Between interviews, Zhang Yueran signaled to take a break and go out to "breathe."
Through the glass door of the café, you can see her standing outside and lighting a cigarette, which coincides with the plot of her new book" "I Follow the Light of The Fire".
"The hero and heroine meet at a party, and when the hero wants to go out to smoke, he sees the heroine outside through the glass door, holding a lit cigarette in her hand. Later, when the heroine asked the hero: Why are you close to me? The hero said, "I came by the light of the fire." ”
The story is included in a collection of novels of the same name, which also includes eight other novellas she has written in the past decade.
Zhang Yueran is not a prolific writer, or she once had a period of "high prolific". In 2004, when the works were most intensively published, a total of four books were published, "Cherry Far Away", "Are You Here to Examine My Sorrows", "Red Shoes", and "Ten Loves".
Non-stop output is a kind of consumption and damage to the writer, and Zhang Yueran decided that "I should write according to my own inner rhythm."
After 2006's "Oath Bird", Zhang Yueran began to drastically reduce production, trying to run magazines, teach, and write only occasional short stories.
In 2016, Zhang Yueran returned with his novel "Cocoon".
"My previous work may have been more obsessed with 'me', which is not difficult to understand, all writers are writing from the search for what kind of person I am and how I want to start writing;
When I came to Cocoon, I wanted to explore more about the relationship between 'me' and society and the times and the world, in addition to 'I', there are more other people, that is, there are 'we'. ”
The "oath bird" retracted its wings until it broke the "cocoon" into a butterfly again, exactly ten years have passed.
Zhang Yueran is considered to be the "second generation of Wen", his father is a teacher of Shanda University, and he has lived in the South Courtyard of Shanda Since childhood. In her impression, her parents' discipline of her was not meticulous, but more relaxed and free.
Since junior high school, Zhang Yueran has been fascinated by reading, and many small bookstores at the gate of the mountain have become places she often patronizes.
In his third year of high school, Zhang Yueran won the first prize of the third new concept essay competition. However, the new regulations of the Education Commission introduced in April, canceling the guarantee of students in liberal arts, deprived Zhang Yueran of the opportunity to directly guarantee the university.
"My situation is special. After I won the award in 2001, I planned to send it to Tsinghua University. But then the quota was abruptly cancelled, and my mood was greatly affected. Later, the college entrance examination did not do well, and only went to our local Shandong University. ”
Zhang Yueran spent his entire childhood at Shanda, "my hometown in the true sense of the word". Yet she also felt "something very conservative and constrained" here, and she felt she should leave.
Zhang Yueran trained in the Shandong University for a month, and soon after, she was admitted to the Singapore Government Scholarship to study computer science at the National University of Singapore.
Zhang Yueran, who went to Singapore, was not happy, the traditions and detention of his hometown were more conceptual, and the high cleanliness and order of this tropical country formed a sense of oppression in the system. "Out of the subway station everyone is moving at the same rhythm, and at this time it feels like if you slow down they will step on you."
The convergence of people and people is too strong, coupled with the weak cultural soil, Zhang Yueran still feels uncomfortable. Fortunately, she still found a place to breathe.
Every week, she would leave from her residence and take a long subway ride to the city center, where there was a Japanese chain bookstore that sold Chinese books, in few simplified and mostly Taiwanese traditional scripts.
"I will sit there and read books for a long time, because traditional books are still quite expensive, usually choose one to buy every week, but want to see a lot, usually sit there and read, after reading it, I finally decided to buy one, and then take the subway back." 」
Being in a foreign country, but still feeling depressed and bound; reading a profession that he does not like, facing boring code every day, Zhang Yueran needs to find an exit.
She began to write intensively, and during her five years at the university, Zhang Yueran published a total of five works: beginning with the 2003 short story collection Sunflower Lost in 1890, Zhang Yueran shut herself in her room every day, using writing as a catharsis for her emotions. In 2006, after graduating from university, Zhang Yueran, 24, was ranked 23rd on the first list of Chinese writers.
It was also in this year that Zhang Yueran returned to China and settled in Beijing.
In Zhang Yueran's view, Because Beijing is big, it has a feeling that it is difficult to familiarize itself with.
"For example, familiar with Chaoyang, not familiar with Haidian, not familiar with Nancheng." Because of this unfamiliarity, it's hard to say tired of it. We get tired of our hometown, or of a small city, because we are too familiar with it, feel bored, know everything, walk this place many times a day, and get tired of it. ”
The vastness of Beijing makes Zhang Yueran aware of something "heartless", which makes the person in it but always keeps a distance from it.
For Zhang Yueran, the hidden and wild vitality behind Beijing is what Jinan and Singapore lack, making her feel "fit".
Zhang Yueran also began to find that she could not adapt to the "uniform" of "writer identity", which "cannot be considered fit".
"I've been a writer since my sophomore year, and I haven't done any other job or any social experience. In addition to writing and participating in activities as a writer, I think this kind of life is quite scary for a person who is only about 24 years old. ”
When "Oath Bird" was published in 2006, Zhang Yueran felt that she needed to slow down. "I had already published three novels at that time, and some of the instincts and self-expressions of youth had been exhausted. Overexpression is actually an overdraft of youth, and I feel that I have not fully grown up, but I have become very vicissitudes. ”
Zhang Yueran, who "has always been protected by literature" during her college years, found that her novels "need more communication with reality" and "need some sense of participation in reality.".
Zhang Yueran stopped his high-intensity professional writing and began to look for his own literature. "I didn't publish a novel during this decade, but I did something else, like editing magazines and writing short stories."
In 2011, Zhang Yueran met a Czech female writer Milena in a writing project in the United States. She "has no fixed home, has been in various literary camps", obsessed with the "romantic story" in the writing camp, she believes that she can write her own "great novel".
This made Zhang Yueran aware of the fragile and sensitive "dramatic distortion personality" of the writer, "Literature is a different environment from daily life, and we may become weaker and weaker when we stay in it for a long time." ”
"Some professional writers will gradually get off the ground and out of real life, but I welcome outside things into my life and even change me." 」
In this way, Zhang Yueran "unloaded" herself from the road of writing and embraced a normal life.
In 2012, Zhang Yueran chose to become a university teacher. Every Tuesday at Chinese University, she teaches film and television adaptation courses to undergraduates, and discusses and analyzes their novels with the writers' class. Although the profession of teacher has her "very annoying part", it often gives her "satisfaction".
After no longer fleeing, Zhang Yueran finally accepted her responsibility calmly.
Zhang Yueran himself did not think, "I think it is very interesting, I especially hate responsible things." Zhang Yueran, who became a teacher, took a long time to adapt to another rhythm.
The mere "punctuality" thing is indeed a "particularly big challenge" for Zhang Yueran, who has developed a loose habit since college.
Her teaching work was not smooth at the beginning, Zhang Yueran described it as "like a great enemy", "feeling that before class is more busy than when she was a student"; compared with doing a book club, she needs to actually pass on "something useful" to students in class, "when she goes to class, she feels a special responsibility".
Fortunately, Zhang Yueran realized the importance of "responsibility" in writing, and she found that the chaotic and spontaneous, purely artist-like life of the past could not make sense for writing. Sometimes a little bit of responsibility is needed to build the order of writing.
"It needs to be more rational, more planned, and have a fixed time to deal with the work. Because you are a professional writer, you are no longer a writer who relies on emotions, on a momentary impulse. It's completely different. ”
Zhang Yueran has the consciousness of being a professional writer and should "treat himself according to such requirements." "A moderate sense of oppression, a moderate constraint, is beneficial to me at this stage."
Writing for Zhang Yueran also has an extra layer of "contradictory" meaning: the previous writing was a way to eliminate loneliness.
But in fact, after choosing to write, she found that "writing is one of the loneliest things"; the previous writing was to escape the shackles and gain freedom. However, she now understands that writing has never been free, and that writers are not the gods of their work.
Zhang Yueran describes himself as a "very difficult person to write", except for the "honeymoon period" with writing in Singapore, and now writing more and more slowly. "But in fact, I think that in the slow, you can feel a lot of subtle changes, you will feel your own small changes, and I think this process is also very important."
This kind of transformation brings Zhang Yueran a "state of confrontation and anxiety", but this is not that the passion for writing is gone, "but a new force is brewing, no longer relying on a primitive impulsive force to write, this power includes thinking about things, such a force has a more lasting enthusiasm."
Zhang Yueran knew that this brewing process, as well as the state of entanglement, would last for a long time. This is because "I have relatively high requirements for myself, and I hope that I can complete the improvement of understanding and the change in writing." ”
This is the inevitable result of a sense of responsibility for writing. "I've never felt that anxiety is a derogatory term because it expresses the creator's dissatisfaction with himself, his uneasiness in the environment, and his uncomfortable life. I think that's what it takes to create."
Anxiety actually makes Zhang Yueran feel at ease, because it is a "particularly normal creative state", "if one day I am no longer anxious about writing, then I am afraid that I will also feel anxious for my own lack of anxiety.".
Zhang Yueran's heart had a fire, so that she would not be lost in anxiety.
Some people say that Zhang Yueran's novels are always related to the loneliness and diaphragm in people's hearts, and "I Follow the Light of Fire" is no exception.
Frustrated painters, young girls in foreign countries, women who have lost their husbands... The protagonists in the story have different social backgrounds and life experiences, but they have the same complex personality and unspeakable past, they are innocent and sophisticated, indifferent and warm, and everyone is obsessively looking for the fire in their own world.
Zhang Yueran said that her novels are always concerned with people themselves, and dealing with people's hearts is always the problem of people's hearts."
In her novel Cocoon, Zhang Yueran wrote: "After many years, we grew up, as if we had finally stepped out of the fog and seen the world in front of us. Not really. We just put the fog on our bodies and formed a cocoon. ”
It is obviously simple and rude to describe Zhang Yueran with a label similar to "post-80s writer", Zhang Yueran may have been on the road of youth literature at first, but from the beginning of these years, it can be seen that she is groping for a new literature that belongs to the individual. This made her a loner, looking for the honorable but lonely "Don Quixote happiness".
Some commentators said: "Zhang Yueran's novels are feeling-type and emotional, and it is difficult for you to summarize them into traditional realist writing."
The impetus of her story comes not so much from a specific and strong plot conflict and character conflict, but from the feelings and emotions of a moment in the characters. ”
Foggy emotions form a cocoon in the characters, and together they point to some kind of spiritual dilemma. Just like in her new book "I Follow the Fire": there is no real respect and understanding in "Animal-shaped Fireworks"; in "Big Joe Little Joe", who wants to shake off the identity and shadow of the original family but cannot join the embarrassment of the world and society; in "Home", the petty bourgeoisie tries to save its "failure" by integrating into the times and seeking guidance in reality.
But Zhang Yueran feels that although the situation of these lonely individuals in her writing is worrying, they have not given up on themselves, and often try to carry out a self-help, although sometimes this will make their situation worse.
They are always falling on the run, and trying to grasp some kind of rescue rope when they fall.
But at the same time, outside of the materialistic commodities and social occasions where money is intertwined, Zhang Yueran has set up some kind of metaphorical device for his novels, such as fireworks and lakes, fires and hotels, which often become the exit of the novel characters to find meaning.
Today' Zhang Yueran has become accustomed to the dual identity of writer and teacher, she covers her ears to face her heart when writing, and raises her ears when teaching, hoping that students can be honest with each other and talk more about shortcomings as a principle of discussion.
Fortunately, he can continue to hide in writing, Zhang Yueran firmly believes:
"Writing is always the first, the most suitable for me, and the most satisfying expression vehicle." I gain valuable experience when trying to participate in other things, but they are no substitute for writing."
When Zhang Yueran returned to the protective shell of literature, she described it as "a bit like sinking into a bottom of the water."