Zhang Ailing’s Yangko can be purchased on Taobao.
The novel "Yangko" written by Zhang Ailing in Hong Kong in 1953 mainly describes the bloody mass incidents in a post-land reform rural area in Jiangsu during the period of my country's economic recovery. It is a very good literary work. Zhang Ailing strives to write the historical truth from her own perspective.
Hu Shi likes Zhang Ailing's "Yangge" very much. He believes that "Yangge" takes "hunger" as the theme. It not only describes the despair of ordinary farmers in the face of hunger in great detail, but also highlights the performance by analyzing the causes of hunger. The contradiction between farmers' needs and government control, the conflict between human nature and the system.
The novel also includes the government’s cultural and organizational construction in the countryside (peasant literacy classes, women’s associations, poor peasant organizations, etc.). Although it is also a means for the government to control the countryside, it obviously does not have the social progressive nature. The theme of "hunger" is clear.
Zhang Ailing had very little contact with rural areas. In 1947, she went to the countryside near Wenzhou to stay with Hu Lancheng for a while, and she also wrote the prose "Stories of a Foreign Land". The description of rural scenes in the prose was identical to "Yangge". Bad (such as the appearance of the village, Comrade Wang inquiring about the whereabouts of his wife at a fellow villager's house, killing pigs, etc.).
It is possible that she briefly experienced rural land reform in 1950, but there is no objective evidence so far, and there are no more rural details in the novel than in "A Strange Land". However, she was able to rely on her limited experience to Some of the farmers I have come into contact with have seen it more clearly, and have shaped farmers with more three-dimensional personalities that are in line with real life.
Of course, she cannot write about farmers with different personalities, rich ideas and complex positions like writers who have taken root in rural areas for many years, but her writing is very detailed and specific, which shows her extraordinary talent.
She has also read novels about rural areas in the liberated areas, such as the works of Ding Ling ("Love in the Red Earth" quotes "The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River" in many places), Zhao Shuli and others, and tried her best to write them on paper Therefore, it is untenable for some people to accuse Zhang Ailing of completely "making things up" after taking foreign money.