Text/Yangcheng Evening News reporter Zhu Shaojie
At the end of the year and the beginning of the year, major domestic publishing and cultural institutions have launched their own annual book lists and lists, among which Shenzhen writer Lin Zhao's second novel "Tide Map" has been frequently selected and attracted much attention.
Three years after his debut, Lin Has won several literary awards with his only two novels. But before the publication of the feature-length Virgo "Flowing Brook" in 2019, she hadn't actually done any writing-related work.
January 16, 2022 Yangcheng Evening News A8
In her self-prepared profile, Lin said that she was "born in 1984 in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, graduated from the Department of Chinese, engaged in real-world game design, sold flowers, and planted trees." ”
But after entering the 21st century, she did not write a word for more than a decade. From the beginning of her writing to the time she became a professional writer, it was an unexpected encounter.
In 2018, while Lin Was recuperating at home due to illness, her mother found a hard disk while cleaning up her belongings, which stored a novel she created 13 years ago, that is, the first draft of her long debut work "Flowing Creek". This unexpected gain seems to inspire her to return to the road of literary creation.
After three or four months of rewriting, Lin Di completely subverted the "affectionate" tone that originally belonged only to adolescence and replaced it with an ironic tone, because it was more suitable for her thinking about life or fate when she was old. In the end, "Flowing Stream" is like a suspicious monologue, recounting the girl Zhang Zao'er born in a small coastal town in Guangdong, growing up in a violent family relationship, circling between a wandering lover, a broken mother, and a violent father, and a sensitive girl who becomes a murderer.
In Stream Stream, the reader can easily capture Nabokov's shadow. Lin read Lolita twenty times and said that he was the kind of reader who was "willing to pay tribute to Nabokov anytime and anywhere." Like Nabokov, she played a multi-voice narrative, writing amazing rhetoric such as "the wind kisses the water for a long time, making it old and wrinkled."
The name Lin Zhao has thus attracted the attention of professional and general readers. In fact, this pen name is also related to her hometown.
"棹" is a polysyllabic word that refers to both oars and boats, as well as "table". Lin Explained that "棹" was a fairly common word in the past, and it also appeared frequently in ancient poems, such as "the hidden song returns to the far side" and "the white bird flies to the wind full of trees"; while the old Cantonese word "棹忌" ("taboo") comes from people on the water, containing a reminder of "don't rush the oar".
In the coastal areas of Guangdong, boats used to be the most important means of transportation, but with the change of the times, boats and the word "棹" have gradually faded. Therefore, in her opinion, this word is closely related to her hometown and the past, and there is a sense of closeness.
If "Flowing Stream" weaves a huge web of minds about private memories, then the new work "Tidal Map" continues to grow on the ground in the land of Lingnan, facing far away and going back to the depths of history.
The novel uses a Kafka-like setting to take the reader on a journey through the 19th-century Pearl River Delta, featuring a 19th-century female frog.
In the 1820s, scottish naturalist H traveled the world and landed in Guangzhou, where he captured the giant frog in a local reed bamboo forest. This strange giant frog from the Pearl River water people,to the Guangzhou Thirteen Elements, and then to be raised in the Macao Rare Garden, and after several turns, and finally returned to the ocean of animism, it feels the new knowledge of the world, sees the sentient beings of the four seas, and experiences the joys and sorrows of the world.
The creation of "Tidal Map" came from an encounter, and in 2017, Lin Zhao flipped through the album and encountered a watercolor butterfly. Key inspirations came at the end of 2018:
The first is the 1824 Cantonese-English dictionary "Tongshang Zihui", which "is undoubtedly a dialect ecological tank, a ghost box, in which the most vigorous and powerful words break out of the shell, screaming, coercing me to open up a period of time and space for them to dominate";
The second is a series of "Chinese trade paintings" collections, which direct her attention to Chinese and foreign painters in the 19th century, including the Guangzhou Guan brothers, who had a profound influence on Chinese export paintings, George Chanali, who left a portrait of the Pearl River trade port, Auguste Borges, who sensationalized the Parisian high society and cultural circles with the painting collection "China and the Chinese", and more paintings floating around the world... "The author dilutes the paint with time and shade to make the Pearl River have an eternal face."
Starting from the album, Lin Zhao embarked on a journey of "tracing the origins" of the Pearl River and Guangzhou. In the summer of 2019, Lin Zhao watched people coming and going on the Thirteen Elements Road in Guangzhou, walking slowly along the bank of the Huadi River. She took a ferry back and forth, from the Xidi Pier to the former Henan Island, from Huangsha to Jinshazhou... But she feels that even with rubber tires and digital maps, it is still difficult to traverse the Pearl River.
Because to understand this thousand-year-old city, it is not enough to rely on the present. Lin Said in a creative talk written by Harvest magazine, which first published this work for her:
We traveled through the "Inner City" and "West City" and bred a new stratum, which is the product of the "Guangzhou Chengfang Zhi" (Huang Foyi) and Guangzhou in 2019, or the liquid sandwich between the two. Thanks to the "Guangdong Customs Chronicle" (Liang Tingfeng), "Guangdong Thirteen Elements Examination" (Liang Jiabin), "Guangzhou Trade" (Fan Daike) and other works, I have overlooked a kind of "Thirteen Elements", a mirage.
Critics believe that Cantonese literature, which has long been set in Guangdong, seems to be on the edge of the literary field, and the significance of "Tide Map" is precisely to impact the past stereotypes and let readers see new possibilities in southern literature.
【Interview】
Lin Zhao
When we renew growth, the world renews growth
Yangcheng Evening News: "Tide Map" shows the Lingnan where you grew up. When familiar things become the object of narration, how to break through this familiarity, how to discover the angles and details of "seeing without seeing"?
Lin Zhao: The history of the earth is more than 4 billion years, the history of Homo sapiens is hundreds of thousands of years, and the city of Guangzhou is thousands of years old. We've been living for decades, and it's hard to "familiarize" ourselves with anything. J.B. Jackson once discussed the "visibility" of the landscape, proposing that this "visibility" is relative—the same object, which may be meaningless to A, is full of information in B's eyes.
Therefore, whether the object is "visible" and "visible" to what extent is closely related to the viewer's individual experience, target intention, knowledge structure, perceptual ability and other aspects. The world has always been there, we renew and grow, and our world renews and grows.
Yangcheng Evening News: In the afterword to the Tidal Chart, you listed a number of literature and studies related to Lingnan. Are these reading experiences the cause or effect of writing?
Lin: Reading is also an experience and experience, or we can call life another kind of reading. We read cities, mountains and rivers, stars, others... Reading and writing inspire and inspire each other.
Yangcheng Evening News: In the "Tide Map", you can see a wealth of local customs and historical background. What kind of preparation do you do before writing?
Lin Zhao: It depends on the specific theme. Preparation also requires something new to keep the mind curious and excited. Characters begin to live in your body early, parasitizing, growing up slowly or slowly withering. I find ways to find nutrients, supplies to the characters, and also to the world that is slowly forming.
Yangcheng Evening News: The narrator of the novel is set as a female frog. Why choose the perspective of others, women, animals?
Lin Zhao: At first, the protagonist I designed, the first-person narrator, was an overly realistic woman who lived in Guangzhou in the first half of the 19th century. But her movements will be very limited, unable to use her body and actions to push the space like the men of the same period. Until one day, it occurred to me that the protagonist could be "not human" – and the characters and perspectives were released.
Everything is in the service of the subject matter. Considering the dense water network of the Pearl River Delta and the fact that the Pearl River has eight gates into the sea, amphibians are particularly capable of being able to develop. The giant frog carries the viewpoint, carries the narrative sound, and can intervene in that particular time and space in as many ways as possible.
Wholehearted writing is a kind of "five-star happiness"
Yangcheng Evening News: You have mentioned the reading of Nabokov many times, and there is also a "learning to apply" to "Lolita" in "Flowing Stream". So have you now found your own style and creative path?
Lin Zhao: I am too inexperienced, and style is not something that should be concerned now. The first priority is to write carefully. The more the creative path, the better, "more skills do not pressure the body".
Yangcheng Evening News: Although both works are attracting much attention at the moment, it may take more courage to go from working as a worker to writing full-time. What made you decide?
Lin Zhao: After the age of thirty-five, I gradually had a feeling of "beginning to understand". The time node that everyone "understands" is different, and in my case, this node is almost thirty-five years old. Courage, confidence, security, encouragement and support from family, teachers, and friends, these elements form a strong and solid foundation, and when we encounter specific opportunities, transformation is possible.
It is fortunate to be able to make this transition around the age of thirty-five. Write with all your heart, just write, and I've described this on other occasions as "five stars happy" (five stars out of 10). Writing is like a core, everything revolves around it, it is in its own order, and the music is played in ensembles.
Yangcheng Evening News: Your text uses a lot of Cantonese, will you consider the experience of readers in other regions?
Lin Zhao: My main consideration is how to complete the novel, how to realize each specific plan, for example, how to virtualize Guangzhou in the first half of the 19th century? In what ways can we mimic the local situation at that time? Dialects are a key factor in achieving your goals.
Yangcheng Evening News: Many of today's young writers start with short novellas, and your current works are all novels. This can be no small challenge, how do you think about it?
Lin Zhao: Each style has its own temperament, and writers also have their own "stylistic comfort zones". The most critical difference between short stories and long stories is not in length, but in the inherent "temporality". Short stories are harder for me to control.
Yangcheng Evening News: Your ongoing third work is also rooted in Lingnan. Self-experience and the surrounding environment are important sources for a writer. How do you want to maintain your creativity?
Lin Zhao: Exercise. Be kind to curiosity. write.
Source | Yangcheng Evening News Yangcheng Pie
Editor-in-charge | Deng Qiong