There are clouds in the song "There are many stories in a small town", which turned out to be not a lie.
In the thirties of the last century, a Chinese female writer wrote the story of the Hulan River, a small town in the northeast in the 20s, presenting the climate, people and life there. In the West, which is the same era as the Hulan River in the story, a writer under the Austro-Hungarian Empire has created a fictional castle located in a distant town, where reality and absurdity overlap, and finally force the protagonist to despair......
"Family Portrait", by Sun Yisheng, Casting and Engraving Culture/Single Reading/Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2024.04
One hundred years later, when Sun Yisheng wrote the semi-autobiographical novel Family Portrait based on Cao County's childhood memories, he received guidance from both writers across time and space: Xiao Hong brought inspiration for the prose narrative structure, and Kafka gave him the texture of depicting life that he had always been looking for. From the perspective of a child who is forced to run from the county to the city and his family, he meticulously presents the survival plight of low-level workers.
The writer Zhang Chu directly fictionalized a county town named Yunluo, the prototype of which is his hometown Luannan. This fictional county town near the sea has materialistic desires, lust, appetite, as well as plants, birds and insects, full of fireworks in the world, eating men and women, everyone in the county has a rich voice and character, Zhang Chu shows their triviality and unbearable, but also shows their furry happiness.
Also fond of writing in the county is Ah Yi, most of his works are set in Ruichang, a county-level city in northern Jiangxi, where he lived until the age of 26. The novel "Fiancée" tells about a love memory that happened in the county, obviously, in China's county, love can never be a matter of two people, but a matter of the whole family...... In Ah Yi's view, small town literature or county town literature naturally has a texture that is closer to real life - revealing the depression, hardship, inferiority, blandness, and despair in the hearts of the locals, a reality of exile, "It's not that we want to shape the county into that, it's that the county is what it is." ”
"Fiancée", written by A Yi, People's Literature Publishing House, 2022
Zhang Chu's understanding of the county seat is more rational, he said, the county seat is a wonderful existence, is a combination of the city and the countryside, the integration of the dual characteristics of the two, it is the subtle and accurate epitome of the times. The people living in the county town, on the one hand, closely follow the footsteps of industrial civilization, and on the other hand, they also retain some traditional customs of agricultural civilization, and in this harmonious and contradictory concept, time is both fast and slow. The same is true for the impact of major events and nodes on the county, which is not a thunderstorm, but a drizzle. In the slow and rapid passage of time, people understand something, and then forget something.
Previously, people's intuitive perception of the atmosphere of the county town probably came from Jia Zhangke's series of film works, and the more individual, in-depth and delicate storytelling of the county town has been carried out in literature. It is said that after watching Zhang Chu's "Cloud Falling", the writer Sun Ganlu said something like this: In the past, China's county towns were more represented by movies, and next, further stories will be told by novels.
"Cloud Falling", by Zhang Chu, Beijing, October Literature and Art Publishing House, 2024.05
A writer who was shaped by the county
When Sun Yisheng, a native of Cao County, Heze, Shandong Province, went to Qingdao to promote his new book "Family Portrait", he was just in time for Heze to rush to the hot search because of the grassroots Internet celebrity Guo Youcai, and the young people at the bottom of the society are trying to find a way out and pay attention to the characteristics, which may be in line with the writer's personal life experience. Sun Yisheng told the beginning of his mediocre and even somewhat unbearable life: his parents were farmers, his family was always very poor when he was a child, outside of farming, his parents wanted to make more money, so they went to the town to sell cloth and shoes, and when he was in high school, his father did almost all the small businesses that he could do, but he still owed debts and could only repay the debts, and the family no longer had the anxiety of arrears because his father later went to do the hearse business and pulled the deceased to the crematorium, which made the family a little more stretched.
Parents hoped that Sun Yisheng would change his fate by studying and find a good job in the city, but it backfired, he repeated the college entrance examination four times and took the exam five times, although he claimed to have done his best, Sun Yisheng still did not get admitted to an undergraduate college, he went to a junior college, majored in chemistry, and had to return to his hometown after graduation to work as a security guard in the cement yard in the town. As a restless young man in a small town, Sun Yisheng seized an opportunity to work as a waiter in a Shanghai hotel, and in Shanghai, he began to think about his future life. From Shanghai to Zhengzhou, he devoted himself to his creation, and sent his resume to Beijing, attaching all the works he had written at that time...... In this way, from the county seat, Sun Yisheng traveled all the way to Beijing, where he rediscovered the county seat that shaped him and wrote it into a novel.
The protagonist "I" in "Family Portrait" also set off from the county seat, and his purpose was to find his family. This is the story of Zhao Maisheng, a left-behind teenager, who met in one day - he and his sister ate at his grandfather's and grandfather's house respectively, and they exchanged them when they got tired of eating. Their parents worked in Heze, one sold dumplings in the night market, and the other ate and lived on the construction site. Because of a photo that must be handed in and tuition fees, "I", that is, Zhao Maisheng, had to go back to my grandfather's house and grandfather's house, and I had to take a motorized tricycle to Heze to find my parents. During the day's trip, he walked past the school, walked through the night market, walked through the railway, walked through the dirt road, walked through the street lamp, walked through the jujube tree. In front of me is the road stretching into the distance, in my mind is the flashback of the memory picture, why the family is separated, the "strangeness" between me and my sister, and other trivial family trivialities. From the perspective of a child, the living conditions of a family are strung together, and the reader follows the teenager to experience the difficulties of life. For example, Sun Yisheng quoted the dialogue from the anime "Gintama" in the epigraph of the novel: "Unlike you young masters, we have done our best just to live." ”
Stills from the movie "The Story of Time".
You'll find that the writers of those counties tend to be unwilling "escapers", and their way of looking back is usually rational and detached. A few years ago, Ah Yi was interviewed to trace Ruichang's shaping of his temperament, although he left his hometown after the age of 26, he said that after several renovations in the county, he was still able to walk through it with his eyes closed. "If I had the courage to write about the city, I would only be able to show the shallow, cramped, embarrassing, and temporary side of the city." In all the cities, I lacked a rich life and socialization, a lack of relationships. And novels, unless they are too philosophical novels, are always inseparable from life, social interactions, and relationships. ”
Ah Yi's life, social interactions, and relationships will always remain in the county seat he knows but once wanted to escape. He came to realize that man actually lives with the geography and history that he represents and relies on. Origin could not be more obvious in shaping a person's temperament. We can even discern a universal character. "For people like me who come from a depression of self-esteem, there will be no natural high-spiritedness, chic, and easy to show up when there are good things, easy to forget, and most of the time, they will show inferiority, self-doubt, depression, hardship, and fear." Perhaps this is where the novel's temperament and inspiration come from.
Ordinary and exuberant typical atmosphere
Unlike Sun Yisheng and Ah Yi's adolescent escape from the county seat, the writer Zhang Chu lived in his county seat, Luannan County in Tangshan, Hebei Province, for nearly forty years. By the time he wrote his novel "Cloud Falling", he had settled in Tianjin and still returned to Luannan once a month. "Luannan is like an old nest, a little old and closed, but my relatives and most of my friends live there, and for me, Luannan is my well-being, my healing place."
Not long ago, at the "World Wake Up Like Spring - Zhang Chu's "Cloud Fall" New Book Sharing Meeting" held at the Sinan Literature House in Shanghai, critic Huang Dehai said that unlike the single-family in big cities, the county is a big family. The reason why there are so many characters in the novel is because everyone in the county town may know each other. In Huang Dehai's view, such a network of people has become the source of "escape" on the one hand, and on the other hand, it also means that life is more "humane". Huang Dehai cites his favorite character, Wan Ying, as an example. In his opinion, Wan Ying is similar to the eldest mother in Lu Xun's "A Chang and the Classic of Mountains and Seas", seemingly chaotic but full of vitality, even if she encounters difficulties, she can still live vigorously, "In order to live, she does not care about the constraints of ethics and morality, and naturally shows her desires and needs, as the old saying goes, 'Etiquette is not inferior to the people'." In the view of writer Cheng Yongxin, although the main line of "Cloud Falling" revolves around Wan Ying, due to the large number of characters, Zhang Chu narrates the story from the perspective of everyone, so as to make the characters close to the true state of life, "For example, the male personalities around Wan Ying are different, and they are combined with Wan Ying to form a different magnetic field, and these magnetic fields also constitute the network of the county, and this network is the microcosm of Chinese reality." He said that the novel provides a sample of a typical county town for the contemporary literary world, and that Yunluo County is like a microcosm of society, from which readers can get a glimpse of China's subtle ecology, such as how to deal with the intricacies of interpersonal relationships, "It also condenses all the customs and customs of China, including its richness and shortcomings." ”
Correspondingly, the world in "Cloud Falling" is not tragic, although it is not perfect. This is one of the important reasons why Huang Dehai finds this novel appealing to him, "The reason why we like this world is because it is full of vitality. The life described in the novel is as flavorful as real life itself, and characters with different personalities can live comfortably in it. Huang Dehai describes the novel as "the moment of spring awakening in the jagged world", like a spring awakening, reminiscent of spring revival, insect activity, and growing greenery, "just like Rilke's poem, 'If spring is coming, the earth will make it complete little by little'." ”
And Zhang Chu said frankly that the reason why he was able to write novels full of affection was related to his mentality when he created it. He was in Tianjin when he wrote the novel, "When you look back from one city to another, there is a sense of ritual in your heart, as if you have to pass through countless trees, villages, railroad tracks, rivers, factory chimneys to reach your hometown." "It is precisely because of the simple and pure love in the heart that there are no outright bad people in the novel, but a group of the most ordinary people, exuding vigorous vitality. So, the reader also followed the writer back to the tailor shop, curtain shop, barber shop, and small restaurant in the county town, and heard all kinds of noisy and repetitive sounds in the streets and alleys.
Perhaps, Zhang Chu did not deliberately ask himself to think about social and contemporary issues in his writing, but as he said, he naturally followed the path of the characters. He once wrote a short story called "The Love History of Middle-aged Women", in which those shining feminine qualities have also entered the fictional county town, which has become a unique incision for people to understand today's Chinese county. And the ordinary days of these ordinary people are the most real life scenery in the folds of the great era.
"The Love History of Middle-aged Women", by Zhang Chu, Beijing, October Literature and Art Publishing House, 2018
Write the texture of real life
"There are no traces of rise and fall, no historical changes, no magnificent plots, only fleeting moments, only the reality of the world that we have left behind under a long lens." This is Sun Yisheng's self-summary of the novel "Family Portrait", and it seems to be equally applicable to Zhang Chu's "Cloud Fall".
What is human reality? In "Cloud Falling", it can be an inconspicuous appetite. "Eating" is an important existence that is easily ignored in this novel, in which all kinds of food are written and tasteful, and the meaning of "eating" for ordinary people is presented in the dense and long writing: everyone's eating habits and taste preferences seem to constitute the background color of their lives, and every banquet and banquet also witnesses the joys and sorrows of the world. And this is also Zhang Chu's deliberate behavior, he said, daily life is usually trivial, shriveled, greasy, boring, lack of fantasy poetry, but if we give daily life a sense of ritual, it will definitely become different, such as food, corresponding not only to our tongue and stomach, but also to our attitude towards life and traditional aesthetics. In the novel, three or four large-scale dinners are written, on the one hand, to further integrate the relationship between the characters, and on the other hand, to witness the most ordinary joys and sorrows in the world.
For "Family Portrait", the reality of the lost world exists in the processing of many details, and Sun Yisheng understands it as the texture of real life. In his opinion, writing a novel is to establish a scene and give the reader a sense of picture. He mentioned one of his favorite novels, Pilgrim's Progress, which began with this: "I was walking in the wilderness, and I came to a place where there was a cave, and I lay down and slept, and I fell asleep, and I had a dream, and I dreamed of a man in rags, standing there, and behind him was his own house, and he was holding a book in his hand, and on his back something that seemed to be very heavy, and I saw him open the book, and read it, and wept as he read it, and he couldn't control himself. A sad cry: "What should I do...... this graphic and rhythmic action description brings out the universal question of "what should I do", and its sense of language and atmosphere will be even more memorable.
"Night Wandering God" by Sun Yisheng, Single Reading/Casting and Engraving Culture/Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2021
Further, how can this sense of language and atmosphere be established? Sun Yisheng refers to Kafka's novel Children on the Highway, which depicts the moment when a carriage passes through a garden, and Kafka uses an unexpected way of observation: as the carriage passes through the garden, the flowers darken a little. Sun Yisheng did not miss this easily overlooked detail, and he believes that this kind of literary description is the texture of real life embodied in the novel, which is manifested in the progress of the story, rather than the drama of the ending. And he has been trying to write the same sentence, showing the nuanced texture of life.
In the preface to Family Portrait, Sun Yisheng again refers to Kafka's Children on the Highway, which depicts a group of rural children playing in the evening, which is rich in detail and subtle. In this novel, Kafka writes about his original "movement", like the movement of the camera in a movie. "The most powerful thing about the novel is that it has no purpose, no directional meaning, and at the same time rich in meaning. Only the scene is traced and observed like a shot, there is no voice-over, only natural white noise. There are only small children's runs inside, there are no instructions, only descriptions of the runs. In the end, when I was leaving, I didn't have the reason or motivation to leave, and even the direction of my progress (even though I said where I was going, I didn't say what I was going to do) didn't mean anything. Actions without purpose are the deadliest. At the end, the children were called back by their parents one by one, but the protagonist 'I' wanted to leave his hometown and go to the city......"
"Family Portrait" is also a story about a child living in the county town who marched to the city alone due to some accident. The writer wrote: "If "Children on the Highway" is a child's unknown yearning for the road ahead, then this "Family Portrait" is the child's beginning of this unknown yearning. Sun Yisheng said that he tried to write a movie out of fiction.
Sun Yisheng also wanted his novels to have the texture of prose at the same time, so he used a lot of scenery descriptions, from the countryside to the city, through the wheat fields on the plains, as well as the trees and houses on both sides of the road. He bluntly said that this is a bit of a reference to Xiao Hong's "The Biography of the Hulan River", paragraph by paragraph of memories of childhood, like an essay, and a little tribute to Shen Congwen's "Border City", "He writes very innocently, which is what I want to pursue - a sense of innocence, showing a child's heart." (Qingdao Daily/Guanhai News reporter Li Wei)
Qingdao Daily, June 25, 2024, page 11