A successful "circle-breaking turn"
——Watch Fan Wen's "The Sun Turns"
Pan Kaixiong
About the first half of 2020, the People's Literature Publishing House included Fan Wen's novel "The Sun Turns" among the key topics reported on the theme of poverty alleviation, and then this topic was included in the "2021 Theme Publication Key Publications Selection" by the Central Propaganda Department. Honestly, I didn't have a particularly good idea of this topic at the time. Of course, this is not a distrust of Fan Wen's creative ability, but only a bottomless heart about whether he can be competent for this type of creation. Fan Wen's past novel creation, the important works are not the "Tibet Trilogy" composed of three novels such as "Water Milk Land", "Compassion for the Earth" and "The Song of the Earth", or "The Eye of Chongqing" and "My Blood and My Soil", these works have distinct characteristics and are excellent, but the content involved is not about the history and culture of Tibet or some important events in China's modern history, and it is rare to write on the theme of realistic themes at close range, not to mention the theme of "poverty alleviation", which is indeed a certain challenge for novel creation.
The time quickly turned to the middle of March this year, and the People's Literature Publishing House sent me a printed version of "The Sun Turns" for me to grasp and read. Therefore, I entered the first read-through of this finished product with a curious mentality, and the basic judgment of the pawn was two: First, this is a particularly "novelized" work in the novels I have read on the theme of poverty alleviation; second, of course, there are obvious deficiencies. A week later, the Humanities Club invited four professionals, including myself, to consult for him, and "frankness" was the main theme of the consultation. In this regard, Fan Wen, in addition to occasionally smiling and squinting to make some responses, most of the time is nodding or burying his head (record). More than three months later, Fan safely handed over the current draft. The reason why I have taken the trouble to review this process is that I want to say that a good work may be completed in one go, but sometimes it needs to be polished.
Fan Wen himself actually has a clear understanding of the difficulty of creating this work, as well as the creation of this work in order to complete and do it well, although this is his seventh novel since entering the "new century", but "in the past, I was more devoted to historical narratives, taking national culture and history as the object of my study and expression, Tibetan, Naxi, Yi, Hani and so on." This time I turned my gaze to the present, to the Zhuang. I know it's a huge challenge." In the face of this challenge, Fan Wen understood that he "needs to choose seedlings, cultivate intensively, connect with the ground gas, absorb nutrients, walk in the field, and discover on the ground." To this end, he went deep into the Wenshan Zhuang and Miao Autonomous Prefecture in Yunnan, which "is located on the border of the southern country and guards the southwest gate of the country, which was still full of wars and heroes more than forty years ago, and was not fully opened to the public until the mid-1990s." Therefore, it is one of the regions with the deepest poverty and the widest area in Yunnan." Here, Fan Wen "visited dozens of border villages, witnessed the great changes in remote mountain villages, and met many leaders who got rid of poverty and became rich" and soberly realized that "it is an honor to be in the great battle of 'poverty alleviation'." We are witnesses and recorders. For a writer, how to present it is particularly important." Yes, "how to present" is crucial.
If you don't understand the above process and just look at the work for the first time, it is not impossible to see "The Sun Turns" as a crime-solving novel. The first protagonist of the work is not the village chief or branch secretary in the common theme of poverty alleviation, nor is it the "first secretary" who is arranged by the organization to go to the grass-roots level to help the poor, but Zhuo Shimin, the old director who has just retired from the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the Provincial Public Security Department. Moreover, this old criminal investigator who has been "a man of great horses all his life and has experienced hundreds of battles" and regards "a magnificent life is a heroic nature, but the days when the wind and waves are calm are the days of life" have not yet enjoyed the "days" of "life" because of "a placeholder" on his pancreas, and the main body of the story of the work is that although he has just retired, he has formulated for himself the "three noes policy" of "not interfering in the work in the bureau, not mixing with any cases, and not helping people to intercede" The old criminal investigator, He had to be involved in the successful investigation of a child trafficking case until his heroic sacrifice before the dawn of victory. As for the Nanshan village related to poverty alleviation, it happens to be the location of this criminal investigation case, and the whole process of this village from extreme poverty to poverty alleviation to poverty alleviation is naturally brought out in the whole process of solving the case, whether it is Cao Qiankuan, the old village chief who has worked hard to get rid of poverty in the village, or Cao Qiangui, who has lost his direction of life and embarked on the road of crime because of extreme poverty.
Not only that, in addition to these two important but not parallel narrative lines, there are many interesting settings in "The Sun Turns", which are also very elaborate and exquisite. For example, Wei Xiaoxiang, the mother of the abducted child Nong Yangyang, is designed to be a Zhuang, and her fellow aunt Bao is an old nanny who has served in Zhuo Shimin's family for many years, and the research direction of Zhuo Shimin's daughter Zhuo Wanyu, who is studying for a doctorate, happens to be the origin and migration of the Zhuang people, and this series of "coincidences" not only makes Zhuo Shimin seemingly accidentally "involved" in this "strange case" an inevitability, but also quietly introduces the element of Zhuang culture, so "find a handful of rice spikes to shout the soul", The entry of Zhuang folk customs such as "making spectators think of non-wrongs and non-activities that make spectators think of non-wrongs" and "opening the yangmen gate" and the meaningful "Ancient Song of sacrifice to the sun" is very natural. In addition, the opening paragraph of the work describes Zhuo Shimin's retirement life, such as playing tennis and fishing with his old partner Lan Gaorong, waiting for his old father with Alzheimer's disease, and accompanying his wife Xiao Yu to do the head... And so on. All these seemingly "idle brushes" are actually some of the most allegorical finishing touches in the work, which are very natural and appropriate to plant the meaning of the work.
Although it seems to be complementary, "The Sun Turns" is also quite careful about the narrative design of "poverty alleviation", which is another heavy narrative main line of the work. Fan Wen placed the main battlefield of poverty alleviation in Nanshan Village and Yangjiazhai where Cao Qiankuan, the leader of the poverty alleviation attack, and Cao Qiangui, Yang Cuihua, Zhao Simao, who were "turned around" and misguided because of poverty, and this was precisely the place where Zhuo Shimin, who was the commander of the reconnaissance company in the southern front war 40 years ago, and Cao Qiankuan, the former militia company commander of the village branch, formed a life-and-death friendship. When the battle against poverty began, people in the borderlands declared war on poverty without hesitation. This is not inferior in any way to the war that defended the frontier. Generations of people on the sidelines... It should not be poor, it should not be forever behind the times." As a result, the two current "wars" caused by poverty were launched here at the same time: one was that Zhuo Shimin resolutely bid farewell to the original comfortable life, and came to the place where they had fought together with his long-time like-minded comrade-in-arms Lan Gaorong, where they finally punished the evil and promoted the good to save Nong Yangyang, and Zhuo Shimin completed the last course of his life in the brave fight with the gangsters. The other is that the villagers who live here, Nong Jianguang and Wei Xiaoxiang, as well as Cao Qiangui, Yang Cuihua, Zhao Simao, and others who once "turned around" due to poverty, once "turned" and strayed into the wrong path of human trafficking; in stark contrast to them, the old village chief Cao Qiankuan's dedication to road construction, he always used the perseverance and spirit of Yugong to build a road to modern civilization for Nanshan Village, and this once zhuo Shimin's right-hand comrade-in-arms had a never-say-die blood and tenacity in his life. In his eyes: "For those villages with dangerous living conditions, villages like Nanshan Village, which have been sentenced to 'ecological cancer', no matter how difficult it is, we must also wage war against poverty like the war in the past." 'Ecological cancer' is not terrible, what is terrible is that people have no motivation to get rid of poverty and lack the spirit of fighting for the country. Cao Qiankuan's "Road Construction History" is in a sense a metaphor and symbol, condensing the development history of the poverty alleviation campaign in this land: from the individual villagers digging shoulders to the enthusiastic help of the kind people to the implementation of a series of precise poverty alleviation measures of the party and the government, the poverty alleviation cause in Nanshan Village is in full swing until it is victorious, the abducted child Nong Yangyang is successfully rescued, the leukemia patient Lin Chucheng is healed, and the villagers begin to get rich... How can all this not be a microcosm of the historic and great achievements made by the entire Chinese land in poverty alleviation?
Shortly after returning to the beginning of this article, I said, "This is a particularly 'novelized' work in the novels I have read about poverty alleviation." What does it mean to be a novel that is "particularly 'novelized'"? This is relative to the other novels I have seen with the theme of poverty alleviation, although this part of the work is called a long novel, but as a whole it is more like a long non-fiction writing, obsessed with talking about people and things, and when you look at the work, you can roughly understand who its prototype is. Such writing clearly contradicts the most basic characteristics of the novel, and thus forms a new "trap", and the novel that mistakenly falls into this "circle" cannot have much vitality even if its theme is prominent. In contrast, "The Sun Turns" integrates poverty alleviation into a broader social, era and cultural background to think, express and write. Including the "pre-history" of poverty alleviation from a twilight heroic policeman passively involved in a child abduction case spanning thousands of miles, including the background of a certain part of the work with Zhuang culture as the background, including the battle of the Southern Front 40 years ago... These plot details and scenes, which seem to be parallel and relatively independent to the fight against poverty, are actually related to the direct and indirect history and culture of "poverty" and "poverty alleviation" objectively, and it is these factors that are rationally and skillfully implanted to not only greatly strengthen the depth, thickness and meaning of "Sun Turn", but also ensure that "Sun Turn" as a long novel can stand, stand firm and go far. It is in these senses that calling him Fan Wen "a successful 'circle-breaking turn' is well deserved."
This article was originally published in the 11th edition of Wen Wei Po on December 3, 2021
【The author is Vice President and Critic of China Publishing Group】