Zhang Jie, the lone traveler: Love is colder than death

Zhang Jie in Italy. Photo/Courtesy of respondents

Zhang Jie, the lone traveler

Reporter/Huang Wei Song Chundan

Published in China News Weekly on March 14, 2022

If you use the language of modern psychology, Zhang Jie may be said to be a person who has had difficult obstacles in intimate relationships all his life. No one is harsher and more ruthless about this than her self-dissection.

"In any way, Wu Wei is a great custom that has fallen into the rolling red dust, can you expect the great customs to refuse even the temptation of sesame seeds?" Not to mention other temptations, such as love. In her Mao Dun Literary Prize-winning work, "Autobiography of the Soul," "Wordless," she wrote.

Throughout Zhang Jie's novels, from "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten", through "Heavy Wings", to "No Words", it is like different chapters of a complete love story, from unforgettable to silent.

Zhang Jie once wrote that none of the several great wishes of his life have failed, and only the last wish remains: to expect a perfect death. Her ideal is to die in a place where no one knows who she is, such as in a foreign country, such as in the howling of the wind, such as on a backpack trekking journey.

On January 21, 2022, 85-year-old Zhang Jie passed away quietly in the United States.

Love cannot be forgotten

Looking back, Zhang Jie's famous work "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten" published in 1979 is like a subtle and warm love letter.

Zhong Yu, a single mother, silently loves an elderly leading cadre in the organ. The veteran cadre had worked underground in Shanghai, and out of morality and responsibility married the daughter of an old worker who had sacrificed to cover for him. In order to glance at the back of his head through the rear window of the car he was sitting in, Zhong Yu often painstakingly calculated the time he had spent commuting to and from work; in order to see her, he stared from the window every day at the cyclist who was flowing like water on the side of the road, but the two had not even touched their hands. During the "Cultural Revolution", the old cadres were killed, and Zhong Yu held this feeling alone until the last moment of his life. The 27 chekhov novel anthologies given to her by the old cadres were inseparable from her before she died, and she was cremated with her after death.

Zhong Yu's daughter sighed after reading the diary left by her mother: It is not love at all, but a kind of pain, or a force more powerful than death.

Novels do not equal reality, but Zhang Jie has left a lot of "codes" in it: old cadres are persecuted for opposing a "theoretical authority" who has been in power for a while; he has very hard bones, saying that even when he gets to Marx, this lawsuit must be fought; he has been harming tracheitis for many years, and he walks quickly and breathes slightly.

Zhang Jie later admitted that not taking a pen name at that time contained some infatuation. Because she was in love with someone at the time, she hoped that the constant appearance of the name in the press would give him "some stimulation", and what would it mean if the name was changed.

Female writer Zhang Xinxin published her debut work only half a year after Zhang Jie, and she met her very early. Zhang Xinxin remembers that the two of them once walked westward on Chang'an Avenue together, and Zhang Jie recited to her the "Love, Which Cannot Be Forgotten" as she walked. As dusk approached, the setting sun loomed softly in the shadows of the trees and the buildings, and she felt as if everything was just right.

She felt that in Zhang Jie's text, every ordinary scene was a long and complete wait. She had seen Zhang Jie's old version of Chekhov's anthology, a thin pamphlet that "gave her a huge backing for her long, thin dreams."

But once, she felt hurt by Zhang Jie, because Zhang Jie told others that the reason why she was good to Zhang Jie was to use her true story to write a novel. She wanted to come and go and decided to go to Zhang Jie to explain it in person. Zhang Jie was not there, and she poked her heart out at Zhang Jie's mother. Later, she figured it out herself and understood that Zhang Jie may have "distrusted everything for a moment" due to her experience from childhood to adulthood and the huge whirlpool she has now thrown into.

The hero of the story, after the dust settled, Zhang Jie himself announced loudly to the world: "My husband is my pride, my love." He is the famous former executive deputy director of the First Machine Department, Sun Youyu. ”

Zhang Jie met Sun Youyu for the first time at the end of 1966 at a criticism meeting attended by all the staff and workers of the First Machine Department. After graduating from the Department of Planning and Statistics of Chinese University in 1960, she was assigned to the First Machine Department, which was the first time that the leader of the department was numbered according to the sign hanging around the neck of the person on the stage. Sun Youyu, the vice minister who opposed Kang Sheng's beating as a "three anti-elements," wore a torn cotton jacket and a smile as cold as the weather that day, and the rebels asked him to be honest, and he still smiled coldly. Since then, this "tough guy" image has been engraved in Zhang Jie's heart.

Slightly different from the old cadres in "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten", Sun Youyu is not an underground party member in Shanghai, but an underground party in Chongqing under the leadership of Zhou Enlai. His wife was not the daughter of a sacrificial old worker, but his underground party colleague. At that time, his job required the cover of a lady who "permed her hair and put on lipstick", which led to the marriage.

Zhang Jie said she regretted going to the fight because it was the beginning of the "endless calamity" that fell into her second half of her life. But when she got her first book, she also lamented: "My pain is actually my wealth." ”

Heavy and flappy wings

Zhang Jie once said that she is a person who values feelings more than reason, and wrote "Heavy Wings" not because of much research on institutional reform and so on, but because of "loving the house and struggling to do it".

The novel was written in 1980, written in four months, with a total of 260,000 words, and serialized in october in two installments from July 1981, and is the first masterpiece in the new era to positively reflect industrial reform.

As soon as the novel was launched, it became a compelling event. This is because the novel is very close to reality, writing a story that takes place in the "Ministry of Heavy Industry" from late 1978 to early 1980, and involves a fairly high level, presenting the image of the minister and the three vice ministers and the contradictions between them with a large length and sharp brushstrokes.

Among them, Vice Minister Zheng Ziyun is the image of the reformer that the novel focuses on. Minister Tian Shoucheng was portrayed as a "wind figure" who had to "wait and see" everything. "It's like the wind blowing in Beijing in winter, when it comes up, it is seven or eight levels, flying sand and stones." It can't be scraped like this, scratching for a day or two, it will turn into five or six levels, three or four levels, and finally become one or two levels. ”

It is not difficult to understand that immediately after the novel was published, it attracted "the right number to enter the seat", causing an uproar.

Wei Junyi, editor-in-chief of the People's Literature Publishing House, admired the novel. She believes that every character written in it is a person, especially the senior cadres are written alive, and in the past, when it was written about senior cadres, it would be facialized. After the novel was serialized in "October", she immediately arranged for the release of the single book. After the typesetting was completed, a superior leader called and thought that the novel had a serious error and demanded that the printing stop.

Wei Junyi told Zhang Jie that she was ready to save the situation. Zhang Jie said that a certain ministry has sued her superiors, but she will not review a word. Wei Junyi advised her to revise the manuscript so that the central authorities could speak up if necessary, "so that they do not have any room for maneuver."

After hundreds of revisions, Heavy Wings was published by the People's Literature Publishing House in December 1981.

In June 1982, the editorial board of literary review magazine held a symposium on Zhang Jie's creation. At the meeting, Sheng Ying said that Zhang Jie was influenced by the Western trend of writing "the hope of the disappointed", and "Heavy Wings" wanted to fly but could not fly. Cai Kui said that Zhang Jie's works are delicate and popular among intellectual circles, but her works are sometimes not subtle enough, and she rushes to answer questions. "Heavy Wings" has a lot of discussion, and some of it is to cram the conclusion straight to the reader. Her work seems to be too close to life, which is a different issue from "experiencing life", and attention should be paid to typicalization. Similar discussions and criticisms were numerous.

Zhang Jie revised the novel as required, rewriting almost a third of the book, deleting more drastic phrases such as "The period of hysteria has long passed, but the virus has penetrated the bone marrow to a certain extent." In July 1984, a revised edition of Heavy Wings was published, and the following year won the second Mao Dun Literature Award.

Li Qing, former vice chairman of the Beijing Writers Association, told China News Weekly that she met Zhang Jie at the Beijing Writers Association's life meeting in 1980, when she was 43 years old, with a gaunt face, a cotton jacket and sleeves for moving honeycomb coal at home. After the publication of "Heavy Wings", her entire appearance and temperament changed significantly, and she began to wear a cheongsam and makeup, becoming more confident and having an inner self-esteem and pride.

Not only that, "Heavy Wings" also made Zhang Jie embark on the international literary scene.

In 1985, the German version of the novel was translated and published by the Federal Republic of Germany's Hanse Publishing House, and it jumped to the top of the best-seller list overnight, and posters of Zhang Jie's novel were all over the streets.

In August of that year, Zhang Jie was interviewed by the German magazine Der Spiegel in Hamburg. She recalled that there were three men 60 meters away waiting for her in the room, all with the style of a big reporter. Editor-in-chief Meyer and reporter Reinhardt cross-examined questions without stopping, as if afraid to leave her with half a breath, the camerajournalist DanHegel's lens kept clicking, and the large disk tape on the tape recorder slowly swirled. She felt that they were like a few old wolves, ready to eat her. "But I'm also an old dog, having been bitten by others countless times, and bitten by others in self-defense."

The German version is based on the first edition of the translation, the first sentence of the questionnaire "Jiaolong lost water and was deceived by snakes" (the revised version of the People's Literature Publishing House was changed to "I would like to dedicate this book to those who work selflessly for the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation"),, she said that it was for Vice Minister Zheng Ziyun, he was a reformer, but the foundation under his feet was unstable, but that was four years ago. The other side asked, is the situation of the reformers much better now? She said that there will still be people who cling to stereotypes and bad habits, but the determination of the Chinese people to break with the poor days and move forward cannot be stopped.

"Heavy Wings" has also published more than ten editions such as the British version, the American version, and the French version, and Zhang Jie has traveled around Europe and the United States and accepted no less than 200 foreign media interviews. As "China's first political novel" and one of the most important reform literature in the eyes of the West, "Heavy Wings" is highly praised in the West.

German book reviews write that the two camps of "orthodoxy" and reformers are holding each other back, and their fights are not as obvious and visible as boxers, but like wrestlers twisting together. The introduction of Austrian radio said: Zhang Jie described the consistent elements of Chinese temperament very deeply, which is a concept of hierarchy. Sakar of the Swiss Daily Herald writes that the novel unabashedly and straightforwardly reveals the problems in the unsolved economic sphere and attacks some of China's rusty social structures. In terms of ideology and form, it bears some resemblance to Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century European Literature, so when I read it, the word "poetic realism" flashed through my mind. Zhang Jie's writing is unique in that she can integrate the detailed description of the situation peculiar to China with her fundamental observations of the human condition.

In 1986, Ba Jin and Zhang Jie became candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and foreign media quickly reported on it, but Zhang Jie did not disclose the matter to China. She said, what's there to say, show off the bride isn't it you?

In October 1989, she received the Malapati International Literary Prize in Italy, which was awarded annually to a writer, Borges, Sol Bellow, Le Carré, etc. In 1992, she was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Letters and Arts, and the only Chinese writers who received this honor were her and Ba Jin.

No words

The ending of "Heavy Wings" was originally pessimistic, but it was later changed, and in real life, Sun Youyu left the post of vice minister. In Zhang Jie's view, the main reason is to "vigorously advocate the arrow in the reform." At the same time, after five years of long litigation and a storm in the city, Sun Youyu divorced his wife and married Zhang Jie, who was 22 years younger than himself. Zhang Jie sighed that in order to marry her husband, she really "went up the knife mountain, down the sea of fire, the waves were magnificent, and nine deaths were a lifetime."

But the marriage soon faced various tests.

Mr. Gentleman is a gentleman, although he is old tracheitis, but the collar of the cold winter moon is wide open, and every year he always goes to the hospital, and Zhang Jie is grinded hysterically. Every year, he carefully filled out the world directory for her, and bound the commentaries of various countries into a book-like neat book, but he often ridiculed her for reading few famous books and writing some chicken and dog pieces. The husband's circle of relatives and friends also has a lot of rejection of her.

During the divorce case, Mr. L and his wife jointly sent a letter to the court to express their opposition, which was jokingly called "thirteen Taibao" by Sun Youyu. After the other "Taibao" had reconciled with the Sun family, one day in April 1994, Mr. and Mrs. L finally came to dinner.

Early in the morning, Zhang Jie took her nanny to the wellcome supermarket in The International Trade Center, the best supermarket in Beijing at that time, to make purchases. Mr. Partial circled the "cream mushroom soup" required seasoning sour cream can not be bought in four shopping malls in a row, Zhang Jie is sweating profusely, "trembling slightly", but there is no choice but to use sweet cream.

Dinner guests are not only mr. and mrs. L, but also Mr. Z, two couples who have never met before. Except for Zhang Jie, all five of them grew up in prominent families, received a good Western-style education since childhood, were fluent in English, and talked and laughed at the dinner table, and she could hardly understand their conversations. Mrs. L never looked at her, and avoided shaking hands with her when saying goodbye. She felt that she had always been an outsider.

After Zhang Jie got married, her mother did not want to live with them, and Zhang Jie ran on both sides like work every day. It was a kind of left and right day, and mr. here blamed her for not taking good care of her family, and over there she was ashamed that she did not have the heart to accompany her mother.

In Zhang Jie's life, fatherly love has always been absent. Her father was remembered as an irresponsible man who abandoned his wife and daughter, or even a domestic violence man. "Either because he is in a bad mood, or because he doesn't have money to buy rice, or because the war ahead is tight, or because he is angry somewhere, as if he beats me, his mood can get better, he has money to buy rice, and he can win the battle ahead, and he will no longer be bullied." The mother said, "She gave me one mouthful of porridge, and two mouthfuls of porridge are still mine, unless there are three mouthfuls of porridge, only one of which is hers." Over the years, the mother, Zhang Jie and the daughter born to Zhang Jie and her ex-husband, three generations of women are dependent on each other, and now the daughter has grown up to go abroad, Zhang Jie remarried, and the mother is only a shadow.

Greater misfortune befell this home. The mother developed a pituitary tumor and severe brain atrophy. At that time, Alzheimer's disease was not yet familiar to people, Zhang Jie just felt that her mother's brain seemed to be unable to fit anything into it, often fell into a coma, her waist was also slumped and her shoulders were crooked, her clothes were not neat, and she was no longer the same as the spirit of Li Suo before. She stumbled as she walked, her two feet rubbing against the ground, and zhang Jie felt nervous when she saw her like this, thinking that she was slacking off herself, and asked her to "walk well" with a reproachful tone.

After her mother had a pituitary tumor resection, Zhang Jie mistakenly thought she had been cured. The mother could not stand up, but slipped out of the chair and slipped to the ground, Zhang Jie was afraid in her heart, wanted to motivate her to stand up on her own, and made up her mind not to pick her up. Her mother was unable to exert herself, she was trembling with exhaustion, and she felt that her mother was like an old horse that fell to the ground and could not drive.

Seven days after being discharged from the hospital, on October 28, 1991, my mother died of a sudden heart attack in the night. Soon, Zhang Jie saw an old horse slipping and falling on the icy road, no matter how hard she struggled, she could not get up, she stood on the street and could not help herself to cry bitterly.

The long essay "The Man Who Hurt Me the Most in the World" was published in October 1993. Zhang Jie later said that this was achieved in one go, she had not had the courage to look back and look again, and neither psychological nor spiritual ability could withstand the emotional blow of reading again.

Her marriage also came to an end again.

Zhang Jie began to write the novel "No Words" in 1989 when she was visiting Wesleyan University in Connecticut, but it did not go well, after the death of her mother and family changes, she was depressed, and she only started again in 1994, and really entered the state after 1998. In 2002, "No Words" was published by Beijing October Publishing House.

The heroine Wu Wei is a divorced writer, with her daughter Chanyue living with her mother, after meeting her 20-year-old cadre Hu Bingchen, who was born in the underground party, she was attracted by her revolutionary experience and talent, and had extramarital feelings with him. How Hu Bingchen used means to force his ex-wife to divorce him, now how to force Wu wei to divorce and remarry his ex-wife.

The title page of the novel reads: "Dedicated to my mother Zhang Shanzhi. This work makes Zhang Jie the only writer in China who has twice won the Mao Dun Literature Award.

In the eyes of Sui Lijun, the editor-in-charge, Zhang Jie was by no means inferior to Xiao Hong or Zhang Ailing. She recalled that when talking about the manuscript several times, when talking about the fate of the characters, Zhang Jie actually cried bitterly and lost her voice.

Zhang Jie told the writer Wang Xuan that he could not repay many debts in life one by one, nor could he ask for forgiveness or apologize for many mistakes and even sins he had committed, and the only thing he could do was to write a Rousseau-style confession with his heart and soul.

Writer Li Qing believes that "Wordless" can be seen as Zhang Jie's deepest autobiography of the soul. This is an important reflective work, but it may be due to personal likes and dislikes and other reasons, there are relatively few researchers at present, and it needs to be slowly discovered.

Wang Meng, who has been friends with Zhang Jie for many years and knows her well, wrote a book review for the book "Extreme Writing and Boundless Realism". He wrote that this is a book that has been opened up, a book that can no longer be frank, too sincere to be sincere, too bold to be bold, and it is extreme writing like extreme sports.

He also raised his own questions: the writer is actually a person with the privilege of discourse, and should he treat the right to speak as carefully as he should treat all rights? How should the distinction between a novel and a debunking material be defined? The utopia of love has been shattered, should there also be a psalm of memory? Can you be more ruthless about certain values?

But he admits that the novel does write about the heart of a little woman of a big era, and is a new contribution to the literary gallery. He said that even if you pick one car and two cars, you can't deny the extraordinary and unique nature of this book. It burned like fire, cold numbness like ice, sharpness like a knife, entanglement like a snake. It landed on the ground with a loud shot. It is a book written with life, transparent, shocking, and silly. Even if it is stretched to the limit or even flawed, it can stir up the storm in the reader's soul more than many unassailable books.

The other is wordless

Zhang Jie said that after completing "No Word", she felt that she had completed the task of "responsibility" and could enter her spiritual world.

She laughed at herself, in the young man's heart she was probably as old as Ba Jin and Bingxin, like a stupid and big fish thrown to the shore, only to flutter blindly, the only wish was to return to the water.

In 2006, at the advice of her doctor, she began painting without a teacher.

Her home was full of canvases and paints, and the walls of the room were full of her paintings. She paints landscapes, still lifes, animals, portraits of people, all without exception without titles, only "Zhang Jie" signatures and time. Her paintings often have a sense of desolation or even depression, such as a lonely flower that has failed. Tie Ning said that he reacquainted himself with Zhang Jie in the canvas, and she walked the world like a lone hero.

Li Jingze believes that this is another kind of "wordlessness" after "wordless". He found it difficult to imagine a Zhang Jie who carried a brush to draw a few bamboos to paint a few landscapes, and Zhang Jie who painted oil paintings was Zhang Jie. Chinese painting inevitably has to write and write, but Zhang Jie only wants no words, "oil painting at least let her not have to bother to explain or argue with the world."

In April 2012, the People's Literature Publishing House published an 11-volume Collected Works of Zhang Jie. Zhang Jie did not include "Love, Cannot Be Forgotten" in it, believing that it was "the work of misleading people". Those essays that describe the life of marriage and love have no income.

Later in life, when asked if she liked her home in Beijing or in the United States, she said, "I like wandering. In 2013, she published her last book, Stray Old Dogs.

She once wrote a preface to a novel by the writer Zhu Yong, in which she said: "Some people are born to walk, and I call these people walkers." The walker seems to be out of place with the world, and a good day of ordinary people will feel restless. Only in walking will his heart be quiet. But he has a harvest, and this harvest is to step into the color that many people can't see.

At the urging of her daughter's family, who had married and settled in the United States, she decided to immigrate to the United States. She began to break away, selling her house in Beijing, giving away everything, and even destroying letters, diaries, photographs, and some manuscripts in batches.

Zhang Jie insisted on giving her writer friend Xu Xiaobin a pair of italian big-name high heels, because the shoe size was not suitable, Xu Xiaobin declined, but she must send. Xu Xiaobin feels that she has a lot of temperament and style, but she thinks that she is old and does not like to contact young people. However, she will cheer Xu Xiaobin up in the email: "Be a person with a straight face, as long as you write your own book." ”

In October 2014, Zhang Jie's solo oil painting exhibition was held at the China Museum of Modern Literature. At the exhibition, she made her will public: no obituary, no farewell to the body, no memorial service. She also asked her friends not to write articles in her memory, as long as they remembered that there was once such a friend as her. Finally she said, "Zhang Jie said goodbye to this." ”

This is also the last time Zhou Ming, former deputy director of the Museum of Modern Chinese Literature, sees her. Zhou Ming said that Zhang Jie used to have a clear love and hatred, and she had close contacts with people she liked, and stayed away from people she didn't like. When I saw her at the exhibition, I obviously felt that she had become more cheerful, as if she had let go of everything and had no worries.

Her little apartment on the Columbia University campus in New York was quiet. Wang Anyi recalled to reporters that in 2016, she was stationed at New York University in the United States, living near Columbia University, and always fantasized about whether she would meet Zhang Jie, but unfortunately she had not met. Li Tuo's residence was just across the road from Zhang Jie, and he didn't touch it.

In Zhang Jie's later years, Xing'an, the former deputy editor of Beijing Literature magazine, often helped her take care of some affairs. He once asked Zhang Jie what kind of influence she hoped her works would have on others, and Zhang Jie said that it was now a "small era" and that their books could not affect anyone, but she believed that there were still a few readers who could understand her, and that was enough.

She once wrote in an essay about the famous scene of Chekhov's death, thankful that he left this world before the storm of the great times came, before taste and elegance disappeared forever. Until the last moment, he could still hold a glass of champagne and say to death, "I haven't drunk champagne in a long time." Then calmly finish drinking, lie down, face the "future", forever, quietly turn around.