◎ Zhang Yue
On January 21, 2022, the famous writer Zhang Jie died of illness in the United States at the age of 84.
Zhang Jie is an important representative writer of Chinese literature in the new era and a writer with special contributions granted by the State Council. She is the first writer in mainland China to win three national awards for long, medium and short stories, and the only writer to win the Mao Dun Literature Award twice. Zhang Jie's works such as "Heavy Wings", "Wordless", "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten", "Emerald", "Child from the Forest" and so on are deeply loved by readers. 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.
Zhang Jie wrote a lifetime of novels, and at the age of seventy, she began to challenge oil painting creation without training in painting. In October 2014, after Zhang Jie said "goodbye to this" at her solo oil painting exhibition, she went to the other side of the ocean to live with her daughter.
Zhang Jie has not appeared in public or published her works in many years since then, but many readers and friends still miss her. This winter month, but waiting for the news of her departure, it is sad! "Favor" specially published zhang jie's friend's old articles to commemorate it.
Circle of Friends Commemoration
“I 'm so happy. I feel so loved.” This is the last words that Teacher Zhang Jie gave to her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson when she was dying. I think this is also the last words of our friends and readers who love her, as well as literature and painting. Teacher Zhang Jie must have walked very peacefully, just like when she used to walk out of the peace gate home, to meet friends, to travel, and just like when we sent her to the airport, after hugging, we saw her peaceful and comfortable back.
(Writer Xing'an WeChat)
When I was in junior high school, I read a novel about her in "People's Literature" and the name has been forgotten. I just remember saying that the socks of the unemployed young man could stand there when he took them off, like a pair of calfskin boots... It made me so happy that I almost fell out of bed. How I loved to laugh so much at that time, laughing endlessly, I could laugh until tears flowed out...
Heavy wings are no longer heavy, and the most complete relief is to leave. Teacher Zhang Jie rested in peace!
(Screenwriter Quan Yongxian WeChat)
Seeing the news of the death of Zhang Jie's eldest sister (she has always opposed others calling her teacher, she must be called her eldest sister, otherwise she will break off diplomatic relations), her mood is quite unstable. I remember the last time I saw her, I went to her house with Ning Ken and saw her paintings, saying that her paintings belonged to no teacher, all by feeling. Flip through two old articles to express nostalgia. The eldest sister went all the way. This photo is my favorite, and I think it can best express the personality and style of the eldest sister.
(Critic Xie Xizhang WeChat)
I still remember that when I was in college, the thesis was written by Zhang Jie, and the scene of reading her words at that time is still vividly remembered. I'm going to find Wordless and see.
(Reader's Eyebrow)
Zhang Jie is the memory of our reading in that era, Zhang Jie has been through the ages! Love cannot be forgotten.
(Reader Road)
If anyone had given her the slightest help or kindness, she would have been flattered to reciprocate
In her later years, Zhang Jie began to dispose of her belongings one at a time, and her friends would receive such invitations: You come and see, is there anything you can use? I take what I like, and I take care of the rest. Her clothes, jewelry, daily necessities, ornaments, souvenirs, books, picture books, paintings... I moved books and albums from her house, hung a painting in the living room for decades, and conveniently pulled away the big cake sent to her birthday by the Writers Association, and directly carried it to the stage, and the hungry wolf colleagues of various types of work at the live broadcast site ate it.
She also processed and destroyed material from various historical periods, including letters, diaries, photographs, and some manuscripts, and I witnessed her daughter protesting to her: "You can't do this!" If one day our children want to see what grandma looks like, they can't have a single photo. "In the end she will still leave some behind, right?"
I also asked her, "Okay, why is this so painful?" ”
She said: "I don't want to trouble others all my life, and I hope that after death, I will not cause trouble, and I can arrange things to settle in advance." As for why words and photographs are not willing to be preserved, she means that after death, she does not want to be remembered, discussed, guessed, studied, and does not want anyone to remember her, but wants to disappear from this world completely! So, at the moment I am writing this article nervously, should I write it? I still remember that many years ago, in the first conversation, she said to me: "I have seen the articles you wrote and the shows you did, and I liked it, we can chat and be friends, but I will not accept your interview." So I never asked to interview her, and although I had this desire, I even wrote a complete outline of the interview, but never showed it. Over time, trust and understanding, everyone has no heart, the conversation often involves privacy, including some little-known storms in the literary world, I consciously snuff out the shrewdness of being a journalist and the good memory of the host, so that I can talk and forget, there is no ride... Promised not to do it, so now I write that she should?
And, can I write it clearly?
Who is Zhang Jie?
Is she a once-huge writer? Is he the most creative old man in today's literary world? Is it a fox spirit that has provoked too many big peach blossoms? Is it a freak with a perverse temperament that is difficult for others to approach? Is it a very aggressive woman? Is it a clumsy and confused intellectual?
Zhang Jie, who is she?
If when kneeling on the stairs to wax, it happens that the second wife comes down from the stairs, Wu Wei will raise his small face and smile at the second wife.
When she was young, she knew very well that when the second wife was happy, she could give her a few pieces of sugar or a snack, and she could say a few words to her mother... Wu Wei was able to see what color was a good color.
If the Second Lady was not happy, she would hide and look at her little hand, as if there was something worth studying on the small hand; and then quickly lowered her head to Ye Lianzi's side, shrinking the body that was already small enough to make the Second Lady's feet obliquely, and the small eyes blinked and tilted the Second Lady's feet in order to make a wider passage for those feet.
……
In fact, all her misdeeds, some small things are loud and powerful, including her bravado, is just a small trick of serenity, in order to cover up her fear of the law of the law of the weak and the strong, to resist her own servility, to resist her dislike and fear of servility, in an attempt to prove to herself that they have never posed a threat to her in personality and spirit...
If you ask what made Wu Wei, this staircase is undoubtedly the first chisel that created her. It is it that determines the tone and direction of Wu Wei's life, and her life has actually been broken since she was two years old. (Quoted from the novel "No Words")
This is wu Wei's childhood in the novel "No Words", this bitter little girl who depends on her poor mother because of her father's abandonment—I am a student of literature, not to confuse the novel characters with the author—but this humble two-year-old girl at the corner of the stairs, I firmly believe that she has Zhang Jie's shadow. In the chaos of war, in the flood, in the fire, in the extreme poverty and displacement, Zhang Jie and her mother are dependent on each other, humble and tenacious growth, she is bound to grow into a strong woman, otherwise she would have died long ago. She is independent, self-respecting, not afraid of suffering, can cover her daughter, cover her mother, cover her lover... She doesn't spend other people's money, she doesn't owe other people's affection, and she doesn't ask for help from others, and this "other person" includes her relatives. If anyone had given her the slightest help or kindness, she would have been flattered to reciprocate. She seems to be strong, but in fact she is fragile, and her desperate efforts are only because of her lack of inner security, she is tough and difficult to deal with on the surface, but in fact, it is only because she does not understand human feelings and sophistication...
These self-talk are her enduring creative vitality
When she was almost 60 years old, she was renovating a house, and if she was willing to accept help, some people were willing to work, but she was naturally unacceptable, and she couldn't do it from the age of two. She broke her leg, dragged her broken leg up to the windowsill, painted and cleaned, and shouted into the empty room: "What else can you do with me?" "Is this calling out to fate? What else can fate do to you? If you open yourself up and this life is not included in the cost, what else can you do? You live proudly, and even if a thousand people want to spoil you, you can only work hard all your life! This was predestined seventy years ago.
Did Heaven favor her or torture her? Let such a stubborn woman have a good look? Zhang Jie is not beautiful, but she is beautiful, the more recent the middle age, the more beautiful, the style is elegant, the handsome and foreign atmosphere, which is rare in Chinese women of the same age, which is another tragedy.
Who was the person who threw Wu Wei on the stairs? Her father, Gu Qiushui, the macho old-fashioned northeast man, handsome and decent, well-dressed, talented, and loyal; he was patriotic but did not love people, or he could be good to irrelevant people, but he would never put his own woman in his eyes, no matter how virtuous and beautiful his wife was, he was just a turtle with a yellow face, and his daughter was a small oil bottle. Outsiders saw him as bold and enthusiastic, and only his wife and daughter knew how cold and rude he was.
It is precisely in this way that Gu Qiushui freely sows and cultivates the hatred, awe and dependence on men under the deep sowing and cultivation of Wu Wei's soul, and this hatred, awe and dependence thrive under the irrigation of her repeated failures in life.
Instead of retaliating with tit-for-tat, but standing on top of men with an iron heart to dissect them and examine them, is this not a more complete revenge than revenge? No wonder she was so calm during sex with men that she was like an X-ray machine that she could never devote herself to it.
It wasn't that she was so vicious in the first place. For a long time in her life, she did not give up the dream of finding a man, in a vain attempt to rely on that man to overcome her fear of men, to end her trial of men, to overthrow her preconceptions about men — a dream of an old woman or a normal woman, not the Oedipal complex that people usually understand, but again and again she fell into a desperate situation and finally fell into the fate of being incompatible with men and walking alone. (Quoted from the novel "No Words")
Yes, this is a novel, but why is Zhang Jie's childhood not like this? When a girl is unfortunate enough to have such a father, the girl will look for such a man for the rest of her life: handsome, talented, brave and righteous, cold and arrogant... She wants to find that familiar taste, to conquer this man, to be hurt by this man, and they will love deeply and fight all over the body, which is called replication in psychology, and it is also called compensation. It is completely a subconscious choice, but it is extremely difficult to escape, just like the curse of fate, so if she writes "Love cannot be forgotten", it will be bloody, and her realistic version of love, in the early days of reform and opening up, almost shakes half of China, if it happens today, it is enough to burst the WeChat circle of friends.
Later, she often told me that she didn't like "Love Can't Be Forgotten", although so many people liked it, it was just a self-mistaken work, and she told me not to be obsessed with that tune, and if I couldn't meet a man who was really good to you, I would rather not get married, because marriage could become a huge harm:
"You don't have to be afraid of loneliness, you will be lonely if you get married or not, you don't have to be afraid of being old and no one will take care of you, if you are old and need help, at least I can help you!" 」 This again shows her sincere and stupid side, saying that she is nearly thirty years older than me, I am old, what does she take care of me?
Zhang Jie's group of writers, who became popular in the 1980s, mostly put aside their pens after entering the 2000s, and at most wrote essays and prose memoirs. Like Zhang Jie, who is still producing new novels after the age of sixty or seventy, she is the only one. I've been wondering why her creativity has been thriving? I think about it because of her: incompetent! In the face of real life, she is extremely incompetent. Not only does she not deal with the trivialities of daily life, but also does not deal with people, everyone thinks she is powerful, her attitude is rejected, I sometimes listen to her answer the phone to discuss things with people, and I will laugh out loud next to her:
"You just talk like that?" Changing the tone of voice is much better! ”
She shrugged in confusion and didn't say anything. If she expresses affection, it looks like this:
"I was in Italy and bought you a good pair of leather shoes, but when I came back and thought about it, I'm afraid the number was wrong and you shouldn't be able to wear them."
Or something like this:
"I was in the U.S. and wanted to buy you a particularly good set of skin care products, and I went to buy them, but I didn't have the money, so I lost the money."
That pair of unreliable shoes, I am still in the shoe cabinet, can not wear, throw and reluctant, as for skin care products, I should have been smeared on the face.
She not only repeatedly lost money, but also repeatedly lost her credit card, lost it, and went to the bank to report the loss of the replacement card, and apologized to the bank with trepidation:
"I'm so sorry! I'm so confused that I'm in trouble for you! ”
A week later, the bank called her:
"Ms. Zhang Jie, your credit card has been replenished, you can come and get it."
She was very happy, very relieved, with a feeling of having a credit card again to buy something, at checkout still can not pay the credit card, she is about to cry, and then ran to the bank to apologize:
"I'm so sorry for you, I'm so much in trouble for you!" You just made up my credit card, and you let me lose it! ”
The bank staff was also surprised:
"How could you possibly lose it?" The credit card is still with us, and you didn't pick it up after you answered the phone. ”
Later, she simply gave her various documents and key deposits to the neighbors, and the neighbors never made trouble after taking over, fortunately she had a good neighbor.
In an era when human beings are becoming more and more shrewd, Zhang Jie seems to be becoming more and more stupid. In fact, she was very stupid since she was young. Her upbringing was too simple and painful, and such a person would certainly not be shrewd. When you are young, you are aggressive, the more stupid you are, the more aggressive you are, and you show a very strong appearance; when you are old, you have no aggression, and you know that you are stupid, so you simply close yourself off and don't deal with the world. Art has always been the product of loneliness, the result of her own dialogue with herself, she has loved to ask the world some strange questions since she was young, and after being hit back by life again and again, she can only ask herself. These self-talk are her enduring creative vitality.
It was a farewell to warmth
Her early works, which were so popular, don't seem to me to be impressive. I thought that the real beginning of her creation was "The Man Who Hurt Me The Most In the World Went."" It was a farewell to warmth, the deepest warmth of her life, her mother, gone. Saying goodbye to warmth is the beginning of true self-questioning and self-tearing. The long story "No Words" is the most fierce, painful, and worthy of her life: in the past hundred years, Chinese men and women have experienced how to shape and shape each other in this cultural soil, tearing and distorting them again and again into the way they are now. The author kneels in front of fate, tearing apart his scarred body over and over again, and whipping his soul, such bravery and sincerity are rarely seen in Chinese writers, whether you like it or not, this is a work that you can't ignore.
It is an epic of human nature, a living case of psychology, a living case of sociology, and even a good footnote to political science. It is a work that all psychologists, sociopoliticians, and readers of human nature should read carefully. It's just that this work is too painful, the helplessness of the soul and the blurring of flesh and blood, the people who watch it are tearing their hearts and lungs, and the people who write it must suffer from depression even if they don't die.
Zhang Jie, who survived from "No Word", gradually drifted away from the country, the nation, the times, and so on, and his subsequent works were whether it was the short story "Dreaming when the Benefits Become Nothing", "Listening to the Comet Glide Silently", "The Dust of the Rose", "Four Chimneys"... Or the long "Knowing Presence" and "The Soul is Used to Wander", it is no longer possible to see what country and what era she is writing about, she has left the usual writing framework and entered an increasingly deep place of human nature, expressing sorrow and distance. I would like to summarize all her work at this stage by the name of one of her essays: "The broken expression of our time"... Her short story "Life is Too Long", which I regard as her sealed work, she writes about an old lone wolf, wandering alone in the alpine wilderness, the old wolf sees everything in the world but is full of confusion, it howls —
The reason why I screamed was that I was pleading, pleading with the moon to let me go, even if it was a small slit, so that I could enter the passage, even for a little while, or at least let me ask: "Where did I come from?" "And why I came here and took root here to reproduce... Did I just go into the world looking for this answer? Then the price is too high. But which of all things in heaven and earth will be willing to be rootless and unprovoked? (Quoted from the novel "Life is Too Long")
It encounters an injured hunter who can easily bite the other person and eat a full meal, but it does not, it pushes the shotgun to the hunter's hand and waits quietly for the hunter to kill himself.
Farewell, life! Not only in this life, but also in the next life, in the next life. Never, never again... I want to end my life when I am still competent, not when I am old and weak.
The old wolf is dead.
I finally glanced at the world I had lived in, remembering the kind of ignorance that I had when I was born, and the feelings and expectations that I had for coming to this world...
After that, my soul flew towards another world with the comfort and happiness that I had never received in my life, without a trace of sadness, lightly... (Quoted from the novel "Life is Too Long")
When I read this novel, I was on a business trip, I was suddenly hit, and along the way, I didn't even dare to lift my head, for fear that the tears that kept pouring out would scare my colleagues! I was also struck by the precision and sharpness of her words, the knife was bloody, and there was not a single waste word, thinking of her countless sighs to me: "How difficult it is to narrow the distance between feeling and expression as much as possible!" It's a heart-wrenching. And at this moment, I also sighed: "I can't do it, I can't do it... I can't write my mood, I write it, it's not right! ”
Whether Zhang Jie writes it again in the future, I regard "Life is Too Long" as her last work, a farewell work.
She really stopped writing, she expressed it in a more secret way - painting, she is not like others, the merit of the year Gao Dexun painted ink freehand, she painted oil painting, from the sixties to paint, no teacher, so that art critics are surprised. Her paintings are often desolate and old, even depressed, such as: a flower that has failed, and it is a lonely flower, I said: "What is this for?" Weird! "But I like the leopard she painted, a female leopard in the sunset, sharp and mysterious and beautiful, standing alone in the empty world." She painted me a picture of a Spanish streetscape, a sunny sun, a small house of color, bright and gorgeous, which was not her style, and she certainly didn't like it, just to take care of my mood.
The goodbye has always been continuous, slow, all-round goodbye. Her house is getting emptyer and less, things are getting less and less, life is getting simpler and simpler, she has experienced a lot of honors and humiliations in her life, she has won many awards, she has seen a lot of the world, she has caused a lot of things, many big chinese and foreign people are her readers and fans, any one of her experiences can be taken out for a vain person to blow a cow for ten or twenty years, but it doesn't matter to her. In the past, we would also make appointments to go to some good restaurants for a meal, and later, even this was exempted, every time we met, I went to the German bakery to buy two breads, she cooked pumpkin soup at home, although she made a good Western food, but it was all counted, bread and soup are enough! She said:
"I'm so tired, in this life, I have to do everything my best, I'm really tired."
We poured wine, had a drink, and talked for an evening.
If I die, you don't have to feel sad, I'm not afraid of death
Say goodbye to everything continuously, and this time it is goodbye to the homeland. In 2013, she finally decided to immigrate to the United States, in fact, she could have had American status long ago, but she gave up because she did not want to cause trouble for her daughter's family living in the United States. Although she was ready to die alone, she ultimately failed to do so. The Chinese environment continues to deteriorate, so that she has asthma patients continue to fall ill, at the urging of her daughter's family, she had to leave, she sold her house in Beijing, divided all her things, when she went to send her, she saw her luggage, is a supermarket shopping cloth bag, bread in a few old porcelain plates porcelain bowls, said that it has been used for a long time, and an old hat worn for many years, she carried these old things, and left.
It is said that her little apartment was on the edge of Columbia University, very quiet, imagining that her residence in the United States must have been more simple and empty, with long paths and deep woods at the door, the sun shining through the leaves on the path, only birds singing and no sound—imagining her painting, dazed, walking—living in peace.
She said: "If I die, you don't have to feel sad, I am not afraid of death!" ”
Of course I understand, my friend! I'm just sorry for your sadness. Every time I see a life that has been destroyed at an early age, and I have struggled all my life in pain and still struggle to surpass myself and squeeze myself, I will be very sad! I feel sad about the many broken expressions of the liver and intestines in this era! And among them, there is also my expression. I've been worried about you, not loneliness, not sickness, not death, I'm just worried that you can't reconcile: with life, with the world! I just want you to be "happy", a very inaccurate and frivolous word, but I can't find any other word, maybe you have reconciled and I don't know! Maybe I just thought I understood you and I didn't.
I can't help you, my friend! I can only offer my deep blessings!