"Big Time"
Li Jingze once said: "In the 80s, many people claimed, and the 90s seemed to have become an era of unclaim. Unclaimed is partly because the 90s are far from over. "Massive infrastructure, a strong desire to connect with the international community, the unprecedented prosperity of popular culture, and the violent shocks of social classes, like the bones of savage growth in adolescence, will inevitably have growing pains in the dead of night." Therefore, the narrative of the 1990s constructed from the 80s, who was in the midst of adolescence at that time, is not suspicious.
Digital images, teacher-student love, water pollution and blood diseases, mentors squeezing students, "honest people", stock market downturn, doctor-patient contradictions, these abrasions and pains in the rapid development of the past, at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, it seems that the times deliberately wrote a long volume of metaphors for twenty or thirty years, and finally see the poor dagger today.
For children who "play alone in the early winter dusk", perhaps the roar of the times is just the background sound of loading and unloading steel bars. Those who witnessed it were all ignorant and understood, until they looked back and realized that they had been born in a "big era". When we look back today in the 1990s, we do not want to gain some kind of enlightenment-like hindsight, but to reconstruct our own experiences and memories like the psychological reconstruction of ordinary people after the earthquake in "Dong Ni" reported by Jiang Wei, like "every writer created his own pioneer", and trying to trace where everything that is happening came from.
As the world prepares for 2020, we dive into the memories of the 1990s in "Carp I Went to 2000", which is also a collective examination of the post-80s writers' fading youth, trying to trace together how the experience of that time affected their present self.
The Piano of Steel
Dictation | Diane
Interview | box
In the 1990s, my peers and fathers,
I still believe that struggle can change some destiny
Regarding Taiyuan, I have always had a stubborn impression that Taiyuan in my childhood was a place where people were very rare, of course, this impression must be wrong. But I have a picture in my mind, there are very few people, surrounded by gray, only seven or eight years old, playing alone in the early winter afternoon, only myself, occasionally there are one or two passers-by who have nothing to do with me, in the dim light, there seems to be a sound of loading and unloading steel bars, it is a background sound, it is a very deep-rooted picture of childhood.
Although I know that this picture is unlikely to be true, because we probably didn't have a lot of construction there in the 1990s, and the big construction happened after 2000, when the price of coal rose. But it wasn't until 2017 that I got to Detroit. Detroit's suburbans are sparsely populated, and at dusk, this bankrupt and reviving industrial city has a feeling of desolation... At that time, I was very excited: yes, yes, my childhood was like this! That's it! It's an important memory for me.
In fact, after I grew up, I felt that Taiyuan was good. We are not big there, an industrial city, in fact, in the last five years has changed a lot, built a lot of roads, and has retained a lot of the pattern of my childhood memories before. I haven't been back for many years, I don't know much about the current situation, and I have the impression that our Taiyuan is quite peaceful overall, not a place with a lot of anger. I didn't know it was precious when I was a kid.
At the end of the day, I think the spirit of the city is first and foremost an individual spirit, and the effort of each individual is to achieve a life that is not disturbed. This process may be slow at home, but it is actually taking place. As for the problem of the loneliness that comes with it, I think it's much easier than solving the problem of a bunch of people watching how you live.
A lot of the education we received as children tells us that children who study hard can only leave home and go outside to see the world when they grow up. I don't know if this is the case anywhere else, anyway, at that time, from elementary school to high school, the teachers said to us: "Want to live in a better place?" Then listen carefully to the lessons! This was the norm in my teenage years. The so-called "better place" is the big city, the more prosperous and more developed place.
And when I was very young, my dad instilled in me the idea that I had to go abroad and see, the world is big.
Probably because he happened to be in the 1980s, he had the opportunity to see the United States and the Soviet Union, and I think dad was actually a young man at that time, and he had seen a very different world, and it was also a shock to him. He really had a big impact on me on this, and he firmly believed that one has to struggle. Why do you say I have an American dream dad? He did not mean to be a superior person, but to believe that struggle can get rid of his original situation.
I think this must be brought about by reform and opening up, and my father really changed his situation because of reform and opening up. Like my mother, in the 1970s, she worked in the factory for many years, and after resuming the college entrance examination, she went to college, began to write, and then stayed in school, which really changed a lot of things. So my mom actually believes in this.
I think this was a particularly important foundation in the 1990s, when people seemed to believe that struggle could change our situation to a greater or lesser extent, or that through hard work we could have a better life, and that tomorrow would get better and better. This is a deep memory for me in the 1990s.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, there was a round of layoffs. Taiyuan may not be the same as the northeast, and it is not a particularly serious place. The impact of this incident on me and my classmates was not very big, because the largest industrial area in Taiyuan was the steel factory, and they were a small society of their own. Most of the neighborhoods where I grew up were children from hospitals, post and telecommunications offices, and coal control bureaus, and most of the classmates in the elementary school I attended were also from these places.
When the layoffs began, I was about fourteen or fifteen years old, and I didn't quite understand what was going on. I listened to adults talking and said that was unemployment. For example, many of these things, three generations of a family work in a factory, and then the factory suddenly goes bankrupt, which sounds terrible. I was thinking, what then?
But at that time, I still had a very naïve idea, that is, the children in such a family, gritted their teeth and went to college, and then the situation would slowly improve. In the 1990s, I and many of my peers around me still believed that struggle could change some destiny. However, I did not think about how difficult it was for a child who had lost his life to study well.
"The Blizzard Is Coming"
When my father talked about this, he did not forget to say to me: "You see, these children of laid-off workers have no choice but to study hard, if you don't work hard, you should go to work for others when you grow up, people will live better than you, grow up to be your boss, who calls you to only enjoy yourself from childhood." ”
Nightmarish, I really believed at the time that I might be a very unproductive person when I grew up, because I didn't know how to work hard, and I was too spoiled at home. In fact, to this day I also believe that if I had a poor or bad life one day, I would definitely not work hard, of course, this sentence is only true for myself.
It seems that most of today's young people no longer believe in the meaning of struggle. This is how I feel when I talk to readers over the years, and many children are only teenagers and already think that their lives will be what they will be like in the future. Maybe because the house has become too expensive, it makes people feel embarrassed when facing reality. In the 1990s, I had no idea that the house was to be bought, and the utopian girl was so disgusting.
It was the first time I watched a play in my childhood and didn't hate bad people.
It has shaken a child's view of good and evil
Except for layoffs, events like the flood and the Three Gorges, I don't have any impression, I think those are all news.
One thing I have remembered, in 2001, after the college entrance examination, my girlfriend and I did not do well in the exam, the two people were comparing themselves to each other, and then the TV news said that Beijing's bid for the Olympic Games was successful. At that time, I was really happy, and I remember my girlfriend saying that no matter what, there was finally a happy thing.
Although we ourselves are still so mournful, that kind of happiness is a very simple feeling. Because I know that in the world pattern at that time, China was not developed enough at that time, and the people from China were basically equivalent to the countrymen, and when they saw the success of the Olympic bid, they felt as if they were slowly and slowly, and our country was also going to enter the city, which was a good thing.
The handover of Hong Kong would have been a joyous thing, but we were about to take our final exams, and I wasn't very happy. I was in my second year of junior high school, physics was a mess, I could never count whether there were a few lines on the pulley or the moving pulley, and that despair overwhelmed everything. But I should be quite influenced by Hong Kong film and television and music. The first thing that comes to mind are two Hong Kong dramas, "Big Time" and "I Have a Date with Spring", which were the dramas that I was particularly fascinated by in the years from elementary school to junior high school, and I still feel that there are no longer such good TV dramas.
The two male protagonists of "Big Time" are Liu Qingyun and Zheng Shaoqiu, and the director is Wei Jiahui, and perhaps young people do not quite understand the significance of this cass. It's really good-looking, I've seen other Hong Kong dramas before, but "Big Time" is always the first place in my heart. It is a story of stock speculation, and the male protagonist finally concludes that the only way to defeat a person who has always had particularly good luck is to have better luck than him. That's cool, right? There's a line in it that I still remember, he said, the world is cruel, you are good to one person, sometimes it is bad for another person.
Stills from Big Time
I remember when it was winter or summer vacation, our classmates watched it, and everyone would discuss it when school started. At that time, a few of our children seriously discussed one thing, whether the good man played by Liu Qingyun had become bad in the end. Some people think there is, some people think there is not, which stimulates a deep discussion among children. I thought there was, and now I don't, he just wasn't so simple.
It was the first time in my childhood that when I watched a play, I didn't hate the bad guys in it, and it shook a child's view of good and evil. At that time, I felt that the good people here seemed to have problems, and the bad people were of course bad, but if those good people could take a step back and think about it, it seemed that things would not be really bad enough to be irreparable. When I grow up, the bad guy played by Zheng Shaoqiu is actually not much evil, but a fool.
Then there was "I Have a Date with Spring", which I watched in junior high school and told the friendship between girls beautifully. In my eyes, the friendship between girls is like that, not a palace fight house fight to rob men, at that time I thought these girls were fantastic, a lifelong friend, singing and playing mahjong at work, how happy! As for love, I don't remember much.
"I have a date with Spring"
I have watched "I Love My Home", and I also like it, and I can vaguely feel that hong Kong and mainland dramas are two systems, and I don't feel good or bad, mainly because I think the accent is very different. I started to like watching movies after 2000, and I was not very impressed. I've been to the video hall too, but it's not like there are good memories there, it's all made up in the novel.
"I Love My Home"
Singer's words, like Zhang Guorong, "Overlord Farewell" also likes. Then Zhang Huimei and Xu Meijing, even if I seriously chased the singers, at that time, chasing stars was to buy tapes. Now that I think about it, the reason for liking it is very simple, I think Zhang Huimei's songs at that time can express me, like "Listen to the Sea", "Dreamer in the Air", and the song "Listen to You Listen to Me" for Zhang Yusheng, as well as "BadBoy". At that time, I really didn't listen to the works of mainland singers, although I wrote about them in novels, but I personally did not particularly like Faye Wong.
In 1995, I heard adults chatting that Zhang Ailing was dead.
Thus opened her first book
Overall, there are still many good memories of the middle school era, except for math and physics, other classes are fine. The most impressive thing should be high school, spent two beautiful years in the liberal arts class that no one cares about. Our school is responsible for improving the promotion rate of science classes, and our liberal arts class is the kind of person who has nothing to do anyway, and lives a happy life under the disguised laissez-faire of the school.
I don't like to read books casually when I listen to lectures, and I read a lot of japanese cartoons at that time. I don't know why, I just think that world is beautiful. To this day, I feel this way, after watching a big animated movie, I feel that the human beings with their eyes are so ugly.
At that time, the manga I watched was mainly girl manga, and the first book that entered the pit was Saito Chiho's "Ballet Doll", which was rented in the shop where the manga was rented at the entrance of the school, and it would not be circulated, it was all privately hidden, and could not be seen by the teacher. Later, I also watched things like "Tokyo Babylon", "Absolute Love 1989", "X-Men", "Reiko Shimizu", "Evangelion"...
I witnessed the golden age of Japanese manga in the 1990s, and later learned that the manga artists I liked were also not small. When I was in college, listening to the young people talk about David Lynch, I went to see "Mulholland Road", to be honest, I think there is nothing new, I have seen similar expressions in Otomo Katsuyo.
EVA (Evangelion) should have been involved in constructing my worldview, and it has the same role as a cornerstone. I feel like later I became a formally baptized Christian, and maybe the seeds were planted by EVA. It's not that you're directly aware of the existence of God, or at least start trying to assume a world where God exists. In fact, in the twenty-six episodes of the cartoon, one thing has not been said: Who sent the apostles? It may have been later considered that the parties had their own opinions, but the work really did not say that the apostle was a being that would always have to be faced, and did not explain where it came from.
Evangelion
I remember that when I was sixteen years old, I knew when I looked at it that the apostles were sent by God, and then I suddenly became enlightened and felt that I understood a lot of things at once. During the Antarctic expedition, humans took Adam, causing a second shock.
For some reason, I seemed to suddenly understand that it was a kind of god for man, and I couldn't say punishment, but it was some kind of price. Overly curious, he probed without permission, took Adam away, and tried to gain insight into God's affairs. Human completion plans, how beautiful the setting, is really rare in literary and artistic works.
EVA talked about a lot of difficult attempts to complete, but did not know how the ending would be, nor did it know whether people could be completed and redeemed. The old version I watched was open-ended, and Shinji said, Maybe I can try to like myself, and everyone suddenly applauded collectively and said "congratulations." Perhaps it set an aesthetic tone for me, and the boys and girls who discuss the ultimate proposition in the atmosphere of the end times are the most beautiful beings. It's just that I also lived to the age of Miri Katsuragi, but I didn't bless Mr. Katsuragi.
Then another influence is that if you want to become a creator, first see how far the work of the great god has reached. Look at the Japanese manga of the 1990s, and then look at the present, Makoto Shinkai can be a master, I have no opinion on Makoto Shinkai himself but...
Another thing I believe in particular is that if the novel dies one day, games will carry the human demand for literature. I believe that the game is a carrier for expressing literature, and will eventually be an important medium for literature, because the game is actually freer than the movie, the essence of the story is metaphor, I think metaphor is the source of literature, the game is capable of carrying the metaphor function, is not the story is not so important...
I'm not actually a gamer, but I've been invited to a worldview planning meeting with a game, which I think is much more interesting than a movie planner.
I now find that when I was a teenager, my reading taste was actually not low. The writers I liked at that time, Zhang Ailing, Lu Xun, Faulkner, Haruki Murakami, Kenzaburo Oe, Yukio Mishima, Sartre, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, as well as Nabokov, Bai Xianyong... They were all loved before they were in their twenties. It seems that there are no writers who liked at that time and do not like them now.
I saw Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto in 1998, and it was a beautiful freedom. At that time, when I saw Haruki Murakami, I didn't hear anyone's introduction, that is, I saw a copy of "Strange Bird Journey" in the bookstore, and I thought I had never seen such a novel, so I bought it; Banana Yoshimoto's "Kitchen" was also like this, I didn't hear anyone's recommendation, I thought that there were people who wrote novels like this; I also bought "They Look at the Heavens", and when I was a freshman in high school, I still felt that this black female writer was seriously underestimated in China.
I was twelve years old to see Zhang Ailing, when she died not long ago, in 1995, I heard adults chatting that Zhang Ailing died, I asked everyone who she was, so I opened her first book, the first book I read was "The First Burning Incense", I was actually a child at the time, in fact, I could not understand her, it seemed to understand, but somehow, there was something in that story that attracted me to read it repeatedly.
Later, when I was about sixteen years old, I looked at her again and understood how powerful she was, and at that time I thought that "The Golden Lock" was written so well, and it could express the complexity of a person in this way. When I watched "Love in the Fallen City" as a girl, I felt that it was a story about a pair of men and women who were brought together by war. But after the age of thirty, one day I went to see "Love in the Fallen City" and knew that it was love. Between The White Fringe and Fan Liuyuan, there is love. When they first met, when Tassel went to Hong Kong, it was already love. They each had fears, but Fan Liuyuan would still call at night and ask her if she could see the moon in the window. I really need to grow up to understand, but Zhang Ailing was not yet twenty-five years old when she wrote this, so this is genius.
TV series version of "Love in the City"
The popular Chinese writers at that time, I have seen Yu Hua and Shi Tiesheng. I like Yu Hua's "A Kind of Reality" because, in fact, that novel is quite two-dimensional, that is, it may not be so logical to reality, but it is true in that text.
Uncle Tetsuson was friends with his father, and the first one I read about him was "My Distant Qingping Bay." But I didn't have any concept of "literary circles", at that time my father went to see Uncle Tie sheng alone, only the two of them, but what they said, I really don't remember. All I can remember is that writers get together to gossip about others.
When I was a child, I always lived in my grandmother's house, my parents came back every day for dinner, I actually always felt that my family was a very ordinary family, until I grew up, there were many people who had to believe that this family was not ordinary at all.
As for the poet, I was a die-hard fan of Haizi at that time, and his romanticism attracted me more. Favorite of his "Asian Copper", his aesthetic system is not Oriental, more similar to the Hellenistic period of the barbarians,
"The steppe that witnessed the death of the gods" is the feeling of Greek mythology, the gods are Greek things, and the religion behind it has become monotheistic. In short, it is a genius, the kind that is not born.
During the winter vacation of 1999, I bought a set of "Ancient Greek Tragedies" translated by Mr. Luo Niansheng, which is still in my house and has given me a particularly important influence. That kind of spiritual temperament, that is, primitive, or some kind of quaint helplessness, those things with a primitive vitality and a sense of primitive tragedy, I will feel that it is related to me, there is an instinctive closeness.
This made me less receptive to the pure intellectual taste in the subsequent reading, such as Joyce, such as Calvino, such as Milan Kundera, always felt that there was a lack of vitality, not to say that it was not good, but when I looked at it, I could only think that it was written very well on the intellectual level, but emotionally close. This is a more important part of the aesthetic orientation, of course, my aesthetic has always had other things.
This tendency may be innate, I don't know what kind of mutually shaped relationship between what I see and my personality, it is a natural tendency and choice for me. My mom said I was a pessimist, which wasn't quite accurate, and I always felt that I was, overall, a realistic person, and that reality and pessimism were two different things.
I can't say much about the inheritance relationship with the 1990s today, but I am grateful that I experienced the 1990s in my childhood and adolescence, mainland literature, Hong Kong film and television, Taiwanese music, Japanese anime, Hollywood... Overall, it is very vigorous and splendid, with a lot of good works.
About the 90s
The following text is selected from
"Carp I Went to 2000"
There was my teenage years in the 1990s. If anything special about it, maybe I had the illusion that not only me or my classmates, but the whole country was in a kind of juvenile age. Together with everyone, I discover new things that break into my field of vision.
I'm learning to use money, adults are learning to use money, and the time I eat my first piece of Kentucky fried chicken is also the time my dad eats the first piece of Kentucky fried chicken. His past life experience is like a void treasury bill that can no longer be given to me.
The 1990s were too late to be used, too late to be bored, too late to be mocked. The call of the new century becomes a sweet temptation, and people can't wait to step into the year 2000 to welcome a new life. In the 1990s, like a fallen gecko tail, would the gecko keep its own tail that had fallen off? For people who are running fast, the past years become a burden.
——Volume Beginning (Zhang Yueran)
The market-oriented reforms of the 1990s gave birth to another word and another group of people – "laid-off" and laid-off workers. I did not discuss these people in the context of the new socialist character because of its own complexity.
In reality, they seem to return to the meaning that Agamben discussed in What is the People: "The poor, the weak and the excluded." "Together with 82 female workers who were killed by fire at a joint venture in Shenzhen in 1993, they make up the other side of the 1990s."
For their writing and expression, it is necessary to wait until the emergence of works such as "Tiexi District" and "The Piano of Steel", and at the same time it also strangely constitutes an aesthetic resource and theme, especially represented by the "Northeast Writing" in recent years - it seems that it can be used to quote a sentence by the writer Lu Ling in the late 1940s as circumstantial evidence: ... Time, moving forward with difficulty.
——The 1990s (Yang Qingxiang)
Technology brings a true synchronic experience, where people and people do a lot of enlightenment in chat and complete self-confirmation. What life is really made of, whether I have anything in common with others, and when can I see the world. These serious agitations, born in the impact of the times and youth, seem to have something big happening, and they want to participate, but they don't know what they are involved in.
——I went to 2000 (Wu Qi)
In the early morning of February 20, 1997, I heard a loudspeaker for the last time in my life.
--Horn (Li Jingrui)
After the rainstorm passed, the sky returned to brightness, we stood in plastic sandals in the changed external world, the water flooded to the calves, garbage and leaves floated together, the bicycle broke the waves, and my parents were one of them, riding from the unit to the house. And the time in between was a beautiful void, the air was clean, and I was stuck with everyone in the tranquility covered by water.
—— Storm Day (Zhou Jianning)
Looking back at the 90s, he thinks more about the memories left by his father. One summer, when it rained heavily in the morning, my father carried him on his back and wore a raincoat. It was pitch black, and he listened to his father's panting, and unconsciously, he arrived at the school. He was like a blind man, driven by the times. Roughly.
- None of the big things have anything to do with him (Wei Sixiao)
The impression is that my parents and those female students are self-sufficient and free, fiercely loved and can be withdrawn at any time, real and fearless. In the era when there were no fashion brands and blockbusters everywhere, there were no Internet celebrities wearing red eye shadow all over the street to take pictures, each of their makeup and dress styles were unique and charming, making people yearn to grow up.
- Background color (Ryugi)
I sat up against the gray wall, sweat almost soaked in a quilt, and I whispered a few words to myself to make sure my tone was normal and could speak smoothly: language, construction, violence, language, canyon, road, language, struggle, forgetting, language, coal, forgiveness, mom, language, mom, mom, mom, mom.
- Stone Prison (Ban Yu)
The image of the millennium worm should be closer to the ant, they can not be killed, a regurgitation of time, a disregard for pain, can become an idol of mankind.
- Arc de Triomphe (Zheng Zhi)
While she was washing clothes in the courtyard, there were white sheets hanging there, music on the radio, and from the wide open window that spread across the courtyard: "Where are you from, my friend, like a butterfly flying into my window..."
- Angel of the North (Haruki)
You go ashore along the embankment, the grass mowing your calves, and a few steel hammers clanging in your pockets, as in the past, reminding you that when you go home, you will pass by the small supermarket where you can buy a Myofu chocolate cake or a real lollipop. But this time it won't be used.
—— The Other Side of the Island (Zhang Lingling)
New books on the shelves
Zhang Yueran is the editor-in-chief
In the interview section, director Bi Gan and writer Diane respectively talk about how the experiences of the 90s shaped their unique expressions. In the special section, critic Yang Qingxiang and Wu Qi, editor-in-chief of Single Reading, analyzed the characteristics of the political, economic and cultural fields at that time from a macro level, Li Jingrui and Zhou Jianning chose two privately remembered images of loudspeakers and typhoon days to write, and Wei Sixiao and Long Di shared their childhood experiences.
Ban Yu, Zheng Zhi, Chun Shu, and Zhang Lingling present new novels with the same theme, returning to the 90s in a fictional way, leading readers into the escape in the snow, the moment when the millennium worm is approaching, and the small towns in Beijing and the south at that time.
There was only one in the nineties