“On the morning of the big test, the dismal mood is probably only comparable to the dawn before the army fights, like the rebels of the slave revolt in “Spartacus” looking at the Roman army setting up in the morning fog, the most horrible scene in all war films, because it is completely waiting.”
Eileen Chang’s “Small Reunion” was considered by many critics to be jaded and out of standard. In fact, after putting aside the many things attached to the surface of her work, the self-deprecating and sophisticated style of Eileen Chang’s writing in her later years is still very impressive. Readers who like Zhang’s gorgeous words and clever metaphors can probably only find them in such fantastic lines as “bathing in the blue moonlight of the late Tang Dynasty”, “shrimp-red and purple-peach azaleas”, “a sea of duck-egg green” and “the sky and the sea”. In the words of her youth, she traces a little bit of the colorful, flashy robe covered with fleas. Wang Dewei says that this is Zhang Eiling’s active de-charming in her later years.
Zhang Eiling has a kind of cunning, a little bad, a kind of black humor of smart people. “It is only those who live poorly themselves who like to pry into the private affairs of others.” “Loyalty is an alias for uselessness.” “Now these young people are the opposite, the Family‘s money is wanted, the family to marry a wife can not.” “Articulated is a quick bone, lost is a piece of meat.” The mean-spiritedness is endearing, like Chu Di saying Jiuli: “You are bad.”
The wonderful words that make people smile, also always still have a lot: “The heart is anxious rotten.” “Do not like modern history, modern history hit the door.” “I’m like a skeleton yarn, all made up of flaws.” Writing about the caught pigeon: “Who knows this pigeon overnight worrying, like Wu Zixu over Shaoguan, although it did not become a white pigeon, overnight work lost half of its weight. The next day when I saw it, I thought it was a different bird. The old Qin mother took the back porch and killed it, stewed Soup with a gentle fire, and Jiu Li ate it with a miserable heart.” Write and fourth cousin rented the “burning red lotus temple” of the full collection of comic books, bought duck gizzard liver cigarette sugar, lying on the bed while eating and reading. “The room was very cold, and everyone was covered with a large red flowered cloth quilt. The smell of the dirty and greasy comforter was slightly salty and wet, and mixed with the taste of duck gizzard liver, there was an alien feeling.” Writing about the unprecedented pomp and circumstance of the parade on Nanjing Road to celebrate the war victory: “Even the pickpockets rested their hands.”
Shao Zhiyong, who is thought to be based on Hu Lancheng, doesn’t arrive until almost halfway through the novel, comparable to Zhao Min, who appears only halfway through the book of Yitian Tu Long Ji. Readers who were drowning in a sea of names and character relationships in the first half of the novel, once they saw the name “Shao Zhiyong,” they grabbed the straw and began to enjoy the novel that almost everyone read as Eileen Chang’s autobiography, which she tried so hard not to write. “All relationships that can happen must happen”, “The years are quiet, the world is peaceful”, these have been chewed up between the two Hu and Zhang promise need not be repeated, even when reading this book, it is still hard to believe that Zhang Eiling in love and Hu Lancheng is an extremely humble woman in front of her, but the truth is that she is indeed “low to the dust”.
“Jiu Li thought: ‘This man really loves me.'” As if “Lust – Caution” Wang Jiazhi to Mr. Yi, a moment drifted off.
She said, “Actually, I’m not usually this thin.” He was slightly stunned, Fang said, “Is it for me?”
She said, “I am always happy like ecstasy, you are like a little sad.”
He stroked the “piece” of white, greasy leg (“piece of leg” is a good word) that showed on the end of her socks and said, “Such a nice person to be so close to.”
He said, “I don’t like to fall in love, I like to get married.” “I want to be sure with you.”
“‘Bright as the moon, when can I collect?’ Here it is!” He made a gesture to catch her and both of them laughed.
He said, “You love me very much, and I know it very well.”
He said, “We can’t get tired of seeing each other, only Jingting Mountain.”
“Jiu Li suddenly felt that the whole of the Middle Kingdom lay between them, so far away that it made her heart palpitate.”
“His past had a voice, not so empty, waiting for him to come.”
“She knew he liked suburban cold island thin all the way to the dishes. If she learns to cook, she will not give her three aunts to die of laughter?”
“When taking pictures Bibi directed from the side: ‘Think of your hero.’ She was thinking of him, people far away, the view is vast, there are ‘rolled up combing looking at the Yellow River’ feeling.”
She said, “You just said a person can not love two people at the same Time, I seem to suddenly the sky darkened down.”
“Jiu Li knew it was to say she was a hair, just pretend not to hear. Finger-pointing, like a country woman’s curse. The shrew who probes in his frontal visage finally appears.”
“Zhiyong could convince himself to believe in just about anything. He had his own explanation for her death and thought ‘it’s good too’. And then a cloud of peacefulness rose again.”
“She saw that air pollution was causing stone cancer in the stone statues of Venice, and thought, ‘Now the sea will soon dry up.'”
“The rain gurgles like living by a stream. I’d rather it rained every day, thinking you weren’t coming because of the rain.”
When reading these love passages always can not help but out of the drama, little daughter state to some embarrassing. Grandma Qiong Yao wrote in “Flowers are not flowers, but fog”: “‘Think’ is a ‘phase’ above, and a ‘heart’ below, that is your You have taken over my heart, and you dare to ask me if I want you?” How blunt. All her emotions turned inward and eventually stayed in her own heart, like the incense bag in her mouth, “sewed up with dense stitches and put in the clothes box to hide it well”. To put it in layman’s terms, it is about sultry. For example, the “small reunion” in the episode: “after he left an ash tray of cigarette butts, she picked up, put away in an old envelope.” “She inconveniently said that after the war, when he fled to a remote small town, she would find him a thousand miles away and reunite in the shadow of the dim oil lamp.” “She does not go to see him, the water is far away from the mountains smile look to thousands of miles away, perhaps still over there under the city lights.” “Walking hand in hand to the center of the street. The wide asphalt road seems to be upside down, and people walk on the green-black sky covered with stardust.” “She had a feeling of being at a loss, like going out to sea at dusk, the road unfamiliar and far away.” “The streets, clear autumn mornings. She had the same feeling, as if everyone was gone, but clear and lovely.”
Listening to the play in the countryside, Jiu Li “very sorry not to see the private engagement for Life, the examination and welcome together, two beauty three beauty reunion.” This title of “Little Reunion” is really good, which all love, which can not give up the greedy man, three beautiful reunion of the old-fashioned vision, with the mean and bleak Zhang Eiling-style. “Their past stretches and undulates on the horizon like the Great Wall, but the Great Wall has no use in modern times.”
The two most impressive sentences in the novel, one is that Jiu Li asked Shao Zhiyong to choose one between her and Miss Xiaokang, Shao Zhiyong was “obviously surprised and smiled after a slight pause”: “Why should a good tooth be pulled out? To choose is bad ……”
Second, Jiu Li returned all the money Ruiqiu had spent for her, and Ruiqiu shed tears: “Even if I’m just a person who has treated you well, you don’t have to do this to me.”
Zhang Eiling and Shen Congwen were discovered almost at the same time in Xia Zhiqing’s History of Modern Chinese Fiction, although their styles are very different. I think of the regret that Zhang Eiling did not finish revising “The Little Reunion” until her death in her late years in the United States, and I also feel that Zhang Eiling might have lived the rest of her life in her memories of Hu Lancheng. Although there is no way for outsiders to guess the feelings of others, the dream of Jiu Li written at the end of the novel is still somewhat moving: “It was as vulgar as a coloring postcard of the landscape, with red and brown huts on the green hills, reflecting the blue sky, the shadows of the trees swaying in the sunlight, and several children in the pine forest, all of them hers. Ziyon appeared, smiling, and pulled her towards the cabin. Very ridiculous, she suddenly shy up, their arms pulled in a straight line, just then woke up. The film from twenty years ago, the person from ten years ago. She woke up happy for a long, long time.”
“The empty room was basking in the sun, already ancient.”
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