Double snow waves
Photo by Cai Xiaochuan
Under shuang xuetao's pen, Yanfan Street is a place that exudes a strong literary temperament. In "Moses on the Plain", the fate of the characters irreversibly intersects and detonates in Yanfan Street; in "The Hall of Light" and "Out of Geller", Yanfan Street is the space where the story can grow.
For the writer himself, it was a place that always exuded heat in memory. "Pink Street is very white in my heart, although in fact it may be very dirty." With the power of words and fiction, he brings readers back to the original hometown of that piece of literature again and again, taking us to interpret the messages sent from Yanfan Street and the wider Northeast.
"Pink Street is very white in my heart"
Dictation/Double Snow Tao
Interview/ Sun Ruoxi
01.
Pink Street is a great fact
Pink Street is my fictional field, and I don't agree with many people on this point, which includes the arrogance of the fictionalizer and the weakness of the imaginary. Arrogance is because writing memory is to create memory, or to create one's own spiritual truth, weak because indeed many things have been forgotten, and as we grow older, imaginary memories encroach on real memories, and the two are layered and cannot be scrutinized.
So seeing the first shot of Yan Fan Street in Wang Bing's documentary ("Tiexi District Part II: Yan Fan Street"), my tears came down. It was another pink street. Although it has also been selected, but it is a great fact, objective, I was also one of them, the street is a muddy path, as soon as you enter the house there is no sun, there are always a few people hanging out on the street, people can also get drunk during the day, standing in front of the broken food shop and chatting for half a day, nothing to do.
When I was about 10 years old, around 1993, I moved from the hutong of a bustling commercial street in Shenyang to Yanfan Street, one of the most depressed areas in the city. At that time, we didn't say "Yan Fan Street", we said "Rouge Powder" or "Rouge Powder Tun", there were a lot of idle people, etc., my neighbors probably had thieves, fraudsters, porcelain touchers, drunkards, gamblers, and decent people, but I had to find them. In short, in that environment, you will see all kinds of people, just like later.
At that time, I had a neighbor, a white jingba, stuffed the dog under someone else's tricycle, and as soon as the car opened, the dog jumped out with a "wang" sound, and the two big eyes stared outward. "It's over, you've crushed my dog." He specifically blackmailed the peasants who came to sell vegetables, and asked them to lose twenty or thirty yuan, or at least to smoke the whole cigarette. The foreign peasants still can't do the goons in the city, not because they can't do it, but because of the strangeness, just like when I first came to Beijing, I didn't dare to argue with people, so he always succeeded. Later, this dog was trained, as long as the car started, it jumped fast, never been injured, and when it came out, it was still turned, and it was definitely a performance artist.
For a while we lived in a house on the corner of the street, it was a right angle bend, and often cars would break other cars, and two people would fight. I used to be inside that corner and watch people outside fight and fight. Once a man pushed open the door of our house, broke into the house and grabbed the stove hook and left. Unfortunately, the door lock in my house is not repaired well, so for a while, whenever there is a noise outside, I will use my hands to pull the door from the inside. Whether it was dragged once or every time, I can't remember exactly.
Ice rinks, billiard halls, and game halls also have always had fights, and conflicts are generally caused by girls. Ice rink I do not go, from a young skating can not go, billiard hall and can not afford to go, that is to tease the big children to play in the place, the game hall I have been to a few times, the inside of the smoke miasma, we call it "big child", with a large game console to play "Street Fighter", some people also specially put the game coin to take an eye, tie a rope, throw inside the play and then drag it out, and then stuff it in. I went less because my parents were strict with me, and they were more decent and honest. To tell you the truth, I inherited my father at this point, and people don't like to go to places with many people.
An old man playing chess in the Labor Park of Tiexi District, Shenyang City
Honest people living in Yanfan Street are actually a bit out of place. My dad played chess well, so he still had a bit of prestige, and many people came to him to play chess. I don't know if it's because there are many idle people or what, when I was a child, chess was particularly prosperous in the northeast, and there were many chess stalls on the streets, usually with car repairers or key holders. In the winter, the old man of sixty or seventy years old dressed more tightly, took a warm water bottle and squatted there for a day, feeling that their health was getting old, I squatted for a while and my two feet were unconscious, and people were fine. The level of these chess stalls is still quite high, unlike the chess stalls in Beijing, there are too many words and energy is spent on the mouth. It's just that my father's prestige can't penetrate into other fields, which is also a good thing, and it maintains partial simplicity.
02.
You can think of Pink Street as my American West
The documentary "Pink Street" is very real. Although there are also elements of Wang Bing's creation, what to shoot and what not to shoot, the choice itself is a creation of his, but after all, it comes directly from life. Even the people who walked back and forth in the camera were very familiar to me.
I was especially afraid of seeing myself inside, and my heart was very anxious, so I only looked at the beginning and did not dare to look down, and I have not finished reading it until now. That bloody naked reality is really scary. Because it was so close to me, it had even entered my interior. Something particularly close is called "closer to homesickness, dare not ask people", this film is the "coming person". Sometimes, I'm really afraid of seeing that kind of real thing, afraid that the things in my head will be shattered, and I think it's better to keep it in my memory.
It seems that reading will give people the illusion, in fact, there are not many things written on yan pink street in my novel, and very few stories take place in yan pink street. In "The Hall of Light" and "Out of Grad", Yan Fan Street is a subject, and the others seem to only mention a detail, or a scene, like "Moses on the Plain" there is only one clinic.
For the description of Yan pink street, there is a long passage in "Out of Grad":
The streets were littered with rubbish in the early morning, and only one-eyed sanitation worker cleaned them. He was old enough to look at the prostitutes who left work in the morning with his blind eyes, most of them carrying shiny leather bags, wearing high heels, some shaky and drunk, makeup on their faces, some smoking cigarettes, eyes almost open, hurrying back to the rental house to sleep.
There are often robberies on the road, and the robbers are usually senior students of nearby vocational high schools, who specialize in water cases or repair cars. They show up in a corner or behind a tree with folding knives in their pants pockets, and they pull you into the alley, punch you twice, and start searching your body. I can't remember how many times I've been robbed, but it stands to reason that if they could share information, it would be very inefficient to rob a child like me, I didn't have a penny in my pocket, I didn't wear a watch on my wrist, only a school bag of books and a rusty stationery box.
Unfortunately, in that industry, there are always new people who join me, they don't know me, they need money to buy coins for game consoles or to buy Hachinoji soda for the girls they like. I'm used to standing in front of them and taking off my clothes on my own initiative, letting them see clearly before putting them on. This avoids some punches and kicks, saves time and prevents being late.
This is what I wrote in 2013, and when I look back now, I feel that it is indeed full of fiction, but I am also a little confused about which ones are fictional, and I just said that I can't tell the truth and falsity of the memory.
I wrote about dozens of novels, only one or two of which took place on Yanfan Street, why did it still leave such a deep impression on people? I don't know. Friends around me also asked me about Yanfan Street, and they were curious and thought it was a very magical field. It may be that people need a handle to talk about everything, especially when they don't know how to start, and Yan Fan Street takes on this function.
To me, it's probably a bit like the American West. You can think of Pink Street as my American West, and it's a place where some rules aren't particularly useful, a freer place, a lower ground place, but it comes alive because of it. It is a place where sin and goodness, the maintenance of order and some many things that break order are intertwined. For myself, it's like a midday town for me, but it may actually be a bland shantytown.
Whoever believes in a writer is even more naïve than I am, because I have never felt that the novel should have a folk meaning, but it should be a more glorious existence. It's vibrant, it's vibrant, it can be written, it's shaped, it's fictional, and it gives me that opportunity. This must have something to do with the objective appearance of its own existence, its miscellaneousness and its dirt and grime, its exclusion from mainstream society, these are objectively existent.
Its natural temperament is particularly suitable for being transformed into a literary kingdom. I describe it as bright, but it may be gray, like in the documentary. What I wrote contrasts greatly with this documentary. In the pursuit of truth in a novel, it will lose its reality, that's for sure. Acknowledging that fiction in fiction is only true is a dialectic.
03.
Life is the process of gradually burning itself up
My way of thinking is more idealistic, it should start from "me", my imaginary world is more important, I live in this.
For example, at the beginning of "Hall of Light", it is written that a person named Liao Chenghu drew a map of Yanfan Street. But if I really want to take my novel and follow the picture, it is actually impossible. A scholar wrote an article that examined the geography of my novel, and he said that I had drawn a guide map of the opposite directions, and the real Yanfan Street was located in the Tiexi District, the westernmost of the five districts in Shenyang, while the Yanfan Street in "Moses on the Plain" was written at the easternmost end of the city. One of the places directly related to the case in the book, "the intersection of Nanjing Street and North Third Road," is, in his words, "an urban geographical representation of the chaotic spatial orientation." ”
Book Ghost Photography
In fact, I basically write casually, what is the point of me writing it accurately? In fiction, nothing has to be accurate and cannot be fictional. Truth and falsehood is an original proposition in the novel. Admitting that novels are fake is a kind of contract between the author and the reader, and in the process of reading, the reader may forget, increasingly feel that it is not who created them, until after reading it, it is reflected that this is a work, which makes the author proud.
Friends around me have basically not given feedback on my work, they never feel that what I write is true, maybe they will see some familiar place names, they will think "I live on the North 2nd Road", or "South 3rd Road is on our doorstep", but the tone and atmosphere of the novel will only make them feel that they are reading a novel. At this point, these friends around me, including the average reader, are happier than those who make a living studying novels. Of course, sometimes happiness and seeking truth are contradictory, which is a matter of personal choice.
Many of the elements that recur in my novels are also non-existent, such as the fire and the lake. What does it feel like to be a fire thing? Burn, and then it's gone, in fact, this is life, life is the process of gradually burning itself, right? But if it is a good texture of wood, the remaining ashes are also very clean.
The lake is also a particularly good image, a large piece of water, a large plane that separates the two worlds, not only the difference between above and below the ground level, but the problem of the water and the world, and I especially like this. The lake may also become ice, and some lakes can even freeze all of them, forming a large ice lump from the lake surface to the bottom of the lake. But I actually can't remember the shadow lake on the pink street written in "The Hall of Light", but I don't remember that there is water in that place, but it is not a lake, or a shape of water, I don't remember. So all art is hypnotic.
The chapel written in "The Hall of Light" doesn't actually exist in Pink Street, but I think it can appear there. The reason why I think they may exist, that Pink Street is bright, is because although there are people in Pink Street who break the jar of life, the vast majority of people are still seeking happiness, even if they are not using the usual ways of others, such as they will cheat, or touch porcelain, and other ways, but some people are still seeking the legitimacy of their lives. Pink Street is not so special, it is not a very special place completely independent of the city. If it feels very special, it is also because my writing is misleading, and I have to apologize to the former residents of Yan pink street.
Old people in the workers' village
People have some stereotypes about Yanfan Street, just like people's thinking about the northeast is also simplified, such as vibrato, such as wearing mink, who still wears mink now? I remember an old man in Yanfan Street, his family was bigger than others, and there were several houses in it. The old man was thin and tall, with a big gold chain hanging from his neck, and a few big wolf dogs, and when it was not so hot he was bare-chested, and someone pushed a cart to sell peppers, and he picked up the raw ones and clicked to eat them, and sat there with the feeling of a goon. But his son seems to have studied sculpture at Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, which impressed me deeply.
I was also particularly impressed by Yan pink street, one of which was winter, the northeast is always cold and snowy, but the room is steaming. Hot things are on the inside, cold things are on the outside, cold on the outside and hot on the inside, and this correspondence often appears in my mind. I often write about a person who walks for a long time in the winter, and as soon as the hat is taken off, the heat rises. Pink Street is very white in my heart, although in fact it may be dirty. As soon as it snowed it became white, the kind of whiteness that had existed for a moment, and then it was soon muddy and dirty again.
There were always ice flowers on the windows in the house, steaming hot. There was a curtain on the table, and when it was opened, there were buns and steamed buns, and the hot air spewed out. The people who entered the house stomped on the snow on their shoes, shook the snow on their gloves and hats, their faces were frozen red, and their beards were covered with ice ballast, but as soon as the hat was taken off, it was full of sweat, and then they began to eat. Another scene is in the summer, a young man wearing a white shirt, sitting under a large tree and pinching clay sculptures. But in fact, the person who studied sculpture never returned to Yanfan Street.
In my mind, these two scenes are particularly real, more real than they have ever existed. The boy who pinched the clay sculpture was written by me as the character Liao Chenghu in "The Hall of Light". He wasn't real, but it was strongly in my mind, and I don't know how that kind of concentration in the shade came about, but it had a big impact on me, and I wanted to be that kind of person.
Around '98, before the demolition of Yan pink street, we moved out. Later, the director and crew of "Moses on the Plain" came to see the scene, and I accompanied them back to see it. It has become a large residential building, with small squares, fountains, and old people sitting on the side of the road basking in the sun. I also saw a white jingba, but it had a sluggish expression and didn't seem to be able to perform, just lying at the feet of an old man, motionless, yes, why suffer, since our memory is so bad.
(Originally published in Sanlian Life Weekly, No. 14, 2019,
This article is an excerpt)