Dayanhe, My Nanny

The novel is adapted from Ai Qing's poem "Dayan River, My Nanny", but it is not limited to the lyrical framework of the poem. Instead, it is set in the rural areas of eastern Zhejiang from the 1920s to the 1940s, and uses delicate brushstrokes to inject fresh flesh and blood into the image of "Dayan River". The novel is about shaping "Dayanhe" from a symbolic "nanny" into a lower-class woman with flesh and blood. She is no longer just a silhouette "working with thick hands" in the poem: when she was a girl, she made a promise to Ahu to "build a hut" in the reed swamp. In her middle age, she endured the humiliation in the Jiang family compound, but gave all her tenderness to her non-biological son Jiang Wen; during the war, she fled with the orphan Niu Niu on her back, treated the wounded with herbs, and never gave up her kindness even when she was beaten by the Japanese army. These concrete experiences make the suffering of "Dayanhe" no longer an abstract text, but a life that can be touched: there is the tattered wedding dress that was held in the hand when being kicked out by the husband's family; there is the half piece of sweet potato given to the old man on the way to escape; there is the "letter home" written by someone to Jiang Wen before his death. The novel takes "Dayan River" as its core and weaves an emotional web that spans classes and eras: Jiang Wen grows from a spoiled young master to a hero; Lin Wei grows from a progressive student to a rural teacher; Niu Niu grows from an orphan to a doctor guarding the mountains. Their fates are all connected with Dayanhe's goodwill, making "love and inheritance" a cruel force in war. When Niuniu hung Dayanhe's little shoes on the wall of the health center; when Lin Wei donated Jiang Wen's diary to the museum, we saw not only the story of one person, but also a group portrait of a generation of lower-class people who persisted in goodwill in the face of suffering.