《饥饿的女儿》写作技巧小考

Abstract

Daughter of the River is an autobiographical novel. The author revealed a special girl's growth in a special age through her unique perspective and successfully depicted a period in history through her own perspective. Instead of attracting readers by complicated plots, the author used pieces of "quiet", "boring" memories and conversations to construct the whole novel. This shows besides the plot, the novel's structure and language are worth noticing. This novel's success lies in its compact plot, real characters, distinctive structure and special language. Generally speaking, a history retold from an individual's perspective easily catches readers who have empathy with the author's joy, anger and sorrow. Hong Ying's Daughter of the River vividly presented Chinese society in the past decades to readers and brought them incessant sadness. Born in 1960s, Hong Ying has her own torturous experiences and crucifixion. Normally, when people recall their past, they tempt to recall those happy memories and avoid sad aspects of the past. However, Hong Ying disclosed without hesitation her growth under the dual pressure of physical starvation and spiritual hunger as a girl in Chongqin's slums in Daughter of the River. She faced her sorrowful past bravely. She narrated her birth as a bastard, her childhood lacking food, her helpless and confused youthhood, and her rebellious emotion and fight with fate and reality in an environment which has no loving family and is suffocated in political atmosphere. "I don't know why. But I always feel Hong Ying's pen is like a two‐edged sword. She will have mercy on no body. Only when people feel pain will she stop. Meanwhile, she's very thoughtful and spares no efforts to find the hidden truth." Therefore, we find a series of vivid figures like "I", the mother, the foster father, the birth father and etc. in this book. It's this unaffected tone that brings the readers a painful feeling. Its depiction is closer to a real family and closer to a growth story.   "After more than 30 years, my mother still remembers this. I really want to know what's on father's mind. Mother said you gave part of your salary to that woman and her daughter. Mother said they were also pitiable. But my mother's meaning is that you had an affair first, otherwise she wouldn't fall in love with my birth father and I wouldn't be born." If the foster father hadn't had an affair, the mother wouldn't have loved the author's birth father. Then the author wouldn't be born, and we couldn't read this book and be touched and shocked by this period of history.