Lao She's first novel, "The Philosophy of Old Zhang," was written while he was teaching at the Oriental Institute in London. He wrote some of it in his spare time, and said he was just "writing for fun". After the completion of the draft read to the same in London, Xu Dishan listen, Xu Dishan laughed a mess, and suggested that Lao She sent to the country. Two or three months later, Zheng Zhenduo edited the "Novel Monthly" serial publication. Later, Lao She wrote "Zhao Ziyi" and read it to Ning Encheng, who also laughed so hard that he put salt as sugar in his tea.
How Lao She Wrote "The Fourth Generation"
After Lao She settled down in Beibei, Chongqing, many of his friends went to visit and asked Hu Jieqing about what happened after the fall of Beiping. Hu recounted time and again the suffering of the people after the fall of Beiping, and these authentic details provided detailed background material for Lao She to conceive a new work.On New Year's Day, 1944, Lao She began to write a million-word novel, Four Shires of the Same House, which was set against the backdrop of the fallen Beijing. He said, "It must be written to become one of the larger souvenirs of engaging in antiwar literature." Lao She's bedroom-cum-living-room-cum-study was exposed to sunlight on three sides in the summer, and the heat refused to dissipate by midnight; Lao She said, "You can still bake bread on the wall. I don't sleep well, I don't get enough sleep, so of course I get dizzy." Dizziness and often suffer from malaria, to the end of the year to write the first 300,000 words of "fear". 1945 Lao She wrote in the "eight sides of the rain": thirty-four years, my body is particularly bad. These illnesses often made me put down my pen. I wanted to use two years of effort to finish writing The Four Families, but by the end of the thirty-fourth year, only two-thirds of it had been written. This is simply not writing, but playing with my life!"