A Fiction About Lu Yao

Preface

I like Lu Yao's essay Morning Begins at Noon. He quoted a sentence to express his mood, and my mood is just like his at that moment:

At this moment, I thought of nothing, and remembered only a few words by the great German writer Thomas Mann: "...At last it is finished. It may not be good, but it is finished. So long as it can be finished, it is good."

That is exactly what I want to say at this moment.

You know me. Writing about Lu Yao is not pleasant for me, nor does it seem like something I would do. When you see a destiny unfold and are burned by its flame, you acquire a certain responsibility. My responsibility is to finish this short text, in the hope that it may refract a little of the radiance of Lu Yao's epic.

He himself may be worth 100 points. I can imagine 10. But I can only complete 7. Still, at last it is finished. It may not be good, but it is finished. So long as it can be finished, it is good.

Lu Yao was undoubtedly a writer of his time, which is to say that his importance will diminish as time passes. But I believe that the work called "Lu Yao" that he lived out is not bound to its time. In the wilderness of Chinese spiritual history, he sculpted an eternal statue.

It is a heartbreaking statue. A strong man walks out from among ragged children, leaves himself behind, and sets off on an expedition to escape scarcity and change his fate. He struggles painfully in order to escape pain. In literature, through affectation, he gives dignity to himself and to a generation of Chinese people.

I hope his age is gone forever.

I hope future Chinese people will appreciate his magnificent journey.

I. The Man Who Talked Through the Night with "Him" in a Cave Dwelling

All of this is something I heard. It is said that he, the "he" you all know, once knew Wang Weiguo when he was sent down to northern Shaanxi. They were both ambitious, both loved literature, and once talked through the night in a cave dwelling.

It was probably on some day in the 1970s, perhaps in 1972 or 1973. Wang Weiguo may already have been becoming another person, beginning to possess another name.

Counting from then, a little more than ten years later, Wang Weiguo's other name became known to women and children alike. He wrote his representative work, a book that has remained popular for forty years.

That universally known name was "Lu Yao," but the road of his life only reached the age of forty-three. His work, which readers a hundred years from now may not know, is known by almost everyone today: The Ordinary World. In my view, it is about the pain of human beings in poverty and scarcity, and about their struggle and striving to escape that pain.

I have never been a reader of Lu Yao, but I acknowledge that the life he portrayed, and the struggle of people within that life, are real. Because they are real, they are fundamentally sincere, even if the text itself is not entirely sincere. One might even say that the textual affectations and vanities are part of a larger truth.

Those affectations and vanities belong both to The Ordinary World and to its characters, and also to Lu Yao himself. In fact, the characters in it are Lu Yao. From every angle, they reflect the kind of life Lu Yao wanted.

As for the other person who talked with him through the night in the cave dwelling, I have heard that over the next thirty or forty years, he maintained his love of literature. Perhaps you know his name too.

What did they talk about in that cave dwelling?

Two young men of about twenty. Perhaps one talked about the storms he had stirred up in Yanchuan County, while the other spoke of his dangerous flight in Beijing. They must also have talked about their ambitions. Late at night, the candle in the cave dwelling went out. They could neither clink glasses nor clap hands, but perhaps they heard the violent collision of youthful hearts.

In the following ten-odd years, each could hear news of the other in newspapers and on the radio. One became famous across the northwest; the other guarded one region in the southeast. One "he" walked the path idealized by the other "he"; the other "he" practiced the literature loved by the first.

Half a century passed. One "he" lived a life called Lu Yao; the other "he" carved "Lu Yao" onto the tombstone on Wenhui Mountain in Yan'an.

For decades, generations of Chinese readers have read Lu Yao's works. In the fates and struggles of Shaoan and Shaoping, they saw themselves. In their dignity, affectation, and vanity, they also saw themselves. From this they received encouragement and consolation.

But besides The Ordinary World, Lu Yao completed another work: the person called "Lu Yao."

He was the poorest and bitterest child on the Loess Plateau. He was a formidable man who "could succeed at anything." With incomparable resolve, he left himself behind and pursued another fate. During the Cultural Revolution, he stirred up storms. He married a Beijing educated youth, using marriage to leave the impoverished Loess Plateau. In the 1980s, he became famous throughout the country through writing, and seized the crown of the Mao Dun Literature Prize.

He was boastful and vain, spending his and his lover's income on expensive cigarettes. He was tough and snobbish, wanting to trample everyone else underfoot. He was both sincere and affected. He wrote against the current amid various literary trends, but his writing inevitably carried the falsehoods of its era and its system.

He placed himself on the kind of millstone I once saw in a Ksitigarbha hall, grinding himself into flesh and blood in pursuit of a spiritual achievement that could soothe all his wounds and all his dignity.

"He was Kuafu, fallen on the road of thirst."

I think Lu Yao the person is more interesting than his works. If he is ultimately immortal, I do not think it will be because of the works printed as books; on the scale of history, those will be perishable. If he is ultimately immortal, it must be because of the life he lived, because of the ordinary world he named with the name Lu Yao.

II. "The First Choice" and "Damn It All to Hell, Literature"

Jia Pingwa once wrote an essay called "Remembering Lu Yao," in which he said: "Lu Yao was a man of great ambition. Literature may not have been the first choice of his life, but whatever he did, he would have succeeded. His literature burned like fire, giving off a scorching, brilliant flame."

That essay is written with great care. Its opening lines are these:

Time passes so quickly. Lu Yao has been gone for fifteen years. In these fifteen years, I have often thought of him.

I remember standing with him on a hill in Yanchuan. He pointed to the county town below and said: Back then I wore a torn cotton jacket, but I stirred heaven and earth here. Do you believe it?

I think Jia Pingwa knew what Lu Yao's "first choice" in life was, because Lu Yao had already chosen his first choice in 1966. What Lu Yao proudly described to him in that memory was precisely that first choice.

There is a famous sentence in Jia Pingwa's essay. All the versions I can find today say this:

He was an excellent writer. He was a person of tremendous momentum. But he was Kuafu, fallen on the road of thirst.

What a pity. This passage, which almost settles the final judgment on Lu Yao, is missing its most important sentence. What Jia Pingwa wrote was:

He was an outstanding politician.

If we see Lu Yao as a work completed in the world, this sentence is exactly right. But on the level of reality, it is indeed something that must be deleted in public. The fate of this sentence is almost the fate of Lu Yao himself.

In 1966, that storm-filled year you all know, Wang Weiguo was seventeen. He had just graduated from junior middle school in Yanchuan. He had not yet become the thunderous name Lu Yao, but before Lu Yao, he had already made the name Wang Weiguo resound.

He threw himself into the "heaven-and-earth-stirring" rebel movement and became commander of the middle-school rebel faction "Jinggangshan." Wearing a torn cotton jacket, he displayed the "tremendous momentum" he would later display throughout his life. He became the publicly elected leader of several mass organizations, and served as commander of the "Yanchuan County Red Rebel Fourth Field Army."

In 1968, after Yanchuan County implemented the "three-in-one" and "grand alliance" of military representatives, old cadres, and rebels, Wang Weiguo became deputy director of the Yanchuan County Revolutionary Committee.

Yes, the same position Tian Fujun holds in Yuanxi County in The Ordinary World.

It is said that when Lu Yao was a rebel leader and deputy director of the revolutionary committee, he respected and protected old cadres. Tian Fujun is precisely the "old cadre" whom Lu Yao wanted to respect and protect. Starting from deputy director of the revolutionary committee, Tian Fujun's "official career" and Lu Yao's were worlds apart. Of course, that is why Lu Yao had to write Tian Fujun.

Tian Fujun's life was the "first choice" Lu Yao wanted to become. When you see Tian Fujun's magical force on the political stage, do not doubt it: Lu Yao was exercising the privilege of the author.

At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Tian Fujun was overthrown. Those were the glorious years of young rebels like Lu Yao, and it was Lu Yaos who overthrew Tian Fujun. After 1970, Tian Fujun kept serving as deputy director of the Yuanxi County Revolutionary Committee, and later, in a time of political transition, he encountered a turning point in his official career.

Lu Yao's own official career, however, was cut short in the very years when Tian Fujun returned. In 1969, military representatives and old cadres fought back nationwide, and Lu Yao, who came from the rebel faction, was removed from office and sent back to the countryside as an educated youth.

In fact, Lu Yao's fate was not bad. Many rebel leaders were shot, while he merely returned to the countryside. This may also show that the rumor that Lu Yao protected "old cadres" was true. But his future was indeed bleak. There was a danger that he would "rot" in the countryside. It was probably around this time that he was abandoned by the Beijing educated youth Lin Hong. Later, even after he got another Beijing educated-youth girlfriend, Lin Da, it is said that he never recovered spiritually.

By the end of the Cultural Revolution, Lu Yao was in an even worse position. He was thoroughly one of the "three kinds of people," placed in a separate category and never to be used again.

But Lu Yao somehow fought his way out. In the early 1980s, he won a national prize with a novella, then wrote Life and became famous throughout the country. You all know the later story. Lu Yao's essay is very good: morning begins at noon. Through six years of labor, he wrote The Ordinary World. Although critics were initially cool, before the book was even finished, China National Radio began broadcasting it. It swept the country, and in 1991 it was awarded the Mao Dun Literature Prize.

His literary success seemed to sweep away the shadow of his political origin.

It is said that in 1992, the Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee had decided that he would become chairman of the Shaanxi Writers Association, but he died before taking office. In 2018, Lu Yao "was awarded the title of Reform Pioneer by the Party Central Committee and the State Council, received the Reform Pioneer Medal, and was recognized as an outstanding writer who inspired hundreds of millions of rural youth to join reform and opening."

If Lu Yao had lived to this day, it is very likely that, like Tie Ning, he would have become a state leader.

Of course, such a path may not have been Lu Yao's ideal. Lu Yao's ideal was to become Tian Fujun: to stir heaven and earth in great storms, climb to the summit of power and fame, and still possess a moral legitimacy he could boast of to others, just as The Ordinary World depicts.

Extreme ambition for fame, extreme dignity, and an extreme pursuit of moral and spiritual achievement in the universal sense: this is Lu Yao.

Lu Yao was successful in the worldly sense, dazzling, famous, prize-winning, married to an excellent woman. He wanted to be Tian Xiaoxia, and also He Xiulian. But even this was not enough, not enough to soothe the heart of the boy.

He had too much truth and too much fantasy to write: to write a successful politician, like the one he met in the cave dwelling; to write a dignified youth who did not climb toward a city girl beyond his station; to write another dignified youth, more mature and spiritually richer than himself, who maintained humor, dignity, and faith in love despite a vast difference in status.

He also wrote women.

Tian Xiaoxia's letter to Shaoping did not disappoint him. In the diary she left behind, she tenderly called out to "the man who digs coal." But some women, at the most difficult moment in a man's life, sent a letter breaking off the relationship.

He wrote Liu Qiaozhen. She says to Gao Jialin, "I will support you." Do you think Lu Yao was writing wish-fulfillment? A real woman really said this to Lu Yao, who was still called Wang Weiguo at the time. The real version may have been even more sentimental.

He wrote He Xiulian. Though she complains a little, she still supports Shaoan and lets him prop up his worthless family. Lu Yao's own wife, Lin Da, does not seem to have been so "reasonable."

He also wrote Runye. How painful Runye is, marrying someone she does not love. Is that not Lin Hong, who abandoned him?

He had to write.

Writing was of course also for worldly achievement, but worldly achievement alone was not enough. He had to write his ideals and regrets into his works, into the various fates he deduced. Only in this way could he soothe the wounds Lu Yao suffered because of poverty and scarcity, and only in this way could he be worthy of the pain and sacrificed dignity caused by the collision of youthful hearts in that cave dwelling.

This is "damn it all to hell, literature." This vulgar phrase was allegedly said by Lu Yao to his younger brother when he went to Beijing to receive the Mao Dun Literature Prize. The immediate reason he said it was poverty: his brother had to borrow money everywhere to scrape together his travel expenses.

It was only poverty. Was he not still going to do it?

After receiving the Mao Dun Literature Prize, he once spoke of how it felt:

I trampled them all underfoot!

That was said in private. In his public remarks, he said:

The people are our mother, and life is the source of art. The great tree of the people's life is evergreen. Perched on its branches, we cannot help but sing for it. Only if we do not lose the feeling of ordinary laborers can we possibly grasp the mainstream of social and historical progress, and possibly create truly valuable works of art. Therefore, to devote oneself wholeheartedly to life, and among the countless laboring people whose hands and feet are calloused as they create great history, great reality, and a great future, to comprehend the great realm of life and the great realm of art: this should be our lifelong pursuit.

I believe both statements are completely sincere and completely conscious. When saying each passage, Lu Yao absolutely knew what he was saying, and knew what kind of sculpture he was making out of his own life. This is precisely what is so thrilling about the work called Lu Yao.

III. The Long March from Wang Weiguo to Lu Yao

In the previous sections, we used the phrase "Beijing educated youth" as a modifier for Lu Yao's two lovers. This was not the author's perverse taste.

I wrote it this way because Lu Yao himself once said:

Not long after the Beijing educated youths arrived, I had a premonition: my future girlfriend would be among them.

Lu Yao was a strong person who created his own life. What he called a premonition was less a premonition than a plan.

And he had a reason for making such a plan:

Which local woman would have the ability to support me through university? If I did not go to university, how could I get out? Was I to rot in the countryside for the rest of my life?

Later, Lu Yao did indeed find two "Beijing educated youths," and neither relationship was exactly "happy."

In 1969, when Lu Yao was under investigation, his first girlfriend asked someone to write him a letter breaking off their relationship. At that time he was still Wang Weiguo, not yet Lu Yao. It is said that many years later, Lu Yao roared at a friend:

Do you know under what circumstances she abandoned me?

Do you know what that abandonment meant?

Do you know what it means to add frost to snow?

Do you know what it means for someone close to you to stab you in the back at the most difficult moment?

Do you know how much suffering, how much pain, how many times I clenched my teeth in order to prove myself?

Under what circumstances?

It was 1969. The fire of the Cultural Revolution had been burning for two or three years. In those years, rough heroes everywhere stirred heaven and earth. Some names you know: Wang Hongwen, who had fought in the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea, rose from security officer in a cotton mill to become one of the top figures in Shanghai, and in 1969 was promoted to member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. He still had a great future ahead of him.

But 1969 was a nightmare for many more rebel heroes. The elders found their chance to counterattack. Some were killed; some were imprisoned.

Yang Xiaokai was arrested in 1969, and his mother hanged herself. Yu Luoke, who wrote On Family Background, died in 1970, sentenced to death at a public trial in Beijing Workers' Stadium. In 2019, I listened to a Lo Ta-yu concert at that place. The concert was called The Young People Who Left Home Back Then.

Lu Yao was the same as Yang Xiaokai and Yu Luoke, and also different.

They were the same in that they were all rebels, figures who stirred up storms. Precisely because of this, misfortune found them in different places during the same period. They were different in that Yang Xiaokai and Yu Luoke struggled for ideas, whereas Lu Yao's struggle was to escape an ordinary life. Of course, in an ultimate sense, that too is a kind of idea, but it is different after all.

It is now 2025. We can understand that in 1969, Wang Weiguo's situation was different from Yang Xiaokai's and Yu Luoke's. Lu Yao at the time did not know that.

In fact, to say they were different is also to say they were the same. In other places, other Wang Weiguos were arrested or shot. It is said that another mass organization in Yanchuan County kept filing accusations, saying he was connected to deaths in armed struggle, so at the time there was talk of arresting him.

It was then that Wang Weiguo received Lin Hong's letter breaking off their relationship.

Indeed, the postman delivered it at too perfect a time.

He was removed from office and sent back to the countryside. We think he was lucky; for him it was engraved into his bones.

I think Lu Yao possessed a kind of wisdom born of his background: a sensitivity to status and future prospects. He knew clearly that Beijing educated youths would return home (in fact they did return, and half a century later took over), while he might rot on the Loess Plateau.

It is not that others could not recognize this. His wisdom lay in his deep and inseparable adherence to this recognition, and in his decisive determination, based on it, to leave himself behind and pursue a different fate.

It is said that through a certain Beijing educated youth, he saw the possibility of leaving the countryside through literature. He then began following Cao Guxi, writing poetry and running literary journals. That was probably between 1971 and 1972. For a poem, Wang Weiguo chose a pen name. That pen name was "Lu Yao."

In 1973, Lu Yao was admitted to Yan'an University. Just as Wang Weiguo, not yet "Lu Yao," had long anticipated, the Beijing educated youth Lin Da became his wife. Like a plain northern Shaanxi woman, she worked hard, was diligent and frugal, saved money to support him through school, made herself dusty and worn, and saved money to buy him cigarettes, just as later, when he became the great writer Lu Yao, he would spend the household income on expensive cigarettes.

Lu Yao's marriage to the Beijing educated youth Lin Da did not have a good beginning and a good end.

In 1992, just months before Lu Yao's death, Lin Da brought divorce papers to Lu Yao's sickbed in Xijing Hospital, obtained his signature, and then took the train back to Beijing. She probably boarded at the railway station beneath the Xi'an city wall.

She missed by only a few months the chance to see off the Lu Yao she had helped create.

I imagine that as Lin Da sat on the train leaving Xi'an, she must have remembered the train that had brought her there in the late 1960s. What a long and short stretch of time.

When she left Beijing, she must have seen red flags waving through streets and alleys. She must have heard the sharp sound of loudspeakers. Like a tide, they submerged the everyday life she knew. They swore to dedicate their youth to the great northwest. That was something said for others to hear. She could not have imagined that her years in the northwest would be so long.

And when, in the bitter and long winters of northern Shaanxi, she pledged herself to that strong and striving young man; when she sacrificed her youth, beauty, and future to support and create that Lu Yao; when they named their daughter Yuanyuan, she surely could not have imagined that the road they walked together would be so short.

All of this was destined. Just as Lu Yao wrote in his novels.

In Lu Yao's novels, he repeatedly writes women and marriage. He deeply understood that marriage is an important path by which young people at the bottom change their fate, and that marriage is crucial to a man's career.

But he understood even more that a person can only seek a lifelong partner according to his own conditions. A marriage that crosses class and violates social matching is undesirable and will not end well, except for a few heroic figures. And he was one of those few heroic figures, even though his own marriage cannot be said to have ended well.

Years later, when he wrote The Ordinary World, the brothers Shaoan and Shaoping lived different lives for him.

Shaoan rejects Runye. He is the Lu Yao who knows that marrying above one's station will not end well. Shaoping is another Lu Yao: the Lu Yao who, through reading, embraced a larger world and possessed a higher spiritual realm, which allows him to interact with Tian Xiaoxia with humor and ease.

Readers a hundred years from now may be confused. To put it simply: Shaoping is a miner from the Loess Plateau; Tian Xiaoxia is the daughter of a provincial Party secretary and a famous journalist.

Lu Yao writes Shaoping's vanity and dignity very well. Of course he does, because he is writing himself.

He writes Shaoping receiving Xiaoxia's letter and feeling proud to have such an "outstanding" girlfriend. He also writes Shaoping being invited to a banquet by the mine's propaganda chief because of Xiaoxia, and Shaoping saying he must go, not in order to eat and drink for free, but for "a man's dignity." Of course, he also writes Shaoping's struggle and spiritual pain over the gap in their status.

In the book this is natural. It is also the key to reading Lu Yao himself as an epic. If we did not read these things, we might think he was a true formidable man, ruthlessly pursuing wealth and rank, with no inner friction at all.

But because we read these things, we know that the formidable man in Yanchuan County who wore a torn cotton jacket and stirred up storms, inside his powerful body, was still only a poor child. The spiritual pain he underwent in changing from Wang Weiguo into Lu Yao required a great book to heal it.

He makes Tian Xiaoxia say to Shaoping, "Don't take offense, don't feel like an outsider." Perhaps that was what he longed for, and what his Beijing educated-youth girlfriend never finally said to him. He makes Shaoan ruthlessly reject Runye in order to settle the dignity of a poor man.

Why did he write Tian Xiaoxia's death? Perhaps he knew what the future of Xiaoxia and Shaoping would be. He himself was inside that future. Inside that future, he wrote the essay Morning Begins at Noon. He wrote about his daughter Yuanyuan, but not his wife Lin Da. Not long after that essay was finished, he died. A few months before his death, on his sickbed, he signed the divorce agreement Lin Da handed him.

What was he thinking then?

Did he remember Tian Xiaoxia and Shaoping's appointment beneath the pear tree? Did he remember the breakup letter of 1969? Did he remember the long and painful road from Wang Weiguo to Lu Yao?

No matter how long and painful that road was, it was a road he opened himself. Among all forms of pain, only one kind of pain is real: the pain of a person becoming himself.

He became the successful person he wanted to become. He also became the person he wanted to become who, in the secular world, climbed bravely toward the spiritual summit he could see. He also became the person he wanted to become who forever leaves himself and then forever calls himself back.

A few months ago, I wrote the following as the ending of this piece:

From Wang Weiguo to Lu Yao was an expedition of self-shaping by the will to power. It was the expedition of a person leaving himself for his fate, and also the expedition of a writer painfully calling back the self he had left behind.

IV. Reunion with the Pure and White

Several months have passed, and I still have not been able to write the final chapter of this series. About Lu Yao, it seems I still have many things to write, and yet also nothing left to write.

I think that in Lu Yao's life, in many people's lives, and also in my own life, we have all once believed that we firmly and unshakably believed in something. We pretended that it was a pure and white ideal.

But in life's expedition of forever leaving ourselves, we will never reunite with that pure and white ideal.

For Lu Yao, that pure and white ideal was literature.

On the long journey from "Wang Weiguo" to "Lu Yao," not only did he fail to reunite with pure and white literature; one might even say he had never seen it at all.

For Lu Yao, literature was stained from the very beginning by the scarcity he was born with, and by the ambition for fame and profit nourished by that scarcity.

Just like the first time he saw that Beijing educated-youth girl.

Of course, there was something there: that pure stirring of the heart. It was the stirring of barbarism before civilization, the stirring of a village hoodlum before a city girl. But at the same time, it was calculation and snobbery. And when you examine it deeply, you cannot understand what difference there is between purity and snobbery.

When he passionately pursued Beijing educated youths, that was connection between people, love and desire. At the same time, it was also his expedition to change his fate.

These two motives were mixed together. Lu Yao himself probably could not distinguish them, and he had no intention of distinguishing them.

Likewise, through literature he established a spiritual connection with hundreds of millions of readers, and through literature he also established a connection with the fate of rising above others.

This is the fate of people like us: everything we believe in, in this world, is stained by all kinds of karma. Or rather, they are originally formed by the convergence of infinite karmic forces.

Among all people there is one kind of person, the kind Lu Yao was: someone who spends his whole life passing the false off as the real, and turning the false into the real.

He hated the specks of mud on himself. He tried to use literature to forge a pure world in order to deny the self that came from scarcity and was full of calculation. This is cruel and tragic.

But those false things are also real, and those real things may also be false.

The utilitarianism and snobbery in him, the extreme longing to change fate and leave scarcity, and the vanity and affectation accompanying that longing, are precisely the truest spiritual ground color of a generation of Chinese people, and the fundamental reason his literature can move people.

The affectation he wrote is the affectation carried by a generation of Chinese people. Because it is a genuinely existing affectation, writing that affectation is, in fact, a kind of sincerity.

That was a road full of mud and filthy water. We painfully walked through it.

The road we have walked, so long as it is sincere, so long as it is the road of becoming ourselves, is ultimately pure and white.

When we look back on the road from which we came, we once imagined it in such false and affected ways, yet it truly grew on the earth into the shape we imagined.

(End)