The background of the Ke Yan era

Ke Yan is a Manchu, formerly known as Feng Kai. He was born in July 1929 in a railway worker's home in Zhengzhou, Henan Province, and his ancestral home is Nanhai, Guangdong Province. At that time, the Northern Expedition failed for only two years, and the broken China was full of white terror and darkness. Ke Yan's grandfather and grandfather both worked as small officials, and his father was an upright intellectual. He has a rebellious character since he was a child. In order to oppose feudal marriage, he broke up with his family and ran away resolutely. In the extremely difficult years, he struggled and lived tenaciously. He worked hard, worked hard, worked part-time and worked hard, and finally became a railway technician and engineer. He loves reading and literature, saves a little money by scrimping and saving, and often buys literary books. He loves talents, worships knowledge, loves Lu You's poems and respects his noble patriotic sentiments. He has always despised those rich and powerful people who bring disaster to the country and the people, and often used a dissatisfied tone to ridicule or insult those uneducated officials, big and small, who climbed up by bragging and flattery. "I don't want to seal Wan Huhou, I wish I knew Jingzhou was in North Korea" is one of the famous sentences he often used to educate his children. His way of being is: "A gentleman doesn't flatter when making friends, and he doesn't study when making friends." This arrogant attitude towards life has made his life bumpy and frustrated, and he is often at odds with his boss, constantly being transferred, demoted or unemployed. When he was young, he also wrote many short stories and translated Vandermaus' French detective stories, which were all the rage at that time ... The value of his literary activities mainly lies in his influence on Ke Yan. Ke Yan's mother was also a traitor to feudal ethics, and she was kicked out of the house because of her free love. She is a woman who is proficient in writing but has a strong sense of art. She is eager for knowledge and dreams of a bright future, but the hard life has suppressed her enthusiasm and pursuit. In addition to occasionally reciting some Tang and Song poems to express her feelings, she also pinned her unfinished ambitions on her children, and often told them all kinds of stories about her lofty ideals and loyalty and filial piety, hoping that they would make progress and learn expertise. Parents' personality, character and hobbies have left a deep imprint on their words and young hearts. Ke Yan said: "I like literature, admire talents, respect knowledge and pursue spiritual life since I was a child, all of which are inseparable from my family influence."

Workers on the railway, like trains, keep running and never stop at the station. Ke Yan is loved by her father and takes her everywhere. In this way, Ke Yan has seen many great rivers and mountains of the motherland and the sufferings of people along the railway since he was a child.

Ke Yan's childhood was lonely and empty. She is naive to want to play freely in her children's kingdom, but her parents, brothers and sisters who struggle for food and clothing all day can't meet her simple requirements. So she often ran out to play alone, was bullied and beaten, and complained in front of her mother in tears. Mother loves her daughter very much and refuses to let her go out, so she promises to tell her stories. In this way, she began to contact with folk oral literature such as Mulan Joining the Army, Legend of the White Snake, Lu Yao Knowing Horsepower, Girl Without Hands, Meng Jiangnv Crying for the Great Wall, and Goddess Casting a Bell. She never tires of hearing these stories, and the more she listens, the more she likes to hear them. Some stories have been told several times, but she still pesters her mother to tell them. The story in my mother's heart has long been finished, and even famous articles such as Pipa, Song of Eternal Sorrow have been taught by heart. The story has become a wheel and is repeated all day. Father felt sorry for his mother, so he found a "juvenile library" and asked her to read it to his daughter. From then on, five-year-old Ke Yan knew that there was a "little match girl" and a "scarecrow" in the world, and she hoped to have a purple sister and a beautiful big sister like Yongming. ...

When Ke Yan greedily loved all the stories in the world, she went to Changxindian Railway Workers' Children School to study. She is the youngest in the class, but she studies the hardest. She thinks there are many lovely characters waiting for her in the book, and that beautiful and interesting story can't be ignored. In the second grade, books became good friends. She began to read all available books indiscriminately, skipped unfamiliar words, and was fascinated by the stories and characters in the book and eagerly pursued them. The little hero in The Education of Love makes her understand that children are not just free takers of parents, but little women make her feel the warmth and strength of friendship, Ye Shengtao tells her right and wrong, Bing Xin makes her childlike innocence yearn for the sea and poetry, Zhang Tianyi's Dalin and Kobayashi leave opposing images of the poor and the rich in her young mind, and Green and Andersen describe a magical and beautiful world for her. ...

Later, she went to Jiang 'an Rotary Primary School, a child of railway workers in Hubei. After the outbreak of War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, her father took part in the Yunnan-Myanmar Highway Project, and she also went to Yunnan. At the age of nine and ten, she has been in Baoshan and Xiaguan primary schools with beautiful mountains and rivers in Yunnan. Ke Yan's ten brothers and sisters live on their father's salary. Life is already very difficult. At the time of national disaster, the family burden of this ordinary civil servant is even heavier. Prices are rising day by day, and my father is often unemployed ... but no matter how hard life is, my mother makes sweaters, sews and sells junk, and she is still struggling to provide education for her children. In order to reduce the burden on the family, Ke Yan and her sisters worked hard to get into public schools and get scholarships. During that time, life at home was extremely miserable. When my father loses his job, the family will have to stop eating and have no food to eat. She and her mother and sister often go to the streets to sell old clothes, knit sweaters and sew socks for others ... No matter how bitter it is, there is always a flame of knowledge burning in young Ke Yan's heart. Under the dim little oil lamp in Yunnan, she read many books silently. The works of Goethe, Heine, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Balzac, Mo Bosang, Hemingway, Ba Jin, Bing Xin, Zhang Tianyi and many fairy tales are the original sources of her understanding of society and life. Beauty and ugliness, sublimity and meanness, honesty and hypocrisy are separated in her mind. Human sympathy, sense of justice, light and freedom, as well as the roots of natural beauty have penetrated into our hearts. Even those novels about fugitives can make her worship heroes, hoping to see the bumpy road when she grows up and kill the rich and help the poor. At that time, she didn't understand class oppression, but the reality of the disparity between the rich and the poor made her vaguely dissatisfied with the old society. She still remembers the folk songs recited at that time:

Miss oil wiped her hair with water,

Make shoes, walk barefoot,

Carpenters have no place to live,

The old man selling salt drinks light porridge,

Weaver girl, light back,

Wheat growers eat vegetable chaff,

Hit the mat, lie in bed,

On the dead side of the coffin ...

The uneven songs made her feel uneven. She hangs on books every day and makes blind dates with the characters in the books, despising the rich ladies and dude who have no ambition and specialize in eating, drinking and dressing up.

Ke Yan had a hot personality when he was a child, much like a boy. She knew from an early age that if she didn't work hard, she wouldn't get a scholarship, or she couldn't get into a public school, she would drop out of school. So, like her brothers and sisters, she worked tirelessly and even successfully advanced placement many times. In the meantime, this little girl, who is only about ten years old, has shown her literary feelings-when her father received a letter full of literary colors, he excitedly said to his family, "Our family is leaving Xie Bingxin!"

After the age of twelve, Ke Yan studied at Overseas Chinese Middle School in Yunnan, Baoshan Normal School, Yuexiu Middle School in Kunming and Kunhua Normal School for Women. When she was a female teacher in Kunhua, she looked forward to taking Chinese classes every day, because every class made her learn a lot of things she longed for. The female teacher recited Wang Bo's Preface to Wang Teng-ting: "The sunset is lonely in Qi Fei, and the autumn water is the same as the sky.". Fishing boats sing late, knocking on the other side of poverty and ignorance; Yan array was shocked by the cold, and his voice broke the pu of Hengyang ... "This respectable teacher not only deeply influenced Ke Yan in writing and love of literature, but also educated her to love her country and great motherland ideologically.

1 94565438+February1day, the "December 1st" tragedy that shocked China and foreign countries occurred in Kunming. Four patriotic youths who demanded democracy and opposed hunger were killed. Wen Yiduo said: "This is the darkest day in China." In this dark and horrible day, Ke Yan served as the chairman of the strike committee of Kunhua Women's Teachers College, and went to The National SouthWest Associated University with her classmates all day to participate in a democratic rally, vowing to avenge the dead with college students. Most of the students of female teachers are children from poor families. The school said that their strike was manipulated by the producers of * * * ... and Ke Yan, influenced by her father, thought that no party was the noblest, and that she took an active part in the democratic movement out of a sense of justice and a strong dissatisfaction with the Kuomintang rule and the dark reality.

After War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression's victory, she lived in Chongqing for one year with her brother and moved to Hubei with the refugees. At that time, the school had passed the examination period, so she had to learn English at the monastery, typing at the typing school and journalism at the news workshop. Half a year later, I entered the winter enrollment of Hilida Middle School, attending the last year of middle school. At that time, Ke Yan's love for writing had already appeared. 1947 published the essay My Classmate in the school magazine and Night and Loneliness in Hubei Daily. On the bank of the Yangtze River, she studied until 1948. Later, she was admitted to the drama department of Suzhou Institute of Social Education, where she officially came into contact with drama art. In May of the following year, the ancient city of Suzhou ushered in liberation. Nineteen-year-old Ke Yan enthusiastically participated in the revolution and came to the north to work in the creative group of China Youth Art Theatre and write plays.

Beijing, which has just been peacefully liberated, is devastated. Cities need construction and people need education. The Ministry of Public Security quickly gathered thousands of prostitutes and placed them in eight or nine women's production and reeducation homes for treatment and education reform. Young Ke Yan took part in this work. Most of these prostitutes were good women who were destroyed by national oppression and class oppression and then sold to brothels. They live an inhuman life and everyone has a history of blood and tears. Based on her understanding of Sunrise by Cao Yu, Resurrection by Tolstoy, Turtle with Nine Tails by Qing Dynasty and the translated novel Grandma, Ke Yan enthusiastically went to Beijing Women's Production and Reform Institute to participate in the reform of prostitutes. Ke Yan listened to their angry complaints with indignation. They cried, and so did Ke Yan. Their tragic life scenes always torment Ke Yan's feelings and strongly shock her soul. Although she experienced war, poverty, hunger and pain since she was a child, she never understood the injustice of this world from the perspective of class. When the abscess of the old society was presented to her in such a terrible form, her fantasy of being a pure "artist" that day was completely dissolved in this ocean of blood and tears. Ke Yan said: "Open exploitation and prostitution are the most shameful and inhuman behaviors of human society for thousands of years. And * * * producers are determined to completely eliminate them. What a bright and great cause! Only the * * * production party can save China and save slaves in hell! " So, she put forward the request of joining the China New Democratic Youth League and the China * * * Production Party, saying, "I want to join this ranks and fight for it all my life!" She believes that this is the truth of being a man, the bright road that should be taken, and the real pursuit of justice and truth.

1950, Youth Art Theatre organized a "cultural train" to perform for workers and railway soldiers among the masses. 1953, she took part in a condolence group to North Korea and met the most lovely people and the heroic Korean people. 1956, joined the China * * * production party. In the first few years after liberation, Ke took advantage of various opportunities to go deep into life and get in touch with the masses extensively. He has successively created one-act drama "The Chinese and Korean people are as close as flesh and blood", opera "Strive for an Early Reunion" (1950), "The Story of Marriage" (1957, 12) and "The Script".