Xiang Jing's sculpture "Chasing Fish"
◎ Dalloway
In 1997, Rainbow Shadow, who was in London, England, wrote the blockbuster work "Hungry Daughter".
In 2009, "Good Children's Flowers" came out, and at this point, the story about the hometown of Chongqing seems to be exhausted, Hongying said.
In the past ten years, Hongying, who has left her hometown, has embarked on dazzling new attempts: she has become a "mother" and begun to write children's books for her children; she has become a food writer and written the world with "chili peppers"...
In July 2021, Rainbow Shadow returned with the novel Moonlight Samurai. Interestingly, this time she was also "trapped" in London, and her hometown became a place she could not reach, and it also became a place where she could not speak.
Because of the epidemic, Rainbow Shadow lived in London for the first time for more than a year after leaving London for twenty years.
"Freedom, only when it is lost, is it precious; the hometown, only when you leave, can you understand its connotation." Hongying said that one day in the supermarket found that the place of production was Chongqing's small sharp pepper sauce, at that moment, suddenly stood still, as if the Water of the Yangtze River flooded the whole body.
The story of "Moonlight Samurai" begins at the end of the "Cultural Revolution" in 1976, telling the story of an unfinished redemption between Dou Xiaoming, a teenager in the mountain city, and the goddess Qin Jiahui. Separated by the "double" distance of time and space, Hongying completed a re-examination of her hometown.
The current Chongqing is not the Chongqing I am familiar with
But chongqing people are still
Beiqing Art Review: If you only look at the name, you may think that this is a fairy tale.
Rainbow Shadow: The story of "Moonlight Samurai" is derived from a folk song, a long time ago there was a teenager, he rode a jujube red horse, dressed in red, in the moonlight for people to fight uneven, is such a samurai. Once he saved a girl whose parents had died and rescued her from the terrible abyss, but found that the girl did not want to live, so he took her to see the river under the moonlight, to see the flowers blooming in the moonlight, which gave her hope to live.
Beiqing Art Review: Why mention the name of this novel, because it does give this novel a different temperament, but also prompts us to enter this novel, and it is completely different from the earlier works such as "Hungry Daughter", "Moonlight Samurai" is some kind of more poetic existence, and the strong physical "presence" seems to be withdrawn. Again, does Chongqing have any different feelings about the city?
Hongying: After writing the two books "Hungry Daughter" and "Good Children's Flower", I didn't want to write about Chongqing anymore, but every year when I went back, there were a lot of new stories coming in, some new people coming in, and these new people were connected with those who had been before, like my cousin, uncle, big sister. My eldest sister is now living in the hospital because of cancer, and my eldest brother-in-law's first wife is the prototype of Qin Jiahui in the novel. In real life, they are three sisters, one of whom is married to my eldest brother-in-law. I asked him not long ago where she was now, and he told me that she was still in Japan, and that all three of the sisters had gone to Japan and are still there.
So I wondered if I was going to write something more, but I didn't actually write because I was a little confused, and I was wondering if this thing was real because it was far away from me. I was born on the south bank, the No. 1 bridge is particularly far from the south bank, in 1976 In Chongqing, our south bank still belongs to a more inferior place, and the No. 1 bridge is the city central district, taking the public facilities such as the water pipe as an example, Chongqing is configured according to the region, and we may have hundreds of people sharing a water pipe on the south bank.
Beiqing Art Review: Yes, this "sense of distance" is a particularly strong feeling when reading the novel "Moonlight Samurai".
Rainbow Shadow: This is a kind of distance in space, and in time. Chongqing has the most bridges in the world, and Chongqing has the largest number of air raid shelters in the world. What those bomb shelters do, no one can imagine, is generally put by those rich people with red wine, into a wine cellar, because it is a natural refrigerator. The current Chongqing is not the Chongqing I am familiar with, but the people of Chongqing are still familiar to me. In this regard, I am writing about chongqing people, the Chongqing in my heart, and our spirit.
What impressed me the most was that in our courtyard, when I was a child in the "Cultural Revolution", because usually these people were fighting with each other and wanted each other to die, but when the Red Guards came to arrest people, all the people in the courtyard put up the gate, and each family took out the knives and iron rods at home, and everything that could be used as defense, and all stood neatly behind the gate. Why? Because they want to protect a person who is usually particularly annoying. This is the Chongqing people, you are my friend, I will insert a knife in your ribs, if you are my enemy, I would hate to kill you.
Chongqing people are particularly jianghu, and this spirit is still in Chongqing. As writers, we can peel back the reality and reconstruct the world we want, but today I have constructed the "Moonlight Samurai", which is the warmth and love that I want to keep in my ideal, an emotion between ordinary people.
Beiqing Art Review: This "sense of distance" is also reflected in the choice of your narrative perspective, and you no longer use the perspective of "I".
Rainbow Shadow: No matter what the choice of perspective, I ultimately want to write about women. In addition to Qin Jiahui, it also writes about Dou Xiaoming's mother, his later wife Su Huan, in fact, my favorite character in it is Su Huan.
Beiqing Art Review: Yes, Qin Jiahui is not much like the characters in your novels, the world of "Hungry Daughter" is very similar to the Italian writer Ferrante's Naples, they have the kind of tenacity and pungency of women born in Chongqing or the low-level society in southern China, Qin Jiahui is in today's words, it is "goddess", I don't like this word, "god" is not "human" after all.
Hongying: Why should I write about a female character like Qin Jiahui? When I was a child, my sisters were the kind of people who dared to think and dare to do, but Qin Jiahui was not. There are also some women in my memory, such as Zhang Ma, whom I wrote about, and in the depths of my memory, as soon as I opened my eyes, she was in front of me. She was a prostitute who had been bought for a few silver dollars. Before 1949, she was bought by her husband from Wuhan to Chongqing, because our entire yard was full of people on the boat, all in the crew quarters. She had no children, they had a child, and every morning she served her husband to dinner, but the slightest mistake was that her husband beat her, and he beat her in front of many people. I remember watching her husband kick her with thick leather shoes with rubber-soled shoes from a very young age, and she could do it without saying a word. Her face was all white, and I knew it hurt. Such a person has no say in the whole courtyard, nor at home, and when someone bullies me, she looks at me, and after that she will be nice to me. For example, the first book she showed me was inappropriate for children, in fact, she was illiterate, she said it was a book, I like to read, she gave it to me. I was so frightened when I saw the book that I didn't dare to read it and gave it back to her. Every time I think of this person, throughout my childhood life, a person cast a concerned and concerned gaze on me, and with practical actions to show that she is different from others. She ended up with a tragic end, hanging herself because her husband later died, and her son was unfilial to her and continued to think that she should be insulted and bullied. I was not there when she died, and my sister wrote to me that Mama Zhang had hanged herself.
As mothers, as wives, as individual women in this world, we can live very well now, but we as women, the female editors and female professors around me, they all have to be responsible for housework, they all have to worry, for parents, for children, none of them are easy, we do more work than men, but what we bear should not be only borne by women. When I wrote about Qin Jiahui, her life was already too low to be low, and in my life since I was a child, I especially hoped that someone would stand up for me. So, now I have fictionalized such a samurai.
Thirty years of feminism
I've been through about three metamorphosiss
Beiqing Art Review: When it comes to women, this is indeed a key word in your creation. In the nineties, a large number of female writers formed a peak period of feminist creation with a unique expression of feminine consciousness, including your works, and today thirty years later, from "Hungry Daughter" and "Good Children's Flower" to today's "Moonlight Samurai", I can actually see a change, worried that others will say that you have not become sharp enough?
Hongying: This issue was discussed with Xie Youshun once, which is why he said, "Only the hermaphrodite soul can carefully measure the boundaries of human nature." "I think I went through three stages: when I was a kid, I thought men were terrible, and the way they treated women was very inhuman, so I didn't want to get married or have kids when I was a kid. It was probably around my twenties, and I probably had a confrontational mentality that I never thought I would be a mother.
The second stage is probably in London when I returned to China, before I had no children. I've been thinking about this relationship between women and men, and during that time I wrote K and the Shanghai series of novels, trying to raise the issue. The problems in the world are not so easy to solve, whether I want to continue to maintain a hostile relationship with men, or to take a more lenient way of understanding myself and men. "Good Children Flower" is probably a work of this stage.
After having children, it seems that it is not so tit-for-tat, but in fact it may be more powerful... You know what I mean, right? I think the relationship between men and women is not so simple, in the end, the spirit of equality is what matters. Women's good things can not be lost, first of all, the economic status, you must have a guarantee to talk about the other. But initially, I probably wasn't like that, first I hated men, and second, I particularly liked to expose my body.
Beiqing Art Review: Yes, at that time, "body writing" I remember caused a lot of controversy in the media, and some of the rebellions had a very extreme thing in it. Now in "Moonlight Samurai", when you write about the love of the hero and heroine, I think of "The Age of Innocence", and the writing of desire seems to have entered a new stage. As a feminist who has come from that era to today, how do you see the ubiquitous female expression on today's public accounts?
Hongying: For example, Li Yinhe, I think she is particularly interesting, just from an aesthetic point of view, you will find that she is now more inclined to the way she opposed in her early years, such as the clothes she wore, her dress, and today there seems to be something that returns to the beauty of women themselves. Before as a feminist, you needed to dress up a little more neutral, like I wear high heels, maybe some people are dismissive. That is to say, don't pretend, you are what you look like, and some of the past may have been played.
Beiqing Art Review: For yourself? Will there be performances in that period?
Rainbow Shadow: We were all angry at the earliest days, because that's how the generation lived after the thaw. I wrote about Dou Xiaoming's whole wandering process, because I was particularly familiar with it, so I wrote about a group of people, one moment to go to this place, the next to that place.
Beiqing Art Review: Just like Kerouac's "On the Road". In the work "Good Children's Flower", a Chinese man who grew up in California in the 60s and experienced the liberation movement in 68 years walked together with a girl who experienced the Enlightenment in China in the 80s, and they explored the various possibilities of love, which seems very pioneering today, which is also the representative work of the "confused period" you mentioned.
Rainbow Shadow: Sartre and Beauvoir could only exist in that era, and if they had been changed to the present, they would not have been able to continue. In this day and age I think people are more concerned about our spiritual realm.
Beiqing Art Review: Speaking of the spiritual field, some of the female writers in the 1990s disappeared after a sensation, and a few years ago there was news that Wei Hui seemed to be fascinated by some kind of mysticism, and only you were still writing.
Rainbow Shadow: I'm a fiction writer. When I write things, I don't think much about anything, there are many characters in "Moonlight Samurai", they appear like flowing water, so many people seem to be no one is a bad person, there are so many people, they are particularly poor, but they are particularly happy, I write some people who live a tasteful life, that is, the kind of warm things between the neighbors and villagers.
Beiqing Art Review: Many of the Chongqing dialects used in the novel, such as "big fan", which means "big beauty"?
Rainbow Shadow: I use dialects in this novel more moderately, not as much as in the early days. Because there are also changes involved, if you go to Chongqing now, they don't speak much dialect, but pepper salt Mandarin.
Beiqing Art Review: In addition to novels, you have also written a variety of different works over the years, will you be different about different writing?
Rainbow Shadow: I think there is. Children's books are a gift to the child, a process of accompanying her to grow up, and it is also very happy to write these books; writing scripts is a job for me; when writing prose, I still enjoy it, including writing poetry, I feel particularly happy. It's a process that makes you particularly happy. But what about writing fiction? Writing a novel is a process of thinking, really thinking, because I write a novel first of all, there is a synopsis, usually one or two thousand words, just like building a house and laying the foundation, after the beating, and then I will follow the steps every day.
In my writing career, there are two scenes that I will never forget, both are new book launches: once in Beijing, I did not have any experience, the publishing house did not, found an inexplicable place, but came a lot of people, then and now is completely different, many critics who like this book are spontaneous, the media is also spontaneous; and once in Chongqing Jiefangbei Xinhua Bookstore, there are too many readers, they are like watching rock stars, especially crazy, the crowd shouted at me, you wrote our story. At that time, I told myself that as a writer, I should never write bad things in my life.
Rainbow Shadow, famous writer, screenwriter, poet, foodie. One of the representatives of Chinese feminist literature. Representative works include the long stories "Hungry Daughter", "Good Children's Flowers", "K: British Lover", "Shanghai King"; the poetry collection "I Am Also Called Sarangpo"; the children's book "Magical Boy Sangsang Series", "Midora" (four books) and so on. Six novels have been translated into more than 30 languages and published in Europe, America, Israel, Australia, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. Many works have been adapted into film and television works, among which "The Death of Shanghai" was adapted by Lou Ye into the movie "Lyceum Theatre". The long autobiographical novel "Hungry Daughter" won the 1997 Lianhe Bao Readers Best Book Award in Taiwan. "K: British Lover" was named one of the top ten books of 2002 by the British newspaper The Independent. In 2005, he won the "Roman Literature Prize" at the Italian Academy award for literature. "Good Children's Flowers" won Asia Weekly's 2009 Global Chinese Top Ten Novel Awards. In 2009, he was elected as the Chongqing City Image Promotion Ambassador by chongqing citizens.