The Song of Youth (novel)
청춘의 노래 (소설)
A novel by the Chinese writer Yang Mo, published in January 1958. Lin Daojing, a girl who has run away from home, passes through love and prison in 1930s Beiping and becomes a Communist. It sold 1.21 million copies in its first year and was filmed in 1959.
In depth
What is the story?
Lin Daojing is the daughter of a rich Beiping family; her real mother was a tenant's daughter seized by her father. After middle school her stepmother tries to marry her to Director Hu, and she runs away. At Beidaihe, realising what the headmaster sheltering her has in mind, she is about to drown herself when the ardent youth Yu Yongze saves her.
She sets up house with Yu and begins to stifle, weighed down by domestic chores with no time to study. Then the patriotic student Lu Jiachuan, met after the Mukden Incident, reappears, and she starts reading Marxist books and dreaming of revolution. Yu resents this and refuses to help when Lu is captured. Lu is killed and Daojing leaves Yu.
Handing out leaflets, she is betrayed by the traitor Dai Yu and arrested. The agent Hu Meng'an tries to force her into marriage, but friends get her out, and she goes to work in Ding county and meets the Communist Jiang Hua. Arrested again and beaten, on her release she joins the party with Lin Hong's encouragement and throws herself into the anti-Japanese movement.
Why was it so widely read?
Because it is a revolutionary novel and a love story at once. A woman finding her own life between three men gripped readers in 1950s China. It sold 1.21 million copies in its first year and four to five million in the next two, and it went into many languages, Japanese, English, Russian and Arabic among them. In 1959 the Beijing Film Studio filmed it, directed by Chen Huai'ai and Cui Wei, with Xie Fang in the lead.
That was also its danger. Yang began it in 1951 and finished a draft in 1955 (first called Unquenchable Wildfire), but it was rejected repeatedly for failing to extol workers, peasants and soldiers and for its petty-bourgeois sentiment and love triangle. In the Cultural Revolution the main charge against her was the book's petty-bourgeois ideas.
How does it touch the author's life?
Yang's own life resembles the novel. The daughter of a ruined rich family, she refused a marriage to an officer, left home and drifted as a teacher. In 1930 she met Zhang Zhongxing, lived with him and left him over housework and politics, later marrying the underground party member Ma Jianmin. During the war she worked for the women's national-salvation association in the front areas of central Hebei, with death close by. Her date of joining the party is tangled: her husband gave 1936, then said under pressure in the Cultural Revolution that he had made it up to comfort her, and the party is said to have recognised her re-registration in 1938.