Back to 80: My literary life.

Chapter 645: Anti-corruption Literature in Officialdom
It was already the second evening when Fang Minghua returned to Xijing by train.

He didn't ask Song Tangtang to pick him up at the train station. He took a taxi home directly. As soon as he opened the gate and entered the yard, he heard the voice of a little girl.

"Dad is back"

Then two children ran out from the living room and pounced on him.

"good"

Fang Minghua put down her luggage bag, bent down and picked up her daughter who was running in front of her.

Forget about my son.

The children have grown up and it is impossible to hold two at a time.

At this time, the nanny Li Xiaoqin also came out and called out "Brother" very attentively to help him carry the luggage. Fang Minghua then walked into the living room holding his daughter in one hand and holding his son's hand in the other.

"Dad, did you bring us any gifts on this business trip?" the daughter asked impatiently.

"How could I forget to buy gifts for my two babies?" Fang Minghua put her daughter down with a smile, took out a beautifully packaged Barbie doll from her travel bag and handed it to Ruirui.

"Thank you, Dad!" The little girl started to unpack happily.

"Dad, where's mine?" the son asked quickly.

"Of course you won't be left out." Fang Minghua took out another book from his travel bag and waved it towards his son.

"Look, what is this?!"

"Wow, Space Hero Ultraman!" The son screamed.

He took it immediately and started reading it with great interest.

In January of this year (1993), Shanghai TV broadcast the Japanese animation "Ultraman: Space Heroes". Once it was broadcast, it quickly captured the hearts of Shanghai children and triggered the first wave of Ultraman craze in mainland China.

Ultraman-related cards can be found in the shops around the school. Every Wednesday and Saturday evening at around 5pm, many children would sit in front of the TV with their stools, waiting for the Japanese superhero to transform.

Shengshi Book Company, which was moving to Shanghai, discovered this phenomenon and immediately contacted the producer, Japan's Tsuburaya Company, and purchased the comic copyright of the cartoon to distribute it nationwide.

Fang Minghua bought one of the books in this set for his son.

After comforting the two children, Fang Minghua took off his coat, changed into cotton slippers, and asked the nanny: "Where's Tangtang? Hasn't she finished get off work yet?"

"My eldest sister is busy working upstairs."

As he was speaking, Song Tangtang, who was wearing cotton pajamas, came down the stairs and greeted him.

"Minghua, you're back? How was your business trip?"

"It was OK. I met Yu Hua, Wang Anyi and a few other friends. We had three days of meetings and wandered around Nanjing with Yu Hua for three days."

"I saw the news about your seminar published in Guangming Daily, saying that you proposed the concept of 'new realism novel' at the meeting?" Song Tangtang said as he sat next to Fang Minghua.

"Yes." Fang Minghua briefly recounted the content of the meeting.

"Then Minghua, are you planning to write another new realistic novel?" Song Tangtang asked again.

"That's my plan. I've been free lately."

"Similar to The Piano in a Factory, which reflects corporate reform?"

Fang Minghua shook his head.

"No, this time, I want to write a book about officialdom. Specifically, it should be a novel about anti-corruption in officialdom." "Ah? You write this? It seems that no one has written about it before." Song Tangtang was a little surprised.

"No way? Last year Liu Zhenyun wrote a novella called "Officialdom" and published it in "Yanhe"." Fang Minghua replied.

He's right.

Liu Zhenyun changed his previous new realism novels which mainly focused on small characters, and published a novella "Officialdom" in "Yanhe", extending his pen tentacles into the officialdom.

It tells the story of a place where the district wants to promote one of the 7 or 8 county wei secretaries, including Lao Jin, Lao Cong, Lao Zhou, and Lao Hu, to be the deputy district commissioner. The personal psychological activities of these 7 or 8 old friends when they are arranged to live in the same house, and finally the election of Lao Jin as the deputy district commissioner serves as a clue to a series of stories about the human relationships in officialdom.

This novella is not as famous as "Tapu", "A Pile of Feathers", "One Sentence is Worth Ten Thousand Sentences" and other works of Liu Zhenyun, but it pioneered the contemporary officialdom novels in mainland China.

Hearing Fang Minghua say this, Song Tangtang looked a little worried: "Minghua, it's hard to grasp the scale of this kind of novel. It might end up like the reportage you wrote last year, which was finished but couldn't be published publicly."

"Don't worry about that. I've thought about it carefully and I'll keep the scale right. After all, novels are not reportage, they're fiction."

"Okay, I'll make you a cup of tea."

Song Tangtang stood up.

Fang Minghua had thought about this question on the train back.

There is an important component in the "new realistic novel" that is about to become popular - anti-corruption novels.

It was particularly popular in the mid to late 90s and into the millennium.

Wang Yuewen's "Traditional Chinese Painting", Yan Zhen's "Canglang Water", Li Peifu's "Sheep's Gate", Lu Tianming's "No Trace of Snow", etc., and of course Zhou Meisen's series of anti-corruption works: "The Right Path in the World", "Supreme Interests", "Absolute Power", etc.

However, Zhou Meisen has now given up writing and gone into business, speculating in real estate.

He found the writer Jiao Jian from Shandong, and took all the royalties of 130,000 yuan, and went to Daya Bay in Danshui, Guangdong Province together. However, he ended up losing money and went back to his old job - writing books.

Later, he joked about this experience: "Wang Shi built a Vanke by building a house, but we built a chicken coop."

Some commentators interpreted his move as "the result of the economic centralization of the 20s running out on the literary center of the 90s."

Now Zhou Meisen is still messing around with his house.

Zhou Meisen’s most popular novel is In the Name of People. Although the TV series adapted from it has only been broadcast once, its popularity online remains unabated.

Although the story takes place in the 2010s, it would not be out of place if it were set in the s.

Moreover, Fang Minghua does not have to worry about whether the book can be published, as the social environment in this era is more relaxed.

Just write about him.

The next morning, Song Tangtang got up and went to work, and took the two children to school. It was so cold in winter, and sometimes it was windy and snowy. It was really hard to bear to let the children walk to school before dawn.

Song Tangtang sends her there in the morning, and Fang Minghua picks her up when he has time at noon. He doesn't have to worry about her in the afternoon when she goes to school.

Not long after his wife and children left, Fang Minghua also got up and washed. Although he had hired a nanny, he still liked to leisurely walk to the Lao Sunjia store outside Chaoyangmen every morning to drink a bowl of steaming hot Hu La Tang, which immediately warmed his whole body.

After returning, Fang Minghua went upstairs to the study, made a cup of tea, turned on the computer and prepared to write.

The story of "In the Name of People" takes place after 2010, so naturally some official titles, departments, objects that appear in the novel and even some plots have to be changed to conform to the current social environment of the s.

But this is not the difficulty. The difficulty lies in that although the TV series is very popular, the original novel is also very popular. It is said that more than 150 million copies have been sold, which is simply unimaginable in the 2010s when physical novels are declining.

But from the perspective of literary value, this novel is not a classic.

(End of this chapter)