Facing The Difficulty Of Death, Inquiring The Value Of Life

In the contemporary literary world in China, Shumin Bi enjoys a unique reputation because of her distinctive experience. She dedicates 11 best years of her life to snow-capped Ngari in Tibet, being a medic and then a military surgeon. After transferred to civilian work, she is devoted to the field of medicine: being a physician, psychologist, etc., which exerts profound influences on her style and themes in her literary works. Her works can generally be divided into two parts: the early Tibetan military series and the later urban life series, with most of her urban life series being psychological novels. Touched by disease and death, Shumin Bi starts her writing career in awe of life. One of her writing features is describing death through disease, and sensing life through death. Keeping faith with realistic writing, she narrates the dignity and desolation of the living and the dead in Tibet, the struggle of ordinary people in hospital, the ups and downs of special groups in reality, the pressure and difficulties of people in modern society. Though cruelties and bloods scatter in her writings, the tenor within is still simple, peaceful and amiable.Shumin Bi not only gives people medical treatment as a doctor, but also saves others’ soul as a writer. With a doctor’s responsibility of saving patients and rescuing the wounded as well as her great compassion, she devotes herself to literary creation. The numerous depictions of disease and death in her writings cannot be simply attributed to her medical experience, in which death leaves her a very deep impression. It should be noted that she is not only conveying her own comprehension of death, but also summoning human beings’ courage towards death, raising her deeper doubts on life and death, encouraging people to observe the appearance of life, expressing deeper compassion to life, maintaining the dignity and value of life, and ultimately finding the meaning of life. In Shumin Bi’s literary writings, female characters are the definite leading roles and the carriers of themes. Instead of claiming herself as a feminist, she observes life and death from a female perspective, she cares and loves women. By implanting ideals in female characters, she reflects the theme of human condition.Through a thorough interpretation of Shumin Bi’s representative literary works of different time, this paper tries to conduct a deep elaboration of disease and death in different period in her writings, and thus explores the nature of life in Shumin Bi’s creation of the death theme. Then it thinks deeply the individual life and human being’s condition and analyzes how life experience, career and female consciousness influence one’s literary works.Shumin Bi thinks highly of truth and thinking. She views human nature with kindness and attaches great importance to truth, kindness and love, from which vitality is discovered. Beneath her quiet and reasonable narration lies great and bright creative passion. With her broad bosom and kindness, the heartbroken ones are deeply encouraged and inspired, thus she is granted “White Angel in the Literary World”.