Passionate Return East

Author: Gao Ge
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-02-01
Features: Comes with a valuable bookplate, game experience time 240 points! Collect 6 bookplates to embark on a game treasure hunt and have a chance to win exquisite virtual equipment! A grand game group novel! A reading of a game, a game of reading, a role-playing writing of six authors! A luxurious author lineup: Qingchuan, Du Ruo, Ge Jinzi, Pan Haitian, Liu Wenyang, Gao Ge. Strongly recommended by renowned writers: Jin Hezai, Jiang Nan, Zhao Haihong, Liu Xingshi, Cheng Lingsu, Han Song. The epic of the passionate alliance's return east. The Golden Alliance established unparalleled achievements across Europe, yet its leader was a mysterious figure from the East. After the sudden turn of events, who would step forward to laugh at the changing tides. A game of strategy, two legends of passion.
Below is the naval port, the sea, the lover I have loved for a lifetime. If I get tired, may I rest in your arms? Prince Henry is dead, leaving behind the lonely Golden Coast. Dias's sailors grew weary of the Cape of Good Hope, Columbus discovered America, but the name of the continent was given to the thief Amerigo Vespucci. The Strait of Magellan had no trade winds, and its discoverer remained alone for five hundred years. The sea is my king, I am the flood surging in the sixteenth century. I must return to the sea, to that desolate expanse between land and sky. The tide surges, the cold wind howls, the fierce call of nature, irresistible.
At the bloody dusk, though I may be extinct at any moment, I still want to return to the heroic century—the age of navigation. The story of the Mongol and Han descendants stranded in Europe who returned east in Gao Ge's Passionate Return East and the entire Age of Navigation series is permeated with an indescribable emotion. As the novel's protagonist says, "It turns out that the glory of the ancient Eastern nation also flows in our blood." That's why it's called Passionate Return East.
The descendants of Asian conquerors, though they established the wealthy Golden Alliance in Europe, were always "exceptions." Meanwhile, the sea route eastward pioneered by Zheng He was to rebuild true glory in the homeland. As Captain Baiyin put it, "There, no one will look down on us with our yellow skin, there will be no cannons of the Portuguese or Spanish. Two hundred years ago, the entire Europe trembled before our ancestors! Now, we must return there!" This elevates the novel beyond a simple game text. And the author's description of the "Sharp Yi" of Asians versus the "Dawn" of Europeans in a battle will take me back to 1999 in Macau. I seem to see the Portuguese flag slowly lowering in front of the Governor's Palace, the five-starred red flag rising, and the Portuguese governor leaving in tears.
I once ended my own novel Red Ocean with these words: "The Portuguese established a foothold in Macau in 1553, the thirty-second year of the Jiajing era of the Ming Dynasty. This was the first Western fleet to reach China. The White people (Caucasians) thus began a new history." But in Gao Ge's logic, it is inevitably the fleet of the Chinese who first goes to such places to create a great future! In reality, it is the world's great changes over the past half-century and more that have given rise to the unique culture of our generation, and the unique culture of Gao Ge's generation. Perhaps there are differences in age and cultural understanding, but people share a similar sense of destiny. This feeling hased several generations, even a dozen generations of Chinese people since the nineteenth century. Is this the profound background against which the Age of Navigation game and novel were born? How many people reading Passionate Return East will feel a surge of passion as Han and Mongol sailors use advanced ships and cannons to confront the fleets of Portugal and Spain? Perhaps such descriptions will seem a bit funny when Gao Ge's children grow up, but this was the era. ── However, there are still differences.
The background of the Age of Navigation game is more ambiguous. In the eyes of the new generation, the fifteenth century was already a globalized world. Trade between Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East had been established, and sailors were of various nationalities. Different religions had the possibility of mutual understanding. Amidst the clash of civilizations, the author gave it a sense of appreciation that previous generations could hardly fathom. It should be noted that this is still six hundred years after Zheng He's voyages to the West. The rebirth of the ocean complex is more natural, more confident, and more deeply rooted in the affirmation of China's maritime interests compared to the previous century.
Let the descendants of Genghis Khan leave their horses and take the helm of first-class warships, rather than seeing the farmers from the Loess Plateau staggering towards the sea. This is indeed the sentiment of a new generation, the generation that grew up with the anxiety of aircraft carriers, with an air of arrogance.
The greatest exception lies in the fact that this emotion ultimately finds its expression in a game. The entire series of novels is rooted in the online game. It is a trend, a fashion, and a branch of commerce. The sea depicted by gamers in the early twenty-first century is already fundamentally different from the sea seen by intellectuals in the 1980s. The alliance between literature and games is becoming increasingly popular. People turn games into literature, or adapt literature into games, creating a brand-new reality where three-dimensional animation and two-dimensional text can freely transform. This makes people realize that the world can exist in a more playful way, and with just a mouse, one can play with the world. Perhaps the world itself is a game? Should we approach the world with a gaming attitude?
In the year-end special issue of Orient Watch Weekly in 2004, an essay on Chinese culture that year called 2004 the "year of gamification." So, how many "grand sacred objects" of the spiritual world can be transformed into game plots? Can they be transformed into program code? Can they be transformed into digital existence? Can they be transformed into "nothingness"? In this sense, the emotions that stirred people's hearts at the beginning of this preface are, in Gao Ge's novels, actually completely dissolved? Clearly, many are not yet mentally prepared for this. In the near future, people may submit more to the rules of games than to the rules of reality. This is the inevitable trend foreseen by the novel.
Reading Passionate Return East, I seem to see Jules Verne resurrected, including the detail of using whale oil to churn the waves, which seems directly inspired by The Children of Captain Grant. But what kind of resurrection is this? Verne was serious, such colonial cases had indeed happened in the West; but in Age of Navigation, such history or future can only exist in the imagination of a nation, labeled as "fictional," and cannot be taken seriously.