At 2:25 p.m. on June 8, Liu Yihuan, a famous Hong Kong writer and media personality, died at the age of 100 at the East China Academy in Hong Kong. His wife, Luo Peiyun, issued an obituary to announce the news.
Liu Yiwei is known as a generation of masters of Hong Kong's literary scene, and mainland readers may be unfamiliar with it, mentioning that the movies "Fancy Years" and "2046" are mostly familiar, these two films directed by Wong Kar-wai are inspired by Liu Yiwei's famous articles "Opposite Down" and "The Drinker". Wong Kar-wai once said: "It is the most gratifying thing for me to let the people of the world re-understand and know that there was once a writer like Liu Yihuan in Hong Kong."
Born in Shanghai on December 7, 1918, Liu Yihuan ( Liu Yihua ) worked as an editor in Hong Kong and has been committed to serious literary creation. In 1936, he published his first short story, "Anna Floschi in Exile", and wrote works such as "The Drunkard", "The Opposite", "Terauchi", "Typing Mistake", "Island and Peninsula", "He Has a Sharp Knife", "Model, Stamp and Ceramic" and other works. Among them, "The Drunkard" is known as China's first stream-of-consciousness novel, and together with "Opposite", it inspired Wong Kar-wai to make the movies "Fancy Years" and "2046", and the end of "Fancy Years" also specially thanked Liu Yihuan.
On June 9, Chen Zishan, a professor at the Department of Chinese at East China Normal University, mourned Mr. Liu on Weibo and took a copy of the "Biography of Hong Kong Literary Writers" edited by Liu Yihuan, "Hong Kong writer Mr. Liu Yihuan passed away at the age of 100, and I thought of this big book. Mr. Lau is well-known in the world for his novels such as "The Alcoholic", "Ternei", "Opposite Down", and the monthly magazine "Hong Kong Literature" that he founded. However, he also attaches great importance to the collection and collation of literary historical materials, and has published literary memoirs such as "Looking at trees and looking at forests", which is also an important achievement in the collation of his literary historical materials in Hong Kong. ”
Hong Kong writer and poet Liao Weitang commented that Liu Yihuan is a generation of grandmasters of Hong Kong's new literature, with a blue wisp of the road, a low-key person, not proud of his achievements, and a rare thing. His novels are deeply poetic, behind which is the cold and warm self-knowledge of that generation of Hong Kong literati, who look at themselves in the mirror and are also mirror sentient beings.
The People's Literature Publishing House has just published Liu Yihuan's books "The Drunkard", "Opposite Down", and "Inside the Temple". In the novel "The Drunkard", Liu Yihuan tells the story of a new literary writer from Shanghai to Hong Kong, who faces difficulties because of his insistence on serious literary creation. The book Chinese Simplified Version of the Introductory Novel" from the inside out to comprehensively show the protagonist's despair of society, for human beings, for life, and even for himself, although he is dissatisfied with everything, he is powerless to fight, and can only escape and anesthetize his understanding of the truth with drunkenness. Before his death, Liu Yihuan himself devoted his life to serious literary creation, and in his view, a good literature needs to be both experimental and practical. Wong Kar-wai was also born in Shanghai and later went to Hong Kong to engage in artistic creation, and he paid tribute to the pioneer of the "Shanghai complex" in the ending subtitles of "Fancy Years".
In addition to being a writer, Liu Yiman is also an editor of newspapers and magazines. In 1941, after graduating from St. John's University in Shanghai, he went to Chongqing to edit the supplement of the National Gazette, returned to Shanghai in 1945 as the editor-in-chief of Peace Daily, left Shanghai in 1948 and moved south to Hong Kong, successively serving as the editor of newspapers and magazines such as The Hong Kong Times, Sing Tao Weekly, and Sing Tao Daily, during which time he also worked as a supplement editor in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. In 1986, he founded the monthly magazine Hong Kong Literature and served as editor-in-chief until 2000. The literary documentary "They Write on the Island" series of "Liu Yiman: 1918" records Liu Yiman's experience and creation with light and shadow.
In 2010, when the Hong Kong Book Fair first established the "Writer of the Year" award, he was expected to be the first Writer of the Year to receive this honor. He was 91 years old, gave live speeches, and was collectively saluted at a cocktail party attended by 500 writers and guests.
Chengdu Business Daily client reporter Chen Mou
Edited by Jing Lingyan