The Story of Prisoner Li Tongzhong

Author: Zhang Yigong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-10-01
Features: Over the span of more than two decades, several generations of writers with vastly different concepts, experiences, and mindsets have emerged, as have countless works in terms of care, narrative style, and literary forms. The selected works in The Top 50 Chinese Novels (1978-2000) included here bear witness to the truth of this observation. Chinese writers, constrained by historical traditions and real-world environments, cannot develop their fiction and ideas outside of this tradition and reality. Around the late 1970s, novels began to reveal aspirations and characteristics distinct from those of the unified era. As a form of imaginative and fictional writing, it gradually shed its singular political objectives and emphasized didactic functions. Issues related to human nature, such as inner suffering, emotional needs, and ideological conflicts, began to be reflected and expressed in novels.
Content: Why does it always rain during the Qingming Festival? The silent, fine, and dense raindrops, like weaving a silver net, intertwine with chaotic thoughts, shrouding the mind of Tian Zhenshan, the Party Secretary of the County Committee. Tian Zhenshan is sitting in a jeep, heading to a remote mountainous county to attend a rehabilitation meeting for a former branch secretary. This branch secretary had passed away nineteen years ago. Over the past nineteen years, history has brought people so many unexpected disturbances and cruel jokes! Yet, Tian Zhenshan has never forgotten this person—Li Tongzhong, the small laborer born on the road of famine, who began working for a landlord at the age of ten, the militia team leader during the land reform, a volunteer soldier in the Korean War, the disabled veteran and "lame branch secretary" of Li Jiazhai Brigade—Li Tongzhong.