"Tayubang Natural History", by Zou Hanming, Dafang CITIC Publishing Group, July 2021.
A video of appreciation by Zou Hanming, author of "Tayuhama Natural History".
Tribute
Tayuhama is both a geographical term that has disappeared and a spiritual coordinate attributed to literature. The author's panoramic look back and scanning of his hometown reaches the depths of time, which is especially precious at a time when the process of urbanization is advancing. Wooden bridgeheads, cement white fields, tombs within the walls, eight points, pig houses, swing fields, old people's lower, houtoutian, etc., the geographical architecture of villages is both "limited territory" and the beginning of "infinite roaming", and the seasonal festivals, natural customs, grassroots sentient beings, etc. reconstructed based on memory in the book outline a picture of natural life in the past - the reproduction of this paper village, which contains the story of the secular survival of man and nature.
We pay tribute to the Natural History of Tayuhama, as a non-fiction work, it reconstructs the history of the existence of Tayuhama, an old village in Jiangnan, from the perspective of almost rural fieldwork, leaving a well-documented spiritual historical material for the present and the future. We also pay tribute to Zou Hanming, who, with the acumen and insight of a poet, conveyed and recorded the traditional life of harmony between man and nature.
Thank you
I am very happy that my book was selected for the "2021 Beijing News Annual Reading Recommendation". This is an affirmation and great encouragement to this book and to me personally. Takyuhama is my birthplace, where my imagination soars. In short, this little-known place on Earth is a source of inspiration for my own enjoyment. But now, it is only one of the countless villages that have disappeared in the land of Jiangnan, and because by chance, I wrote it, and because of good luck, the book was published and remembered by a small number of readers. More because of your newspaper's recommendation, more people know, for which I am deeply grateful. Thank you to the judges, and to CITIC Press, especially my editor- Ms. Luo Mengxi, for her contribution to this book. Although Takyuhama is gone, the nutrition it has given me has been nourishing me. If it had known, it would have been as happy as I am at this moment.
From the very beginning, I have been writing about my hometown of Tayuhama as a typical village in Gangnam. The writing process of this book is very long, and the writing process is also the process of my comprehensive understanding of the village, because Takyuhama is ordinary, unremarkable, and nameless, but it makes it representative and universal. I can even say that in any secluded old Jiangnan, there is a tayubang, which can be called tayuhama.
Today, an interesting book can be passed smoothly to the reader, this process is not the author alone can complete, in such a wine is also afraid of the deep alley, good books also need to continue to shout in the era, the popularity of the book is the result of everyone's joint efforts. Serious media, on the other hand, have the ability to wash the pearl shell from the grains of sand – as a public gift, to give it bitterly to readers. In this different winter, thank you for the precious warmth that the Beijing News Book Review Weekly has passed on to the readers and for giving me this author.
--Zou Hanming
Zou Hanming is a poet and writer.
This book
Beijing News: What prompted you to create this book?
Zou Hanming: Many black and white dreams I have had in my life. Strangely enough, most of my dreams were done in the demolition of the previous tower Fish Hama. Well, writing this book is probably a reliving of old dreams.
"Tayuhama Natural History" is a literary biography of Tayubang in the Jiangnan village, and it is also an elegy composed of a personal growth history of a southern rural teenager, a series of living details.
Cherish your past, cherish your childhood, all your future is rooted in the past. Don't forget that we once had a life that fit so closely with nature, so "for the source of living water". Also, then a clean Chinese language.
Beijing News: To you, what does the disappeared village of Tayuhama mean?
Zou Hanming: When I was a child, my mother bought me a ceramic piglet, which was very cute, and there was a small gap on the back of the pig that could be stuffed with five, two and one nickel coins. At that time, I didn't have much change, but I could always put a few coins into it every month. After a year and a half, I picked up the pottery pig and shook it, and the brush inside was pulling and pulling, and my heart was beautiful. Until one day, the pig's belly was stuffed with nickel coins, but it could not be taken by hand, and the only way to take out the coins was to break the ceramic piglet. So I lifted it, threw it on the ground, and with a thud, the silver shining cent rolled to the ground, a surprise that I will never forget for a lifetime. My childhood was spent in Takyuhama, which inadvertently stored an inexhaustible fortune for me. However, the acquisition of wealth is also at the cost of some kind of fragmentation.
When I was in my twenties, I wrote a poem "Blue Sky in the Well", which wrote about leaning over the wellhead, looking at the bright and narrow blue sky at the bottom of the well, and seeing TaYuhama lying lazily at the bottom of the well, my heart moved. Since then, "the little droplets of childhood have repeatedly overflowed my bright eyes." The last sentence of the poem reads: "Some people die with a dark incense / Toward the desolate twilight." "If I want to hook up with the past with this village, I first think of this well, there was such a well in The Yokoguchi of Tayuhama Sanfenta, because I often went to the wellhead to look at it, it was very dangerous, and the well was filled in by Captain Tiger." It occurred to me that many years later, this mud boy who was looking at the diorama at the mouth of the well became a person who searched for and dug a spring on the circumference of the tower fish hama, and fortunately he also happily dug out a clear spring.
Beijing News: What kind of village is Tayubang?
Zou Hanming: A village of things and things, but also a village of people. An ordinary Jiangnan village with an ancient atmosphere. For a long time, the night is not closed, the road is not left behind, and the ancient style still exists during the New Year's Festival.
Beijing News: "Tayubang Natural History" chapter structure is very special ("Geography", "Geography Chronicle: Father's Old House", "Chronicle of the Ages", "Animal Chronicle", "Insect Chronicle", "Agricultural Poetry", "Agricultural Poetry Supplement: Grass and Wood Column Biography"), which has its own details, why is this book completed in such a classification, in an almost natural history way? You see the use of language to reconstruct Takyuhama as a writer's duty, and what is the significance of this reconstruction for us today?
Zou Hanming: Natural history writing is a kind of literary writing, and "Tayuhama Natural History" does not belong to this lineage. The structure of the book is more inspired by the local chronicles of the Ming and Qing dynasties. In the past ten years, in order to supplement my family, I have written a lot of literary and historical works for localities, so I have read too many local histories. Of course, I did not completely copy the structure of the local history, but remodeled it. As for "completing this book in the way of natural history", it can only be said that Tauyuhama is indeed a village that is seamlessly integrated with nature.
You know, the disappearance of a village also means the disappearance of a living custom. Reconstruction in the literary sense is only a reconstruction in the author's personal sense. I did try to revive the village in my modern Chinese, which was mixed with Tayu Hama native, one detail at a time. This process is also a process of knowing and loving, but I think that even if I were lucky enough to resurrect it, it would only mean that I personally wish that as the son of Thayohama, I would not want to see my village completely destroyed. It should survive in another spiritual form, stronger and longer. This is probably also a kind of literary gratitude to the homeland. It is in this sense that the epilogue says that "this is not a literary ambition, but is really the duty of every writer".
This person
Beijing News: Before creating the "Natural History of Tayubang", you also wrote the "Jiangnan Dictionary", which is also a memoir about Tayubang. Why do you obsess over writing Takyohama? Why would you choose to complete this memory in prose rather than poetry?
Zou Hanming: When I wrote the Jiangnan Dictionary, my horizon expanded outward from Tayuhama. TaYuhama is the center of the circle where I can observe Gangnam, and the whole of Gangnam is its circumference, and I walk on this circumference.
The foothold of both books is Tayuhama, but the way of processing is completely different, the former is polished glass beads, exquisitely carved, the latter is a tapestry, you need to sort out the complicated warp and weft, but there is a point, the content of the two books is actually not much repetition.
Strictly speaking, the Jiangnan Dictionary was the first book I went from poetic style to prose writing. Over the years, my main work is still poetry. Prose and poetry are also two genres that I have used interchangeably in recent years. I had secretly resolved that, in addition to writing a prose Takyohama, I had been thinking about writing a poem, and my interest in the latter was far greater than the former. In fact, I wrote two complete books of poems about Tayuhama, which were published sporadically, but none of them. It is a very helpless fact that poetry collections are not easy to publish.
Beijing News: The Jiangnan Dictionary was first published in 2007, when the village of Tayubang was still a geographical term rather than a past tense. But in 2021, when The Natural History of Thayuhama was published, the village has disappeared for more than a decade. Will there be some different feelings when you write twice?
Zou Hanming: TaYubang was demolished in 2009. In fact, there were many years before the village completely disappeared, and like any Jiangnan village, it was already half-dead, and it did not have the vitality that I lived in in the 1970s and 1980s. When I wrote it, a family of three had already moved to Jiaxing City, so that there were some gaps in time and space, which was actually the best state for writing.
If there are some different feelings about the writing of the two books, it is that after the village disappears, my whole heart is empty, and I need some memory to fill it. I think villages can be demolished, but the memories of a generation cannot be erased. Of course, the demolition also speeded up the completion of the book, and suddenly there was a sense of elegy.
Beijing News: How should we face the changes in the countryside and the disappearing villages in the process of urbanization?
Zou Hanming: The countryside and the city were originally two sides of the same coin, but later, the city became more and more in front of the countryside in the direction of modernization. I think of an Indian story about the countryside and the city, where it is said that a Western expedition hired an indigenous Indian as a guide, and after three days of rapid walking, the Indian guide asked to stop and rest for a day, and the reason was that the soul was too fast to keep up, and it was necessary to wait for the soul.
In the process of rural urbanization, to use an inappropriate analogy, the city is our body, all the way up, the countryside is an ancient soul. Now, our footsteps are even firmly fixed on the front, but the soul in our body is lying flat, not necessarily able to keep up, which requires us to wait for it. We need to reinvent a village where we once lived.
This year
Beijing News: If you use a certain word or a certain sentence to describe the past year, how would you summarize it?
Zou Hanming: Buying vegetables, cooking, busy with three meals a day. Experience a line of poetry by my literary hero Philip Larkin: Alive, just repeating. If there's one word to describe it, it's waiting. We are all waiting, waiting for the pandemic to pass. Of course, I am still waiting for the successful publication of my new book, The Biography of Mudan.
Beijing News: What is your daily life like?
Zou Hanming: Write or revise past works in the morning and read in the afternoon. During the epidemic, I finished reading three volumes of Proust translated by Zhou Kexi, and I read three-quarters of the "Golden Plum Bottle" in these two months. Of course, a week is also inevitable to go to the unit to do some physical work. Go to the swimming pool every day on time for a freestyle of 1,500 meters. Grocery shopping, cooking, and a glass of rice wine in the evening. Chat with a few friends on WeChat and exchange some questions.
There is still a book to be completed about TaYuhama, and now I can only say that it is a book about the characters of Ta Yu Bang, which together with the Gangnam Dictionary and the Natural History of Ta Yu Bang constitute a non-fiction trilogy of a village.
In addition, when I was fifteen years old, I went to live with my mother in Shimen Town, and lived for a long time next to Feng Zikai's former residence Yuanyuan Hall, planning to write a book from Jiangnan Town, purely in white and full of details. I wanted to write about the smell of a small town—yes, the smell rather than the fun.
Written | Ho An Ann
Edit | Qingqingzi and Luodong
Proofreading | Guo Li