In a conversation, the writer Lin Zhao compared herself to a fern, she said: "In the next life, consider making a swift, that is the cousin of the legless bird." Lin's voice also carries a hint of subtropical flavor, which permeates the writing, making her novel rich and moist Lingnan.
In 2019, Lin Published his first novel, Stream Stream. This feature-length debut was shortlisted for the third Blancpain Republic Literature Award and won the 2020 Douban Reading Chinese Literature of the Year. With this novel, Lin Also won the "2020 Most Promising Newcomer" of the "2021 Southern Literature Festival".
Lin Zhao
Many people feel that Lin Zhao showed amazing talent in his debut work, but they did not know that Lin Zhao had been active in the literary forum Pickbaby under the pen name of "Puppet", and as early as fifteen years ago, she completed the prototype of this novel "Avignon". Lune once said that Avignon was "the most talented writing he had ever seen, by no means inferior to any avant-garde writer", and regretted that she could not find the opportunity to publish and faded out of writing for health reasons.
As Lu Nei said, although Lin Zhuo began writing very early, he was once unknown. After fading out of the literary forum, she once disappeared from the sight of literature lovers and did things that seemed to have nothing to do with literature: during this period, she sold flowers, planted trees, worked as a game designer, and it was not until she had a serious illness in 2018 and lived in the ICU for 15 days that she realized that writing was the most important thing for her and was determined to return to literature.
Stream: A literary hoax laid out by a young girl
Fortunately, Lin Zhuo did not waste her writing talent. Her previous work experience gave Lin a keen interest in naturalism and nourished her writing. She began to be particularly sensitive to plants, animals, and the weather, and her stories took on the characteristics of salty south. At the time of the creation of "Avignon", Lin Zhuo was not deeply involved in the world, and the ending of the novel still has a fairy tale color. Picking up the pen again after her thirties, the writer also has more precipitation and understanding of life and literature, and she rewrote this novel, giving "Flowing Stream" a completely different ending.
The opening of "Flowing Creek" is like a dazzling literary kaleidoscope, and Lin Zhuo smashes the names of Druid, T.S. Eliot, Dostoevsky, Rob Grillet, Camus, etc. into the reader's brain before slowly unfolding the narrative of the main text. This is not a writer deliberately flaunting literary accomplishment, so that the novel becomes a pretentious groan of little Bourgeois, but a literary and rhetorical violence - whether the girl is slandered by literary clever words like Fang Siqi, or as a tool to defend herself, is the suspense that Lin Zhuo left to the reader.
"Flowing Creek"
In "Flowing Stream", Lin Zhuo portrayed an outrageous girl, Zhang Zao'er. She grew up in a family of violence and prejudice, witnessing her father beating her mother, the family falling apart because of her father's infidelity, and her own often being ostracized by her family because of her female identity—a setting that often allows readers to see her as an innocent, weak victim of a patriarchal society, and to easily gain their sympathy. However, at the end of the story, Zhang Zao'er transforms into the murderer of his half-brother. With a detached tone, she calmly recalls her revenge plan: she describes her brother as a "ninety-centimeter rat" in total length, but plays the image of a "good sister" like a "conscientious and well-performing room manager", and finally succeeds in winning her brother's favor, luring him to the roof and pushing him down.
Lin Zhao, who calls Zhang Zao'er a liar, said: "The best liar is the kind of liar we will be fooled, and we thought that ta really used affection." While the reader is moved by Zhang Zao'er's tragedy, Lin Zhuo reminds the narrator that it may also be deceptive, and Zhang Zao'er's flawed defense may also symbolize the victory of the liar. Therefore, what "Flowing Stream" really wants to tell is not the depravity of a naïve girl, but the rift between words and deeds.
The story of "The Girl Who Lied" also appears in Elena Ferrante's new book, The Life of An Adult's Lies, and Jovana is also the creator of the lie when she dismantles her parents' lies. But Zhang Zao'er is more mean and ruthless than Jovana, who is always watching the feelings of others, because when she is anxious about the lack of love, Zhang Zao'er has been able to skillfully use the deception of narrative to ruthlessly shatter the illusion of a "naïve and innocent girl".
"Tidal Map": Let Lingnan float out of the literary landscape
In addition to "lies", the strong Lingnan atmosphere is also a feature of Lin Zhao. In addition to teenage revenge, domestic violence, lust and betrayal, "Flowing Creek" also has a damp subtropical atmosphere. The novel takes place in the "Saltwater City", and its prototype is Lin Zhao's hometown of Shenzhen. In her opinion, "the hometown will remain in our bodies in the form of atoms" "Whenever we want to find a landing point, the atom of the hometown begins to work, and it will always stay in your pen and ink and blood." ”
In The Tide Map, Lin Further expanded her lingnan territory. The novel tells the story of a Giant Frog in Guangdong at the end of the Qing Dynasty. The giant frog drifts from the Pearl River to Macau, and then deep into the center of the European Empire, taking in the history of the sea skin. Teochew, Guangzhou, and Cantonese ballads roll between words and phrases, making the novel a fierce sea of Cantonese. Readers (especially those unfamiliar with Cantonese) need to overcome many language barriers to see the story of this Cantonese frog. Lin Said in the afterword that such a rich Cantonese vocabulary benefits from the collection of "Chinese Trade Paintings" in the Martyn Gregory Gallery series of Cantonese-English dictionaries " Trade Vocabulary " . At the sharing meeting of the new book "Tidal Chart", the critic and young scholar Liu Xinyue pointed out that Cantonese has always had a non-negligible influence in popular music, but it is on the margins in literature, and the use of "Tidal Chart" in dialects can be seen as Lin Zhao's response to southern literature, and Lingnan can also be seen in literature.
Tide Chart
However, the defamiliarized language not only embodies the "Lingnan nature", but does not stop at dialect novels. In addition to the extensive use of Cantonese dialects, the novel also shows the language of the translation style and the Chinese standards. The carnival of three different languages not only reflects the writer's pursuit of language experimentation, but also implies the life course of the giant frog legend: from the barbaric growth of the Pearl River fishing basin era, to the encounter with people of different colors and races, the formation of cognition, and then the journey of going deep into the European Empire to gaze at "modern civilization".
In the process, giant frogs both tell stories and create illusions. It reminds the reader at the beginning of the story that it is "a fiction, an animal that has not yet been fixed." His mother was "born in 1981 in a new worker village on the construction of The Fourth Road in the provincial capital". The confusion of the times proves the fictionality of the giant frog's identity, and also casts the shadow of "metafiction" over the "tidal chart". The giant frog tells the story while deconstructing history, and the miserable middle quicksand boat fishermen and the luxurious and extravagant garden may also be a dream of Nanke.
Through the giant frog, Lin Zhao is practicing a more free way of writing
The Tidal Chart is a way for Lin to retrace the history of Guangdong. In order to write this novel, she flipped through the "Guangdong Sea Journal", "Guangdong Thirteen Elements", "Guangzhou Fan Ghost Record", "Old China Miscellaneous Records", "Research on the People" and other materials. During the writing period, Lin Zhuo often took the old map and ran to the Pearl River compared with the old landscape paintings. In the process, Lin Di tried to sort out the historical context of Lingnan and try to revive a forgotten history through literature.
The giant frog wandered all his life and briefly formed a friendship with Qi Jiajie and painter Feng Xi. She knew that the red paper sent to her by the Qi family sister would be corroded by the seawater, or did her best not to let it be wet by the seawater; when the frog became the pet of the nobility, the painter Feng Xi seemed to know it as if he had encountered the old country, and took it on a night tour, shuttled through the streets and alleys of Macau, telling it about the history of the city and her desire for "long travel" and "freedom"... It was also the only time she was treated warmly and freed from scrutiny and humiliation.
Other times, she has been regarded as a rare foreign object by humans, and has been repeatedly examined: on the middle quicksand fishing boat, the fishermen regard the frog as a spirit toad and want to hang it on the bow of the boat to worship it and let it protect the safety of the children of the sea; the giant frog is trapped by the naturalist H, and then raised by the noblewoman Minna in the "Garden of Good View" in Macau. Naturalists gathered together to debate endlessly about their identity, and finally gave it the name Polypedates giganteus so that it conformed to the red tape of the globe; in the European Empire, the giant frog was transformed into a "giant frog Taiji from afar in the Tang Empire", imprisoned with Malay tapirs and alpacas in the "Imperial Zoo" to satisfy people's imagination of the East.
However, humans stare at the giant frog, and it also stares at humans. Minna let it wear a dressing gown and a sare, retaining its "beastly" habits, while learning foreign languages and human etiquette, but it was never as easily trained as a pet that was "loyal and enthusiastic to its master, cold and arrogant to others" as fan people imagined or expected. It was used as a mascot to attend the wedding, but felt that "I don't know the bride, from head to toe, she is white like wearing a hemp and filial piety." The little ghost child ran around, throwing flower petals like a little ghost scattering stream money. Everywhere there was obscurity, and no one was unhappy. The newcomers are next to the dead. Death sat in the cool air of the cemetery and looked over, like a mud man on a lunch break. That's why I say that it's weird. When humans look at the giant frog to satisfy the curious mentality of the monster, how can they not be greedy and stupid monsters in the eyes of the giant frog, and love to deceive themselves?
Interestingly, H thought he had captured the giant frog, but he didn't know that it was the frog that lured him to discover it. With the mentality of experiencing whether there is a good cage in the world, it takes the initiative to enter the cage, looks at everything that imprisons itself, and treats the bondage itself as an experiment, dissolving the authority of the powerful. In this process, human greed has nowhere to escape - if the practice of worshipping giant frogs by the fishermen in the middle of the sand reveals the hardships of the lives of the people at the bottom - because they live on water, but they are fluttering all their lives, and they are easily taken by the waves, then the practice of the fan people to study and exhibit giant frogs and make up legendary lives for them symbolizes the colonists' deprivation and gaze at the East.
The giant frog saw the golden rooster being made into a specimen, and because it was "unique" and "rare", it was regarded by naturalists and scientists as the result of the discoveries of the new world. But she did not ignore human brutality because of this "survivor" status. In her opinion, the process of making the specimen is tantamount to a slaughter, it imagines the scene of the execution, the golden rooster's "internal organs suddenly see the light, the wind, frightened and contracted." Its specimen issued a barrage of accusations: "Welcome to my body, my organs, and this set of tortures inflicted on me." ”
The human atrocity against the golden rooster has brought the frog out of the stage of vague gender cognition - as early as when H used davis brand clamps to identify her gender and pronounced her as a "puppet", she had already sensed her identity from the fate of the golden rooster: the giant frog saw the hardened eggs of the dead golden rooster, and also began to ovulate, and swallowed them raw with sad emotions.
When the giant frog understands what a "cage" is with the nature of the game, it completely breaks away from the ambiguous and ambiguous fish basin era and truly forms self-knowledge. Previously, the giant frog understood luck, the style of the Pearl River and the sufferings of the world by swallowing cicadas, pond mackerels, water rats, swimming fish and birds, and now recognizes itself in this way. Therefore, when she was about to go to Macau and bid farewell to her sister, she exchanged heartfelt words with her like a sister. The frog said: "When I finally recognized myself and talked to you, I felt something different, as if I understood your situation better than in the old days. ”
At this point, the fate of rare beasts, poor women, and colored people has been felt and recorded by the giant frog, and thus connected. The giant frog said, "People look at me, I look at people, and I open my eyes like I can't see them." I want to see, I want to remember, I want to live long, I want to keep my eyes open, even if I am a prisoner (I am already), a specimen, a ghost, I want to see it forever from cages, museums, and wilderness. "Its body should have been sealed in a museum, permanently watched by the world, but in the end it disappeared into ice, leaving a thin letterhead in the air." The colonists spent their entire lives trying to possess the giant frog, but they did not expect that the giant frog was freer than man.
It can be seen that whether it is from the character, region or language, Lin Zhuo has not adopted the most mainstream writing mode. For example, in terms of characters, she did not write about the heroes in the traditional history or literary field, but took a female giant frog as the protagonist; geographically, she deliberately salvaged the history of the Pearl River Delta in the nineteenth century, and had no intention of repeating the stories of Beijing, Shanghai, Northeast china and other regions that had been written many times; in the use of Cantonese dialect, Lin Di not only adopted modern Cantonese, but also integrated ancient Cantonese, Chaoshan dialect and other languages, which are relatively marginal existences in mainstream literature.
In addition to Lin Zhao, in recent years, a number of writers who show Lingnan have also emerged. For example, in "Two Principles of Longhua Dancing", Deng Yiguang shows the ups and downs of "foreigners" and "new immigrants" in Shenzhen through the life experiences of twelve people with different identities, such as factory sisters, problem students, and programmers; Lin Peiyuan records the sadness and joy of chaoshan "little people" through "Small Town As a Writer"; Soel's "Logging Night" uses the "Lychee Garden" in his hometown Zhanjiang as the place where the story takes place.
If the group of Hong Kong writers represented by Liu Yihuan, Jin Yong and Xixi is included in the category of "Lingnan literature", it will be found that Lingnan is not a literary desert, but a fertile soil that has long been ignored by mainstream literary narratives. Since the nineteenth century, Guangdong has been an important commercial region in China, and it is also the forefront of reform and opening up, and it also has a rich civic culture, but for a long time, Cantonese literature with Guangdong as the background has been on the edge of the literary field. The significance of "Tide Map" is precisely to impact the concepts of "center" and "edge" in the past stereotypes, so that readers can see new possibilities in Southern literature.
Lin Zhuo once said that the original protagonist of the novel was a Cantonese woman living in the early nineteenth century. But she soon discovered that the actual living situation of women at that time would make the novel very limited, and finally she found the "frog" as the protagonist - the frog is not human, and it is an amphibian. Therefore, it can travel more freely through the heavens and the earth, more objectively present the changes of life, and record the changes of the world more permanently. This is also the greatest significance of Lin Zhao's writing in contemporary times - through the giant frog, she is practicing a more free way of writing.