Moderator of the 020 issue | Dong Ziqi
New Year's Eve, are you home? We've talked about going to the city before, and going to the city and returning home are two sides of the same coin — people who come to the city always have their hometowns behind their backs, and those who are already in the city may have nostalgia for another place.
Zhao Benshan's film "Leaves Fall back to the Roots" (2007) is a black comedy film about migrant workers carrying dead workers all the way from Shenzhen to their hometown in the southwest. No matter how many strange obstacles there are in the way, such as insufficient tolls, car robberies, slaughtered meals, and being told by the police not to transport the body privately, it cannot weaken his will to "return the leaves to the roots" of his co-workers. I think this movie pushes the "homecoming" of a migrant worker to the impossible extreme: the person who wants to go home is dead, his home is no longer in place because of planning and construction, and the way home is repeatedly frustrated and laughed. Also telling the story of returning home, Xu Zheng and Wang Baoqiang's "People on the Road" shows the unfortunate journey of the city boss to meet the countrymen, and does not show the strong intention of returning home to find home such as "Leaves Falling back to the roots".
Stills of "Leaves Falling back to the Roots" (Source: Douban)
Why do you want to go home so much? I don't think this is a custom feature film showing cremation or burial, on the contrary, the dilemma faced by the character of Zhao Benshan- whether to carry the dead bodies of co-workers to find a home, is a story that will only happen after the tide of entering the city. We did not see them meeting and working on the construction site, but we saw the figure of returning home against the current after the end of the work.
From this movie, we can also think of a more fashionable film, such as the Taiwanese TV series "The Cultivation of Ordinary Women" (2019). The heroine of working life in Taipei is almost forty years old and suddenly finds that her life seems to be unable to last at all, so she briefly returned to her hometown of Tainan, originally prepared to live in Tainan, but the small stay became a permanent residence, taipei life and Tainan memories are constantly in contrast in the series: the lights in Taipei's office are miserable, the boss's requirements are unreasonable, the boyfriend and his mother are extremely controlling; the memories of Tainan as a child are covered with gentle warm colors, and the grandparents and grandparents, including the children next door, are so real and loving. The days of returning to Tainan are like a journey of self-discovery, and the heroine finally finds it difficult to give up the love of the countryside, or choose not to return to taipei that pays attention to efficiency and speed rather than love and warmth. The heroine who made such a choice was praised by the critics as cool, brave, and dared to face her true self.
Stills from "The Cultivation of Ordinary Women" (2019) (Source: Douban)
Many people living in the metropolis also have this yearning to return to a more familiar and more comfortable environment, even if it seems that life is not achieved in the eyes of the outside world. But I still reserve a little question: can such a homecoming really be at ease in the end? Is rebuilding family relationships the best solution a wandering person can think of?
Returning to the hometown is also a profound Chinese literary image, and the return of the literati to the field and the return of the shi is more like revisiting the long-lost ideal state of life. When commenting on Tao Yuanming, the scholar Dai Jianye pointed out that this poet is not as peaceful and happy as people think, and Tao Yuanming's real life is often filled with rich and poor: the life of deprivation is not the most unbearable, and what is more difficult to digest is the gap between the current poverty and the future that should be there. It is not easy to return to the hometown in simplicity, and the poet enjoys the idyllic pastoral life while worrying about the harvest, "often afraid of frost and thunder, scattered with grass." ”
I'm home, are the fig trees in my hometown still there?
Pan Wenjie: There was a thing I couldn't understand before, why the end of "The Lord of the Rings" was that Sam took a breath and opened the door of the house and said, "I'm home", this is not too bland compared to the previous vigorous adventure, and then it occurred to me that many adventure stories may be based on Odysseus, first working outside, and then going home after a lot of hardships. It's a bit like a song, no matter how passionate it is, and it has to return to the main note at the end to give people the feeling of consummation. Before the running activity, I heard Bi Feiyu say: "A writer can only write two books in his life, one is how to leave home, and the other is how to go home. This "home" may refer to the house, the hometown, or it can be a cultural form. When I was young, I wanted to escape, and when I was older, I began to look for my roots, which is what I have seen in many elders. Homecoming in this sense seems premature to me. The family is the smallest unit of culture, and leaving home can be away from some habitual, deep-rooted ideas, reflect on the set of things you are familiar with, and thus reconstruct yourself, and this process is still in progress. When it comes to the return of the flesh, some are "rich and noble do not return to their hometown, such as the night walk of brocade", to contribute to the construction of bridges and roads in their hometowns, but more and more young people seem to be just because they have no other choice.
Xu Luqing: As a resident with limited experience in big cities, I haven't had enough moments of boredom with the city to disenchant it, but it's not so little that I never want to go back to my hometown. The shoe shine masters in Shanghai don't speak English and don't have a coffee time, and most workers in Shanghai can only see old bungalows on weekends on a day trip to the French Concession. When one-third of the monthly salary and rent can't sleep one-third of the time, and even when I have to be asked if it is 310 (the first three digits of the Shanghai ID card), I will start to question the old slogan of "the city makes life better".
Sometimes I chatted with the security guard downstairs and found that our city boredom moments were very similar, concentrated in the relationship with the landlords, in the investigation of whether it was a local or a foreigner, in the distance between the home at the end of the subway station and the dizzy city center. However, the difference between us is that my second-tier city hometown still has reasonable job opportunities, public facilities and social security, and I am a person who can still go back, while his rural hometown in Henan can no longer find a labor force under the age of forty, and he does not even have a way to return to his hometown. Paul Coelho's shepherd boy pursues a lifetime and eventually finds that the treasure is under the fig tree in the church of his hometown, but more people are in the situation that the fig tree in his hometown has long been cut down. So I think that the people who can flash the idea of returning home in the tired moments of the city are lucky, which shows that their hometown is not so bad.
The Shanghai style shown in the movie "Love Myth", the grandfather buys fruit with a baguette, and the shoemaker drinks coffee
Lin Ziren: Returning to home is a more grand and far-reaching cultural phenomenon than simply returning to home, which is reflected in many aspects of popular culture, and the first two years when Plum Ziqi became popular made me feel this way, and I also wrote a review at that time to discuss why homesickness is a modern disease. Homecoming can be generally summarized as a return to a more retro and simple (so it seems to many people to be more pure) way of life, in my opinion, "wild luxury" hotels, organic food, craftsmen's handmade, rural life narratives, and even the current pursuit of "national style" and "national tide", in fact, are some sense of homecoming. Returning home is a spiritual need that comes from the essence of human nature, and this process can also make people burst out with a lot of creativity - Tao Yuanming's real life of returning to his hometown may have all kinds of unsatisfactory, but his idyllic poems have been passed down to this day, touching generations of Chinese literary readers - but an equally worthy question is that the root of people's impulse to return home is dissatisfaction with real life, what is that dissatisfaction? I previously heard art historian Cao Xingyuan talk about "what young people who are keen on national style want to pursue" on a podcast program, and her sentence is quite thought-provoking:
"If a group of young people, or people of a certain age group, collectively embrace a certain cultural phenomenon, it means that there is something in the current cultural life that they want to reject but cannot say." When young people embrace 'ancient', they also contain an avoidant mentality towards the present. ”
The wave of homecomings associated with high housing prices, young people who are in a dilemma
Xu Luqing: I feel that there are two modes of the current "homecoming tide": one is to return to the hometown from the big city, which is a smaller city, county seat, or rural area; the other is to move from the city to the countryside, but the countryside here is not necessarily the hometown, it may also be a place with beautiful scenery or pleasant climate. Both of these ways of "returning home" are becoming popular.
Most of the young people in the Douban "Bye-bye First-Tier Cities" group are aimed at provincial capitals closer to home, such as Chengdu, Hangzhou or Xi'an. "Lying flat" and "not rolling up" are the keywords that often appear in this group. Social problems such as the tense work model, overtime, high housing prices, and the solidification of social classes in the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou, make more and more people want to withdraw from competition, and the tide of returning to the country against the process may also be that people begin to reflect on the one-dimensional concept of success, and consider life from more angles. My mentality in the past few years has also changed from yearning for the central city to beginning to questioning the simple dichotomy between the center and the periphery. There are countless dimensions to the criterion for judging the place of residence, and real-life people, in addition to considering economic development and backwardness, political first-line and eighteen-line, will also care about the details of climate, friends, local culture and natural phenology. For example, I have always longed for the cities in the southwest region, and I always feel that there are abundant vegetation, diverse ecology, and a sense of distance from modern life. Of course, this is also most likely a kind of inland gaze.
Douban bye bye first-tier city group
Another trend of returning to the countryside is that people move from the city to the countryside, starting a rural life that is completely different from the logic of urban life, doing handicrafts, growing vegetables, and embracing nature. Such motifs often appear in Japanese dramas, such as "The New Life of the Wind" in which the heroine lives a stable and boring life in a company in Tokyo, and after waking up from a fainting, she begins to reflect on her life, decides to quit her job and start her life again in the countryside. "Bread and Soup and Good Weather for Cats" is also the story of the big city resigning and returning home to open a small shop. These dramas with Japanese filters healed a large number of urban middle-class audiences and created their imagination of small town and rural life. In fact, as Wen Jie said, small towns and rural life also has a conservative and repressive side, a few months ago Douban had a post criticized by many people, entitled "Why did I choose a low-desire life in a mountain village?" The rural life depicted by the author in it carries the filter of the urban elite and is also out of the vision of the locals. That kind of rural life has no mud, no poverty, no complex and traditional human relations, only leisure and romance.
Jiang Yan: Leaving the big city and choosing to return to your hometown or some other place that looks idyllic and quaint, there are actually many practical problems to face. For example, for most people, there are still livelihood considerations, I have a friend who chose to return to his hometown two years ago, but he did not find a suitable job in a year. After working in a company with a relatively mature and developed operating system, you will find that the same post setting or operation mode in small counties is often very non-standard, of course, the income difference is also very large, and whether that part can be accepted and adjusted is also a question mark.
Lin Ziren: I have consulted the comments related to the Douban hot discussion incident "Low Desire Life in Mountain Villages" and seen an article in the "Surging Thought Market" that sorts out the history of the wave of Young Chinese people returning to their hometowns. The article pointed out that as early as 2010, "escape from the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou" was selected as one of the "top ten real estate hot words" that year, and it was also in that year that the housing prices in first-tier cities rose steadily, making many young people working hard in first-tier cities (do you remember the name "ant tribe"? For the first time, the idea of leaving germinated. In my impression, there was a "Yunnan fever" during that time, and many people went to Kunming and Dali to settle down.
Dali Erhai (Image source: Visual China)
But then there was the "reverse return" – many young people who returned to their hometowns or settled in lower-tier cities found that "escaping from the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou" did not necessarily mean settling down physically and mentally. In more economically backward regions, where the social fabric of traditional acquaintance societies is so complex that urban youth, who have long been accustomed to an atomized lifestyle, may not be able to adapt; fewer job opportunities and reduced incomes are also very practical problems. So the article on Douban "Why do I choose a low-desire life in a mountain village?" After it spread, didn't another Douban netizen publish an article refuting that the so-called "low-desire life in mountain villages" was just a romanticized imagination of the urban middle class to the countryside.
For now, both of these conflicting narratives exist – which may be the inevitable result of the still uneven regional development of China's urbanization process – and most young people in cities are probably caught between. I am like this myself, although my hometown is also a city with a good development momentum, my parents have been encouraging me to return to my hometown, and when I am tired, I often fantasize about the beauty of my hometown and the warmth of my relatives and friends, but I also know very well that I have to do the work I like, and I can't leave yet.
Interpersonal relationships in the township: Intimacy is also troublesome
Pan Wenjie: I can say that I am a small-town youth, and I really feel that there are many commonalities when I read "American Town" before. The book says that the town is what people want America to be, the neighborhood is harmonious, warm and friendly, but it is suffocating for people who don't need that feeling. This characteristic of it is determined by scale, and the relationship between people looks good because they don't look up and look down. This can lead to problems, for example, if you have a different opinion than most people, you may often give up your own expression. In this sense, the town is conservative and repressive. People living in larger places should look for different ways to build comfortable social relationships, and returning home may create new problems.
Jiang Yan: There is usually a middle choice between returning home and fleeing, that is, to change to a city life, for example, I recently read some of the twin-city life diaries written by Deng Anqing on Douban, and I think it is also an echo of our topic. He has lived in Beijing for many years, and in 2021 he chose to leave, go to Suzhou to buy a house and settle down, in order to get a good salary to work in Shanghai, often traveling back and forth between Suzhou and Shanghai. It feels like he's still figuring out the rhythm of his new life, whether it's more cost-effective to commute that day or stay in Shanghai for an occasional night in a homestay. In his diary, he wrote about the reasons for choosing Suzhou, and wrote about the prerequisites for choosing to be close to the train station when buying a house. You can feel the joy of finally owning his own house after years of moving and renting, and you can also feel the exhaustion of him sitting on the commuter high-speed train at night and talking to his father in his hometown on the phone.
Returning to home does make interpersonal relationships closer, and in my limited experience of staying in the countryside of Wenzhou, a friend's home, close interpersonal relationships bring a lot of convenience, but there are also inconveniences. My friend's mother is a teacher in the town, everyone knows her, and someone always keeps sending her home cooking, and I do follow a lot of light. But in the same way, close relationships can easily lead to the disappearance of a sense of boundaries. Everyone seems to care about the eyes of others, although it is only in the town, but many people have to dress up and go out again to buy a dish, so my friends and I have become the two most plainly dressed people in the town.
In fact, there is another issue related to my hometown that I am very interested in, that is, the question of "where is the hometown". As the population movement increases, many of the younger generation are constantly changing where they live. For example, Fu Shiye, a reporter in our former group, was born in his hometown of Inner Mongolia and spent his childhood time, and then because his father worked in Guangzhou, he came to Guangzhou as a teenager, went to Wuhan as an undergraduate, went to the United States as a graduate student, and came to Beijing after work. As these places of residence change, will this generation's understanding of their homeland also change?
Shinmei rather than my homeland, where is the hometown?
Ye Qing: I also have a deep feeling about what Jiang Yan said about "where is the hometown", and I changed five places in kindergarten and primary school alone: I came to Qidong from Chongqing in the first class, transferred to Shaoyang not long after, and went to Wenzhou in the third grade, during which I briefly borrowed half a year in Huili. I was born in Huili, and my memories of Chongqing, Qidong, and Shaoyang are already dappled, Wenzhou is the city where my parents live, and Chengdu is where I currently live. These cities all carry a certain stage of my life, but to say which one is my hometown, I really don't know, so that every time someone asks me where I am from, when I say Wenzhou people, I will spit on myself in my heart: I can't even say Wenzhou dialect, which Wenzhou people are you counting?
My mom, like me, has spent most of her life shuttling between different provinces. My grandfather left when I was a child, and when my grandmother left in 2018, she cried and told me, "I may rarely have the opportunity to go back to the meeting in the future, and my home is gone." "Although the word she uses is home, which is not exactly the same as her hometown, I always feel that what disappears with my grandmother is most of her beautiful associations about her hometown." What is our hometown, where we record our childhood figures, where the deepest memories of our lives occur, or the home of our parents? I was still looking for it, but home was in Wenzhou, and after my mom said that, I decided to go home and see more.
Chen Jiajing: A while ago, I read the Japanese poet Shotaro Hagiwara's "Barking Moon", which talked about the irreconcilable contradiction between the poet and his hometown. Although he lived a century after today, his experience of leaving his hometown in his youth and deep nostalgia in his later years has much in common with contemporary people.
The Vedic Moon
[Sun] written by Sakutaro Hagiwara Akira Kobakiyama
Lucida Mingmu/Beijing United Publishing Company 2021-12
Hagiwara was born in Gunma Prefecture, Japan, which at the time was a rather isolated village, and in Hagiwara's words, "everyone is a relative." The problem is that he doesn't really fit in with these relatives. As a "useless" poet, he was despised by the villagers, who were cold to him, looking at him with white eyes, spitting on his back, saying "there is an idiot walking there". Eventually, Hagiwara ran to modern Tokyo with despair and anger toward his hometown, and suddenly felt free. As Baudelaire said, "The crowd is the home of the lonely." Hagiwara does not see life in the big city as a source of stress, but rather as a place of tolerance, where people who are exhausted, people who are troubled by heaviness, and people who are lonely and lonely can find a corner. There is no need for trivial negotiations between people, and everyone thinks about different things but looks at the same sky life, which makes "everyone form a happy group with the city as the background".
However, the more he reached his twilight years, the more Hagiwara missed his hometown, but at the same time he also regarded himself as a person without a hometown, a "perpetual wanderer". He missed, of course, not the human relationships and closed environments that had once resented him, but the emotional connection he had established with the mountains and rivers of his hometown, the land, and the way of life in the countryside, which the big city could not give, but the foundation of his growth and the foundation of his original writing. He briefly returned to his hometown when his father died, but then returned to Tokyo. Because he has understood that although his hometown has a peace with nature, it is not the same as a "place of peace of mind":
"In the countryside, symbiotic with nature, leisurely and real, only eternal "time"... There is no change in the environment there. Like all ancestors, the ancestors took the same agricultural tools, used the methods of cultivation of the ancestors, and continued the same time without change. Change is disillusionment, the degeneration of country life... In the desolate nature, life in the countryside is isolated. Marriage, childbirth, and funerals all take place inside the four walls of the tribe, in a closed time and space. The village is a sad settlement, and in the depressed foothills, people tremble alone. "
Of course, the situation in today's China will be different, and the "hometown" may not always be unchanged, backward and closed. With the acceleration of urbanization, there has been a "wave of returning home", some of which are forced to retreat under pressure, and many people have indeed found that their hometown can be used as another desirable way out. But where is peace of mind? Ultimately, the question may not be about place, but about following your inner voice to find belonging.