Wuxi Man
Most tourists who pass through the small town of Clinton, Ontario, drive to the west of Goderich. Goderich is located on the shores of Lake Huron, known as "the most beautiful town in Canada", with picturesque scenery and tourists. Few tourists are willing to explore the northeast to visit the seemingly ordinary farm towns. Half an hour's drive northeast from Clinton is the town of Wingham. It's hardly visited, quiet, laid-back, and as unremarkable as many North American towns. The town's zip code is N0G 2W0, and local residents have a classic joke that this zip code means "no one wants to go to Winham, Ontario" (think of 0 in the zip code as the letter O, which is the acronym of this sentence). But I was not passing by, but came to Wingham with the warmth of homecoming to look for the past on the Huron Plain. On July 10, 1931, a baby girl was born to the Laidlaw family in the small town of Winham, and because her mother's name was Anne, Mr. Laidlaw named her daughter Alice Anne Laidlaw. In this not-so-rich family, Dad raised foxes in the western suburbs of the town, skinned and sold to fur traders, Mom worked as a teacher in the town, Alice spent her childhood, childhood, and adolescence here, studying, playing, first love, and longing, until she was 18 years old and entered college.
Anyone who has read Alice's novel will be familiar with her small town of Huron. She tirelessly writes about small-town life, digging literary synapses into love, secrets, betrayals, and the essence of everyday life. She fictionalized a small town called Zoberley, with a clear pattern and a mixture of crowds, "with red-brick town hall towers, post office buildings and churches of several denominations, a main street, a residential area with many large houses, and a slum." If you have been to Wingham, you will find that the Burleys in the novel are the real Wingham, tightly sewn together, not a perfect fit.
In The Life of Girls and Women, Alice writes, "After school, Neiomi and I didn't want to go home, we watched movie commercials at the Lysin Theater and the bride in the photographer's window, and then went to the library, which was a room in the town hall." There was a rope next to the door, hanging from under the bell of the dome tower. "In reality, the Town Hall building is still in use, and I have seen the dome tower clock, but the Leyson Theater has closed down, people have gone to the building, the gate is dusty, and the empty sign is still there. She wrote that Uncle Bill had taken herself to buy food, "The Red Front Food Store has just been converted to a self-service, the first in town, with narrow aisles that can't push a shopping cart, but there are baskets to hang on your arm." "The Red Front Food Shop is now a pizzeria and is still open today... Love hate, laughter, tears, sorrow and joy, she got almost most of her life experience at Wingham.
Her home was on the edge of a swamp on the westernmost outskirts of town, where she watched her father kill foxes as a teenager, becoming a famous horror in her later works. It took half an hour to walk from home to school, and her mother lived in the town, while Alice often went to her grandmother's house in town after school. Grandma's house was sold in 1983, but it was completely preserved by its later owners. The homeowners and the couple are very enthusiastic about uninvited guests, talking about the Laidlaw family's past affairs, and seem to be very proud of the town's business card, not at all like the neighbors of decades ago.
In those distant years, Alice Monroe was an unpopular presence here, even ostracized and hated and threatened.
Alice was born in the town's hospital, where she attended elementary and secondary school, where the local radio station is now located. Like many small-town girls, perhaps ordinary people spend their ordinary lives in this closed town unhurriedly, getting married and having children, living and dying. But unlike this, Alice completed her literary initiation in the town's town hall library and eventually embarked on this "warm and mixed journey."
Even today, Wingham is still closed, with no trains, no public buses, and only by car. Decades ago, the folk customs here were more conservative, and the peasants, hawkers, tramps, prostitutes, etc. at the bottom competed with each other in the town, and what they saw and felt accumulated Alice's "small town survival experience". Fortunately, she read a large number of works by Southern American writers in the library, in addition to Faulkner, but more importantly, some female writers. She saw the vast world beyond the town in her literary works, and the idea of "escaping" was born both mentally and physically, which eventually became the theme of her repeated arrivals throughout her life. It wasn't until college that she began to experiment with writing, sketching the small town of Winham in Zizi, writing about the joys and sorrows that were within reach or passed down by word of mouth. The young girl who read and dreamed in the small town library would never have imagined that in a few years the library would be renamed after her name.
Writing quickly got into trouble. Small-town chickens and dogs smell each other, neighbors are familiar, and parents can naturally idle, but they are written into novels and published, which is a taboo. One true story is that Alice wrote about a baby burned to death in boiling water in the novel The Hour of Death, and in 1939 there was an exactly the same accident in the town. After reading Alice's detailed description, the family of the infant who died carried a gun and ran to Alice's house to find her father, "Let your daughter stop writing the story of Winham!" Alice's relationship with the townspeople became awkward and complicated. Years later, when she received the highest honor in literature, a young girl from Winham ran home to tell her elderly mother the good news, and the mother replied dismissively: "Alice Monroe should be ashamed of herself, she is not writing a novel, because I know everyone in it; but it is not a documentary report, because everyone in it is worse than in reality." ”
Another interesting thing is that a group of literature lovers in Wingham admired Alice's work, and after several deliberations, decided to hold a tea party and invite Alice to tea and talk about literature. Alice came as promised, but the originally enthusiastic readers were restrained and silent, and after questioning, it turned out that everyone was afraid of saying too much and Alice wrote into her novel, becoming a "bad person" that the whole world could know.
Throughout the ages, many writers have become undesirable in their hometowns. Those writings that face the human heart seem to be the sculptures of dark humanity, and finally exposed to the sun. Alice is no exception. In the fall of 2013, the town girl finally became a world literary hero who left a name in history, and the town of Winham was deeply honored and built a small "Alice Monroe Literary Garden" next to the post and telecommunications office and opposite the city hall. The square bricks of the garden path are engraved with the names of her works over the years. Alice and Winham complete each other, so that more people know and understand the Siren Sidi, so that more people and the Winham people's feelings and hearts communicate and cherish each other, like a code chain, like their own life precipitation. As the years passed, Wingham did not change much, but the owner of the bronze statue in the garden, the girl who concentrated on reading on the grass of her hometown, fled her hometown forever.