Chapter 18 I wrote "Beijing Fayuan Temple"

"Beijing Fayuan Temple" as the title of the book was decided seventeen years ago when I was a political prisoner for the first time in the black prison of the Kuomintang.Since 1971, I have been imprisoned twice by the Kuomintang government. The first time I was imprisoned for five years and eight months; the second time I was imprisoned for a total of six months; Including the 14 months of house arrest at home, it was seven years and four months in total.Of the seven years and four months, six years and two months were spent in prison.I went through seven cells, including the airtight cell in the Security Office, the stinky cell in the Military Law Department, the completely isolated bungalow in the Renjiao Camp, and the No. 3 cell in the Taipei Detention Center.Among them, I lived the longest in Room 8 of the Military Law Department. I lived alone for two and a half years.Room No. 8 is less than two pings in size. After deducting a quarter of the toilet, sink and a quarter of the desk I set up with broken door panels, there is not much space left.A person eats, drinks, and sleeps all day long, and all his activities are here.However, it is not people-oriented, and there are also living things in the small room, such as termites, cockroaches, geckos, spiders, and centipedes.All households are limited to wearing clothes and coming and going freely.As for those who are not as good as dogs, they can't help themselves.House No. 8’s household restrictions and comings and goings mainly rely on a small hole at the junction of the wall and the ground. It is rectangular and about 30X15 cm in size. Three meals a day are pushed in from the small hole; drinking water is contained in a five-liter bottle. Plastic buckets are also dragged in from small holes; shopping for daily necessities, borrowing needles and thread, borrowing nail clippers, sending letters, and taking out garbage all pass through small holes; even cotton quilts from outside are rolled into long rolls after inspection stuffed.Although the small room has a door, it is extremely difficult to open it.Although the door is set and always closed, the high windows can be opened, but the gray walls and chill seen outside the window through the iron bars on the window, even on sunny days, make people feel gloomy.In that haze year after year, I conceived several novels, one of which is "Beijing Fayuan Temple".

Since writing is prohibited in the black prison, I had to roughly conceive the plot of the book in case I was released from prison.I was released from prison in 1976, and began to write the first few chapters intermittently while taking care of the disaster.In 1979, I returned to the literary world. In terms of other writing, I wrote for twelve years, published 120 books, 96 books were banned, and 117,600 volumes were seized.In the past twelve years, almost all the main force has been invested in other writing aspects, and "Beijing Fayuan Temple" has been delayed.In the twelve years, I only wrote ten thousand characters intermittently, but I couldn't finish it.

The reason for the delay is not all the lack of time, but a fault in my psychology.Voltaire once said: The best is the enemy of the good. (Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. The best is the enemy of the good.) Just because I wanted to write the best, even the good hesitated to write. After the Kuomintang’s thirty-seven-year-long newspaper ban was lifted in Taiwan, I decided to start Qiushi Daily. On the one hand, I would deal with this puppet regime, overthrow it, and mourn it; , deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and create a future for China.I know very well that once the newspaper is published, my time will be trapped, and "Beijing Fayuan Temple" will come out in unknown years and months.So I spent more than a month writing more than two hours a day, and finally finished it quickly at the end of last year.Evelyn Waugh said that a novel takes six weeks to finish, and my book fits that bill.Since it's just one of my epic novels, I don't intend to use one novel to cover all the topics, so what it covers is only within 400 sub-topics, but the content is also amazing.

"Fayuan Temple in Beijing" takes the concrete and standing ancient temple as the vertical line, and the abstract and dissipated historical figures of various dynasties as the horizontal section, including important themes: life and death, ghosts and gods, monks and customs, entry and exit, and officialdom. Seclusion, government and opposition, family and country, monarch and ministers, loyalty, Barbarians and Xia, Chinese and foreign, strong and weak, group self, others and self, public and private, reason, constant change, going or staying, cause and effect, economy (economics (economics for the people), etc., are all discussed List.It is rare for such a novel with strong expression of thought to be rich in content.

Why is it rare?Because "Beijing Fayuan Temple" is a historical novel.Ordinary historical novels are just such boring stories as taking a bath for Concubine Yang and washing the feet of Empress Xi University, but "Fayuan Temple in Beijing" is not like that at all.Its focus is on manly characters.This is a masculine work. Strictly speaking, there is only one woman in the book, and she is a bad woman, and the rest are all male thoughts and activities.It writes about men's heroism, men's loyalty, men's determination, and men's tragedy.But it does not discriminate against women, from Guangxu's concubine Zhen's lamentation to Tan Sitong's ex-wife's farewell, all of which can be reflected, but its theme is not limited to the relationship between men and women.

The historical figures in "Beijing Fayuan Temple" are all based on historical research, and its accuracy is far above that of history professors (for example, Zhang Hao wrote "Martyr Spirit and Critical Consciousness", the author is like Tan Sitong's expert, but At the beginning of the book, it is stated that Tan Sitong lived for thirty-six years, but in fact, Tan Sitong was born in 1865 and died in 1898, so why did he live for thirty-six years?).After doing a good job of historical research, try to delete the fake works in the history (for example, according to Wang Zhao's "Xiaohang Wencun" and Tang Caizhi's "Hearing and Seeing Records during the 1898 Reform Period", Tan Sitong is in prison, and it is impossible to write letters to Kang and Liang) , and save the truth.However, in order to meet the needs of the novel, I also left key suspicious documents on the edge of the knife (such as Tan Sitong’s poems in prison, and the matter of going to and from Kunlun, I have already researched it in "History and Portraits", but this is The scope of history, not the scope of novels, in the novel, I will deal with it separately), and there are even mistakes (for example, Tan Xuncong, the grandson of Tan Sitong, wrote "The Chronicle of Mr. Tan Fusheng of Qing Dynasty" and said that he went to Fayuan Temple to visit Yuan , but according to Yuan Shikai's "Diary of the Reform Movement of 1898", he lived in Fahua Temple. But in order to emphasize the story of Fayuan Temple, I have made mistakes in the chronicle).Generally speaking, the historical events in the book are consistent with the history as much as possible. Apart from the history, of course there are a lot of plots in the novel based on the historical background, but the plots of the novels are also linked to the historical events from time to time. The accuracy is very interesting ( For example, the large row of square wooden windows of the Japanese Legation that Tan Sitong saw in the book was actually written by me based on a photo of the Japanese Legation in 1900. Or the whole story about Fayuan Temple As for the current situation, it was Xu Yiqi who personally took pictures and drew pictures for me in Beijing; about Yuan Chonghuan’s tomb, it was Pan Junmi who asked Li Rongsheng of Beijing Writers Publishing House to find it for me; about the current situation of the former residences of Kang Youwei and Tan Sitong, it was Chen Zhaoji who personally visited on my behalf.).Historians of the Qing Dynasty said that there were painstaking efforts in the middle but could not be shown, and that there were adjustments in the middle but people didn't know it, and so on.

In addition to historical events, the same is true for characters.If there is such a person, and there is something real, all seek their conformity.In addition, of course there are characters created, but we also try not to fabricate them out of thin air (for example, the little monk Pujing, he is the combined incarnation of three people, in terms of participating in two revolutions, he is Dong Biwu; in terms of being proficient in Buddhism, He is Xiong Shili; as far as he is a martyr for the Communist Party, he is Li Dazhao. I named him Li Shili, and added one to the 20 people who were hanged, including Li Dazhao, because of this. Another example is in the American Legation Stilwell, who had a dialogue with Kang Youwei in China, is indeed a character who is good at Chinese and sympathetic to China. I came to China in advance for him, and formed a relationship with Kang Youwei).There are many such painstaking efforts and adjustments in the book.

In short, when writing historical novels, the problems of realistic truth and artistic truth naturally arise, and the two kinds of truth are expressed, and the theory of the novel is straightforward. In terms of novel theory, "Beijing Fayuan Temple" deliberately breaks the rules in some places.In some places, it does not pay attention to the novel theory of the past, nor does it pay attention to the modern one, because it does not want to become a boring novel of the secret history of the Qing Dynasty, nor does it want to become a trendy technical novel. If you should cross the bridge quickly, you should not spend too much ink; if you should exert yourself vigorously, you should not avoid the ridicule of Bernard Shaw's play "Speech by One Man".

Authentic novels started in the eighteenth century and became popular in the nineteenth century. For the novelists of the twentieth century, it was already too late.TSEliot had insisted that the novel was useless after Flaubert and Henry James, but that was seventy years ago.If Eliot sees the challenges of modern film and television seventy years later, he will be even more surprised at the backwardness of the novel in terms of visual images and failure in communication media.Because of this, I believe that unless fiction reinforces ideas that can only be expressed by fiction, it will have little future.Those who try to tell the story by the strokes of the novel or entangle the form, in fact, it is difficult to restore the decline of the novel.

In the undergrowth of novels that usually feature small characters, I am glad that I have completed this "Beijing Fayuan Temple" with big characters as the main characters.What an inspiring and inspiring thing to write about big people!Tan Sitong, one of the great characters in the book, martyred himself and dared to die (in the words of Zhang Dayan), and since the Qing Dynasty, he has been a real person for one person (in the words of Xiong Shili). Book.After it was written, he felt that Taiwan had lost the hand of Japan. Instead of using his real name, he used the cover of a book written by a Taiwanese to mourn the troubled times; now, I am alone in Taiwan, writing "Beijing Fayuan Temple", the first book written by a Taiwanese Prophecy, a hundred years of loneliness, repeats itself again and again.Qi Kuo forty years.I am printing this book today to return to my homeland, and I will never forget that I am only a mainlander.

June 12, 1991