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"The Road to the Mountain: Wang Dingjun's Memoirs, Part Three" Author: Wang Dingjun Publisher: Life·Reading·New Knowledge Sanlian Bookstore Douban Popular Memoirs TOP10
"The Road to the Mountain: Wang Dingjun's Memoirs, Part Three" Author: Wang Dingjun Publisher: Life·Reading·New Knowledge Sanlian Bookstore Douban Popular Memoirs TOP10
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Introduction · · · · · ·
This is the third part of Wang Dingjun's "Memoirs Quartet", which focuses on describing the faces and choices of various characters of different identities, different classes, and different regions, in order to correspond to and interpret the real history that has been obscured by ideology for a long time, touching on a series of major historical events related to the Kuomintang-Communist Civil War, and revealing the mystery behind the defeat and victory of one side by personally experiencing the differences in the behaviors of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party.
"War brings writers a kind of abundance. Writing materials come down like a mountain. Writers move stones to build their own houses. There is no end to the moving and use. There will always be people writing about the Civil War and the War of Resistance. Generation after generation will never finish writing about them, and it is never too late."
The third part of Wang Dingjun's "Memoirs in Four Parts" records the author's ups and downs of traveling 6,700 kilometers during the Chinese Civil War. The author was in the Kuomintang army and experienced the Liaoshen and Pingjin campaigns. In 1949, he was captured by the People's Liberation Army in Tianjin, trained in a prisoner camp, wore a PLA uniform, walked the entire Jiaoji Railway from Qingdao to Shanghai, and finally went to Taiwan... Along the way, contrasts, crises, and conflicts were extended, entangled with each other, rolling forward, and thrilling. The author distilled and sublimated the anger, sadness, and regret of these four years into a unique memory that transcends politics, class, and personal gains and losses: "The Kuomintang and the Communist Party are like two mountains, and I am like a small river. I have to cross mountains and fight for my way out. This is a wonderful life."
As a historian, I have always been wary of or even repulsive to memoirs written by writers, but I was pleasantly surprised by "The Road Across the Mountains". Mr. Wang Dingjun appropriately presents the pursuit of beauty in literature, the pursuit of truth in history, and the pursuit of understanding in philosophy in the form of a memoir. There is no sensationalism, no shouting, it is calm and peaceful, but it touches the soul.
——Wang Qisheng
Series Introduction
Waiting for a lifetime of freedom
Describes the causal entanglement and the cycle of life and death of Chinese people in the 20th century
Recommended by Qi Bangyuan, Zhu Xining, Yang Zhao, Gao Hua, and Wang Qisheng
Wang Dingjun's memoirs in four parts:
"Yesterday's Clouds", "Angry Boy", "Robbing the Mountain", "Literary World"
"During the Anti-Japanese War, I lived in the Japanese-occupied areas and also lived in the rear areas of the war. During the civil war, I joined the National Army and saw the peak of the Kuomintang and the complete victory of the Communist Party. I was a prisoner and entered the liberated areas. During the Anti-Japanese War, I received the Kuomintang's wartime education and was baptized by autocratic ideas. Later, I came to Taiwan and was washed away by the trend of the times. I deconstructed the ideas of democracy and freedom. I went through great cold and heat, great destruction and great construction... My experience is very complete. I think God has kept me until now just to let me be a witness."
——Wang Dingjun
The War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, exile, civil war, white terror... the world was in chaos then, but these four memoirs have a clear thread, using personal experiences of separation and chaos to show the turbulent times like the Flaming Mountain. Reading them is like a chapter novel, with wonderful stories connected one to another - this is actually what the octogenarian author has earned with his youth, blood and tears!
What is rare is that the author did not write the memoir as an article of his own blood and tears accusation, but turned his blood and tears into pearls through his own feelings, thoughts, actions and knowledge, with the pursuit of beauty in literature, the pursuit of truth in history and the pursuit of philosophical solutions, to present the existence of a generation of people, trying to arouse people's attention and understanding of the most important collective experience of the Chinese people at that time. There is no sensationalism, no shouting, and it is calm, but it has the grandeur of an epic and the power to touch the soul.
"Fighting for the Pass" won the United Daily News Reader's Best Book Award in 2005, "The Four-Part Memoir" was selected as one of the Top Ten Books of 2009 by China Times, and "Literary Jianghu" won the Grand Prize at the 3rd 2010 Taipei International Book Fair.
About the Author
Wang Dingjun was born in 1925 in Lanling, Shandong Province, into a traditional farming and reading family. He came to Taiwan in 1949 and worked for the China Broadcasting Corporation (Taiwan). He also served as the editor-in-chief of supplements for many newspapers. In 1979, he was hired to teach at a university in the United States and has since settled in New York.
Wang Dingjun's writing career spanned more than half a century, and he has written nearly 40 books. From his early works in the 1960s to "Open Life" in 1975, and then to "Seven Skills of Composition" in the early 1980s, his "Four Books on Life" and "Four Books on Composition" have been widely sold in Taiwan and are still popular today.
Since the late 1970s, Wang Dingjun began his unique literary creations such as "Broken Glass"; after the publication of "Left Atrial Vortex" in 1988, he was hailed as "a well-deserved master of prose."
From 1992 to 2009, Wang Dingjun published his "Memoirs in Four Parts" over a period of 17 years. These four volumes integrate life experience, aesthetic observation and profound philosophical thinking, showing the entanglement of cause and effect and the cycle of life and death of a generation of Chinese people.
