Text/Chen Pingyuan
The idea of writing a book for his hometown of Teochew has only been around in the last five or six years. This choice, regardless of learning, is largely determined by age and mood. When I was young, I always wanted to go outside, hurried to the road, occasionally turned back, and paid more attention to my family than to the countryside. At a certain point, the three lines of family affection, locality, and learning overlap, which begins to feel a little special. In my case, it was 2016. This year, I printed the "Collected Poems of Both Parents", wrote "The Story of the Spring Festival with Mixed Tastes", "The Girl Carrying the Flag", gave a speech "Six Looks at the Hometown of Chaoshan", and co-edited the "Chaoshan Culture Reader" with friends, which suddenly brought me closer to my hometown.
How to talk about "hometown" is a science and a state of mind. In an era when the virtual world is becoming more and more developed and more mysterious, talking about the hometown of "locality" and "real feeling" is not pure nostalgia, but also contains a cultural ideal and life interest. When it comes to hometown, you may wish to talk about it from the foot of your own family (including childhood life and family stories) to the distant directions.
This is the nature of the book, there are papers, essays, speeches, orderly, mixed genres, but the main themes are similar, all point to the "hometown complex". Therefore, it is most appropriate to choose the beginning of "How to Talk About "Hometown"" ( . The first series, "Looking Back at My Hometown", not only opens the momentum, but also lifts the weight lightly, which can well reflect the purpose of this book; the second series, "Hometown Humanities", talking about folk literature, local teaching materials and Zhang Jingsheng, etc., is showing my professional background; the third series, "My Own Life", reminiscing about the past, trivial and trivial to see the truth, is also the main driving force for the initial promotion of this book. Love hometown and love family, the two are superimposed on each other, and only when the love is thick can it be written and inked. The quotations between the various texts are not so much to seek echoes, but to honestly admit that it is due to the lack of overall conception, the article is not written at a time, it is painted with the passage of time and the change of mood, so some places are thick and colorful, and some places are light and breezy. At the end of the day, this is a collection of articles, not a dedicated work.
Chaozhou Kaiyuan Temple (watercolor) Chen Plateau
Several essays written in the 1990s, to be honest, focused on family rather than hometown. Because of the death of my father and grandmother, I suddenly fell into the abyss. The pain of "the son wants to be raised but does not wait" can only be truly appreciated by those who come over. The pain of bereavement has nothing to do with the place of origin, but countless students who travel far away, while thinking about the safety and happiness of their relatives, often unconsciously think of the actual situation and cultural traditions of their hometown.
What really prompted me to reflect on this issue was that twenty years ago, at the invitation of my mentor at CUHK, Mr. Wu Hongcong, he wrote "Local Feelings and Folk Consciousness: The Significance of Qiu Fengjia in the Ideological and Cultural History of the Late Qing Dynasty" (Chaoxue Studies, No. 8, Huacheng Publishing House, July 2000). In order to participate in the seminar "Qiu Fengjia and Modern China" held at Shantou University on January 6-8, 2000, I seriously talked about my hometown from the perspective of history and culture for the first time. The first section of this article talks about Qiu Fengjia, who was originally from Jialing, and the other people in Neidu in the same period, did not have too much self-pity for Gu Ying, nor did he try to seek an official and a half-post, but quickly gained a relatively stable mentality in "returning to Haiyang" and "lecturing in Chaozhou": "In "Talking about the Tide", "Day and Night in the East of the Great River, Flowing Through Ancient and Modern Affairs", it is not difficult for the reader to feel the urgency of Qiu Fengjia to touch the pulse of this mysterious land by narrating the history of Chaozhou. In "Peace In The Journey" and its preface, Qiu's eagerness to participate in the construction of local culture is even more overflowing. "When I first wrote the above paragraph, I was a little moved.
One day five years later, I received a letter from the editor of the Southern Daily Publishing House, saying that their newspaper had spent more than a year, on a full page every Monday, launched 50 issues of "Guangdong History and Culture Trip", and now it has been published in a collection, hoping that I will write a five-thousand-word "introduction". After reading the manuscript, I hurried to complete the introduction entitled "Gaze at the Water and Soil of This Side" on June 30, 2005 (the first issue of "Together in the Same Boat", No. 4, 2006). At the beginning, the manuscript was in a hurry, and I was only given twenty days, but the official publication was delayed for several years. The article begins: "How to gaze affectionately at the 'water and soil' of your birth and growth is an old and fresh challenge. I say 'ancient' because, in traditional China, there are so many writings that commend the advanced towns and describe the customs and places of interest in the countryside, like local chronicles. To say 'fresh' means that with the rapid advancement of global economic integration, the protection of cultural diversity has become a major problem. As a result, the discovery and care of those slightly wild , not yet fully domesticated ' indigenous knowledge' or 'regional cultures' has become the focus of academic attention. After describing the characteristics of Guangdong's history and culture as I understand it, especially the rapid rise of Guangdong in modern times, the conclusion is: "Not every 'reader' who was born or has lived in Guangdong for a long time has enough knowledge of the history and culture of this region." Most likely, due to educational limitations, or differences in the type of knowledge, you didn't have time to take care of this before. Today, in the face of this colorful and winding cultural book, don't you have the impulse to deeply understand the land under your feet? "If I hadn't been invited to write an introduction, I wouldn't have had the desire and ability to have such a comprehensive understanding of Guangdong's history and culture." Feeling this, I wrote a preface to the Chaoshan Culture Reader in the future, and I once again stressed: "The colorful knowledge about the local area is not naturally acquired, and it also needs to be learned and reminded, cared for and remembered." ”
Finally, one day, I realized that the topic of "hometown" is so big that it is difficult to present it perfectly. Since it is not an autobiography, nor a memoir, just a collection of articles about home and hometown, bits and pieces of feelings, long and short memories, there can be continuations in the future, and there can be no commas or semicolons at the moment. Unlike many of my previous academic works, this book contains more of my own feelings, focusing on my hometown and family, as well as my childhood and youth that I have long lost. The historical part is easy to say, somewhat academic value; will anyone be interested in recalling a small corner of south China in the 1950s and 1970s? Latecomers listen to me repeating, talking about "going to the mountains and going to the countryside" and "resuming the college entrance examination", which may be a little annoying -- just a little bit of Chen sesame rotten grain, what is there to be excited about? Yes, compared to the big history, individual life is indeed very humble; the Yellow River always flows eastward, but you unfortunately happen to face the reverse flow or inflection point, what can you do? Fortunately, in any era, no matter how chaotic the stage is and how unbearable the background is, there is a new generation to grow. Of course, to say good or bad, those memories that cannot be erased belong more to themselves and their peers.
The manuscript was compiled, re-read, and I felt that the most unfinished was the third series. There are several topics that I must add a little bit to let it continue to ripple for a while.
Since my parents moved back to the agricultural school dormitory after Chaozhou West Lake Mountain, we no longer go to Shantou Agricultural School located under the Yangtie Ridge every year when we go home during the holidays. I know that the school is still there, but with the changes of the times, it has become increasingly dilapidated. It wasn't until January 2004 that I had a sudden idea to ask my mother and brother to go back to nostalgia together. Fortunately, there was a return visit and I took a number of photos that I could use to illustrate this time. Standing in front of the dormitory of the family members who lived as a child, and watching the house where my parents lived one after another, and the old library, it was really emotional. This winter, at the invitation of the school, we will visit the newly rebuilt Chaozhou Agricultural School, and the old buildings that can still be recognized are only the large classrooms with deliberately preserved windows but the roof is still there. After returning to Beijing, I received five or six hundred old photos sent by the school, and I smiled bitterly when I saw them, which were all stories that happened twenty or thirty years after I left the agricultural school and went to the countryside to join the team. You can't complain about the passage of time, you can only say that you are indeed old, which is nostalgic.
At the beginning of the year, four "Under the Yangtie Ridge" were serialized in the Chaozhou Daily, which attracted a lot of onlookers, the most interesting of which was "My Chinese Teacher". Several retired principals and teachers said they recognized the "Teacher Li" who had taught me, and the mention of names was varied, all pronunciation problems. One of my classmates said that Teacher Li lived in Shantou and went back to Guxiang a few years ago to find old colleagues to gather. This made me full of expectations, so I entrusted the Shantou Education Bureau and the Shantou Daily reporter to help me inquire. The final clue was that Teacher Li belonged to the rabbit, and at the end of the 1970s, he was still teaching at Chaozhou FuzhongLian Middle School, which was deeply respected by the students, and then transferred back to Shantou, where he died a few years ago. A friend who helped with the inquiry wrote: "If Teacher Li is alive, I will be very happy to read your article." "This makes me even more annoyed, why did I just care about my own busyness, and I didn't write an article earlier to thank Teacher Jin and Teacher Li who gave me a lot of encouragement and help?" I can't regret it.
The first time I heard the famous literary and historical experts Zeng Chunan and Huang Ting say that the Yangshan Village where I joined the team was a famous historical and cultural village, I thought it was a joke. Only by carefully checking the information they quoted did we understand that what they said was true. However, I lived/fought in this mountain village for eight and a half years, and I had no knowledge or feelings about this. I only know that this village is backed by Qiping Mountain, west of Jinsha Creek, and the scenery is very good. In order to facilitate the villagers to cultivate behind the mountain, a large gap was blown up in the middle of the mountainside, which is said to have destroyed good feng shui. I went to the countryside for more than half a year, and I witnessed a tragedy - at the end of the noon work, the ferry slowly sank due to overloading, it could have slid to the shore, some people jumped away at the moment of crisis, the unbalanced ferry immediately overturned, and many women were detained underneath, so seven corpses were killed, and the whole village cried for days. The loudspeaker sounded, and the whole village flocked to the ferry, when I was 16 years old, for the first time to face death so directly and concretely, the scene is still unforgettable, and it can be said that it is the most thrilling lesson during the period of going to the countryside. Jinsha Creek is a narrow and long stagnant area in the lower reaches of the Han River, not living water, and at first I thought that the creek was very wide and difficult to swim over; when I went back ten years ago, I found that the river was narrower and the water was a little dirty. Fortunately, in recent years, the site has been selected to build a sewage treatment plant, and it is expected that the scenery will soon reappear.
Two years ago, the CCTV Xiqu Channel filmed the Chaozhou chapter of "Tasting Opera Reading City" and invited me to go back to the scene. Listening to me talk about the one-month Chao opera meal I had eaten when I first went to the countryside, as well as my poetry/book work "Ju Ji Xiang Tou Set Long and Young, The Music Is Like Water Flooding the Mountain Village", I thought it was very interesting, and I wanted to use this as a clue. Later, I found that it was not OK, and I went off topic, and "reading the city" became "reading the village". The choreographer couldn't give up such interesting scenes, so he made a compromise plan, still going back to Yangshan with me, filming me talking with my father and fellow villagers at the Chen Family Temple (formerly Yangshan School), and taking photos with colleagues who were teaching at that time; then moving to the ancestral hall that has now become a rural cultural station, listening to the villagers entertain themselves and sing Chao operas. When the show aired, these rare scenes were preserved, and everyone was very happy.
The 1992 "Father's Poems" and the 2016 "Collected Poems of both parents" should of course be read together. In addition, the first issue of "Southern Weekend" on March 18, 1994, can also be recommended for "The Wind and Rain Of the Dead". That's about the first time I visited Taiwan more than twenty years ago, I inquired about the old site of the Zhonghua Daily and thought of the place where my father worked to take photos. In the absence of the principal, the female secretary was attentive and gave me some historical information. The article said: "I don't remember who invented it, and introduced me to the female secretary as a 'son of the deceased'. I appreciate the title because it is reminiscent of the ancient poem 'The Wind and Rain Come'. If there had been no overly dense 'wind and rain' of these decades, there would have been no 'sigh and sigh' of my late 'late son'. As for the "North Garden Poetry Manuscript" copied by his father in his later years, most of them are realistic and sentimental, citing a poem "Smelling Songs with Feelings" as evidence: "People outside the window sang "Wu song top", which provoked a hundred feelings inside the window. Tianchi Wusong greeted the rising sun, and the Prancing Horse sang lyrically and proudly. Time has persecuted twenty years, and his ambition is heavy and he walks. Knowing that yuan is missing ordinary things, he is partial to white hair and hair. - "Wu Song Ding" is a Chao Song composed by Yu yu in the summer of 1949 for the wounded and sick at Wu Song Ding of Phoenix Mountain, which became popular in Chaoshan counties after liberation and was adapted into a short drama. In the summer of 1969, when Yu was under control at the May Seventh Cadre School, he heard the control personnel outside the window singing this song loudly. ”
The Collected Poems of both Parents is printed at his own expense and given to relatives and friends in his hometown, as well as readers who are interested in the history of Chaoshan literature. Feedback was received one after another, including the addition of a number of works that were not included in the collection, such as the first small singing of the Shantou regional literary and art magazine "Workers, Peasants and Soldiers" in 1959, "Wu Song Song", which was sung in praise of the people's commune, and had nothing to do with the above-mentioned Chaoqu oratorio "Wu Song Ding", written by Chen Bei and Zeng Qingyong.
Teacher Zeng is a full-time writer at the Chaozhou Cultural Center, and when I was studying writing in the countryside, I got his guidance, and last year's "Memories of the Cultural Center" talked about this matter. After the article was published, I did not have enough to explore how grassroots cultural activities can be carried out. Therefore, there was a cultural salon on the theme of "Reminiscing the Old and Chasing the New - The Story of Chen Pingyuan and cultural center" jointly organized by Chaozhou Daily, Chaozhou City Cultural Center and Chaozhou Rao Zongyi Academic Museum, in addition to my speech on "Localization, Enlightenment, And Sense of Participation - Mission and Feelings of cultural centers", I also respectfully invited local famous cultural figures Li Yingqun, Zeng Chunan, Qiu Taoliang, Huang Jingzhong, etc. to participate together to talk about their fate with the cultural center and the possibility of building a grass-roots public cultural life. This event attracted many Chaozhou literature and history enthusiasts, and the special report on "Music Like Water Flooding Mountain Villages" - Mass Culture and Cultural Chaozhou in the Eyes of Chen Pingyuan and Chaozhou Cultural People) in the Chaozhou Daily on December 8, 2020 , and "What is "Cultural Chaozhou" - Written on the Edge of the Cultural Salon " ( Xing Yingchun ) were widely circulated in the future.
In my keynote speech, I talked about what really mattered about the significance of amateur writing, from reading my father's poems to compiling and printing the Collected Poems of My Parents, to writing The Memories of the Cultural Center. There are many people who love literature, and very few become professional writers in the future. The purpose of most people's reading and writing is to cultivate sensitivity and imagination, so that people can live a healthy, fulfilling, and happy life, which is the true meaning of literature. If we look at the aspects of cultivating amateur authors, meeting the cultural needs of the masses, promoting local culture, and achieving new enlightenment goals, grass-roots cultural centers can play a great role.
Looking back at the history of more than a hundred years since the late Qing Dynasty, in addition to the reform of the political system and the improvement of economic strength, there is also the transfer of cultural production methods. The latter has many twists and turns and is worth seriously savoring. How to improve the education level and cultural life of rural /urban areas, in the early years, it was mostly spontaneous, and the new cultural people based on the enlightenment position, the vision was downward, the initiative to intervene, and actively guided. Since the 1950s, the establishment of mass art/culture centers has been improving. After the 1990s, the rise of commercialization, the marketization of stage performances and film production, achieved great success, but also left a lot of regrets - the most important point is that it is out of touch with the daily life of the local people.
The horizon is getting bigger and bigger, but people's psychological space is getting smaller and smaller. One of the important reasons is that the way of knowledge learning and entertainment dissemination has shifted from pyramid to vertical, winners eat all, and the public has become spectators (fans) without a sense of participation. With the help of the omnipresent and omniscient network and mobile phone, it is difficult for you and me in the virtual world to have independent experience, feeling and expression ability. The spontaneous cultural activities of the people everywhere, except for those supported by religious beliefs, have basically collapsed. Because young people watch TV and visit the Internet from an early age, they are familiar with various cultural forms in the sky (they are accustomed to the commercial factors that are hidden behind them), and they ignore the local culture that is close at hand.
In today's world, where technology and business have allied to revolutionize our daily lives, including temporal and spatial perceptions and aesthetic tastes, governments, schools, and humanities scholars have the responsibility and obligation to stand up and balance this trend. In my opinion, the cultural center, museum (art gallery) and library in charge of the government are three-legged, and their respective functional positioning overlaps, intersects, and complements, and can play a great role if it is well operated. Pay attention to the cultural needs of the masses and support the cultural activities of the masses, the most difficult of which is literary creation. I started here, so I was very emotional. Today, with the popularization of higher education and the development of online literature, it is difficult for cultural centers to play their role in this regard. Literature can truly affect the cultural ecology of a place, or the spiritual outlook of a city, and literature is precisely the most fundamental. Literature and folklore, festivals hand in hand, literature and science and technology, business alliance, literature and film, film and television, intangible cultural heritage marriage, and then each beautiful, take what they need, and thus enrich their own unique lives, whether this possibility exists, it is worth serious consideration and exploration.
Among all the articles in this book, "Forever "College Entrance Examination Essay"" has the most follow-up stories and is also the most worth sorting out. The essay, written in 1992, ends with a mixture of self-satisfaction and self-deprecation: "Probably, no matter how hard I try, it will be difficult to write an article in my life that is more influential than 'college entrance examination essay' and more exciting to my fathers and fellow countrymen." Unexpectedly, this is only the beginning of the story, and the gradual unfolding after that is even more surprising. Without saying that I wrote my own articles or interviews with the media, I will talk about how it became a "landmark event" and incorporate memories and statements about the tide of reform and opening up. "Literature and History Reference" is a high-end current affairs/history magazine sponsored by the People's Daily, and its June 2011 (part 2) "Special Issue for the 90th Anniversary of the Founding of the Party" published "The First College Entrance Examination After the Cultural Revolution: Chen Pingyuan's Essay Appeared". CCTV-10's "Reading" program, on March 17, 2013, aired a 45-minute feature film "My Extracurricular Book chen pingyuan", and at the end of the program, the host specially gave me a college entrance examination essay "Meteorological New in the Year of Dazhi" published by People's Daily with magnification and frame. In 2019, Xinhua News Agency's "New Youth" produced a special program for the 70th anniversary of the founding of New China, selected seven people, representing 70 years, and the choice was very strict, and the approval was carried out layer by layer, especially in my episode, which is said to be hesitant again and again. Talking about the decade from 1969 to 1979, how to write is a trap, and finally choosing "resuming the college entrance examination" as a symbol is obviously to avoid contradictions. The so-called "telling rich experiences, discussing the issues of the times, and inspiring contemporary youth" is difficult to fully realize in my episode. The Cultural Revolution did not allow talk, and only one side was allowed to go to the mountains and go to the countryside (otherwise why resume the college entrance examination), although the producers were very serious, the effect could only be said to be "passable". In the same year, the "Yangcheng Faction" reported that the history museum of Zhongshan University was opened, especially mentioning the reform and opening up part, showing my college entrance examination essay "The New Weather of the Year of Dazhi", which made me even more worried: forty years, still "eating" college entrance examination essays, really did not come out. Last year, in order to "present the changes in China's college entrance examination system and the far-reaching impact on candidates," the People's Pictorial, which is under the supervision of the State Administration of Foreign Languages, and the 8th issue of the English journal "China Pictonial" published the Chinese and English edition of "The College Entrance Examination that Changed Destiny", which was excerpted by the editor from my previous articles and only asked me to authorize it.
A college entrance examination essay has such magic and many dramatic changes, which is a projection of the big era. It is not that I am particularly competent, but that the narrative of contemporary Chinese history needs this pen. In 1978, "People's Daily", in fact, published a total of five college entrance examination essays (divided into two times), the reason why I have repeatedly chosen me as a symbol of the restoration of the college entrance examination, in addition to my life in Beijing, more active in the academic circles, the media is easy to find, there is another important reason, that is, the composition topic. At that time, the People's Daily published a Shanxi essay entitled "Words from the Heart dedicated to Chairman Hua", and Anhui's was "Follow Chairman Hua, Sing Loudly"; these are too close to the situation, and the passage of time cannot be used; it is still Guangdong's "Meteorological New year of the Great Rule" and Beijing's "I am in this year of fighting" is more secure. In December 2017, I recovered from a serious illness and rushed back to CUHK to attend the 77th grade reunion, where several teachers mentioned my college entrance examination essay and revealed a secret - the college entrance examination essay questions in Guangdong that year were written by Jin Qinjun of the Department of Chinese of CUHK. As for the person who read the file and who recommended it to the People's Daily, it is impossible to verify.
In the end, it may surprise people. I was very satisfied to be admitted to and university, and I never thought of checking the score. Two years ago, due to the needs of work, I asked the Chinese Department of CUHK to go to the archives to check my college entrance examination results that year: Chinese 92, Mathematics 67, Politics 75, Shidi 76.5 - in addition to Language, the scores of various subjects are not high, but it just happens that the composition score is full, and there are many magical stories in the future.
Finally, there are two points to explain, one is that in order to ensure that the structure of the whole book is relatively complete, I borrowed four texts from the other two books ("The Ranger Man" and "How literature is Educated"), and then further coordinated when editing personal essays in the future. The second is the many illustrations, in addition to the book shadows and photos I prepared, especially thanks to the family of the famous painter Lin Fengfeng for allowing him to use the two paintings he created, "Go to School", and my third brother Chen Gaoyuan specially created ten pen pastels for this book, reminiscing about the childhood and hometown that is going away day by day.
An excerpt from this article was published in the A11 Flower Land Edition of Yangcheng Evening News on January 25, 2022
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Editor-in-charge | Wu Xiaopan