social interaction in their lives Very big. Even Tao Yufu and Li Shufang, a couple with their own inner life, Yufu still has many unavoidable entertainments. Li Shufang, the oriental Camellia, he asked her to move out to recuperate. , she would rather be 'hospitalized' in a brothel and endure the noise. Probably because once she moved out and rented another house, it became his waifu. The more his family refused to let him marry her, she would not marry him as a concubine; And if you hide in secret, you can no longer have banquets together, or even if you are sick, you can still let the aunts and elder sisters who follow the police pin him and never leave. Once the inside and outside are separated, no matter how much you trust him, you still can't rest assured." If Zhang Ailing hadn't pointed out this passage, it would be difficult to understand the protagonist's tortuous feelings of "the needle in the bottom of a woman's heart" in such a deep way just by reading the story.The rest are like "Xiaoyun made friends with Mrs. Qi and boasted to her, and had a very happy night that night. The same is true when her husband comes home when he meets something he is proud of. This is love." Kind-hearted. She seemed to be tired of the world, and when she advised Shuangyu not to be too aggressive, she said that she was going to get married soon anyway, and she said the same to Shanqing. He didn't take the blame, but he was calm, probably knowing that she didn't like it It’s about him.” It’s also a word that awakens the dreamer. It is a pity that no matter how hard Hu Shi and Zhang Ailing tried to promote it several times, because the description is too calm and distant, blindly adopting the line drawing method, and the grass snake gray line is too subtle, so far it has not been popularized. It is also a bible that makes most red fans dizzy. Zhang Ailing once mentioned in "On Writing": "Like, most people read it several times in their lives. As far as I am concerned, I read it for the first time when I was eight years old. I only saw a little excitement. After that, I read it every time. Read it once every three or four years, and gradually get the outline, style, and strokes of the characters' stories, and the impressions are different each time. When I read it now, I only see the troubles of mutual interaction. —— Personal appreciation is limited, but forever It's 'one for ten'." This passage seemed to come from the bottom of my heart. And she said in her preface: "You don't need to pay attention to different books, and the words that are slightly unfamiliar will pop up." It also made me feel the same.Therefore, it should be quite vivid and interesting to imagine Zhang Ailing's evaluation and analysis. It wasn't until I held the book in my hand that I realized that it was boring and entangled. At the beginning, I blindly picked on the contradictions in the original work, down to the number of silver and the month, so as to infer the different ages of different versions-however, the contradictions are too numerous to enumerate. , the most obvious example is the mystery of the identities of "Parrot" and "Zijuan", as well as Qiaojie's big and small. . A novel is a novel. To analyze a novel as scientific data, to peel off the cocoons layer by layer, is a matter of asking for trouble.I can imagine Zhang Ailing's annoyance of "being obsessed with textual research for ten years, and won the name of Nightmare of the Red Chamber", because I gradually became annoyed when I watched her. However, she concluded that the continuation book is "the continuation of the dog's tail has become a gangrene of the bone", but it is delicate and gratifying. For a confidant, but in the 104th chapter, there is a saying "Qingwen is a girl, and there is no big advantage", which is obviously contrary to Xueqin's original intention; and the previous article tried to blur the distinction between Man and Han, and the description of Daiyu is even more serious. It's just a posture and expression, and there is absolutely no real clothing. After eighty chapters, Lin Daiyu will appear wearing a moon-white embroidered fur coat with silver waistcoats, a red gold flat hairpin, and a Yangfei-colored embroidered cotton skirt tied around her waist. The descriptions left traces—these were things I hadn’t noticed or thought about before.