Sunward Years Long Channeling Go Silent

Zhang Ailing is a special phenomenon in the history of modern literature. Her works are from short stories to novels, from 1940s to 1950s. One common characteristic of her works is her penetrating insight into the tragedy of the times. She always takes "destruction" that has happened and will happen in her age as the main background, and then explore the world of personal feelings, especially the feeling of boys and girls who lay a wage on their love in the chaotic times and their desires that are fated to be derided by the cruel reality. The destined relation between people and the times is the fundamental narrative mode of her novels. Zhang Ailing describes people's psychological world, deepens into people's consciousness, and depicts their awakening.Zhang Ailing ingrates the noble culture and meanwhile has dense feelings of last phase due to living hi the noble culture decline. The feelings of living in last phase, together with the crisis sense of living hi war times and the vehement intuition that human civilization is fated to be destroyed, bring about her special feelings towards the "desolation" of the times. This kind of "desolation" is her generalization of the characteristics of the times and her penetrating understanding of the hard times that she, a lonely woman, lives in.Zhang Ailing's unique creative thought comes into being in the following situation: She is solitarily set into the modern urban civilization, which is full of menaces. She loses the background support of the profound noble culture and at the same time she cannot find the psychological support in the bizarre and motley modern culture. Therefore, the strong feelings that human civilization is doomed to be destroyed permeate her works. The fairy tales about human miracles in the tradition of idealism culture completely vanish in her works. What she displays to us is the true human situation in the wartime. She describes human selfish instinct when striving for livingand gives her deep understanding and tolerance towards it.Compared with male writers, female writers mostly write according to their intuition. Unlike male writers, female writers is not easily limited by social responsibilities over thousands of years and by the theory that articles should be written to tell and record the history and facts. Thus, sometimes although the materials female writers choose to write are narrow-ranged and far from the times and the tendency of social politics, they can always write easily and fluently and they lay emphasis on internal thought, such as the feelings towards colors, the creation of images etc. Among overseas writers, Zhang Ailing is completely different from any other writer. When Shanghai is a "isolated island", her works neither belong to war literature nor belong to entertaining literature. She creates her own atmosphere and unconsciously lays bare the devastation and the twist that the stale feudal history and contemporaneous Shanghai culture have done to human nature. She establishes a special and bizarre literature world.