"Tide Map" is the second novel of the new female writer Lin Zhao. The novel features a 19th-century frog-shaped girl who weaves beautiful texts intertwined with divine knowledge, human hearts, and animal languages, writing about innocence, sorrow, and adventure.
Up to now, "Tide Chart" has only been listed for 15 days and has received widespread attention from the media and readers. Today, Xiao Yijun brings you a dry literary interview with Lin Zhao, made by literary journalist Yu Bingxia for the Chinese edition of "Excellent WSJ.".
Lin Zhao
Lin Li read Lolita twenty times before and after, and like Nabokov, she played a multi-voice narrative technique, always writing amazing rhetoric such as "the wind kisses the water for a long time, making it old and wrinkled". It is difficult to interpret the 1984-born female writer's new novel "Tidal Chart", or her novel "Flowing Stream", with traditional literary criticism, perhaps because Lin Zhao's literary nature is mystical—at the beginning of the new book "Tide Map", the female protagonist set to "half human and half frog" announces in the first person - "I am a fiction." I don't talk about people because I'm not human at all. I've had many names, and they've left me one by one, enough to make up my other tail. I speak water dialect, provincial dialect and much better English than Pidgin English. A little bit of Macau native language. Have a certain understanding of Hokkien, Portuguese and Dutch. Recognize a dozen words. I am a fiction, an animal that has not yet been shaped. Reading Lin Zhuo is reading such an incomparably object-oriented thing, and any label of "dialect literature" or "southern women's literature" cannot provide a clear coordinate for Lin Zhao's literary world. Entering her novel is like entering some kind of dense jungle that is only imaginary, and in the jungle, Lin Zhuo is deeply cultivated and meticulous, not disturbed by the outside world.
Tide Chart
Lin was inspired by the popular literary forum "Secretly Sick Children" in the 2000s and began to create very early. For more than a decade, she did not write a single word, worked with literature, and her hobbies were bird watching, planting flowers and grass, and studying naturalism, even her "list of favorite books" when she was twenty-two or three years old. A few years ago, Lin Tong rediscovered his passion for literature and changed his stream-of-consciousness novel "Stream Stream", which he wrote when he was 21 years old, into a new work. Less than two years later, she wrote "Tide Map", using a polkafka-like setting to take readers on a journey through the Pearl River Delta in the 19th century. This new passion, which may be difficult for someone who is used to writing for a living, kept reiterating how important it was to her to find writing and how lucky she felt—"to find the target." Man becomes an arrow. "Diligence and excitement are closely linked, and few writers can fully establish their writing style and self-confidence in just two or three years."
We share her literary world with Lin.
"Excellent WSJ.": As a young man, you were an active member of the literary forum, can you talk about why you were interested in literature when you were young?
Lin Zhao: In my youth, reading gave me a great sense of joy and satisfaction. You know that there is a world in every book that is better than the reality of a moment. You're holding a new book like you're holding a gacha that's just slipped off. As for why it is reading, not ping-pong, chess or guzheng, I can't answer. Everyone in the early stages of life probably has a hazy feeling of the love of a lifetime. When adolescents come into contact with literary forums, the world is opened to a greater extent, and it is more diverse and diverse. In my personal situation, the angle of daily life in adolescence is very small, literature is a kind complement, and more importantly, literature is about creation.
"Excellent WSJ.": The online literary forum has a very important influence on writers in the 70s and 80s, and there is a part of "Flowing Creek" that is a postmodern collage style popular among literary youth in 2004 and 05, and this style (or the emotion behind the style) has disappeared in a sense. How did you re-revise it into a novel more than a decade later, and see what it was like to see what you could say was a passionate creation, reminiscing about an era that was very different from what you are now?
Lin Zhao: Several long passages in subsection 2 of "Flowing Stream" pay tribute to the literary forum "Secretly Sick Children". I'm very introverted, even on the Internet, sick kids are the only forums I've ever been in, and the emotions projected on it are deep and deep. From my point of view, it was indeed a coming-of-age story. I myself am growing, and I am also far away, very one-sided, watching the growth of forum members. The confusion about big concepts like "style" or "era" has never eased. When people reach middle age, it is the ship of Theseus that is still sailing, and it is not clear for a while whether the wind has changed or the material of the sail has changed. I felt like I was still passionate, but the fuel turned into confusion and curiosity.
"Flowing Creek"
Brilliant WSJ. What is the current state of life, and how much time is spent writing every day? How much time do you spend doing something else?
Lin: Basically arranging life around a writing plan, reading, collecting materials, field trips, or learning new skills according to the needs of the subject. Prepare for the formal writing phase and start six hours a day. Dedicated to collecting the simplest, fastest, and healthiest recipes for three meals a day.
"Excellent WSJ.": You grew up in Shenzhen, Shenzhen may not be a place with a very strong cultural atmosphere, do you think that a social literary "circle" is important to you?
Lin Zhao: How to define the "social literary circle"? Fiction is a skill, and the more professional and empirical exchanges, the better for the author. Encouragement from peers or seniors can help authors strengthen their faith. Of course, you can also carry out the lonely writing to the end. Every writer is different, and anything that helps improve their craft is worth trying.
"Excellent WSJ.": You quickly won several literary awards in the past two years, how did it feel to win the award?
Lin Zhao: Winning or not is uncontrollable, it is about luck. What is more important to me is to complete the writing plan well, and every part of the novel is controlled, which is cause and effect, logical, and the greatest source of happiness.
"Excellent WSJ.": For a long time you did not write, the post-80s generation in literature, because of social environment reasons, a large number of people debuted very early, also very early to give up literature, to live for this generation of small bourgeois white-collar life. In the years when you were not writing, did you pay attention to the dynamics of the literary circle? What inspires you to write?
Lin Zhao: Almost no attention. Although they still maintain their reading habits, they are mainly social sciences or read with a strong sense of purpose for work. As a result, my "list of favorite novels" is still the one when I was twenty-two or three years old.
Because it is a long story, the process of deciding on a topic is slow and cautious. You come across something, in reality or in a book, it makes your heart contract and you feel excited, you have to hang it up, hang it there, go to see it every day every day fiddle with it, if within a month the excitement starts to drain, take it down and throw it away; if the excitement doesn't decrease, it increases, hang it for another month. You don't know how many lives, a year or ten, you're going to throw at this long story next? You pack up and drive the boat out, without a map, without navigation, and if the destination (or imagination about it) doesn't get you excited enough to sleep at night, the consequences will be disastrous.
"Excellent WSJ.": From your practice writing on Douban to the publication of long stories, the pen name has changed from Lin Jin perch to Lin Zhao, can you talk about what the meaning of these two pen names is?
Lin Zhao: There is no special meaning, just some pictures. A fish in a stream. Or paddle against the woods.
Outstanding WSJ.: You have talked many times about Nabokov's influence on you, tell me about your experience of reading Nabokov, why did his work attract you?
Lin Zhao: The first time I heard that Nabokov was a senior or freshman in high school, from a girl in the forum, she wrote very good poetry, very talented. Thus I read Nabokov's Lolita for the first time. I read it back and forth more than twenty times. Later, I went to read his other long works. The most immediate and first impact, of course, came from his imagery, the pictures and landscapes he summoned, his long English sentences pushing away like a good windy wave that pushed away each tip of the wave and flashed golden light... It is a complete genius, brilliant enough to blind. He shows how words can vibrate, penetrate, penetrate, and rush along the spine, nasal, ear, esophagus, large intestine, or whatever, from the eye into our brains.
Outstanding WSJ.: Besides Nabokov, what other writers, or people (or things) in other fields, have influenced you more deeply?
Lin Zhao: Getting in touch with the natural sciences was a very beneficial transition. Around 2015. Before that, I was a "traditional liberal arts student" with a serious bias, and I lacked a scientific and systematic understanding of the world outside of man. Naturalism is a very friendly intermediary, a gentle, vivid teacher.
Brilliant WSJ.: When you start writing at length, is narrative (story) first, characters first, or atmosphere first for you?
Lin Zhao: Every time the situation is different, depending on what the driving force is. For example, "Tide Map" is the priority of space (Pearl River Delta).
"Excellent WSJ.": How would you describe the emotions and personality of the half-human, half-frog protagonist of "Tide Map" in one sentence?
Lin Zhao: Curious, fickle, afraid of death.
Brilliant WSJ.: The postmodern collage of Stream Creek, to the Tidal Chart, which seems to be a further collage based on images, did you have a clear principle of language experimentation when writing this novel? The novel uses a lot of comparative sentences, a lot of rhythmic nouns, these methods are also used in "Flowing Creek", will you think that this is your personal more prominent style?
Lin Zhuo: I don't know much about summarizing my "style" and don't care too much. For me to think about "style" is a bit of a reverse. In the process of writing, I first set the narrator, then let the language gush out naturally, and then I became a censor to cut and throw away the language that did not fit the identity of the narrator. Kind of like role-playing. The process is subconscious and fast. The process of setting the narrator is slow: a lot of work has to be done to slowly discover "her" and become "she".
"Excellent WSJ.": The frequent appearance of a "raw swallowing" image in the tide chart seems to be an animalistic vent in the case of difficult communication with the outside world, what do you think?
Lin Zhao: As a feeding behavior, in addition to amphibians (frogs in the Tide Chart), most reptiles and birds are also "raw swallowing". Humans need to chew on food, and we use "raw swallowing" in the sense of analogy, which is a cross-species loan word.
Brilliant WSJ. Can you elaborate on the research you did when you prepared the Tide Map, and whether there were any experiences in the process that particularly will be memorable to you?
Lin Zhao: The National Library of Portugal has a picture album with unknown artists, edited and arranged by Ye Nong and Jin Guoping, published by Guangdong People's Publishing House, entitled "Album of Macao and the Atlantic Islands". The album consists of 49 pencil sketches, landscapes, figures, and clumsy paintings, presumably left by a crew member or traveler, from the first "Seeing the Selva rens Islands" (1831) to the penultimate ascent island (1832), flipping through the album and traveling with the painter through Macau, Canton, and St. Helena. The boredom of the sea and the passion of exploration may be his mood when he writes. He left a year of scenery behind and then disappeared. Before, and since then, there has been no trace of it. No name, no name, no beginning and no end. I've come across a lot of similar pieces, from one or a group of people who can't be sure, leaving a watery fad of light and disappearing.
"Excellent WSJ.": The so-called "southern atmosphere" in your writing, in addition to language, is it because of the combination of dense vegetation and complex names of animals to form a landscape that may not be familiar to people outside the south, and you also like to deal with nature, how do you usually study the botany and zoological topics that interest you? For example, if you love bird watching, what is the relationship between this activity and your subjectivity as a writer, or your emotions as a human being?
Lin Zhao: I like Duan Yifu's definition: "Place means security, space means freedom." Space is transformed into "place" after absorbing a full and full sense of "meaning" and individual value. The characteristics of the place can be reflected by the local native species, which are another set of symbols, older and more worthy of than man-made objects. Climate, water, land, all of these make up where we are, they are the reasons why we are "so", and they also imply a precursor to what we will be. Identifying and documenting local creatures, flipping through local chronicles, retrieving climate and geography, and writing stories are all processes that I find and build meaning.
"Excellent WSJ.": There may be scholars who will classify "Tidal Chart" into the category of "posthumanism", that is, the human perspective is not the only perspective, and the animality of man is more important than the so-called "intellect" of man, as if we see this frog-shaped protagonist in your novel, which can naturally produce many expressions that do not conform to the basic principles of human society. Do you agree with this view? Do you feel that plants and animals are closer to you than humans?
Lin Zhao: Human definitions and attitudes towards the "other" have been changing, and the changes are largely based on the continuous improvement of human cognition of the world and even the universe, which is promoted by "intelligence" and at the same time, at the expense of "other". Animality and intellect, nature and civilization, are abstract, conceptual issues. The people, plants, and animals around us are specific problems, and they establish emotional connections with us, stimulate and mobilize our compassion and empathy, and reflect the specific and subtle details of civilization.
Brilliant WSJ.: What kind of writer do you want to be in your own mind?
Lin Zhuo: Honest and sincere approach to the art of novels.
"Excellent WSJ.": What is the biggest change between you who first became interested in literature and you are now?
Lin Zhao: Found the target. Man becomes an arrow.
Lin Zhuo sighed
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
This magical story rooted in the terroir of Lingnan, from the Pearl River water people's home, to the Thirteen Elements of Guangzhou, stop at the Macao Rare Garden, and explore the rivers and oceans of the animism. Where East and West meet, large and small utopias collide with each other, it is a fascinating feast through the modern world.
Shanghai Culture Publishing House
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