Only the reappearance of the truth can most inspire resonance - read Huang Xiaoji's prose collection "The Taste of Eight Centimeters"

The Taste of Eight Centimeters, Guangdong People's Publishing House, October 2021.

Zhou Huiwen

Hachikoshi Village is an ordinary small village in the Shonan Mountains, because Huang Xiaoji's "Eight Centimeters of Time", "Old Artifacts Under the Eaves", "Farming in the Old Garden", "A Village's Food List", "Taste of Eight Centimeters", "Hometown in Festivals" and a series of works such as true and warm records, many people go to find the cypress trees that only a few people can hold together in the book, the old lonely oil mill, the old toys in the stone alley...

"When shaving the scalp of taro, I often itch my hands, and this job is usually done by my mother, who does not let us dry it, saying that our hands are tender and her hands are thick." ("Mother's Recipe") Huang Xiaoji's bland narration has no superfluous lyricism. But I know that in the poor years when we grew up, rural mothers, whether they were doing farm work in the fields, vegetable soils, or doing housework, were working like gyroscopes for a moment. But the heartache of the child, love the child's mood, the world's mother is the same, the child will itch after the taro scalp, is the mother really because of the "hand skin old skin thick skin" and not itchy? The answer, of course, is no, but the mother's heart is yes. In such a chapter, although there is no lyrical sentence, the emotion is hidden in the specific and perceptible details, hidden in the plain language, which is also a sign of the maturity of a writer.

"The river is flooded with silver waves, the rice fields are sprouting and flowers, the mountains are verdant, the shade is dense, frogs and insects are everywhere, birds rise and fall, and everything is thriving. Pepper trees, one by one, row by row, leafy, densely packed with clusters of green peppers of all sizes. This description in the book, if it appears in the text, would be a sentence that my language teacher asked the students to recite and copy. In the book "The Taste of Eight Centimeters", there are not many sentences describing the scenery like this, most of which are a few words, and they are brushed over, really because the bushes of large and small green peppers are so cute, that is the most ostentatious moment of vitality. This description will serve as a model for me to instruct my children in their essays.

"Pumpkins grow like bowls, like pots, and it's a pleasure to look at, one by one, or creeping, or sideways, dark green, black and green, or completely exposed between the branches, or only partially shiny green skin, or hidden deeply." ("Mother's Recipe") What an interesting text, recorded in the interesting melon search, when you are a child, when crawling on the ground or high pumpkins, melons, watermelon fields, leafy loofahs, bitter melon vines to find, or accidentally found, is a happy thing. When people reach a certain age, they get closer and closer to the land, and they like those familiar old objects, old events more and more. Even reading is the same, the bitter melon, pumpkin, eggplant, water melon, winter melon, loofah recorded in the chapter of the book "Melon Leaf Growth" are all very happy for me, I read each one several times, after reading the book, my mind is full of pictures of my mother planting melons, watching melons, and picking melons.

"All the way to play, all the way to the pedaling, all the way to the cold wind, all the way to the ice cap, haha, childish laughter, accompanied by the clear sound of the ice cap, Ding Zero Dang." ("The Day of the Icing Sheet") truly reproduces our time, and there will be many days of this icing in the year. Blowing the snow pole under the eaves, putting a small bench in the pond to skate, this is the joy that children today or in the future will never experience, and the function of literature is to record the truth, leaving an immortal witness for future generations.

In the fourteen articles in the book "The Taste of Eight Centimeters", the first chapter "Melon Leaf Growth" and the second chapter "Mountain Village Twilight", although the author's family life is poor and the parents are tired, the author is still a child, young, living under the protection of his parents, the eight centimeter village has bitterness, but more like the water in a small stream: refreshing and sweet.

In the fourteen articles in the third chapter of the book, "The Rusher" and the fourth chapter, "Homecoming", the eight centimeter villages are mostly bitter and bitter.

"A variety of snakeskin bags with bulging sacs are carried, carried, carried, and carried, flowing with the crowd of people pressing their heads." ("A Night in the Culvert") The author was unemployed when he was young, came to Guangdong, blindly walked to Dongguan, to Humen, factories and mines, construction sites one by one to inquire, trying to find a job to make a living. This reader who jumped out of the dragon gate through diligent study was once the pride of his parents and the pride of the eight-centimeter village, but after graduating from secondary school, he worked in a small state-owned factory on the verge of bankruptcy, with a salary of dozens of yuan, and even had difficulty supporting himself, and finally was forced to join the blind stream of migrant workers in the south. The experience of having nowhere to live, being robbed, living in a culvert, clutching a dollar and trying to tighten his body as much as possible, pretending to watch the street scene to evade tickets, I am afraid that the memory of the collective generation born in the late 1960s and early 1970s and working in the south. At that time, communication was not developed, there was no mobile phone, no telephone, there was no such thing as applying for a job on the Internet today, but mentioning two changes of clothes, pockets with dozens of yuan of road fees, squeezed into the south train, after the Station, dazed, no reception, no accommodation, one factory after another to find, the longer the time, the more the pockets were deflated, the toilet, the culvert, the bridge hole, robbed, stolen, driven away, these same experiencers, reading "The Taste of Eight Centimeters", will surely let many readers recall many unforgettable past events Today, there will still be a lot of emotions.

In his youth, Huang Xiaoji, although he had no life, still wrote poetry with dreams. In 1993, Huang Xiaoji's poetry collection "Southern Journey Collection" was affirmed by the publishing house, although he was very eager to publish a book, and although he had received the support of some teachers and friends, the publication fee of four thousand yuan was undoubtedly astronomical for him who had nothing to live everywhere and could not even get two yuan of expert review fees, and the collection of poems had become a fool's dream.

Poverty prevented the publication of poetry, but it did not curb Huang Xiaoji's literary dreams. Although in the following many years, forced to make a living, he traveled to many cities, took multiple certificates, sought multiple careers, supported his family, and sent away his parents, he still did not forget his original intention and became a writer. For many years, he insisted on writing every morning outside of work, and Hachiko Village was his inexhaustible material library and inspiration station. With ten years of work, he wrote eight collections of essays in an eight-centimeter series of essays based on the eight-centimeter village in his birthplace and wrote about the social changes in the rural areas of southern China, including this "Taste of Eight Centimeters".

In the book "The Taste of Eight Centimeters", the "Funeral Record" truly records the complex human hearts of children, daughters-in-law, etc. when sending away the elderly in the countryside today, they are all presented in the eyes of others, and they are all weighed by others. When the last of the parents is gone, the drama of their respective families will be staged around "pension money", "personal exchange money", "burial expenses", etc. This is also the watershed of brothers and sisters who will become the same relatives who care about each other as always, or ordinary acquaintances who are suspicious and do not get along, or even enemies who are like swords and strangers. Although all parents love their children the same, because of their different characters or their different economic situations, it is impossible for parents' love to be evenly distributed as if they were weighed on a scale. But in the countryside, brothers and sisters compare, weigh, calculate, quarrel, and even make a big fuss at the time of the death of their parents, especially the last one, which is far more complicated than weeping and mourning. Looking at Huang Xiaoji's works, we can awaken our memories and let the people and things that were once, and the people and things that are now constantly emerging in our minds.

"When he returns to his hometown, who smiles and greets him?" ("Parents' Grave") Parents are not there, the home is not there, the empty house is sun and rain, they take out the key to open the door, the house is empty, cold and clear, a layer of dust, a pile of garbage. No one goes out to greet us, no one pours us a cup of hot tea, no one is busy behind the stove for us, even eating and eating, this is the hometown where we used to live with our parents, with our brothers and sisters, with relatives and friends. A handful of bitter tears slid down our cheeks to the hem of our clothes, and we were slowly getting old.

Days go by, the hometown has never been far away, Huang Xiaoji, who has won the Wenjin Book Award, the Bingxin Prose Award, and the Sun Li Prose Award, huang Xiaoji's local series of works with the eight centimeter village as the foothold, after many years, the audience will not become smaller and smaller, but more and more large, because we will eventually not only miss the homeland, but also have to return to the homeland and get close to the homeland. The taste of eight centimeters is the common taste of our generation.

About the author:

Zhou Huiwen: Female, senior lecturer in middle school, member of Hunan Writers Association, student of the 19th session of the Seminar for Young and Middle-Aged Writers of Mao Zedong Literature College, has published hundreds of articles in periodicals at all levels, and authored the collection of essays "Shake Down".