Live, but remember - watch Deng Yiguang's long new work "People, or All Soldiers"
Finally, I read Deng Yiguang's new 770,000-word novel "People, or All Soldiers" intermittently, and the mood was just like the material appearance of this new work: thick, heavy, and a little stuffy...
"People, or All Soldiers" by Deng Yiguang, Sichuan People's Publishing House
As a writer, Deng Yiguang has a well-known logo that is "the most able to write about soldiers", and his works such as "I am the sun", "Father is a soldier", "I am my god" and other works are evidences of this logo, in his pen, his soldiers are full of heroic and masculine beauty. This time, the new work "Man, or All Soldiers" was released, and the media also defined it as a "war novel", and in terms of theme alone, such a definition is not inevitable. There is naturally a war, there will inevitably be soldiers, but this "People, or All Soldiers" is quite subversive compared with the image of the soldier in Deng Yiguang's previous novels. Of course, far from being just characters, this new work has made a new dedication to contemporary Chinese literature in multiple dimensions such as material selection, structure and depth of thought.
"Man, or All Soldiers" is about a little-known past from the "World War II" period. On December 8, 1941, just a few hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, another raid on Hong Kong was launched. The Hong Kong garrison, made up of multinational forces, surrendered after 18 days of resistance and after paying a heavy casualty price. At that time, Yu Shushi, a lieutenant quartermaster of the Kuomintang Seventh Theater Military Station Directorate, was unfortunately captured by the Japanese army and spent three years and eight months of inhuman life in a prisoner-of-war camp located in the jungle of Shendao Island. The work does not show the war head-on, but takes the trial of Yu Shushi in the military court of the National Government after the war as the axis, and unfolds from a multi-person and multi-perspective narrative. Around the confessions, statements and testimonies of the defendant Yu Shushi, the inquisitor Feng Houwei, the lawyer Xian Zongbai, Yu Shushi's adoptive mother Yin Yunying, the boss Mei Changzhi, Li Mingyuan, the deputy officer of the prisoner of war camp Yashi Daisuke, the prisoner of war camp comrade Aaron and others, two clear clues gradually appeared: one is the life course of Yu Shushi's study in Japan, the United States work, and the return to China to join the army and was involved in the Hong Kong campaign and eventually captured; the other is the three-year and eight-month prisoner life of the prisoner camp. There are historical figures in the book, such as the intersection of historical celebrities such as Yu Shushi and Xiao Hong and Zhang Ailing, as well as fictional characters; there are historical events, witnesses to many major events, and there are also fictional plots; detailed to the climate change of each day, the trajectory of each bullet, and the thinking of the country, the current situation, the war and the fate of mankind. For the writing of this work, Deng Yiguang went in and out of Hong Kong many times, combing through tens of millions of words of various graphic historical materials, and collecting and sorting out hundreds of gigabytes of video materials from libraries in various countries. In the face of such a heavy work, the angles that can be interpreted will naturally not be less, but the following two characteristics are particularly prominent.
Although "Man, or All Soldiers" takes the 18-day defense of Hong Kong as the overall background of the story, the war in Deng Yiguang's pen is treated as neither limited to China and Japan nor subject to both Britain and Japan, but as part of the entire Second World War. Such an international vision with strong subjective design is very meaningful in China's contemporary literature. As we all know, the eight-year bloody War of Resistance is a popular theme in China's contemporary literary creation, but although our past novels with this theme also involved a small number of outsiders, such as the Burma Expeditionary Force and General Chennault's "Flying Tigers", etc., more of them were isolated on the local battlefield, whether it was a frontal battlefield or a guerrilla attack behind enemy lines. It is not that this kind of material selection is a big problem, but if it is all the same, it will indeed bring some limitations. From an intellectual point of view, it is as if China's eight-year War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression was merely an isolated event between China and Japan and had little to do with the anti-fascist war in the whole world; from an epistemological point of view, dealing with the subject of the War of Resistance in isolation can neither fully restore Japan's strategic intention of invading China nor fully understand the international contribution and world value of China's eight-year War of Resistance. As the saying goes, vision determines the pattern, and the pattern affects the depth. If it is said that the anti-war novels in Contemporary Literature in China have not yet appeared "peak" works, the limitations of their vision and pattern cannot but be said to be one of its important reasons, and it is not difficult to see the difference of this work when examining "People, or All Soldiers" from this dimension. The work seems to be based only on the 18-day defense war in Hong Kong, but the attitude of the United States to ride the wall at the beginning of the Japanese war of aggression against China, the secret joy of the Kuomintang after learning that Japan launched the Pearl Harbor attack, and Churchill's preferred to give Hong Kong to the hands of the Japanese army rather than agree with the entry of the Chinese army, etc., have greatly deepened the thickness of this work, and it is thick in the author's understanding of war to enter the philosophical height, from the perspective of the whole human race to reflect on war and pray for peace. So that readers have a new thinking about history, the future and responsibilities, and gain new enlightenment.
Different from the masculine and powerful military figure that appeared in Deng Yiguang's previous long war novels, the protagonist of "Man, or All Soldiers", Yu Shushi, although a soldier but also a prisoner of war among the soldiers, showed more weakness in him--- obedience to his father's instructions, only promises to reprimand his superiors, and silence in the care of the Japanese army; and there was not only a prisoner of war like Yu Shushi in the work, but also a group of prisoners of various colors on The Island of Sunshine and the wooden expression of ashes that had lost hope. Speaking of which, in the genealogy of world literature, the life of prisoners of war and prisoner of war camps is a rich mine for many writers to create materials, and there have also been many popular works such as "Black Hell Tyrant", "The Great Sneak Attack", "The Fifth Slaughterhouse", "Polar Rebirth", "A Prisoner of War Who Has Been Hunted for Forty Years" and so on. However, in the history of contemporary Chinese literature, there have been very few novels about prisoner-of-war camps. This is because for a long time in our conception, the image of the soldier has been more solidified: either to kill the enemy or to sprinkle blood on the battlefield, rather than stand and die than to kneel, and to be captured is a shame. The result of the solidification of such a concept will inevitably lead to the shaping of the image of the military who should have paid attention to individuality into an industrialized standard production. As a result, the facialization of images and even the dramatization of gods have become a common writing custom. In stark contrast: Deng Yiguang's "Man, or All Soldiers" takes a prisoner-of-war camp as a microcosm of "World War II", which is of course creative in the war novels written in Chinese, which is not only a manifestation of the author's courage, but also determined by the depth of Deng Yiguang's thinking about the relationship between war and people.
In Deng Yiguang's pen: Although Yu Shushi is a prisoner, he is not yet a betrayal; he is sometimes meticulous, but he never betrays his companions; he looks weak, but often fights for the meagre rights and interests of his friends in a "self-masochistic" way... In his works, Deng Yiguang did not subjectively elevate the spiritual will of the prisoners of war at the spiritual level, but only logically imagined what different individuals in a long-term environment of extreme hunger and high fear were thinking and doing. Therefore, in Yu Shushi, we see more fear, from one fear to another, and his sense of life as a normal person has been cut to the skin by war, like a social defect made by the war machine.
At this point, it seems that a general text can be written for "Man, or All Soldiers": this work is not so much a novel with a prisoner of war theme, but rather a meditation on the depths of human nature in a cruel and real extreme environment. The author creates an extreme environment through the defense of Hong Kong, and then fully excavates "people" and dissects human nature. The novel is obviously different from the war theme in the general sense, beyond the habitual home country and the world and moral thinking, and its dissection of human nature through war and the depth of thinking about human civilization are rare and valuable, which is undoubtedly a new harvest of contemporary Chinese war literature. If there is anything unsatisfactory, it is that there is indeed room for further condensation in the work. (Pan Kaixiong)