Lao He replied quickly, and he would arrange for the two comrades to go to Xi'an around March 25. Sure enough, on the afternoon of March 24, the office of the Writers' Association called Baling Township** in my area, and a cadre who was returning home sent me a message and asked me to pick up visitors from Beijing at the railway station at 8 o'clock in the morning on the 25th.

As soon as the village cadre who sent me the message went out, the village health doctor walked in with my mother in his arms and said that my mother's blood pressure was over 200 high and that she had to lie down. My mother couldn't stand up when she lay down, and half of her body was numb and stiff, just under my nose as I watched. The doctor quickly hung up an infusion bottle for her to lower her blood pressure. My head is wooden, and a visitor from Beijing may have just taken a train out of the capital at this time. It was a coincidence that there was still a sunset in the evening, but after dark, there was a sudden heavy snowfall. I barely closed my eyes all night, guarding my mother and watching the snow in the yard thicken to a foot. About an hour before dawn, I asked a villager to take care of my mother, and I stepped on the road through the snow. The snow was so good, starting from the gate of my house, walking through the fields between the two villages and villages, I stepped on the first footprints of the virgin's snow fields and village lanes. I caught the first suburban bus, and when I entered the Writers' Association compound, it was not yet time to go to work. I asked for a bus to rush to Xi'an Railway Station, and after waiting for a long time, the honorable Gao Xianjun and Hong Qingbo from the Gaomen Tower finally walked out of the station, and the time was about 8 o'clock.

Gao Xianjun and Yue are casual, there is no strangeness and estrangement when they meet, and they smile very charmingly. Hong Qingbo is younger, but he wears a pair of thick glasses, doesn't talk much, and has a strand of shyness when he laughs, which makes him even more charming. I thought at the time, how could the people who had come out of the high gate tower still have a restrained shyness when they arrived in the local provinces? I arranged for them to go to the guest house, and they went to find food and scenery to play on their own, and hurried back to the countryside, saying only that there were still two chapters left to "pass", and that they were still told that there was still a mother who suddenly lay down and hung a medicine bottle. My wife and children lived in the city, I lived in an old house in the countryside to write my manuscripts, and my mother returned to the countryside from the city during the Spring Festival, but she fell ill before she returned to the city. In this way, I watched my mother watch the slowdown of the liquid hanging in the air, while reviewing the text of the last two or three chapters of the manuscript in the next study. Thinking that Gao and Hong were living in Xi'an and waiting to get the manuscript, I felt psychological tightness and oppression for the first time, which was a sense of urgency that I had never felt in the four years since the beginning and completion of the Bai.

Two days later, I arrived in Xi'an early in the morning with the manuscript in my bag. On the bus in the suburbs, I kept holding this stack of manuscripts, a kind of calm in tension and tension in calm. Along the way, I was thinking about how to speak when I handed over the stack of manuscripts to Gao and Hong, hoping that they would read them carefully, but also not wanting to put pressure on them, so it was better not to mention any ideas and difficulties in writing. In this way, in the guest room of the Writers' Guild guest house, I just took the manuscript out of my pocket and handed it to them, and I could not even say a word, when suddenly a sentence came to my lips, I even surrendered my life to you, and at the last moment I pressed it down my throat and did not say it, but I almost burst into tears. In fact, based on my own understanding of literature, I only need to ask the editor to read the manuscript without explanation. In the afternoon, I hurried back to my hometown in the countryside to take care of my mother, and I didn't even have the opportunity to invite Gao and Hong, two new friends, to taste the gourd chicken, which I still think is a regret.

That's when I began to enter a state of complete leisure. I don't read any novels, and I have a strange state of mind that has never happened in my life, refusing to read modern literature, or even rebelliously reading modern literature. But I suddenly wanted to read classical poetry, so I pulled out the "Dictionary" that had been stuffed in the bookshelf for many years, and tasted the charm in those antique ink marks and was amazed. As a rule, I envisaged a long review process for the manuscript of the book "Bai", with the first review, the re-examination, and the final review, and it would take more than two months for a manuscript of nearly 500,000 words to complete this process of review, to say the least, because the editors could not only look at the manuscript, they had to hold meetings, receive visitors from all over the world, and deal with household chores. Until they agree on their conclusions, it is difficult to give me a concrete statement. Therefore, I waited in the rare silence and tasted the wonderful sentences of the poets. Quite unexpectedly, on the twentieth day after Gao and Hong left Xi'an with the manuscript, I received a letter from Gao Xianjun. I hurriedly read the letter, squealing three times before falling on the couch, pouring out the tears that had not been shed in front of him.

It's a letter that drives me crazy. The letter said that he and Hong Qingbo had finished reading the manuscript during their journey from Xi'an to Chengdu and back to Beijing, and that they had written to me on the day they returned to Beijing. The excitement of their reading made me feel the effect of expectation, and their common comments made me tremble. I tested my personality once again, and soon I calmed down and fell into a soothing silence that I had never experienced before. I also realized that the tension and fear of waiting for the verdict were hidden under the surface of the leisure of the previous 20 days, but I knew that the result was still far away. The early arrival of this unexpected verdict-style letter completely dissolved the deep psychological fear and tension. All my intentions have been understood by Gao and Hong, and all the efforts of the past six years have been reasonable, and what else can make people feel the happiness after the labor of creation!

Lao He then wrote a letter, and the excitement and joy that can be imagined for which he waited for nearly twenty years, from the encouragement and agitation on the streets of Xiaozhai in the winter of 1973 to the review of the book "Bai" he wrote to me in Beijing in the spring of 1992, which was too long for him, and for me, at least it did not disappoint this friend, and our friendship was self-evident. Then there was the trivial matter of how to deal with the manuscript, which I left to him, and I had full trust in the editors in the tall gatehouse.