The title of the poem is "After singing the song of the great river, we turn eastward"
Original text
After singing the song of the great river, we turn eastward.
Facing the wall for ten years and trying to break it,
It is difficult to be rewarded for being a hero despite crossing the sea.
Appreciation
"After singing the song of the great river, turn east" is a majestic starting line, which expresses Zhou Enlai's determination to sail eastward to seek the truth. "Song of the Great River" refers to Su Shi's passionate poem "Niannujiao·Chibi Nostalgic" that has just been sung. The poem begins with the sentence "The great river goes eastward, and the waves are gone, and the romantic figures of the ages". Zhou Enlai used this allusion here, firstly, to express the heroic ambition, and secondly, to reflect the experience of crossing the ocean and rivers eastward to Japan. "U-turn east" indicates a decision without hesitation. When Liang Qichao was in exile in Japan after the failure of the Reform Movement of 1898 in 1898, he once wrote a poem: "The road ahead is covered with ten thousand mountains, so turn around and ignore our east!" Liang Qichao expressed his determination to leave China and go to Japan to seek the truth. Zhou Enlai wrote this poem It also reflects his ambition to save the country when he crossed east in 1917.
“A sophisticated group of sciences can save the world from poverty” refers to his goal of studying in Japan, which is to study multiple sciences in detail to save China from the brink of despair. Zhou Enlai had the lofty ideal of "study for the rise of China" since he was in middle school. The era he lived in was also a period when calls for "saving the country through industry" and "saving the country through science" were rising in China. Most of the Chinese young people in the wave of studying abroad had such ideals. Foreign countries seek advanced ideas and advanced technologies to serve the country and save China. Therefore, he could give up studying in Japan when the domestic revolution required it, and he could also go to Europe for a work-study program in 1920 to meet the needs of the revolution.
"Facing the wall for ten years and trying to break it" uses the story of Bodhidharma to practice meditation while facing the wall to reflect the state and pursuit of the poet's hard work to achieve. Zen Master Bodhidharma, who came from the west, crossed a reed from the south of the Yangtze River to reach the Shaolin Temple in Songshan Mountain. He meditated silently in the cave for ten years and finally successfully introduced Indian Buddhism to China and became the first ancestor of Zen Buddhism. Zhou Enlai said that one should have Bodhidharma's spirit of facing the wall when traveling east to study abroad, and after completing the studies, one should reach a situation like a giant dragon breaking through the wall and taking off. The theory of "breaking the wall" comes from the legend recorded in "Records of Famous Paintings of the Past Dynasties". It is said that Zhang Sengyao, a famous painter from the Southern Dynasty, painted four eyeless dragons on the wall of Anle Temple in Jinling. Once he pointed out the dragon's eyes, The giant dragon broke through the wall and flew into the air. Zhou Enlai's clever combination of "facing the wall" and "breaking the wall" is not only an artistic creation in terms of rhetorical techniques, but more importantly, it expresses an extraordinary pursuit of life.
"It is difficult to reward a hero even if he crosses the sea", which shows that he gave up studying abroad for the needs of the revolution this time. "It's hard to reward one's ambition to cross the sea" means it's difficult to reward one's ambition to cross the sea. "Crossing the sea" can be understood in two ways. One means jumping into the sea to die. For example, Chen Tianhua, a recent man who studied in Japan, resolutely committed suicide by jumping into the sea to wake up the sleeping Chinese people as a warning; the other means that in the late Qing Dynasty, he went abroad to seek Truth is also called "crossing the sea". I take the second meaning here, which may be more in line with the background of Zhou Enlai's poem.