Literature Guanlan Book Club
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Dalian University of Technology Chinese discipline point "Heguang Reading Club" was established in June 2018, and the host is Dai Yaoqin. The main participants of the "Heguang Reading Club" are the "post-90s" and "post-00s", positioned as a combination of basic and master's degrees, the intersection of arts and sciences, and the promotion of reading and creation activities in the form of theme salons and writers' classes.
"Vulgar Land"
Author: Li Zishu
Publisher: Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House
Online: 2021-4-1
Dai Yaoqin (Host)
"Flowing Customs" is Li Zishu's creative transformation back to realism, and the "local" writing maintains the circle structure of "people-family-society", but its writing landing point has shifted from focusing on private experience to caring for social ecology. The true meaning of "vulgar land" is a combination of Xidu (abstract) and HDB flats (figurative), and Lai Zishu takes the multi-ethnic life of his hometown Ipoh as the starting point of creation. The community life of the "HDB" era no longer exists, so the new change is really a new life or once again into the old track, the novel does not give the answer, maybe this is the real ecology of the world, no one can decide the future, can only look forward to the future.
From the perspectives of Xidu, cochlea, cats, children, beliefs, education, and memory, the "Wako" reading club opens up a variety of paths to peruse "Liu Xiandi".
Zhang Huimin
Siddoo
The 20-storey KOTAB flat is a microcosm of Sidō Castle. In the hot and dry space, people hurriedly spend some undesirable time here, and they scatter in an instant. The noise of organic and inorganic matter is noisy day and night, indicating that the big machine of HDB is still running. Although the days are trivial and uneventful, the worries of the hermit are constantly lingering.
The noisy reverberation of the multi-ethnic group confuses the position at all times. Fierce conflict is gone, but crisis is lazily stretching its tentacles. The formation and disintegration of HDB flat life echo the uncertainty of Xidu. The space constructed by cement, soil and wood is not necessarily stable, and the connection between people is particularly fragile. Under eternal change, any shelter becomes unreliable. The yearning for stability and the rejection of new changes quietly change the trajectory of people's march.
Xiao Hui represents a member of the ordinary Chinese children in the small town, and Yin Xia pushes this complex state of loop to a new level. Mutilation of the body and excessive intelligence constitute the proverb: the wise God/the suffering man. Half of the Yinxia lurks in the night, passing between mirrors and dreams, gaining exceptional insight because of its visual impairment; the other half, as a fragile life, experiences all the disasters that the Malay Chinese, especially the Chinese women, may face.
Intellect constitutes exuberant ambition to go outward, and Yinxia refuses to be a blind person who makes a living from skill, which runs counter to her mother's vision. The obscure abuser is doomed to have no name, because the perpetrators of the "Ganissa" who defeated Yinxia, almost the entire Xidu, are fermented desires, alien alienation, cowardice limited to culture and faith.
Lotus Beads rise to the top, Ma Ping's sister-in-law lives in peace, Hui Lan succumbs to blind love, and the prodigal son Dahui transforms into a hidden temple. The people who go out are all around the corners, and many of the girls who stay in the same place have also turned into unjust souls. No life leads to absolute security, and no life should be overly harsh or celebrated.
Conservative and bold, tough and weak, sometimes aggressive, sometimes withdrawn. Yinxia's body condensed the shadow of countless local Chinese. Teacher Gu, who suddenly arrived, not only gave her a relatively happy ending, but also smeared a warm touch on the whole crisis. On the day of marriage, Yinxia, who was no longer young, fell into a dream. The days ahead are still unknown, the uneasiness will take more time, or perhaps this vigilance will continue to be with people for a long time. But no matter what, new hope will forever cover the old wounds.
Yu Mingyu
cochlea
The moment the omniscient narrator jumped on Yinxia's body, it was like being clamped into a vast and infinite dark cage. The sound envelops many of the realities of Ipoh's Chinese cultural ecology, growing from visual imagery to returning to the characters themselves through the senses of the ear. Indonesian, Malay, Tamil and Chinese spread the complex scene of multi-ethnic symbiosis in Sidhu. The folk situation is filled with sounds: the magic instrument next to the Temple of Baluo vibrates in a push-and-pull manner, and the Great Compassion Mantra is mixed with the chanting of "only Allah"... They all wander freely in the auditory space with fine texture.
When the horizon becomes empty, the soundscape alternates. The allegorical natural and artificial sounds provide interpretation for the subject's instantaneous mood fluctuations and the continuation of the external atmosphere, and the reader also unconsciously achieves self-consistency for fictional personnel in a highly realistic resonance relationship. The text is full of mud spots of life - the "clicking" sound of rattan breaking through the air, the "clicking" sound of the word machine, the "rattling and rattling" sound when the neck is turned. In contrast, "silent" as the fourth sound landscape, with the overload of information in an instant to build a will ring. As a result, we see the weak Xiaohui hitting the "wax statue in the melting of the street" with a roar as a fist, the bereaved mother's Yinxia pinching the handprint of the elephant head god for herself who was confined to Cen Lonely, and the wordless time was confined to "the eve of the storm". It is precisely in the gradual decline of meaning that Yinxia's interpretation of the ballast noise as a bright signal can be rejuvenated by fairy tales.
Yin Xia sat in the office of the "Taxi" radio station, holding the hub of thousands of clues in the whole book. The world flowed into the blind woman's cochlea, slid out of her lips and tongue, and radiated to every corner of Ipoh. Every story that haunts the protagonist's soul repeatedly flashes back to the plot line at the moment she picks up Dahui's phone, and then completes a series of doubts, inferences and judgments according to the program. The truth and truth of the "internal rumors" and the "subtle relationship between people" in the upstairs building are hidden, but they cannot escape the mirror and capture of limited perception. The abdication of the "visible" ushered in a new "audible" order.
However, it should be noted that the prospect of hearing sharpness is a distortion of visual perception. The world was noisy, and only a silent Silver Xia was left walking alone in the eternal night. In the process of his identity from a child to a woman, the indistinguishable acoustic translocation is the beginning of fear: the "Iron Triangle" relationship has long buried the hidden danger of separation, constantly worn out in the utilitarian calculation of the marriage, and completely collapsed with the news of Razu's death; the joyful description of the Indian sister Flower's killing of the kitten by her mother, and the crisp collision of the small metal device on the operating table, across the distant time and space, sharpened into a heart-breaking cry.
In the xidu where good and evil are intertwined, it is difficult for readers to look at this miscellaneous "feast" with an absolutely enjoyable posture. Whenever the source of the noise and the mud of the intolerant information poured into the ears, and the dust of the past exploded like a bird at the same time, Yinxia could only drag her cochlea, filtering out the "pure sound" of life from those fleeting and ragged messages. The world visible to the naked eye has been replaced by a strange and eerie collective consciousness, and Yinxia is the only key. With a "meow", it is destined that only she will go straight to the truth in the gap between day and night.
Wang Yuexiao
cat
Ipoh has spread the saying that "dogs are rich, cats are poor", and even extends the national position of "Malays raise cats, Chinese people raise dogs". The cat in the novel is given the color of "human", which is both a flexible clue hidden in the story and the true meaning of "vulgarity".
Cats run through the two spaces of "Upstairs Upstairs" and "Beautiful Garden", connecting Yinxia's infancy and adulthood. The Indian sister Hua, who lives in the "upstairs", once told Yinxia the legend of the cat, which is both magical and fragile. The cat's duality echoes Yinxia's disability and stubbornness, and also metaphorically dominates the ruthless fate of cats and people. Yinxia went to investigate after the sisters moved away, but the cat disappeared without a trace, like the people who disappeared in time.
The real cat only appeared in the "Beautiful Garden", which became the opportunity to open a new narrative. It only appears at night, and Yinxia takes the name "Punai" in the Tamil language. Teacher Gu called it "Scarface". The different names convey the two people's respective moods. The word "Pu Nai" reminds Yin Xia of her Indian sisters and Aunt Lotus Pearl, and through these associations, "Pu Nai" has become an unforgettable memory embodiment. And the weakness of the cat has also become a symbol of the plight of Yinxia and many low-level women. "Scarface" is from the movie "Scarface Star". This unique name is both Teacher Gu's remembrance of his old friendship and his relief from a failed marriage. "A cat eats two tea ceremonies", "Pu Nai" or "Scarface" stitches together darkness and light, touching the red line between the two, and driving the narrative of the novel with objects. It has disappeared and returned, reproducing the departure and return of Dahui. The "cat" is uncertain, and the cause of personnel affairs will lose the deliberate coincidence, so that the original "legend" will fall back to the "world".
But is it really "Punai" who has returned? The end of the novel is precisely a fiction, which can be understood as a return to structure or as the beginning of an unknown future. Stray cats have two faces. "Pu Nai" saw Yinxia's blindness and revealed its true gloom in the night. But during the day "it thinks it's another cat", lazy and smooth. The difference is precisely the dialectic of the novel's operation: the darkness and light of the world, the beauty and imperfection of life, all focus on the individual. The deep meaning of "customs" is also gathered here.
Sun Yanqun
child
From the undead daughter ("Maggot Nightmare"), Xiao Jin ("Some Ordinary April Day"), Xiao Ai ("PushIng Open the Window of the Attic"), Traveler ("The Town Without Rain"), etc., to Yin Xia ("The Vulgar Land"), who was recently in the "upstairs" of Xidu ("Liu Xiandi"), Li Zishu often used children's perceptual experience to present and illustrate the external social world in the literary picture of the dilemma of human existence.
Due to the lack of rational cognition in children in the early stage of growth, their perception of the adult world is mostly derived from the functional effects of sight, hearing, touch and smell, so children's narratives have traces of subjectivization and fragmentation. The boy "I" sniffs the strange sour taste in the claustrophobic ("Floating Desert"), Xiao Ai ("Push Open the Attic Window") after the loss of his lover is stirred into a colorful color, and the secrets in the secular music flow penetrate the visual dead end and burrow into the ear canal of the blind girl Yinxia. Children's magical imagination and experience extend their emotional tentacles to the encroaching day, the chaotic night and the thick dreams, and finally make the sensual world with smells, colors and temperatures appear.
However, the emotional world of children is wrapped in adult desires, and the primitive wolf nature of adults who have betrayed or hypocritically fermented and deteriorated in the urging of damp air currents. Xiao Ya endures her parents' preference for sons and daughters ("Flowing Years"), Hui is abandoned by her father ("Write Her in a Novel"), and Yin Xia is brutally abused in the dark afternoon. Children can only curl up in the cold and cramped attic house, or in the stack of nylon nets hooked in the "coiled silk hole" of the lone silence, cut off contact with social space, end the dialogue with the self-soul, those diary letters used to show the heart and communicate the dialogue are drenched and swollen, rolled up and wrinkled to the point of unrecognizable, from this moment on, the child gradually loses his voice, autism, and even morbidity.
The "unqualified" of adults plays an "enlightenment" role in giving children trauma, and children are stripped of their innocent nature in a pathological state, and they begin to gaze, imitate, and follow the adult world. Luya obediently ("Luya's World of Will"), the dead daughter kills her father ("Maggot"), and Xiao Ai ("Push Open the Window of the Attic") drowns the baby in the yellow sewage of the toilet, full of lust, violence and evil acts wild. The logic of identity between children and adults is gradually loosened, and the boundaries between purity and barbarism in their emotional world are ambiguous.
Children fall into the quagmire of the adult world, struggle, assimilate, and eventually disappear, faintly merging into a shadow with adults. Or perhaps, Li Zishu did not want the child to sink himself in the bitter sea for too long, and among the sick children, Yinxia did not return with her, and she was cared for by Ganissa. In her, Li Zishu reproduced the cruelty of survival and poured infinite tenderness.
Liu Yan
faith
The common people depicted in "The Land of Customs" points to the loose "folk beliefs" circle of the Ma Chinese in Ipoh. In Ipoh, a city with a very high Chinese population, deity beliefs and ancestor worship are like a woven ring of nets, linking malay Chinese with China on a spiritual level, and also enlisting people living in KOTAB flats, so that every "exodus" and "new change" are in the game.
"Ci Hai" analyzes that "folk beliefs are popular folk psychology and behaviors of worshiping certain spiritual concepts and certain tangible objects." Cave Temple, Nantian Cave, Sanbao Cave, Guanyin Cave, Jade Emperor, Lü Ancestral Master, Treasurer Xingjun, and the tangible entities of the gods and goddesses condensed into Ipoh's Chinese cultural enclaves, no different from the Buddhist temples flourishing throughout China. At the Nine Heavenly Goddess Temple, white rice incense can communicate yin and yang through "Ask Mi Po"; the ancient temple of Da bo gongba Luo and the palace of the Nine Emperors doumu pray for blessings and wealth, and each needs to go once a year; the Shrine of the Chinese family in HDB houses is dedicated to Bai Guanyin and ancestral tablets, bringing together the beliefs of the gods and ancestors in the community of folk beliefs.
The people are the main force of folk belief, and "there is a spirit that must be sought" and "there is a reward for what is needed" is the general mentality of folk belief. However, there is no "main worship god" in the Chinese families of Komba hdbboy, the system of gods is complex and arbitrary, mythological images, heroes and sages, celebrities, prominent ancestors, and various "gods" with different functions perform their duties, all of which are part of the folk belief circle, which has a wide and profound impact on MCA society.
However, The death of Siu Hui's father was tragic; Razu died young when she went to the city to study; Aunt Lotus Zhu had an unhappy marriage after moving out of the HDB house to become "Mrs. Dato"; and the Yinxia family noticed that "the people of the Beautiful Garden were silent, and they did not even greet each other when they met". The residents of the upper floors and upstairs, with a sojourn mentality, kept running away, leaving the HDB houses that were compressed with gods and Buddhas, like shallow fish, trying to swim into the vast deep sea, but drowning in the "water" due to lack of oxygen. It seems that "the road of life has come to a spacious place, and there is no need to froth with those who have the same disease", but it is actually stepping into another dilemma. The shackles of folk beliefs reflected in "The Land of The Flowing Land" eventually fell into the narrative trap of "division-fall-healing".
Zhao Jiajie
educate
The six-year Chinese education of Ipoh Chinese Primary School has cultivated Li Zishu's reading habits and writing hobbies. She attended the National Secondary School of Malaysia, which has only a few Chinese lessons per week, but this did not affect her love of Chinese creation.
Yinxia's school for the blind is the result of Chinese education. In 1819, Malaysia established the first Chinese school, "Wufu College", and the people also spontaneously established private schools with the help of temples and ancestral halls. With a century-old history, the Perak Hokkien Association established the private school in 1917 and founded Penang Hua Primary School 8 years later. Local overseas Chinese leaders promoted the opening of Chinese schools, which took China's "Four Books and Five Classics" as teaching materials, did not set up full-time teachers, and only hired local Chinese elderly people who were highly respected among themselves as teachers. The blind school in the novel is not far from the Fude Temple, and it is also near the Mishan Huaxiao.
Ipoh's first Chinese school was the Yucai School established in 1907. After the Chinese have a stable life, they set up a school in the local area, with the aim of enabling future generations to inherit Chinese culture and be able to reconnect with their Chinese relatives in the future. The number of Chinese is increasing, and more and more Chinese schools are being set up. According to Malaysia's Star newspaper on November 11, 2020, more Malaysians are choosing to attend local Chinese schools than in the past decade. Compared with Chinese schools, "LiuYudi" reveals that compared with Chinese schools, there are problems such as insignificant educational effects and weak school management, so in addition to Chinese parents, parents of other ethnic groups also send their children to Chinese schools, and Chinese schools show a broader inclusiveness. Although Razu is of Indian descent, he has won the first place in the whole year and various medals in The Barohua Elementary School many times, while his older siblings in the Malay school are very common. His parents were delighted that La was fluent in Mandarin to converse with others, and he was publicized by the school and the media for his A in Chinese in the Diploma of Education Examination, which overshadowed the real huihuiyuan.
Wong Kam Shu, the representative writer of the "MCA New Generation", mentioned that "Chinese education is a necessary condition for the existence of MCA literature". The promotion, development and rise and fall of Chinese education have directly affected the future of MCA literature.
Han Guidong
memory
Leonard Cohen said, "There are rifts in everything, and that's where the light comes in." "It is precisely in such a dappled writing that "Flowing Land" reproduces the past of the joys and sorrows of "upstairs and upstairs". Walking to the corner of life, there will always be someone in the bronze dark night, suddenly overturned the spotlight in his hand, so that he peeled off the skin bag full of dirt, revealing the noise and secrecy of the dust falling to the ground, which belongs to the purity of "The Land of The Flow". Those stories that accompanied Li Zishu's birth and growth in Si were also engraved into eternal Tin du memories in the uncertain stream of ming and death.
"The Land of The Vulgar Land" seems to be more like a book of ethnic memory, which is full of life and death, sin and punishment, black and white, and the layman, and the characters are gradually disappearing in the fragments of time. We do see the little people who are uprooted and displaced for their lives, along with the marginal trifles that have been salvaged by time, and all of this interprets the brilliance and redemption of the depths of human nature in the touch of darkness. Yinxia, Dahui, and Chanjuan are all indifferently facing the withering of life in the daily life of life and death. Hui Lan was at the door of the room, "stepping on the meager bright light squeezed out of the room, most of her body soaked in the dark", and in an instant, life escaped into the endless dark night.
"Flowing Land" is not only a literary written expression, but also a philosophical worry that entrusts life to the universal value discussion in the transition of thought and the charm of the world. Flying to the sky and falling back to the earth, its tight emotional loop tells the story of "upstairs and upstairs", which flows through the empathy of kitsch, oblivion, ethics, chance and necessity. It is true that we do not have to deliberately seek the meaning of life, but to realize the nature of life like the people in the book, that is, to live this life.
The indifference and pride that invaded the bones faded in the uninhibited rings of life. Milan Kundera borrowed the protagonist Thomas's words in "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" to clarify: History, like the life of an individual, is too light to bear, as light as a feather, as light as dust, caught in space, and will not return tomorrow. "Flowing Land" writes about the wolf running suddenly and out of chaos and coldness, but avoids the epic narrative of Hong Zhong Da Lu, but only plans the future and destination that we have not foreseen in the life that XiDu can see. Li Zishu used the figure of a vulgar person to weave a web of darkness, but there was a bright unknown hidden in it. What Li Zishu writes for us in "The Land of Customs" is precisely the way of looking at life and the possibility of reading the meaning of self.
(This article was published in the 7th edition of the special issue "Literature Guanlan" jointly organized by China Writers Network and Literature and Art Daily on January 24, 2022)