Manuscript．Cold Night

Author: Ba Jin
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2005-10-01
Features: The Night is Cold is the last full-length novel written by Ba Jin. On a night in autumn of 1944, after the air raid warning was lifted in Chongqing, Ba Jin began writing The Night is Cold. The plot of the novel unfolds almost in parallel with the author's own life: both take place in Chongqing during the War of Resistance. The day after finishing the novel in 1946, on a cold winter night in Shanghai, the ending of the story also takes place on a cold night. Ba Jin once said that writing The Night is Cold was like living within the work, as he himself lived in the background described in the novel. During those years, the essayist Miao Chongqun, the novelist Wang Luyan, and his old friend Chen Fanyu all died painfully from tuberculosis; after the war of resistance, upon returning to Shanghai, he personally buried his third brother, Li Yaolin, who had not received proper medical treatment due to his illness. Therefore, when the novel depicts Wang Wenxuan struggling for survival and suffering from illness, the faces of these friends and relatives would flash through Ba Jin's mind, making his writing deeply immersed. Professor Chen Sihuo of Fudan University said that reading the manuscripts of Ba Jin's The Night is Cold and Random Thoughts evokes completely different feelings. Random Thoughts was completed by Ba Jin in his later years when he was frail and ill, with every stroke painstakingly written down; whereas The Night is Cold was different. Ba Jin wrote with bold, flowing, and unrestrained passion, as if the ocean of emotion surged out through his pen. The manuscript of The Night is Cold has survived the erosion of time and has been preserved almost intact. It is said that during the war of resistance in Chongqing, one night, the building where Ba Jin lived caught fire, and he rushed out with a small box in haste. This box contained the first two pages of the manuscript of The Night is Cold. Later, Ba Jin said that he was lucky the fire did not spread that day, otherwise, if the building that served as the setting for Wang Wenxuan's life had been destroyed, he might not have continued writing the novel. Despite escaping one disaster after another, the existing manuscript donated by Ba Jin to the Beijing Library (now the National Library) is missing an entire page in the 56th page, with partial damage to pages 57 to 62, and the entire final part of the manuscript, from the 26th chapter to the epilogue, is lost. To ensure the completeness of the work, the published text of The Night is Cold first appeared in Cultural Renaissance was used to print the missing parts in a typeset form—because this manuscript was the typeset version used for its publication in Cultural Renaissance, and the text is identical.