Yu Feng's "The Great Tailor": Salvage and restore the creation of the giant ship | the past

About author:Yu Feng, born in Shanghai, graduated from the School of Journalism of Fudan University. He is the author of novels such as "Flying Fish in Paris" and "The Year of Tranquility".

Salvage and restoration of the giant ship of yesteryear

—— "The Great Tailor" creation talk

Wen | Yu Feng

The creation of novels with historical themes has a lot of self-limitations for me, if you don't want to "mash up the paste", you can only go all out to find credible clues in the old paper pile, this kind of work is difficult and tiring... Today, after two years of unlenting marathons, allow me to take a light and relaxed tone to talk about the creation of The Great Tailor.

It is more difficult for me to accept that kind of "literary works" that essentially despise historical truth. If I myself stuck in a middle school history textbook and used the free scale of fiction to lust the past, it would be better to write advertisements for inferior coffee beans to make a living.

Before I started writing, I sifted through a room of historical works and compilations of historical materials, covering a hundred years between 1840 and 1943 between China, Japan, Britain, France, and the United States (there was still a large lump of old paper that I could not afford to move back to carefully reading), and asked myself to read and excerpt them page by page. This is the amount of work that was ironed before writing The Great Tailor.

Saying this is not the same as declaring that the essence of the novel is a collection of historical materials, and the difference between the novel and historical prose or historical documents is that the novel has a group of characters who vividly live in the pages of the book, which is the driving force for the growth of the story. The characters of the novel are like the larvae of cicadas in the dirt between the pages, living, sneaking, mourning, advancing and retreating together, and looking for opportunities to run outside the book...

Please allow me to keep myself up while maintaining self-knowledge: I'm doing the same job as Cameron.

Cameron spent money and effort, with high-end equipment and a team of experts, to recreate a large ship that sank and simulate the sinking of the Titanic.

My aim is also to "reproduce", to reproduce the municipality, economy, urban construction and war of the city of Shanghai between 1860 and 1943, the scenes, the atmosphere, the personnel and the joys and sorrows, and then the development of the citizens and the loss of love and hatred.

I have visited the cities described in the book, I have sailed the seas by cruise ship; I have traveled to forty-eight countries to write a good foreigner, and I have spent two years in the academy of Paris with more than two hundred elites from seventy-two countries; I have consulted historical materials that I believe to be fully or partially authentic and can corroborate each other... I'm also trying to restore a giant ship— a century of prosperous and war-torn history.

The difference between the characters of that era and the present world. As more authentic writers, there is one thing I always respect: they were the masters of that era, we weren't, I wasn't, I was just trying to understand and understand the old days.

When I wrote The Great Tailor, I was teaching a humanities course at a college, with students from multiple provinces of the country. In the five or six different grade classes I've been with, there are very few young people who are interested in history. These students all look forward to working in Shanghai after graduation, and they have finally achieved this goal. However, without understanding Shanghai's past and present lives, people cannot understand the meaning of staying here, but narrowly believe that Shanghai is a workplace that is "easier to make money as a white-collar worker".

There are too many false or abrupt texts in today's book markets, such as floating dust covering sedimentary rock formations and covering fossils with imprints. Although "The Great Tailor" is only a novel, I still try my best to make it like a climbing tiger, stretching out countless delicate climbing feet and grasping the walls erected by the truth in history.

In that hundred years, outside Shanghai was the vast land of China, and inside shanghai was the whole world on the land of China. There are many historical events covered by "The Great Tailor", including the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom (Small Knife Society), the burning of the Yuanmingyuan, the Meiji Restoration of Japan, the Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, the Chinese Alliance Association, the May Thirtieth Massacre, the September 18 Incident, the Nineteenth Route Army Songhu War of Resistance, the Film Empress Hu Die, Kong Xiangxi's CoinAge Reform, the Xi'an Incident, the Lugou Bridge Incident, the Battle of Songhu, the Potsdam Announcement of Japan's Surrender, and so on...

How to go back and glimpse the real scenery of Shanghai Huayang in the past century?

About the protagonist of the novel, three generations of dress tailors, what is their historical opportunity and what is their original sin?

In the marathon of long-form writing, as a native of Shanghai, I have always been obsessed with an idea: Is there a character that belongs to the city itself from the day of Shanghai's birth, which has always existed darkly through wars and years, and has evolved into an indelible feature of Shanghai and Shanghainese?

The answer is yes, and The Great Tailor uses the length of the entire novel to show.

Finally, I would like to introduce the protagonist family of the story of "The Great Tailor": they are the villagers of Fenghua in the land of Zhejiang, although the water towns in Jiangnan are smooth and rainy, but there are few people in the past, which is doomed to leave the hometown and expand outward.

First, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Zhejiang people went to the sea through Ningbo to trade and learn from Dongying; after the opening of The port of Shanghai, many wealthy families went to the nearby British Concession to look for business opportunities. Silk and tea from all over China converge from the Yangtze River to Shanghai Beach, and wholesale foreign woolen wool, textiles and opium from India from foreign merchants, and travel up the river to market the vast inland.

The Qiao family, who learned suit craftsmanship in Japan, returned to Shanghai to open a western clothing shop, and gradually became the first choice for Western travelers in Shanghai and the local new merchant class to seek suits. The third generation of Qiao family heirs no longer have to cut by hand, began to receive Western-style education, entered the middle and upper classes of society, did small openings, became bosses...

However, the horrors of the times no one can escape. From the end of the Sino-Japanese War at the end of the Qing Dynasty to the end of World War II, the men and women of the Qiao family in Yokohama or Shanghai had to face the severe national fate and war disasters.

Joe's family chose their own life path in different positions and with an independent conscience. No one in the Qiao family succumbed to the obscenity of the invaders, endured the pain of unjust war one by one, maintained courage in the face of challenges, and demonstrated the principles and techniques of survival in the chaotic world with a shrewd and steady way of dealing with the world.

Any era must have its moving details, preserved in no-one corners. As a writer, I am pleased with the sincerity and perseverance of "salvaging the truth in the midst of the chaos".

Hopefully, my characters will be recognized by most truth-seeking readers and approved by historians.

An abridged version of The Creation Talk was first published in Wen Wei Po