|
站内搜索
|
|
The Making of a Young Writer
编辑时间：2004/10/10 CHINA RECONSTRUCTS
The Making of a Young Science Writer
WU YAN
[Editorial notes]: Wu Yan is a senior at Beijing's Dengshikou Middle School. He has published a dozen articles on scientific subjects that have proved popular with young readers, and last August, at the age of 17, he was invited to attend the National Forum on Science Writing.
— Editor.
It was my cousin Huang Chaolong who got me into this. Although Huang Chaolong is two years older than I, we've done everything together since we were very little. As he was a bookworm. so was I, and as his preferred books were on science, so were mine. Some of these books described experiments, which we tried to do — unsuccessfully, as it turned out, until one lovely afternoon when I was in the third grade.
Huang Chaolong had been reading the Soviet writer Nechayev's Stories About the Elements, and he proposed that we try another experiment, the electrolysis of salt. We prepared salt water, a battery, graphite rods and copper wires, connected them up, and waited. And waited.After what seemed like a long time, the water around one electrode started to change color, and bubbles of chlorine appeared around the other. Eureka! Our first successful experiment!
Nechayev recounts how Sir Humphry Davy, who first decomposed caustic soda in this way some 170 years ago, made a record of the event, so we too, on a small wooden board, wrote "remarkable experiment" — the words Davy had used.
As Huang Chaolong wrote down the details of our experiment, I held Nechayev's book in my hands, entranced. The book and our "remarkable experiment" made me know what I wanted to do in life.
Hard-to-Find Books
There is plenty of knowledge in books, but it was hard for me, a third-grader, to dig it out, even when I could dig up the books in the first place. This was the early 1970s, and most books, including "juvenile'' titles, were on politics, not science. But even during the "cultural revolution" the "back door" could be opened, and my parents had friends who were able to get me some books from a library that had been closed. I struggled through them, using dictionaries and consulting teachers frequently; later, my science teacher opened his own small library to me. Every day I haunted a neighborhood bookstore to see whether any science books had come in. Sometimes, when I wasn't able to get a book for myself, I'd copy it down, and so I built a collection of "manuscript" editions of children's science stories, science fiction, even poems on scientific subjects, like "Song of the Mammoths along the Yellow River." I also clipped newspaper stories dealing with science, and made frequent visits to the Beijing Planetarium, the Museum of Natural History, and the Geological Museum.
My First Article
At school, no matter what subjects my Chinese teacher assigned, I managed to turn my composition toward science — winter snow, autumn leaves, morning fog, Einstein, Edison, China's ancient bridge at Zhao-zhou, the world's first double-arch bridge, were grist for that mill In 1976, after the terrible Tangshan earthquake, I wrote a "crosstalk" dialogue on the nature of earthquakes, and presented it in public with a schoolmate.
After a while, I was able to discriminate among the various science writers. My favorite was Ye Yonglie, whose children's story "Small Bees with Red Eyes" I found especially vivid and descriptive. I wanted to write him a fan letter, but didn't know where to send it, so I wrote instead to Gao Shiqi, a science writer known throughout China, who is now in his late 70s and whose address I was able to get from a neighbor. To my great surprise, I got a reply in a few days, advising me to write directly to Ye Yonglie. But I still didn't know where to find him. Finally, I wrote an article, "A Unique Style — The Writings of Ye Yonglie", and sent it off to the Guangming Daily.
A few days later, an editor of the paper came to my school with galleys of the article, and so, in May of 1978, my first article was published. I was so excited I determined then and there to devote my life to science writing.
Learn from Ye Yonglie
One evening, after my article had appeared, a man in his 40s wearing black-rimmed glasses showed up at our house. "You're Wu Yan, aren't you?" he said. I nodded and he said, "I'm Ye Yonglie."
It's hard to describe my state of excitement. Imagine — a boy's own hero comes knocking at the door to offer encouragement. He asked about my studies, and that wasn't too bad, but then he asked to see my writing. Even now I blush with embarrassment at how bad the stuff was. But Uncle Ye read everything carefully and gave me some tips on how to write better. He said we needed more writers who could popularize science, so I should study hard and join their rank's as soon as possible.
I did start to write, and got many encouraging responses from readers. The one that moved me most was from Gao Youcheng, a worker at the No. 17 Toy Plant in Shanghai. He wrote to say he liked my work, and regularly sends me the magazine Junior Science, published in Shanghai.
My family, too. has been very helpful. My father, mother, and sister are my first readers and best critics. In the evening, they all sit and listen to whatever I've written that day. Father's criticisms are sharp and to the point. My sister, I thought, offered gratuitously negative views of everything I wrote — but I found out later she was really proud of my progress. Mother has been perhaps too generous and partial to me.
The Work to be Done
In 1979, Junior Science published two of my articles — "Eyes for the Blind" and "Special Methods of Mining" — and a short story, "Adventures of an Iceberg". Also in 1979, my article "I Love Popular Science" took second prize in a competition sponsored by Beijing Children magazine on the 30th anniversary of liberation.
Last year, I published a few more pieces. But it's clear to me I have a long way to go before I can consider my work adequate. In recent years, I've read and collected hundreds of science books, and subscribed to half a dozen journals, including Science Year and Science News from the United States. I've also gotten into the best Western science and science-fiction writers, like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke. Ray Bradbury, and Jules Verne. Nor have I neglected general literature, classic and modern, Chinese and foreign: To be a good science writer, one must first be a good writer.
The Chinese people need to raise up a generation imbued with the spirit of science, and I hope I can do my part in achieving that.
From China Reconstruction, June 1981
·The Making of a Young Scienc...
|
