Masterworks of Jia Pingwa and Chen Zhongshi

In his commemoration of Chen Zhongshi (1942–2016), Jia Pingwa (1952–) borrowed a verse from a Buddhist poem to express the everlasting presence of Chen even after his death: “the wave is fundamentally part of the ocean, the moon that descends is inseparable from the sky.” ¹ Reflecting on death, Jia asserts, “each life expresses the whole … when a person dies, part of a whole is lost, part of I is gone. But what get lost are illness, physical pain and fear. Life itself is inextinguishable.” ² Jia’s pithy commemoration illuminates not only a sense of existential interconnectedness but also expresses his and Chen’s shared writerly concerns of cosmic structure, time, historical change and loss.