Chapter 645: Anti-Corruption Literature in Official Circles

It was already the second night when Fang Minghua took the train back to Xijing.

He did not ask Song Tangtang to pick him up at the train station, but took a taxi home directly. As soon as he opened the gate and entered the small courtyard, he heard the voice of a little girl.

"Dad is back"

Then two children ran out of the living room and rushed towards him.

"Good boy"

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

Forget about his 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 him "big brother" to help him carry the luggage. Fang Minghua held his daughter in one hand and led his son into the living room with the other hand.

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

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

"Thank you, Dad!" The little girl opened it happily.

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

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

"Look, what is this?!"

"Wow, Ultraman!" The son screamed.

He immediately took it and flipped through it with great interest.

In January of this year (1993), Shanghai TV broadcast the Japanese animation "Ultraman", which quickly captured the hearts of Shanghai children and led to the first wave of Ultraman fever in mainland China.

Cards related to Ultraman are also found in the shops around the school. Every Wednesday and Saturday evening at around 5 o'clock, many children would sit in front of the TV with stools, waiting for the superhero from Japan to transform.

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

Fang Minghua bought one of these books for her son.

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

"My elder sister is busy working upstairs."

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

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

"It was okay. I met Yu Hua, Wang Anyi and a few friends. I had a three-day meeting and walked around Nanjing with Yu Hua for three days."

"I saw the news about your seminar published in Guangming Daily. It said 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 going to write another new realism novel?" Song Tangtang asked again.

"Is that the plan? I've been free recently."

"Something similar to "The Piano in a Factory" that reflects enterprise reform?"

Fang Minghua shook his head.

"No, this time, I want to write a novel about officialdom, specifically, an anti-corruption novel about officialdom."

"Ah? You write about this? It seems that no one has written about it yet." Song Tangtang was a little surprised.

"Really? Last year, Liu Zhenyun wrote a novella called "Officialdom", which was published in "Yanhe". Fang Minghua replied.

He was right.

Liu Zhenyun changed his previous new realist novels that mainly focused on small characters, and published a novella "Officialdom" in "Yanhe", which extended his pen 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 commissioner of the district. The personal psychological activities of these 7 or 8 old friends when they were arranged to live in the same house, and finally a series of stories about the human relations and worldly affairs in the officialdom are triggered by Lao Jin's election as the deputy commissioner of the district.

This novella is far less famous than "Tapu", "A Place of Chicken Feathers", "One Sentence Worth Ten Thousand Sentences" and other works of Liu Zhenyun, but it has pioneered the contemporary officialdom novels in the mainland.

Hearing Fang Minghua say this, Song Tangtang looked a little worried: "Minghua, this kind of novel is not easy to grasp the scale. It might be like the reportage you wrote last year, which was written but could not be published publicly."

"Don't worry about this. I have seriously considered it and will grasp the scale. After all, novels are not reportage, they are fictional."

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

Song Tangtang stood up.

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

Anti-corruption novels are an important part of the "new realistic novels" that are about to become popular.

It was particularly popular from the mid-to-late 1990s to the millennium.

Wang Yuewen's "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 Way in the World", "Supreme Interests", "Absolute Power", etc.

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

He found the writer Jiao Jian from Shandong, and took all the 130,000 yuan he earned from his writings to Daya Bay in Danshui, Guangdong Province. 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 1990s running on the literary center of the 1980s."

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 of the same name adapted from it has only been broadcast once, it is still very popular online.

Although the story takes place in the 2010s, it is not inconsistent with the 1990s.

And Fang Minghua doesn't have to worry about whether it can be published. The social environment in this era is more relaxed.

Just write about him.

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

Song Tangtang sent them in the morning, Fang Minghua would pick them up at noon if he had time, and he didn't have to worry about them going to school in the afternoon.

Not long after his wife and children left, Fang Minghua also got up to wash up. Although he hired a nanny, he still liked to go to the old Sun's store outside Chaoyangmen every morning to drink a bowl of steaming hot spicy soup, which made him feel much warmer.

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 the People" takes place after 2010, so naturally some official titles, departments, objects in the novel and even some plots have to be changed to conform to the current social environment in the 1990s.

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 1.5 million copies have been sold, which is unimaginable in the 2010s when physical novels are declining.

But if you look at it from the perspective of literary value, this novel is not a classic.