"Zhang Ailing: Portraits of Beauty and Desolation: Beauty and Desolation

Author: Ren Ruwen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-10-01
Features: Zhang Ailing is undoubtedly one of today's most outstanding and important writers in China. In terms of short stories alone, her achievements can be compared to those of modern American female literary giants such as Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Flannery O'Connor, and in some aspects, she may even surpass them. The Golden Cangue is a fifty-page novella, in my opinion, one of the greatest middle-length novels in Chinese history since ancient times. After Lu Xun, there was her. She was a great seeker, and unlike Lu Xun, whose search was the mournful cry of a battle-scarred warrior after decades of revolution and counter-revolution, Zhang Ailing was like a newly sprouted seed, seeking sunlight and air. She seemed fragile, but because she had never been crushed, she was free of any pathology. In the long, harsh winter of the sky, the news of the heavens stirred, and this fresh seed brought to the world an invincible vitality of health and brightness. Lu Xun faced politics sharply, so his satire and condemnation were fierce, but Zhang Ailing was not like that. In her hands, literature returned to the human world from politics, becoming more intimate. The era was disintegrating, and she sought a life of freedom, truth, and stability. Zhang Ailing, a Chinese woman with the "vulgar" Chinese name, once created a war-torn China, but it all ended badly. Is Zhang Ailing's fate a good ending? No one can answer that easily. She created a strange apocalyptic world filled with too many memories of family and nation, like overlapping copies of photographs—a complex and illogical past. Family heirlooms, wedding robes—words like "the vastness of the sea and the passage of time" and "a fleeting life like a dream" are prophecies of history; at the intersection of yin and yang, she felt the coolness of an ancient tomb in the historical tunnel, squinting at the sunlight but unable to step into its brilliance. A sense of magnificence and desolation, a magnificent yet decaying setting—this is the apocalypse in an elegy. In short, Zhang Ailing is a tree in the garden of literature, lush and graceful, with branches and leaves spread wide, reaching far into the unknown.