One hundred years, many people, many things

Introduction

"One does not know how many people and events a person will encounter in his life. At my age, I have experienced the warlords' civil war, the Anti-Japanese War, the Liberation War, and everything that happened after the founding of New China. Although I am an ordinary person, I have many people to remember and many things to say."

This book is the only oral autobiography of Yang Yi, a person of the same age as the May Fourth Movement, a progressive student of Southwest Associated University, a famous translator, and a centenarian. From 1919 to today, Yang Yi's 100 years of life are exactly the 100 years of wind and rain, vicissitudes and great changes in China. The tempering of the times and life condensed into a song of innocence and romance of a generation of intellectual women.

Looking back over the century, Yang Yi values ​​her "days" more than legends and achievements, and the family, friendship, love and worldly affairs it carries: in the deep house of her childhood, she could not make out the glory of her ancestors and the vicissitudes of the political and business circles of the Beiyang government, but she could not forget the circumstances of ordinary people; the friendship of classmates, the thoughts of girls, poetry and drama, the "Chinese and Western" ten years riding on the wings of songs, were the most carefree; when the nation was in danger, she sang "On the Songhua River" on the way from Tianjin, Shanghai, Hong Kong to Kunming, and the flame of civilization was not extinguished; from Southwest Associated University to Central University, the memory is still full of young figures - the first meeting with "literary idol" Ba Jin, Wen Yiduo with dust on his head after the bombing, Wu Mi tapping his cane on the stone road, Shen Congwen, the teacher who "praised us as brave girls", and the moonlight chat by the Dian River, the reunion and farewell by the Jialing River...

Scholar Yu Bin spent ten years listening to resist forgetting and using details to get to the truth of history. Family history, jade years, the road to study, mountains and rivers, and people and events of a century slowly unfold in the narrative. "I consciously or unconsciously acted as a middleman between Mr. Yang and the readers. This should be an oral history that can be presented to the general readers."