Fact in Fiction: 1920s China and Ba Jin's Family

摘要

Taken together, the two books under review provide the best possible overview of literary and intellectual, but also more broadly social, life in Chengdu during the Republican era (1912-1949). Each study focuses on one writer, while at the same time presenting an engaging portrait of New Culture Chengdu, and questioning connections between social, intellectual and literary history. Ba Jin (born Li Yaotang, 1904-2005) and Li Jieren (1891-1962), both Chengdu natives, were undoubtedly Sichuan's greatest novelists of the Republican era. Both spent time in France, Li Jieren as part of the "Diligent Work, Frugal Study" programme in 1920-1924, Ba Jin more briefly as a student in 1927-1928, and both acknowledged a debt to the French 19th-century novel. Both largely fell silent as writers after 1949, and devoted themselves to reworking their earlier novels. Li Jieren came under particular political pressure during the Anti-Rightist movement in 1957 (for his involvement with the poet Liushahe), while Ba Jin was subjected to reeducation and lost his wife to an untreated cancer in the Cultural Revolution. Both had heterodox leanings, Ba Jin towards anarchism, and Li Jieren towards Sichuan nativism, as Kenny Ng argues. Despite this blemish, Ba Jin went on to be enshrined in the PRC writers' canon (summed up in the ditty Lu-Guo-Mao, Ba-Lao-Cao魯郭茅巴老曹，which includes another Sichuanese, Li Jieren's classmate Guo Moruo) and became president of the Writers' Association in the 1980s. By contrast, Li Jieren's contribution was consistently downplayed as that of a regionalist writer, and his Collected Works in 17 volumes (probably still not entirely complete) were first published only in 2011.