Recently, I have read Hu Wenhui’s “The Poetry of Chen Yin-keun”, and there are several places that seem like novels.
Chen Yin-ke stayed on the mainland after 49 years and met a tragic end, so his poems mostly hide political codes. Eight years ago, after reading Mr. Yu Yingshi’s “The real reading” of Chen Yinke’s poems in his later years, I checked this book, but I didn’t read it carefully, so I recently read it from the beginning, like a refresher on modern Chinese history.
Chen Yinke’s poem inscription in 1949 is quite long, “Cxu spring, living in England, the treatment of eye disease is ineffective, take the sea route east. In the winter of wuzi, again from Shanghai to Guangzhou by ship. In the seventh account Chen gave during the Cultural Revolution, he said, “Tang Shuan and I both have heart problems. The doctor said it was better to go to a warm place in the south. I therefore thought of Lingnan University,'” and so on.
Tang Shu is Chen’s wife, and Lingnan University refers to the old school in Guangzhou. The most unique thing about this paragraph is the Time jump and omission. It became the issue that needs to be repeatedly explained. The statement that “it was advisable to go to the warm south” was certainly not credible under the great political oppression, but reading his poems before and after, we can see that he not only wanted to leave, but also argued with Tang Chuan over the question of whether to stay or go.
In 1946, at the beginning of the civil war between the Communist Party and China, Chen wrote “The Southern Dynasty” when he was living in England for treatment of his eye disease, and Hu Wenhui said that it was a comparison of the Southern Dynasty to the Nationalist government, and it also foreshadowed the Communist struggle, which would lead to a situation where China would be divided between the north and the south. Two years later, when the Chinese Communist army had besieged Beijing, the Nationalist government sent a special plane to rescue scholars and celebrities, and Chen went to Nanjing with his wife and daughter, accompanied by Hu Shih. Hu Wenhui said that Chen’s move was an indication of his unwillingness to live under the new regime, citing a quote from Deng Guangming, who was Chen Yinqian’s teaching assistant, recalling Chen’s parting: “Actually, Mr. Hu had to go because of political relations; I could not go. But I heard that in the communist-ruled areas everyone eats millet, so I can’t bear to eat millet too. Hu Wenhui has doubts about this recollection and thinks that Chen would not say it so plainly. But Chen Yin-kean did not love millet, and reading it today has an additional meaning.
In 1949, Chen Yin-kean moved to Guangzhou, which seems to be related to the geographical location, and could be exiled overseas in case of political disturbance. In the poem “Seeking medical help before getting three years of ayurveda, avoiding the May flowers”, the allusion is to one Chinese and one Western, “three years of ayurveda” is from Mencius, referring to the good Medicine, the failed operation for eye disease, Chen was nearly 60 years old, blind, and could not go to Europe to teach; “May flowers” is a reference to the fact that Chen Yin-keun was blind. The “Mayflower” was the ship taken by the Puritans who were persecuted and emigrated from England to North America in 1622. It was not easy to avoid Qin.
Whether to stay or to go, where to find the Peach Blossom or the Mayflower, is the problem of Hong Kong people today, and also the problem of Chen Yinqin in those days. Hu Wenhui attempts to restore Chen’s hidden worries about going to Taiwan and Hong Kong with historical data. Before and after the fall, Chen had worked at the University of Hong Kong and lived in Hong Kong, only to feel that “there was no one to talk to and no books to read”, and most people at the time believed that Hong Kong was indefensible, and that the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and Britain was not clear, “one of the five most dangerous areas in the world. Although Fu Sian applied for an entry permit to Taiwan for the Chen Family, could Taiwan be defended? In August 1949, the U.S. published a White Paper that blamed Chiang Kai-shek’s government’s failure on its own shortcomings rather than on insufficient U.S. support, and said it would stop supporting the KMT regime. Until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950, when the U.S. dispatched the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan was still a critical situation in the minds of the people of the time.
Since Hong Kong and Taiwan were both in danger, Chen chose to move rather than stay still, but Tang was determined to leave the mainland and went to Hong Kong alone. But once the time passed, the situation changed, and it was difficult to leave, Yu Ying-shi said that Chen Yin-kean took the trouble to write “Liu Ru-ye” in his later years because he regretted that he had not learned from Tang’s foresight. Hu Wenhui thought this interpretation was too realistic, just as he has objected from time to time to Mr. Yu’s use of the word “communist” in Chen’s poem as “communist,” but there is one decoding process that is particularly brilliant.
In 1950, Chen Yinkeng wrote in the first line of “Scripture and History”, “What is the meaning of the false scripture and the corrupt history”, and Jin Kemu knew that there was something in it, saying that “it is better not to pass on the poem”, arguing that both the false and the corrupt are verbs, “what does it mean to empty the scripture and destroy the history? meaning?” Hu Wenhui felt that Jin Kemu was reading the poem in the right direction, but in the wrong way, saying that the “false scripture” was in fact “Liezi”, so the book was also called “Chongxu Zhenjing”, while the “corrupt history” was “Shiji”, as Sima Qian had been corrupted. What’s the difference between the two? In fact, he was talking about Marxism-Leninism, expressing his dissatisfaction with the official ideology. The words were earlier and more subtle than a few years later when he said that he did not follow “the new sayings of the real man, Chongxu,” which implied “horse” and “column”. It is really not easy to tell the truth.
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