Shen congwen biography of william
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Family Letters
An excerpt
Shen Congwen
Photograph by Sherman Ong
Beijing
Chongwen:
I had a cold for two days, a fever, it's very uncomfortable, and yesterday I asked for half a day off. It's Sunday today so I rested, and hopefully I will recover.
A water lily in the courtyard has opened up, it's honey yellow, beautiful yet sweet. The flower has a better sense of time than you: it wakes up on time every morning, and at four it shuts its eyes for the night. The mothers in the front and back of the courtyard all agree that this is a curious flower. The children sit around looking at it but no one dares touch it.
I took the pleasure of reading your work. In my opinion, you should not publish this straight away. Not every topic has to be so serious, but even if you are writing a novel against mahjongg, you are still exaggerating something insignificant. Also, it's not as if playing mahjongg is so harmful that you have to be against it or else, we still need to wait for more research on the matter, despite moments of clear discrimination against cardinal questions of right or wrong. We must consider if we want to publish this work. I hope you can write a better, weightier work. As you haven't written for so long, plenty of people are looking forwa
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Shen Congwen: A Letter
Shen Congwen’s work began to appear in mainstream publishing in 1924, when he was twenty. In 1934 he completed his masterpiece, Border Town (translated by Jeffrey C. Kinkley, 2009, Harper Perennial), which tells the story of a young girl pursued by two eligible men whilst at the same time caring for her only known family member, her grandfather. It was also around this time that he fell in love with his nineteen year-old student, Zhang Zhaohe.
Zhang was the model for Cuicui, the protagonist of Border Town. References to Cuicui appear throughout Shen’s diaries and letters, as does Sansan, his nickname for his wife.
This diary entry letter from 30 May, 1949, comes at the eve of the founding of the People’s Republic on October 1 of the same year, and it was in the late forties that Shen Congwen found himself profoundly isolated. His ‘radical’ belief