Writer Bai Hua Has Died; His Early-1980s Work Bitter Love Set Off No Small Storm

He was one of the few writers "criticized" after the Cultural Revolution ended.

According to a report in Wenhui Daily, the writer Bai Hua died at 2 a.m. on January 15, at the age of 89.

He was born in 1930 and named Chen Youhua, in Zhongshanpu, Pingqiao District, Xinyang, Henan Province. During the War of Resistance Against Japan, Japanese military police buried his father alive.

He took the pen name "Bai Hua" — white birch — in the 1940s, from a stock image in a Russian song popular at the time.

Bai Hua began writing at 15; his first poem, The Weaver (《织工》), appeared in the Southern Henan Daily (《豫南日报》). According to The West magazine, in the closing years of the war, from 1942 to 1945, Bai Hua left home for Huangchuan to attend middle school with his twin brother, the screenwriter Ye Nan — later known for Emperor Ming of Tang (《唐明皇》), Evening Rain on Mount Ba (《巴山夜雨》) and The Naval Battle of 1894 (《甲午风云》). Bai Hua studied by day and at night helped weave towels in his sister's workshop, where deserters and refugees also worked. That is where he wrote the "painful and pure" poem.

Bai Hua joined the army at 17. In 1947 he enlisted in the Central Plains Field Army as a propaganda officer, writing mostly battlefield reports. In 1952 he worked on He Long's staff, and later served as a writer in the Kunming Military Region and in the Creative Writing Office of the PLA General Political Department. Between 1953 and 1954 he wrote two "anti-espionage" short stories — the genre existed to attack Kuomintang secret agents — When the Mountain Bells Ring, the Caravan Comes (《山间铃响马帮来》) and The Bell-less Caravan (《无铃的马帮》). Both ran in People's Literature and both were made into films.

Sixty years later he told The West magazine that most of what he wrote then "wasn't really literature." He was happier with another work from the same years, the long narrative poem Peacock (《孔雀》), published in 1956: "It's about a Dai folk legend, and has nothing to do with politics." That poem became the film Princess Peacock (《孔雀公主》) in 1982.

In 1958, Bai Hua was labeled a "rightist" for his contacts with Hu Feng, expelled from the Party and discharged from the army. According to Southern Weekly, while under investigation and held in "isolation," he planned to flee into a reed marsh and cut his wrists there, but someone found his suicide note, which brought struggle sessions and tighter guarding. In 1961 he was transferred to the Shanghai Haiyan Film Studio as an editor and screenwriter, and in 1964 moved again, to the Wuhan Military Region Drama Troupe, as a playwright.

After the Cultural Revolution ended, Bai Hua wrote the stage play Dawn (《曙光》) in 1978, about a tragedy of the 1930s in the Honghu Soviet area: a founder of the base area is pushed aside and suspected within the Party, then purged and executed. In the end the play could only be staged for internal audiences. Bai Hua told Southern Weekly that people urged him to drop it — "don't bring more disaster down on your wife and children" — and that a denunciation of it had already been written and set in type at the Liberation Daily. Then things turned. Yang Dezhi, commander of the Wuhan Military Region, and its political commissar Wang Ping turned up to watch a performance, and when it ended they announced from the stage that the play would open publicly in Beijing the next day and the news would run in the papers. Bai Hua put it down to the fact that the two men had come straight from the Third Plenary Session.

That was only the start of a troubled "comeback." Bai Hua next wrote Bright Starlight Tonight (《今夜星光灿烂》) for the August First Film Studio, set against the Huaihai Campaign. The film was finished in 1980 and scheduled to open in early May, but was pulled a week before release: it was accused of publicizing the cruelty of war. It reached screens only after cuts.

Bitter Love (《苦恋》), written at the end of 1980, set off a far fiercer storm in the literary and art world, and made Bai Hua one of the few writers denounced after the Cultural Revolution. Treated in standard literary histories as a representative work of "scar literature," Bitter Love is still the label most firmly attached to his name.

By Bai Hua's own account to The West magazine, it began with an invitation from Peng Ning, a director at Changchun Film Studio: Bai Hua wrote a biographical documentary script modeled on the painter Huang Yongyu, The Road Extends Beneath His Banana Trees (《路在他的蕉下延伸》), published in the Hong Kong paper Ta Kung Pao in 1979. On Xia Yan's advice he stopped writing about Huang Yongyu alone and widened the story to representative figures in the art world and how they survived catastrophe — and that produced the feature script Bitter Love. Peng Ning finished his adaptation, the film Sun and Man (《太阳与人》), at the end of 1980. It failed censorship review and has never been shown publicly, though it was screened "internally" some 600 times.

Xu Qingquan, deputy editor-in-chief of Yanhuang Chunqiu, has traced the whole course of the "Bitter Love affair", noting that the script drew argument in the literary and art world — and the attention of the Party's Central Propaganda Department — as soon as it was published.

The Bitter Love screenplay ran in the third issue of October magazine, published in September 1979. It follows the life of the painter Ling Chenguang: press-ganged into the Kuomintang army as a young man, rescued and loved by the boatman's daughter Lü Niang, he flees to the Americas to escape Kuomintang secret agents, becomes a famous painter, and is reunited with Lü Niang there. After Liberation the couple return to the homeland they had longed for day and night, and their daughter, Xingxing — "Star" — is born under the five-star red flag. A short happy stretch, and then the Cultural Revolution: the family is put into a dim room with no windows, and Ling Chenguang is struggled against and reduced to misery. His daughter and her boyfriend decide to flee abroad. He objects, and she asks him: "You love this country, you love it bitterly, painfully… but does this country love you?" Ling Chenguang is later forced into flight, living like a wild man in a reed marsh on raw fish and birds' eggs. At the end, with the last strength of his life, he crawls across the snow tracing "an enormous question mark."

In a written reply to He Jingzhi, head of the Central Propaganda Department's Bureau of Literature and Art, and his deputy Li Yingmin, Chen Bo, who then ran film work at the Ministry of Culture, set out what was wrong with the script: "The script fails to show that before the Gang of Four ran wild, the Party did value intellectuals… At the end it shows Chenguang crawling in the snow after the Gang of Four was smashed… Presenting it that way is bad — it makes people feel that Chenguang died after the Gang of Four was smashed, and why? There is no answer, and it is hard to understand… A lot of it is unintelligible, such as the scene where Chenguang goes to Tiananmen and pastes up a copy of Qu Yuan's Heavenly Questions…"

With PLA Daily out in front, the press opened a large-scale campaign against Bitter Love. On April 17, 1981, PLA Daily ran an editorial, "Uphold and Safeguard the Four Cardinal Principles," attacking tendencies toward "anarchism," "extreme individualism" and "bourgeois liberalization" in the arts, with Bitter Love as its target. On April 18 the paper published three "letters" from military writers criticizing Bitter Love, in support of the editorial. On April 20 it published, under the byline "special commentator," a piece titled "The Four Cardinal Principles Must Not Be Violated — A Review of the Film Script Bitter Love," charging that the work "spread a mood estranged from the socialist motherland." Beijing Daily, Report of the Times, Literature News, Red Flag, Changjiang Daily and Hubei Daily followed with attacks of their own.

Xu Qingquan points out that senior figures in the literary and art world were in fact sharply split over the script: Zhou Yang, Zhang Guangnian, Feng Mu and Chen Huangmei broadly backed it, while Liu Baiyu and Lin Mohan pushed hard against it. The matter reached Hu Yaobang and Deng Xiaoping. Hu Yaobang said the method of criticism mattered and the whole thing had to be handled more steadily — Bitter Love was "harmful," but Bai Hua had written some good work. Deng Xiaoping said criticizing Bitter Love was right, but that the commentaries in PLA Daily and elsewhere had not argued their case well enough, and instructed Wenyi Bao to produce a convincing critical article.

Organized by Zhou Yang, Zhang Guangnian, He Jingzhi and others, Wenyi Bao then published "On the Erroneous Tendencies of Bitter Love," which People's Daily reprinted in full. Bai Hua made his self-criticism in the form of a letter to the editorial departments of PLA Daily and Wenyi Bao. That letter, "A Letter on Bitter Love — To the Editorial Departments of PLA Daily and Wenyi Bao," ran in the second issue of October magazine in 1982, and People's Daily reprinted it too. With that, the "Bitter Love affair" subsided.

Zhu Zinan, a professor in the Chinese department at Soochow University, recalls in his essay "Ding Ling and Bitter Love" that when the Report of the Times supplement attacked Bitter Love, it made a point of printing the script alongside, and sold briskly — newspaper hawkers shouted, "Come read Bitter Love!" Zhu Zinan bought a copy, and the vendor joked, "Shouldn't the author of Bitter Love get a fee out of this?" He also recalled what Ding Ling — an older writer who, like Bai Hua, was branded a rightist in 1957 and made her "comeback" after the Cultural Revolution — thought of the affair: "Bitter Love has chosen its subject well. The question is whose account you charge it to. The motherland's? The people's? You can't do that! But the way it is being criticized now convinces nobody. … What Bitter Love gets hold of is real: we are exactly the ones who love our country bitterly and painfully. We have suffered, and we don't complain; we still believe our motherland will get better."

Zhang Qinghua, a professor in the Chinese department at Beijing Normal University, argues that although the literary and art world and the leadership raised every kind of objection to Bitter Love, the affair ended with nothing more than a public self-criticism from its author — which shows that the temper of the period was "exploring and drawing lines at the same time." The call to "oppose bourgeois liberalization" surfaced now and then, but the push to test and break through forbidden zones kept its momentum.

Then scenes from Bitter Love started playing out in Bai Hua's own family. According to Southern People Weekly, in the early 1980s, while Bai Hua was still under attack, his son left for the United States, saying he did not understand it: "Other families' Cultural Revolutions are over. Why isn't ours?"

In 1982 the Taiwanese director Wang Tong made a film of the same name, Bitter Love, written by Wu Nien-jen and others and starring Mu Sicheng and Doze Niu. It was nominated for Best Feature Film at the 19th Golden Horse Awards.

Thirty years on, Bai Hua said publicly and repeatedly that he did not regret writing Bitter Love, and that he was sure it would one day be "unbanned." In an interview with Southern Weekly he said: "What Bitter Love meant to do was call for the return of humanity — to write the word 'human' across the sky — to set down the hard road and the honest feelings of those who love the motherland bitterly." He was blunt about the rest: "The 1980s argument over the film script Bitter Love shouldn't be a matter of asking me what was wrong with it. Ask the people who raised the questions back then what was wrong. Bitter Love was simply a normal act of literary creation in a particular historical period."

After the Bitter Love affair, Bai Hua left the military in 1985 for the Shanghai Writers Association, where he served as deputy chairman. From the late 1980s to the mid-to-late 1990s his work was all but invisible in mainland newspapers, magazines and publishing houses; in fact he kept writing and publishing throughout, mostly abroad — short stories including Deer Calling (《呦呦鹿鸣》), The Red Sparrow (《红麻雀》), Wolf in the Desert (《沙漠里的狼》), The Zhu Player (《击筑者》) and The Ancient Sea Route (《古老的航道》), and novels including Far Away There Is a Kingdom of Women (《远方有个女儿国》) and Mama! Mama! (《妈妈啊！妈妈》). In 1988 he joined the International Writing Program in Iowa and gave a lecture tour at more than twenty American universities, among them Harvard, Columbia, Minnesota and California. In the 1990s he also worked on television scripts, including Prime Minister Liu Luoguo (《宰相刘罗锅》), Yang Guifei (《杨贵妃》) and Moon over Dianchi Lake (《滇池上的月亮》).

Bai Hua went on writing into the new century. In 2009, at 80, he brought out three new books: the story collection The Bluebell Girl (《蓝铃姑娘》), the poetry collection Long Songs and Short Songs (《长歌和短歌》) and the essay collection Pictures That Will Never Return (《不再重现的图画》). Long Songs and Short Songs included the long poem From Qiu Jin to Lin Zhao (《从秋瑾到林昭》), which took him ten years — started on July 15, 1997, finished on July 15, 2007. It won the "2008 Poetry Monthly Annual Poetry Award." Onstage to accept it, he said: "I know perfectly well why I could win this award: because I, a poet of 80, still have memory — clear memory. I still remember that in the past hundred years our beloved China gave birth to two great women, one Qiu Jin and one Lin Zhao."

The last time Bai Hua appeared before the public was in 2014, when his play The King of Wu's Golden Halberd and the King of Yue's Sword (《吴王金戈越王剑》) was revived by the Beijing People's Art Theatre, staged again by its original director, Lan Tianye, after 30 years away. The play had met obstruction at every turn because of the "Bitter Love affair," yet it opened officially on March 5, 1983. In a 2014 essay, Lan Tianye recalled that Xi Zhongxun, then a vice premier, came up onstage after the performance to greet the cast and said, "This is a fine play. It is true to history… and it speaks to the present." Bai Hua counted it among the things he found hardest to forget.

In the preface to the four-volume Collected Works of Bai Hua (《白桦文集》), published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House in 2010, Ellena Dong wrote: "Mr. Bai Hua is an outstanding representative of the 'generation of suffering'… What I see is an artist in three dimensions — his rare distinction and his human weaknesses, even his flaws of character; his strength and his softness; his innocence and his fearlessness; his resolve and his hesitation; his romantic, unguarded feeling; his sharp sensitivity and his helpless compliance… All of it together makes up the real man."

For the collection, Bai Hua used a poem called The Overwintering Birch (《越冬的白桦》) in place of a preface: "Yesterday I was still scattering leaves of gold in the autumn wind; today a cold front has sealed me onto frozen ground… An immense legion, silent and without mercy, closes in and hems me tight, the wind sounding like the mournful songs of Chu. All I can do is shut my eyes and draw myself downward, extending without end."

Image source: Douban Movie