Hua Bai, whose real name is Chen Youhua, was born on 1930, November the 20th, in Xinyang, in the Henan Province. His father was killed in 1938 by Japanese soldiers who had invaded China: this fact was certainly crucial for his later political positions. He enrolled at the Art Department of the School of Xinyang and in 1946 he published his first works on the local newspapers; the following year he directed, always in a local newspaper, the extra page of art and literature, where he published, along with some young progressives, writings of various literary genre. After these early cultural activities, Hua Bai was kicked out of school because his ideology was considered too radical.
During the fall of 1947 he enlisted in the "Army of the Central Plains" People's Liberation Army and as a member of the department of propaganda, writed dispatches and war posters in verse. In January 1949 he joined the Chinese Communist Party; he then was transferred with the Army in Yunnan where he began to work on literature by writing poetry, essays, short stories and theatrical subjects. In 1952, Hua Bai was transferred to the military zone of Kunming (Yunnan Province) as head of the group of literary work, and stayed there until, in 1955, was called to the General Political Department of Beijing.
In 1957, he was accused of being ideologically against the national party and because of that Hua Bai was sent in a field of reform through labor. This happened after the Anti Rightist Campaign launched by Mao Zedong in 1957 as a corrective to the excess of liberalism in the debate arising from the Hundred Flowers Campaign, launched the previous year, and addressed to the operators of the cultural world so that they could give their contribution to the effort for the development of the country. It was only after four years that he was taken away and from 1961 to '64 he lived in Shanghai at the Haiyan film studios. Reinstated in the army, he was transferred to the military district of Wuhan as a writer-in-chief of the theater group. During the period of the Cultural Revolution, Hua Bai was again accused and spent in prison from 1966 to 1973, but his complete rehabilitation took place only in 1978, with the coming to power of Deng Xiaoping .
In 1985, Hua Bai, left his position in the army, and started working at the Association of Chinese Writers in Shanghai, where he also resided. He had lived for long periods, as a member of the People's Liberation Army, in the border regions of southwest China: these were regions populated predominantly by ethinic minorities and this had deeply influenced the content and the style of his works.
His first collection of short poems, “Memories of the River of Golden Sands” (Jinsha Jiang de huainian), was published in 1955. It is a praise of the brave actions of the soldiers of the border who were fighting for the defense of the country and, at the same time, describes the affection of the local population against the military and, in particular, in respect of He Long. During the period from 1961 to 1966, while he was working in Shanghai and in Wuhan, Hua Bai had managed to publish in a magazine of Canton only the play that were staged. In 1977, Hua Bai wrote the play Early morning light (Shuguang), published in 1978, in which the author, describing the struggle between the two political lines in the history of the Chinese Communist Party, realistically portrays the image of the old proletarian revolutionary He Long. During the same period have been published the collections of poems “Songs of the Evening and Songs of Welcome” (Wan ge ge yu huan), and “Feeling and Reason” (Qing); the play “Tonight the Stars are Shining” (Jinye Xingguang Canlan), then reworked by the author in a film subject and the operetta “The Small Mill Wheel as Flying” (Xiao mo feizhuan); the film subject for “Bitter Love” (Ku lian) and short stories like “A Bundle of Letters” (Yi shu Xinzha), where Hua Bai addresses the problems of corruption and bureaucratic privileges among the elite of the Communist Party.
It is the 1988 novel "The Remote Country of Women" (translated into English by Qingyun Wu and Thomas O. Beebee). It is the story of two young people of different nationalities and cultures that met during the period of the Cultural Revolution. The male protagonist is a Red Guard, who, tired of the situation, took refuge in a remote border region. Here he met a girl of the local ethnic minority, still living in a primitive social organization, and falls in love with her. But the young man is just dazzled by the overall beauty and fascinated by the way of life of the girl. He, in fact, really could never be able to adapt himself to the new habits and therefore, although with deep sadness, eventually he decided to abandon her.
Two problems are raised by this novel.First, the question is if the things were really as primitive as it is stated in the ancient culture. And, at the same time, the author doubted if whether modern times were so advanced as it is supposed to be. This novel is, also, a clear reflection about the love stories and it serves to question about the needs for a social recognition, like marriage, for the acceptance of two lovers. The narrative poetic pursues the will to compare, page after page, the two different societies: the primitive one, where the girl was born and raised, and the modern one, to which belongs the boy. With this novel, the writer wanted to show that thanks to modernization many thing have been accomplished and have become affordable, but, in the end, the risk is to loose sight of the most important ones.
In this sense, a strong message from the book regards the social institution of marriage and its connection with sentiments. Among so-called primitive societies, even though the marriage is not officialized as an institution, there are couples bound by real and deep feelings. Conversely, in the modern societies citizens have to get married in order to legally live together with the partner, but it has to be said that this legal and social recognition cannot ensure the presence of a true sentiment.
A feeling strong and important in "The Remote Country of Women" is the conception of death in everyday life. And it is possible to make a comparison between the way Chinese and Western people watch at this crucial moment of human life.
While in the traditional culture existed precise rituals for the rite of burial, modern China is adopting new ways to tackle the problem effectively. In some villages continues the custom of placing tombs in the forests or at least close to some specific trees; even cemeteries of important cities such as Beijing began offering several burial services, including those at sea or under a tree, incurred by those who believe that the deceased is brought to nature in a sustainable manner for the environment. The cypress and magnolia are among of trees the more popular.
In the past, especially in rural areas, many preferred a burial in a tomb: a lavish funeral was a credit to the prestige of the family. But through the centuries it was realized that the irrational positioning graves made it impossible the use of valuable arable land, with huge waist of economic possibilities and physical soil.
In Western society three behaviors are most relevant about the relationship with the idea of death: the concealment, the spectacle, the anticipation. The concealment of death is just a way to allude to a new form of taboo. It was wittily observed as once upon a time it was thought that children were born under the cabbages while the old ones would have died at home, surrounded by the affection of their loved ones. Today, the children seems to know all about the physiology and also on diseases of the sexual apparatus, but in return have no idea of the end that make those who at some point there are no more. The second way to deal with the concept of death is a kind of spectacularization of death as we see routinely in mass media communication. It represents an attitude apparently opposed to the previous one. It regards the ostentation of the death, for examples in the images of those who were killed in war or by spectacular or violent actions along with the growing presence of violent scenes in movies and fiction. In both cases the objective is to increase the audience of programs but it creates, at the same time, the impression of a purely virtual death, which is true with regard to the fiction, while it is false for the raw images of real situations. This spectacle of a virtual death tends to generate the thought that even the actual event of dying can be imagined as any situation from fiction: virtual and reversible.
At last, the last way for occidental culture to deal with death is to act some kind of anticipation of death. Those so-called risk behaviors that characterize the choices of many young people and not only like the phenomenon of cars launched at breakneck speed when crossing dangerous intersection, explicitly challenging the ability to cause (to themselves and to others) a fatal accident or the conscious use of psychotropic substances, with well-known deleterious effects on health, as well as drugs, smoke, alcoholism. All of these cases are many different forms of some kind of deferred suicide: the death si understood as a possibility of which the subject is consciously, but without the capability to take seriously the end of life.
As can be seen in both Chinese and West cultures the idea of death has to be the compared with the materiality of everyday existence.
In the village of "The Remote Country of Women" or in the great metropolis of the United States the questions are the same. The question is always to find a way to explain the possibility of an afterlife.
The differences are obvious: a different concept of death brings Chinese culture to not distinguish differences between the life after death and the everyday. The life and the afterlife are simply an invisible version of our present world.
In contrast with that, the West's death, Often much more present in daily life as a visual presence (movies or newscasts) evokes an invisible world of difficult understanding or imagination.
Hua Bai works of art are extremely poetic and human, were imbued with patriotism that turns out not only through dialogues and the story of the characters, but also through the description of the landscapes of his motherland.
On the theme of humanism and patriotism present in the work from beginning to end is specifically focused Michael Duke (1985):
It is first of all a profound love for the Chinese people - the human beings that together constitute the Chinese nation - in all the dignity of their work, their striving to create a better life, and their sufferingSecondly, it is a deeply felt love for the sheer physical beauty of the legendary Chinese landscape. Finally, both of these aspects taken together - love of the Chinese people and the Chinese landscape - contribute to a deeply felt respect for national cultural values (Chinese values) in contrast to the physically and spiritually destructive anti-traditionalism of the Cultural Revolution (pp. 141-142)
The decline of the "New Realism" should therefore be seen in this light: for generational reasons and for political and social development of the country the interest in this kind of works fades until its natural end.
Nevertheless the contribution, that they have given to the understanding of China in its most crucial and perhaps most obscure historical phase, it is still the subject of studies and debates. Hua Bai has been certainly a powerful voice, an uncomfortable figure for the institutions, but he was always true to himself, aware of his political beliefs and limits, a voice that dared to bite with his speeches and accepted to pay personally certain positions and poetics beliefs.
Cited Work
Duke, Michael S. "Chinese Literature in the Post-Mao Era: the Return of “critical Realism”." Critical Asian Studies. 16.3 (1984): 2-4. Print.
Consulted Works
Twitchell, Jeffrey. "Review: The Remote Country of Women." Chinese Literature: Essays Articles.Reviews (CLEAR), Vol. 17 (1995): 167-69.JSTOR. Web. 07 Dec. 2014.
Clark, Paul. "Film-making in China: From the Cultural Revolution to 1981."The China Quarterly 94 (1983): 304. Web.
