This month I would like to introduce a new book, a long-form non-fiction work co-initiated and completed by two media people, and the title of the book gives the protagonists directly: Dr. Zhang and Dr. Wang. Of course, it is not only them who write about them, but also their respective families, from the generation of the Kwantung generation to the generation of zero and zero, not only the history of the family, but also the place where these generations live together - Shenyang - in the past century, especially the social changes in the past four decades of reform and opening up. The latter is often simply summarized as a "wave of layoffs" or "urban transformation", but when it comes to each family and each individual, its impact and performance are bound to be very different.
"Dr. Zhang and Dr. Wang", Yi Jianfeng, Yang Ying/, Wenhui Publishing House/New Classic Amber, November 2021 edition
The slices provided in this book are two junior high school classmates of one of the authors, Yi Jianfeng. They stand on the opposite side of the popular stereotype of the status quo in the Northeast: knowledgeable, rich, status, and, without a doubt, successful people in the secular sense. As self-employed people born in the 1970s, how they "swim against the current" and complete the so-called class jump in the tide of overall sinking is the main thread of discussion in this book. A very important reason is that they all have "scholarship boys" traits. Smart, hardworking, admitted to the medical university in the era when the academic qualifications had not yet depreciated, and then obtained this professional status, and got a comparable opportunity to marry and start a family, after "living like this for thirty years", they have firmly stood on the steps of the middle class.
When comparing the acceptance of military culture in Beijing and Shenyang, the author argues that unlike the Beijing compound-style loyalty and courage, Shenyang has an extra layer of emphasis on skills because of its working class characteristics. The children of workers choose the medical profession in large part because they have a similar core: compared with business or law, being a doctor is more like "eating by ability", whether it is Dr. Wang's thyroid surgery or Dr. Zhang's neurosurgery, they need a kind of "craftsman nature of working class craftsmen". What confirms this is that their careers were invariably started with the help of their mothers, and Dr. Zhang's choice of military medical university happened to be a military plus skill double insurance in the 1980s.
Speaking of mothers, I have to mention my father first. The father of the two families shared a masculine appearance, honest and responsible, but also meant that there was no opinion, nothing to do, in the Northeast dialect called "a labor of the gods". Since its liberation, Northeast China, as a socialist industrial powerhouse, has been solidly labeled as the "eldest son of the republic", a pressure-filled honorary title. However, in the process of state-owned enterprise reform, industrial transformation, and workers' layoffs, a generation of men belonging to the "eldest son of the republic" gradually fell off the horse and became a group of "lost fathers" who could not smile into the new century - in film and television or text works, we have seen more such images, they have lost their old lives, lost their sense of existence, and maintained some hobbies that are not taken seriously, such as Dr. Zhang's father loves to read idle books. As the author puts it, "The failed father is indeed related to the failed city, and the role of the failed father is part of the failure of the urban transformation called Shenyang."
As with any deindustrialization city, the service industry can bring new jobs to the city, and these opportunities are often obtained by women first, not only because of the gender distinction of the service industry, but more importantly, the adaptability and initiative of women in the northeast in finding self-help ropes, and then they will drive the whole family to save themselves. Historically, the northeast is the area where women are the fastest to get rid of their families and enter the workplace after liberation, and the 38 Hotel is a more famous example. The working women in this land are like a high-speed spinning top, the family workplace grasps both hands, and can fully mix the resources of both sides and use them to the extreme. Including the mothers of the two doctors and their mothers-in-law/mothers-in-law, these actual family members can devote lasting enthusiasm and effort to support the possibilities of survival, whether in the period of social stability or turmoil. Dr. Wang's classmate's daughter said of the southerners that "cleverness is an outcome rather than a cause," and this logic also applies to Yang Shuxia, Dr. Zhang's mother. She likes to say "destiny" and "nobleman", and also likes to say that the success of her children is inherited from her own genes, which the author calls The Chrisma-type personality. From the interviews, I constantly felt the wisdom and nervousness of Yang Shuxia: trying her best to fight for a better life and carefully maintaining it. With this effort, she laid a clear future for her two sons and one daughter. There is a scene that is very cruel, in the case of the eldest brother entering civil aviation, the second brother studying medicine, and the family's economic conditions are not so embarrassing, Yang Shuxia still chose a civil aviation college for her daughter who studied experimentally in the province, because of stability and "not afraid of no work". Sure enough, after graduating, her daughter Zhang Huijuan lived a carefree life in civil aviation, with a salary several times that of an ordinary Shenyang worker — until she took the initiative to jump out of the track.
Zhang Huijuan's story has become the most real and most chest tight part I have read in this book, which of course benefits from the great understanding, respect and empathy of one of the authors, Yang Ying, for women of the same era. In her third year of civil aviation, she decided to drop out of school and retake the exam, largely because her classmates were studying at prestigious universities. So the family rushed to stop it overnight, including the second brother who studied medicine, and also wrote a letter to persuade him, although the letter was not sent. Zhang Huijuan's first resistance failed. After more than a decade of living a quiet and prosperous life, Zhang Huijuan, who is still unmarried and still worried about the path of overseas settlement of the famous university - elite occupation - overseas settlement that belongs to the provincial experimental students, cannot accept the life package arranged by her mother. Her second revolt succeeded. Quitting her job, learning languages, and going to Canada alone, but this brave and admirable decision did not bring her an ideal new life, thirty-five-year-old Zhang Huijuan recognized reality in a foreign country, gave up her studies instead of opening a grocery store, married and had children with not very good brand college students, and eventually became an ordinary housewife. This story is true, brave and cruel, compared to the step-by-step "scholarship boys", Zhang Huijuan has won a hand for herself, although it has not achieved the "leap" she imagined. Moreover, after having children, she seems to be more and more like her mother.
When the author wrote this part of Zhang Huijuan, he deliberately crossed her with Dr. Wang's wife, Li Li, because it was like this: "When I put them together and write them, I always feel that there are some mysterious correlations here." Li Li was free when she filled in the college entrance examination, she could go wherever she wanted, but she did not care so much about her opinions, believing in the importance of traditional families to her, so she prepared for marriage early... Li Li and Zhang Huijuan are of equal age and are both very smart. But they seem to have made different choices at every critical moment. ”
Going abroad and going south, for the generations in the book, are "lighthouses" that are constantly changing positions. Dr. Zhang's uncle, seizing the opportunity, changed from a song and dance troupe actor to a businessman who dared to be a pioneer and moved abroad early. Li Li and Zhang Huijuan have also worked hard to go abroad. At the same time, Dr. Zhang and Dr. Wang often take the initiative to mention the south in their stories, which is a south where reality and imagination are mixed, it is more transparent, more practical, and more independent, unlike the north, which talks about relationships and human feelings everywhere. But like pulling a sweet potato, they yearn for the south, but they can't pull their legs out of their families and local society, and unconsciously, they spend half their lives in the same place. And the next generation in the story, the daughters also look forward to the south, but also with practical actions to adapt to the south, and grew up in the era of rapid development of the motherland they disenchanted the matter of going abroad. (Dr. Wang's daughter does not understand her father and sees studying abroad as an unpatriotic sign.) What about the North, the North that was left behind, the North that was neither abroad nor the South, what kind of place would it become?
Stills from the documentary "Iron West"
The first time I went to Shenyang was in the summer, born in a small southern city, I sat in a taxi and exclaimed to my Shenyang classmates, this is obviously a metropolis. He said, no. Elevated, overpassed, vast buildings in the distance and the SEEMINGly bustling CBD up close, this is completely different from the Northeast shaped by stereotypes. In the book, the author also raises this confusion, obviously it is the first place to complete urbanization, the largest number of industrial workers, why in recent years is remembered is similar to the two-person transfer of the local symbol? Think of many provincial cities that have been there, all of them are the same, as the place with the most financial and material resources in the province, these cities and the appearance of the north, Shanghai and Guangzhou look no different, there should be some urban landscapes, even more luxurious, more domineering, but carefully inquire, the average salary is not high, the real estate bubble is very large... That summer, Shenyang classmates standing in the middle of a large shopping mall also said to me, who do you think will come to consume? Perhaps it is in these cities that the modern landscape and per capita GDP are slowly tearing apart, and the class is also slowly tearing apart. The world is folded and the walls are impenetrable.
In this book, we see slices of two successful doctors in Shenyang University Hospital, but what about the other slices? The descendants of northeasterners who have emigrated to other places, doctors and nurses in private hospitals and community hospitals, patients who have to wait for a week if they can't register their numbers, drivers and security guards who quietly become registered scalpers, residents who still live in the old buildings of Wuai Market, workers who have not been abroad for generations and have not been to the south, where are these slices, Kuaishou Douyin, or the local station sketches and people's livelihood news? Hopefully, they, or us, will be present in more narration, proactively, patiently. Of course, we can also choose to refuse to be slices and live only in a narrative facing ourselves.