"Wang Liang, Bannerman of Taibu Temple, Inner Mongolia, Master of Arts." He was once a sword and pen officer, and now he is a fire-headed army. On the mouth of the book "Daddy's Literature Class", there are only two lines, which is the self-introduction of "middle-aged literature" Wang Liang. Wang Liang, a common-sounding name who does an ordinary job, is now an ordinary Chinese father — just like many people around us, but he does a not-so-ordinary thing: in his spare time, insist on loving and chic "literature co-reading" with his daughter, and in the long time that accompanies the child's growth, the infiltration of literature into himself flows through the child in an intimate way.
These articles about literature and common reading, wang liang posted intermittently on the Internet, are now compiled into a book. This was his first book,", which he called the "pamphlet," and there were many precious things in simplicity, about literature, about the family, about education, about love, which were hidden between the lines, in the innocent and philosophical dialogues of fathers and daughters, and also showed us how a family can establish a close, literary parent-child relationship through reading.
"Daddy's Literature Lesson" Wang Liang Beijing United Publishing Company/ Lefu Culture
Immersed in reading "Firehead"
Different from professional educators, Wang Liang's "Dad Literature Class" is personal, even a little private, compared to what kind of "purpose", simply from his love for children and his love for literature and reading. If you follow his unsustainable experience, you will find that this love affair has long been internalized in his life experience.
Wang Liang, whose hometown is the closest town to Beijing in Inner Mongolia, describes it rather poetically, "The grassland is in the south and the Gobi in the north, with short spring and summer and long cold winter." To this day, my deepest impression of the homeland is still the boundless, dotted with glass bottle fragments, and the gray-yellow snowfield mixed with dust. During the college entrance examination, like all young people in small towns, he longed to leave his homeland, the farther away the better, so he applied for Yunnan University, which was the farthest in the score segment. When I was an undergraduate, I listened to my family's opinions, learned a major that I didn't like, and decided to go to graduate school across departments before graduation, and only then did I apply for the Chinese department that I wanted.
Recalling the days when he studied graduate school in the Chinese Department of Yun University, Wang Liang felt that it was the most important and enjoyable three years in his life, almost all of which were spent in the school library and surrounding bookstores. Teachers from the Chinese Department are often met in bookstores and asked him what books he has been reading recently and how he feels. What touched him the most was the scene of encountering Mr. Zhao Zhongmu, who was still alive at that time, already a rare age, but still standing on the side of the bookshelf with a staff, flipping through the newly published books on literature, history and philosophy. Wang Liang seemed to have an epiphany: a person should pursue self-improvement, regardless of age and circumstances. Years later, he concluded that his greatest ideal in life is still to "be an ordinary reader who always maintains enthusiasm and indulges in the joy of reading without distraction."
After graduation, Wang Liang, a native of Mobei, stayed in Southwest Kunming, worked, settled down, and turned around for more than twenty years. He successively worked as a TV reporter and magazine editor, and later entered the government unit to engage in office work, and in the past two or three years he was mainly responsible for managing the staff canteen and other properties of the unit, just as the joke in the personal profile, from a "knife and pen official" to an unworthy "fire-headed army". Although he has been away from school for many years and has a very busy job, he has never let literature leave him, and still insists on reading and writing to resist the "internal wounds" caused by ordinary life.
In 2012, daughter Zhiyue was born, which changed Wang Liang's life. The time to read was greatly compressed, and he could only stuff a book of poems or prose in his bag, and read a small paragraph at any time with fragmented time. But the clever daughter soon gave him a new pleasure from being a father, that is, to study with his daughter, and he was willing to be what Montessori called a "wise and cultivated guide", to introduce her to the spiritual world he loved and relied on.
Wang Liang's daughter Wang Zhiyue loves to paint, and Wang Liang also encouraged her to paint literary works. The painting "Beautiful, Not Lonely Train" painted by Zhiyue is inspired by the poem "Train" by the Turkish poet Tarangi, who was read with his father.
Let literature meet experience
Wang Liang recalled that she consciously accompanied her daughter to read together, starting when she was 5 years old. That year, Wang Liang bought her a set of "Picture Books of Masters of World Literature", one of which was Cortázar's "Words of the Bear", one of the representative figures of the Explosion of Latin American literature. After reading it, the daughter was once keen to go to the bathroom to listen to whether the "pipe bear" in the water pipe was moving, which made Wang Liang feel very interesting, and the father and daughter got endless joy from the imagination given by reading.
When reading with his daughter, Wang Liang also read to his daughter at first, like most parents, but unconsciously, the attributes of "literary middle age" were revealed. He always couldn't help but carry some "bootleg goods", not only in a new way to re-tell the familiar works such as "Quiet Night Thoughts" and "Jiang Xue", but also took his daughter to "visit" Bian Zhilin, Wang Zengqi, Kipling, Ted Hughes, Rilke and other writers who were slightly "far away" from children, as long as they were not completely out of children's understanding and cognitive experience, they would be introduced by him and became the literature class materials for their daughters who were still in elementary school.
Reading Wang Liang's "literature lessons" to his daughter one by one often makes people feel at ease. This "daddy teacher" does not explain words or convey what kind of "meaning" at a glance, but affectionately mobilizes the growth experience that a small child has and understands, opens her emotional channel, and seeks resonance with the words on paper. When reading the famous poem "Train" translated by Yu Guangzhong, the Turkish poet Tarangi, he and his daughter discussed why "the passengers are more or less related to me", at first the daughter was puzzled, he patiently described the scene of the family's last farewell to her grandfather at the train station, and the scene when the whole class cried together at the end of the kindergarten, regardless of the distance, so that she gradually realized that this is a "common" emotional experience of sending off pedestrians. When the epidemic was isolated at home, he would tell his daughter Du Fu's "Jiangcun", in which Lao Du "went to the liang on the swallow, close to the water gull." The old wife draws paper as a chess game, and the child knocks on the needle as a fishing hook" In the depiction of the daily scene of the grass hall, after more than a thousand years, we experienced the preciousness and interdependence of the family and the family in the eyes of the storm.
Just like Wang Liang's own experience, when guiding his daughter into literature, he attaches great importance to this connection between literature and life and self-experience. He told one thing: when his daughter was just in elementary school, he once picked up a Chinese textbook and looked at it, and the first page of the first volume was impressively printed with a pair of rhymes: one two three four five, gold, wood, water, fire, earth, heaven and earth, the sun and the moon shine in the present and ancient times. To his chagrin, the way humans perceive the world is supposed to expand from familiar to unfamiliar, but language education seems to run counter to the opposite, "Why start with such an abstract expression, rather than the things around the children?" For example, school, classroom, teacher, classmate, even if it is a chalk, a desk? Wang Liang always feels that only by recognizing individual experience and literary works can literary works have meaning for "us", and it is precisely because of the participation of generations of readers that their emotions and thoughts are "pinned" on literary works, they can continue to be revitalized. He made a well-hetted metaphor: "The works of art displayed in the museum are beautiful, but many of them have lost their basis in reality and become specimens for us to admire, and only those things that surround us are truly vital." In this sense, we see that every work he reads with his daughter constitutes a new text by adding the conversations, jokes, and explanations of father and daughter in the present time and space.
Literature is a way of life
Because of Wang Liang's busy work and his daughter's intense studies, the time left for "literature class" is not abundant—this can also be seen from the frequency with which he updates his articles, so the texts he often chooses are poetry, prose and stories. Poetry, in particular, occupies a large part of the page, from Luo Binwang's "Goose" to Rilke's "Premonition", both ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign. This is also related to Wang Liang's own preference for poetry.
Although he was "lecturing" to his daughter in the lower grades of primary school, Wang Liang did not perfunctory, seriously "prepared lessons", and regarded her daughter as an object that could be equally dialogued and even inspired to him, taking her from the surface of the text into a deeper literary field and cultural background. Therefore, although facing his daughter, from a general point of view, Wang Liang's interpretation of poetry is also quite insightful. For example, when talking about "Jiang Xue", Wang Liang found "Fishing Songzi" and "Chu Ci Fisher Father", Jiang Ziya and Yan Ziling Diaoyutai Story to read with it, so that his daughter could initially understand the symbolic meaning of "Fisher Father" in the ancient Chinese cultural conception. Or for example, Wang Bo's "Send Du Shaofu to Ren Shuzhou", in addition to some other ancient farewell poems, he also "used" Yao Thirteen's "Yulin Bell" (adapted from Liu Yongzi) and Chen Hongyu's "Don't Send Me" as auxiliary materials, in the interaction of these texts, let the daughter gradually experience the farewell feelings belonging to Chinese.
Wang Liang loves ancient poetry, but he has his own views on the so-called "traditional cultural inheritance". His daughter's school sent a notice of lectures on Chinese studies, he looked at the propaganda, and the list of books opened to the children actually included "Taishang Induction" and "Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic", felt unreliable, and simply chose to give up. In his view, with the passage of time, classical literary culture has become somewhat "mineralized", the "flash point" is higher, and it takes greater efforts to make it bloom again, and this hard work should be the responsibility of adults, not the burden of young children. This is similar to the problem of "parent-child reading" that he discussed in the preface to the book: in today's era of reading pictures and videos, adults choose a simpler and more intuitive shortcut, but let children go to "open the book beneficially", taking a more difficult road, which is difficult to be convincing. Therefore, Wang Liang's literature class, as he explains on the Internet, is a kind of "experiment" he has done in himself and within his own family, exploring a possibility of education from specific problems and directions.
When she began to take "Daddy's Literature Class", Wang Liang's daughter had just entered the first grade, and now she was ten years old, and she could watch "Harry Potter" and "The Lord of the Rings" on her own, and the father and daughter gradually changed from reading together to a discussion after independent reading. Wang Liang said that his bookshelf has always been open to his daughter, and as long as she is interested, she can casually pull out books from it to read. This winter vacation, the daughter read Tokarczuk's "Collection of Grotesque Stories" on her father's bookshelf and wanted to read it with her father. This Nobel Prize winner's novel is more stylized and not friendly to primary school students, Wang Liang feels "quite challenging", but on second thought, since "one is willing to fight and one is willing to be beaten", why not try it. The only thing that "Daddy Teacher" has to do is to properly pick and grade the reading materials, so as not to be too out of the child's experience and understanding.
Wang Liang, who was born in the Chinese department, did not become a professional writer or poet, he gave his children "literature lessons", and did not harbor professional purposes in this regard, only because he believed that literature belonged to a wide range of the public, was an attitude and way of life, "as long as human beings still use language, need to communicate with each other or have expressed demands, literature will exist and occur, or implicitly or explicitly around our lives." Wang Liang said that he himself has been nourished by literature and reading, so he also hopes that his children can be more independent, more respectful of human nature and more aware of the beauty of life through reading and learning literature.
(Original title: A Dad's Family Literature Class)
Source: Beijing Evening News Author Zhang Yuyao
Process Edit: u027
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