Zhang Ailing's fairy tales are unscrupulous
Author丨Zhang Ailing
In the past, when people celebrated the New Year, there were red paper strips on the wall with "Look up and see joy" and "Children's words are unscrupulous". Here I use "children's words are unscrupulous" as the topic, and there are no taboo words, I am eager to vomit as soon as possible, but I plan to talk about my own business. When the primary school student came back from school, he excitedly recounted what he had seen and heard, how Mr. was eccentric, how Wang Debao was late, and how the classmates who shared a bench with him were deducted one point because they were untidy. When I was a child, I felt the sadness of this phenomenon, and since then I have a taboo about talking to myself. Until now, I have always had a good time talking to people, if they say I listen. If I say that people listen, then I think about it later, and I always feel very uneasy, afraid that people will be annoyed. I really have nowhere to say what I have to say, but there is only one way, go out and do something earth-shattering, and then write an autobiography, not afraid that no one will pay attention to it. This was a naïve dream, but now I gradually know that to be a world-renowned person, to write an autobiography of a person, the hope is very slim, or to write out your own things anytime and anywhere, so as not to be too depressed, and when you are old, you will be irreproducible, and you must be nagging more than anyone else.
However, the literature around "me, me, me" throughout the article is to be scolded. Recently I came across two sentences in an English book that were very apt to scold writers who are overly interested in themselves: "They spend their whole lives staring at their navel and trying to find it, but there are other people who are also interested in it, and they are called to stare at them too." "I'm a little skeptical about whether this counts as a belly button exhibition, but I wrote it anyway.
01. Money
I don't know if the custom of "catching the week" is widespread in various places. When I was one year old, I routinely picked an object from a lacquer plate to determine my future aspirations. I'm taking the money—like a little gold pound. My aunt remembered that, and a maid insisted that I was holding a pen, and I don't know which one was more reliable. But anyway, it seems that I have been very fond of money since I was a child. My mother was very surprised to find this layer, and as soon as she came, she shook her head and said, "People of their generation ......" My mother is a noble person, although she never mentions money when she has money, even when she is forced to do it very badly, she still takes money very lightly. This spotless attitude disgusted me and provoked me to go to the other side. Therefore, as soon as I learned the term "money worship", I insisted that I was a money worshipper.
I like money, because I haven't suffered from money - although I have experienced some of it, it is really nothing compared to others who have really suffered - I don't know the disadvantages of money, only the benefits of money.
When I live at home, I don't have to worry about food and clothing, tuition, medical expenses, and entertainment expenses, but I never have money in my hands. Because we were afraid that our children would buy snacks to eat, our New Year's money was always put under the pillow and returned to our father after the New Year, and we never thought of resisting. Until I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I didn't go to the store alone to buy anything, I didn't have a habit, and I didn't have a desire.
When I came out of the movie, I stood on the curb like a child in a patrol house, waiting for the family driver to recognize me, (I couldn't find him because I couldn't remember the number of the family car) This is the only luxurious feeling I remember in my memory.
The first time I made money in my life was when I was in middle school, I drew a cartoon and submitted it to the English Evening News, and the newspaper gave me five yuan, and I immediately went to buy a small Danqi lipstick. My mother blamed me for not keeping the bill as a souvenir, but I wasn't as emotional as she was. For me, money is money, and I can buy all kinds of things I want.
There are things that I feel should be mine, because I enjoy them more than others, because they give me great joy. Sleepy thought about planning a piece of clothing, and when it was time to buy it, he had to think twice, and the process of thinking about it also had joy in pain. There's too much money to think about; There is no money at all, and there is no need to think about it. My restrained bitterness belongs to the petty bourgeoisie. Every time I see the words "Little Citizen", I think of myself crampedly, as if I was wearing such a red silk note on my chest.
I've been a self-reliant citizen for the past year. Regarding professional women, Su Qing said something like this: "I see for myself, everything in the room, even a nail, is also bought by myself." But what's the joy of that? This is a wise saying, and I have to revisit it a few times before I feel the desolation in it.
Then I heard a woman with her breasts puffed up, "I have supported myself since I was seventeen years old, and I have not used a man's money until I am Chinese New Year's Eve a year old." "It seems to be very proud, but it's also close to negative energy, right?
So far, I'm still enjoying the joy of self-sufficiency, maybe because it's still new to me. I can't forget how I asked my father for money to pay my piano teacher when I was a kid. I stood in front of the cigarette shop for a long, long time, and could not get an answer. Later, I left my father and lived with my mother. Asking my mother for money was a kind thing at first, because I had always loved my mother with a romantic love. She was a beautiful and sensitive woman, and I rarely had the opportunity to come into contact with her, but when I was four years old, she went abroad, and came back and left several times. In the eyes of children, she is distant and mysterious. On two occasions she led me out, and when she crossed the street, she occasionally held my hand, and felt a kind of rusty irritation. But later, in her predicament, I reached out and asked her for money for three days and two days, and I was tormented by her temper, by my own ingratitude, and by those trivial embarrassments, which ruined my love little by little.
To be able to love someone to the point of asking him for pocket money is a rigorous test.
It's hard, but I love my profession. In the past, literati relied on the ruling class to eat, but now the situation is slightly different, and I am glad that my parents are not "emperors" but the public who buy magazines. It's not a sycophant of the public - the public is really the cutest employer, not so capricious, "unpredictable", not on the shelf, sincere to others, for your little benefit will remember you for five years and ten years. And the masses are abstract. If you have to have a master, of course you would rather have an abstraction.
Although the money I made was not enough, I also stocked up on some goods. Last year, I heard a friend predict that Qiao Qi Velvet, which has been unmarketable in recent years, will soon be in fashion, because in today's Shanghai, women's fashion can't turn out any new tricks, and they are bound to look for inspiration from the memories of five years ago. So I saved a few hundred dollars to buy a piece of Qiaoqi velvet clothing. Hoarding until now, I saw a Qiao Qi Rong appear on the market, and sent it to the consignment store, but I hope that I can't sell it, so I can keep it myself.
It's just full of contradictions. Going to the street to buy groceries, probably with a romantic attitude of a fallen son? Recently, however, an old man selling vegetables weighed the vegetables into my net bag and put the stumbling blocks of the net bag in his mouth for a while. I was carrying the wet stumbling block, and I didn't feel anything out of the ordinary. I was very happy to find something different from before—it seemed like a little steady progress, and I couldn't say why.
02.I wear it
Zhang Hatshui's ideal can represent the ideal of ordinary people. He likes a woman to wear a blue cloth blouse, and the red silk cheongsam is slightly exposed under the blouse, innocent and honest, with a little temptation, I am not qualified to enter his novels, nor do I have this will.
Because my mother loved to make clothes, my father once muttered, "A man is not a clothes rack!" "One of my first memories is of my mother standing in front of the mirror with a jade brooch pinned to her green jacket, and I looked up at it with envy, and I couldn't wait to grow up. I said, "At the age of eight, I want to comb my hair, when I am ten I want to wear high heels, and at the age of sixteen I can eat zongzi gnocchi and eat everything that is difficult to digest." "The more anxious I become, the more I feel that the days are too long. The day by day of childhood, warm and slow, just like the sun basking on the pink velvet inside the old cotton shoes.
Sometimes I think that the days go by too quickly, and suddenly I have grown a lot taller, and the newly made foreign clothes, green brocade, have no upper body once, and I can no longer wear them. Later, when I thought of that dress, I was sad and thought it was a lifelong regret.
There was a time when I lived under my stepmother, and I picked up her leftover clothes to wear, and I could never forget a thin cotton robe of dark red, the color of ground beef, which I wore inexhaustibly, as if I had chilblains all over my body; Winter has passed, and there are still scars of chilblains—such hatred and shame. Most of them are because of self-shame, middle school life is unpleasant, and they rarely make friends.
After graduating from high school, I lived with my mother. My mother proposed a very fair solution: if you want to marry early, you don't have to study, and you can dress up with tuition fees; If you want to continue studying, you won't have any money to take care of your clothes. I went to university in Hong Kong, and later won two scholarships, which saved my mother a little money, and I thought I could be presumptuous, so I made some clothes as I wanted, and I still indulge in them.
The harmony of colors, the Chinese have learned from the West the two rules of "contrast" and "harmony" - in a superficial view, contrast is red and green, and harmony is green and green. As everyone knows, the conflict between the two different greens is very significant; The more the two greens are pushed and pulled a little bit, the more unsettling it is to watch. The red and green contrasts have a gratifying irritation. But the contrast is too straightforward, red and green, like a Christmas tree, and lacks aftertaste. The Chinese also used to pay attention to clear contrasts. There are two children's songs: "Red with green, not enough; Red with purple, a bubble of. In "Golden Vase Plum", the family's daughter-in-law Song Huilian wore a red jacket and borrowed a purple skirt to wear; Ximenqing looked unpleasant, opened the box and found a blue basket to make a skirt with her.
Modern Chinese often say that people in the past did not know how to match colors. The contrast of the ancients is not absolute, but uneven, for example: royal blue with apple green, pine color with bright red, green onion with pink. We have forgotten what we knew before.
The delicate and complex harmony of the past can only be found in Japanese clothing. So I like to go to Hongkou to buy things, but it's a pity that their clothes are rolled into a cylindrical shape like ancient paintings, and I can't visit them casually, so I have to let the shopkeepers slowly open them one by one. It's embarrassing to mess up an entire store and end up buying nothing.
The kimono is extremely complicated, and the wider patterns on the fabric are often buried, but the Chinese cheongsam with simple lines is made to give people a clearer impression.
Japanese flower cloth, one piece is a picture. I used to take it out several times before I gave it to the tailor: the leaves of the palm trees half-concealed the small temple in Burma, the rain was pouring down, in the reddish-brown tropics; In the pond in early summer, there is a layer of green film on the water, floating duckweed and purple and white lilacs with broken stems, as if it should be filled in the small order of "Mourning Jiangnan"; There is another piece, the theme is "Flowers in the Rain", on a white background, the big purple flowers of the shade, dripping with water.
I also remember what I saw but didn't buy. There was a dark olive green silk, with large black shadows swept over it, full of wind and thunder. There is also a silky Japanese material, pale lake color, shining with wood grain and water grain; Every other way, two plum blossoms the size of a tea bowl float on the water, painted with iron and silver hooks, like the multicolored glass window paintings in medieval chapels, and the red glass is embedded with heavy iron edges.
The most common on the market is a variety of colors that cannot be named, green is not green, gray is not gray, yellow is not yellow, can only be used as a background, that is a neutral color, also called a protective color, also called a civilized color, also called a mixed color. There are also secret and lovely colors in the mixed color, shining on the body like the sun in another universe. But I always felt that it was not enough, it was not enough, like Van Gogh's drawings of sunflowers under the scorching sun in the south of France, I always felt that the coloring was not strong enough, and I piled up a lot of colors, raised them high, and the oil painting became a relief.
For those who can't speak, clothes are a kind of speech, a kind of pocket drama to carry around. Isn't living in such a self-made theatrical atmosphere a "man in a suit"? (Chekhov's "man in the suit", always wearing a raincoat and an umbrella, strictly covering himself, even his watch has a watch bag, and everything has a cover.) ）
The dramatization of life is unhealthy. People like us, who grew up in urban culture, always see the picture of the sea first, and then see the sea; Read romance novels first, then know love; Our experience of life is often second-round, with the help of artificial drama, so it is difficult to draw a line between life and the dramatization of life.
One night, under the moon, I was walking in the hallway of my dorm room with a classmate, I was twelve years old and she was a few years older than me. She said, "I am very good with you, but I don't know what you are doing." Because of the moon, and because I was born to write novels, I solemnly whispered, "I am ...... Except for my mother, it's just you. "She was very touched at the time, and even I was touched by myself.
There was another thing that also disturbed me, and that was even earlier, when I was five years old, and my mother was not in China at that time. My father's aunt was an older prostitute named Lao Ba, with a pale melon seed face and long front bangs. She made me a fashionable snow velvet dress and said, "Look how well I treat you!" Your mother makes clothes for you, and she always uses the old ones to change them, so where is the whole velvet? Do you like me or your mother? I said, "I like you." "Because I didn't lie this time, I feel even more worried when I think about it.
03. Eat
When I was a child, I often dreamed of eating cloud cakes, and while eating, the thin cakes turned into paper, and in addition to astringency, I also felt an embarrassing melancholy.
I have always liked to eat the foam of milk, and when I drink milk, I try to swallow the small white beads on the side of the bowl first.
On "Dream of Red Mansions", Jia's mother asked Xue Baochai what drama he liked to listen to and what he liked to eat. Baochai knew that the elderly liked to watch lively dramas and love to eat sweet and rotten things, so they all chose what Jia's mother liked. I love sweet and rotten food just like the elderly. Everything crisp and refreshing, such as pickles, pickled radish, toad crisp, I don't like it, melon seeds can't be eaten, and more delicate dishes such as fish and shrimp can't be eaten at all, and it is the most peaceful "meat eater".
The so-called "beef village" in Shanghai is a lovely place, snow-white and clean, with a T-shaped "soup and meat ×× yuan, Philip ×× yuan" deep pink paper strip on the tile wall. On the roof, the spherical white lamp is covered with a black cloth cover for air defense, lined with a big red lining, which is very bright. The guys in white coats were all ruddy and fat, smiling, with one foot on the bench, standing and reading tabloids. Their eggplants are particularly large, their onions are particularly fragrant, and their pigs are particularly deserved. There was a collapsed car parked at the door, and two pigs were transported in, neatly and neatly, not yet peeled, with some blood stains on the tip of the mouth, and a line of belly and abdomen was opened, revealing a big red lining. I don't know why, but there is no unpleasant feeling when I see it, everything is no longer as it should be, no matter how legal, no matter how it fits. I'd love to find a job at the beef farm, sit in front of the computer and collect money. It is a spiritual sanatorium with fresh air. It's not okay to think too much about everything.
▲ Zhang Ailing's hand-drawn illustrations
04. Upper Adult
Sitting on the tram and looking up at the people standing in front of him, most of them are dignified and unconventional, but their nostrils are rarely clean. Hence the saying: "No one can be a hero in front of his subordinates." ”
05. Younger Brother
My brother was born beautiful, and I wasn't at all. Since I was a child, everyone in our family regretted it, because such a small mouth, big eyes and long eyelashes, born on the boy's face, it was simply a waste of nothing. The elders liked to ask him, "Would you like to lend me your eyelashes?" I'll pay you back tomorrow. However, he always refused. Once, when people talked about how beautiful someone's wife was, he asked, "Is it beautiful with me?" People used to make fun of his vanity.
He was jealous of my drawing, and tore it or painted two black bars when no one was around. I can imagine the oppression he felt psychologically. I'm a year older than him, I can talk better than him, I'm better than him, he can't eat what I can eat, he can't do what I can do.
When we play together, it's always me who comes up with ideas. We are two strong generals on the "Jinjiazhuang" who can fight habitually, my name is Yuehong, his name is Xinghong, I make a sword, he makes two copper hammers, and there are many virtual partners. It is always dusk at the time of the opening, and Aunt Jin is chopping vegetables in the public kitchen, and everyone is feasting on the war meal, taking advantage of the moonlight to climb over the hill to attack the barbarians. On the way, two tigers were occasionally killed, and tiger eggs were robbed, which were big brocade balls, cut like boiled eggs, but the yolk was round. My brother often disobeyed me and got into an argument. He was "neither commandable nor uncommanded", but he was so beautiful and lovely that I sometimes asked him to make up a story: a traveling man chased after a tiger, rushed, rushed, ran like a wind, whined and rushed...... Before he could finish, I was already laughing, kissing him on the cheek and treating him like a gadget.
After having a stepmother, I spent a lot of time living and studying, and I rarely went home, and I didn't know what kind of life my brother was living. Once on vacation, I was taken aback when I saw him. He became tall and thin, wore a blue cloth blouse that was not very clean, and rented many comic strips to see. I myself was reading Mu Shiying's "North and South Pole" and Ba Jin's "Perdition" at the time, and I thought that his appetite needed to be corrected, but he only shook it for a moment and disappeared. Everyone told me about his bad deeds, truancy, disobedience, and lack of ambition. I was angrier than anyone else, and I echoed the crowd so violently that they turned to me instead.
Later, at the dinner table, my father slapped him in the mouth for a trivial matter. I shook so hard that I covered my face with my rice bowl and tears streaming down my face. My stepmother laughed and said, "Hey, why are you crying?" It's not about you! You see, he didn't cry, you did! I dropped the bowl and rushed to the bathroom next door, latched the door, and sobbed silently. I stood in front of the mirror, looking at my own moving face, watching the tears gush down my face, like a close-up in a movie. I gritted my teeth and said, "I want revenge." One day I want revenge. ”
▲ Zhang Ailing and her younger brother
The glass window of the bathroom was facing the foreign platform, and with a bang, a leather ball jumped on the glass and bounced back. My brother plays football on the stage. He'd forgotten about that. He's used to this kind of thing. I didn't cry anymore, I just felt a cold sadness.