The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River

Foreword
It may be of some help to the reader if I give a brief account of how I wrote this novel*

In July 1946, I joined the Huailai land reform work team. Later on I left for Zhuolu, and returned to Fuping at the end of September. There was no chance to summarize this stage of our work satisfactorily. However, since I had no other work to do at Fuping and my mind was full of the people I had seen, I decided to start writing this novel. All I hoped to do at that time was to describe this stage of land reform and give a fairly faithful picture of a village with all its troop of living people. I would feel satisfied if I could just avoid making them too abstract. My original plan was to divide the book into three parts: the struggle, the distribution of land and the peasants’ voluntary enlistment in the army. While I was writing, I received some very moving materials about the land protection corps in the Sanggan River area. The leader of the corps is the original of Comrade Pin, the county propaganda commissioner in the novel. I had travelled over that county several times too, so I hoped to go back there in order to be able to write the second part. Thus, while I was writing, I made constant allusions to material that would be more fully developed later. The manuscript was half written when the final checkup of land reform work came in 1947. That made me hesitate to go on with my work and wish to go back again to the countryside to make good the deficiencies in my experience of life and in the novel by taking some part in the mass struggle. Accordingly, I set my manuscript aside, and went with a team to Xing-tang in central Hebei, then came back to Fuping. This experience of life proved of value, but failed to provide me with much actual material for my book, so I went on writing for another three and a half months, till the summer was over, I devoted most effort to writing the first part, about the struggle, and was just about to start on the second part when the land reform programme was promulgated, and I took, part in the land reform conference. As a result, I felt renewed doubts about going on with my writing, and decided to go back to the country first to take part in the distribution of land. I worked in a village in Huailu for over four months, and as a result of this experience made certain changes in my original plan. I felt there was no need to write the second and third parts I had originally decided on, because the distribution of land and the join-the-army movement the previous year had been somewhat superficial and carelessly carried out. This was a result, of course, of war conditions, but still these working methods were not good enough to be worth describing. So, after thinking it over, I decided to compress the book, and since there was no way of adding other relatively new material, my first plan had to be modified. I did not, therefore, develop the two later topics. Just at that time, too, I was to take part in the Congress of the Women's International Democratic Federation; thus I had to bring this work to a hasty close. If there is time in future, I hope to be able to revise this book further.