Ai Wu: China's outstanding southbound "wandering literary heroes" (part 1) ‖ Huang Huiqing

Ai Wu: China is outstanding

Southbound "Wandering Literary Hero" (Part 1)

Huang Huiqing

Ai Wu (1904-1992), formerly known as Tang Daogeng, formerly known as Tang Ren, pen names Tang Yun, Tang Aiwu, Tang Aiwu, Ai Wu, etc., was born on June 20, 1904 in Xinfan County, Sichuan Province (abolished and merged into Xindu County in July 1965, and abolished in January 2002 to set up Xindu District of Chengdu City) Qingliuchang (now Qingliu Town, Xindu District) Cuiyun Village. He is a member of the Communist Party of China, an outstanding fighter of the Left-Wing Writers' Union, a former advisor to the Chinese Writers Association, the former honorary chairman of the Sichuan Provincial Federation of Literary and Literary Circles and the Sichuan Provincial Writers Association, and a famous writer in modern and contemporary China.

Why did you take the pen name Ai Wu? It turned out that when he began to write, because he was influenced by Hu Shi's proposition that "people should love the big self (that is, society), but also love the small self (that is, themselves)", he took the pen name "Love Wu", which slowly evolved into Ai Wu. Legend has it that he liked to read classical novels, and when reading "Xiao Wuyi", he admired the little hero "Ai Hu" in the book, so he used the harmonic "Ai Wu" as his pen name. Since then, the name "Ai Wu" has become famous in the world, while Tang Daogeng's real name is little known.

Absorb nutrients from new cultural works

In 1921, Ai Wu felt that the high school curriculum could not satisfy his desire for knowledge, and met with a classmate in this class to apply for the famous Union Middle School in Chengdu in advance, and the test score was the third place, surpassing the candidates in the graduating class. However, due to the difficulties of the family at that time, he could not afford the tuition and miscellaneous fees of more than 40 yuan per semester, so he had to sigh at the United Middle School. The blow forced him to nearly commit suicide, and he wanted to die in a mountain pond in his hometown. But in the face of the natural scenery of the green grass and the sparkling spring water, he remembered the expectations of his loving mother, remembered the poetic and picturesque spring breeze depicted in the new literary works, so he evoked the attachment of life, he cheered up the spirit, overcame weakness, and in the search for a new way out of life, under the influence of the new culture, he fell in love with literature.

In the autumn of the same year, Ai Wu was admitted to the Chengdu Provincial First Normal School with excellent results and studied until the summer of 1925. In the past four years, he has made great progress, but his family's situation has also changed greatly. First of all, my father sold the 15 acres of land he had gained from the family to pay off the debt; Then, his mother died of illness, and the decay of the family made his otherwise cheerful personality gradually depressed. In order to seek comfort and relief, he put aside his distractions and read works such as Tolstoy and Dickens that sympathized with the tragic fate of the working people of the lower classes, and found resonance from them, and was also inspired by the works of Francis, Iccason and others who advocated the liberation of individuality and advocated marital autonomy. Literary works helped him broaden his horizons, dispelled the yin in his chest, and inspired him to cut through thorns and thorns on the road of life and forge ahead in spite of difficulties.

It is particularly gratifying that Among his classmates, Ai Wu met Sha Ting, a writer of the same age, who had similar interests, and later encouraged and supported each other throughout his life, and was equally famous in literary creation. At that time, the school Liu Zuobin organized the monthly magazine "Stars" as his editor-in-chief, and with the encouragement of Liu Zuobin, Ai Wu published a new poem and a paper entitled "Individual and Society" for the first time under Tang Yun's signature. Later, attracted by the surging passion and free and uninhibited poetic style of guo Moruo's "Goddess", Ai Wu turned his attention to the Creation Society. The encouragement given to him by the Creation Society not only improved the artistic style of literary creation, but also changed his ideological concepts, that is, from the pure literary and artistic activities in the early stage to the in-depth understanding of dialectical materialism.

In the summer of 1925, the 21-year-old Ai Wu was about to graduate from the Provincial First Division. He is faced with a major choice in the path of life: First, he hopes to go to Beijing, the center of the new cultural movement, to apply for a university, but the economic conditions do not allow it; The second is to return to his hometown to become a teacher and retake his father's old path, but he is not very happy; The third is to enter the Sichuan Provincial Infantry School according to his father's wishes, but because he hates the warlords, he is even more reluctant. After all, Ai Wu grew up under the influence of the May Fourth Movement, and he affirmed that a person should bravely go to the world to find new ideas, expand knowledge, and expand knowledge. Therefore, Ai Wu decided to go to Nanyang to work and study half-time. He took more than a dozen yuan given by his grandfather and father and took a boat from Chengdu to Kunming via Nanchuan. Ai Wu absorbed nourishment from the new cultural works and embarked on the path of literature.

Draw on themes from wandering life

In March 1927, Ai Wu wore a reed leaf bucket hat on his head, carried worn-out clothes and his favorite books and periodicals, and bravely embarked on the journey of wandering again. Ai Wu set off from Kunming on foot, passing through Yunzhou, Shunning, Yongchang, from Tengyue and Ganya in western Yunnan, with Lao He and Lao Zhu, two caravans, crossing the Gurkha Iron Bridge, entering the thatched meadows of the Kachin Mountains in Myanmar, and then arriving at Bamo. Because the work was not settled, it was turned back into the thatch. The thatched meadows are sparsely populated, and there are only two inns in the Kachin Mountains, one is the "Basho Village" and the other is the thatched grass. Ai Wu worked as a buddy in the British colony's guest house, greeting passing merchants, cleaning horse dung, and also working as the boss's tutor. During this long period of wandering and miscellaneous labor, Ai Wu had enough to see the humiliation and suffering of the lower-class people, and also enjoyed the beautiful and peculiar natural scenery on the border of Yunnan and Burma. After the changeable storms of "ten miles and different days", I have seen the strange customs and customs of ethnic minorities such as the Dai and Jingpo ethnic groups, especially the low-level people such as caravans, tobacco dealers, horse thieves, and horse head brothers. He has a unique vision, from a special perspective, to examine the shining points hidden in the appearance of these people's rough mines. He always listened to them tell strange and bizarre encounters and stories that had never been heard before, and thus gained a lot of wisdom and philosophy of life that he had not learned from books. He used an ink bottle hanging from his neck and a small notebook on his lap to constantly record what he saw and heard along the way.

In October of the same year, he began a new trek, taking a boat down the Minjiang River to Jiesha. After that, take the train to the old Kyung-Mandalay in Myanmar and then to the capital Yangon. Under the Shwedagon Pagoda, he began a new struggle and struggle. In Yangon, there is no place to work, the money is spent, and the poverty and illness are compounded. Fortunately, he was taken in by Master Wan Hui of Sichuan, who was quite prestigious in the overseas Chinese circles at that time. Master Wan Hui was the third brother of Xie Wuliang, who had studied in Japan in his early years and became a monk because he opposed arranged marriages. He studied Buddhism intensively, was familiar with Indian languages such as Sanskrit and Pali, as well as Tibetan and Mongolian, and was a patriotic scholar with profound knowledge and extensive contacts with the cultural circles of Yangon. In addition to buying vegetables and cooking for his family, Ai Wu also uses his spare time to write for Chinese newspapers and periodicals. As a result of the Master's introduction, he was taken care of by Chen Lanxing, editor-in-chief of Yangon Daily, and Yun Banlou, editor of the supplementary magazine Han Guang, who published poems and essays such as "Night Cry on the Base", "Night of Escape", "Wandering in The Eight Mozas", "Bandit Cave in the Ten Thousand Mountains" and "Savage Mountain". Ai Wu's first short story, "The Old Man," was also published in the supplement "Boguang".

In 1928, through the introduction of Master Wan Hui, Ai Wu went to Juemin Daily to do proofreading work and became close friends with Huang Qiqing, a typographer whose ancestral home was Taishan, Guangdong. These two self-taught young people often talked about society, life, career and ideals together, and later participated in the study and activities of the Burmese Communist Group. Ai Wu wrote about their friendship in his "Preface to the Journey to the South" and "Ah Huang". In the second half of 1928, Ai Wu became acquainted with Wu Jingxing, who fled to Nanyang to join the communist movement after the defeat of the Great Revolution, at this time Wu Jingxing organized a communist group in Burma, and according to Ai Wu's ideological expression, Ai Wu was absorbed as the first new member of the Burmese Communist Party group. In order not to implicate Master Wan Hui, Ai Wu left Wan Hui's house in the winter of that year and taught at an overseas Chinese civilian school on Baimi Road.

In April 1930, the Communist Party of Malaysia held a party congress in Singapore, and Ai Wu went to Singapore as a representative of the Burmese Prefectural Committee (at that time, the Burmese Communist Party group was led by the Malaysian Communist Party). Due to the plague epidemic in Southeast Asia at that time, frequent quarantine and disinfection on the way made him stay for a week and missed the meeting. After returning to Yangon, he worked as an editor and proofreader for the Overseas Chinese-sponsored Sprout Daily. Although he is in a foreign land, he always misses his homeland and cares about his relatives, and at this time he writes a long poem entitled "Drifting Song", which euphemistically and delicately expresses this feeling. In the winter of the same year, Ai Wu was officially arrested by the authorities for publishing in the Sprout Daily sympathizing with and supporting the peasants in Burma's Turawadi county against the British colonial rule. The incident shook the Yangon diaspora, and Master Wan Hui visited him and personally went to the riverside to see him off when he was deported back to China. In the spring of the following year, Ai Wu was escorted to Hong Kong, locked up for one night, and then expelled from Xiamen, ending a four-year wandering life in the South China Sea.

Ai Wu believes that this trip to Burma is the "most difficult pleasure in his life" because he and the Burmese people and the overseas Chinese living in Myanmar share weal and woe and have formed a deep friendship. He regarded Burma and Yunnan as the bases of the second stage of his writing, and at the beginning of his return to China, he wrote "I Curse You for Smiling Like That", "Huai Dajin Pagoda", "Memories of burmese changes", "The Hope given to Me by the Burmese", "When Japan Bombed Burma" and "Night of the Southern Kingdom" with the themes of the Burmese people, the life of the compatriots and the struggle against colonial rule.

(To be continued)