May 15
The famous writer Ye Yonglie died of illness in Shanghai
He died on December 31, 2012 at the age of 8
Ye Yonglie was born in 1940 in Wenzhou, Zhejiang
Published literary works from the age of 11
At the age of 20, he became the main author of "100,000 Whys"
In 2018, Ye Yonglie was a guest on CCTV-1 "Let's Talk"
Tell about his life experiences and insights
Tonight, let's review Ye Yonglie's "literary dream"
Carefully popularize science and pass on cultural power
Speaker: Ye Yonglie
The speech is excerpted from CCTV-1 "Let's Talk", September 8, 2018
In the national unified textbook published by the People's Education Publishing House, in the textbook for the sixth grade of primary school, there is a text called "Truth Was Born After a Hundred Question Marks", and the author is in the next. Science is not difficult, and many scientific principles can be found by observing the surroundings. For example, I started by writing about a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, named Shepiro. Every day after his bath, the tub plug was pulled out, and once he happened to notice that the whirlpool was in a counterclockwise direction. The second time he took a shower and pulled it out, he found that it was still counterclockwise, and he felt that this thing might not be an accidental phenomenon. So he studied the problem and analyzed why it was a counterclockwise vortex. Because he's in the United States, in the Northern Hemisphere, this has to do with the rotation of the Earth. From this he deduced that typhoons in the Northern Hemisphere were also counterclockwise. Sure enough, his reasoning was correct. That is, he was from a small thing like a bath pulling plug to notice the direction of the whirlpool, extending to the direction of the typhoon. On March 11, 2011, a major earthquake struck Japan, and a large whirlpool formed in the sea, and that vortex was counterclockwise. Instead, in the southern hemisphere, it is clockwise. As long as you are a person with a heart, to discover science, to discover the principle, to straighten a question mark into an exclamation point, then you are a scientific discoverer.
Then, a writer who can put articles into language textbooks should be a bully when he was a child, and he should have achieved great results. Today I brought an old antique, you may wish to take a look. I went to elementary school in 1945, and there were two failed grades on the report card, one of which was a failed reading course, which is the current language, 40 points, and one was a failed essay, 40 points. This report card shows that I was not a child prodigy since I was a child, so how did I become a writer? It started when I was in the fifth grade of elementary school. I am a native of Wenzhou, Zhejiang, and we have a local newspaper called Zhejiang South Daily, which is the predecessor of the current Wenzhou Daily. I like to read this newspaper every day when I go home, the newspaper is also very close to our home, when I walked through the door of the newspaper, I saw a wooden box with a submission box written on it, I wrote a small poem on a whim that day, I threw it into this submission box, and after a few days, I received the first letter of my life, and the envelope said that Ye Yonglie's children received it. This letter tells me: Your manuscript is very well written, and we are ready to publish it in the next issue of the supplement. After about ten days, one day when I came home from school, my father was very happy to tell me, "Your poem has been published in the newspaper today!" "I went to submit articles, but my father didn't know, so my father was very happy to see that my little poem could be published in Zhejiang South Daily. That poem is actually a piece of "dried tofu", 70 words. I didn't expect this little poem to be published, when I got 9,000 yuan in manuscript fees, which was old currency at the time, and 10,000 yuan was equivalent to 1 yuan now, so my manuscript fee was actually 9 cents. Anyway, it was a great inspiration for me at the time. Everything I had started with this piece of "dried tofu", which ignited my literary dreams.
In fact, when I was in middle school, because I had more time, I could read a lot during the summer vacation and winter vacation. I thought that was the golden time to read, so I read desperately, and the books in the four major bookcases in the house were almost all gone by me. When I was in my third year of high school, when I was faced with choosing what university to go to and what major to take, I was bent on becoming a journalist. I know that there is a journalism major in the Department of Chinese at Peking University, and I am bent on taking this major. But when I inquired, there were only about two dozen recruits that year, I think the number of one in a province is less than that, I am still a little self-aware, thinking that maybe I can't pass the exam, but I have to study at Peking University, it just so happens that my sister is studying chemistry, then I decided to study chemistry. My father was very happy when he heard that I was going to study chemistry, he said that journalists are actually a very dangerous profession, but if you study chemistry, no matter how you graduate, you can make alabaster, you can make soap, and you will always have a bowl of rice to eat. In this way, I entered the Department of Chemistry of Peking University.
Although I walked into the building with all kinds of strange smells and was busy in the chemistry laboratory every day, I was in Cao Yingxin. Because the chemistry department is the wenshi building, the base camp of the Chinese department. Sometimes I would sneak to the Chinese Department to listen to lectures, and I also joined the Red Chamber Poetry Society of the Chinese Department, at that time, I also wrote poetry, essays, novels, and went everywhere to submit articles, and about one out of ten articles was very good. When I reached the third year of the Chemistry Department, I began to write chemistry in a literary tone, that is, to write science sketches. At that time, the Beijing Municipal Association for Science and Technology had a tabloid called "Science Tabloid", and I initially submitted articles to them, and I found that to write this kind of manuscript, I wrote a hundred times, writing one article and writing one article. Why? It is because not many students in the Chinese department understand science, and not many people in the chemistry department can write articles. I studied science, but I had a certain literary foundation, so I was able to publish science sketches as soon as I wrote them.
In 1959, I put together these scientific sketches into a book called "Carbon Family." After this book is written, which publishing house will it be submitted to? I was only 19 years old, and I didn't know anyone, and I didn't know which one could publish such a book. I was looking at the Xinhua Bookstore next to Peking University, and I saw that there was a similar book published by the Children's Publishing House in Shanghai, so I bought one and came back, and I knew their address from the copyright page, so I sent the manuscript. My luck was so good that my book fell into the hands of a responsible editor named Cao Yanfang. When she saw it, she liked the book very much and decided to publish it. So, in February 1960, I published my first book, Carbon One.
My good luck is actually not only this, a very wonderful opportunity made me the author of "100,000 Whys", one of the reasons is because of Cao Yanfang. At that time, she was also the editor of "100,000 Whys", responsible for the physics and chemistry divisions. The physics fascicle went very smoothly, with several authors of the covenant writing well and passing the editorial board as soon as it was reviewed. The chemistry fascicle is just the opposite, she asked 7 chemistry teachers to write, wrote for a year, after handing over the manuscript, not only was she not satisfied, the editorial department all voted negatively, why? Because the 7 teachers wrote very much like a textbook, I was in a hurry at this time, because the physics fascicle had already been compiled, but the chemistry fascicle had to be torn down and restarted. Teacher Cao Yanfang thought: Didn't Ye Yonglie throw over a copy of "Carbon Family"? This person is from the Chemistry Department of Peking University, can you let him try it? So I sent 5 "whys" for me to write and read, and I wrote 5 and sent them back. As soon as they saw it, they said that Ye Yonglie wrote very well and met the requirements, so they sent all the "whys" in the chemical fascicle. Later, when the chemistry fascicle was published, there were 175 "whys", of which 163 used my answers.
Because the chemical fascicle is well written, the editors of other fascicles have come to me for a manuscript, meteorological, geological, physiological, agricultural, and so on. So the first edition of "100,000 Whys" was a total of more than 900 "whys", a total of 5 volumes, and I wrote more than 300 by myself.
After the completion of "100,000 Whys", I had a little ambition, because "100,000 Whys" is composed of a short article, and I want to write a long article, write a novel. So in 1961, I wrote a book called "PHS Roaming the Future."
The manuscript of the book is still there and can also be seen. At that time, the paper head was this kind of paper, not even white manuscript paper, it was all this dark color paper head, and this was the manuscript of that year. What I didn't expect was that this book was rejected after being sent to the Children's Publishing House, and I really couldn't figure it out at the time, I thought the book was better written than "100,000 Whys", but why was it rejected? Later, I understood that at that time, I couldn't eat enough, but you wrote the future so well, ate well and lived well, and the children who went out drove that kind of floating car, which was droplet-type and fully transparent, and six or seven-year-old children could drive because its operation was almost automatic driving; there were robots at home, and as soon as the guests came, the robots took a cup of tea to greet... This kind of life was too different from the reality of that year, so it was rejected.
Later, I was sent to the countryside and planted rice for 3 years, and because I was from a science and engineering background, people said Ye Yonglie, you come to be an administrator, because you understand science, and planting rice must have a certain scientific foundation, so I became a rice administrator.
But I have always been obsessed with literature, writing a diary for rice every day, from rice seeds, soaking seeds to seedlings, sowing seeds, planting seedlings, etc. I wrote a thick "Rice Diary", which was recorded every day. This "Rice Diary" I also brought over, this is also an old antique manuscript, there are 13 poems in front of the diary, for example, hoe grass I also wrote a poem, sowing to write a poem, just in front of the written 13 poems, is written on the rice leaves, this is a special record in that special era. I began to be interested in insects as I took note of this "Rice Diary", so I also studied insects and wrote a book called "The Story of Treating Insects". Even in that era, I still remembered the original intention of publishing the "dried tofu" when I was 11 years old, and I still remembered literature and insisted on writing.
Now, I'm very different from the situation in a state of adversity, I'm in a good situation. I was also old, and people advised me to enjoy my old age in peace. This is another test for me, do you want to continue writing? I am still writing to this day, my work, genre and content are constantly changing, and I have begun to write documentary literature and reportage. I was still doing a round-the-world trip, taking pictures while walking, and every night I entered what I saw and heard into the computer, so I came up with a set of books called "Ye Yonglie Sees the World".
So all my works add up, the current word count is 35 million words, although the genre of my work can be constantly changing, but it is not far from its origin, this "zong" is the purpose set at the age of 11, the literary dream of that year. And for me, a lifetime is to do one thing, although "one" is a very simple number, but in fact, "one" is also a very deep number, a number that needs to be adhered to.
Life is actually very short, your life is added to this little time, do a good job, it is not enough, so I see writing as frozen time, frozen life, I put all my energy in my work. In recent years, I have been writing and sorting out the letters and manuscripts that I have formed over so many years, as well as my archives, creative notes, and more than thirteen hundred tapes of interviews... I donated so many things to the Shanghai Library. These important materials do not belong to me personally, but belong to the country and belong to history, and in the future future generations will study history, and these may be helpful to them. I would have thought, after I died, to write a sentence on my tombstone – sorry, I can't answer the "why" for you anymore. Later, I thought about it, and I thought it should be changed to -- please come to the Shanghai Library to find me.
Choose one thing, for the rest of your life
Ye Yonglie spent his life
It explains the love of writing
Finish reading this talk
What do you think?
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