One, Two, One
Be united, alert
earnest and lively
Unite to win yet greater victories!
SONG SHUXUN, resident of Jia Family Village
Back in 1949,
everyone called Jia Family Village
a pit.
The place made people ill.
Alkaline soil and foul sewage.
There were just three treasured assets.
Sow thistles, willow shoots,
and phragmites reeds.
Why were these assets?
People could eat sow thistles.
They're an edible foodstuff.
That was one of them.
The reeds were also edible.
They fed the livestock.
So these assets
were essential for life in the village.
Nothing else would grow there.
It was desolate land.
We couldn't cultivate it.
The soil was too salty!
I won't go into the history of it.
Let's jump ahead to when Ma Feng convened a meeting.
A general discussion.
That was the start of the big change.
One evening we talked with Ma Feng.
He asked us
to gather twenty or so people, maybe thirty...
People with skills.
Smart people with good memory.
To have a group discussion.
So we sent out a call.
And more than forty people showed up.
Ma Feng raised the issue
of filtering water before irrigation.
We needed to treat the water first.
The water was causing the alkalinity of the soil.
It's like the clothes we wear.
When our clothes get soaked in sweat,
it's harder to clean and dry them.
You end up with stains you can't get out.
Ma Feng was implementing
what Chairman Mao said about strength in unity.
If one family
tried to solve the problem of alkaline soil,
it couldn't be done.
How to make it happen?
We needed to mobilize everyone in the village.
We took Ma Feng's advice.
With three families, then five, then ten,
we formed
what we called 'mutual aid groups'.
We mapped out a plan for the village.
When we'd figured it all out,
there were thirty to forty people in each group.
And each group took about ten days
to finish the preparations.
We started by filtering the fresh water.
Then drained away the salty water.
And then let the sun do its work.
It was just like drying clothes outdoors, under the sun.
Bit by bit, the seeds took root.
They germinated.
Nothing died, the seedlings flourished.
They grew.
The mutual aid groups
speeded things up.
We went on to form a production team.
It was based on individual production units.
We were highly motivated.
As a result of all this hard work,
Jia Family Village became quite famous.
Lots of people came to see our progress.
Other villages were still short of grain.
They couldn't feed themselves.
Relied on food coupons.
But we had plenty to eat. We even had surpluses!
In fact we had enough surplus to sell grain to the government.
We ended up contributing one million kilos to the state.
"Working the land, standing tall"
"Raising his work-tool even higher"
"He holds the hoe up in the air"
"As if he were holding a flag of toil"
He holds the hoe up in the air
as if he were holding a flag of toil
- Yu Jian
I like what you are.
And I like how you behave.
-Straightforward, optimistic... -It's true.
He could hear you with his hearing aid.
How old are you?
I'm ninety-one.
Bring it over.
I can hear now.
WU SHIXIONG, resident of Jia Family Village
In the past, the village had three "too manys".
Too many unmarried men.
Too many young children sold away.
And too many beggars.
Life was so hard here that no-one would marry our men.
There was a saying: "Don't marry your daughter into Jia Family Village."
Those who came here to marry would suffer. So no-one did.
That's why there were so many unmarried men.
Ma Feng...
The first time we met was in 1953.
In the spring of that year.
I was First Secretary of the Communist Youth League.
We were having a meeting that evening. Talking about...
The county League had given us three promotional tasks.
One was to promote the Marriage Law.
It came into force in 1953.
Second, to promote the collective procurement and distribution of grain.
And finally, to promote collectivization.
To encourage people to join co-operatives. Mutual aid.
We were in the middle of the meeting, assigning tasks,
when Old Jia arrived with Ma Feng.
Old Jia came in and said,
"This is our League's First Secretary."
We knew that he was a writer,
but we didn't know he was such a big name. We just knew that he was a writer.
He loved joking, making fun of this and that.
Our members loved listening to him.
He smoked a fat little cigar,
about this thick, but quite short.
He invited us all to try it.
He even invited the girls who were there!
We were all teenagers, but he offered his cigar regardless.
Laughing, we said we couldn't smoke, you could have it all yourself!
That made us laugh.
Lots of us were there that night.
He said that to promote the Marriage Law,
we should take the lead ourselves. Find ourselves partners!
"What about you with him? Or you with her?"
He was fooling around with us. "You look like a good match for him"
"You two look good together."
He became the League matchmaker.
She and I...
In fact he matched three couples in our League.
We got together and married.
So to speak... He planted a seed in people's minds.
A seed of love.
That was when people started seeing each other, forming couples.
When love became a freedom of choice.
Arranged marriages were outlawed.
We were free to choose marriage partners.
"In the mountains and rivers"
"I would like to hold your hand to cross the bridge"
"On the bridge are red flowers, green leaves"
"Families and rivers are nearby"
"On this side of the bridge, hair is black"
"On that side, hairs have turned white"
On this side of the bridge, hair is black
On that side, hairs have turned white
- Shen Congwen
My father Ma Feng was born in 1922.
23 May in the lunar calendar.
It was in Juyi Village, in Xiaoyi County.
When my father was born, my grandfather was over fifty.
And my grandmother was still in her twenties.
When grandfather died, the family went downhill.
Nothing went well.
My grandmother wanted to raise this son herself.
So she refused to remarry, despite being so young.
She sold the house and land,
took the money,
and returned to Dawang Village, in Fenyang.
So my father, from the age of six or seven,
grew up in Dawang Village.
DUAN HUIFANG, Ma Feng's daughter
When he finished school...
Not long after that, the Anti-Japanese War began.
When he was in the army, his squad leader was Sun Qian.
The writer Sun Qian.
His involvement in the arts began by accident.
Father liked painting when he was young.
Back then, the platoons
held a blackboard newspaper competition.
He remembered a magazine he'd once seen.
The illustrations in it
were woodcut prints.
They showed soldiers with machine guns in the undergrowth,
taking aim at the enemy.
There were no paints available, ?nly ink.
He made the best of it.
He did a big ink drawing.
No paintbrushes, only an inkbrush. So that's what he used.
The competition was judged the day after he finished it.
And his platoon ended up as the winners.
So they decided he was a talent.
He seemed to be talented.
That got him transferred to the publicity team,
which was actually a performance troupe.
In 1940, the troupe crossed the Yellow River and went to Yan'an.
He was very impressed by Yan'an.
He said there were so many books in Yan'an, a great cultural climate.
Later on, someone told him
the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts had a school for the military.
My father applied, and was admitted.
My father applied for the art major.
He was a life-model for the art class. Why did he want to do that?
Because he could read while posing.
You know which book had the biggest influence on him?
It was 'And Quiet Flows the Don.'
After he graduated from the Academy, he became a journalist.
At the start of 1945...
It was either the end of 1944 or the start of 1945...
There was a conference on outstanding workers at Mount LŸliang.
They were sharing stories of heroes.
My father and his colleague were sent there
as both journalists and volunteers.
After that, they began writing their 'Heroes of Mount LŸliang.'
He and Xirong, the two of them...
They took turns writing it: "You do today's, I'll do tomorrow's"
It was serialised in 'Jinxi Public Newspaper.'
They kept up daily instalments for a while.
Then they thought they should take a break.
They stopped for a couple of days,
but the readers complained about its absence,
so they went back to writing it.
That's how that book took shape.
They'd begun it in the spring of 1945.
Japan had not yet surrendered.
The war was still on-going.
In the run-up to October 1949,
my father attended a Youth Conference in Beijing.
He went as a Youth Leader.
And after that, he stayed in Beijing to work.
That was when he came to know the literary world.
He was almost thirty by then.
But he wasn't married, and didn't even have a girlfriend.
One time he went back to Xiaoyi to see his mother,
and saw a couple of newlyweds on the train.
Observing this young couple,
he thought how interesting they were.
It inspired him to write 'Marriage.'
His story was about how marriage changes the lives of young people.
When it was published, it caught someone's eye.
He had the idea of filming it.
When this man found out my father wasn't married himself,
he thought he should intervene.
This was a director called Guo Wei.
He'd once been my mother's supervisor
at a theater in Hebei.
He was plotting to make this introduction,
but he didn't have a photo of my mother.
All he had was a group photo of the theater company.
When the time came, he showed my father this group photo.
He told him "I want to introduce you to one of the girls in this photo."
"Guess which one it is."
My father studied the photo.
He thought, she looks nice. But some seem a bit too...
Anyway, not suitable.
Some were too pretty. Some were too old.
Some, probably already married.
In the end, he pointed to one girl in the photo, "Is it this one?"
And yes, he picked my mother!
He tried writing about city life in Beijing,
but he wasn't happy with the results.
But when he left Beijing for Shanxi,
and started writing in and about the countryside,
his fiction became quite popular.
'Stockman Uncle Zhao' for example.
And 'Han Meimei'. It became very popular.
Both those short stories were selected
for student textbooks.
Chinese studies.
He'd thought he should focus on rural topics.
That's why he went back to the countryside. Back to Shanxi.
The one who objected strongly was my grandfather.
He was originally from Hebei.
He thought since they had a place in Beijing,
and were settled there...
what was the point of moving back to Shanxi?
He had no idea what Shanxi was like.
There was no comparison between Beijing and Shanxi.
It's the difference between a capital city and a provincial town.
There's a huge gap.
It was not at all pleasant when we first moved.
Our lives were entirely different.
And the local dialect was different.
Being from Hebei, he could understand the Beijing dialect,
but he could barely grasp a word of the Shanxi dialect.
I came to Jia Family Village when I was very little.
With my parents.
We arrived and lived in the village.
Actually, his writing had a very intimate connection with this place.
He was writing non-stop.
My father wrote about many people.
When the villagers read it, they knew who it was about.
"That character is you!" "That's about you" and so on.
'The Young People of Our Village' depicted China's first generation of educated farmers.
How should they appear? They should be literate...
The characters were about those educated farmers.
The People's Republic had celebrated its tenth anniversary.
People were getting decent educations.
How was their life when they returned to their villages?
JIA FAMILY VILLAGE, 1979
JIA FAMILY VILLAGE, 2019
What you can see here, is a general view of Jia Family Village.
It shows both the village as it is now,
and the plans for its future.
-What are you doing here? -Nothing, Sir.
-We're just chatting. -Chatting?
Show me what's in your bag.
FENYANG, 1997
FENYANG, 2019
I've been thinking, at the Literature Festival,
I'll be able to see the writers in person.
I can listen to what they say.
It's a site for literary encounters.
No particular obligation this time.
I'm there to have fun.
Jia Zhang-ke told me I'd have fun any time.
Jia Family Village.
Good afternoon to all our Festival friends.
Let's hear it for our next guest. He's a renowned writer.
Let's welcome Mr Yu Hua to the stage.
We've come to Fenyang.
Coming here feels like
being Brahms
when he went to visit Schumann in his country house.
YU HUA
So being here... All of us, whether we're authors or readers...
We're all like Brahms.
We're in Fenyang. We're in Jia Family Village.
SU TONG
It's a group visit to our country home.
We use our own
individual voices
to make
the so-called lonely countryside lively again.
God created the village.
GE FEI
Man created the city.
Take our house...
LI JINGZE
Back then, it was my grandfather's house.
Situated below the dam.
Coming back here...
A lot has changed.
A LAI
We've used the word "nostalgia" many times today.
Girls in the villages most likely...
From the point of view of equality...
It's very hard to win a real place.
LIANG HONG
Since there's been so much rebuilding the layout has changed a lot.
YIN XUEYUN
I couldn't even orient myself.
Knowing a place is like being in an airport.
LU? XIN
You can take off,
and fly back some time later.
Opera is like an open classroom for the people.
MO YAN
Actors are teachers in make-up.
You became a rabbit
ZHANG SHISHAN
I became an eagle to catch you
We always miss things that are lost.
YE ZHAOYAN
Modernization needs ?o be interpreted differently.
YU JIAN
Fenyang Middle School has a history of 113 years.
OUYANG JIANGHE
That's twelve years more than the history of Chinese modern poetry.
I think villages are the reality.
HAN DONG
I notice how people wait for trains.
Some of them squat down.
XI CHUAN
HUANG DENG
In my hometown, not least in my extended family,
almost every family unit has someone working in Guangdong.
XI'AN CITY
We usually drink tea from Hanzhong.
It's also Anji white tea.
Actually, I don't like Anji white tea.
I prefer Shangluo white tea.
There's a Shangluo white tea?
Shangluo white tea is good.
One time, I went out with some Xi'an University teachers.
One of them told me he managed to get you to drink white tea.
Nonsense!
-I'm bringing out my poetry collection. -The second?
The second and third will both come out later this year.
It will include unpublished earlier poems?
These are all new.
I wrote them after the first collection came out.
Writing poetry...
I have nothing against it,
but the first thing...
is to live a good life.
First, be a good person.
Fulfil your duties as a wife and mother in the family.
-And then write poetry. -And be a good daughter too!
Actually, I don't care about that.
The main thing is
that writing poetry doesn't mean living a poetic life.
Dihua lies in the basin of the Qin Mountains.
There's a river near the village.
Nowadays it's called the River Dan.
Back then, it wasn't called that. We used to call it the State River.
"State" as in city-state, that character.
When I was very young,
I could see boats on the river from the village.
Of course boats can't sail there now. The water's too shallow for boats.
I remember when I was in primary school...
In the third or fourth year...
I went to my aunt's place.
And she had a copy of 'Dream of the Red Chamber.'
A hardcover copy, I don't know where she got it.
It was in four volumes.
That was the first time I ever read it. That time, visiting my aunt.
At first sight, all the poems at the start,
and all the mythological stuff...
That made no sense to me.
When I reached the main text,
and it was about daily life,
I felt I understood it.
It was an interesting read.
Although it was about life in a great mansion, and I lived in a village,
it nonetheless intrigued me.
I enjoyed reading it.
Since I could stay for only one night,
when I left the next day, I 'borrowed' two volumes.
When I got home,
my cousin noticed that two volumes were missing.
He knew I loved reading and must have taken them.
So he came to demand them back.
In my early years, in my family,
there were already more than twenty people.
When I was in primary school,
I remember there were already twenty-three.
If everyone was there,
we had to serve twenty-three mouths with one wok.
At that time,
my 'po' was still alive. 'Po' was our word for grandmother.
My father had three brothers,
and they each had more than one child.
Twenty-odd people, all squeezed together.
The conditions were rather difficult with so many people.
If you can imagine, this huge family,
was like the one in 'Dream of the Red Chamber.'
Every daughter-in-law of my father's generation,
all my aunts, including my mother,
took turns to cook for everyone.
Each had to do it for a whole week.
Whoever was handling the ladle,
she'd be sure to serve her own kids the thickest congee.
The rest of us made do with what was left.
All from the one wok.
Everyone served themselves.
In the end, people tried to hide the ladle.
Why was that?
Because the ladle could reach the bottom where the best stuff was.
The burnt rice at the bottom tasted better.
Everyone tried to get to it first.
Anyhow, times were pretty hard, but we didn't split up.
Because my 'po' was still there, she held the family together.
Until 1958. That was when mandatory communal kitchens came in.
People couldn't get along, and the family split up.
The year I started junior high, the Cultural Revolution began.
Actually, the schools were already closed by 1966.
We'd just reached mathematical simple equations.
My father was a teacher.
...urban and rural separate.
My mother was a housewife.
If a mother was classed as a 'rural citizen,'
her children were also classed as 'rural.'
There was 'household registration,' and that was linked to food coupons.
Without that piece of paper you couldn't even stay in a hotel.
Without food coupons you had nothing to eat.
"There's an old saying."
"The place you're born, is the place that half-buries you."
"That's why 'birthplace' is also called 'blood land'."
That's why 'birthplace' is also called 'blood land'
- Jia Pingwa
The college my father went to
was later renamed 'Shaanxi Normal University.'
He studied there, and when he graduated, he was assigned to a suburb of Xi'an.
A teaching post in Tianjiawan Primary School.
The Chinese civil war was coming to an end.
When it ended in 1949, the Communist Party took power.
Xi'an had been ruled by Hu Zongnan.
He was a KMT general, and he was in charge here.
He was known as 'King of the North-west.'
He had both political and military power.
Not long before the KMT retreat he convened a big meeting in Xi'an.
Later, during the Cultural Revolution this meeting was reclassified
as training for the KMT secret service.
And whoever had been at the meeting was for the 'secret service training.'
Well, my father and five or six other teachers
came by foot from Tianjiawan to attend it.
About halfway there,
my father sneaked away with another guy.
They went to Yisu Theater to see Shaanxi opera.
So they never went to the meeting at all. But his name was on the attendance list!
They checked the record during the Cultural Revolution,
and there was his name!
The record said he was there.
The matter was reported to Xi'an.
Since the meeting was now classed as 'secret service training,'
my father was accused of being a KMT secret agent.
He was fired from his job.
Sent back to his birthplace to do forced labor.
We had to move back too.
When he arrived under armed military escort,
I was working on the land.
I was doing some farm job on the mountain and I saw him.
He was walking along the road with two armed escorts behind him.
The moment I saw him, I rushed back home
He'd already been reassigned to the local production brigade.
At home, Father was lying on the kang bed.
When he saw me, he cried. That was the only time I saw him cry.
Because, in his mind, my father, always thought of me as a scholar.
He thought I'd go to high school, and then to college.
But now I'd been sent back to the village too,
I probably wouldn't get to university, since he was a 'counter-revolutionary.'
He thought my future was hopeless.
My brother, three years younger was as tall as me.
We two brothers started working in the production brigade.
One day's work earned three points.
And one point, at that time, was worth twenty cents.
The normal rate for an adult male was ten points per day.
Worth twenty cents per point.
For women, it was eight points per day.
That made one Chinese dollar and sixty cents.
I could only earn three points. That amounted to very little money.
Sixty cents per day. Just sixty cents.
Back then, the villages were preparing for war with the Soviet Union.
All of the young people had to register in militias.
Every day there was training to prepare for war,
until my father was named as a 'counter-revolutionary'
and sent back to his birthplace.
That disqualified me from being in the militia.
They threw me out.
When they recruited, I applied to rejoin,
but I could never pass the background checks.
I remember having the physical examination.
Someone checked your ears, this part of you and that.
I passed those tests, but never made it on to the list.
Later, they started hiring geological workers.
I tried that too.
They accepted my application,
but disqualified me after two or three rounds of checks.
Still later, they needed road maintenance workers.
We didn't have asphalt roads then, they were still sand roads.
They always needed maintenance workers
to shovel sand from the roadside ditches, and flatten the roads.
That was the job.
Very often the work was
in quite remote areas.
I applied, and the checks took forever.
In the end, I was rejected again.
Then, in 1969, there was mass mobilization
in water conservation for agriculture.
At the time, Chairman Mao said
"Water conservation is the lifeblood of agriculture."
Everywhere began building reservoirs.
Our county planned three of them,
and one was in my home village.
One rainy day I put on a back-pack with a bag of corn grits in it.
Even though it was a construction job,
you had bring your own grains for communal cooking.
I rushed to be first in line for the job.
I paced in front of the construction office, hoping someone would notice me.
As I hoped, the commander greeted me.
I said "I'm here to work."
He knew I had good handwriting.
Then he asked if I'd be willing to work for the office.
I was more than happy to.
So he gave me a bucket of paint and a broad brush.
And that afternoon he assigned me to paint slogans on the rocks.
I climbed up the rocks,
tied a rope around my waist,
and hung down to paint the slogans.
Everyone was pleased.
That's how I came to work for the construction office.
That was a good preparation for college.
Soon after that, universities started enrolling students
based on recommendations.
The ones they took were called 'worker-peasant-soldier students.'
They were the children of workers, peasants and soldiers,
hence the name.
My father's case had not yet been re-examined,
but there were signs that he might be rehabilitated.
Since I was classed as a 'reformable child,'
I was allowed to apply.
I've been in Xi'an ever since.
"Cast a cold eye on the world"
I studied arts at Northwest University
and published twenty-two pieces during my college years.
In September 1975, I was assigned to Shaanxi People's Publishing House.
Strictly speaking, the Cultural Revolution wasn't over.
There was barely any market for literature.
Given the times, I tried writing revolutionary stories.
Essays, novels.
Even traditional songs.
And poems. I wrote everything.
When we reached the 1980s,
Chinese writing in general came to be thought of
as literature of the new era.
That marked the start of real modern literature.
Why? Well, there was foreign literature.
Modern work.
It began appearing in Chinese translations.
The first I learned about the west was from the arts.
From introductions to foreign artworks.
Van Gogh,
Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso.
Cubism, Fauvism, Impressionism and Structuralism.
There were books
about all these movements.
I thought I could become an artist by learning this.
But when it came to my writing, it was hard.
I didn't know what path to take.
Because at that time, you either imitated western models, or...
Whenever something new comes along, people tend to absorb it by imitating it.
What they're really trying to see is what's the boundary.
Is there a breakthrough? Can it be improved?
But I was facing a different blockage.
I didn't know what I wanted to write.
I was young, impulsive and curious.
I wanted to write down everything I saw.
Looking back at that time, I called myself a roving bandit.
My work had no roots.
I just wrote whatever my gun was aimed at.
I was sure it wouldn't work, I feared the worst.
Then, sometime between 1982 and 1984, that was when it struck me.
I should go back home.
Back to my birthplace, Shangluo.
So off I went, and found someone I knew.
Someone who could take me around.
There was no public transport, so it was hard to get around.
We only had bicycles, and cycled back to base every night.
Every morning, at random, we'd visit nearby villages.
It was delightful.
There was nothing to worry about in the countryside.
Nobody to supervise you.
Just two or three of us, riding our bikes.
It felt free! We ate wherever we went.
When we were hungry, we simply stopped to buy some food,
or paid local people to cook for us in their homes.
In the evenings,
we slept wherever we could.
But that was when my body failed me.
I got sick.
I was in the worst pain I've ever experienced.
Those times brought me great joy, but also the worst pain.
I'd caught a cold and been to a clinic for a shot.
The clinic had an alcohol stove.
Lots of needles in the boiling water.
They used boiling water to sterilize back then.
Everyone who came with a cold, would get a shot with a new needle.
They gave me the injection, and it made me very ill.
I was infected with Hepatitis B.
I found only later that there'd been a local hepatitis epidemic.
I've been treated for it ever since.
It took fifteen years to recover.
During that period, I wrote a lot.
Stories, novellas, essays...
The main essays were the 'Three Records of Shangzhou.'
There were so many short pieces.
The novellas included 'Chicken Coop Valley.'
After that...
In 1985, 1986,
I wrote the novel
'Turbulence.'
Since that time, I've slowly established myself here.
From Shangluo...
From the hometown I live in, I'm looking at China.
Looking at the whole world.
YELLOW RIVER
I was born on 3 April 1960, in Hangzhou.
My father worked in the provincial center for disease control,
and my mother worked in Zhejiang Hospital.
When I was three years old, my father was assigned...
There was a severe outbreak of snail fever (schistosomiasis) in Zhejiang.
My father was transferred to Xiamen and he ended up in Haiyan.
They were establishing a new hospital in Haiyan, so he stayed there.
He wrote to my mother
saying that things were good in Haiyan,
so she took my brother and me to Haiyan.
Later she told me
there weren't even any bicycles in Haiyan back then.
We lived in the workplace
Right opposite the surgery was the morgue.
The surgery faced it. It was just a small bungalow.
My brother and I came and went freely.
The operating theater was inside the bungalow.
While my father performed surgeries and we could even go in there.
Many times, after midnight,
we'd hear crying.
The cries of grief would wake us up.
Haiyan had particularly hot summers
When I woke up from a nap,
I saw that my sweat left the outline of my body on the mat.
Homes didn't have their own bathrooms then.
We used the public toilet.
That was next door to the morgue.
There was a concrete slab in the morgue, about this wide.
It was kept very, very clean. In my mind, I feel in the world...
When I think about the cleanest place there is...
it's not the lobby of a five-star hotel,
but that morgue I passed by as a child.
One time I took a nap there.
At least, I tried to... It was nice and cool.
When we were little, people thought that was unbelievable.
But my generation took it in its stride.
We don't believe in ghosts. We're all atheists.
As an adult, I came across a poem by Heinrich Heine.
"Our death is in the cool of the night."
When I read that, I thought That's me, in the morgue!
That was exactly how I felt.
In primary school, we had a classmate whose father...
he killed himself. He jumped down a well.
Southern wells are about this wide.
If you jump head-first, there's no turning back.
The well is too narrow.
In a northern well, you could still hope to change your mind.
You could try lifting your head,
roll forwards and paddle in the water.
Not possible in a southern well. So, just like that, he killed himself.
We didn't know
Our classmate showed up with his satchel,
but he was crying, he stood in a corner and cried.
...did we realize that his father killed himself the night before.
So we asked our classmate to play ping pong with us
We asked him twice and he finally came.
He was still crying while he waited for his turn.
And when he played, and even when he won, he was still crying.
When he won again, he smiled.
In our high-school years,
we managed to read some novels.
Mostly books
which had survived the Cultural Revolution.
Books which hadn't been burned or confiscated.
They'd been hidden away.
Passed through many hands.
By the time they reached me, they'd lost pages at the front and back.
You'd have no idea how the story started, or how it ended.
Didn't know the title, or the author.
I soon realized that the title and author didn't matter.
And I could manage without knowing how the story started.
But it was very frustrating to not have the ending.
You got through it,
but the next book that came along was in the same condition.
And by the time another book came into your hands,
a month or two had passed.
I was so frustrated, that I was haunted by those missing endings.
I figured out what to do.
As the line in the 'Internationale' goes "There are no supreme saviors."
We need to save ourselves.
Since I lay awake at night, thinking about endings,
I came up with my own ending.
And if it wasn't good enough, I'd think of another one.
At that time, boys and girls didn't really speak to each other.
It sometimes happened that girls were bolder than boys
A girl classmate once handed me a note.
In our school, she was given a job
as a school librarian.
The note she gave me was an accusation.
I'd recently returned a book and apparently I'd damaged it.
The pages were slightly torn,
but she accepted it anyway.
Her note made a very strong impression on me.
It was the first time a girl ever handed me a note,
and it was to criticize me.
The note ended by saying she'd let it go this time,
but if it happened again, she wouldn't let me return the book.
I'd have to pay for the damage, something like that.
I got her real meaning right away.
Back then, nobody would write "I like you" in a note. Nothing of that sort.
They'd use indirect or oblique expressions instead.
Expressing affection had to be implied, not explicit.
It seemed like a common-or-garden note.
You have no idea how complicated this all was.
The girl folded...
She'd folded the paper down to a tiny square.
It probably took her only a minute or two to do it.
But it would take me twenty minutes to unfold it.
I was scared of tearing it.
It might have contained something beautiful! And I might have lost it!
So I was very careful. I worked hard to unfold it.
And it turned out to be a criticism!
But I got her real point.
In the following days, I noticed she kept looking at me.
It made me a bit nervous.
Eventually I decided to tell her
that I was interested in her too.
But I suddenly realized that she'd lost interest in me
Not long after that,
we went to a place called Ganpu.
We were in the middle of some military training...
when we heard a loudspeaker announcement.
The Gang of Four had been arrested.
After that, college entrance exams started again.
I took the exam in 1977 and failed. I failed again in 1978.
So I gave up trying, and went to become a dentist.
In 1977, the government had already ended...
the 'Learn from Peasants and Workers' movement.
Urban students were still stuck in the countryside,
but nobody was being sent to remote villages any more.
Some of my classmates were assigned to factories.
Some went to work in department stores.
I ended up in Wuyuan County Health Center.
Maybe it was my fate
to become a dentist
I didn't like the work at all.
All day staring into people's open mouths!
The worst view in the world. Day after day.
I was still young.
I wanted to see the world and the rest of the country.
I could barely imagine what the world was like,
but I wanted to travel and see things.
The dental hospital had one merit.
It was bang in the center of the town.
And my window happened to look out on a bridge
and the adjoining road.
Whenever there was no patient to see,
I stood looking out of that window.
I was feeling quite despondent.
Was my whole life going to be like this?
I was desperate for a change.
I began notice that people from the Cultural Bureau...
were always strolling about on the street.
The town had a small population.
Eight thousand people, and they all knew each other.
I asked them why they weren't at work.
And they said strolling in the streets was their work.
I thought, that's for me!
I'd love a job like that!
I asked them how I could get a job in the Cultural Bureau.
So I started writing fiction.
To begin with I had no idea how to write.
I couldn't even get punctuation right.
So I looked for a short story to learn from.
I figured out how to build paragraphs, and began writing.
I had big ideas.
I didn't know if my story was any good or not,
but I sent it off to 'People's Literature' and 'Harvest' magazine.
When they rejected it, I tried less prestigious places.
Such as 'Beijing Literature' and 'Shanghai Literature'
And if that didn't work either,
I'd try sending it to random magazines in places like LŸliang.
The postman,
every time,
he didn't knock to deliver the mail.
He just threw my rejection letters over the fance.
Every time we heard one land, my father said "Another rejection letter."
I was determined.
Being rejected would depress me a bit,
but I mainly wanted to see who'd rejected it,
so that I could aim a bit lower next time.
In November of 1983,
very late in the evening,
I received a long-distance call.
This was before we got direct dialling.
Long-distance calls had to be connected through a switchboard.
We had only one switchboard operator for the whole of Haiyan.
The person calling was the chief editor of 'Beijing Literature.'
The executive chief editor.
The nominal chief editors were Yang Mo, and his deputy Wang Meng
This was the executive chief editor, Zhou Yanru.
When I picked up the phone,
the operator asked if I was Yu Hua.
I said yes, and was told that someone in Beijing was calling me.
It took another half-hour for the call to be connected.
It was Zhou Yanru.
She wanted me to come to Beijing to edit my story.
My very first reaction was to wonder
who would cover my travel and accommodation costs.
Zhou Yanru was really nice, a lovely old lady
and an experienced editor.
She said "Yu Hua..." Those were her first words.
"I placed this call this morning."
"The day's almost over, and I was about to give up."
"I thought I wouldn't get through today. So I'd try again tomorrow."
"Then suddenly I got connected."
She talked about the three stories I'd sent them.
I'd already forgotten that I'd sent three. "One of them needs some editing."
She went on
"We'll pay for your travel and accommodation."
"Plus an allowance."
I was on the coach next morning to Shanghai.
I bought a standing-class ticket at the rail station
and stood all the way to Beijing.
There I met my editor, I met Zhou Yanru.
She discussed the editing with me.
"Your stories were very well written, but one of them has a gloomy ending."
"In a socialist country like ours such things cannot happen."
I asked her "Teacher Zhou, what do you suggest?"
She said "You need to change it."
I asked "Do you mean giving it a happy ending?"
She said yes.
I asked if she'd still publish it with a happy ending.
You see, I was bargaining.
That was me being me.
Even the people at 'Harvest' heard about this later.
She said "If it has a happy ending, we'll publish it."
I said "If you agree to publish it, I'll make it happy all the way through!"
She replied "You young people!"
"A happy ending will do, it doesn't need to start happy."
"The beginning isn't very dark anyway, not so dark."
"It's just that the ending is a bit gloomy."
"A happy ending will do, it doesn't need to start happy."
It took me just one day to change it.
I remember there was a writer from Henan, famous back then
He was bursting with pride
because he'd just won a National Short Story Award.
Zhou Yanru introduced me to him.
"This young man is Yu Hua. He's only twenty-three."
"He writes good stories."
"He's very bright. It took him one day to edit his story."
"Some writers need half a month..."
"A whole month or even two months to do that."
"But he got it done in one day."
I was thinking, it's just a happy ending. Nothing to it!
She told me my stories would appear in the first issue of 1984.
I was ready to head home once the editing was done,
but Zhou Yanru was really kind.
She said "Yu Hua, it wasn't easy for you to get to Beijing."
It never crossed my mind that I'd live in Beijing one day
I just said "Well..."
She said "Enjoy yourself a bit." So I stayed for a month.
I went everywhere I could
Eventually I had to ask her where else I could go.
Every place she mentioned, I'd already been to.
In the end she had to say "Time to go home."
She calculated the allowance they were giving me.
I felt rich for the very first time.
Since I had to take the train,
they bought me a ticket back to Shanghai.
Since it was a business trip, I was entitled to civil service treatment.
That meant I got a sleeper berth.
But I changed it for standing-class. I didn't even choose a seat!
And I pocketed the difference in price.
I'd been there for a whole month.
My per diem was two Chinese dollars a day.
That was the going rate in 1983.
When I got home, I had in my wallet eighty-odd dollars, almost ninety.
I felt very rich.
When the train stopped in Shandong,
I bought four roast chicken for my father.
Four roast chicken.
Because he was originally from Shandong.
After that, I became a Haiyan celebrity.
My editor had been very thoughtful.
She asked if I needed a letter to explain my absence.
I agreed that I did.
I'd been gone for a month and the hospital didn't even know about it.
So she gave me a letter vouching for the purpose of my trip.
The hospital chief was furious at first,
but the letter convinced him that I was someone important.
The leaders discussed the matter. They concluded that it was a big deal.
In all the years of the People's Republic,
I was the first local person to be published in Beijing.
They suggested transferring me to the Cultural Bureau.
So that was when I changed my job.
Towards the end of 1987,
or maybe in early 1988,
I took delivery of some letters, I forget if it was three or four.
They were all asking for stories from me. And they all wanted them within a week.
One was from 'October' magazine.
I showed my father these letters.
Laid them on the table and said, "Look."
My father took a look and asked what I was getting at.
I told him, "This is fame."
I started out submitting work, now they're asking for it.
"Your son is famous now."
People ask me what it's like to be famous.
I tell them that was the only time I had that feeling. Since then, never.
"Remembering the past or longing for your native place,"
"are, in reality, ways of reaching for reassurance"
"when we feel some disorientation in life."
"Even if feelings are involved, they're purely decorative."
Remembering the past or longing for your native place
are, in reality, ways of reaching for reassurance.
- Yu Hua
We swam here every summer as kids.
One time I wondered where I'd get to if I kept swimming.
But then I got caught in a current.
I knew not to fight it, I just had to let it carry me.
I was carried along for some twenty kilometres
before I finally scrambled ashore.
I had to walk all the way back, barefoot.
Dawn was almost breaking.
HAIYAN COUNTY, ZHEJIANG PROVINCE
In October 1989, I entered Beijing University.
Life on campus was all peace and joy
Through open windows you could hear people playing mahjong.
Around Weiming Lake, you saw couples dating.
And then in the 1990s, especially after Deng Xiaoping toured southern China,
the whole nation went into business.
The result was economic prosperity.
Some who'd become writers like me,
abandoned their careers to become entrepreneurs.
People who'd been together went their separate ways
exploring their own paths.
I finished writing 'Cries in the Drizzle.'
And in 1993 I published 'To Live.' I wrote about a man's whole life.
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DENGZHOU CITY, HENAN PROVINCE
Physics is the opposite of metaphysics.
Why?
Socrates said that.
-Then that's philosophy, isn't it? -No.
Since you bring up Socrates...
How many pupils did he have?
Yeah... Plato.
Socrates and Plato.
Plato was Socrates' student.
In September 1997,
I was mastering in Chinese at Zhengzhou University.
That was the year that Hong Kong reverted to China's sovereignty,
but I wasn't really conscious of such momentous things.
I seemed to be immersed in my own world.
I moved to Beijing in September 2000.
My first impression of the city was quite good.
I was studying literature at Beijing Normal University.
September was the best season in Beijing.
Autumnal, with clear skies and nice weather.
But when I'd applied to do the PhD in April,
the city was hit by the most severe sandstorms.
That was in April 2000.
From the start, I was greeted with thick, sandy dust
That was 23 April, the day we had to sit the entrance exam.
Despite the sandstorm, I couldn't understand
why all the girls on the street covered their faces with scarves.
Come 2007, I'd got my PhD four years earlier,
I'd given birth to my son.
He was two years old.
And I felt that a chapter in my life was coming to an end.
It was time to move on to a new phase.
But it suddenly felt very difficult.
It's hard to explain.
Life seemed to be good.
Living conditions were improving,
but everything felt wrong.
The word 'betrayal' lingered in my mind. I couldn't shake it.
During the summer break, I made the decision that I'd go home,
Though I couldn't quite say why, even though I did not quite know why.
I knew I was going to write something, I wasn't sure what.
But I absolutely needed to go back for a while.
This was different from previous trips home.
They'd been more like short visits.
Village tourism, hanging out by the river. Seeing what it all looked like...
But this time, what I had in mind was something more serious.
I wanted to write.
In 'China in Liang Village,' I wrote about Liang Village.
Its elders, its women and its children.
I included the river by the village. The natural environment.
Also, the current situation in the village.
When I interviewed the people, for instance,
when a family received a call from far away,
everyone was so joyful.
Or when someone sent money back, the day became so festive.
I gradually came to realize
that the workers who've migrated to other places,
are still part of village life, even though they're usually away.
I was born in the 1970s.
The rural order was beginning to recover.
I could still recall the days of the 'production unit.'
But not in any detail.
I think my earliest real memories were formed in the 1980s.
At that point, my sisters and brothers were all in school.
My family was very poor,
but my father was very insistent on one point.
He insisted that we were all educated.
Nobody was migrating to other places yet.
You pretty much lived on what you could harvest.
Everyone lived on farmland.
Food was very limited.
Sometimes you had to look for edible wild plants,
or grow some tobacco or peppers.
Stuff you could sell to cover some of the cost of living.
At Chinese New Year or other big festivals,
we could get up to a kilo of meat from the county.
There were six girls in the family. And my mother had medical issues.
In the years
before I became sensible and responsible, she was already paralysed.
I was admitted to high school at fifteen.
Before that,
time passed
extremely slowly.
My elder sister was another worry.
As she reached puberty, she got into a relationship.
I already knew that things like that could be difficult.
And my younger sister had asthma.
Anyhow, it was
all very hard
It's even hard for me to talk about these things.
Not to mention my mother.
She rarely spoke.
It's as if she's a shadow in my heart which never goes away.
Even now that I'm an adult, it seems I still can't talk about it.
I guess there may be many things in life which you never get over.
I once said, if the day comes when I can
speak freely and frankly about my mother
then that will be the day I have my emotions under control.
That day hasn't come yet.
I was six years old when my mother had a stroke.
That was common enough in the rural areas.
Probably caused by her high blood pressure but we knew nothing about that then.
We had access to only very basic medical services.
And we had no money for doctors.
It started with hemiparesis, she could still walk,
but one side of her body was weakened.
During my time in primary school,
my mother exercised every morning.
When I walked home after school,
she was often nearby on the same road.
I later realized she was probably waiting for me.
Maybe she wanted to pick me up from school
but she felt embarrassed because of her disability.
She was quite shy.
Anyhow, we'd head home together.
By the time she was confined to her bed...
That was when she suffered complete paralysis.
She was in a near-vegetative state.
Even then, she was eager to communicate.
The family kept up the basic courtesies.
When we left for school, we'd call 'Bye, Ma!'
By then she couldn't speak.
She would shed a tear
to respond to us.
That had a huge impact on me.
I can't really talk about it.
Her state...
She was breathing,
but she couldn't say a word.
It was so painful.
My father had a really good reputation.
He was the one who took my mother to hospital
and he cared for her devotedly.
We were all like that in our family.
I still went to school, despite all the problems.
I remember when we didn't have the money
to pay for the tuition, maybe six or eight dollars...
Couldn't afford it.
So I had to stand outside the classroom,
until we'd saved enough money.
The teacher had no choice if we couldn't pay.
He made us stand outside. I stood there for a month.
That was the longest period I had to stand outside.
As I recall, the experience wasn't at all shaming.
Just rather sad.
Then my father would take me,
together with my sisters, I think,
from door to door in the village to borrow money.
Twenty cents here, thirty cents there, or even one dollar.
He had ideas and really wanted to make more money
because we were so poor,
but every business he started failed in the end.
After my mother passed away, his reputation went down.
He was in his forties,
just as I am now.
Maybe he could find a new wife and have more children?
Actually, there were no more children.
In those days, country villages gossiped about such matters all the time.
Anyhow, my sisters and I reached adolescence...
and we were always fighting.
Father tried to start a business. We didn't know where he'd got to.
Actually, he went to Shanxi.
It should be... I forgot what was it called.
And this friend introduced him to a local woman.
We knew almost nothing about it. Hardly anything, in fact.
The woman was a victim of domestic violence.
I heard later that her husband used to beat her.
She wanted to leave.
My father's friend asked him to help out.
Since we're on the plains. Henan is on the plains.
He asked my father to get her out of the mountains.
He didn't ask him to marry her.
Next thing,
he brought her to live in our house
She'd been with us for about a month
when we said we'd try to find her a husband.
But she didn't want to marry anyone other than our father.
She said he was such a nice person. My father was indeed very kind to women.
His only weakness was being so sweet to his wife.
Very sweet indeed.
When my father brought this woman back to our house in Henan,
my instant reaction was to cry.
Conflicts followed
The local villagers, it seems to me now,
saw her as something of a joke.
Many of them watched our family as if we were a soap opera.
I hated that feeling of being watched.
Since I was scared,
I hid myself away in dark corners.
My brother was fifteen or sixteen at the time.
He was quite obstinate.
And my sisters were seventeen and eighteen
It was an all-round difficult situation, as I look back.
Lots of fighting,
both with father and with the woman.
She was very unhappy because she also contributed to the family.
If you ask me now, I'd say it was all unnecessary,
but none of us could control their anger.
And we didn't know how to deal with the new relationship
And my father was kind of helpless.
Since he was such a kind man,
he wanted to please his new 'wife,'
and us too.
In the end, no-one was pleased. And he faced a big dilemma.
I used to think I no longer liked him, didn't love him.
But when I reached this age and came to write about Liang Village.
My father was deeply involved in my research for the books.
He came back with me for 'China in Liang Village,'
and for 'Leaving Liang Village' he joined me as I went around the country,
recording interviews, finding people who came from Liang Village.
During that period, we got to know and understand each other again.
Eventually, the woman left. She left my father.
She probably couldn't stand the situation any more.
One time, when we'd grown up, we went looking for her.
We were all married by then. My father missed her.
He nagged us.
We just had to take him to see her.
I didn't go. Three of my sisters took him.
When the two of them saw each other, they broke down in tears.
"Father has always been my question."
"And the biggest question of all is his white shirt."
"In those days,"
"the old road from Wu County to Liang Village was still nice and flat."
"Tall, straight poplar trees on both sides."
"Father was hurrying home from Wu County and I was on my way to school."
"We passed each other on the road."
"In the shade of the trees,"
"Father's white shirt was clean and neat."
"Soft, tidy... It shone like a beam of light."
Father has always been my question
- Liang Hong
"What trouble did Father have to save enough money"
"for such a costly, unnecessary, luxurious white shirt?"
"How did he keep it stainless all year round?"
One of my sisters was the eldest in the family.
There was a saying in the village.
My father liked to repeat it.
"People would rather be mules or horses than eldest sons and daughters."
Our family is a case in point.
My eldest sister went to a vocational school.
That used to be considered a high qualification.
Once she completed the course,
she had a choice between working in Beijing and a job in Zhengzhou.
She had plenty of good offers.
Because of the family,
she came back to the county to work at a local health center.
This was in the 1980s A high-school diploma counted for a lot.
She could earn twelve Chinese dollars a month.
Unimaginable to the rest of us.
She would keep two dollars for herself
and give the rest to us.
And every time she visited,
she'd bring me a gift, such as a pair of sneakers.
They cost more than one dollar.
I'd be so excited, running around the village in my new shoes.
I still keep the letters between my father and my sister.
They depended on each other
and tried to solve the family's problems together.
In some sense, I think
my father's trust in her made her more important to us
She was always the one we counted on.
We could hide behind her back, we could cry...
but she could not. She had to solve problems.
When there was no money, she had to make money.
And we were always short of money.
What with my mother's illness, with our schooling,
with our food and clothing...
It was like a big black hole and she was the one who had to fill it.
She worried about it for years. But my sister has a big heart.
If life's hard, you have to be optimistic. She's pretty and open-minded.
But because the rest of us were so dependent on her,
men from good family backgrounds would be scared off when they heard about us.
Eventually...
She found her husband.
My brother-in-law is great. A very nice person.
His family was as poor as ours, so neither side looks down on the other.
My sister organised the wedding
and the banquet all by herself.
My father was as usual caught up in lots of hassles.
She made it easy for him.
On the eve of the wedding, we shared a bed
In the middle of the night, I knew she was crying.
I'm lost for words.
LIANG XIUMEI, LIANG HONG'S ELDER SISTER
"Xiumei, your letter was received and read with care."
"Your father's tears run down his face and drop onto this paper."
"You remind me of many things in my life."
"I shed many tears, I cried out loud."
"You said you had things to say to your loved ones."
"You're right."
"When family members talk together, their words can relieve heartaches."
"It's been a long time since I last had a letter from you or heard your voice."
"It felt like losing my guide. As if the machine had run out of gas."
"Family life seemed to have ground to a halt."
"Daughter, you have so much on your mind."
"Studying, housekeeping, teaching your siblings,
"caring for your mother and persuading your father."
"Thank you for all of it"
"It makes me fee l..."
"as if I'm the daughter."
"Wheat, plant"
"It's hard to detect growth"
"Life on this earth is one and the same"
"In the field, the three elms fall into silence"
"Like Father, Mother, and Child"
In the field, the three elms fall into silence
Like Father, Mother, and Child
- Xi Chuan
My name is Wang Yiliang.
I remember I was born in Henan and raised in Beijing.
My mother is Liang Hong and my father is Wang Hengtao.
I turned fourteen this year. I study at Renda Middle School.
I like physics.
In my spare time, I sometimes watch TV and play video games.
I read about this river in my Ma's book.
She says the river used to be much closer to the village.
Over many years, the river has changed its course.
"Thirty years on the east, thirty years on the west."
I find that saying especially touching.
When I was younger, I had no idea how time would change things.
Every time I came here...
Mostly I just hung out with my cousins.
I didn't see much of my grandfather. We didn't see much of each other.
And towards the end of his life,
I had few chances to see him.
I'd like to have known...
When he was young, did he have enough to eat?
I'd like to have asked him...
Did he ever want to see the world?
See how other people lived?
Can you introduce yourself in Henan dialect?
I've pretty much forgotten my Henan dialect.
Give it a try!
I'll teach you.
My name is Wang Yiliang.
I turned fourteen this year.
I was born in Henan and raised in Beijing.
I study at Renda High School.
My hobby is physics.
I'd like to be a physicist in the future.
Okay, your turn.
My name is Wang Yiliang. I turned fourteen this year.
I was born in Henan and raised in Beijing.
I study at Renda High School.
My hobby is physics. I'd like to be a physicist in the future.
When I was little,
the sea was yellow
But the textbooks said it was blue.
We liked to swim here back then.
One day, I think I'll swim right out...
Swim out till the sea turns blue.