原創七律

敢正乾坤敢守真，自由魂釋死囚身。

獨鳴夜海啁啾曉，交響冬原霹靂春。

驚蟄眾傳龍在野，平居誰念鳳歸塵？

江山血淚中華墨，灑滿芳碑一字仁。

（平水韻上平十一真）

LYJiang

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林昭（原名彭令昭）生平：

見維基百科 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/林昭

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In Memoriam: A Great Chinese Humanitarian

In my dream, I laid plum blossoms on Lin Zhao's grave. A single bullet that's worth 5 cents in her time ended her life. It also began her legend.

Alive, she had already been known to bite more than a bullet, idiomatically speaking. For a young woman, that's a lot. Still, she was living a bright dream in a dark age, even though she never expected that life would be easy for a dissident. However, she hardly expected that life could be so dim, so short, and gunpoint so flashy, so close.

It is, perhaps, above my paygrade to fathom her ocean otherwise known as her deep conviction that rivaled Joan of Arc's. Indeed, her admirers couldn't wait to put a halo around her, posthumously. To worship her like China's Joan of Arc, in my humble opinion, is to deny her the mortal she was and she loved to be. Don't forget that, in her own writings, she had made no bones about her staunch opposition to deification of a certain "beloved leader." She impresses me as a humanitarian through and through. Let her be a proud member of humanity, which she was and, in a sense, still is.

Humanitarianism, a product of the Age of Enlightenment, reached the shores of China in the second half of the 19th Century. It had grown in strength and popularity among Chinese intellectuals ever since--until it suffered a violent near-death just when Lin Zhao was soul-searching as an internal exile in the red desert, thanks to the Great Cultural Revolution. A born-again humanitarian, she re-examined everything her ancient country had to offer. Finally and critically, she zeroed in on civil society or rather the lack of it. She was no armchair philosopher. She was bleeding in a prison cell. She bled so that she could write in blood when ink was hard to come by. Today, miraculously, we can read her words. We may even be able to read her mind.

P.S.

Not too long ago, when I finished reading Svetlanna A Alexievich's Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, I knew that I would never forget what a broken soul in her book said, and I quote, "Show me an honest person who survived Stalin's time." Living honestly was living dangerously.
 

Lin Zhao did not survive the Great Cultural Revolution, but she did not die a broken soul, either.

--- Lingyang Jiang