Face to face| Ye Zhaoyan: Like a time traveler

Looking out from Ye Zhaoyan's study, a picture of the river flow came into view, and here was a window he opened in Nanjing. Living by the Yangtze River, I started writing before dawn. "People my age can still persist every day. Watching the sun rise every day, the vast Yangtze River will make people have some 'deceased people like Sifu' ideas. The river flows like this every day, day after day, I think life is actually like this. The interview is based on two face-to-face interviews, and with new works coming one after another, writer Ye Zhaoyan is the "most familiar stranger" to the people of Nanjing. Constantly "salvaging" Nanjing's past, present and future, he does not define his role as a researcher of history and culture, but a time traveler in travel.

Time travelers "possess" a city with words

The gushing Yangtze River makes people have endless reverie, and also brings the desire to tell stories to 65-year-old Ye Zhaoyan. At the beginning of 2022, he launched the long story "The Gate of Yifeng", which is still a story that takes place on the banks of the Yangtze River. From the late Qing Dynasty to the Republic of China, to the Entry of the National Revolutionary Army into Nanjing, the establishment of the National Government, and the subsequent change of various military and political forces in and around Nanjing. "If I hadn't seen the Yangtze River every day, if I hadn't been in Shimonoseki, I probably wouldn't have made up such a story." For fans of the book, there will be a kind of "archaeological" fun, and some details in the book can be found in the real shimoncle.

Some people say that Ye Zhaoyan occupies a city with words. Obsessed with writing the story of Nanjing, and this city is not only a space for Nanjing people Ye Zhaoyan to load stories, but also a platform for the distant world. Whether it is an account of the water vapor of the Qinhuai River and the Jinchuan River, the fragments of historical civilization scattered around the city of Nanjing, the monuments left over from the Six Dynasties period, or the eating, drinking and fun in Nanjing, the easy-going and true disposition of the People of Nanjing, he concluded, "The symbol of Nanjing is like a stool under my ass. ”

In "Old Things", Ye Zhaoyan wrote about more than 40 famous figures in modern and modern China related to Nanjing; in "Nanjing People" and "Old Nanjing: Old Shadow Qinhuai", the different aspects of the history, characters, architecture and culture of old Nanjing are described one by one, taking readers to roam Nanjing; in "The Woman Who Raced to the Night", the fates of two Nanjing women are intertwined to describe the changes of the times in Nanjing from the Republic of China to the present. "Unforgettable Hearts" tells the story of Nanjing in the 1920s and 1930s, warlords fighting, the Japanese army invading China, in this era of life and death, the life of all classes in Nanjing. He even launched the popular reader "Jiangsu Reader", which introduces the history, geography and culture of Jiangsu, which can see the prosperous backdrops, prosperous weather and historical changes of 13 cities in Jiangsu. "The Biography of Nanjing" is even more through the window of Nanjing, telling the history of China. After all kinds of thick ink and white sketches, the brushstrokes on Nanjing still did not stop, and "The Gate of Yifeng" set its sights on that year, and the reconstruction of Yifengmen was completed. It is the main road from the north of Nanjing to the bank of the Yangtze River, and it will pass through this city gate when going north, marching and triumphing.

In the interview, Ye Zhaoyan did not define his role as a researcher of history and culture, but a time traveler. "I like to travel through time and space and swim in history. For the history of Nanjing, the past of Nanjing, the future of Nanjing, I have a lot of wild thoughts in my head, like a time traveler walking around, and then turning some of my ideas into books. ”

"A writer must stand on a piece of land to write, and I think Nanjing is this land. But I also feel that writers should never become a souvenir, a local product. In many face-to-face interviews, Ye Zhaoyan has a clear understanding of this issue, "Chinese literature is also part of the common standard of world literature, can you write the most sensitive part of human nature, this is the most real thing." ”

Writers write a day is a day, thinking that "writing a day earns a day"

The writer Chen Cun once lamented that no matter who was specializing in Ye Zhaoyan, reading his catalog once would be exhausting. Writing nearly 10 million words for more than 40 years, ye Zhaoyan's study, just his own published works, almost occupy a bookcase. But he did not like the label of "high yield", "I always feel that a writer should not write too much, grind a sword for ten years, and write a book of "Dream of the Red Chamber" for a lifetime, but the writer is actually like the workers and farmers, he is a person who is constantly working, and writing is his working state." Many big writers have the habit of writing every day. ”

"Can you publish a short story in a month?" Writing is not an easy task for writers. But I feel fortunate to be able to live by writing, and to be able to write for the rest of my life in a free and quiet environment. Ye Zhaoyan was content with such an environment, such an opportunity, and thus generated a sense of urgency to "write a day, is a day". He, who loves to watch NBA games, made an analogy, "Athletes always have to retire, and sooner or later writers will not be able to write." But if an athlete can play a season, it is a season; a writer writes a day is a day, and a day earns a day by writing. ”

When writing "Unforgettable Heart", Ye Zhaoyan told his daughter that he was too tired to write, which may be his father's last work. But after the book ended, Ye Zhaoyan "died and came back" to write "Nanjing Biography", working ten hours a day. "I was in a particularly bad mood when I wrote a long story, and it was dark. After writing a book, I had no master, eating wrong, sleeping problems, and nothing was right. Later, I learned that writing can cure all my problems. Although the process of immersing himself in creation often makes him feel miserable, if he does not write, he will fall into the panic of having nowhere to put it.

Because of the encouragement of the writer Han Dong's father, the novelist Fang Zhi, Ye Zhaoyan began the creation of "The Murderer" with the mentality of playing tickets, tearing off several pages of the calendar and creating the novel on the back. During the summer vacation from the first grade to the second grade, I wrote eight novels in one go and published five. In the next five years, it fell into a bottleneck and was rejected many times, and the "Youth" magazine alone was no less than ten times. This experience exercised his mental nature and decided to calm down. At that time, the vanguard represented a kind of loneliness, represented a kind of non-acceptance, and did not integrate with the trend of the times. "There is no baggage, when a writer is not to write a masterpiece, the key is to see if you have the desire to express." In fact, when a writer has no threshold, he is a writer when he writes it, and nothing that is not written out is nothing. For those who love to write, writing is the right thing to do. "Ye Zhaoyan wanted to use writing to discover a group of people with similar hearts." There are always people who like to read books and read novels, and a small number of people even like to read novels of my kind. After reading it, we became connected, and it turned out that there were still some very lonely people in the world who wanted to read novels, and I wrote them for them. When we don't communicate, what I write doesn't make any sense. ”

At present, people's reading, both pay attention to the latest news, but also look back at the classics, some worth recalling the old text has become a popular network reprint. In the text Written 20 years ago to communicate with his daughter who is about to go abroad, Ye Zhaoyan is still a father figure of a "chicken baby", and now her daughter has become a college teacher and a mother. "Time is too fast, my daughter often talks to me, has begun to take care of me, and like many young people, she has the pressure to survive." 」 This also makes Ye Zhaoyan a writer with an "undead heart", feeling that working hard every day is a "salvation" for previous works, and "others will not forget you".

Bibliophiles' hearts and minds, treasure old books with "wrapped pulp"

The elegant and easy-going Ye Zhaoyan carries a certain old-school literati atmosphere, and the frank and sincere words also exude a peaceful and idyllic confucian atmosphere. With the daughter also stepping into the literary world, the four generations of the family are a contemporary history of Chinese readers. As we all know, Ye Zhaoyan's grandfather was the famous literary scholar and educator Ye Shengtao, many people have seen him write famous articles such as "Collecting Three or Five Buckets" and "Suzhou Garden" when he was a child, his father Ye Zhicheng is a playwright, his mother Yao Cheng is known as the "Queen of Tin Opera", his uncle Ye Zhishan and his aunt Ye Zhimei are also in the literary world.

The dazzling stars in literary history are his family's frequent visitors, and the special experiences of his grandparents and fathers have also given him a lasting look at the fate of generations of Chinese intellectuals in the 20th century. In his new book, The Road to His Father, Ye Zhaoyan tries to focus on generations of Chinese intellectuals with a long scroll like War and Peace, "The road to his father is too long, and Zhang Zuo finds that he has never really approached Zhang Xiyi, and sometimes the closer he goes, the farther he feels." ”

In the eloquent, but slightly withdrawn text, there is a writer's personal experience. For example, the experience of raising cattle in the novel stems from the grandfather and uncle. "My uncle raised cattle in the cadre school, peed for the cows every day, made the cattle pen particularly clean, and did the same for the cows as for the children, and his grandfather also found him books on raising cattle at the Xinhua Bookstore in Beijing. Although the story is fictional, there are a lot of real details in between. ”

The tall bookcase that my grandfather left to my father blocked a wall tightly. This wall made of books became the first world Ye Zhaoyan faced in his childhood. Now this bookcase, still in Ye Zhaoyan's study, still contains some plays from his father's collection. My father was once the head of the Nanjing Book Collector, and the vast majority of the books in his collection were translated foreign novels. When Ye Zhaoyan was a child, the earliest game he did was to go to the bookcase to find the words he already knew, and open up the world of reading for him.

Speaking of the anecdotes of his father's book collection, "Because there are too many books in the family, my father will also deal with books and sell books that have no place to put them." But for the books he likes, he is actually particularly afraid of others borrowing books from him. If he borrows it and doesn't pay it back, he will also be angry, and interestingly, if he feels that he may not be able to come back, he will buy another copy. "I was impressed by the foreign novels in my family, such as "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Train Ticket with Stars", which were still "banned books" at the time, and many of them disappeared after being loaned out. ”

The bookcase is filled with old books handed down from his father' generations. "My daughter said that people's bookcases are all new books, and they are complete sets, but I like these old books in our family, they are all wrapped in pulp, the so-called old does not mean that the version is old, see these old books with a sense of age, I will feel very good." If they are all new books, it will make people feel like they are in Xinhua Bookstore. ”

From the cracks of history to understand the whereabouts of his father's generation, the birth of a family of books and fragrances also made Ye Zhaoyan sigh that it was difficult to obtain a sense of achievement in writing. What will happen on the road to fatherhood? Everyone will have a different interpretation.

Quick questions and quick answers

Z = Yangtze Evening News / Purple Cow News reporter Zhang Nan

Y = Ye Zhaoyan

Z: What is the daily life flow?

Y: Get up in the morning to write, eat breakfast, and write again. Have lunch and write a little more. Take a nap and swim. In the evening, come to some wine, enjoy the fun of the world, and also watch movies and chase dramas.

Z: What have you been up to lately?

Y: When writing a new novella, I want to "sew" a story with a sewing machine, and I am working on a story outline. I also published five short story collections, collecting all my short stories, my short stories were very few, almost ten years to write one, the year before I wrote the long "Yi Feng Gate", and I wrote a batch of novels like an explosion, just to make up the fifth book. In order to write "The Gate of Yi Feng", I hoarded a batch of grain and grass, just to fight a protracted war, and the soldiers and horses did not move the grain and grass first.

Z: The New Year is coming, will you give yourself a holiday?

Y: Can't make it feel like you're always writing, I've been a little tweaking lately. The long story is followed by a novella, and suddenly stops, consciously allowing itself to stop. In 2021, I also published a collection of essays, "Going to School", and suddenly produced a lot of new books, which many people did not understand. Although I don't feel so much pressure, I do want to take a little rest. On average, it's 500 words a day, and I just write every day, just insisting.

To sum up, over the past two years, I've been a bit over-consuming myself, a little crazy. Writing "Nanjing Biography" to the present, the old man talks about juvenile madness, and the working state is similar to that of when I was young. But the physical exertion is very large, I now write for an hour or two will feel hypoxic, and it is time to serve old.

Z: What do you do when you take a break?

Y: Speaking of rest, I am also writing intermittently, talking about Japanese literature, writing prose, it is really boring, I will re-sort out the old manuscript text. Face the computer, keep changing, spend a lot of time on it. For example, I often struggle with editors, as small as punctuation. In the middle of the narrative, I don't like to play question marks. A period can solve a problem without a semicolon. The language is constantly being revised, but the reader may not notice any change.

Text | Yangtze Evening News/Purple Cow News reporter Zhang Nan

| Rong Yiye

Clip | Dai Zhehan

Face-to-face series works may not be reproduced or excerpted without permission