Ｒｅｍｉｎｉｓｃｅｎｃｅｓ ｏｆ Ｍｙ Ｍｏｔｈｅｒ

My mother Ru Zhijuan passed away ten years ago. Time flies. For most people， she is remembered mainly as the writer who authored “Lily”， her 1958 war story about a nameless soldier and a nameless bride. As her eldest daughter， I remember a sea of details about her.

Born in 1925 in Shanghai， my mother had her ancestral roots in Hangzhou， capital city of eastern China’s Zhejiang Province. With her mother dead while she was only 3， my mother and her four brothers were brought up by their grandmother. Directed by her elder brother， my mother joined the New Fourth Army led by the Communists in 1944 at the age of 19.

It was in the army that my mother acutely felt the power of art. Enraged by the tragedy of “The White-Haired Girl” in the unfair bad society in a namesake opera， soldiers chanted slogans for revenge and marched off to fight for a new society. She determined that writing would be her lifelong career. In these war years， she as a soldier had to throw away a lot of personal belongings in order to travel light but she carried Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” with her all the time. She wrote art programs for her regiment to boost soldiers’ morale.

In 1955 my mother was discharged from the army and came to Shanghai and worked as an editor at Culture and Art， a Shanghai-based literary monthly.At that time our father was still in the army. I was four and my sister was one. My mother and we daughters lived in a 2-room apartment. Her room was small but it was where she could write. Outside the window of her room was a noisy narrow alley.

My mother wrote slowly and laboriously. I remember going to see her in her room whenever I came back home after school. At that time she was able to enjoy leave to write stories at home.I was always impressed by manuscript sheets stacked on her desk. Mother played games with us when we were home， but now and then she would become absent-minded. Once I caught her absent-minded and asked what she was thinking. She replied she was thinking of a story. Then I retold a story I had just learned at school and offered generously that she could use the story. She laughed， saying she was thinking of a very long story.

My mother wrote laboriously for a reason. Junior high school was all the serious education she had got previously. She was a self-made writer. The books she read helped her improve and she knew how important books were. When my sister and I were just kids， we were instructed to recite Tang poems. And one day we were given “The Dream of Red Mansions”. She pasted scraps of paper on paragraphs that she thought inappropriate for us to read. The book became very thick because of a great number of the censored paragraphs.

Sometimes she told us stories and discussed them with us. One day she mentioned the significance of details after telling us a story. She pointed out that descriptive details carried a story most effectively and commented that “The Dream of Red Mansions” was a masterpiece of details. Her stories reflect her understanding of the art of writing well. “Lily” was rejected by a few literary magazines for the reason that it “incorrectly focused on the cruelty of the war”. After the story finally came out， it caused a sensation and my mother rose to national fame.

She successfully established herself as a writer and published two collections of short stories. She visited USSR and Japan with fellow Chinese writers. Many of her stories were rendered into foreign languages. But my mother asked me to explain， in case someone was curious enough to ask me what she did， that she was an editor because she knew she was far from being an excellent writer.

During the early years she just began her writing career， writers were not as free as they are now. Her early stories were about the war years she had experienced and the new-born socialism the war years had ushered in. After the Cultural Revolution， her stories showed her honest reflection on the past.

As a well known writer， she received a lot of fan letters. She told me once about a typesetter in a print house. The typesetter was so thrilled by her story that he stopped working and went through the story at one sitting. He later wrote her a letter saying that it was his first experience of being enthralled by a story like that.

As far as I know， Mother committed herself to writing stories that would be loved by her readers.During her lifetime， she disregarded fame and material joys and wrote very hard. From 1955 when we came to Shanghai to 1998 when she passed away， we as a family experienced a lot but moved only once and we never lived in a big house as her position allowed. She only needed a desk where she could write.#8194;