Reading a novel means entering its world and watching the full range of human lives unfold inside it. From the outside, you observe each person, weigh their choices, and sit with their words and actions for a while. White Deer Plain is, in essence, a world built around the Bai and Lu families. Bai Jiaxuan is upright and unbending, exactly the kind of person I admire. Lu Zilin is crafty and full of schemes, yet his end is madness and death, which makes him more pitiable than hateful to me. As for Lu San, he is one of the characters I truly liked, which only makes his death harder to accept.
The first half of the novel carries a kind of warmth, even though that warmth is never free of tension. Most of what fills it is the quiet maneuvering between people, the small and constant calculations of human relationships. But once the third generation of the Bai and Lu families grows up, and the country itself falls into turmoil, the meaning of White Deer Plain starts to shift. The novel writes not only about family ties across three generations, but also about the bond between master and servant in Bai Jiaxuan and Lu San, the friendship between Heiwa and Lu Zhaopeng, the love entanglements among Lu Zhaopeng, Lu Zhaohai, and Bai Ling, and Lu Zilin’s affairs with various women. Alongside all of this runs the broader unrest of the nation.
When it comes to family feeling, Bai Ling is the one I still cannot fully understand. I can, perhaps, make some sense of Lu Zhaopeng, but Bai Ling’s decisiveness leaves me confused. Was she really that detached from kinship? Maybe I still cannot grasp the idea that the nation stands above the small family. At least for now, that conviction does not come naturally to me. So when I reached those parts, what I felt most strongly was not admiration for sacrifice, but regret for what Bai Jiaxuan and the others had to endure.
I have never been particularly good at writing about books. The moment I start, it feels as though too many thoughts are trying to rush out at once. But when I try to sort through them carefully, I realize how little I truly understand. Even so, one thing I keep wanting to write about is Bai Jiaxuan’s way of governing his household. I admire it deeply.
The novel presents him as an old-fashioned farmer, but I do not think that description fully captures him. Yes, there are parts of feudal morality that deserve criticism, but within that older moral order there are still things worth respecting. Bai Jiaxuan’s integrity, his strictness with himself, his refusal to bend for convenience—these are qualities I find genuinely admirable. Under Mr. Zhu’s guidance, his principles gradually become something more refined. The idea that learning is meant to teach a person how to be good is one example of that.
Bai Jiaxuan cares about honor, but not in a shallow sense. He wants to act in ways that answer to his own conscience, to moral standards above him, and to himself as a man. In that sense, morality matters greatly in the novel. Bai Xiaowen is a perfect example. Once he breaks through moral restraint, he does not become freer in any noble way; he becomes vulgar, shameless, and depraved. Looking at the present, I sometimes feel that many people also live without moral restraint, and in places where the law cannot really reach, conduct declines all the more easily. That is why I do not think every inherited idea from the old world should simply be discarded. Some things are still worth passing down.
Bai Jiaxuan may be labeled a landlord, but in my eyes he is still, above all, a farmer. That is especially clear in the way he treats Lu San. Bai Xiaowen was originally meant to be a reflection of Bai Jiaxuan himself, but Xiaoe led him toward ruin. After Bai Xiaowen changed, Bai Xiaowu effectively took his place as the one who carried forward Bai Jiaxuan’s values. And honestly, I do not think there is anything wrong with Bai Xiaowu. Even Mr. Zhu, a great scholar who had read widely, ultimately only wished for his son to gain enough learning to understand reason and then return home to farm.
To me, the novel is also fairly restrained and objective in the way it handles national upheaval and the conflict between political forces. It does not insist that national interest stands above all else in some abstract, unquestionable way, nor does it turn into a slogan about who alone can save China. Instead, it tells the story through the lives on the plain and leaves questions of right and wrong for the reader to weigh afterward.
Maybe I have read too many love stories. Maybe I am still too young. In any case, the national and political side of the novel did not move me as deeply as the fates of its people did. I found myself grieving for Bai Jiaxuan’s bitter hardships, for Bai Ling’s ruthlessness, for Lu Zhaopeng fleeing marriage, for the missed fate between Lu Zhaohai and Bai Ling, for Heiwa’s life, and for Bai Xiaowen’s fall. All of these sighs are, in the end, sighs over life itself—over how people live, and how hard it is simply to go on living.
Death, for me, is another painful part of the book. One by one, characters I cared about are taken away by this event or that turn of fate. That hurt stayed with me. As long as a person is alive, whether they have schemed against others or been beaten down by suffering, life itself still leaves room for something. If one can only go on living well, then somehow everything is not yet lost.
That is as far as my thoughts can go for now. The more I write, the more they scatter in different directions.