Chapter 12 From "May Fourth" to "Fourth Five"

The May 4th Movement has reached a full sixty years this year.Today, when I sit down and recall the past sixty years, it really flies by like a flash of lightning.But the thunder after this flash of lightning "shocked" me onto the road of writing! I have loved reading literary books since I was a child, but this hobby was caused by my lonely and companionless environment where the sea and the sky are connected.Like most children, I started to find story books to read by myself because I liked listening to stories.At that time, there were very few books for children, and all I could find on the bookshelves of adults were "Liao Zhai", "Three Kingdoms", "Water Margin", and some legends. " and other translations of foreign novels, as well as "Anthology of the Ice Drinking Room" and "Tianchao", etc., are all books that teenagers in our era can read in our kind of family.

After the age of six or seven, I went to a private school to attend school.I say "affiliated school" because the students in the family school are all cousins ​​and cousins ​​who are several years older than me. As an attached student, I just go to join in the fun.The teacher also taught me some books. The textbooks he used were Chinese textbooks from the Commercial Press, and he made short sentences.Before the age of eleven, he had read one or half of "Mencius" and several short stories in "Zuo Zhuan".But my attention was focused on the teacher's lectures to my elder brothers. They wrote long articles and learned to compose poems.As for myself reading Tang poetry and Song Ci, that was after I was twelve years old.

These experiences of mine are almost as rare as the children who had books to read in my time. I never dreamed that I would write as a career. The word "occupation" was thought of very early on. Both my father and mother believed that girls should be employed when they grow up, especially my mother.She often told me sadly: When she was eighteen years old, on the eve of her brother's wedding, the elders in the family were decorating the new house, and my mother happily interjected, asking whether the small table could be placed A vase of flowers? One of her cousins ​​looked at her and said, "There is no need for a girl to intervene here, and a girl's finger can't be a door latch!" This sentence stimulated her greatly.

Why can't a girl's finger be a latch?So she often reminds me, "Now that you have the opportunity to go to school like boys, you must strive to go out to work in the future, and with the ability to be financially independent, your fingers will be like boys, and can be used as latches! "At that time, intellectual women had very narrow employment opportunities. Apart from being a teacher, they were doctors. I chose the profession of a doctor since I entered a formal school. The main reason was that my mother was weak and sick. I had contact with doctors. More often, when the doctor came, I greeted him on the steps before the court, and when he entered the room, I served tea and water, waited for him to wash his hands, carefully checked his pulse, and watched him prescribe prescriptions.Later, I went to a western doctor, and I became more interested. Although I dare not touch the thermometer, stethoscope, and sphygmomanometer he used, I still asked the familiar doctor about the structure and use of these instruments.I think these instruments are very scientific, but my mother is not used to diagnostic methods such as listening to the chest and listening to the back, and there were very few female doctors at that time, so I decided to study medicine when I grow up, so as to help me Mother sees a doctor.My father agreed with my opinion very much and said: "The ancients said, 'If you are not a good look, you must be a good doctor'. China, where the sick in East Asia, needs good doctors, you should study medicine!"

Therefore, in school, I worked very hard on science subjects, such as algebra, geometry, trigonometry, physics, chemistry, biology, even astronomy and geology. Everything else is almost indifferent. During the May 4th Movement, I was a first-year student in the pre-science department of Peking Union Medical College Women's University, and I worked as a secretary in the Student Government Association.After the movement started, our student self-government association also joined the Beijing Federation of Female Scholars, and I also became a member of the propaganda department of the federation. I followed the big sisters who were representatives to attend the conference, wrote promotional articles, and so on.Starting from writing and publishing propaganda articles, this surging epoch-making Chinese youth patriotic movement, cultural innovation movement, this strong trend of thought of the times rolled me out of the narrow threshold of my family and church schools, and made me go from ambiguity to Slowly I saw all kinds of problems in the semi-feudal and semi-colonial Chinese society around me!In our daily life, there are problems almost everywhere.There is blood, tears, insults and groans, oppression and cries... From Jing Ye's ears, even the desolate and distant cries of "Sai Li's Carrots" and the heart-shattering sound of fortune-telling gongs can cause arousal. My many sighs.

At this time, full of enthusiasm, I went to the streets to publicize, raise funds, and hold meetings during the day, and wrote "problem novels" at night.But the social problems I write about are not the problems among the workers and peasants that I have never been in contact with, but the problems in the social life around me. The distress of young people who are imprisoned and unable to participate in the student movement; "Autumn Rain and Autumn Wind Worrying Sharen" is about a young woman who aspires to serve the society. As soon as she graduated from middle school, she was forced to marry a rich boy. ", which ruined her life; "Zhuang Hong's Sister", which is about a girl, because the parents of civil servants can only get half salary from the "poor" government every month, and because of this The family favored boys over girls, so she was forced to suspend school and died of depression.In these novels, what is given to them is only a gray and gloomy ending, and the protagonists in the problem all become depressed, haggard, and depressed.

I did not give them a glimmer of hope!The reason is: I am not a person who is in the situation, so I will not think hard to figure out a way to survive death, and I have not yet found the main force of anti-imperialism and anti-feudalism-the workers and peasants. Before they were united, I couldn't point to this glimmer of light! At that time, I hadn't realized these things yet, and I just wanted to write out the various problems I saw and heard in the form of novels.At this time, the wave of new ideas was at an all-time high, and the new publications in Beijing and other provinces were springing up like mushrooms after a spring rain.After reading the things written by college and middle school students in these publications, I think that everyone is trying to write, why don't I publish my trial work.But after all, I am a primary school student in a university, immature in thinking and writing, so I dare not use my own name, so I used the pseudonym "Bing Xin". Underneath, there is an extra word "Ms."!It is said that Mr. Editor added it, but when I called to inquire, it was a done deal, irreversible.

I was slippery in writing, and kept writing. Writing took up most of my time, and my science homework fell behind by a large margin.Because I went out to do publicity during the day, I owed a lot of experimental homework in the laboratory, so I couldn't make up for it.While I was looking left and right, and under the persuasion of the people around me, in 1921, after graduating from pre-science, I changed to liberal arts and skipped a class. At this time, I started writing "Stars" and "Spring Water".Regarding these two small collections, I have already mentioned them in the article "How I Wrote "The Stars" and "Chunshui" written in 1959. The general idea is: I wrote "The Stars"

When I was with "Spring Water", I was not writing poems, but was influenced by Tagore, and I collected the "fragmented thoughts" I usually wrote in my notebook in a collection and sent them to "Morning News" published in the "New Literature and Art" column.The reason why I don't call them poems is because I always feel that poems should have rhythm and music should be relatively strong.It would be too flimsy and hasty to turn a few words into a poem.When I re-read these two collections, I felt that there were still a few rhymes in them, and the poetic flavor was not lacking. The main shortcoming—the same as my other works—is just like what Comrade Zhou Yang said, “New poems also have A big shortcoming, the most fundamental shortcoming is that I didn’t integrate well with the working people.” That is to say, at that time, in the era of the great anti-imperialist and anti-feudal struggle, I only paid attention to describing the trivial things around me and my personal experience. and feelings, neither expressing the emotions and thoughts of the working people, nor using the language forms that the working people like and are familiar with, and so on.

What I mean by re-excerpting this article is that from the time of the May Fourth Movement, when I embarked on the road of writing, until I returned from Japan in 1951, whether I wrote novels, poems, or essays, It was all because I did not have and could not combine with the workers and peasants at that time, and my living circle was narrow, and the source of creation soon dried up. This is also the reason why my works after the "May 4th Movement" became increasingly rare. But a person does not live in a vacuum. No matter how narrow the circle of life is, it will always be impacted and stirred by the surrounding airflow.In the 1930s, China was at its most critical moment. There was oppression and aggression by the imperialists, especially the Japanese militarists, and the bullying and exploitation by the corrupt and weak Beiyang warlords and the Chiang Kai-shek government. Any Chinese had a great impact on the future of the country and the nation. , have begun to have their own, even vague, inclinations and choices to step out of the darkness and turn to the light.From 1936 to 1937, I traveled in Europe and America for a year, which made me feel dissatisfied and disappointed with the capitalist world.When I came back to China, I was catching up with the "July 7th Incident"!

I went to the southwest of our country—Kunming in Yunnan, and Chongqing in Sichuan, especially in Chongqing. I saw that the Chiang Kai-shek government was not only corrupt and reactionary, but also treacherous and brutal. It is from the masses of Chinese workers and peasants who really resisted the war. In the early winter of 1946 after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, I went to Japan. There, I secretly sent me a few books of Chairman Mao’s works through my friends in Hong Kong. .In October 1949, the news of the liberation of the motherland came, and I felt the joy I had never felt in my life.In 1951, we finally returned to the vibrant motherland after many twists and turns! As soon as I set foot on my beloved country, all I saw were new people and new things: the vast masses of workers and peasants, with a sense of pride in being the masters, working happily and hard on the devastated land, intellectuals When old friends meet again, they all say: "It's so easy to look forward to today's freedom and independence. We must reform well and work hard to serve the new society in our own positions!" Thanks to the party's care and education, I have the opportunity to study and work, to have the opportunity to contact and learn from workers and peasants. During this time, I also visited several friendly countries and people... The enthusiasm for writing that has never been seen since the "May Fourth Movement", and the freedom and happiness that have not been felt in the "May Fourth" era. I sing loudly, praising the Communist Party of China and Chairman Mao, praising the earth-shaking changes in the great motherland, praising the heroic people who have created our happy life, and I describe the new generation living happily under the socialist system... Most of these works are in the literary form of prose written down.In an article "About Prose" I wrote in 1959, I said this: Our China is a country with the most brilliant achievements in prose and the largest number of authors...whether he writes "Ming" or "Biography" is "ji", "book", "wen" and "words", all of which can be classified into the category of prose... Prose is short and free, the most convenient and sharpest that can be picked up and put down This literary form is most suitable for our glorious era of leap forward.The overwhelming construction projects and lively characters rumble past in front of your ears like a loud thunder or a flash of lightning. If you are not under the overflow of emotion, quickly catch it and press it On paper, it disappears forever and is nowhere to be found. ... To catch "inspiration", it is much easier to write prose than poetry...Prose can be written as sonorous as poetry, as majestic as military songs, as vivid and twisted as novels, as sharp and lively as dialogues in dramas, and as an author At the moment of "God Comes", not only will the images in his pen shine brightly, but the author's own style will also appear vividly on the paper. The above has written my preference for the literary form of prose, and how it suits to reflect our boiling and colorful era. At the same time, I am self-aware!I was limited by life and literary accomplishments, so I couldn't write good poems, novels, and scripts... It can be said that I was pushed to the top when I wrote prose.But I still fell in love with this little Liangshanshuipo. During the rampant period of the "Gang of Four", I also stopped writing for ten years.In September 1976, when I started writing articles mourning Chairman Mao, I started to pick up my pen again.That is, in this year, the "Fourth Five-Year Movement" that shocked the world was set off in Tiananmen Square, where the May Fourth Movement was set off!This is a life-and-death struggle between light and darkness that will determine China's future with greater force and power.The vast number of Chinese people, especially the new generation, mourn the mainstay of our socialist motherland with the turbulent crowds, the majestic mountains of flowers and the vast sea of ​​poems - the beloved Premier Zhou, to defend Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and to demand democracy And science, to oppose the "Gang of Four", to blaze a road to realize the four modernizations. That is to say, in October of this year, under the leadership of the Party Central Committee, the mighty revolutionary people took the evil "Gang of Four" On the trial bench of history.In the midst of surprises, I felt a second liberation! Over the past sixty years, some friends from the literary and art circles who participated in the "May Fourth Movement" have passed away with time.In the past ten years, after the rain and wind of the "Gang of Four", there is not much left.But I think the victory of the second liberation was hard-won. When we are in prosperity, we should have the spirit of "Aim for a Thousand Miles" and take advantage of the strong wind of the "Fourth Five-Year" Movement to do what we can. The "Gang of Four" was shattered, and the sun and the moon are shining again. On the long march of the four modernizations guided by the party, we veterans are still needed.I have always loved children, and the older I get, the more I feel that I have a lot to say to the children, because this new Long March, far away, is heavily influenced by my country's thousands of years of feudal culture; Under the interference and sabotage of Lin Biao and the "Gang of Four", our journey will never be smooth and easy!As their loyal friend, I would like to use the form of letters to share my own experience and lessons, and my current thoughts on building the four modern socialist motherlands, and talk about the executors of the four modernizations in the 21st century. Soliciting their opinions, arousing their attention and discussion, this is the plan and direction of writing in the near future that I can think of. From the "May 4th Movement" to today, it happens to be a "Jiazi".The thunder of the May 4th Movement "shocked" me onto the road of writing; the turbulent waves of the "4th Five-Year" Movement "pushed" me to a new Long March!Life is endless, writing is endless!Collection of April 10, 1979". )