Deng Youmei

I would like to thank the Writers Publishing House for encouraging and urging me to compile this five-volume collection. I would like to take this opportunity to review and summarize my literary writing over the past half century.

The first work I published was in 1946, in the New Fourth Army journal Song and Drama, and it was the dramatist Zhang Tuo who encouraged me to write and publish that work for me. The work, along with the journal in which it was published, is no longer available. But since then, I have been interested in writing, so I will never forget Comrade Zhang Tuo and this publication.

Forty-three years have passed since then.

However, my writing time cannot be counted as 43 years, because in the 22 years from 1957 to 1978, I did not write anything other than "inspection books", "ideological reports", and "reform summaries". Although the review book inevitably criticizes himself for being influenced by foreign bourgeois literary and artistic ideas and the black line of Chinese literature and art, it still does not belong to the literary category. So to be fair, I should have been writing for the first 12 years and the last 15 years together, just over 20 years. Fortunately, I didn't have the honor of participating in the "Great Criticism Group" or "Writing Group" during the *****, and I didn't have to burn some of my favorite products.

Of course, I made some choices.

Five books came out this time, one short story, two novellas, one novel, and one essay.

I started with short stories in my novels, and the first two were published in Rap & Rap. It was sent by Comrade Zhao Shuli's hand. The first article was written when he participated in the literary and artistic group of the Korean front-line condolence group, and under the leadership of comrades Tian Han and Tian Jian, he was gathered in Dalian. At that time, most of the participants in that group were old writers, and I was a small rush class in it. Learn from others and get guidance from everyone. Probably less than half of that group is left now. Comrade Tian Han, Comrade An E, and Comrade Tian Jian have long since passed away. Wang Wenshi, Huang Guliu, Liu Shengya, and Haimo have also passed away. Although Lu Ling is alive, he is no longer able to write; Comrades Yan Chen and Lu Fei are riddled with old illnesses. However, Comrade Cao Ming is still energetic. The young ones are me and Lin Jinlan. Jin Lan has become famous, has become a family of his own, is married in the human realm, his heart is far away from himself, his head is full of silver hair, and he has a red face. There are still new works that surprise the world. A few years ago, I saw He Bitterness in Tianjin, and I don't know what happened to him now.

I'm also the least successful of my younger generation. But the encouragement I received from several teachers for this first novel strengthened my confidence in writing a novel. After reading this novel, Comrade Shuli only made one opinion: "Can you write clearly in the future?" I can guess anything else, but I can't guess the name of this person and place. At the same time, I was assigned a task: "It's August Day soon, and you can write another novel that reflects the life of the Eighth Route Army." So I moved on to the second one. This is "We Are All Gay" and "Growing Up". Today, it really doesn't even reach the level of composition for middle school students. I chose these two articles, one is to commemorate the old-timers who supported my start, and the other is to show my ugliness. Remind yourself: don't think you have any genius or aura. ! It's the older generation who are holding it and helping you get on this road. What we did today is far from what our predecessors expected. If you have good energy, you will work hard, and if you don't have enough energy, you will stay honest. Don't know how many bowls of dry rice you eat, make a light and thin appearance!

"Our Commander" is the first work I published after my comeback. When I wrote it, I hadn't smashed the "***", and I was grief-stricken after hearing the obituary of Comrade Chen Yi's death on the radio, and secretly wrote a few memories to express my nostalgia for the old army commander, and I didn't plan to publish it. After I became a rightist, I wrote a letter to Commander Chen Yi, and soon after a unit approached me to talk. He said to me, "Comrade Chen Yi has sent a letter. At present, the Central Committee has no policy against the rightists that can be screened. As soon as you have it, we will solve your problem immediately! "Although this policy of the central government was not promulgated until ***** later, Comrade Chen Yi personally interrogated me about it at a time when the day was full of opportunities, but it gave me the determination and courage to persist in surviving in the situation of nine deaths and a lifetime. When I heard the news of his passing, I couldn't put it into words.

This work was hidden after it was written, and after "***" was just defeated, it was seen by my childhood comrade-in-arms and lifelong eldest sister Ru Zhijuan, and when I had not yet implemented the policy, I took the risk to take it to Shanghai and publish it. They had sent me a letter to my pre-retirement unit for advice (I had been ordered to "voluntarily retire" when I was forty-five years old), and the comrades from the security section there were very nice and wrote back: "There are no new crimes during the reform period." But the world is changing faster than people think, and by the time the work is published, the whole country is already criticizing the two "whatevers", proposing that practice is the only criterion for testing the truth.

This novel won the first prize in the first National Excellent Novel Awards. Since then, I have started my second life as a pen farmer.

I haven't written a novel for more than twenty years. I haven't read a novel for ten years, and after I started writing again, I have a question of "how to write novels in the future". Twenty years of life in a separate book have given me a lot of new insights into life and art. Although the Soviet-style literary ideas I received in my youth will leave an imprint on me for the rest of my life. But subjectively speaking, I try my best to "change the law". First, pay more attention to culture and readability; The second is to insist on my personal evaluation of people and things. The former's experiment was to write Pekingese in Beijinger; The latter is manifested in the shift of the focus to the trivial things that were once excluded from the object of literary depiction. In this way, he wrote the series of works "Words of Tao Ran Pavilion", "Double Cat Picture", "That Five", and "Smoke Bottle". At the same time, I don't want to give up the war life and extraterritorial life that I have accumulated over the years. These are the "Stronghold" and "Farewell, Seto Inland Sea" and several other articles. So my novels have two sets of pen and ink. Write about Beijing and write about outside Beijing. I attach great importance to the influence of literature on people's spiritual cultivation, but I do not believe in its role and ability to "intervene in life". I rarely write about this kind of thing. I'm a conservative person by nature, and I can't catch up with the new trends even if I want to. No matter how lively the outside world is about the various new waves and new genres, I still write in the way I know and love to use. Sometimes I come up with a new twist just to make a joke and try out how wonderful the trendy writing is, and whether it is unattainable. "Deserted Temple" is this kind of thing.

Actually, I prefer prose in my heart. Especially after the age enters the stage of "old and not dead". The prose is not written with too much sense of mission. Don't take a shelf, don't pretend to be knowledgeable, talk about gossip, and entertain yourself. But it's not all of that stuff in this collection of essays. I'm from the 40s. I didn't have the talent of a superman, a prophet, or a thinker, and I used to want to be a standard and obedient young man (I used to be an outstanding youth league member in Beijing). Influenced by the trend of the times, there have been erroneous and harmful manifestations in ideology, viewpoint, and literary style. I also picked a little bit of these articles in the concentration. The first is to honestly admit to readers that his hands and face are not as inherently white and unpolluted as some friends, and the second is to voluntarily become a negative teacher, so that others will no longer like that point of view and that style of writing after seeing it.

Finally, let's talk about this "long book". This long book is the product of chance. I wanted to write something like a memoir, a long essay on a solid note, or something like that. I thought it was good, but I found that it didn't work when I moved my pen. This is written about many people who have had relationships with me. From cadres at the central leadership level, senior celebrities, contemporary celebrities, to friends of the three religions and nine streams. If they all sing praises and say that they are all perfect, they are not telling the truth; If there are deficiencies in the points, even if there are weaknesses that ordinary people have, or even just fun, it will cause trouble. Not to mention that there were some things that even I felt that I should be ashamed of, so I gave up the whole plan. However, at the beginning of the 50s, I entered Liangshan with the Central Nationalities Visiting Group, and it was an unforgettable page in my life. At that time, Liangshan was restored to the untouched stage of slave society. There are very few Han Chinese who have gone deep into the world and lived with slave owners for a few months. I'm afraid that there are some situations that the current young people of the Yi nationality in Liangshan don't know much about. A few days ago, I was talking to Jidi Maga, and he told me that a little girl from the Yi nationality that we brought out to study, Qumu Axia, later became a martyr in the style of Ding Youjun (when the martyr Ding Youjun died, we were also besieged by bandits in Xichang City). One of the cadres we worked with as a slave owner even mentioned my name in a conversation. It made me a little emotional. I took this experience and turned it into a novel with imagination and fiction. I don't know if this novel will succeed or fail. But I wanted to give readers a little bit of the hard story of starting a business, which should always be achieved.

1993, 5, 18. Beijing