As soon as the new old man appeared, the tea customers immediately intuitively felt that the quarrel had already arranged a tea. There was a chaotic call in the tea hall. Some sat in their seats and shouted to the church as usual, some stood up and shouted, and some shouted while waving bills, but they all raised their voices very high and high, afraid that the new master would not hear.
- Satin,"In its Fragrant Teahouse"
In 1904, Sha Ting was born in An County, a remote county town in Sichuan, and his parents named him Yang Chaoxi, who sent him to a private school at the age of seven. If nothing else, he could have continued the tradition of the Shuxiang family. But the tide of the times swept him into the whirlpool of revolution. In the year he entered the private school, the Sichuan Baolu Movement broke out, which became the fuse of the Xinhai Revolution soon after. Since then, Sichuan has also become a stage for new and old forces to fight each other. Years later, Satin still remembers many poor peasants who were charged with kidnapping by the government and dragged to the execution ground to behead them. However, the bandit leaders who really kill people and overdo it are relying on the protection of the official office and are at large.
In 1922, at the age of 18, Yang Chaoxi entered the Sichuan Provincial First Normal School. Here, he came into contact with the "May Fourth" new wind that had been blowing from the East for a long time. In 1926, he finally came to Beijing, the center of the new cultural movement that he longed for. Here he felt the turbulence of the National Revolutionary Movement. When he returned to Sichuan the following year, it had become a stage for the two forces to fight. The "216" incident and the "331" massacre in 1927 became Satin's deepest horror memory, and the head and hands and siblings of the party comrades were stained with blood, and the bleak reality made him an exile in his own country. In 1931, he came to Shanghai, the grandest stage of left-wing culture. Here he became "Satin".
This article is from the B09 edition of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly's June 11 feature "For the Memory of Forgetting". You can also scan the QR code in the picture to focus on this issue.
Written by | Rodong
Satin
Writing that begins in reflection
Satin's writing began in 1931. In April of that year, he wrote the short story "Russian Kerosene" set in the story of the resumption of Sino-Soviet relations, showing the welcome of Russian kerosene being transported into China. The protagonist is an intellectual. Shortly after writing, he met Ai Wu, who had just returned from Singapore and has since become a writer, on the streets of Shanghai. The two were close friends during their studies at the Sichuan Provincial First Normal School, and as early as that year, Ai Wu was obsessed with literature, and Sha Ting had not yet developed a writing interest. Now that they had met many years later, Satin had tried to write his first novel, and was very eager to discuss the novel with Aiwu, so he invited him to move in with his family, and for a period of time afterwards, the two spent the day talking about creation. And this is a literary life that Satin had never imagined, and according to him, had "never thought about writing" before.
After graduating from the Sichuan Provincial First Normal School in 1926, Sha Ting participated in the party organization activities in his hometown of Anxian County, and was forced into exile under the "White Terror", arriving in Shanghai in 1929, and then participated in the founding of the "Xinken Bookstore" and read a number of classics of world literature. Even so, he was not satisfied with his first life in Shanghai. In October 1937, he recalled in the prologue to his collection of novels, The Route, that in the year or two before he wrote in 1931, he "lived a completely gray depraved life." Writing Russian Kerosene allowed him to find that literary writing was a way of observing, understanding, or, more importantly, contributing to his time. Because of this consideration, on November 29, 1931, he and Ai Wu jointly wrote a letter to Lu Xun to ask about the theme of the novel.
In their letters, they refer to the novels they have written, in which "one is to express, in a satirical artistic manner, the petty-bourgeois youths with whom they are acquainted with them, the general weaknesses which have manifested and lurked in the present epoch", referring to Satin and his Russian Kerosene. "I wonder if a work of such content has any significance for the current era?" Lu Xun praised these two young people in his reply letter, and reminded them when talking about the subject matter: "What you can write now, you can write, you don't have to be timely, naturally you don't have to create a mutated revolutionary hero and call yourself 'revolutionary literature'; but you can't be satisfied with this, there is no reform, so that you sink yourself - that is, eliminate the help and contribution to the times." The reply was published in Cross Street on January 5, 1932, and on the same day, Satin wrote a letter to Ai Wu again, attaching a draft of their novel. Lu Xun therefore read "Russian Kerosene", but thought that "Gu Ying was self-pitying and had a waste of fame". After this, Satin rarely wrote about intellectuals. That was not territory he was familiar with.
Join the Left Writers' Union
Fast forward to October 1932, when Satin included Russian Kerosene in the publication of his first collection of short stories, Routes Outside the Law, and joined the Chinese Left-Wing Writers' Union.
Two months later, Mao Dun wrote a book review entitled "Routes Outside the Law," which was published in the October 1932 issue of Literary Monthly magazine. Mao Dun spoke highly of the article, first, he thought Satin's character dialogue was alive. Second, he argues that the collection is "devoid of incitement" and does not fall into the prevailing "formula." According to his book review, the narrative structure of the formula is that "first some oppressed people cannot find a way out in their poverty and indignation, and then a 'revolutionary' comes like a flying general, an all-knowing and all-powerful 'ideal' vanguard... The characters must belong to two well-defined opposing classes, with no middle tier and no 'class traitors'." This is the same reason that Lu Xun asked Satin to avoid writing the characters as romanticized "mutant revolutionary heroes" in his reply.
The August 1933 Edition of the Yearbook of Chinese Literature and Art (1932) reviews the literature and art of 1932 and mentions the decline of Romanticism, the rise of realism, and especially the proximity of "left-wing" writers to realism. Unfortunately, they were mostly young new writers, "most of whom were still naïve", but the Annals considered an exception, namely Satin, who "had his special ability to describe a complex and intricate scene, although his expression may be obscure".
Re-enter the countryside
However, Mao Dun also pointed out in the book review that there is a novel included in "Routes Outside the Law" that still has the shadow of "formula". The novel is called "On the Docks" and is about homeless children. Mao Dun praised Satin's ability to pay attention to the lowest level of the periphery and the possible revolution, but "the writer must first observe the lives of these wandering children, and discover the revolutionary parts, and then engage in description", and Satin's enthusiasm is more than observation, and there is a lack of understanding of the street children he writes.
Satin then abandoned the original "judgment first" approach to writing. He himself had some generalizations about this approach in his april 1946 collection of novels, The Way of the Beast, "but with some fragmentary impressions and an easy way to piece together the work from the material collected from newspaper correspondence." In the process of reflecting on his past writing, he turned his subject matter to the most familiar rural and small towns in northwestern Sichuan.
In the autumn of 1935, when his mother died, Sha Ting returned to his hometown of An County to live for a while and re-entered the life there, and since then, "I have turned my pen to the Sichuan countryside that I am familiar with", with themes related to human nature and suffering during the War of Resistance, and focusing on writing characters. Before and after the July 7 Incident in 1937, all of his novels were based on rural areas. If most of the previous works have been based on a momentary impression and newspaper correspondence under the full of enthusiasm, then according to him, only the works that have been written since then are "in line with ideals, and they are written with pain and effort, because they are all familiar subjects."
In March 1943, the Shanghai writer Huang Guofu commented on Satin's article in the magazine 'Ai Wu and Satin', which was "deep and strong, twisted and stubborn and not very popular", resulting in "a high school student who cannot understand his works much".
Huang Guofu was also amazed that Satin's personality was the opposite of his work, and his personality was cheerful and bright, straight and innocent. For example, Huang Guofu wrote that at a literary and art seminar, Satin supported the "popularization of literature and art", but he did not accept criticism that his works were not popular enough, and he believed that "the form of literary and artistic creation is free, and it is possible to use various creative methods to achieve the purpose he wants to achieve." Among those who debated With Satin were the writer Zhou Qiying and others. He finally blushed as he argued. When he returned that day, he cried, and he could peacefully argue with different opinions, so why go too far, so that night, he got up from bed and ran to the home of Zhou Qiying and several others to apologize one by one.
Sha Ting avoids an either-or personality, which in fact always influences his creation, and inspired by Lu Xun and Mao Dun, he constantly adjusts and reflects on the black and white writing "formula" to get closer to real life. He gives the impression of being "short, calm, and with infinite enthusiasm in his heart", and he writes because of this "infinite enthusiasm", and he is restrained in the process of writing. Whether in the 1930s and 1940s, when writing began, or in the second half of his life, Satin showed a relatively rare enthusiasm and calmness.
Resources:
Sha Ting Research Materials, editors: Huang Manjun, Ma Guangyu, edition: Intellectual Property Press, January 2009
"Sha Ting Anthology, Volume 10 "Memoirs", author: Sha Ting, edition: Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House, August 2017
Edit | Wang Qing, Li Yongbo, Shen Chan
Proofreading | Xue Jingning