Author: Li Li
There is a Cantonese song that has sounded in many Hong Kong films, such as in the movie "Rouge Buckle", as soon as the film opened, a song was heard from the Jinling Restaurant Hall, and it was Mui Yanfang who played Ruhua singing a southern song in the hall, "The cool breeze has a letter, the autumn moon is boundless." Si Jiao's emotions are like living like a year... It is difficult for each side to meet today, because the lonely boat is silent and the evening scenery is cool. You look at the oblique sun to illuminate a pair of double flying swallows, leaning alone in the window thinking quietly..." In the haunting of the song, Zhang Guorong's twelve young men played by the merry prince climbed up the ladder, and he couldn't help but be attracted by the singing of the flowers.
This song is a dishui nanyin that has been circulating since the Jiaqing period, called "Ketu Autumn Hate". Nanyin is a kind of Cantonese rap, which uses a specific rhythm to tell stories in a way that both speaks and sings. "Ketu Qiu Hate" can be regarded as the most widely known song of Nanyin, telling this story: Enke Miao Lianxian met the prostitute Mai Qiujuan in the Qinglou, but Miao Lianxian has not been able to redeem mai Qiujuan, and finally Mai Qiujuan died, and Miao Lianxian could only sigh alone in the world. "Rouge Buckle" arranged ruhua singing "Ketu Autumn Hate" as an important beginning of the plot development, which not only conformed to the background of the era of the 1930s Wind and Moon Field, but also hinted at the tragic ending of the love story of Ruhua and twelve teenagers with the story of this song. This song is sung by Mei Yanfang's mezzo-soprano characters, desolate and deep, and is a hint of the tragedy of three days around liang and a hundred turns. Mei Yanfang, who carries a certain classical beauty of an old woman, let us believe that she is "like a dream like a phantom moon, if you leave a flower", that infatuated woman is like a flower; Zhang Guorong, who has a certain decadent beauty of the declining aristocracy, let us believe that he is "vowing to make smoke and clouds", the love idiot who is not familiar with the world in addition to talking about love.
"Ketu Autumn Hate" has been widely circulated and well-known in the Lingnan region. Growing up, I have heard this song countless times on different occasions, because there are too many neighborhood elders who love to listen to Cantonese music and love to sing Cantonese music. Even if you don't necessarily like this kind of local music art, it is inevitable that you will often hear the sound of Cantonese music in your ears.
"I heard the autumn sound of the leaves falling in my ears, and I only saw the cold smoke of the fading willow locks of the Flat Bridge... Smelling the garnets, drumming three more, only to see the River Maple fishing fire illuminating the sad people. Several times wandering about the past, advising Jiao jiao to be obsessed. The wind and dust have a lot of pity pilgrims, and Luo Qi also cherishes the jade people. You talk about fireworks who are not greedy and rich, do you prefer to give affection to small life, and I am poor as a guest bag, throwing and wrapping my head in shame. Remember to fill in the words and occasionally write a paragraph of rouge well, with affection accompanying you to the silver lamp. You asked me in detail what story was in the song, and I told you about the main passage of Chen Hou's affair. It is said that the soldiers trapped Jingyang's family and the country was broken, and the song was remnants of the jade tree in the backyard spring. Carrying the second concubine to hide the bottom of the well, dead and alive, difficult to give up, difficult to give up the beloved. Hearing this, I sighed more, and the words of the heavenly son were more serious. But the family should enjoy the luxury of blessings, and put the splendid rivers and mountains to the dust. You are a female stream who knows the rise and fall of hatred, and do not waste plum blossoms as bones and blood for the heart..."
The lyrics of "Ketu Autumn Hate" are euphemistic, with a strong Southern Cantonese rhyme, which seems simple and exquisite in substance, and the Southern Tone is still very deep. Its gentle shallow chanting can echo our childhood recitation of the Tang poem "Wild grass flowers by the Suzaku Bridge, the sunset at the mouth of Wuyi Lane", all of which tell the lonely wandering of the discrete era. Listening to it, it makes people listen to it, and a personal life and the vicissitudes of history quietly come to mind. For me, this piece of music makes people feel a distant feeling of reminiscing about the past between the flowers in the past, just like Lu You entered the Shen Garden after forty years to reminisce about Tang Wan's invincibility and endless entanglement.
Many years have passed, and I have long left the south and stayed in the north to live and work. But as long as I hear another song "Ketu Autumn Hate", I will suddenly think of my southern hometown, and there is a strong sense of loss to my hometown. In the migration of the times, many people have embarked on the road of the guest, and tens of millions of people have embarked on the road. However, this guest route eventually became a place of settlement for many people. Life is a book that is too hasty. Sometimes, before you can read it in a hurry, everything has already rained and blown. Sometimes, as soon as you turn around, it's a lifetime. The travelers on the road have a hometown that cannot go back, and the soul is still haunted by the year, leaving other places empty to look back, how can autumn not be hated?
For me, hometown is highlighted in two different ways. On the one hand, Wuzhou is still in some kind of space (a small southern city, on the banks of the Xijiang River) and time (the years before I was eighteen years old), as an effective reference and witness, confirming my "being" and "not being"; on the other hand, it flows endlessly, through many personnel entanglements and clutches, and experiences one runaway after another with me, experiencing the tossing and turning and helplessness of life, always in my heart. It seems to remind me from time to time that the city in front of me is just a floating city without roots, just a guest way, and in the end it is still necessary to embark on the road back to my hometown. However, when I travel a long way back to my hometown, I will find that everything I once missed and cherished has long been human, unable to resist the erosion of time and space, and has become strange and distant. As the French writer Proust said in his novel "Remembrance of The Age of Water", "We return in vain to the places we once loved, and we can never re-see them, because they are not in space, but in time." Because the person who revisited the old place is no longer the child or teenager who once decorated that place with his own enthusiasm. ”
Why is the hometown such a thing, people get closer and closer to it, they will find that the moment it is about to arrive, it is gone, the hometown in your heart has long been transformed into the mountains and rivers in the years, and the mountains and rivers are far away. Looking back, I want to take another look at my young self, the familiar homeland, it is not enough, and the "guest way" of walking will inevitably become the "way home".
Life is really strange, the closer you are, the farther away you are, the more you are close. Perhaps, it is precisely because of the mistakes in the hometown that we frequently look back. I often ring this familiar song "Guest Autumn Hate" in my mind, reminding me of my identity as a guest - what is identity? Identity is not solidified, static, but always in a state of flow, right? For so many years in the north, as a foreigner in a strange environment, the once difficult and difficult situation has long been gently turned over, but sometimes I feel that in the face of this piece of heaven and earth, I am still looked at and examined as an outsider, and I am still a guest of the city wall, a guest of Qujiang, a guest of Weihe, and a guest of Qinling. Thinking about the big place, we humans are also guests of the earth, we are guests of grass, guests of woods, guests of birds and beasts, guests of rivers, aren't we? But this "guest way" also eventually becomes our "way back" and becomes our resting place in this life.
Every time at dusk, in late autumn, I remember my identity as a guest, and remember the misses everywhere in my life, as if hearing the tune of guzheng, Qinqin, Dong zhen and coconut hu wan, there is a desolate voice singing: "The cool wind has faith, the autumn moon is boundless..."