How Faith is Forged: Re-Treading the Long March of the Red Army

Author: Cultural Long March
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
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That was 1995. That year, I was serving as the Deputy Director of the Policy Research Office under the county committee. This position required me to work day and night to draft materials for the county committee. Just as the year-end work was in full swing, I received a meeting notice from the Changde Writers' Association, on behalf of the Hunan Provincial Writers' Association, congratulating me on being honorably elected as a representative of the "Fourth Hunan Provincial Youth Writers' Congress" and asking me to attend on time without absence. I was delighted and naturally wanted to go and bask in the glory, but I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to take time off during the busy year-end. I tiptoed into the office of the Director of the County Committee Office, took out the notice from the envelope, and laid it flat, pushing it to Director Chen Hehuan, who was buried in his work at a curved black office desk. Director Chen first looked at the notice, then at me, and smiled brightly, the corners of his mouth and the skin around his ears and face crinkling into beautiful rays of light. I felt relieved.
“Go, it’s a good thing! The year-end work is busy, but you can arrange it well.” he said. After signing “Agree to Attend” with a, he handed it back to me. Even as he was buried in his work, his mouth was still smiling gently, and I felt happy but also worried whether this slender person could handle the “mountain of literature” pushed upon him. Given this frail scholar’s body, he had still managed to achieve fifteen years in Tibet! I took the notice and attended the conference with honor. Five young writers from Changde (all under the age of 38, I was 36 at the time) attended, and I was one of the least accomplished among them. Although I had published a small book titled Winter Sowing, Spring Harvest with Lijiang Publishing House two years ago, I didn’t feel it was a work of genius. It was like a raw block, full of the marks of chisels and saws, just as I warned in the postscript Life in the Forge: I firmly believe that life must be hammered and refined. I am still a lump of ore or raw iron, but there are plenty of hammers and furnaces in front of me: I must go and refine myself. I also invited friends and colleagues who understand my life’s refinement to come along and refine together, to forge the “golden elixir of life” for the common ideal of humanity! Therefore, when speaking to the leading Chairman Chen Dixin, I said: I came here on the spoils system and wasn’t yet worthy of the “glory.”
The conference report and representative introductions told me that the “Hunan army” had many masters, and seeing how everyone looked ambitious and full of youthful vigor, I really regretted coming. As the year-end approached, I could still help Director Chen and my colleagues at the unit, and I often acted this way—I always found myself in the middle of contradictions: when I received good news, I couldn’t wait to bask in the glory, but when it was my turn to make someone else feel honored, I felt that I shouldn’t be honored.
The conference was held at the Junkai Hotel in Changsha, the capital, and it was the first time in my life that I attended a high-level literary conference at the provincial level. Among the attendees, in addition to the Changde representatives I knew, I only recognized the older generation, including Xie Pu, the teacher who wrote the preface for my book. As soon as I met him, he greeted me with “” (Nice to meet you), and the frequent nods of his hat gave me courage. Of course, I had to come and meet him—I, an amateur writer who had worked as a film projectionist in the countryside for eight years—had finally met the writer Tan Tan of the film The Winding Mountain Road and the writer Shui Yunxian of The Calamity of the Inner Court, as well as Peng Jianming, the writer of the nationally awarded novel That Mountain, That Person, That Dog, who had a very distinct style. During the reception, all of them were invited into the dance hall one after another by beautiful female writers. We, who were like raw blocks freshly dug from the mountain, had to stay in a corner, unable to even cheer loudly with our applause. Later, we stopped clapping altogether, clenched our fists.
The conference program ended. The host, Liang Rui, called out the names of 36 writers, including me. It turned out that the Hunan Provincial Writers' Association had accepted the task of writing the “Giant Biographies Series” for young readers, planned by the “China, International Biographical Literature Research Association.” Writing biographies of famous figures who had already been written about was time-consuming, laborious, and difficult to please. Generally, writers with great fame and talent wouldn’t want to do this tedious work. Changde had selected Zhang Shicheng and me.
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