In the fourth year of fame, Yu Xiuhua returned to her hometown, writing poems and articles as usual, and bringing goods on her small public account.
But more or less, her countryside is different from the past - in 2019, Fan Jian, the director of the documentary "The Shaky World", revisited and saw a "new countryside" that had been exquisitely transformed: small bridges flowing water, newly planted greenery. Yu Xiuhua's self-built house has also changed from the home of an ordinary peasant woman to the hospitality of a divorced female poet, and from time to time distant friends come to her for drinks and chats. She loves men and also loves to drink and is outspoken about it.
In January 2015, Yu Xiuhua's poem "Across Most of China to Sleep with You" was retweeted more than a million times on social networks, and Yu Xiuhua quickly became famous (Source: Documentary "Shaky World")
But all this seems to be difficult to bring her the heat and popularity that matched the early days of fame. "Yu Xiuhua" has been partially detached from the narrative that people initially expected and were attracted to.
That narrative was repeated in Han Shimei four years later.
A peasant woman who was only half a hundred years old, decided not to endure the oppressed life of toil, made her own cry, and even more made a female voice, and then, a bang. The crowd rejoiced: how beautiful it was for a woman to write poetry in the fields.
Han Shimei
People pay attention to the dramatic beauty of this sense of contrast, rather than what kind of specific beauty there is in a specific person.
In fact, whether horizontally or vertically, the same kind of narrative has been playing out tirelessly and consistently.
Fan Yusu, a Beijing parenting sister-in-law who wrote an autobiography in 2017; "Chen Hui, a female writer in the vegetable market in Liangnong Town (Yuyao, Ningbo)" who briefly appeared on the local news in the summer of 2021 and later stayed in Baidu Encyclopedia; and less well-known, such as a middle-aged woman in the northeast who works as a domestic worker in Beijing, widowed, cleaning rooms for others during the day and writing for herself at night...
Or Yang Benfen, who looks more "refined", writing books in the kitchen. She only started writing books at the age of eighty, and no matter what she wrote, most of her life was already like that.
Yang Benfen (Source: Documentary "Rewind")
The famous Yu Xiuhua and Yang Benfen, the unidentified Chen Hui and Yin Xiaowei... In today's popular context, they are the same. The temporary "writer" identity, and the eternal "vegetable seller" and "cleaning aunt" and other identities of the sociological conflict, reflect a "she" deeply trapped in the whirlpool of modern rural transformation, and then return to the "people" who are generally plagued by crises
This crisis is actually a vacuum away from the topic of women's rights that has been disturbing in cities in recent years. The stories of Yu Xiuhua and Han Shimei are only the most vulnerable part of women— rural women — a corner of the repressive, instrumental life, and a very small number of people can cry out a few cries, and most of them have lived their lives in silent corners that no one sees.
"Fate bound me to extreme clumsiness"
Ms. Eusenal, a poet and novelist from the early 20th century, said: "When I calculate or write, I transcend gender, and even beyond human beings. "Writing is a high-density movement of thought, and when Yu Xiuhua and Han Shimei began to write, they changed from poor and rude middle-aged women who were peasant women who were deeply involved in unhappy marriages to poets and writers.
Yu Xiuhua
Before that, their lives were highly similar: they spent most of their lives in the countryside, stepped into arranged marriages early, had children, did not read for several years, and circled around farmland and families, as a component of the traditional rural society to maintain the clan system, gender is female.
They remind many young people of their mothers and grandparents, ordinary women at the bottom who have been tied to the family, their husbands, and their children all their lives, and their education level is not high, and they have very few life choices.
It just so happens that they have literary talents and a desire to express themselves, which can effectively release their concrete, real and delicate pain.
Poetry is the most condensed form of a genre that expresses inner passion and freedom. Two sentences are poems, twenty sentences are also poems, in a word, it is said that "thinking is innocent".
For Yu Xiuhua and Han Shimei, inside and out, "writing poetry" carries "freedom" first, dreaming freely, freely spitting on life, stepping on a foot, and then picking it up.
Han Shimei said that writing poetry can bring her a lot of happiness
Han Shimei's widely circulated poem "Unconscious Love" wrote:
"Living with trees / I don't know how bitter / Living with walls / I don't know how painful / No one can understand the mood of my life / I want to cry without tears / I want to say nothing." 」
In fact, there is no too clever way to refine words, but when people know that the author is a peasant woman who has not read a book for several years, the mood suddenly comes up.
It's too bitter, it's too painful. However, compared to numbness and bearing, these stinging sensations are at least sober, acute, and direct to the heart. In the words of the psychologist Jung, "The only purpose of human existence is to light a lamp in the darkness of pure freedom." ”
Yu Xiuhua's "famous poem" is "crossing most of China to sleep with you", and the whole article is the word "desire". A peasant woman with limited physical behavior and difficult living conditions suddenly gave birth to such a free, rough and romantic desire, which is a scarce embryo in contemporary realist narratives.
Of course, in many interviews, poems and confessions, it can be seen that Yu Xiuhua's own reading awareness and accumulation are indeed deeper, and he dare not say that he is comparable to scholars, but not necessarily less than some domestic college students.
The more she read and thought, the more she could shine inward into her heart, and the more she could accurately express the sting of life in her poems.
Fan Yusu, who wrote rather than poems, described those hardships more specifically: "I can't make money for milk powder in the field", "I became someone else's nanny, and my children became orphans with mothers"... Nearly 10,000 words of "masterpiece", the words cling to their own "extremely clumsy life bound by fate.".
In this way, a kind of tried-and-true tragic narrative template is also formed: through writing, women at the bottom construct a set of discourse rights for themselves to explore the crisis of their own existentialism and awaken the consciousness of others and themselves.
Yu Xiuhua (Source: Documentary "Shaky Human World")
Any "bottom" in the secular sense may fall into such a popular narrative mode, causing a similar communication effect. For example, Shen Wei, a tramp who spoke about the history of Wen Dao in 2019, and "a migrant worker reading Heidegger" in 2021.
However, compared with Chen Zhi, the peasant women who write poems have a more social symbol of feminism and female resistance. Yu Xiuhua went to Beijing and divorced. Han Shimei also decided to "reverse" and divorce the marriage, she wrote in "Awakening": "I am no longer sleeping, the waves will hug me." ”
It seems that the "feminism" that has been infiltrating the cities for some years has spread to the countryside, and they will continue to appear when they are awakened.
The difference between rice and weeds
In March 2021, some media filmed a video for Han Shimei, called "The Peasant Woman Who Wrote Poetry in the Wall", and after seeing this video, three students of Chongqing University decided to go to Han Shimei's home to shoot a documentary as a graduation work.
In their view, it is rare for a peasant woman to express her spiritual world through poetry, which "even those of us who so-called have received a little higher education cannot think of."
However, according to media reports, when these college students arrived at Han Shimei's home, they found that the video actually partially beautified the real peasant women's life in the form of "pastoral pastoral".
In reality, writing poetry is not Han Shimei's "spiritual world" and "entertainment method", and even can not let her "find a little color of her own in the same life", but only to alleviate the bitterness and depression of life, as the only bridge for her to communicate with the outside world.
This does not subvert her own family and life. In April, Han Shimei filed a divorce lawsuit, but it was quickly withdrawn because her daughter was about to take the college entrance examination.
It is not so easy to get rid of, the fate that has been nested in them for generations.
As a minority of "Yu Xiuhua" and "Han Shimei", they indeed present the "people" who are not women as tools, but still maintain their inner sensitivity and vividness, not just as a number like dust involved in the flood of the times.
This is a serendipitous coincidence factor. Their talents and the opportunities for the development of the information age have helped them make their voices heard. It just so happens that their voice is the desire and recognition of modern society for freedom, personalness, and "feminism."
Yu Xiuhua's poems were recognized
After being out of the public eye, they continued to return to the crowd, and their figurative life was not fundamentally different from that of other peasant women who endured and endured a hard life.
Yu Xiuhua's other well-known poem" "I Love You" ended up writing: "I am not suitable for liver and intestines to be cut off." If I had sent you a book, I would not have sent you poetry, but I would have given you a book about plants, about crops that tell you the difference between rice and weeds, and tell you about a weedy spring. ”
Farmers know that rice is a staple food, the gold in the crops, and that the weeds are just a weed that competes with crops for nutrients, and is blinded and spurned.
Yu Xiuhua was deeply aware that her life had been restricted long before she became famous, and that both physically and the rest of her life possibilities were always dead and alive again and again in the spring of "fearfulness".
Fan Yusu also read a group of books in her own living environment, and reading gave her the impulse to take risks, and she went to Beijing to work as a child-rearing sister-in-law.
Half a century ago, George Steiner wrote in Language and Silence, "A man can read Goethe and Rilke at night, he can talk about Bach and Schubert, and in the morning he will go to work at Auschwitz." ”
Today, migrant workers return to the construction site to "move bricks" after reading Heidegger, and peasant women continue to chop wood and carry water to feed pigs after writing poems. A middle-aged woman who sells a lifetime of food, even if she spends ten years to write a book, cannot become a writer; the domestic aunt who is picky and called by her employer during the day does not dare to turn on the lights and use electricity at night, and can only hide in the bathroom to continue writing; the "mother" who drives a truck out, after "running out of food", can only return to the family...
Han Shimei feels like she is trapped in a wall and lonely (Source: Documentary "The Woman Who Writes Poetry in the Wall")
A hundred years ago, Lu Xun's question of "what will happen after Nala runs away" still has not received a breakthrough answer today, and the middle-aged women who drive away, the peasant women who have traveled thousands of miles to court "Jin Dong" or "crossed most of China to sleep with whom", are still actively or passively being seen, interpreted, and pitied.
And "Yu Xiuhua, Han Shimei", even if they write a thousand poems with flying literature and delicacy and sensitivity, it is impossible to sit down with you to drink coffee and talk about "existentialism".
Chisel the iceberg
From five or six years ago to the present, the concepts of "feminism" and "equal rights" talked about by mainstream culture in society are still mainly concentrated in cities, groups with knowledge and certain choices.
First, urban women have grown into consumers of the mainstream cultural media of society; second, most of the discourse on equality, freedom and self-awareness is issued by urban intellectual groups.
A slightly more extreme representative is that when public figures such as female celebrities announce divorce, they can always get a round of applause, and it seems that through them as a minority and top individuals, they can reflect the progress of women's consciousness in the whole society.
On December 14, 2015, Yu Xiuhua and her husband Yin Shiping agreed to divorce (Source: Documentary "Shaky Human World")
But there is great bias and imbalance. Those lively and vivid words are vacuum and void for the real majority of China's low-level women.
At present, there are still more than 200 million farmers and more than 800 million rural household registration population in Rural China. Every year, there may be one or two women who "rise up", from Fan Yusu and Yu Xiuhua to Han Shimei and domestic workers, and those poems describing suffering are only the tip of the iceberg of the solidified and rigid predicament they are in.
But it must also be admitted that dreaming is not an ability, nor is it depicting dreams, but choice and judgment.
By writing poems or essays, they do reconstruct their sense of self-identity twice, but this awakening is both artistic and "non-social." Even if they express their sensitivity and awareness of their own suffering, they have never had a clear view and a strong position to question the status of society and family, let alone put forward a clear demand at the socio-economic level.
Yu Xiuhua calls herself unique (Source: Documentary "The Shaky World")
It's easy to talk about "feminism," but poetry depends on freedom of mind, and freedom of mind depends on material foundations.
Woolf's widely circulated "own room" theory mentions the indispensable premise of "money": "If a woman wants to write a novel, she must have money and have a room of her own." ”
You can't praise the moonlight in the eyes of the women who write poetry, because they probably don't have sixpence at their feet.
The remaining women, who had no chance of being seen at all, continued year after year around a few inches of kitchen and acres of land, stubbornly serving as a tool to maintain a detail of local society, depressed and silent.
Constructing a narrative system and selective neglect have become the inertia of social culture. People and things that step into the public eye are labeled as "gaze", "capital", "entertainment to death", etc., and the complexity of reality is covered up.
Ironically, an important tone of modernization is not complexity and difference, but precisely repetition.
But there may be a comforting side to it.
On the one hand, society is undergoing rapid economic and civilizational changes, but today we can still glimpse from the news that many rural areas continue to retarded backward customs and concepts, or bring tragedies, which is shocking and regrettable.
If poetry can be a small window for a small group of people to pass outward, it will at least open up a glimmer of hope to the world.
On the other hand, driven by the development of technology and media, through the expression and expression of those subtle ideas, they have received some appreciation from the outside world, positive feedback from the city and modernization.
Yu Xiuhua's poems take people to the road of spring (Source: Documentary "The Shaky Human World")
Through the repeated discussion of these communication narratives, more people can pay attention to the real situation of the marginalized characters in society, pay attention to the real rich and poor in society, the class differentiation, and dig up and pursue more of their stories.
In this sense, the "story genre" is not necessarily a bad thing, and the most successful commercial films at the box office are often genre films, and they are also the stories that can arouse the hottest discussion in society.
At the very least, our gaze should not rest on the few of them and on the verses that occupy a very small part of their lives.
Author | Xiao Yao, senior reporter of the South Wind Window
Edit | Sumy
Typography | Eight pounds