I was born on the 27th March 1910. One year later, the Bourgeois Revolution of 1911, which put an end to the Qing Dynasty (1616-1619), burst out.
The 1919 4th May movement broke out when I was a primary school boy; that movement aimed at claiming science and democracy for China. That was the time when Marxism started to be divulged in China.
When I was an adolescent, I fell in love with painting. In my secondary school days, led by democratic ideals, I organized street demonstrations with my school-fellows, shouting words of command and devastating goods which were imported from hostile countries, as well as the Inspection for the Interdiction of Opium, where, as a matter of fact, the drug was openly sold.
When I finished my secondary-school education, in 1928, some National Revolution troops went past Jin Hua, my hometown. We went to meet and welcome them in the outskirts and organized a rally among military and civillians in the school's sports ground. Later, the revolution was betrayed and leaders of the mass movements were sanguinarily repressed.
In the Summer of 1928, after some entrance examinations, I was accepted by the "Western Lake" National Institute of Fine Arts. I entered the Faculty of Painting. By the end of the first term, having examined my sketches, the director gave me a word of decisive advice: "You will hardly be able to learn great things here. Why don't you go abroad?"
In the Spring of the following year, several fellow-students and I left for Paris as though we were running away from our families.
At first, my family would send me some money, but it did not last long and I had to start working in a Chinese lacquer shop. Sometimes I has a part-time job there, so that I could learn drawing at a Montparnasse atelier. I had fallen in love with the French Impressionists from an early age and I did not like Academism very much.
I sometimes said: "I have spent three years in Paris, poor but free." In spite of that, I have never really known what hunger like. I read many Realist social intervention books and many philosophic works. In the field of literature, what attracted me most was poetry. I wandered like a wet drop floating at the mercy of the tide.
On the 18th September 1831, the invading Japanese troops occupied, without much difficulty, the three north-eastern provinces of China. National crisis grew daily. In Paris, I attended an Anti-Imperialist Union meeting. My first poem, called "The Great Meeting", reports the event.
One day, when I was drawing in the outskirts of Paris, a drunken Frenchman came closer and shouted at me: "Hey, you, little Chinese man! Your motherland is in danger, how can you find the heart to come painting here!?. That hurt like a slap in the face.
By the beinnings of 1932, I was ready to go back to China, completely deprived of the financial support of my family. At the time, the Japanese invaders were attacking Xangai. Our Armed Forces and our people were offering resistance. On the 28th January, Xangai Resistance Day, I sailed off from Marseille. After a one month and four days voyage, I arrived in Xangai. But by then the conflict was over. The Kuo-Min-Tang, retreating before the Japanese attack, signed the Xangai Armistice Treaty. When I saw the ruins of the Zhabei quarters of Xangai, I nearly burst into tears.
I went back to my hometown in distress. I didn't stay for a full month. In Hangzhou, I met an old schoolfellow of mine. He informed me of the existence of a Left Wing Artists League in Xangai. When I got there in May, I joined them. Together with other young painters, I founded the "Spring Landd" Research Institute. In June, we organized an exhibition in Baxianquiao. On the night of the 12th June, when we were studying Esperanto in a second floor room, we were interrupted and taken away by several secret agents of the French Concession Police. Of the thirteen who had been arrested, eleven were set free. But I remained in prison, together with another of my friends. From that moment on, I gave up painting and started writing poetry right there in the prison.
In the poem "A Reed Pipe", I quoted G. Apollinaire:
"He had a reed pipe.
Which he would not give away for anything in the World
Not even for the staff of the Marshall of France..."
For me, the reed pipe symbolized art and the Marshall's staff, injustice. In that poem, I vilified Aristides Briand and Otto Bismark and declared that I would hold up a clenched first, like in 1787, against the Bastille; but that was not the Paris Bastille. I do not know whether the administration of the prison knew anything about poetry, or even if they would read it, but I managed to send the poem outside, and it was later published in "Epoch", the magazine.
During those nights of torturing insomnia, in the dim light that came through the iron-barred window, I scribbled lines of poetry in note-book. I even wrote two lines on top of each other! In the day-light, I would separate them. Those poems, signed under the pseudonym of "Wojia", were secretly taken out by my visitors, and published.
On a snowy day of the beginning of 1933, as I looked out at the snow flakes through the rice-bowl opening of the window, I remembered my wet-nurse and wrote "Rio Dayen, my wet-nurse". To escape the prison's watch, I changed my literary name. It was my lawyer who took the manuscripts to a friend of mine who later took them to the "Chungguan" (Spring Light) magazine editors.
That was my first piece of work published under the pseudonym of Ai Oing.
After three years and three month in prison, I was set free. And I retutned to my hometown.
One day, on our way to the fair, my father asked me: "Those scribbles of yours you keep scrawling, do they have anything of poetry in them? I hear that you've been quite successful with those poems - is it true?" He did not consider what I wrote as poetry. For him, poetry had to be rhymed and have five or seven characters in each line, but he also knew that there was nothing he could do against my poetic carrer.
During the first half of 1936, I taught in the Hangzhou Female Magistery School. After that, I was unemployed.
But I kept writing verses under a Xangai arbour.
The poem "The Spring" was dedicated to the memory of five revolutionary writers shot by the Kuo-Min-Tang. These are its two closing lines:
"We ask: Where does Spring come from?
And she answers: It comes from the graves of the outskirts of the city of Xangai."
And "Dialogue with Coal" ends with the following question:
"Did you die in deep hatred and in immense indignation?
Dead? No, no, I am still alive:
Please, set me on fire, set me on fire!"
I selected nine poems among the works I had produced between 1932 and 1936 and organized them into a collection which I was later to publish at my own expenses under the title Rio Dayen, my wet-nurse. This edition caught the critics' attention. The book was republished by Ba Jin's Life and Culture Publishing House.
On the 7th July 1937, the War of Resistance against Japan broke out. On the eve, i. e., on the 6th July, I wrote "The Ressurrected Land" on a Hangzhou-bound train from Xangai. Its fifth stanza reads as follows:
"On this instant,
You, the sad poet,
Must get yourself free from your old sandness
So that hope may be regenerated
In your long-aching heart."
The war against Japan, which was strongly wished for, took place then. I left Hangzhou and went to Jinhua and then to Wuhan.
On the night of the 28th December, I wrote "Snow falls upon the Land of China". I was sick at heart when I wrote it, because while the war against Japan was going through a critical moment, those in the Kuo-Min-Tang who were in favour of capitulation were again recommending that peace negotiations should be held. In that poem, I spoke about myself in the following terms:
"Upon the bed of the ebb of time,
The waves that carry misfortune
Have more than once devoured me and thrown me up.
Vagrancy and prison
Have stolen away from me
The verdancy of youth."
From the age of 19 to 25, I wasted the most beautiful years of a man's life in vagrancy and in prison.
The final lines of the same poem read as follows:
"Oh, my China,
Can you possibly derive some courage
From these lyrical, improvised lines I write
Upon this light-less night?"
The day had dawned in copious snow. I told a friend of mine: "This snow is falling for me." He said "You're too egocentgric. You think that even snow obeys your imagination." He did not know that man has a capacity for antecipation.
In 1938, I left Wuhan for Lifen of Shanxi. On the way, I wrote "Wheelbarrow", "Beggars", "Recommender" and the long poem "The North". At that time, Lifeng was under the threat of the enemy, so I left it and went back to Wuhan. On my way back, I wrote the long play "Heading for the Sun". From Wuhan, I left for Guiline, where I wrote several short poems and two long ones: "Trumpeteer" and "He Dies for the Second Time".
From 1938 to 1939, I wrote several essays, such as "Poetry andd Propaganda", "Poetry and the Epoch", "Contributions to an Interpretation of the Beauty of Prose Within Verse", "On Poetry" and "On Poets".
In the beginning of 1940, I taught during one term at the Henshang Rural Magistery, School in the district of Xinning Province of Hunan. During that period, I wrote several short poems and the long piece "Torcha". In the second half of the same year, I left for Chong-ing, where I met comrade Zhou-Enlai, in Beijing.
The first days of 1941 witnessed the South Anhui Incident. During their retreat to the North, the new 4th Army, under the Communist Party of China, was unexpectedly attacked by Kuo-Min-Tan troops.
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