Chapter Seventy-Nine: I've Missed You All So Much I Could Die!
“Speak properly, Comrade Xu, be more confident!” Lin Wei’s single ponytail bounced as she spoke.
A single ponytail—tsk.
How am I supposed to be confident with you around, junior?
“I am speaking properly. Books like ‘Xu Mao and His Daughters’ and ‘The General’s Lament’—I really like them.”
“And then?” Lin Wei and Xu Lu fixed their eyes on him, refusing to let him go.
Say it, idol!
Xu Chengjun spread his hands. “The value of scar literature lies in its courage to lay bare those old wounds that used to be too painful to touch—just that is quite remarkable. Like the factional struggle in ‘Maple’, or the separation of mother and daughter in ‘Scar’—no one dared to write these things before, and now they’re printed in black and white. That alone is progress.”
Lin Wei folded her arms and raised an eyebrow. “Is progress all there is? We didn’t cry for nothing, you know.”
“Of course not.” Xu Chengjun smiled, but his tone turned serious. “But after crying, there should be something more. Some works now seem to treat ‘pain’ as their only skill, writing suffering to its bitter end—the characters wail from start to finish, and when you’re done reading, all that’s left is a feeling of suffocation, nothing more. It’s like someone who falls, and just hugs their wound and cries, forgetting to get up and dust themselves off.”
The two girls frowned at that—this was a bit deep for a pair of college freshmen.
The key was that his understanding fundamentally differed from theirs.
Xu Lu pinched the corner of her book and whispered, “But that suffering is real…”
“The suffering is real, but living isn’t only about complaining about it.” Xu Chengjun leaned back against the wall. “Look at Lu Danfeng and Li Honggang in ‘Maple’—they started out as passionate youths, but ended up as victims of factional strife. That’s painful enough, right? But just writing about pain isn’t enough. Why did they end up that way? How are ordinary people supposed to protect themselves in such times? If these questions don’t get answered, readers leave with nothing but heartache and no enlightenment.”
He paused and looked at them. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t write about suffering—only that writing about suffering needs some kind of ‘follow-up’. Everyone just got through tough days, and what we need more is to know ‘how to live from now on’, not to keep chewing over past hardships every day.”
The two girls stared at Xu Chengjun in a daze.
He made so much sense—he was really something!
After a moment, Lin Wei suddenly smiled. “So what you mean is, you think we just cry and don’t really get it?”
“That’s about right.” He winked at them. “Besides, isn’t it boring to always be a ‘crybaby reader’?”
“Why don’t you try writing something yourself?” the two girls’ eyes lit up. Try and you’ll die!
“I get it now!”
“Me too!”
Xu Chengjun: ?
What did you get?
Because I sure don’t.
Speaking of which, pretty girls always manage to find each other—if Su Manshu is a 98, these two are at least 80.
Not as stunning as Su Manshu, but both are shapely and have fine features.
It’s easy on the eyes to chat with them, isn’t it?
Something feels off, though.
Come to think of it.
Xu Chengjun didn’t dislike scar literature itself—what bothered him was the kind that was only about intellectuals’ pain, as if only their scars counted as literature.
But whether popular or serious literature, when it’s written, it’s for a living, for popularity and distribution.
But in 1979, who was reading newspapers, who was reading those highfalutin things?
Who was the audience?
Certainly not those hard-up farmers and workers.
They couldn’t understand it.
Some scar literature, at its core, is about intellectuals lamenting their sharply declining status in this era.
But in truth, they don’t lose out.
In ancient times, there was a term for such people—“clan gentry”; in modern times, “academic overlords.”
Recently, people have become familiar with Ms. Dong.
But there’s no need to demonize scar literature too much; anyone who’s actually read these works knows that most of the famous ones don’t go on endlessly about “intellectuals sent to the countryside to suffer.”
On the contrary, most scar literature, though excruciating in its first half, turns positive in the latter half.
Among any genre, there are always a few outstanding works, and inevitably some nonsense as well.
You can’t judge the whole by a single part, nor judge an individual by the whole, can you?
What truly limited the development of scar literature—and made it vanish in the 21st century—was its lack of real literary merit.
It couldn’t make it to the big stage.
As for Mo Yan’s award-winning works or Yu Hua’s novels, to be honest, they can’t be counted as scar literature.
At most, they just brush its tail.
You wouldn’t call a “veteran” who joined the Nationalists in 1949 a “brilliant commander,” would you?
That would be too much of a black comedy.
After saying goodbye to Xu Lu and Lin Wei, Xu Chengjun still couldn’t figure out what exactly the two girls thought they’d understood.
In the midst of their lively conversation, the young poet and writer Xu Chengjun was composed, surveying the world with ease, and he made more sense than their teachers ever did.
The girls’ eyes were already different—their admiration was off the charts…
Not good.
Forget it, time to get down to business.
He had to mail the postcards he’d promised to Zhai Ying, Old Chen, and the rest.
More and more people gathered at the bus stop. The trolleybus number 37’s pole scraped along the wires, crackling with electricity.
The post office’s green-painted wooden door was ajar, a stack of kraft paper envelopes on the glass counter, and a tin box beside them filled with postcards.
Postcards truly carry the memories and tears of an era.
In 1979, Shanghai writer Ke Ling wrote in his essay “Shanghai Street Scenes,” “There are always people buying postcards at the post office entrance, picking one with a view of the Bund to send to distant friends or relatives, writing on the back, ‘Shanghai’s autumn, the wind is so warm.’”
See—how romantic!
The most romantic thing I can think of is sending you a postcard!
Thanks to the influence of all those literary types, even in the early 21st century, plenty of young men and women saw this as a way to convey longing and romance.
As for those born after 2000—
They’d ask you: What’s a postcard?
The clerk in blue workwear was busy working the abacus, the beads clacking in rhythm.
“Mailing postcards?” she asked, glancing up indifferently. “Local Shanghai, four cents; elsewhere, eight. Stick on the stamp, drop it in the mailbox.”
State-owned, nothing to be surprised about.
The postal service isn’t going anywhere, right?
A small temple, but plenty of spirits—ha!
Xu Chengjun leaned over the counter, sifting through the postcards, his gaze passing over each yellowing card.
Some showed the clock tower on the Bund, some depicted the zigzag bridge of Yu Garden, and in the corner was one with the Fudan University gate, the gold-embossed “Fudan University” on the lintel matching exactly what he had seen at his interview.
“These will do,” he said, picking out several postcards with distinctive Shanghai features.
For Old Chen, Zhai Ying, Xiao Ma, Old Zhou, Old Su, Liu Zuci.
And for the young folks back in Xujia Village—Qian Ming, Zhao Gang, Xinghua, Erwa, Zhuzi…
“This one,” he decided.
On the back of the postcard for his friends in Hefei, he wrote: “The spicy soup of Hefei misses you all. I’ll bring muffins when I come back. —Xu Chengjun, from Shanghai.”
His handwriting danced across the card, ending with a crooked little smiley face.
For his friends in Xujia Village, he wrote a tribute to his hometown:
“Imagination”
By Xu Chengjun
I long
to be the watcher of the threshing ground
to stack the straw by hand in neat rows
and then
stand guard through the endless seasons
until the coming of frost
to watch row upon row of haystacks
draped in silvery down
blushing in the twilight wind
hot and still
I long
to be a late-sown grain of wheat
in winter’s wind, in frozen earth
in every dawn and dusk
to quietly awaken in the earth’s embrace
grow stubborn and strong
break through the shell of a lingering winter
and with warmth stored in the earth’s cellar
return the earth’s kiss
…
He imagined Zhao Gang looking at it and saying, “What’s this supposed to mean? Kiss who? I don’t get it!”
“Shanghai sure is something to see!”
“Big cities really are something!”
Well, if they don’t get it, they don’t get it!