Press: On November 22, 2016, Taiwanese writer Chen Yingzhen passed away in Beijing. He is a representative of Taiwanese contemporary literature and an honorary vice chairman of the Seventh National Committee of the China Writers Association. At that time, many figures in the literary and ideological circles on both sides of the strait expressed their condolences from different perspectives. Interface Culture (ID: Booksandfun) once wrote that although Taiwan's media reports gave the title of "failing to return to the roots of the leaves", "for this leftist novelist who was born in Hsinchu, Taiwan during the Japanese occupation and graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages of Tamkang University, although secularists often try to discuss his political views and literary beliefs separately, the place of death, Beijing, the core of the motherland, still completes a wonderful echo with his lifelong position."
Chen Yingzhen's left-wing identity has been constantly emphasized in different ways, and as a researcher of Chen Yingzhen, Professor Zhao Gang of the Department of Sociology at Tunghai University in Taiwan believes that Chen Yingzhen's "left-wing" voice and vision are extremely rare in Taiwan and even in today's cross-strait and Hong Kong regions. "It provides a humane, egalitarian, just, popular, liberated, and third-world 'left eye' for a world plagued by developmentalism, neoliberalism, imperialism, nihilism, and the American way of life. In addition to this great value, another important value of this 'left' may lie in the fact that it is a kind of transcendence of the traditional left. ”
In the course "Social Change in Taiwan," Zhao Gang used Chen Yingzhen's novel as the only reading material arranged for students. He believes that Chen Yingzhen's biography of these small people is more real than history: "The historical memory that the modern and contemporary history of the Taiwan region may have will be more sparse and dry, and the historical consciousness will be destined to be more homogeneous and more empty, because we can only emptyly remember the years of some major events and the names of some big people." ”
In the preface to his book "The Orange-Red Early Star: With Chen Yingzhen's Return to Taiwan in the 1960s," Zhao Gang raised such a question in "Questioning and Answering Yourself Should Be Sincere"—from Japanese colonial rule, World War II to the global Cold War, from cross-strait separation, capitalist development, and the formation of mass consumer society, all the way to the Americanization of scholarship and thought, and the identity of the entire island that has been torn apart and distorted... "Please ask, in Taiwan's contemporary literary circles, and even in the intellectual and intellectual circles, in the past half century or so, Who else but Chen Yingzhen is constantly confronted with and asked about these events or processes that have never 'passed' in the past? So, shouldn't Chen Yingzhen's literature become an important basis and reference for us to understand ourselves? ”
Chen Yingzhen's complete novels were recently launched by the Republic of China, on this occasion, in addition to reading Chen Yingzhen, we may also need to think outside the text, why should we read Chen Yingzhen?
<h3>Why read Chen Yingzhen? 》</h3>
Written by | Zhao Gang
Looking back at Taiwan's literary circles since the end of the war, Chen Yingzhen occupies a very important and unique position, his intention is clear and persistent, he continues to put literary creation under the big historical context, painfully collides with the big problems of the times, and unremittingly explores the profound internal relationship between literature and history. In a sense of "thought" specific to the context of the Third World, the literary scholar Chen Yingzhen is an out-and-out thinker, offering a humane, equal, just, popular, liberating, and "left eye" of the Third World. Sincerity is the most important reason why Chen Yingzhen's literature can touch so many people. This sincerity is manifested not only in the reproduction of history and biography, but also in the turbulent exploration of ideas.
Since the beginning of 2009, I have been planted in the state of reading and writing Chen Yingzhen, and I have experienced three cold and summers since I was out of control. In 2011, I published my first book on this subject, Quest: Chen Yingzhen's Literary Path. In the "self-introduction" of the book, I explain several related issues, including the relationship between Chen Yingzhen and our generation, the reason why I reread Chen Yingzhen, and the foolishness of reading literary texts in the process of reading a literary layman like me... There, I didn't properly address an important question—"Why read Chen Yingzhen?" "Respond. Now that I am about to publish my second book on Chen Yingzhen's literature, I feel that I should respond to this question, so I have this "prologue". As for the "preface" of a general nature, that is, an introduction to the content of the book and the expression of thanks, it is expressed in the "Afterword".
On the one hand, this "self-prologue" is a confession to the reader why I think Chen Yingzhen's literature is important; on the other hand, it is also a letter of invitation to read with a strong desire to the public. But in writing, I often turn to wondering whether this is the kind of "he who does what he wants to others" that is often annoying. In addition to trepidation, I can only suggest that readers may wish to take this preface as a sincere self-question and answer for me for the time being, and if you happen to accept some of my judgments on the value of Chen Yingzhen's literature and want to be further contacted, then you may be able to read Chen Yingzhen's works directly and feel, interpret and criticize on your own. After that, if I still have time and am willing to use this book as one of the reading references, and I am willing to correct the shallowness and inadequacy of some of my reading methods, it is my greatest hope. And if my interpretation of Chen Yingzhen's early novel actually replaces the direct reading and comprehensive reading of the original text, it is a sin that this preface cannot bear.
Cut right to the point. I will explain why I read Chen Yingzhen from the three dimensions of history, thought and literature.
<h3>First, history</h3>
Looking back at Taiwan's literary circles since the end of the war, Chen Yingzhen occupies a very important and unique position. Is this a assertion because of "preferences" that cannot be avoided and are not necessarily negative? The answer is no. Well said. Let me ask: Besides Chen Yingzhen, who else, like him, has, in the past half century, with a clear intention and persistence, placed literary creation under the large historical context, painfully collided with the big problems of the times, and unremittingly explored the profound internal relationship between literature and history?
Perhaps, some people will mutter, this is not the literature I want, "Chen Yingzhen" is not my dish. Very good! Taste cannot be imposed. What's more, no literary work must be read, after all, the world has always continued in one way or another, and it has never changed because of this work or that work. However, if you give literature a little chance, a little weight, and see it as an important means of helping us to sympathize with the situation of the characters in various situations, so as to understand the other in history more concretely and more abundantly, so as to open more windows for self-understanding, to help yourself evaluate value and seek meaning, then perhaps you should pay attention to Chen Yingzhen's literature, not to mention that he tells stories that are so closely related to you and me Especially at a time when many, many stories he has told, and the characters in them, have been forgotten by our time. When history is forgetting, the value of Chen Yingzhen's literature is precisely in refusing to forget.
Refusing to forget is precisely to find a way out for the future for the present. Therefore, the refusal to forget is not simply to go back to the past, to remember glory or to lick the wounds – that is the refusal to forget the "old". For Chen Yingzhen, "forgetting" is the other side of the copper coin of "the end of history". To refuse to forget is to ask about the historical clues that make up our situation today. This requires us to break the hegemonic memory project, to re-understand our self-composition, and to see how we have been shaped by various forces in history. Such self-knowledge, needless to say, is an important prerequisite for theory and practice. Theory and practice do not unfold on top of a presupposed universal blank subject.
Therefore, as such a historical explorer, Chen Yingzhen, through many protagonists in his literature, shows us many important historical stages or events in modern and contemporary times, from Japanese colonial rule, World War II and the Pacific War, the Kuomintang-Communist Civil War, the February 28 Incident, the founding of the People's Republic of China, the global Cold War, the White Terror, the separation of the two sides of the strait, the consolidation of the "anti-communist and pro-American" right-wing authoritarian regime, the development and deepening of capitalism, the formation of mass consumer society, the Americanization of scholarship and ideology, and politics and culture "Localization" and "de-Sinicization" continue to confuse the identity of the entire island to this day... I would like to ask you, in Taiwan's contemporary literary circles, and even in the ideological and intellectual circles, for more than half a century, who else but Chen Yingzhen has been confronted and questioned about these events or processes that have never been "past"? So, shouldn't Chen Yingzhen's literature become an important basis and reference for us to understand ourselves?
The above-mentioned historical events are not that no one has studied or expressed opinions on this or on them, but few people have Chen Yingzhen's sense of consciousness, face their source and flow, and then weave into a historical relationship, and put forward a principled view of our today. Amplifying an isolated event, and then expanding it, circumferentially, forming a single historical interpretation, which is not taken by Chen Yingzhen. The historical process is always intertwined and "determined by multiples". This characteristic of the treatment of history can be clearly seen by Chen Yingzhen in 1960 or Zhongxiao Park in 2001. Behind Chen Yingzhen's literature stands a thinker, Chen Yingzhen, but this thinker is always humble and tirenuous in the face of history, and he wants to learn some lessons from history, rather than holding his theoretical axe and sawing, and using history as an ideological forest farm.
Firmly positioning the writing on the interface between history and literature, Chen Yingzhen is the most impressive, and what he has covered up and hesitated for is his biography of the small people who mostly belong to the "backstreet" through the novel. In Chen Yingzhen's thirty-six short stories so far, these little people are either worried, or determined, or nihilistic, or firmly believed, or simple, or delusional... They walk in time and space, which is fictional but incomparably real, sometimes vivid, sometimes shadowy. At this moment, what floated into my mind were: Anaqi's young Kang Xiong, Wu Jinxiang, a hero who had eaten human flesh, The left-wing Judas with a red belt, Lin Wuzhi, a romantic young artist, Lao Mo, a fat man who was "existentialist", Xiaowen, a simple and thick female worker, Zhao Gong, a scholar who was vain and indulgent, Lin Dewang, a small employee of a multinational company who dreamed of being a manager, Cai Qianhui, an old woman who was seeking death in disillusionment, Zhao Nandong, a beautiful man who was born and died in decadence, Li Qinghao, a loyal party member of the party by nature, Lin Biao, a japanese veteran at the front desk, and Ma Zhengtao, a former Manchukuo Han traitor. These, for me, are all "biographies" passed down from generation to generation, and they are more real than history. Without them, the historical memory that the modern and contemporary history of the Taiwan region may have will be even more sparse and dry, and the historical consciousness will be destined to be more homogeneous and more hollow, because we can only emptyly remember the years of some major events and the names of some big people. Therefore, Chen Yingzhen's literature is actually the salvation of history, which re-gives those "backstreet" people who have been frustrated, hurt and forgotten by history with their eyebrows, reproducing their falsehood and truth, fragility and strength, despair and hope, so that readers can almost avoid being completely appeased by the sense of the present, the sense of elite and loneliness in the final era of history, so that they can also face the present and point to the future with strength and strength.
Chen Yingzhen's novels are effective and powerful in understanding history. Taking my teaching experience as an example, I used Chen Yingzhen's novel as the only reading material for the course "Social Change in Taiwan" in the university where I taught, replacing the "social change" material that had long followed the Western (American) pattern, and the response of the students was very good. They felt that reading Chen Yingzhen allowed them to start thinking about Taiwan's post-war history from the intersection of the great historical changes and the fate of tiny individuals, which was a very enlightening learning experience - "very FU!" ”。 Moreover, in my own personal experience in the past few years, Chen Yingzhen is indeed an extremely important medium, through him, I found some fulcrum, some opportunities, to start asking questions about today's various "current situations" (especially the current state of knowledge) why this is the case. Why does it have to be this way? Where is it going? ...... It was through reading Chen Yingzhen that I myself stepped out of the only world of Western theories and methods and began to question the more historical and intrinsic relationship between scholarship and thought. Chen Yingzhen's literature allowed me to step out of a closed, self-reproducing Western theoretical discourse, to history, to reality, to the Third World.
<h3>Second, thought</h3>
Therefore, Chen Yingzhen's literature in the interface between literature and history actually has a third dimension, that is, the ideological dimension. Chen Yingzhen has said many times that the reason why he wrote is to solve the problem of his ideological distress and pain. It is impossible for him to write without thought; he has not been drawn by the muse in a trance, or for the sake of a text. Mr. Yao Yiwei, a predecessor of literary and art theory and a playwright, once pointed out that Chen Yingzhen, as he understood it, was "art for life" and "only when he has feeling, thinking, and doing something about reality, he will write an essay." This "text" is sometimes an argumentative article and sometimes a novel, but they are actually only two sides of the same body. Mr. Yao said: "The theory is an extension of his novel, and the novel is a deformation of his theory. ”
Mr. Yao's words are very good. However, we may want to note that Chen Yingzhen's literary creation has never stood on a high position of enlightenment, promoting certain "theories", "ideologies" or "positions". In the final analysis, this is because he did not write because he was "known", but because he wrote out of sleepiness. In a contrasting spectrum, Chen Yingzhen is a leftist and a unification faction, which need not be disputed or disputed, but the significance and value of Chen Yingzhen's literature does not lie in the fact that it promotes the views and opinions of the left or the unification faction, just like the role of a certain kind of "socialist realism" literature or art that we are familiar with. Chen Yingzhen, who is behind Chen Yingzhen's literature, is actually a thinker who seeks up and down, rather than a theoretician of Shenchi Gaocheng. But this is not because Chen Yingzhen is not good at theory or theory, but because he has no intention of theory for the theory's sake, just as he has no intention of literature for literature's sake. Theory, like literature, can be the means or the way in which he thinks.
Admittedly, you can say that no writer is not thoughtful--how can a family be just a flower fist embroidery leg brocade jade mouth? But "thought" is not "I think, therefore I am", nor is it appropriately referred to by the great proverbs of "dare to think", and such "thought" reflects more often the desire to build a "universal" theoretical and philosophical system in a specific period of Western rise. In the Third World, activity in the name of "thought" (as opposed to institutional scholarship) should summon a kind of denial of hegemonic values, knowledge and politics, a kind of subjective consciousness in the great history of mankind, and an imaginary commitment of the nation to the region and even to the future direction of mankind. In this regard, the First World has no ideas. But to say this does not mean discrimination, but rather fear, because it does not require thought. With very few exceptions, the consciousness or unconscious of first-world intellectuals is how to maintain this hegemony. Knowing this, there is no complaint. What makes people cry and laugh is that intellectuals and literary and artistic creators in the Third World seem to be more exposed and consolidated around hegemony than intellectuals in the First World.
Thus, a "modernist writer" of the Third World may think "profoundly", "mysteriously", "creatively" and express a "sense of the absurdity of the human condition." He was gracefully posing back and forth between the dark and dark worldly nature of the world, and between the two poles, but he had never "thought" after all, and it was precisely because he had not stopped between a particular historical time and space, so that he could receive the problems that this time and space threw at him. Instead, he drifted in "homogeneous empty time" (Benjamin), in order to learn the sorrows of others, and become complacent, and then, even, proud of his wives and concubines.
In a "thought" sense specific to the Context of the Third World, the literary scholar Chen Yingzhen was an out-and-out thinker, and can almost be said to be a thinker in the post-war Taiwanese literary circles who did not think as a second person. But once this is said, does not it also summon an embarrassing question: Since the war and even today, has there been an "ideological circle" in Taiwan? But let's leave the answer in the wind for the time being. In my opinion, Chen Yingzhen is Taiwan's most important post-war literary scholar precisely because he is Taiwan's most important post-war thinker - although he is not famous for his "thought". But, apart from him, who else, with the solitary force of thought, confronts the real questions raised by the real history of this hundred years, including: How to break the division of the Nation beyond the knack nation? How to understand a kind of "close relatives hate"? How to understand and assess the legacy of colonial rule? How to grasp the "historical significance" of the White Terror? How to fight against this overwhelming consumerism that evaporates all meaning? How does a reformed idealism relate to a popular vision and a third world perspective? In this desolate cocooned world, how to forgive, how to be strong, how to love?
Such an ideology and literature, of course, in genealogy, in reality, in contrast, in effect, let us affirm that it belongs to the "left" side. Moreover, such a "left-wing" voice and vision is extremely rare in Taiwan and even in today's cross-strait and Hong Kong. It provides a humane, equal, just, popular, liberated, and third-world "left eye" for a world that has been plagued by developmentalism, neoliberalism, imperialism, nihilism, and the American way of life. In addition to this great value, another important value of this "left" may lie in the fact that it is a kind of transcendence of the traditional left. Of course, Chen Yingzhen is a thinker living in the human world, and of course he lies within this human world's left-right and even the struggle for reunification and "independence", but Chen Yingzhen always has a mentality and sentiment that is both internal and trying to be external to this opposition. Where does it come from? I think it may be a manifestation of Chen Yingzhen's critical inheritance of a certain profound spiritual heritage of Christianity. Drawing resistance to modern and contemporary intellectual forces from religion and tradition is a very important but long-neglected trait of "Chen Yingzhen's left wing" or "Chen Yingzhen thought". This meaning transcends the level at which religion is generally equated with personal belief and salvation.
Therefore, another quality embodied in Chen Yingzhen's literature is a profound self-referentiality or reflexivity. Yes, his novels are telling the story of the world, but they are also telling his own story. When recording, understanding, interpreting and criticizing the world, Chen Yingzhen is also reflecting on herself deeply and painfully. This seemingly contradictory duality of "outward criticism and introspection" makes Chen Yingzhen's literature never have a didactic and reprimanding taste, an enlightenment posture that thinks that the truth is in hand. Today, in the twenty-first century, under the support of the general trend of the world, the "(neo)liberal" intellectuals have even more dazzlingly displayed such a posture as an apostle of truth. Historically, the left wing, as another child of enlightenment, of course, has also had such a kind of criticism, criticism and criticism, bent on breaking the old world and building a new world, but Chen Yingzhen has already shown his anxiety about such a left-wing mental state of "never returning" from a very early age. So in his essay The Story of Judas Calvary (1961), he created a prototype of the "Judas Left", pointing out his imbalance between "ideal" and "introspection", "hate" and "love". Of course, we must also read that this is Chen Yingzhen's reflection on his own state, and it is also his humble invitation to reflect on himself as a humble invitation, inviting everyone to reflect on the "reform subject" problem in the "great cause of reform"; the reform subject must also reform itself. Chen Yingzhen's thought is always entangled in a profound, contradictory duality.
If "temperature" is used as a metaphor for the duality of Chen Yingzhen's thought, then the characteristic of his thought is the homology of ice and fire. In the preface to my previous book, Quest, I described Chen Yingzhen's literature this way, saying that it "always contains a strange heat and a unique ice needle." Fire is Chen Yingzhen's boiling belief in the world, while ice is his cold self-doubt. Here, Chen Yingzhen said: "Because we believe, we hope, we love..." There, Chen Yingzhen said: "Revolutionaries and decadents, gods and demons, saints and losers, originally they are twins who look like each other." Facing his deceased friend Wu Yaozhong, Chen Yingzhen almost wept and said: "I hope you will take away all the darkness and decadence in the hearts of your friends who love you..." Therefore, Chen Yingzhen's thoughts are not only speculative, but also emotional, moral, and even "religious". When we experience Chen Yingzhen's state of mind, we should not experience it in a cold and rational way of thinking about the habits of thinkers. Perhaps, we should not even define Chen Yingzhen's thought abstractly and metaphysically as a kind of "duality", which may also be misleading. "Chen Yingzhen Thought" is not a pure state, nor a result, but a process—a process of how a person struggles with his own nothingness, cynicism, and despair. Chen Yingzhen's literature shows exactly such a thought process.
When we read Chen Yingzhen, of course, we want to learn from him so that we can grow on our own. In learning, such a "process Chen Yingzhen" experience is particularly important. Especially when we know that in China's intellectual tradition, the study of intellectuals is not a single object of classics, writings, or even teachings, but more importantly, a study of a person and body as a whole. For this reason, another profound significance of Chen Yingzhen's literature is precisely that it prompts an important intellectual and ethical question: "How do we learn from a person today?" "In the past, my reading habit was to cut people and works, to cut people and times, to cut works and times, to understand "thought" or "theory" in the abstract, and to learn abstract methods and concepts of speculation; today, I know that it is wrong. Reading Chen Yingzhen also made me understand how to answer the above question. We need to understand a man as a whole (of course, a rich man worth learning from), his direction and loss, his strength and vulnerability, his faith and nothingness, how he struggles in this contradiction, learns, overcomes vulnerability and nothingness...
Therefore, another important quality of Chen Yingzhen's literature is "authenticity". He used his sincerity to overcome the cynicism, nothingness and despair that pervaded everywhere. His literature reveals his truth, and he never bluffs to hide his vulnerability and doubt. Literature, therefore, is just an ordinary person like you and me who sincerely faces his own writing, and writing is actually just a footprint of self-help and exploration. Tao Yuanming's statement in his "Idle Sentiments" that "frankness and concern are sincere" seems to have made a concise outline of an important ideological trait in Chen Yingzhen's literature.
<h3>Literature</h3>
At this point in writing, I, the "recommender" of Chen Yingzhen's literature, vaguely faced a paradoxical situation: just when I have always emphasized that the valuable value of Chen Yingzhen's literature lies in the history and ideas it carries, I have found that these values cannot and cannot be talked about as the external aspects of "literature". Therefore, if the writing before me creates a potentially misleading impression that the reader thinks that the value of Chen Yingzhen's literature is only based on its history and ideas, then it is a necessary clarification. To be honest, this clarification is not something I can do well, but I try hard.
"What is literature?" - This is a big problem. Literature, as a result, is a book of poems, novels or essays, but as a process, literature is a person with a keen heart, trying to understand his world, his people, his time, his society, and his own efforts, and through moderately demanding words and appropriate forms, moving himself and then moving others. Hedada, let ourselves allow others to have a deeper and more thorough understanding of the environment in which we exist, so that we can move forward towards a more reasonable and dignified life. Such an understanding, I believe, comes from reading Chen Yingzhen. If we say in a more grammatical manner, "Literature begins with suffering and ends with wisdom", I think it should not be too much.
In such a literary imagination, words and forms are important. Ever heard of a running-through novel or a clichéd poem or a prose full of clichés? Can it still be called a novel, a poem, a prose? Will anyone else enjoy reading it?
However, on the other hand, if literature is a thing, only beautiful and splendid and even strange words and forms are left, is it still called literature? I don't want to argue about this, because the main purpose of this article is to recommend Chen Yingzhen, not to recommend others.
For Chen Yingzhen, the value of literature is by no means in "word alchemy". Chen Yingzhen is not without this skill. As far as the art of art is concerned, Chen Yingzhen is of course a great alchemist. But the point is that the emphasis on words and forms is not the purpose of Chen Yingzhen's literature. Chen Yingzhen has said more than once that words and forms are the basic skills of the literary profession, and there is not much to say. When we first read his novels, if we hear Chen Yingzhen say this again, we may suspect him of being pretentious: Is this really the case? In our opinion, you are very demanding of words, and your style is unique... This is all true, but we should pay attention to the fact that the concentration of words and forms is the external manifestation of chen Yingzhen's thought and belief concentration; there is no speech, no intention, no basket, no fish. But when he concentrates on the goal of thought and practice, these words or words will be forgotten. This is somewhat like the early Puritan entrepreneurs, according to Weber, when they rushed to the destination of their faith, the goods they pursued on a daily basis were like light cloaks, all of which were thrown away. But for the entrepreneurs of the second generation of capitalism and beyond, these cloak-like floating objects have become "iron cages" that have no escape between heaven and earth. Consider how many literary scholars in Taiwan have been trapped for life in the "ornate end of the century" iron cage they themselves run.
Chen Yingzhen even said: In fact, it does not have to be written. We can do many, many things, not necessarily writing. Writing itself is not necessarily a "cause." We must first have trouble, touch, anger, pity, pain, joy, absurdity... All kinds of real feelings, we just start to write. Originating in the middle and outside, this is the right way of literature; it is also the opposite of "for giving new words to force sadness". For a long time, we have seen many variations of "forced talk", including those who use literature as a footnote or playground writing for Western modern cultural theories.
Sincerity is the most important reason why Chen Yingzhen's literature has been able to touch so many people for a long time. This sincerity is manifested not only in the reproduction of history and biography, but also in the turbulent exploration of ideas, and also in the literature inside and outside. Among them, we must be particularly grateful to literature, if it were not for the magical car of literature, Chen Yingzhen would not have been able to enter his historical and ideological world so deeply. "But for the sake of the king, I have been moaning to this day" - I thought of many of Chen Yingzhen's friends and even enemies. Chen Yingzhen does not like empty car literature, nor will he love cars after reaching the destination, but without this car, there is no Chen Yingzhen as we know it, and this world is probably only the actor Chen Yongshan and the commentator Xu Nancun. To some extent, I have shared the feelings of my predecessor Mr. Yao Yiwei for Chen Yingzhen's literature, and I would like to re-record the last paragraph of his famous "Yao Preface" written for "Chen Yingzhen's Works Collection" (Human Publishing House):
He is a true artist. Because Heaven gave him a heart, he felt good and could understand what was difficult for others to understand; Heaven gave him a pair of eyes, able to see through the inside of things and see what people had never seen; Heaven gave him a pen, wielding it freely, and turning decay into magic. Therefore, I dare to predict that as times change, his other writings may gradually be forgotten, but his novels will remain in this world forever! That's where art is wonderful.
"The wonderful place of art", indeed. Other words may be forgotten, perhaps. However, we must not forget that Chen Yingzhen's literature will remain in this world forever, precisely because it is a fully loaded train.
The train is coming.
This article is excerpted from the afterword of "Night Truck", published with the authorization of the publishing house, and may not be reproduced without authorization.