This article was published in the 16th edition of Tianjin Daily on May 15, 2020
(Invasion and deletion)
Those who have lofty ideals can succeed, break the cauldron and sink the boat, and the hundred and two Qin Guans will eventually belong to Chu;
The bitter hearted people do not bear the burden, lie down and taste the guts, and three thousand Yue Jia can swallow Wu.
This poem is called "Falling First Self-Encouragement Poem", which was composed by Pu Songling after failing a township test, with the intention of encouraging himself to continue to read hard, perhaps even he himself could not think of it, the examination became his lifelong regret, but also achieved a "Liaozhai Zhiyi".
After Mr. Pu's death, Zhang Yuan, the son of his former friend Zhang Duqing, wrote the "Tomb Table of Mr. Liuquan Pu" for him. It is mentioned in the "Tomb Table" that in the fifteenth year of Shunzhi (1658), the nineteen-year-old Mr. Pu stepped into the examination room for the first time. There are many people who have not been able to pass the examination for a show talent in their lives, and he "took the boy's test at the beginning, that is, he was the first in the county, the government, and the province", and the three examinations for entering the school xiucai were all first, which can be described as a teenager's ambition.
However, the title of "Xiucai" can only be regarded as the lowest threshold for entering the university, and the township examination held every three years in the Beijing Division and provincial cities is the real "touchstone". If you win the township examination, you are not only eligible to continue to participate in the higher-level examination hosted by the Ministry of Rites, but also your own identity can be transformed, and you are honored as a "grandfather of raising people", and you have been promoted to a higher rank and rich since then, with wealth and privileges far beyond ordinary people, fan Jin in "Ru Lin Wai Shi" is the best example. However, if the name falls on Sun Shan, it is only necessary to continue to read hard in the previous bleak cold window and wait for the next "three years" for decades, and some readers who have repeatedly failed the examination and lost their livelihood skills are even more short-sighted, such as Chen Shicheng, the down-and-out show talent portrayed in Mr. Lu Xun's "White Light". Helplessly, like Chen Shicheng, who had taken bad luck, Mr. Pu no longer had the smooth sailing of the original examination xiucai on the road to the township test. "Three years after three years, all hopes are hanging", this is the lament of Mr. Pu Kangxi after he failed the township examination in the forty-first year (1702), when he was sixty-three years old. Nine years later, in the fifty years of the Kangxi Dynasty (1711), Mr. Pu, who was already seventy-two years old, won the township examination in October of that year and became a gongsheng.
Gongsheng (匯gongsheng) refers to the imperial court during the Ming and Qing dynasties who passed examinations every year or every two or three years to select excellent students from various provinces, prefectures, and counties as guarantees to be promoted to the study of the Jingshi Guozijian, such as The Brother Li Jia in "Du Shiniang's Angry Sinking Treasure Chest", and the second-selected candidates can also stay in the local areas for teaching purposes, that is, serve as local teaching staff as academic officials. Perhaps because he was too old, Mr. Pu received a local title of alternate Confucian teacher, and received an annual subsidy from the imperial court. Relatives and friends came to celebrate after hearing the news, at this time he was already an ancient and rare old man, he no longer had the heroic ambition of "Xiang Yu destroyed Qin" and "gouge and swallowed Wu" in the "Fall of the First Self-Encouragement Poem", but instead changed into a sigh of "Fifty Autumns in the Famous Field of Falling Tuo, Not a Matter of Snow And Glory" ("Mengpeng Zhihe"), and still regarded people as a lifelong regret for not passing the examination. That feeling, like a certain candidate who wants to go to a 211 or 985-brand university today, because he can't pass the exam and finally is forced to get a diploma in adult education and high self-examination of a famous university, can only be regarded as a kind of self-consolation that retreats to the second place. If you compare with the stories in "Liaozhai", the examination should be more like the goddesses in some of the love tragedies in it, such as the dragon girl in "Luochahai City" and the fairy in "Dancing", so that the students loved for a lifetime, thought for a lifetime, searched for a lifetime, but hated for a lifetime, and finally ended up "returning home with a sense of fear" and "returning with zero nose", which can really be described as "having a taste in the heart". Life, indeed, has too much helplessness and involuntariness.
What is rare is that Mr. Pu's enthusiastic writing heart has not been extinguished, and in the end he chose to find another way, in his own words, "set the armpits for Qiu, vainly continue the record of "The Nether"; floating white pen, only into the book of "Lonely Anger", when the squire Bi Jiyou sat in the library, he read the Bi family's collection of books, which greatly enriched his knowledge and expanded his thinking, and the tang legendary novels could be more superior, "Continued Yellow Liang" and "Lotus Princess" were born; when he stayed at the inn, he accidentally heard the love story of a scholar and a ghost girl fox girl told by the same house, and processed it into "Liaozhai" The famous article "Lotus Fragrance"; when playing with his friend Laoshan Mountain, he was attracted by the peony and the thousand-year-old winter tree next to the Lower Qing Palace, and he gave full play to the famous love article "Fragrant Jade", so that decades of pen cultivation were not stopped, and finally in exchange for a collection of short stories that is considered to be the great Chinese short story collection "Liaozhai Zhiyi". On the contrary, Mr. Pu's good friend Wang Shizhen, who wrote the preface to "Liaozhai", was a well-known literary elite at that time, and his biography was listed in the "Qing History Manuscript", but hundreds of years later, people today only know Pu Songling and "Liaozhai", and how many people know Wang Shizhen and "Notes of Xiangzu"? A "Liaozhai Zhiyi" is like a bright lamp, illuminating Mr. Pu himself who is lost on the road of Keju, and illuminating us in the future generations. Although it has been a bumpy experience, those who have lofty ideals have finally achieved success, and the hard-working people have indeed been rewarded, and if Mr. Pu has known the praise of him and "Liaozhai", he should be relieved.