When she answered the phone, Wenzhen had just returned to her parents' home in Shenzhen. The trip to the south is to go to Guangzhou to receive the Huadi Literature Award sponsored by Yangcheng Evening News. Coming down from the podium, Wen Zhen sent a circle of friends with a picture: "Always a novice walking on thin ice." Graduated from peking university's Chinese department as the first master's degree in creative writing in mainland China, entered the People's Literature Publishing House as an editor and resigned, at the age of 32 became the "youngest winner of the Lao She Literature Award", she has been writing, writing for as long as she has been in Beijing, or even longer - if calculated from the previous study. The award she won this time was the "New Talent Award", which made her feel a little funny, even self-deprecating. But she thinks about it, and the posture of the novice is also very good: every time the writing is to re-stand on the new starting line, there is also the possibility of breaking the barrier and stepping out of the comfort zone, if it really becomes a "famous artist" or "veteran", it probably means that it has lost some vitality and embarked on the road of self-repetition.
It's a fateful cycle— Wen Zhen once interned at Yangcheng Evening News, and some of her earliest assignments were published there, including the 2004 short story "Finding the Key." It was the first work she had ever looked back on her writing career and felt "decent." After 17 years, the Yangcheng Evening News awarded her an award, and she suddenly felt like everything was starting all over again, or like drawing the last stroke of the circle on the previous stage. This "Finding the Key" was included in this year's latest collection of novels, and the title of the book seems to have a metaphorical meaning. After this film, she decided to suspend short and medium-length writing for 17 years, and is launching an offensive to the first long story, like walking on thin ice, but also full of expectations.
Wen Zhen
▌ The world of the other
Many people have read and liked Wen Zhen's "An Xiang Road Love Affair" in 2010, which made her the youngest winner of the Lao She Literature Award so far. The story is very interesting, telling the story of the Anhui boy who is located in the old Hu Guan Cake Shop on Anxiang Road near the Bird's Nest and the love tragicomedy of spicy and hot XiShi next door. Anxiang Road is the neighborhood where Wen Zhen lives, the old Hu Guan Cake Shop is true, the spicy hot shop is also true, but the two shopkeepers do not know each other in reality, but Wen Zhen, who walks the street every day, has a sudden thought: If a love story occurs on this street, it must happen between these two people. It is said that in order to write this story, she ate egg cakes for many days in a row.
It was also the first time that Wen Zhen wrote about low-level characters who deviated from her daily life, and the novel was included in her first novel collection published in 2011, "Eleven Flavors of Love" (recently republished as "City of Smell"), in which the protagonists in the other chapters were mostly elegant and restrained intellectuals or middle-class people, while "Anxiang Road Love Affair" had a unique pyrotechnic atmosphere, fresh and hot. From the school to the People's Literature Publishing House, Wen Zhen, who has always been in the cultural circle, realized that there was a new world there.
Soon, she stumbled upon the story of a courier— the courier who often came to the unit to deliver couriers had a crush on one of her colleagues, constituting a relationship that intersected and did not intersect. Wen Zhen felt wonderful, so she had the idea of "Zhang Nanshan". But this article is not written smoothly, which can be felt from the time mark of "2011-2016" at the end of the payment. After four or five years on the computer, 80,000 words were written, 60,000 words were deleted, and the last 20,000 words were initially published and criticized. Wen Zhen felt a little frustrated, and continued to release it for a long time, never including the several novel collections published later. Until this year, so long that she almost changed from an author to a stranger, when she looked at it from the perspective of the bystander, she felt a certain careful preciousness from the euphemistic and difficult efforts of the courier in the story. Finally, she made up her mind to put the courier into "Finding the Key".
Also badly written is "Sometimes the Rain Falls on the Square." An old man who enters the city from the countryside, in the lonely jungle of high-rise buildings, occasionally finds a friend in the square dance partner, but with the family changes, it is destined to be a dew love affair. They are all a group of people who are far away from Wenzhen herself and strangers, and there is a sense of obstruction in writing, which is naturally due to lack of experience. In order to write about them, she needs to do a lot of "fieldwork", and she is afraid that there are too many facts and there is a suspicion of laziness, or fall into the cliché of spectacle, so the method she takes is to observe silently from the sidelines, reduce her sense of existence, and rarely talk directly to the object. For fiction, talking too much sometimes means destruction. Each is the other of the other.
The other is the key word that Wen Zhen found in the 11 articles of "Finding the Key". Rather, it is "a group of people who are often seen as marginal and who are also involved in the construction of the city, but who have always had difficulty truly integrating into the mainstream." But "'they' also have a part that belongs to the broader 'we.'" Writing about them, first of all, comes from the curiosity of the writer as a general public, and a little more, it is hoped that through writing they will be seen, "not everyone's conditions are equally good". Wen Zhen said that they were like the fruits of the tree, ripe and fell into her hands, into her heart, touching her, and she hid this thing that moved her in the story, which stretched endlessly.
Novels sometimes come back and affect reality in unexpected ways. Wen Zhen said that in reality, the "Old Hu" who sold the cake knew that he had become the male protagonist of a novel, and it was the person who went to eat the cake who told him that the novel even drove the business in the store, but a few years later, Lao Hu gave the store to a pair of Henan brothers. The Henan brothers told Wenzhen that Lao Hu had gone to Harbin. This unexpected follow-up made Wen zhen almost "creepy", because in her novel, spicy and hot Xi Shi Xiaoyu finally returned to her hometown in Harbin. The two people did not know each other in reality, and why Lao Hu went to Harbin was a mystery, but she felt that maybe Lao Hu had read the novel and obtained some hints. To this end, she also wrote a sequel to this "love affair".
▌ In the big painting in Beijing
The stories of "Anxiang Road Love Affair" and "Zhang Nanshan" basically take place in the area where Wen Zhen lives. Anxiang Road, Bird's Nest, Pangu Seven Star Hotel, China Conservatory of Music, Wenzhen often describe these landmarks and their traffic in detail in novels, and the huge buildings appear to be even smaller than the small individuals that shuttle between them.
After 17 years in Beijing, Beijing has become the most familiar and intimate city for the southern humanities, and it has naturally become the background for most of her stories. She liked Beijing, and this liking even happened before she came to Beijing— when she was a bachelor's degree in finance at Sun Yat-sen University, she read "Old Beijing School" and "New Beijing Flavor" while preparing for graduate school, which made her more and more eager to go to Beijing to study. After coming to Beijing, she found that there were many unexpected romances here, such as the flow of flowers in the four seasons, the sunshine, falling leaves and snow that could be expected every year, or some paradise-like corner of the park. She described, "Beijing is a city with a lot of masculinity, a little careless, but with unexpected tenderness."
But Wen Zhen's Beijing is already different from the ancient city she read about. As an outsider in the new century, her Beijing is completely presented as a modern metropolis, huge, mixed, fashionable, compatible with a little cruelty and domineering, escaping the strangeness and loneliness of the acquaintance society, but there is a kind of safety and comfort in the strangeness of "ten thousand people like the sea and one body". Many of Wen Zhen's stories are actually written about these people hiding in the crowd, such as the excluded fat man ("Fat Man Serenity"), the shopping hoarder ("Item Chronicle"), the solitary otaku ("Mimi Peanut"), the bored Dink ("Shuyuan Meijie on the second day of the National Day holiday") ... They are "others", and they are all in us, coming from different foreign lands and sharing an urban space. The relationship between people is also modern urban, often passing by, which makes Wen Zhen's set of stories a typical and rare urban text.
Despite graduating with a Beijing hukou, as a new Beijinger, Wenzhen easily perceives the differences between hiding and wandering, and feels that she can empathize with the mood of these characters, their immutable native accents and tastes, and their successes or failures with the city. Wen Zhen subtly metaphorically said that Beijing is like a "huge whale", everyone lives on the back of the whale, usually basking in the sun smoothly, not perceiving its existence, but the whale is alive in the end, has its own will, logic and order, if suddenly moved, some people may fall into the sea, irresistible. Just like the young female screenwriter in "Misty Moon Frost" who lost her job due to the cold winter of film and television. In Wen Zhen's novels, you can always feel the interlacing and tension between this huge city and the small individual, as well as between the individuals. She borrowed the metaphor of painting to say that we are like in a big painting, some people are far away, some people are near, some people are floating, some people have to look through, but all of us are together, sharing the resources of this city, and also enduring the inconvenience of this city, becoming a community of destiny.
As an outsider in the new century, Wenzhen's Beijing is fully presented as a modern metropolis.
▌ Historian of contemporary life
In addition to the writing time marked at the end of the text, even from the various symbols in the text, it is very easy for us to know the date and month of each story of Wenzhen: in "Pictorial", the mercurial male protagonist convention girl watches "The Sound of the Wind"; to "Anxiang Road Affair", spicy hot Xishi and the suitors watch "Avatar"; "Shuyuan Meijie on the second day of the National Day holiday", Mei Jie uses her mobile phone to brush open a Mobike; the story of "Mimi Peanuts" takes place in the epidemic.
Reading Wen Zhen's novels, I often feel a little interesting and intimate here, her novel time seems to be flowing in parallel with real time, as if she can cut the most relevant contemporary life into the novel, and the novel always echoes with the real world we live in.
Compared with the history or tradition that often constitutes a grand narrative, Wenzhen prefers the present, describing herself as "a person with a strong sense of reality". Compared with writing history, writing about the present is often slighted, but Wenzhen feels that what is being seen is more credible. Contemporary China changes rapidly, changing several times a year, literature seems to lag forever, and there is a risk of obsolescence in writing, but Wen Zhen is not afraid to grasp the traces of time. Even if "Zhang Nanshan" is written intermittently for five years, the express delivery industry has been turned upside down during this period and after that, Wenzhen has not forced the revision to let the courier Zhang Nanshan "keep pace with the times", and now it seems that the novel has retained a picture of the life of the first generation of couriers ten years ago, and even has a certain significance of fieldwork - the contemporary life that is covered by rapid update iterations is the novel that preserves them.
The rapidly changing world, like a potion, stimulates the rapid change of the human heart. This is the part that fascinates Wen Zhen even more as a novelist. The novel gives her a channel of description and inquiry. "Contemporary life also needs to have a living note, and I hope to be a historian who can write this living note well." However, the object of the transmission is not the emperor and the general, but those ordinary people and people at the doorstep. Wenzhen said that she wants to write the words that they hide in her heart, and she believes that these people will also be her readers, and they will be more introspective people who perceive what they have not said in their hearts, and who care about what others have not said in their hearts.
▌ New life and new writing
After 13 years of parallel literary editing and literary creation, Wenzhen finally made up her mind last year to resign from the old Humanities Society, truly devote herself to her love, and become a full-time writer. Bidding farewell to the nine-to-five workplace, she was much more free in time and life, and could refuse many socializations on the grounds of "concentrating on writing long stories" – a reason that was true, and after publishing four collections of short stories, a collection of essays, and a collection of poems, she finally began to write her first novel. In terms of stylistic importance, the long story is often regarded by the outside world as a milestone in the maturity of a writer's creation, but for her, writing a long story is more of a drive from within: "It is not good to constantly observe and write about new people, so it will always be very superficial, it will always be sketching, but I want to paint an oil painting." ”
The "oil painting" being created, in the revelation of only a few words everywhere, is stained with autobiographical oil paint, which is said to project Wenzhen's growth experience in the south when she was a teenager. Born in Hunan and raised in Shenzhen, she is an excellent storyteller of the local stories of foreigners, but contrary to ordinary writers, she has been wandering the stories at the end of her feet for many years, and rarely touches the experience of those starting points. "Maybe it's because those experiences are too precious to me", Wen zhen thought about it and said, too close to herself, it will be a bit "close to homesickness", very afraid of being wasted because of bad writing. Looking back now, she feels more and more that this "timidity" is right, the time distance of observation when she was young is not far enough, and the writing must be carried all the way with the catharsis of the unfinished emotions of adolescence, and after many years of precipitation, with a completely adult mentality, she will turn back to see, and the essence of life will come out of the water.
New genres and new themes make Wenzhen have some new "not easy hands". She was revising it over and over again, writing a hundred thousand words and repeating it, constantly rewriting the beginning, so that there were many scattered scraps in the computer. Just like the phrase "always walking on thin ice" in the circle of friends, Wenzhen admitted that she has always been a "less confident" person in writing, although she has been repeatedly urged by the editor, she always feels that she has to pass the hurdle in her heart before she can really take it out. Just like in the past seventeen years, step by step, she adjusted her rhythm at different nodes, waiting for the fruit to naturally fall in her hands, waiting for the new track to naturally extend forward.