Liu Danting/Wen
One
"In this capricious world, there is nothing more capricious than the reputation of a person after death." Bertrand Russell said. History is capricious, willful and forgetful, sometimes whitewashing and exaggerating everything it dominates, sometimes distorting and ignoring. It casually confers on some people a prestigious name they cannot afford, and then erases other names worth remembering.
Chen Yixi, this name is not particularly favored by history. Its owner retired from the noisy stage of the times early, and his fame quickly decayed, and even the miracles he created were rarely mentioned by posterity: Chen Yixi presided over the construction of the second private railway in Chinese history, and the longest overseas Chinese-run private railway in the country, the Xinning Railway. The railway was built in the Guangxu period of the Qing Dynasty and opened to traffic in 1909, and was independently completed by the Chinese from planning, construction to operation.
As the planner and builder of this grand project, Chen Yixi's life has left only some scattered fragments and only a few words scattered overseas. The Xinning Railway, which he had devoted all his efforts to, was demolished in 1938, and now there is no trace of anything but a waiting building.
A deceased man, a dismantled railway, he and his legend, once pivotal, once ups and downs, but also under the wash of the tide of oblivion, it became difficult to identify. Thanks to the salvage and depiction of people with hearts, this past escaped the fate of annihilation and was preserved in the text of the novel "Far Away", so that it has the possibility of being circulated again.
Chen Yixi's life course is fully traced back to the course of Chen Yixi's life: he set out from a small village in Guangdong with nothing, climbed to the top of Seattle, USA after decades of climbing; in the last twenty years of his life, he returned to "his own people's land" with ambition, capital and technology, built an almost impossible railway in his hometown, and crashed into his own tragic fall...
Spanning two centuries, spanning 60 or 70 years of time, the novel travels to two stages in China and the United States, revealing the author's ambition to write epic poems everywhere. "The Distant Path" is not only a joint collaboration between the two writers, but also a creative relay between father and daughter. Many years ago, Liu Ziyi, an American writer born in Guangdong, became so interested in Chen Yixi and the Xinning Railway that he spent more than 20 years collecting various materials in Guangdong and Seattle, salvaging and piecing together fragments of Chen Yixi's scattered life.
When Liu Ziyi died, the novel was only completed in one chapter, and the work behind was entrusted to his daughter Liu Huaiyu. She continued to collect and organize, and spent another five years to complete the book. This kind of relay creation is very rare, but it also adds a layer of fatalistic color to this already vicissitudes story. Liu Huaiyu recalled in the afterword that she had never understood why Chen Yixi's life had made her father so obsessed. It wasn't until she finished the book that she finally understood:
"After writing the finale, when I look back, I understand what is most empathetic to my father in the life of Elder Chen: hitting an invisible wall, but I am powerless to change what is helpless and miserable."
Far away
Liu Huaiyu Liu Ziyi / By
Chongqing Publishing House
March 2021
Two
From China to the United States, from the hustle and bustle of Seattle to the quiet Village of Langmei, no matter where Chen Yixi goes, it is always difficult to get rid of the fate of "hitting an invisible wall". When the teenager Chen Yixi was locked up in the air-polluted cabin of the three-masted sailing ship, dreaming of the "golden mountain" of gold everywhere in the United States, he did not know the existence of the wall, nor did he know that every day in his future life, he had to fight for the wall.
The upper part of "The Distant Cang" reconstructs Chen Yixi's experience in the United States, and his body condenses the sufferings of countless Chinese laborers who went to the United States to make a living. Today, we have no way to verify the real encounter of Chen Yixi when he first arrived in the United States, I don't know whether he was like the novel, he spent two months in a secret cabin, and just after stepping on the land of the United States, he fell into the clutches of human traffickers; I don't know how he luckily met the American couple who changed his life and had the idea of learning engineering surveying and mapping; I don't know why he decided to go to Seattle and start a difficult business... Only one thing is certain: Chen Yixi has undoubtedly crashed into that high wall built of race and prejudice again and again, enduring hostility from all sides at all times. Hostility sometimes turns into violence and even murder.
He carefully survived in the shadow of the high wall, looking for a way to drill through the wall. He seems to have found that after all the hardships, Chen Yixi understood the fairness of the law, and anyone could seek its refuge; he found the reliability of knowledge and skills, and that a person, regardless of his origin, could rely on them. Walking in doubt, discrimination and prejudice, Chen Yixi's every step is difficult, but he also took it step by step, took root in the emerging city of Seattle, became a partner of a Chinese company, and relied on hard work and word of mouth to occupy a place in Seattle's rail construction industry, win the recognition of politicians and upper class, and then join the United States citizenship. Although difficult and at a high price, Chen Yixi's story can still be seen as an "American Dream", an American legend of a poor boy with no future who has become a construction tycoon.
"Far Away" reveals to the reader the other side of dreams and legends. Just when we were rejoicing in Chen Yixi's achievements, we witnessed him hit his head on the high wall again and broke his head and bleed. In 1882, the US Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, and anti-China sentiment in the United States was high. In the novel, Chen Yixi is caught up in the whirlpool of fierce competition between Chinese and American railroad laborers, becoming a direct victim of the 1886 Seattle Riots. Always kind and tolerant, he is forced to look directly at the most despicable side of human nature - in the face of interests, only you live and die, justice, equality, and fraternity are not worth mentioning, and the difference in skin color, appearance and beliefs alone can be the reason for killing.
"He realized... Although hatred is extremely negative and extremely lethal, it probably still belongs to human emotions, and when the other party is an inhuman alien, human nature is completely thrown away, and the shell of humanity becomes a machine of unscrupulous violence. The mobs that jumped off the carriage with torches and kicked the door of the inn with their big-headed shoes did not even despise the Tang people who were surrounding them, numb and stiff as stones blocking the way of fleas and cockroaches. ”
The nightmare ended with Chen Yixi's lifelong love, Mu Fang, being pushed down stairs and paralyzed by thugs, ending Chen Yixi's fantasies about citizenship, belonging, and rights. Perhaps he had reveled in a dream rooted in The United States and made Seattle his home, a catastrophe that woke him up from a dream in which the community of all men was nothing more than the wishful thinking of a foreigner.
Three
However, in the years of struggle, Chen Yixi has not achieved nothing. He paid a terrible price and learned American rules as a result. Although he was never truly accepted by the United States, more than four decades of hard work still gave him something certainty: laws, business rules, upper-class support... At the moment of crisis, Chen Yixi grasped them tightly and pulled himself back from the edge of the abyss. Two years after the Seattle riots, Chen Yixi paid out of his own legal expenses and recovered $270,000 in compensation for the Chinese affected by the riots. In 1889, Seattle was nearly destroyed in a fire, and Chen Yixi joined the team to rebuild the city, building new buildings and roads for Seattle. In 1893, Chen Yixi led thousands of Chinese workers to participate in the construction of the Great Northern Railway, accumulating a lot of knowledge, experience and financial resources.
In 1905, Chen Yixi, who had achieved fame in the United States, decided to return to Guangdong to settle down and start building the Xinning Railway. The novel "Distant Cang" gives his return to his hometown a motivation that can be understood by contemporary readers - for love, in order to let the paralyzed Mu Fang return to his homeland. Mu Fang is naturally a fictional character in the novel, so what is the real motivation that prompted Chen Yixi to return to his hometown? We can only speculate: perhaps the fear and uneasiness left by the riots cannot be calmed; perhaps, for a Chinese, there is no achievement comparable to returning to the roots of fallen leaves and returning home. In short, Chen Yixi returned to his hometown with capital, technology and ambition to build a railway, which will be the perfect end of his hard work.
In the second part of "Distant Cangcang", the central event surrounding Chen Yixi's construction of the Xinning Railway is slowly laid out. Chen Yixi came to "his own people's land" with great ambition, and what shocked him was that he had left his hometown for forty years and learned the laws and rules of the United States, but he knew nothing about the sophistication and social laws of his hometown. In his hometown, he is still a foreigner who runs into walls and is trapped by invisible walls.
At that time, the United States had just experienced the great development of the railway, everyone understood the value of the railway, and hoped that the railway would pass to their own door, and then in remote places, once the tracks were laid, it would immediately become the center of the universe, and money and opportunities would roll in. In contrast, domestically, foreign capital continues to pour in, all of which want to share a piece of The emerging Chinese railway industry. Chen Yixi had thought that his construction plan would be echoed, but he did not expect that he would have a heavy amount of money raised in his hand but could not move forward.
Chen Yixi's construction of the railway was declared layer by layer, every link in the bureaucratic machine of the late Qing Dynasty was stirred up like a hungry predator, xinningzhi county, Guangdong commercial transfer, liangguang governor... A group of late Qing bureaucrats blushed for the money raised, scrambling to calculate how much they could make, and where they still cared about how to build a railway for the benefit of the country and the people. It was not until Chen Yixi sent the right king Qingmu to the Qing court through the Shang deployment, and received the four-character instructions from the Guangxu Emperor and Empress Dowager Cixi, "According to the discussion, Qin this", that the xinning railway was able to start construction.
But this is only a brief opening to a decades-long farce. Wherever the Xinning railway is paved, the farce is staged everywhere. Squires, bandits, wizards, mobs, scoundrels... You sang and I appeared, asking for money, land, death, and railways, and each one of them made the abacus loud in your heart. Chen Yixi and his colleagues ran on the railway line, visiting all parties sacred, and even the Shang Fang sword was "invited" out... Finally, the Xinning Railway was completed, the emperor also abdicated, the rule of the Qing Dynasty ended, and the political arena was completely reshuffled. However, Chen Yixi's situation did not improve, and officials, warlords, and banks came like a marquee, putting the proceeds of the railway company into their own pockets, and only throwing away the charge of "poor management" to Chen Yixi.
To make everything worse, Chen Yixi broke with his right-hand man and son-in-law Wu Chusan. In the novel, the character of Wu Chusan and Chen Yixi form a sharp contrast. He is shrewd and sophisticated, sees people's feelings thoroughly, and is at ease in the official arena. In the face of any tricky situation, Wu Chusan has a set of coping methods, and Chen Yixi and his daughter often marvel: Wu Chusan's heart seems to have an invisible tip bag, "which is filled with Chinese two or three thousand years of insight." ...... Three words and two words is a key forged by the ancient wise men for future generations, designed to unlock the lock of life, accurate and easy to use. He always knew when and where to use the key in his bag. When this character first appeared, it seemed to be a blessing sent by heaven to Chen Yixi. But as the story unfolds, his "oriental wisdom" and Chen Yixi's Western-style idealism collide violently, his sleekness and Chen Yixi's persistence gradually drift away, and the cruel truth gradually surfaces: Wu Chusan's "wisdom" is just the calculation law of the fly camp dog. He is well versed in the rules of the bureaucracy and the greed of the human heart, and is not only good at exploiting people's selfish desires and greed, but also identifying with them from the bottom of his heart.
In fact, Wu Chusan is a symbol. He represents the other side of the homeland that Chen Yixi loves: dark and unfathomable, but Chen Yixi can never see through it.
Four
Chen Yixi in the lower part is no longer as calm and fearless as in the upper part. In his prime, he was besieged by the mob and did not change his color, single-handedly running for the Chinese, leading thousands of Chinese workers to tame the wilderness, using his fists to smash the high walls erected by race and prejudice little by little, and breaking an unprecedented way for himself and his compatriots to live. Now, standing on "his own people's land", he is tired, lonely, and more and more at a loss. The land was so mysterious that it was difficult for him to dig through. From the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, in the seemingly earth-shaking changes, only this mystery remains unchanged. From ancient times to the present, they have existed for thousands of years and have never collapsed with the vicissitudes of the political arena. They surrounded him in clusters, forming an airtight copper wall, leaving no hope or way out.
After struggling for more than 20 years, Chen Yixi still lost the Xinning Railway he personally laid, and watched it become a battlefield for a group of people to compete for power and profit. The vision of returning to his hometown to benefit the people and opening up the copper drum free port in his later years was gradually trampled into pieces. Chen Yixi, who was trapped in the iron wall of the copper wall, could only release his soul, escape from his body, and run to his clear and magnificent spiritual world. There, what he built and wanted to build, was guarded by his side... After reconstructing Chen Yixi's life of repeated defeats and blood, the novel finally cannot bear to let the great life of this builder end in despair. It liberated his soul and allowed him to jump out of the abyss of filth and despair in time. Chen Yixi would never have known that the Xinning Railway had been ordered to be demolished, and he would not have to endure the pain of being razed to the ground with his life's work like Qin Zhongyi in "The Tea House".
However, in Chen Yixi's silence, we still seem to be able to hear Qin Zhongyi's accusation: "The factory has been demolished, this is a small thing I picked up from there... I'll give them to you, and when you're fine, you can talk to the tea drinkers as a joke, you say: There was a Qin person who didn't know what to do, who loved to run an industry. After decades of doing it, he only picked up such a small thing from the mound of the factory! You should advise everyone that if you have money, you should eat, drink, gamble, and act recklessly, but don't do good things! Tell them where, Qin Someone is more than seventy years old to understand this big truth! He was born stupid! ”
There has never been a shortage of shrewd people in history. Shrewd people are well versed in eating, drinking, gambling, circling and twisting, and can see the location of the wall at a glance, and from then on they are far away. But there are always some natural fools, facing one wall after another, hitting with flesh and blood, hoping to change. Most of the time, their impacts and sacrifices do not leave a trace on the earth, and the blood marks they leave on the walls will also be hastily wiped away by time and oblivion.
But there are always people who crash into the wall one after another, for justice, for hope, for compassion, for the future. They will inevitably fall, their reputation will be smeared by history, but the powder of their incarnation will fall like snowflakes, passing through the sky and soothing the devastated earth.
"Born entrepreneurs, can't stop creating." The afterword to "The Distant Cangs" reads.
Five
On January 8, 2022, the first privately held high-speed railway in the mainland, the Hangzhou-Taiwan high-speed railway, was opened for operation. The opening of the Hangzhou-Taiwan high-speed railway, one of the first eight demonstration projects for social capital investment in the mainland, is a milestone event in the history of the development and reform of the mainland railway.
If Chen Yixi reads this news, if he sees the high-speed rail speeding across China, he will feel extremely happy. He devoted his life to the cause, and more than 100 years later, the aftermath is endless!