Reporter | Dong Ziqi
Edit | Jiang Yan
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According to the China Writers Network, zhang Jie, a writer who has twice won the Mao Dun Literature Award, died of illness in the United States on January 21, 2022.
Zhang Jie, a native of Fushun, Liaoning, born in 1937, graduated from Chinese Min University, and his representative works include "Heavy Wings", "Wordless", "Love, Can't Be Forgotten", "The Person Who Hurt Me the Most In the World Went" and so on. In November 1979, Zhang Jie's short story "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten" was published in Beijing Literature and Art, which deals with the theme of how to love and why to love. It begins with the self-statement of a thirty-year-old girl to be married, "I am the same age as our republic. Thirty years old, that's too young for a republic. For a girl, however, there is a danger that she will not be able to marry. She confronted the suitor, confused about what she loved him and what he loved her, and then she herself was not sure whether she would love or not to love her mother's bitter love in a particular historical period. In the novel, the mother says in a conversation with her daughter, "People say that contented people are always happy, but I can't enjoy such happiness" and "I can only be a painful idealist." For a time, the bitter idealist became a resounding title, and it did not go away from generation to generation. ”
"Love, Cannot Be Forgotten", as the first work after the "Cultural Revolution" to touch on the theme of extramarital affairs, triggered a heated discussion in that year, and also opened the "words of love" in the new era, and led to a trend of personalized writing with love and married life as the main content.
Zhang Jie won the second Mao Dun Literature Award for "Heavy Wings", the difficulty of novel writing reform, industrial modernization took off with heavy wings, and later won the sixth Mao Dun Literature Award with "No Word", which tells the marriage story of female writer Wu Wei and several generations of women in her family, as well as the wind and clouds in China in the past hundred years. In 1992, Zhang Jie was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Letters and Arts.
Heavy Wings
Zhang Jie
People's Literature Publishing House
Zhang Jie's essay "The Man Who Hurt Me The Most In the World Went" is a work dedicated to his mother, in which he writes, "A person's life is actually a process of constantly losing the person he loves, and it is lost forever." This is the greatest pain that everyone must experience. After such a change, I am no longer me. What the new me will be is hard to predict. Mom, you must not know that you have created another life for me. ”
"The Man Who Hurt Me The Most In the World Went"
People's Literature Publishing House, 2015
Writer Xu Kun commented on Zhang Jie in this way, "In the past, we understood love, deep love, love that must be completed and adhered to in "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten", but now, we understand hate in the "Wordless" Heavenly Book, the hatred that comes out of endless love, it is also soft and unforgettable. ”
References: Rao Xiang, "The Symbol of the Next Era": Revisiting "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten" and Its Controversy, Novel Review, No. 1, 2022