Fighting for the Pass

This is the third part of Wang Dingjun's "Memoirs Quartet", which focuses on describing the faces and choices of various people 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 through personal experience of the differences in the behavior of the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, revealing the mystery behind the defeat of one side and the victory of the other.
"War brings writers a kind of richness. Writing materials collapse 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 Against Japanese Aggression. Generation after generation will never finish writing about them, and it is never too late."
The third volume of Wang Dingjun's "Memoirs Quartet" chronicles the author's arduous 6,700-kilometer journey during the Chinese Civil War. Serving in the Nationalist army, the author fought in the Liaoshen and Pingjin campaigns. In 1949, he was captured by the People's Liberation Army in Tianjin, trained in a prisoner-of-war camp, and, donning PLA uniform, walked the entire Jiaoji Railway from Qingdao to Shanghai, ultimately fleeing to Taiwan... Along the way, contrasts, crises, and conflicts each extended, entangled, and rolled forward in a thrilling and captivating journey. The author distills and sublimates the anger, heartbreak, and regret of these four years into a unique memoir that transcends politics, class, and personal gains and losses: "The Kuomintang and the Communist Party are like two mountains, and I am like a stream. Fighting through the mountains, winding my way out—this is a wonderful life."
As a historian, I've always been wary of, even repulsed by, memoirs written by literary figures. However, "Across the Mountains and Mountains" unexpectedly delighted me. Mr. Wang Dingjun perfectly captures the pursuit of beauty in literature, the search for truth in history, and the search for understanding in philosophy through the form of a memoir. It's neither sentimental nor outrageous, but calm and composed, yet it touches the soul.
——Introduction to Wang Qisheng's book series: Using a lifetime of waiting for freedom to describe the causal entanglements and the cycle of life and death of Chinese people in the 20th century. Qi Bangyuan, Zhu Xining, Yang Zhao, Gao Hua, and Wang Qisheng recommend Wang Dingjun's four-part memoir:
Yesterday's Clouds, Angry Boy, Mountain Pass, and Literary Jianghu
"During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, I lived in Japanese-occupied areas and also in the rear areas of the war effort. During the Civil War, I served in the Nationalist Army and witnessed both the KMT at its peak and the Communist Party's complete victory. I was a prisoner and served in liberated areas. During the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, I received the KMT's wartime education and was baptized by authoritarian ideology. Later, in Taiwan, swept by the tide of the times, I was reconstructed by the ideas of democracy and freedom. I have experienced great hardships and great heat, profound destruction and reconstruction... My experience is complete. I believe that God has kept me until now so that I can bear witness."
——Wang Dingjun The War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Exile, Civil War, White Terror… The world was in chaos at that time, but these four memoirs have a clear thread, showing the turbulent times like the Flaming Mountain through personal experiences of separation and chaos. It reads like a chapter novel, with wonderful stories connected one after another - this is actually what the octogenarian author has earned with his youth and blood and tears!
What's remarkable is that the author doesn't write this memoir as a tearful indictment of his own blood. Instead, he uses his own experiences, thoughts, actions, and knowledge, employing the pursuit of beauty in literature, truth in history, and the search for understanding in philosophy to transform these tears into a pearl, presenting the existence of a generation and attempting to awaken modern attention to and understanding of the most important collective experiences of the Chinese people of that era. Without sensationalism or outcry, the work is calm and composed, yet it possesses an epic grandeur and soul-touching power.
"Fighting Through the Mountains and Rivers" won the United Daily News Readers' 2005 Best Book Award, "The Memoirs Quartet" was named one of the China Times' 2009 Top Ten Books, and "Literary Jianghu" won the Grand Prize at the 3rd 2010 Taipei International Book Fair.

2013-01-01

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