At that time, when the 94-year-old Qian Xuesen faced Premier Wen, he once asked a question, the famous "Qian Xuesen's Question":
"Why do our schools always fail to produce outstanding talents?"
Qian Xuesen's wife, Jiang Ying, is a famous soprano singer, and she has a cousin named Jin Yong. In the chinese popular culture of the past hundred years, no one's works can be as well-known and appreciated as Jin Yong's martial arts novels.
One
Jin Yong's real name was Zha Liangyong, and in 1955, when he wrote his first martial arts novel, "Book of Swords and Enmity", he took apart the word "Yong" and became a pen name.
On March 10, 1924, Jin Yong was born in Yuan Hua Town, Haining, Zhejiang Province, and was a fellow villager with Wang Guowei, Jiang Baili and Xu Zhimo, and the latter two were even more related. The Cha clan has been a famous family since the Tang and Song dynasties, and the Ming and Qing dynasties have been the most prosperous talents in the Ming and Qing dynasties, becoming one of the few scholars in Jiangnan.
Jin Yong's ancestor Zha Shenxing was a first-class poet of the Qing Dynasty, and the engraving of his grandfather Cha Wenqing's "Haining ChaShi Poetry Copy" was piled up in two rooms in the Cha family. When Jin Yong was young, he often chased with his cousins in the game between engravings. In 1969, when Jin Yong began serializing his last novel, The Record of Lu Ding, fifty times the recollection came from Zha Shenxing's Jingyetang Poetry Collection. And Zha Liangzheng, who is the same age as Jin Yong, whose pen name is "Mu Dan", can be called the most outstanding Chinese new poetry poet of the twentieth century, and he does not let his ancestors.
By the time Of Jin Yong's father, Zha Shuqing, there were still more than 3,600 acres of land left by his ancestors, which was far from being comparable to the dilapidated Zhou Shuren family in Shaoxing. The Cha family compound has more than ninety rooms and a large garden, and employs many male and female servants. Zha Shuqing graduated from Shanghai Aurora University, received a Western-style education, and has a large collection of books at home. Jin Yong's mother, Xu Lu, also came from Haining's famous and prestigious family, and it was Xu Zhimo's aunt.
In 1951, as a representative of the landlords, Cardinal Cha was shot by the government. In modern times, such as the Qian family, the Yang family, the Cha family, and the Zhou family, which are all based on one side, have gradually disappeared completely, and the day of revival is far away.
Two
Family origins, subtle, Jin Yong likes to read extracurricular books since he was a child. He recalls in the Preface to Jin Yong's Collected Works (Triptych Edition):
"When I was in elementary school, I liked to read extracurricular books. In the lower grades, I read "Children's Pictorial", "Little Friends", "Primary School Students", and later read the rich "Children's Library", and then seemed to understand and read a variety of chapter novels. By the fifth and sixth grades, I began to read new literary and artistic works. To this day, I still love more classical literature than modern or contemporary new literature.
There were no Olympic numbers, no televisions, no cell phones. Jin Yong spent his entire elementary school years with books. Not only is the home full of all kinds of old and new novels, but there are also many foreign works in the library of the elementary school.
When Jin Yong was eight years old, he read the first martial arts novel in his life, Gu Mingdao's "The Woman of the Wild River". At that time, he naturally never imagined that more than thirty years later, he would become a generation of masters with unprecedented achievements in the history of Chinese martial arts novels.
A little older, Jin Yong fell in love with Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Seven Heroes and Five Righteousness, as well as French writer Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers. In his later creation of "The Trick of the City", there are obvious traces of influence from "The Count of Monte Cristo".
In the past few years that Jin Yong used to open his life's interest in reading, most of today's children are busy taking various interest classes and squeezing into a good middle school.
Three
In 1936, Jin Yong was promoted to Jiaxing Middle School. However, only a year later, due to the full-scale invasion of the Japanese and Kosovo, he had to embark on the road of exile for thousands of miles. After nearly two months of trekking, we arrived in the mountainous area of southern Zhejiang to resume classes. The ancestral home and the collection of books of the Cha family were all burned to the ground in the chaos of the war.
Although Jin Yong was facing the entrance examination in the third year of junior high school, one day he had a sudden whim, and together with two other classmates, compiled a teaching assistant for Xiaoshengchu, "Dedicated to Those Who Apply for Junior High School". After the publication, it was a great success, and the proceeds were enough for the three of them to successfully graduate from high school and go to college in Chongqing. For 15-year-old Jin Yong, this shows his business instincts about understanding consumer needs and meeting them in a simple way. This intuitive ability to perceive the psychology of readers was the key to his success in writing martial arts novels and founding Ming Pao many years later.
After graduating from high school and entering the Chongqing Central Political School, Jin Yong began to read the Zizhi Tongjian and Wells's Outline of World History during the summer vacation. However, for various reasons, he dropped out of school after one year. He found his cousin Jiang Fuxuan, who was the director of the National Central Library, and went to the library as an administrator, and concentrated on reading a large number of novels by Western writers such as Dumas, Scott, and Hugo, laying a solid foundation for his own creation in the future.
Later, with excellent writing, Jin Yong successively entered the "Southeast Daily" and the Shanghai "Ta Kung Pao" as a compiler. In March 1948, because of the birth of the Hong Kong edition of the Ta Kung Pao, the 24-year-old Jin Yong set foot on the land of Hong Kong Island for the first time. Although he resigned in 1950 to go to Beijing because of his dream of being a diplomat, Qiao Guanhua confessed to him that because of his landlord origins, he was unlikely to enter the Foreign Ministry.
Jin Yong soon returned to Hong Kong and took up a post at the New Evening News. For the next two or three years, he wrote screenplays for film companies and read a lot of theoretical works on Western theater and film. These were later incorporated into his novels, such as the section in "The Legend of the Archery Hero" in which Guo Jing Huang Rong's Niujia Village Secret Room healed wounds, which is a typical theatrical stage scheduling creation method.
In 1954, because of a martial arts competition in Hong Kong, Jin Yong's colleague Chen Wentong began to serialize the martial arts novel "Dragon Tiger Fighting Jinghua" in the "New Evening News" under the pseudonym Liang Yusheng. On February 8, 1955, Jin Yong was invited by editor-in-chief Rover to begin serializing the first wuxia novel, "Book of Swords and Enmity", which opened an unprecedented miracle era in the history of Chinese popular culture.
In the following 17 years, Jin Yong wrote from the age of 31 to the age of 48, and created fifteen martial arts novels such as "Flying Snow Shooting White Deer in the Sky, Laughing Book God Hero Leaning on Bi Duck", which established his grandmaster status in the history of martial arts novels in one fell swoop.
Four
Jin Yong's motivation was not for literature, but to increase the sales of newspapers, but even if he could not avoid commercial motivations, the deep Chinese cultural literacy he had cultivated since childhood also made his martial arts novels different. Even if it is not perfect, Jin Yong has changed the fate of traditional martial arts novels that are difficult to climb the elegant hall, and truly achieved the common appreciation of elegance and customs.
Hong Kong created Jin Yong. As he himself said, if he stayed in Shanghai, even if he was safe and sound in the following years, he would not have the opportunity to write martial arts novels. In the end, he will only be one of the tens of millions of people at the bottom who have been doing nothing all their lives.
Because of the great changes of the times, Jin Yong settled down in the small foreign country of Hong Kong, but the cultural traditions on his body all came from the Chinese mainland, and he inadvertently inherited the ancient Chinese civilization in the form of popular martial arts novels.
Jin Yong may be the last outstanding talent cultivated by the cultural atmosphere of the Republic of China. After he went west at this moment, even the appearance of the next Jin Yong seemed far away, let alone a master like Chen Yinke. It is not that in the current era, there are no people with talented endowments such as Jin Yong, but these people, in the case of the general lack of family environment and excellent school education, either rely on their fathers or their own clever immigrants to never return, or go to Guo Jingming, who wrote about the small era.
The weather, the place, the people, everything is breathtaking. Therefore, in my lifetime, I may never see the appearance of the next Jin Yong.
It's just that this jianghu is always your highest.