Nothing else makes me as independent of the world as my words do. I have arrogantly said that even if all people hate me, I will live freely because of my words and my paintings...
——Zhang Jie
According to the China Writers Network, the famous writer Zhang Jie died of illness in the United States on January 21, 2022.
Zhang Jie is an important representative writer of Chinese literature in the new era, and joined the Chinese Writers Association in 1979. His works such as "Heavy Wings", "Wordless", "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten", "Emerald", "Children from the Forest" and so on have a wide range of influences. He has won the second and sixth Mao Dun Literature Awards, and has won the National Outstanding Novella Award and the National Outstanding Short Story Award for many times. Some of his works have been translated into many languages and have won the Order of the Italian Knights and the German, Austrian, Dutch and other multi-national literary awards.
Manuscript of Zhang Jie's Heavy Wings. In 1985, "Heavy Wings" won the second Mao Dun Literature Award.
Zhang Jie's works are diverse in style, theme and artistic characteristics, and it is difficult to summarize them in simple words, but in any case, "love cannot be forgotten", Zhang Jie's directness, enthusiasm and sincerity and her works will accompany readers for a long time.
Today, movable type Jun and book friends specially pushed, senior publisher Mr. Wang Jiaming wrote after Zhang Jie's last reunion with friends in his later years, the memories and Zhang Jie's travel texts, chatting with mourning.
Zhang Jie, sitting on a bench under the tree
—
Wang Jiaming text
This article was originally published on January 12, 2016
In the late autumn of 2014, zhang jie's exhibition opened at the Beijing Museum of Modern Literature, and Tie Ning and a large group of other writers were present, making it a sentimental "farewell party" after Zhang Jie had sold her house in Beijing and bought a small old apartment on the campus of Columbia University in New York. In a short speech, she said: "Zhang Jie said goodbye to this"; "I left a will at a very good law firm: after I died, first, no obituary." Second, say goodbye without remaining. Third, there will be no memorial service. Please also, friends, don't write articles in my memory. As long as you remember in your heart, it is enough to have such a friend as Zhang Jie..."
I knew that, in contrast to the writer friends who surrounded her, held her arm, held hands, and talked loudly or quietly, I was only the publisher of one of her books, and I had only a few acquaintances, so I just greeted her and quietly left after the meeting.
It's been a year. In early winter in Beijing, with its smoggy smog, I sometimes wonder if Zhang Jie is sitting outside her New York apartment, a long chair under a tree, as she once said, and feeling the wind blowing from different directions that she has written about? There is no need to endure the dirty, helpless air anymore.
Knowing Zhang Jie began in 1978, when her "Child from the Forest" won the National Novel Award; but she liked Zhang Jie after reading "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten" published in 1979. The novel stirred up such a large social wave at the time, even rising to the level of morality and personal attack. But then and now, I am dismissive of public opinion, only shocked by the heavy, low, unforgettable and poetic emotions expressed in the novel. For a long time, I had to read this novel before I wrote an article, and it always tugged at the strings of inspiration for my creation. Some of these passages have been able to be recited. In August 1980, as the first part of the "Beijing Literature" Creation Series, "Selected Scripts of Zhang Jie's Novels" was published, and I bought a volume and collected it to this day. In the photograph of the author in front of the book, she is wearing a coat, sitting on a bench in a snow park, with an open magazine on her knee as usual, looking at us with her head tilted, and her full face is clearly full of literary tone and determination. She was forty-three years old. The author's handwriting on the back of the photo is a page in "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten".
Because I liked the novel, I also did the editing work: I checked out two paragraphs of text that I thought were superfluous. I would like to tell Zhang Jie this opinion, but there is no way to believe it. Twenty years later, on March 2, 1999, the Swedish Embassy held a reception for the launch of the new book "The Kingdom of Chinese Characters", and Zhang Jie was a special guest of the embassy. As the publisher and editor of this new book (Shandong Pictorial Publishing House), I met her here. Western-style drinks are more casual, just walking around with glasses of wine and talking to each other. I did not rush to talk to Zhang Jie about the revision of "Love, Can't Forget", but talked about her long essay "The Person Who Hurt Me the Most In the World Went", which I liked very much. The book records more than eighty days and nights of Zhang Jie's mother from the onset of illness to her death, interspersed with the stories of three generations of women, including her mother, Zhang Jie, and Zhang Jie's daughter Tang Di. But the publisher put it together with other works, which is very inappropriate. I propose another one-line book, and add three generations of life photos, and to include the mother's registration certificate, cases, diagnosis, prescriptions, medical expenses details, death notices, cremation certificates, funeral home fee invoices, past life fee receipts, calendars marked with time arrangements before and after the mother's illness, photos of the cats raised by the mother before and after her death, several letters from the mother to her granddaughter Tang Di (nicknamed "school bags"), as well as Tang Di's wedding photos, Tang Di's sons and newborn daughters' photos... All the pictorial materials related to this book are collected and made into a "full record", a book that is the most intuitive, the most real, the most memorable, and has sociological value. Zhang Jie praised my sensitivity to the content of the images and thought my ideas were very innovative. She agreed to go home and collect the information.
After returning to Jinan, I immediately wrote her a letter with my suggestions on the revision of "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten", and she wrote back on April 3:
Thank you for your opinion of "Love, Can't Be Forgotten"... Thank you for your interest in my work over the years. As you said, literature is now unhympathetic, and my books are not read, which I think is normal. Literature is originally a "niche" thing, and it may not be normal to read literature like the past years. And as far as my creations in previous years are concerned, they are not all literature in the pure sense, such as the works I won awards: "Heavy Wings", "Children from the Forest", "Who Lives Better"... It seems very unconscionable to say this, but in fact, the society's measurement of award-winning works must first enter the "mainstream", and since it is "mainstream", the relationship with literature is not very large.
In this letter, I learned that the publication of "The Man Who Hurt Me the Most In the World" was not smooth, first published in a northeast publishing house, the quality was too poor, "just a few pages, there are more than twenty errors ... I had to terminate the contract"; and then another publisher came out, and she only dared to sign a one-time contract and printed five thousand copies. "I'm not not talking about efficiency, but in the case that efficiency and good books can't be combined, I'm more concerned about a good book... I am talking to you about this in the hope that you will have a better understanding of me, and if you feel that I am not good at cooperating, you may as well give up the idea of publishing." She wanted me to go to Beijing and talk to her again.
Previously, I did hear that Zhang Jie was one of the most difficult authors to work with, and the royalties were relatively high. It was also in this letter that she told me that when the first part of her novel "No Words" was published, a publishing house in Shanghai actually deleted the three words of "the first part" in order to confuse readers, and there were many text errors and rough production, so she preferred to give up the royalties of fifteen thousand copies and decisively terminate the contract. Later, she gave me the first part of "No Words", and made some corrections in the book with a red pen, and the "content introduction" of lekou was also crossed out with a red pen, and the cover was written with a pen and the word "first part" was added. But I'm confident that she'll be happy and that her readers will be satisfied. On June 3, Liu Ruilin, the director of the editorial office, and I made a special trip to Beijing to meet with Zhang Jie, and the conversation was more in-depth, and when it came to the emotional place, she shed tears. We were taken with us some photos and materials when we left. Before Zhang Jie went to the United States in early July, he signed a contract with us and supplemented the image data. After that, due to her several trips to and from the United States, the book was delayed until the end of 2000. It was printed five times in less than a year. Later, when filming the movie "The Man Who Hurt Me the Most In the World Went", the crew handed a copy of our book, saying that it was of great reference value for entering the plot and performance. The protagonist of the film is Szczygova.
Zhang Jie and her mother
Zhang Jie recounted the bumpy writing process in the "Afterword" of this book: When her mother was ill, in order not to affect Tang Di's studies in the United States, she kept it a secret, and she did not expect her mother's illness to take a sharp turn. After her mother's death, Zhang Jie was determined to write down the experience of these eighty days, because Tang Di was "another piece of mother's flesh and bones, and she has the right to know every detail." But "of all my texts, these hundred thousand words are probably the ones I pay the most for" — one night I was about to finish writing— "I didn't give a delete command, but I lost more than eighty thousand words on my computer." A year's effort was blank in the blink of an eye. At this time, it was only eleven days before Tang Di's return date... I sat in front of the computer desk until three more, struggling to hold on to the heaviest blow since my mother's death. Brother Guowen said that it may be that my mother did not want me to trek in these words, but I thought that this was God's will, and he wanted me to boil in these words again..." Later, with the help of a computer engineer, only two or three thousand words that were not in line, sentence, and fragments were retrieved from the computer. Helplessly, she had to grit her teeth and cheer up the spirit to rewrite. Strangely, after rewriting, the lost tens of thousands of words were found in the computer by another computer engineer...
Another ten years passed. We were all busy, and there were no questions. In the autumn of 2011, I met a child of Zhang Jie and learned that "Grandma Zhang" spends most of her time in the United States, but has an email to communicate with and gives me an email address. So I sent a letter to Zhang Jie. Since then, on and off, for almost a year, we have sent more than a dozen letters. In her letter, she said, "It's really enjoyable to think of the collaboration many years ago, your publisher is a serious and trustworthy publisher. That makes me happy. In the letter, we talk about literature, about painting, about life, and even about life and death. Her words are simple, sincere and meaningful, and they inspire me a lot. I said that she was "pessimistic with unwillingness, and negative with strength", and she replied without comment. She talked about liking Dostoevsky, Borges, Golsworthy, Jack London (coincidentally, I liked it too), talked about her writing over the years, talked about her short story "Life is Too Long", and talked about her liking for Pissarro's paintings in France. I offered to see her paintings, and she said the email photos didn't reflect the real thing, so I went to her home in Beijing and asked my neighbors to show me some of the paintings she had left there. It is no exaggeration to say that I was surprised after watching it. Her paintings, like her words, are beautiful and powerful, subtly showing her heart, and it can be seen at a glance that they are her works. It is not easy to know that many painters cannot reach this realm after painting for a lifetime. The poet and art critic Nishikawa said that her paintings were "landscapes with hearts" and felt the same way as me.
Zhang Jie's paintings
So, what is in Zhang Jie's heart? She once said in a speech:
After writing Wordless, I didn't give it to the publisher for a long time, because I knew that once I handed it over, it would never come back. Unlike friends, who come back to visit me after they leave, I can't write another novel of the same. I spent twelve years with it day and night, spent a lot of effort on it, and often pondered a word in front of it or in the back. A friend said, which reader will notice the difference between the front and back of your words? I said, I care...
Friends say that you have food to eat, clothes to wear, a house to live in, and a successful career, why not be happy? I said, maybe just because of a tree... My relationship with this tree, no one can understand.
In four months, Zhang Jie will be seventy-nine years old, according to the Chinese algorithm of eighty. Across time and space, I seemed to see her sitting on a bench under a park tree in a distant foreign country: gracefully on her side, her eyes still clear and steady.
December 15, 2015 in Beijing
Wang Jiaming, pen name Wang Jiaming and Wu He, born in Qingdao in 1953, was the chief editor of Shandong Pictorial Publishing House, the deputy editor-in-chief and deputy general manager of Life, Reading and Xinzhi Sanlian Bookstore, the president of the People's Fine Arts Publishing House, and the deputy director of the Propaganda and Publishing Committee of the International Confucian Federation. He is the author of "Unforgettable Books and Illustrations" and "Unforgettable Books and People".
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