"Ji Jie Ji"

Author: Li Yimeng
Publisher:
Publishing Date: November 1, 1995
Features: I write poems simply. At the beginning, I had only read Three Hundred Poems of the Tang Dynasty and didn’t understand tonal patterns or rhyme schemes. During my high school years, I would often write essays or monographs, which had to be hundreds or even thousands of characters just to the Chinese teacher. A simple poem, like a five-character, was no more than twenty characters, a seven-character no more than twenty-eight, a five-character no more than forty, and a seven-character no more than fifty-six. Sometimes I would get inspired and write something that actually resembled a poem. This made it easy to get approval from the Chinese teacher. In reality, I had never studied poetry—I didn’t understand the contents or schools of early Tang, late Tang, Tang poetry, or Song Ci. Between 1927 and 1933, I wrote some , but later stopped even that. Occasionally, I would write a few , but I mostly wrote , especially after the 1941 Anhui-Nan Incident. I remember writing a Jiangdu Chun on the Chinese New Year’s Eve of 1941 in Guilin and sending it to Guo La in Chongqing without a title or introduction. He immediately recognized it as my work, and the comrades in Chongqing knew I had safely escaped from Anhui-Nan. For some reason, writing came very naturally to me. From Guilin to Hong Kong, from Hong Kong to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Yancheng, and from Yancheng to Siyang, until the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, I wrote many , though I occasionally wrote a few poems as well. After 1949, I wrote very little. When it comes to poetry, from the ancient Book of Songs to the Tongguang style of the late Qing Dynasty, I have neither engaged with it, nor understood it, nor studied it. However, during my university years, I read a lot of Song Ci. Like poetry, I didn’t understand much about it, but compared to poetry, my interest in Ci was much greater. Even after 1949, though I no longer wrote Ci, I had the means to buy books and collected over two or three thousand volumes of Ci, many of them rare editions. I also put some effort into studying them. I once copied my poems and Ci into a book titled Jike Ji, meaning "to strike the oar against the current." During the Cultural Revolution, I was afraid of trouble and burned it. The poems and Ci from 1933 to 1965 in this collection were gathered by comrades from various sources and can be considered fragments of fragments. The poems from my travels to Lushan, Ruijin, and Jinggangshan are complete because, in addition to being copied into that manuscript, I also printed a mimeographed version. The manuscript was burned, but the mimeographed version was kept by some comrades, who returned it to me after the Cultural Revolution. For the trip to Huangshan, I had over twenty poems, but since they had never been mimeographed, I could only find three after searching everywhere. Looking back now, there’s nothing in them that could be seen as complaining or advocating capitalism. But strangely, these poems about Lushan became the target of the Cultural Revolution’s struggle against me as a capitalist roadster in power. They even claimed that my poem about the small town of Guling was promoting capitalism and that my poem about the Arhat painting was expressing belief in Amitabha. So, I simply burned the manuscript. Now, though I regret it, burning it at the time saved me trouble and got rid of some evidence they could use. From 1966 to 1973, there was no environment for me to write poems. After 1973, inspired by mountains, waters, events, and people, I wrote a few more pieces—only two were Ci, the rest were poems. These are now included in the latter part of this collection. Of course, I also deleted some poems that weren’t very good. Most of my poems are , even if they don’t fit the theme, because writing Ci is troublesome, and so is writing . As a poetry collection, consisting mostly of , it might be too monotonous. The manuscript of Jike Ji has already been destroyed. I don’t want to burn this small collection either. There’s no other name I can think of, so let Jike Ji be reborn from the flames.