The two words "story", permeated with "ancient taste", can always remind people of the scene of lying on the knee of the elders to listen to the story when they were children, and those myths and legends full of romantic imagination and strange folk tales will linger in the depths of a person's memory for a long time.
When we grow into adults who don't need stories to help us sleep, "stories" still have magic.
Luo Yijun is probably the person who can listen to stories, steal stories, and tell stories. In 2019, Luo Yijun opened the audio program "Story Convenience Store" in the ideal, and an audience member left a message saying:
This fat uncle of Taiwan with a Minnan accent, with a variety of "ghost pulls" built up by many people's private "One Thousand and One Nights", like a 24-hour convenience store with a light hidden in the streets and alleys, "prepare a warm midnight snack for you in the foggy midnight, and make a hot breakfast for you in the hazy early morning".
"Story convenience store owner" Luo Yijun (left)
The customers who walk into this convenience store include Xu Zidong, Liang Wendao, and more ordinary readers like you and me, and the stories on the shelves are taken by everyone.
Born out of the audio of the same name book - "Story Convenience Store" contains 40 theme stories, both the world's classic novels and movies, but also the novelist personally experienced or heard the true story, they are related to father, love, death, regret, comfort, sympathy, wishing, body, madness, dreams and other common human experiences, I don't know when you will suddenly be moved by Luo Yijun's narrative, remembering a long-lost old friend, a moment that can not be forgotten, or just an emotion, fireworks will be released in your mind.
What the story itself cannot do, its existence, is beautiful. We know that it is enough to be able to open the little secret room in our hearts through the story and reminisce about the time of old age.
"We use stories to carry the source of our existence and reflect the face of human beings themselves. In the unbearable horrors, nightmares, and grief of human beings, when God has abandoned us and cannot find a trace of salvation, stories often inadvertently redeem us who listen to them. --Luo Yijun
Ding~
welcome
Story convenience store
Glowing room
Luo Yijun
There is a word called "wolf-dog time" and some people call it "magic hour". The so-called "wolf-dog time" refers to the time when the sky is about to be clear at four or five o'clock in the morning, or around six o'clock at dusk, when the light of the day has gradually retreated, and the darkness of the night has not yet been completely shrouded. At this time, the air visibility is relatively low, much like when looking at prints and charcoal sketches, the faces of the people in the paintings are covered with a layer of gray shadows. It is the most ambiguous, the most ambiguous state, all people and scenery are not so clear, not so clear, shadowy state.
In the distance an animal came up, and you couldn't tell if it was a wolf or a dog, and you had to get very close to be able to tell the difference. If it was a wolf, you would have been eaten; if it had been a dog, the former man might have brought it back and eaten it. This ambiguity, mystery, indistinct things, and the illusion of light and shadow intertwined, is what I want to tell in this story.
Stories are used to present the surprises, magic, surprises, etc. that cannot be described in the language you are proficient in, and so on, and we say "indescribable" and we say "mixed feelings" moments and feelings. In the exchange of human emotions, the transmission of experiences, and the interpretation of joy and sorrow, stories usually convey a more complex, multi-layered, condensed or metaphorical understanding of human destiny. Often it was in that time when the wolf-dog was in such a state, when the dream was not dreamed and the person was still half awake, and the story was like a big silver shining fish being caught from the sea.
01
I went to Taipei Chenggong High School in high school, and Chenggong High School is located in a wonderful location, between Jinan Road and Qingdao East Road in Taipei City. In retrospect, it was thirty-five years ago, so Success High School was small in my memory, a bit like a concentration camp. It was still the age of martial law, and the school had instructors to manage the students, which was very bitter and depressing.
I remember for about a year, every day between five and six o'clock in the afternoon, when it was called "wolfhound time", I would feel some gray shadows appear in all corners of the campus, including me, and everyone would move towards a certain corner of the campus. Where is this corner, which is the stairwell between the fourth and fifth floors of the building at the intersection of Jinan Road and Qingdao East Road. This place is the so-called campus dead end, and the instructors won't find it, so some of our high school bad guys will hide here and smoke. Usually cleaning the common area is not very good, and it is not very easy to sweep this place, so it is dirty.
What are you going to do when you're gathered there?
There is a legend handed down from the seniors of the past: there is a building across qingdao East Road (I don't remember how many floors), and a certain family on a certain floor of this building will turn on the lights at dusk, and when the lights are on, they will see a very strange family, because they are not dressed (I still don't know whether it is based on religious beliefs or on their special ideology). At this time, it is dusk, and when it is time to leave work, the crowds and cars are surging, the sound of office workers walking and talking after work, the sound of buses, the sound of various cars starting, the rustle of many nearby schools, the voices of many students, all of which converge into a background sound.
Inside this room, we saw a dad, a mom, a daughter who was also in high school, and a brother who was about elementary school, all of whom were all naked. Generations of seniors gave the family a nickname called "Family Theater".
It was a wonderful sight, and almost every day at dusk, when the lights came on, the lights in this room came on. We, a group of fifteen or sixteen-year-old adolescent boys, huddled in that dark stairwell, looked at the room that looked like it was floating in mid-air from a distance of one street.
When the lights suddenly come on, it's a lot like in an aquarium shop, and when people walk into the aquarium, the lamp in the aquarium suddenly lights up, and you'll see that in that glowing room, there are four people without clothes, like a school of fish in an aquarium swimming. For us at that age, it was an original kind of erotic, poetic, extremely distant imagination beyond the borders, an indescribable feeling. Thirty-five years later, I recall this image as a theater, with a beam of light on the stage, four human bodies shrouded in aperture, and a group of us huddled in a dark audience.
02
Now I think back and forth, still not knowing what happened in that room. Why doesn't the family wear clothes? What the hell are they doing? But I can reproduce very clearly to you, all the light, all the smell, all the sounds in the dark auditorium.
I said it was a dead end of the campus, and I remember it vividly, because none of them had been cleaned, so there was a brass metal non-slip mat on each step, with three or four long grooves on it, and the grooves were deposited with thick, almost cotton wool-like dust. We were very depressed and bored at that time, so we smoked, and after smoking, the hormones were intense. For example, I am a first-year high school student, when I meet the seniors of the third year of high school, I feel that each other is not a good thing, and I do not speak after smoking, and finally I will do a very handsome action, "snapping" the cigarette butt, much like the protagonist in the Western. The most powerful thing is that when the cigarette butt bounces into the air, the flame on the filter will fall off, and if the cigarette butt falls on the ground and is not extinguished, then "click" and step on it.
I distinctly remember the grooves of the brass pads with brown or white butts and shoe prints on them. At that time, it was very poor, there was no McDonald's breakfast in the winter, there would be a grandmother pushing a wooden barrel, selling a kind of taiwanese oil rice, in fact, like zongzi, it was boiled with lard, packed in plastic bags, a bag of about a dollar yuan, and then squeezed some red sweet and spicy sauce, throwing a yellow pickled radish, or pink tender ginger and the like.
These high school students have no public morality, and in the stairwell are thrown plastic bags containing oiled rice that have been deflated, and there are rice grains on the inside of the plastic bags, half of which are soaked with lard, showing brown, and the creases of the plastic bags still have the juice of sweet and spicy sauce left in them. There are also poly dragon bento box omelettes, some people eat the rice grains, the crust is thrown there, so the poly dragon bento box is covered with a layer of salad oil oil film, and like blood droplets, a bead-shaped soy sauce, floating on the oil film.
I distinctly remember the details of it all, and I distinctly remember all the sounds. For example, this building is a new building, there are two small basketball courts underneath, and at about seven o'clock, the training office will turn on the lights and there are students playing basketball here. I distinctly remember the basketball court, not the current good material, but actually cement floor, and then paste a layer of green rubber on it, because if you play on the cement floor and fall or bump, your knee will crack a big wound. There is also a layer of free throw lines and three-point lines drawn with white paint on the rubber.
I distinctly remember these basketball-playing, adolescent high school students, the sound of the leather of their balloon rubbing against the rubber-filled cement floor as they dribbled. I distinctly remember the dull echo of the air squeezing in the inner pocket of a basketball while dribbling; the sound of the rubber rubbing the soles of the shoes worn by these kids (not Nike sneakers, poor sneakers) when dribbling; and the high school students who were in the process of changing their voices shouting "Keep one, don't be so alone, keep one, thug fouls", which echoed in the evening campus...
I can go on like this without restriction, all I've just said is all the background sounds, all the light, all the air in the dark auditorium of this theater, but I never know what happened in the room that glowed in mid-air.
In fact, it is a very bitter story to recall, because it was the era of martial law, and there were only three TV stations that the whole society could watch, and it was not like now that the network was turned on as a vibrato, and at any time you could see the beautiful face and beautiful body of the little sister. Now in Taiwan is also casually open Yahoo is a variety of street photography girls, now too easy to see sex or too easy to see the youthful, beautiful body. But in our day there was no such thing as a very rich guy in our class, who stole a copy of his dad's Playboy and brought it to the class, when there were more than fifty students in a class, and everyone took turns to borrow it and take it home to see. Everyone is also very immoral, and when the book returns to the owner's hand, there is usually only one page left. Everyone secretly tore a page back and took it back.
So, in those dull times, we were all huddled in that dark stairwell, looking at that glowing room across the street. Of course, you're not so lucky every time, and sometimes you have to squeeze the people next to you away. Sometimes you squeeze in, you want to see the naked body of your high school sister, see that it is your mother, sometimes accidentally see your father, but if you see the body of that brother, a little boy, will you have a very dark thought in your mind: What am I doing? How do I hide in the stairwell? Do I have a pedophile? How am I watching a naked little boy?
03
It was a very lonely and miserable time, you don't know the names of these guys next to you, we just happened to be huddled in that stairwell. Now thirty-five years later, I'm fifty years old, and I don't even know what these boys who were huddled around with me at the time were doing now.
In the south, a water ant appears during the rainy season in the spring, flying in large areas. This water ant is particularly strange, flying and flying, the wings fall off, leaving only a fat body, if it falls on your neck, it will also squirm disgustingly around your neck. Sometimes, when the instructor knew that there was such a party, he would take a short Scout stick, wear sneakers and sweatpants, and sneak up to beat us, and everyone would scatter and flee.
I think it's particularly strange that we spend so much, so hard, so lonely, so tired, every day here waiting for the lights of that room in the middle of the sky across a street to come on, what are we for?
At about half past nine, we each took the bus home in frustration. When I got home, I suddenly realized that they were exactly the same as my dad, my mom, my brothers and sisters, and honestly, except for the clothes we were wearing, the relationship or state of our family was exactly the same as the family in this family theater, in this glowing room.
They didn't have the kind of family incest we had imagined at the time, like in the Japanese A-movies, no. Except for the fact that they don't wear clothes, the dad may be sitting and watching TV, and the mom may be frying fish in an apron. There were no cell phones in those days, teenage girls might be talking on the phone, and younger brothers might be playing Game Boy consoles. Later, I suddenly felt that the nickname they had given them, "Family Theater", was really apt. How wonderful it is that the family does not wear clothes.
The impression of this glowing room, or the indescribable picture, has actually been in my presence for thirty-five years, from time to time. I have written it into my novel, but I cannot say what it is in an overly simplistic description, it is not a simple voyeurism, nor is it a simple moral drama or a thriller, but whenever I think of it, it is like a fish in the throat. I can't describe it in classical rhetoric or any literary discourse I've learned in class before.
epilogue
There must be some time in each of our lives when we encounter a state that you cannot describe or express in your old vocabulary. For example, the first time you attend your grandmother's funeral, or the first time you get lost in your life, you are betrayed by your dearest person for the first time. I even met a girl who told me that she swore that when she was in elementary school, she saw a whole row of flying saucers in the night sky, like a school of glowing fish flying past.
These mysterious and indescribable moments are actually the most mysterious times when a very precious and beautiful story is incubated. These moments in life are the "wolf-dog time" of the story.
Editorial Typography: Bear Mur
Source: "One-One", "Blue Gate", "Love Wind and Dust"
"The Story of Time", "Girlfriend, Boyfriend"
Walk into this story convenience store and take away your own life story