Chen Xuezhao's wandering life
——Old Books Retrospective Record No. 5
Written by Guan Yinong
In my bookcase, there is a booklet with yellowed and brittle pages, entitled "Walking through the Liberated Areas", written by Chen Xuezhao, published by the Shanghai Publishing Company in December 1949.
The book is very small, 12 centimeters wide and 17 centimeters high, the text is arranged vertically in small No. 5 traditional characters, 119 pages, a total of 17 articles, about 670,000 words. The price is 5 yuan and 3 jiao (old currency).
From the author's two prefaces, it can be seen that this book was previously published in Changchun during the first liberation of Changchun (April 1946) (according to research, it should have been printed by the Northeast Bookstore run by the Communist Party), and 10,000 copies were printed at one time, but due to the war, not many remained, and it was almost out of print. After the liberation, the author added two articles on the basis of the original book and republished them in Shanghai, and 75 years have passed, and it is estimated that there will not be many books that survive and are relatively good.
I bought this book at a very low price from a scrap yard during the Cultural Revolution. The title page of the book is stamped with the oval official seal of "The Library of the Northwest Bureau of the Communist Party of China", which is estimated to have been cleaned up by the rebels at that time or sold when the public disposed of the old books. However, in my hands, more than half a century has been well preserved, and it can be regarded as a good death. At that time, the reason why I took a fancy to this booklet in the pile of waste books was because I knew that the author Chen Xuezhao had also written a very famous ** "Work is Beautiful", and I also knew that Chen Xuezhao was a progressive female writer who had a relationship with Lu Xun and began to write in the twenties and thirties. According to the relevant information, Chen Xuezhao published essay collections as early as 1925 and 1927, when she was only about 20 years old. Another reason is that it contains articles dedicated to my hometown of Wuzhai in Shanxi and northwest Shanxi, and I really want to see what my hometown in the 40s of the last century looked like in the writer's pen.
My eyes and thoughts wandered with "Walking in the Liberated Areas". Wuzhai County, located in the northwest of Shanxi Province, was occupied by Japanese devils for 6 years during the Anti-Japanese War, and was liberated on April 25, 1945. In "A Glimpse of Five Villages", she not only recorded the material trauma of the war suffered by this county, but also described the spiritual ravages and morbid consequences of the people, and the words were soaked with hatred and condemnation of the Japanese invaders. The article also praised the local anti-Japanese hero Lu Yuxiao and told the story of his wisdom in eliminating traitors. Lu Yuxiao is the pride of the people of Wuzhai, a native of Xiaguan Village, Wuzhai County, who served as the head of the children's regiment and the leader of the militia squadron, and led the militia to cooperate with the Eighth Route Army to fight dozens of times. In 1949, he went south to Sichuan with the army, and after liberation, he served as the director of the Dazhou Regional Building Materials Bureau, and died in 1992. In the article "Crossing Tongpu Road", Chen Xuezhao wrote about her first experience of eating noodles quite interestingly, and I felt very cordial when I read it. She said: "There are not many products in this area, including Wuzhai, which only produce wheat, flax and yam eggs. 'Eat noodles and sleep on hot kang', this is the summary of the life of ordinary people in northwest Shanxi. The first time I saw wheat and noodles, I didn't know how to eat them, so I had to ask the people to help us make them. The people in the house where I lived, the two of them were happy to help us make ......After they knead the noodles, they make them into small rolls, put them in a steamer, and then they are ready to eat. They told me that the noodles are hunger-tolerant, and according to local customs, they must eat vinegar or sauerkraut soup, and that every household in this area makes their own sauerkraut. They shredded the sour carrots they made, soaked them in sour soup, and brought them to me. I don't like sour, but I think it's delicious. The freshly steamed noodles have an attractive aroma, like the aroma of freshly baked bread ......"Haha, I let out a knowing laugh when I saw this. It is estimated that this kind of memory on the tip of the tongue will never be forgotten by this female writer for the rest of her life. Most of the articles in "Wandering the Liberated Areas" were written in the first half of 1946, and as a true record of what they heard and witnessed, they undoubtedly have valuable historical value as they reflect the changes in the appearance of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningbo Border Region, the Shanxi-Sui Border Region, the Northeast China, Inner Mongolia, and other liberated areas.
During the War of Liberation, Chen Xuezhao wrote the long story "Work is Beautiful", which reflects "a corner of several great eras" through the process of growing into a staunch proletarian revolutionary from a petty bourgeois intellectual (Li Shanshang), which is considered to be actually a visual record of the author's own mental journey. **As soon as it was published, it had a strong response, and "work is beautiful" became an inspirational slogan at that time.
When Chen Xuechao was young, she participated in literary groups such as the Asakusa Society and the Silk Society, and was one of the female writers that Mr. Lu Xun paid the most attention to, and her name appeared in more than 20 places in "Lu Xun's Diary". Later, she went to Yan'an, worked as the editor of the supplement of "Liberation **", and participated in the "Yan'an Literature and Art Symposium". Her works leave a different impression on people with the freshness and euphemism of the text, the liveliness and the richness of the scenes. In her later years, she still insisted on writing, and Ding Ling once commented on her: "...When you were young, you were like a precocious spring orchid, standing steeply on a rocky mountain. Idle flowers and wild grasses can take advantage of the spring breeze to shine for a while, but you are out of the mud without staining, slim and slim in late autumn. Now you are in old age, but you are like the red plum by the West Lake, proud of the frost and blooming ......”
Chen Xuezhao died in 1991 at the age of 85. The yellowed pamphlet in my hand – "Wandering the Liberated Areas" – can be counted as a keepsake.
About the Author:Guan Yinong, who has been in the army for 23 years, has been running a newspaper for 28 years after changing jobs, has worked in a newspaper for many years, is a senior editor and reporter, and has won the gold medal of the newspaper supplement of the China News Award. Monographs include "Dictionary of the Art of War and Strategy", etc., and many essays and small ** articles have appeared in domestic newspapers and periodicals. Since his retirement, he has been active in interviewing and writing.