The Yam and Egg Faction was formed in the 1950s, and its representative writer was Zhao Shuli, whose main members included Xirong, Li Shuwei, Ma Fenghuang, Hu Zheng, and Sun Qian, and was known as "Xili, Ma, Hu, and Sun".

The Sinking and Flourishing of the Yam and Egg School

The special spatial and temporal environment of Yan'an in the 1940s was the objective basis for the emergence of the Yam and Egg School represented by Zhao Shuli, and the change in the relationship between the writers and the peasants altered the writers' attitudes toward the peasants. The popularized form of the "Yam and Egg" school became a way of communication between political discourse and civil dialogue. The decline of the "Yam and Egg" school from glory to glory was the result of the fit and estrangement of the writers' creative ideas and modes of creation from the times.

The Jin-Ji Lu-Yu border area and the Jin-Sui-Border area in the 1940s were anti-Japanese democratic bases, where the peasants gradually became the masters of their own lives and destinies and the main force of the revolutionary struggle, changing their position in the minds of intellectuals--no longer a place of sympathy and enlightenment for the intellectuals. -No longer an object of intellectual sympathy and enlightenment, but an object of intellectual veneration and love. Intellectuals began to learn from the peasants, digging out their loveliness. At this time, the peasants became the object of writers' creative service. Zhao Shuli with his strong foundation of rural life, into the anti-Japanese base in Jinsui, with his deep feelings for the peasants, and wrote the "yam and egg" school of works loved by the peasants in the turnaround.

The peasant-oriented thinking of the "yam and egg" school of writers made them look up to the peasants as the main body of their creations, and regarded the cultural value of the peasants as an aesthetic ideal. The peasant perspective of their creations gained popularity among the peasant masses. The high spirit of the liberated areas infected the writers with a philosophical view of optimism, making them look at the peasants in an overly optimistic way, expressing the beauty and goodness of their characters, ignoring their human weaknesses, and scrutinizing the issues from a peasant's point of view. However, the peasant-oriented thinking also bound the writers to a certain extent to the deeper thinking of the problem. With the passage of time, living in Yan'an, the land of the liberated area of the writers, showed some kind of stagnation, did not adjust the concept of space and time, "yam and egg" school of writers of the way of thinking and creative mode has gradually become a kind of shackles that he does not want to get rid of.

Form can sometimes be understood as content, and sometimes there is a potential relationship between form and ideology. the political reality of the 1940s gave rise to a political and cultural movement to promote national and local consciousness. Zhao Shuli's peasant stance and folk forms of writing subconsciously fit into this movement. Political discourse found a way to communicate information to the peasants, and the peasants found a way to communicate their views on the conditions of life upwards. Zhao Shuli's way of creation became an existence accepted by both political and folk discourse***. Zhao Shuli's creative work not only has a formal national character, but also a spiritual folk consciousness. Mao Zedong's Speech at the Yan'an Literary and Artistic Symposium affirmed this way of creation, which led to Zhao Shuli's creation being called the direction of literature and art serving the workers, peasants, and soldiers. This is an allusion. As an intellectual, Zhao Shuli's choice of popular creation as his place of rest is entirely a rational and conscious act. On the one hand, it depended on the fact that he came from the foundation of folk life, and thus had the creative idea of serving the folk, and more importantly, after he read the Speech, he realized that the peasants would play a more important role in the future life, and that the folk culture would also change the destiny. His creative requirement is "the people like to read, politically useful". Zhao Shuli's way of creation was to connect with the political consciousness upward to convey the spirit of the times, and to stand on the peasants' position downward to reflect their lives, thus distinguishing his creative style from that of previous writers who wrote about peasants. The political consciousness of the era of clear-cut class division no longer required it. The folk discourse in the text was at odds with the political discourse of the times, so much so that in his later years Zhao Shuli had to give up writing popularized novels and turn to traditional opera. The dramatic fate of the "yam and egg" school of writing after the publication of the Speech can be said to be an embarrassing path for the writer's peasant position or folk-conscious writing.

The half-century "yam and egg school"

In the 1950s and 1960s, a group of realist writers who wrote about rural subjects, represented by Zhao Shuli, were flirted with in the literary world as the "yam and egg school". The reason was that these writers were all from Shanxi, and their works dealt with rural life. In addition, they all liked to use "earthy" vernacular language, so literary critics named them after Shanxi's most famous local specialty.

At first, this name was pejorative, because potatoes were rarely used in dishes that were well known. Critics of the era used the term as a metaphor for the genre's writers and their works, which were more rustic than elegant. Soon, however, the works of the "Yam and Egg School" were recognized by literary critics. Zhao Shuli's Xiao Erhei Marriage, San Liwan, and Exercise and Exercise, and Ma Feng's The Legend of the Heroes of Lvliang (in collaboration with Xirong), My First Superior, and Young Men in Our Village all had a profound impact on the Chinese literary scene. In the history of contemporary Chinese literature, the "Yam and Egg School" is an important literary school with characteristics and achievements.

The splendor of the "Yam and Egg School" remained in the 1950s and 1960s, and when these writers were no longer able to dominate the literary scene, they continued to write, utilizing their own specialties. Ma Fenghuang and Sun Qian collaborated on The Newly Arrived County Party Secretary, which was adapted into the movie Trail of Tears, considered one of the masterpieces of Chinese scar literature in the late 1970s. This was followed by the movie script "Our Veteran", both of which won every movie award in China at the time.

Nowadays, only the 80-year-old Hu Zheng remains from the "Yam and Egg School", which has left a brilliant legacy in the history of contemporary Chinese literature. It can be said that as a literary genre of a specific historical period in China, their generation has completed its historical mission.