Back to 80: My literary life.

Chapter 801: Spikes

It was already seven o'clock in the evening when they came out of Yu Rongyifang's house. The hostess warmly invited Fang Minghua, Meng Dawen and her family to have dinner together, and also served a special hometown dish - lotus pond fish cakes.

When Fang Minghua returned home, Li Li also brought back a large stack of photocopies from school: "These are all the information I found in the library, take a look."

Fang Minghua sat in the study, drinking tea and looking through the materials.

The content is very detailed, including some historical data released by the government, articles written by scholars, and some records of specific cases.

It seems that there are traces of it, but someone is intentionally or unintentionally trying to cover up this history.

Fang Minghua sneered.

In recent days, Fang Minghua has been reading these materials in his study, and the records in them are so real.

The locals liked to give the Chinese workers some insulting nicknames, which were often used to insult the Chinese, such as "Stone Man Xiong Hua", "Stone Canyon Charlie", "Charlie Bang Bang" and "King of Tut Tut".

Luo's great-grandfather was walking on a high wooden trestle bridge when a train came towards him. In a hurry, he grabbed a railroad tie and hung in the air, only to hear the train whizzing past his head.

I recall my hometown from afar with its mountains and clouds, and I can hear the mournful cries of cold geese on the small island.

The lost hero talks about swords in vain, while the desperate poet takes the stage.

You should know that the country is weak and the people are dead, so why are you imprisoned here?

—— Engraved by an unknown Chinese at the Angel Island Immigration Detention Center in California, USA in 1910.

After the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, Angel Island was used to imprison Chinese who tried to enter the United States between 1910 and 1940. According to statistics, about 17.5 Chinese were imprisoned here and experienced tragic experiences.

These are all good materials.

It rained today and the weather was particularly cool. Fang Minghua took her daughter Xinxin to play in Jack Fisher Park not far from their home. Looking at a group of children of similar age to her daughter playing and making strings of silver bell-like laughter, Fang Minghua also smiled.

During this period, he had been reading materials about Chinese workers, and those tragic stories made him feel depressed all day long.

No wonder Zhang Chunru committed suicide due to depression after writing "The Nanjing Massacre". That period of history was more than ten times more tragic than the Chinese workers building the railways. It takes tremendous courage to read on facing those bloody words and pictures.

The materials have been collected almost completely, and now I should think about how to write.

There are very few literary works about Chinese workers building railroads in the United States. Later, a Chinese female writer born in the 90s, Zhang Chenji, wrote a novel called "The Color of Gold Mountain", which was shortlisted for the British Booker Prize.

The protagonists of the novel are a pair of Chinese sisters. Their fragmented growth experiences are integrated into the process of this Chinese family's roots and dispersion in the wild West. The father is a Chinese orphan who grew up in an Indian tribe, and the mother was originally transported from China as a railroad worker.
Finally, her mother left and her father died a few years later. Lucy, 12, and Sam, 11, embarked on a journey of exile with their father's remains.

This is how the novel begins, "Dad died in the night, so they have to find two silver dollars." There is no male, no desire for money and victory, no great narrative recorded in history, just a pair of Chinese orphans trying to survive in the wild land.

The novel "The Color of Gold Mountain" also mentions a great historical moment: on May 1869, 5, the first transcontinental railroad in the United States was completed in Premontery, Utah.

At the completion ceremony, Leland Stanford, the business tycoon and political leader who founded Stanford University, hammered a golden spike into the railroad tie to connect the tracks.

The novel describes it this way:
"On the day the last railroad tie was driven down, she heard cheers echoing through the city. A golden spike fixed the rail to the ground. A picture was painted as a witness to history, but no one in the picture looked like her, those who built the railroad."

But the novel is at its core about questions of belonging for immigrants, about the family memories that bind and divide, and about the longing for home.

Mom wanted to return to her hometown across the ocean. In her eyes, "gold can't buy everything, and this will never be our land."

Lucy, who has always had a personality similar to her mother and a closer relationship with her mother, does not agree with the imagination of the other side of the ocean instilled by her mother, and asks herself in her heart, "Why are the streets in my mother's hometown more beautiful, the rain in my mother's hometown more beautiful, and the food in my mother's hometown more delicious?"

What she longed for more was the white civilization conveyed by the school teachers' every move, which symbolized elegance, intelligence and courtesy.

Obviously, these are not the main points of Fang Minghua's writing. He just wants to tell this unknown history through an ordinary Chinese worker.

Of course, Zhang Chenji’s narrative perspective is quite good, as he views, discovers, and thinks about this era from the perspective of two children.

There are many such literary masterpieces, such as Gorky's "Childhood", Lin Haiyin's "Old Things in the South of the City", Xiao Hong's "The Story of Hulan River", etc. The children's perspective can better reflect the cruelty of that era.

The story told by Yu Rong Yifang is based on her great-grandfather as the prototype, and the narrative perspective starts from her great-grandfather's second son.

The second son was born after his parents and many villagers smuggled into the United States from China and set foot on this western wilderness. He recorded what he saw from a child's perspective.

There is no need to be too sensational. The story adopts the writing style of a new realist novel and starts with the daily family affairs of an ordinary Chinese worker.

The long tunnels were built through the mountains and rocks, and there was the danger of explosive explosions, avalanches that could fall from the sky at any time, sleeping in the open and the deadly smallpox epidemic...

This is all recorded through the eyes of a child.

During the next two months in San Francisco, Fang Minghua stayed in his villa to write this novel, striving to complete it before returning home.

In China, there are some activities of the Writers Association, provincial and municipal governments that need to be attended, and socializing with friends also takes time, but in San Francisco, Fang Minghua skips all of this.

In addition to going out for a run every morning and taking his daughter and Li Li for a walk nearby after dinner in the evening, Fang Minghua devotes all his energy to writing.

By mid-August, the 150,000-word novel titled "Railway Spikes" was completed.

Railroad spike is not only a commonly used part in building railways, but also the name of the protagonist.

The first reader is Li Li.

After reading it, Li Li said, "Minghua, if your novel is published, there will definitely be a lot of people who don't like it. It is completely different from the history promoted by the US government."

As she spoke, Li Li took out a document and handed it to Fang Minghua.

He has seen it.

On May 1969, 5, at a ceremony in Promontory, Utah, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the opening of the first transcontinental railroad in the United States, then-U.S. Secretary of Transportation John A. Volpi made an impassioned speech:

"Who could dig ten tunnels through the mountains through blizzards and granite? Only Americans! Who could lay ten miles of track in a day? Only Americans! Who could build such a great railroad? Only Americans!"

(End of this chapter)