Back to 80: My Literary Life

It was already seven o'clock in the evening when we left Yu Rong Yifang's house. The hostess warmly entertained Fang Minghua and Meng Dawen to have dinner with their families, and even served a hometown dish - lotus pond fish cakes.

When Fang Minghua returned home, Li Li also brought back a large pile of copies from school: "These are the materials I searched for in the library, take a look."

Fang Minghua sat in the study room, reading these materials while drinking tea.

The content is very detailed, including some official historical data, articles written by scholars, and some specific case records.

It seems that there is no trace to be found, it is just that someone intentionally or unintentionally tried to cover up this period of history.

Fang Minghua sneered.

In the past few days, Fang Minghua has been reading these materials in his study. The records inside are so true.

Locals like to give Chinese workers some insulting nicknames, which are often used to insult the Chinese, such as "Stone Man Xiong Hua," "Stone Canyon Charlie," "Charlie Bang Bang" and "The King of Tut Tut."

Luo's great-grandfather was walking on a high wooden trestle when a train came towards him. In desperation, he grabbed a sleeper and hung in the air, only to hear the train roaring past him.

My hometown is far away and I can recall the broken clouds and mountains. I can hear the cold and mournful geese on the small island.

A lost hero talks about his sword in vain, and a desperate charlatan appears on the stage.

You should know that the country is weak and the people are dead, so why are you trapped here?

——Engraved by an unknown Chinese at the Angel Island Immigration Detention Center in California, USA, in 1910.

After the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, "Angel Island" was used to imprison Chinese who tried to enter the United States from 1910 to 1940. According to statistics, approximately 175,000 Chinese have been imprisoned here and experienced tragic experiences.

These are all good material.

It rained today and the weather seemed particularly cool. Fang Minghua took his daughter Xinxin to play in Jack Fisher Park not far from home. Watching his daughter playing with a group of children of her own age, she let out strings of laughter like silver bells. , Fang Minghua also had a smile on his face.

During this time, he had been reading information about Chinese workers, and those tragic stories made him feel depressed all day long.

No wonder Zhang Chunru ended up suffering from depression and committing suicide after writing "Nanjing Massacre". That period of history was more than ten times more tragic than the Chinese workers building the railway. Facing those bloody words and pictures, it takes a lot of courage to read them.

The material collection is almost done, now it’s time to figure out how to write.

There are very few literary works about Chinese workers building railroads in the United States. Zhang Chenji, a Chinese female writer born in the 1990s, wrote a novel called "The Color of Gold Mountain", which was shortlisted for the British Booker Prize.

The protagonists of the novel are a pair of Chinese sisters. Their fragmented growth experiences are integrated into the process of this Chinese family from taking root to being separated in the Wild West. His father is a Chinese orphan who grew up in an Indian tribe, and his mother was originally shipped from China as a railroad laborer.

In the end, my mother chose to leave, and my father died a few years later. 12-year-old Lucy and 11-year-old Sam embarked on the road to exile with their father's bones.

This is the beginning of the novel, "Dad died at night, so they had to find two silver coins." There are no men, no desire for money and victory, no great narrative recorded by history, just a pair of Chinese orphans trying to survive in a wild land.

The novel "The Color of Gold Mountain" also mentions a great historical moment: on May 10, 1869, the first transcontinental railroad in the United States was completed in Premontray, Utah.

At the completion ceremony, Leland Stanford, the business tycoon and political leader who founded Stanford University, drove a gold spike into the sleeper to connect the tracks.

The novel describes it this way:

"On the day when the last sleeper was knocked down, she heard cheers resounding throughout the city. A golden spike fixed the railroad track to the ground. A painting was painted as a witness to history, but there was no Someone who looked like her, the people who built the railroad."

Very shocking.

But the focus of the novel explores issues of immigrant belonging, family memories that bind and divide, and the longing for home.

Mom wants to return to her hometown on the other side of the ocean. In her eyes, "gold cannot buy everything, and this will never be our land."

Lucy, who has always been close to her mother in personality and relationship, did not agree with the imagination of the other side of the ocean instilled by her mother. She asked in her heart, "Why are the streets in my mother's hometown more beautiful, the rain in my mother's hometown better, and the food in my mother's hometown better?" tasty".

What she yearns for more is the white civilization conveyed by the school teachers’ gestures, which symbolizes elegance, intelligence and etiquette.

Obviously, these are not the focus of Fang Minghua's writing. He wanted to narrate this unknown history through an ordinary Chinese worker.

Of course, Zhang Chenji's narrative perspective was quite good. He looked at, discovered, and thought about this era from the perspective of two children.

There are many such literary masterpieces, such as Gorky's "Childhood", Lin Haiyin's "Old Things in the South of the City", Xiao Hong's "Hulan River Biography", etc. The children's perspective can better reflect the cruelty of that era.

The story told by Yu Rong Yifang is based on her great-grandfather, and the narrative perspective starts from her great-grandfather's second son.

The second son was born after his parents and many villagers smuggled themselves to the United States from China and entered this western wilderness, recording what they saw with the eyes of a child.

There is no need to be too sensational. It adopts the writing technique of new realistic novels and starts from the daily trivial matters of an ordinary Chinese worker's family.

When digging long tunnels through mountains and cutting rocks, there is the danger of explosive explosions, the possibility of encountering avalanches falling from the sky at any time, sleeping in the wind and the open and the deadly smallpox epidemic...

These are recorded through the eyes of a child.

For more than two months in San Francisco, Fang Minghua kept writing this novel in his villa, trying to complete it before returning to China.

In China, you have to participate in some activities at the Writers Association, the provincial and municipal level, and socializing with friends also takes time, but in San Francisco, Fang Minghua omitted all of this.

In addition to going out for a run every morning and taking his daughter for a walk with Li Li in the neighborhood after dinner in the evening, Fang Minghua spends all his energy on writing.

By mid-August, the 150,000-word novel titled "Road Spike" was completed.

The road spike is not only a commonly used part in railway construction, but also the name of the protagonist.

The first reader is Li Li.

After reading it, Li Li said: "Minghua, when your novel is published, many people will definitely not like it. It is completely different from the history promoted by the American official."

With that said, Li Li took out a piece of information and handed it to Fang Minghua.

He's seen it.

On May 10, 1969, in Promontory, Utah, at a ceremony celebrating the 100th anniversary of the opening of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States, then-U.S. Secretary of Transportation John A. Volpi made a passionate speech:

"Who can build ten tunnels in the mountains through snowstorms and granite rocks? Only Americans! Who can lay 10 miles of track in one day? Only Americans! Who can build such a great railway? Only Americans!"