Yu Yang, Remembering the History of the Struggle of Progressive Youth a Hundred Years Ago

Postscript At the beginning, I did not plan to write "Yang Yang" as a short story. The idea suddenly came to me after seeing an essay solicitation activity about the centenary of the founding of the Party. Because I am a writer who gets stuck easily and gives up easily. I have 18 ideas recorded in the memo alone, but most of them were stillborn before I could put them into practice. Therefore, it is almost impossible to complete the original plan to participate in the essay competition in just two months. So at that noon, I began to adapt the original plan into a short story, which deleted a lot of plots about the growth of the protagonist "Yu Yang" and selected five things from her life chronicle that I thought were important in modern history. The above events are described in detail on the major turning points, namely the New Culture Movement, the May 4th Movement, the May 30th Movement, the three armed uprisings of Shanghai workers and the "April 12" counter-revolutionary coup. The first draft took a full month to complete, with nearly 20,000 words in total. Since each chapter and each paragraph was divided into fragments, the context was often incoherent. In order to save time, many contents that I wanted to cover were omitted. For example, in the earliest version, Yu Yang was shot and injured at the scene of the Wuzhou Massacre; for example, there were originally only six chapters, "Tragedy" and "Labor Movement" are one chapter, and "New Youth" and "May Fourth Movement" are one chapter. In the subsequent revision project, the number of words was increased by nearly 7,000 words, and many plots were supplemented. At the same time, many historical documents and historical materials were consulted on the May 30th Movement, the May 4th Movement and the Shanghai workers' armed uprising, so that the plots were slightly fuller and did not look like an anticlimax. As for the character Yu Yang, she is the epitome of the experiences of several revolutionary predecessors. The source of her creation was dissatisfaction with female characters in certain historical film and television dramas, which only regarded them as beings full of love or breadwinners. In fact, in the magnificent historical process of the last century, women rarely appeared. It's not that there are no women involved, but that no one is willing to dig out their stories. Their lives are reduced to a few words and hung online, and no one knows about them. Therefore, we tried to create an image of a woman, detailing her efforts in the early development of our party and becoming an indispensable presence in it. Most of the other characters appearing in the article also have prototypes, but they use pseudonyms because they do not want to offend the names of the martyrs. On the one hand, it is easier to shape their characters according to the plot, and on the other hand, it is possible to change some experiences and reduce the butterfly effect on the historical plot. In any case, the creation process of "Yang Yang" seems to be hasty, so that many of the original plots in the outline can only be omitted or briefly mentioned. Later, this short story will be used as a basis and expanded into a long story, detailing the growth process of this character. The omitted story of studying abroad in Russia and guiding the labor movement after returning to China will also be described in detail. I hope that I will have the opportunity to truly complete this arduous task in the future.