A B Short Story: A Humiliating and Absurd Gray Life

"As far as my reading is concerned, Ah Yi is one of the best Chinese novelists in recent years.

He has the same loyalty and passion for writing as he is for life, and in that respect most established writers should blush."

When Kitajima said these words coldly, we did not know that it was the jiangxi policeman named Ai Guozhu who he enthusiastically praised.

After all, for those who are accustomed to wearing sand in literary journals, A Yi's name is still a little unfamiliar. The "halfway home" writer is said to have "begun his avid reading journey at the age of 26",

"From Camus, via Kafka, Kundera, Calvino and Barico, as far as García Márquez and Borges".

He has been wandering in the forum blog for many years, constantly working like a real writer, unscrupulously arranging words and ideas, and finally becoming known to people until he shines.

From "Grey Story" to "Birds, See Me", to "Below, What Should I Do", we have the privilege of witnessing this sensitive and stubborn young man with the pen name Ah Yi, who cannot escape the inner trauma.

Write with your own piety and fierceness, straight to the true nature of existence. His novels take extreme emotions with them and hit our hearts with rare force.

Most of Ah Yi's novels are works of different lengths, such as popular stories and legal literature. They are mostly presented in the form of detective novels, with many cold and bloody murder scenes.

But the author does not focus on showing bizarre cases based on suspense, but excavates the spiritual world of the characters through events, and then reveals a deep, grand, and shocking theme.

Ah Yi's novel seems to be writing a thousand and one "public security bureau files" under the police story, but its essence is open to the self, and all his novels are writing a secret inner world.

In that cramped township, which was like "a blind intestine of the world", he accumulated too many traumatic pasts and broken and humiliating personal memories.

The lonely dark nights that could not see the light of day and the endless rotation of cards in the police station, together with his long and sad crush, and the desperate escape journey for the sake of dreams, gave him insight into the absurd nature of the existence of the world.

The main plot of "Extreme Years" was rewritten in another novel, "The Valentine's Day Bombing", and this meaningful "repetition" shows its important position in Ah Yi's mind.

"Extreme Years" encompasses the basic themes of A B's novel. This novel combines the dual visions of a police officer and a criminal (or "suicidal person"),

On the one hand, it tells the story of a humble man who is humiliated until he is crushed by life, and with a mortal heart, he goes to the road of self-destruction and killing,

They chose to create an explosion on Valentine's Day, thus turning suicide into a huge extreme event.

As the novel puts it, "the restless mentality of the weak can easily translate into a fascination with tools," and explosives are the last weight of their resistance.

In addition, the same narrative focus is also reflected in the other aspect of the novel, that is, the perspective of the little policeman, the long-term repression of this character in the forced small county town,

And the psychological trauma caused by the failure of love can be seen as a portrayal of Ah B's personal experience. These traumatic events make an already extremely boring life even more humiliating and absurd:

Without the courage to commit suicide, you can only live humbly and silently endure this huge emptiness, which also makes "fleeing" more urgent.

Ah B always locked his eyes on the suffocating and stagnant town.

Hongwu Town in "Accidental Killing", Qingbon Township in "Birds, See Me", Jujiu Town in "Little Man", and Mojia Street in "The Adult Who Plays the Violin" are all the usual geographical spaces in Ah Yi's novels.

Perhaps only the loneliness of a small place can show the humiliation and desolation of the character's heart.

Ah Yi has talked many times about how he had amazing insight into his extremely boring eternal life in the mahjong poker game of the village police station.

One day, Ai Guozhu, the deputy director, the director, and the researcher sat in four directions according to the southeast, northwest, and northwest, and after a night of fighting, the director proposed to change his seat and re-roll the dice. The four of them took a turn clockwise. ”

At that moment, he desperately saw his life that he could see at a glance. This scene later appeared several times in his novels "In exile" and "Accidental Killing".

If the game is the code for Ah B to crack the absurd truth of life, then the crush and its failure accelerate the process of opening up this truth. In A B's case, the crush is also a fatal "traumatic event".

"I give my crush greatness because I have suffered such a disgrace," A B said. Indeed, 8 years of youth have made the frustration, humiliation and psychological trauma suffered as a crush deeply hidden in Ah Yi's heart.

He once revealed this humiliating past in his essay "Paranoia". The novel "The Relationship Between Men and Women" dramatically "reproduces" it.

In this short story, two middle-aged male and female classmates are reunited at the funeral of another classmate, and the love and hatred of the past have long been extinguished, and all that remains is the vicissitudes of each other's love stack and the unsatisfactory flirtation.

After some painstaking attack and defense, the men and women who were familiar with the rules of the game went to bed step by step. However, the scene of this old dream revisited finally reveals its hideous face at the end of the novel:

"After the carriage of youth rushed past, aging and death came slowly like two brothers. I looked at Li Mei lying on the bed like a corpse,

With black grape-like nipples, a buttery belly, and an ugly and sinister lower body, it was disgusting. And she was like the truth about humanity, slacking her skin and muscles and walking into the bathroom. I saw Death follow. ”

For that thrilling glance, the hero of the story buried his own vicissitudes of life, and the unforgettable crush in the legend is destined to be just an anonymous myth, and in the end, this myth will eventually be shattered.

Ah Yi is good at overlooking the earth from the perspective of a bird and opening the whole text, and the "big bird" resembles the eyes of a compassionate God, but he watches the absurd performance of all sentient beings in a very merciless way.

Ah Yi has extreme sensitivity, humble origins, boring experiences and humiliating traumatic experiences, which make him desperately realize the absurd nature of life.

He looked at the world again and found that behind everyone there was an endless period of emptiness and mediocrity, either waiting for an adventure in a boring life, or persistently pursuing for some humble dream.

Zhang Jiamin in "Suicide Journey" fell into a boring emptiness due to the slackness and difficulty of life, and in order to seek relief, he went to the "suicide journey" without hesitation, but he did not have the courage after all.

In the end, the tragic "suicide journey" is transformed into an unappetizing prostitute, and the humiliating life must continue.

In "1983", Jiang Huosheng despaired of his planned life but was powerless to resist, encountered robbery in the middle of doing nothing, and was vaguely involved in it, and then sentenced to labor reform.

After being released from prison, he finally became a real, but he was powerless to protect his wife and children, and finally, he was reincarnated in history and encountered the corner ticket that brought disaster.

"Villain" leads to the wronged Feng Botao from the death of He Lao'er, and finally the burden of humiliation falls on the murderer Chen Mingxi. This humble little man, because his father's uremia could not be cured, embarked on the road to murder.

Nong Xia in "It's All Because it Rained" had to wear "the same panties" and "almost impossible to show" blue ball pants to school because of an untimely rain, which caused her to suffer the moment of loss of dignity caused by material scarcity.

In "The Hermit", because of poverty, Fan Jixiang's courtship is rejected by Liu Meimei, and his revenge-like struggle makes Liu Meimei see the hope of getting rid of the countryside, but the love tragedy between them has long been doomed.

Reflecting on the fate of the contemporary countryside through the song and cry of the humble is also an important aspect of Ah Yi's novel.

In "Adidas", on the surface, the self-struggle of the rural youth Li Xiaodunlian comes from the fascination with materialism synonymous with "Adidas".

But his inner trepidation was "the fear that the countryside that could only hear the barking of dogs that night withered on its own, and was buried on the mountain like my obscure ancestors", Ah Yi wrote about the misery and helplessness of the rural ideal.

And Li Zhi in "The Food Problem" is deeply touched by the question of "what kind of grain are you", and it is precisely because of this humiliation that he has to resist the gaze of others in an extreme way and embark on the road of no return of self-destruction.

It is worth mentioning "A Spell in Yang Village", the story situation set by the novel is extremely clever, it opens a window to see people's chronic diseases and sorrows from a simple incision.

Because of the "poisonous oath" in a quarrel, Zhong Yonglian stubbornly believed that her son's fate would be related to this, and her anxiety and fear, the cry of sorrow and despair, also spread out in this guilt.

It wasn't until her son really died mysteriously that the spell that tormented her ended with the final apparition. Indeed, what could be more frightening than this Žižek-esque "response to reality"?

However, the novel does not intend to explore the overly mysterious karma, but rather portrays the inner world of the characters in the emphasis on the narrative itself.

The highlight of the novel is also that from this "abstract" fable, some "concrete" elements are quietly revealed. The death of Guofeng in the novel presents a shocking scene:

"She wasn't catching human hands, but dead dogs, dead fish, dead cats, dead rats, dead loaches, and her fingers were covered with slippery, stinky fat. Her thumb was clutching her son's tattered wrist to Bai Sensen's bone.

His arms were completely purple, as purple as an eggplant, and they rotted at the slightest stroke. She pushed on his cardigan, and so did his body, purple blood vessels like purple canals, crisscrossing his chest.

By the time she hurriedly climbed up and picked him up from behind, his head was as if he had been cut off, and he fell violently, and in the mouth that was forced to open, he vomited a breath of fertilizer. ”

This is a body destroyed by hard work and harsh environment, and all this illuminates the reality of the survival of migrant workers at present.

This may be the real meaning behind this fatalistic story shrouded in mysticism.

As Ah Yi said, "The sun will only emit great warmth at the end of the cold winter", the ultimate of life is nothingness, and destruction is the only way to end the absurdity of existence, which is the core of Ah Yi's death aesthetic.

"Accidental Killing" tells the story of 6 locals who have been crushed by life on an unusual night and meet another dismal outsider.

A sudden encounter finally turned into a frenzied killing. Supermarket owners who have been caught stealing, prostitutes who have been humiliated, rogue leaders, lowly little cops, dwarfs mad by unrequited love, and fools who are angry,

They were all "banished to a deserted town in the dark of night," waiting for the outsider who had lost money for his medical treatment and had no way to report the crime, and finally fell into rage and despair, and of course, the knife he wielded in his hand.

At that moment, these 6 locals and one outsider had to fight back with the courage of determination to lose their dignity and go to the desperate path of self-destruction.

In a bloody way, the novel tells us how the individual's mental illness is spawned, and also makes us understand the absurd nature of the world.

"What I output is eternal absurdity. I encourage readers to accept the absurd, not to escape. As a fan of Albert Camus, A-B always tried to write his own stories as cold and gloomy as the master of existentialism.

However, how to resist this absurd world? A B once tried to answer this question in the novel "The Prophet". The novel is mainly based on a letter written by farmer Zhu Qiushi to Dr. Yuan Xiaofei of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

This pretentious madman, with many wild fantasies that are caring to not meet, but also has a shocking blueprint for human society,

He pondered the big question of how to seek meaning in life in the rolling torrent of time, and the answer he gave was to kill the endless time as a way to resist emptiness.

The novel seems to want to tell the truth about the existence of the world through the mouth of the madman, but in an ironic tone it ponders the dialectical relationship between time, life and existence.

Ah Yi was afraid of the "cruel whip marks of time", so he walked to the road of "cutting against time" without hesitation. How to "kill time"? Fleeing is one way, killing is another.

Based on this idea, A B had his first novel, "Below, What Should I Do".

The "I" in the novel is an empty man tormented by time, who does not know what to do except to kill people to find a sense of fulfillment.

The novel presents elaborate murders, thrilling escapes, and suffocating final statements in court in a "zero-degree emotion" manner.

At the end of the novel, although "I"'s court statement is deafening, compared to the amazing power naturally revealed by Ah Yi's previous novels, this novel is too deliberately based on Camus's pen to set the issue of existentialism.

It only expresses the author's strong ideas, not the hard life experience, so its exciting power is relatively limited.

Ah Yi once confessed that he "has a ghost on his body" and that "people with a dark psychology can only write dark and uneasy things", and many commentators have pointed out this gray and dark tone of Ah Yi's novels.

Indeed, he was so obsessed with violence and murder that perhaps he really thought that warmth was pale and powerless, and that the only thing that could really understand the boring life and end the innate law of inequality was destruction.

He repeatedly claimed that "it is easy to see a greater void in the light and warmth," while pain and despair are more real.

Although the grayness of Ah Yi's pen only makes people "have a little more respect for the absurd things in the world", it is still heart-wrenching to read.

As he said, "I'm still walking in the night." I still cherish this darkness, even if the dawn is delayed."

In addition to the story patterns and slightly repetitive emotional tones that are closely related to personal experiences, people prefer to see a complex and multifaceted Ah B.

Recently, Ah Yi, whose reputation is no longer lonely, has finally vowed to write a novel that is "warm to make people shudder", which may be an opportunity for change, and people can't help but eagerly look forward to it.