For contemporary Chinese, the late 1960s and early 1970s was an age as dull as the gray clothing of the era, and as monotonous as the political drone repeated on public occasions.
Hence, many readers would be surprised to find out that this age has also arguably generated a pure and sincere lyrical mood in recent Chinese literature. The most representative work is Pan Jing's Shuqing Nianhua (Lyrical Age).
Last month, the committee of the 6th Shanghai Novel and Novella Awards surprised the public by announcing Lyrical Age the first prize winner in the novel category.
The award was announced two years after it first appeared in the literary bimonthly Shouhuo (Harvest) in 2001, and one year later it was published in paperback by Writer's Publishing House in April 2002. As a result, the book, as well as its author, were still quite unfamiliar to readers.
Winning the first prize of the Shanghai Novel and Novella Awards requires a two-thirds majority in the last round vote. Because of this stringent stipulation, the place was left vacant on three of the previous five occasions.
The fact that Li Rui and Wang Anyi, two famous writers, shared the second prize this year in the novel category with their acclaimed works Yincheng Gushi (Tale of Silver City) and Fuping, also adds to people's curiosity to the first prize winning novel.
Youthful force
It seems a routine that books about the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) portray more victims than heroes. And that is indeed what has happened in real life.
But Lyrical Age presents us a young woman and other young people who survived, having found their own way to self-fulfillment during a time when literary and artistic creativity except political propaganda were suppressed and when urban youths graduated from middle schools were sent away from their homes to farm in the countryside.
Milan Kundera once said: "Life is elsewhere." Spiritually, the heroine lived in the world of Russian literature, in her imagination about 19th-century Europe, in her dream of leading a roving life on the continent, but never in the drab, sterile environment besetting her.
In real life, she moved in some unnoticed fissures of the mainstream society with a special tribe of young people, who had exiled themselves from society.
Pan's descriptions about this little- known life supplement a very valuable testimony to the sociological study about the "cultural revolution."
Through her pen, the readers are led into the Moscow Restaurant, a then newly re-opened Western style restaurant in Beijing, where young people come to nurture their nostalgia to the fine, exquisite life they had never lived.
The readers would lead a vagabond life with J and her lover among the deserted parks of Beijing all the winter, and wait with them for the last bus to get a one-night lodge in a house of unacquainted people. Moreover, of course, the readers would be taken into the secret hideaways where the urban youths were pursuing poetry, music and art, seriously exchanging their own writings and drawings, despite their daily toils in the field. They got inspiration not only from artists and writers of the former Soviet Union but also those in the West, such as Vincent van Gogh.
Individual drive
Whether the readers may agree or not, Pan Jing explains that the defiance of her young heroes came from their desire and will.
These were a bunch of unrepentant individualists.
"The force of youth is so blind and powerful, that we disregarded the disasters and misfortunes around us," the heroine observes constantly in retrospect in the novel.
In the vast bleakness of the age, these young people's awareness of the existence of one's individuality only became extremely keen and heavy. Each one of them devotedly clung to the precious little ego which was the only thing one possessed.
Such a gesture of individualism was actually a decision to defend the value of being individual.
It is the spiritual halo around the heroes in Lyrical Age, which makes their stories at once shockingly rebellious, and sadly romantic, and which distinguishes them from other characters portrayed in previous novels about the "cultural revolution."
As a result, the stories of J were told by herself from a pure individualized perspective. The big events and the overwhelming landscape of the era were sometimes casually mentioned as references to date or background, but then J would at once drop them, and move back to her inner private world that was the only preoccupation of her.
In those days, poetry became these young people's religion. It provided the only oasis, just as the famous lines Pan quotes in the very beginning of the book had said: "Poetry -- that cruel but great imagination, It's you that are changing the bleakness of our life."
The poem was written in 1973 by Mang Ke, the most important poet of the "Baiyangdian poet group."
In the book, J had seen him once when their boats almost crushed together in the fog. The young poet was "a tall boy with handsome, clear-cut face, fresh and piercing smile. More than 30 years later, his friends still can't forget his little-wolf-like smile."
Lyrical Age is written in a beautiful, refined prose style. Pan makes J's narrative almost like poetry. The tone of the narrative is tender, soft and vivid, just like the melody of sad blues.
The poetic delineation of the uncontaminated, primitive scenery of the "Lake" brings a long lyrical mood to the contemporary literature. As one of her reviewers Liu Liming said: "There has never been another 'educated youth' novel which has such an emotional symbol as the romantic lake in Lyrical Age. This is the most beautiful, youthful image with which the 'educated youth' life has ever been represented."
Nature spoke into the eyes and heart of the heroine. Throughout her stories, there was a mute intercourse carried on between nature and the heart. As seasons changed, the young body grew, the consciousness of the female womanhood awoke. Pan's subtle depiction in this respect precisely and beautifully shows the tension and delicate sensitivity of youth.
Pan Jing has walked through exactly the same life track in her youthful time as the heroine of Lyrical Age did.
Born in 1950 into an intellectual family, she terminated her education in the Secondary School attached to the Beijing Normal University when the "cultural revolution" started.
From 1968 to 1972, she lived in the lake district of Baiyangdian as "educated youth." After that, she was transferred to an oilfield in Northeast China, where she stayed until admitted by Beijing Normal University in 1978.
Pan is now an editor working with the Beijing-based Writer's Publishing House. Lyrical Age is her first novel.
(China Daily June 18, 2003)
