The "New Wave" column of People's Literature has a history of more than 20 years since its inception and has now become one of the magazine's brands. The authors of this column are all publishing their works in People's Literature for the first time. This year, a national conference on the creation of young writers will be held, and China Writers Network and People's Literature Magazine will jointly launch a special topic on the observation of "New Wave" writers. In view of the large number of outstanding authors in the column, after careful consideration, taking into account factors such as region, ethnicity, and genre, we selected 12 young writers in the first issue: Zhu Jing, Jiang Ting, Li Chao, Qiang Renliu, Li Lu, Sha Mao Zhihua, Yang Zhihan, Kang Yan, Sansan, Jiang Zai, Du Li, Jiao Dian. Writers' interviews and related videos will be launched on the website of China Writers Network, various new media platforms, and various media platforms of People's Literature magazine, so stay tuned.
Kang Yan: I want to write about the big historical bones
Those "joints" that extend and flex
Interview | Liu Jiafang, editor of China Writers Network
Kang Yan
Graduated from the Department of Chinese Chinese Language and Literature of Fudan University. Reportage works have appeared in "People's Literature", "Beijing Literature", etc., and essays and reviews have appeared in "People's Daily", "People's Daily · Overseas Edition", "Guangming Daily", "Liberation Daily", "Wen Wei Po", etc. He has won the People's Literature Award and the Liu Xian's Prose Award. The long-form reportage "They Let the Truth Travel Through Time and Space" was selected as the key work support project of the Chinese Writers Association in 2023 and the major literary creation and publishing project of Jiangxi Publishing Group's "Atmosphere of the Times, Chinese Spirit". He is currently working in the editor-in-chief office of People's Daily.
I don't know much about reportage, and I even have some preconceived "preconceptions". It wasn't until I read Kang Yan's "Li Dazhao the Lamplighter" that I felt that the history of reportage writing can be so vivid, without material piling up, nor mechanical transportation, but with the backbone of history as the base, embellished with literary brocade flowers. After reading the book, it was as if I had experienced a spiritual tsunami, with blood bubbling in the cracks of the bones, and my heart was stirring and hearty. Immediately I opened Kang Yan's information, it was a young face of the "post-90s", with a trace of perseverance in his eyes, I believe that what he "saw" with this firm eye will never disappear, like a blazing torch, illuminating more historical folds.
Liu Jiafang: Hello Kang Yan. I read your "Li Dazhao the Lamplighter" and I feel that this is a thick and passionate work. Can you tell us about your work on this reportage?
Kang Yan: Li Dazhao the Lamplighter was written two years ago and was my first work published in a formal literary journal. I have a writing project, through five character stories, to connect the process of the introduction, translation, and dissemination of Marxist classics in China, which is closely related to the history of our party. In the past two years, I have also written two novellas, "Qu Qiubai the Pathfinder" and "Guo Dali the Flame Sower", which were published in "Beijing Literature" and "People's Literature" respectively. There are also two stories about the translation of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels by two 90-year-old translators. This plan is supported by the key works support project of the China Writers Association and the major literary creation and publishing project of Jiangxi Publishing Group's "Atmosphere of the Times, Chinese Spirit".
Compared with other writers of the same age, my writing started late, and the genre and subject matter were relatively concentrated, but I was not in a hurry at all. Creation still has to be patient, a good work must be like a pot of beautiful porridge, a grain of rice, a drop of water stirred together, the cover is tight, the simmer is slow, the moment the lid is lifted, the nose is full of fragrance.
Liu Jiafang: There is a sentence at the end of the article "Li Dazhao the Lamplighter": "Time is passing, and the light and heat of the lamplighter are always there". This sentence has an extraordinary artistic conception in the present. Is this the so-called "historical mood"? Was that what inspired you to create this series of reportage?
Kang Yan: "The mood of history" comes from the award speech given to me by the jury of the "People's Literature Award". I have always felt that only by guarding two "granaries" can writers "have food in their hands and not panic in their hearts", one is "history" and the other is "life". Needless to say, "life" is another mineral deposit in addition to life, waiting for the writer to open his eyes to explore and explore. To put it bluntly, "history" is the "life" of the past! The richness of the stories, the typicality of the characters, the twists and turns of the process, and the breadth of depth are no less than "life"; As a creative material, the texture and elasticity of "history" are not weaker than "life" at all. Take the "party history" and "revolutionary history" that I focus on, for example, Li Dazhao, we usually have the impression that he is the founder of the party, and finally was secretly strangled by the reactionary warlords and dedicated himself to the revolution, and he is a very great and tragic image of a "revolutionary" and "lamplighter". Li Dazhao's hometown is in Daheituo Village, Leting County, Hebei Province, and his grandfather is a very prestigious squire. Once, his father took him to his grandfather's tombstone, on which was engraved a line of words: "From Jiupin Li Ruzhen", "From Jiupin" is the last in the entire bureaucratic system of the late Qing Dynasty, which is really a strong sense of picture. In fact, the young Li Dazhao, like today's children, is also burdened with heavy expectations. Just like some parents today, it is a truth that you must let your children go to prestigious schools.
Qu Qiubai
Another example is Qu Qiubai, the early leader of our party. He lived in his cousin Zhou Junliang's house for a while as a teenager. At that time, Qu Qiubai was a typical "i" person, and he didn't talk much to all his cousins and sisters, but he opened his heart to Zhou Junliang and talked about everything, and Qu Qiubai even took the initiative to ask to see Zhou's diary. Later, Zhou has been advocating for the Kuomintang, settled in Taipei in his later years, lived alone, lived to be 96 years old, and wrote articles in his later years to recall his association with Qu Qiubai and the process of breaking up, attacking Qu Qiubai's revolutionary behavior. I often wonder if Zhou Yiliang will think of those nights when he talked with Qu Qiubai when the oil of his life was exhausted? The great era, the great revolution is raging, the small family, the little brotherhood and hatred are intertwined, and there is an extremely heart-shaking ethics here. In fact, the history of the past and the life of the present are closely intertwined in time and space, and who can say that the "mood of history" is not the "mood of the contemporary"?
Liu Jiafang: There is no lack of historical materials in your works, but these materials are not boring in the articles, and many literary "details" are very immersive under careful reading. How do you perfectly integrate historical truth and literature in your creation?
Kang Yan: "Perfect" is really too famous, I can only say that I am like a tailor, based on the backbone plot of history, cutting raw materials into clothes, and then embroidering literary brocade onto clothes. What is really involved here is the question of creative method. I'm a beginner when it comes to reportage, but I always feel that reportage has a tendency to be "stigmatized" in today's literary world, and people seem to think that reportage writing is just a pile of materials, mechanical handling, and no need for writers to think about it. In fact, this is a big misunderstanding of reportage. Flipping through the classic works in the history of reportage, such as Qu Qiubai's "History of the Heart of the Red Capital", "Chronicles of the Hungry Country", and Xia Yan's "The Body Worker", the truthfulness, sincerity, sincerity and ingenuity of literature are not weaker than classic novels and essays. After writing a few articles, I realized that reportage is actually a comprehensive and inclusive genre, and the creator's "skill set" is actually very rich. You can not only narrate the plot and describe the characters like writing a novel, but also outline the scene and express your feelings like writing prose, and you can also directly quote historical materials, such as the original historical documents, character manuscripts and letters, etc., to restore the historical scene. You can even jump out of the text to comment a few sentences and make some comments, which is not contrary to the harmony. The key is how the creators sew these "patches" together, sew them finely, solidly, and without traces. This brings us to the method of structuring the text, which is another topic.
As for the "details", I would like to take the reportage "Guo Dali, the Sower of Fire", which was published on the front page of the 11th issue of People's Literature last year, as an example. This work is the story of Guo Dali, the translator of the first full Chinese translation of Capital. During the "May Fourth" period, he was a progressive revolutionary youth, and later cooperated with the former president of Xiamen University to translate Das Kapital, and after the founding of the People's Republic of China, he served as a teacher at the Central Party School for a long time, teaching political economy. Writing this work, I made it clear to myself that I could not only write about Guo Dali's translation of Das Kapital, but also why he wanted to translate this "Book from Heaven", and that in the era of Kuomintang rule, translating "forbidden books" would have to risk his life. This involves Guo Dali's personality, family environment, growth process, and so on. Here, Guo Dali cannot be regarded as a translator, but at the same time, it is necessary to restore his "natural attributes" as much as possible while taking into account his social attributes, and regard him as a living "Guo Dali". He worked as a translator and a revolutionary, and he always put himself in the torn between "family" and "career". I arranged a detail of his return to his hometown to visit his mother's grave after many years in Shanghai:
Guo Dali asked a pair of children to kneel down to the grandmother in the tomb, and the younger brother shouted in a crisp voice: "Do you have to kneel?" The wife put her arm on her son's shoulders and said, "Daddy, let me kneel, be obedient!" The warm wind blew through the messy grass and trees, Guo Dali took out a foreign fire, lit two yellow table papers, and soon, the paper turned into a wisp of green smoke, swirling in front of the grave, and finally fell a cloud of white ash. It's overgrown and inaccessible, with only a few sparse ruts and footprints. At this moment, the world is so quiet, and across the tombstone, Guo Dali seems to still hear the muttering and whispering of his childhood mother. It was a silent dusk, and my mother was under the oil lamp to collect a thousand layers for herself. She drew the needle and thread from the basket and wound them finely, holding the hard sole of the shoe with one hand, piercing the sole with an awl with the other, and then threading the thread tightly into the hole of the awl. The crackling sound of the lamp twisting and burning, and the swishing sound of his mother's fingertips walking the wires, resonated together, and Guo Dali loved to listen to it very much. He closed his eyes slightly, trying his best to search for the familiar sounds in his memory, when suddenly, several frightened wild birds leapt into the air and flew into the distance.
The details of this scenario are my imagination, is it dispensable? It seems that it is, because it has nothing to do with translating the grand purpose of Capital. But almost every Chinese has had the experience of paying tribute to their ancestors, and Guo Dali, like every ordinary person, also deeply misses his loved ones, and also faces the eternal "great questions" of the passage of time and the death of relatives.
Liu Jiafang: You are a young person born in the 90s, do you think that writing about revolutionary history can be closer to some young readers?
Kang Yan: Let's start with a short story. In the early summer of last year, when I went to Zhejiang to attend an event organized by the China Writers Association, I met a young editor of a journal who had also come to participate in the event, and we chatted. He asked me what I was writing about, and I said I was mainly writing reportage. I distinctly remember a look of surprise on his face, and after a pause of a few seconds, he said, "You're the youngest reportage I've ever seen." This is a very "black humor" clip. This editor is a literary person, and he has met so many writers, why would he ask such questions? Why can't young people use literature to report to readers? What do our readers expect young people to write?
On the issue of attracting young readers, I would like to illustrate with the mainstream art of storytelling, TV drama. In my spare time, I love to watch TV dramas, domestic dramas, British dramas, American dramas, Japanese dramas, Korean dramas...... Watch any drama. To tell the truth, whether it is the level of storytelling or the production process, there is still a certain distance between domestic dramas and British and American dramas, even Korean dramas. For example, the British drama "Downton Abbey" and "The Crown", one about the modern aristocracy of United Kingdom, the other about the modern and contemporary history of United Kingdom with the history of the royal family, a proper "revolutionary historical theme" and "main theme works", why are so many young people chasing? Or is it because it provides a good-looking story, vivid characters, and real details. I read "Downton Abbey" to know that the newspaper read by the United Kingdom aristocracy every morning in the old era had to be scalded by the butler with an iron; At home, the distance between tables, chairs, cups and plates should also be measured with a ruler. These details seem to be "pedantic", but they are exquisite again and again, creating a real sense of atmosphere in the script, and human nature still likes real things. The reader's eyes are bright, and the text is something in black and white, you can't fool it.
When it comes to "attracting" young people, it doesn't have to be deliberate. Reading is a rigid need, and the desire to read good works with texture and harvest has nothing to do with age. Of course, it is difficult for us to expect to reproduce the "golden age" of literary reading in the 80s of the last century, but China has a huge reading base, and even the most niche and lonely topics have a specific reading group, which is very reassuring for writers. If you have to link it with young people, I want to use the domestic drama "Awakening Age" to illustrate. It can be said that my decision to write this Red Translator series has a lot to do with the inspiration of "The Age of Awakening". The show was a success, young people liked it, why? Well-made is one thing, but it is still not preachy at all, and the heart and hard work to write people, real people, real people's feelings, the theme of "revolution" is tightly wrapped in "family", "friendship" and "love", patriotic salvation, national righteousness will not appear false and empty.
Stills from "The Age of Awakening".
Liu Jiafang: The characters you portrayed in the revolutionary era are always full of "fighting spirit". This spirit seems to be a challenge to the increasingly "mediocre" literary writing at present. Will you always maintain this "fighting spirit"? How can this spirit be controlled from turning into vulgar anger?
Kang Yan: As I understand it, the "fighting spirit" you mentioned seems to be a kind of rejection and confrontation of the current trend of popular literature, and I don't have this attitude, let alone anger. Reading should be inclusive, hierarchical and focused, I never expect everyone to hold "Li Dazhao the Lamplighter" and "Guo Dali the Flame Sower" to read, this picture is too terrible. I grew up in the south, and before I came to Beijing to work, I didn't know that the mutton in the north was so delicious. Once a good friend came to Beijing, and I took him to a restaurant that I thought was delicious to eat mutton, but he just couldn't stand the taste. Later, I thought that some people can't accept mutton, and they may not like to eat it for the rest of their lives, and they won't eat it no matter how much you blow it. The same goes for reading. When I'm on the subway, I like to secretly observe what everyone is reading. I found that most of the people I read on my mobile phone are some "light novels", mainly online articles, upgraded to fight monsters, urban beauties; Most of the people who hold paper books are slightly serious in content, which is a normal reading ecology. You let people not wake up on the way to work, and when they come home from work, they are half tired to death, and they are still holding "Capital" and gnawing on it, is it realistic? But I insist that even if most reading in society is lightweight and entertaining, you can't stop me from writing what I want to write. I appreciate the views of Mr. Liang Heng, a senior journalist: write about big things, big feelings, and big things. In the reading category in society, in addition to Xianxia fantasy, opening coffins and robbing tombs, suspense and solving cases, mother-in-law and daughter-in-law conflicts, and husband and wife quarrels, there must also be some works related to big history, majestic righteousness and Huang Zhong Dalu. But the problem is that when writing this kind of work, you must not illustrate the times and pile up materials, because no normal reader can read such a text. To write about the stretching and flexion "joints" of the big historical skeleton is a test of the writer's ability to grasp the subject matter, structure the text, and control the language, which is also the direction of my efforts.
Liu Jiafang: Will you always be engaged in the creation of reportage? Will you write some fictional works in the future?
Kang Yan: Reportage is my "first love"! Of course, writing reportage may also be related to my profession. I work in a news unit, and after a long time, I will establish a basic understanding of non-fiction. I also have a large number of outstanding seniors who are engaged in reportage writing, and their works are like torches, igniting my enthusiasm for writing every word.
On fiction, another story will be inserted. Two years ago, when I received the People's Literature Award in Luzhou, Sichuan, the young novelist Li Lu, who won the Newcomer Award with me, asked me a question at the dinner table: "Why don't you write novels?" "yes, that's what I asked myself. I have always felt that writing requires impulse, and this "impulse" does not manage thinking and logical reasoning, but directly releases the result. In other words, what a person can write well is really what he wants to write. If one day an "impulse" comes to me and says it's time for you to write a novel, I think I'll just turn on my computer, create a folder, and write it down word by word.
Liu Jiafang: Can you share your reading experience?
Kang Yan: I'm an "omnivore" about reading, and I've summed up a 16-character motto: no taboos, no majestic. Meat and vegetarian matching, put an end to fast food. After work, I have to read a lot of work-related content, and I can't read as freely as I did when I was in school, and time doesn't allow it. But no matter how much things happen, literary reading can never be abandoned. Recently, I was re-reading "White Deer Plain", commuting, and before going to bed, I made up all the links that I swallowed when I went to school. Chen Zhongzhong writes so well, what kind of strong pen power and abundant language is that, Chen Lao has sharpened a sword for five years, and held out a big book of life, writing is probably one of the most honest things in the world.
/ Liu Jiafang/
Editor of China Writers Network. He has published many novels and essays in "Beijing Chronicle", "Beijing Literature", "China Coal News", "Sunshine" and other publications. He loves literature and art. He often has a big brain, and is good at capturing the seeds of literature in life with a delicate eye.
Typesetting: Xiao Yao Editor: Liu Ya, Deng Jiezhi Second Instance: Zhang Junping Third Instance: Wang Yang