Qilu Evening News Qilu one-point reporter Li Xuxu
Zhu Ruixiang's books were piled up in 4 piles at home, one in the yard, one in the building, one on the left side of the door inside the house, and one on the right side. About 7,000 books, arranged by earthy yellow wrapping paper and white seals, are arranged into regular rectangles. This is the fruit of more than 20 years of his labor.
Zhu Ruixiang is an 81-year-old native of Anqiu, Weifang. He taught himself photography, PS, sound recording, video editing, typesetting and publishing books. With a wealth of knowledge reserves, from 2015 to 2018, 5 books have been published. The dialect of his hometown has also been the subject of Zhu Ruixiang's research for many years, and Zhu Ruixiang has compiled the dialect data collected over the past 20 years into a book, which he intends to publish before the Spring Festival.
People give nicknames "Jack-of-all-trades"
Although he was over eighty years old, Zhu Ruixiang's body bones were still very strong. During the New Year's Day holiday, he and the teachers and students of some colleges and universities in Shandong who came to seek teaching talked about 6 o'clock in the evening from 8 a.m., and for four days, Zhu Ruixiang only said that there was some heat in the room, but there was nothing uncomfortable on his body.
Zhu Ruixiang's family lives in an alley in Anqiu City, Weifang, and he has lived alone in this small courtyard since his wife moved to a nursing home. Walking into the courtyard, the narrow courtyard and the mansion, the two-bedroom and one-hall rural cottage, filled with Zhu Ruixiang's piles of books and dim lights, were somewhat messy.
January 3 is a sunny day, the afternoon sun is still bright, the bright xiazi room on the west side of a tea table, Zhu Ruixiang while spreading tea, while letting the reporter on the sofa on the north side, he took out a maza to sit down, brewed a pot of black tea for the reporter, and boiled a pot of green tea for himself.
Zhu Ruixiang said that there are not many friends who come to visit the house on weekdays, except for the visits of children and grandchildren on holidays and the small gathering of several friends who study dialects together, this cottage is often only by himself.
Zhu Ruixiang is either sorting through the data or sitting in front of the computer to work, unless interrupted by the occasional ringing phone. These calls come from different sources and have only one purpose: to ask something.
Sure enough, around three o'clock in the afternoon, a phone call came in. "Teacher Zhu, I want to open a factory and ask about environmental protection." Zhu Ruixiang picked up the mobile phone and chatted with the other party for 10 minutes before putting the phone down. Zhu Ruixiang said that there are often friends or people who do not know people who call to ask questions, asking questions such as anqiu rare animal and plant species, anqiu ancient skills, intangible cultural heritage declarations, dialects and other issues.
It turned out that Zhu Ruixiang had a nickname, called Anqiu "Baishitong", and his friend Zhang Weirong explained that because Zhu Ruixiang's knowledge is extensive, everyone likes to call him if they have any questions, and the nickname comes from this.
From 2015 to 2018, Zhu Ruixiang has published 5 books, covering many aspects of Anqiu's common animals and plants, folk skills, old-style architecture, cultural opera and so on, which is Zhu Ruixiang's accumulation of more than 20 years.
210,000 photos were taken in 15 years
Compared with the praise of his friends, Zhu Ruixiang's evaluation of himself is "an authentic farmer." He said he had been dealing with the land all his life.
In the 1990s, after the road construction land in the village was requisitioned, Zhu Ruixiang left the land where he had lived for more than 30 years and worked as a technician in the village-run enterprise. In order to subsidize his family, in his spare time, he went outside to do odd jobs: construction workers, mechanics, sheet metal workers... Zhu Ruixiang said: "When I go out to do odd jobs, I usually see how others get it, and then learn it myself. In Zhu Ruixiang's view, one of the reasons for his relatively rich knowledge reserves is from these trivial and diverse life experiences.
Outside of work, Zhu Ruixiang also has his own hobbies. As a young man, he was a photography enthusiast who traveled the streets of Anqiu with a film camera he had bought with the money he had worked so hard to save. After retiring from the factory, Zhu Ruixiang invested all his time in his hobbies. Since 2000, Zhu Ruixiang began to photograph the flora and fauna of Anqiu, and the library has been expanded to 210,000. Zhu Ruixiang compiled the pictures taken over the years into a book and published a children's book called "Knowing the Plants and Animals Around You".
The original intention of publishing the book comes from his life experience, Zhu Ruixiang said that he saw that some children already had no idea where the food they ate came from, and the books on the market rarely mentioned this, so Zhu Ruixiang had the idea of publishing a popular science animal and plant children's book. In the book, the growth process of each animal and plant is shown very clearly in photographs: budding, flowering, fruiting, application in life. Zhu Ruixiang wants to inspire children to ask questions and form the concept of plant protection through the association between pictures.
People in the village know Zhu Ruixiang's photography hobbies, sometimes when they go to the ground to see a plant that they have never seen, they use their mobile phones to take pictures of Zhu Ruixiang and tell him where the plants are, Zhu Ruixiang will put on his back camera and go to confirm the clues provided by the villagers.
The shooting process is not always very smooth, and there are often some unexpected "small situations". Zhu Ruixiang recalled: "The shooting of the whole growth process of a plant often lasts for three or four years, sometimes before a certain stage can be photographed, the flowers have been thanked; sometimes the plants have been dug up or chewed by sheep, and it is impossible to shoot again." ”
Later, Zhu Ruixiang came up with a method - to raise plants. If you want to photograph a certain plant, dig it up, take it home, raise it in a flower pot, and you can "shoot with peace of mind." "Once, Zhu Ruixiang found a wild flower on the side of the road, and when he came back, he found that it was an uncommon ghost needle grass, because he was afraid of being dug up by others in the middle of the night, Zhu Ruixiang was stunned to go seven or eight miles away in the middle of the night to dig the grass back.
In the past, Zhu Ruixiang always took his wife to take pictures together, and after his wife entered the nursing home, this kind of time can only become a memory. Zhu Ruixiang, who was born in 1941, although he was in good health, had also entered his old age. Zhu Ruixiang did not think much of this, and he said that he would continue to work until he could not do it.
Dialect squad of 7 people
Zhu Ruixiang will do more than just take pictures. He has many skills, photography, PS, video editing, recording, typesetting, all of which Zhu Ruixiang taught himself after the age of 66. He was particularly interested in the protection of dialects. Zhu Ruixiang believes that the things of the old ancestors should be left behind.
Zhu Ruixiang is also not very optimistic about the prospects of dialect protection, and he believes that in a few decades, the Anqiu dialect will disappear. "The vernacular (dialect) looks useless, but it is actually a local culture that should not be allowed to disappear. If the Anqiu dialect disappears, then anqiu folk song, minor key and other cultures will also disappear. ”
Since 1999, Zhu Ruixiang began to study the intangible cultural heritage of Anqiu phonetics. In order to protect the Anqiu dialect, in the past 10 years, Zhu Ruixiang often came to various villages in Anqiu with a mobile phone, found some elderly people, recorded their voices in the form of "pulling and singing songs", and asked the Anqiu people who had the ability to write articles to ask them to write articles in dialects.
At a gathering of friends, Zhu Ruixiang met Zhang Weirong, who had a comradeship with him, and Zhang Weirong had worked in the government department before retiring and had always attached great importance to the protection of the dialect in his hometown.
The two hit it off.
Under the organization of Zhang Weirong, they set up a seven-person editorial board with the intention of publishing a book on the pronunciation of the Anqiu dialect and preserving this phonetic intangible cultural heritage in the form of a book. So far, they have collected forty or fifty articles about the Anqiu dialect, thousands of audio recordings.
Zhu Ruixiang's rich knowledge reserves and dialect materials attracted the attention of Professor Yue Lijing of the College of Literature of Shandong University, who has been engaged in dialect research for many years and is responsible for the dialect collection of Anqiu and Changle in shandong province, and has come to Weiwei many times to communicate with Zhu Ruixiang and conduct dialect investigation work.
During the New Year's Day holiday in 2021, Zhu Ruixiang helped some teachers and students of Shandong universities to collect local dialects in Anqiu. Professor Yue told reporters that the protection of dialects is not easy, for Zhu Ruixiang's persistence of folk dialect lovers, Professor Yue Lijing is very appreciative, she said: "Like Teacher Zhu we are still the first time to meet, the information sorted out is very detailed, ask everything to know." After the investigation, Zhu Ruixiang shared the relevant materials and several books he had compiled with Professor Yue, and agreed to discuss dialect-related issues next time.
In more than 20 years, Zhu Ruixiang has published a total of 5 books, and the highest-selling children's books have sold 4,000 copies, Zhu Ruixiang frankly said: "These years are the first book sold, and the second book is sold with the money from the first book." Zhu Ruixiang said that with the 70,000 sponsored by the enterprise plus the 50,000 from his own pocket, the publishing cost of the "Anqiu Dialect Pronunciation" that is being edited and proofread has been enough, and it can be published before the Spring Festival.
This book is not the end, and then Zhu Ruixiang also wants to sort out and publish the pronunciation of more than 5,000 anqiu commonly used words, covering glyphs, traditional characters, colloquialisms, words, phrases, etc., and attach dozens of words to each word to explain.
Given past experience, the book sales are not high, and it is not profitable, Zhu Ruixiang still said that unless he can't do it, he will not stop, he said: "I just want to leave something." ”
On the afternoon of January 3, Zhang Weirong came to Zhu Ruixiang's home for a small gathering, and the two of them discussed a dialect pronunciation.
"Watch a movie."
"Don't get your tongue too hard, watch a movie."
"Watching a movie?"
"Yes!"
Just in response to that sentence: "A poor food, a scoop of drink, in the dark alley, people are overwhelmed by their worries, and they will not change their happiness." ”