[New Book Review] Qiu Shuhong | it is time to pass on to our village

Book Review: "Out of the Wind"

In the past two years, the focus on the countryside has suddenly become my daily life.

There are probably three reasons: one is that I have retired and have enough time; second, when I am older, the "nostalgia" is thicker; third, China is now really entering the stage of rural revitalization, and as a librarian of the Guangdong Provincial Government's Museum of Culture and History, one of the focuses of my attention is also on the countryside. No, in less than two years after retirement, I accompanied the research team of the Provincial Museum of Culture and History to several cities and counties in the province, all of which took rural revitalization and the development of rural cultural tourism as the theme, and volunteered to provide suggestions and suggestions for grass-roots rural areas. I myself have been busy planning and writing works for the whole area of my hometown lianping under the Jiulian Mountains.

In the past two days, there is another thing that makes me very happy: the new book of writer Cheng Mingsheng, "Out of the Lingling Yang: The Humanistic Mirror of Yakou Village", has been officially published. Because it is written about the countryside and zhongshan, it naturally attracts my extraordinary attention at once.

I remember that in July 2015, Cheng Mingsheng once published a large-scale documentary literary work of 240,000 words, "Big Country Empty Village", which was written about his hometown in Hubei Province, and I quickly published "The Countryside Is Hopeless?" at Southern Weekend. Don't donate! The article sighed about his work: "Maybe you can't write a classic masterpiece like Fei Xiaotong's "Jiangcun Economy", but you should be able to inspire the three or two people around you to feed the countryside and devote themselves to rural construction. If you have achieved fame and made a fortune, why not use your funds and influence to mobilize more resources and forces, so that the landscape that gave birth to you and raised you will grow and the humanities will last forever, so that you and more people can retain your nostalgia, and let our nostalgia open forever like the flower of life? Then, a symposium was organized for "Big Country Empty Village", which caused a huge response.

If the tone of "Big Country Empty Village" is gray, then "Out of the Ocean" is bright. The former was full of worries and sorrows about the emergence of the "hollow village", and issued a deep sigh and appeal, while the latter was full of surprises and love for the Yakou Village, and issued a warm invitation and expectation. Two books, two moods, are two beings of the same era; two samples are equally worthy of our attention and attention.

"Big Country Empty Village" is written about the inland Yingcheng Chengwan Village in Hubei Province, a small village in the Jianghan Plain, which does not rely on the city, but is far from the forefront of reform and opening up, has no innate tourism resources such as famous mountains and rivers to use, and has no merchants and celebrities who can boost their hometowns, and has become a "big country empty village" in the tide of reform and opening up, which is very representative.

"Out of the Lingling Ocean" is written as the cradle of China's modern history, modern culture, the Yakou Village in Zhongshan on the coast of the South China Sea, which has been rich in water and soil since ancient times, and the reform and opening up has made this blessed land a pioneer place for creating miracles. Yakou Village is the most representative successful model in the nationwide rural revitalization construction.

"Baidu Encyclopedia" said: Holding wood to help each other is the paradigm of the village. Tun Yi is located in the estate paradigm. "Village" and "estate" are variants of each other. Now the unified norm is simplified to "village". Tun, which is both a sound side and a shape side, indicates stationing. Estates, 篆文 (屯, stationed) (邑, populated area), indicates a populated area where the population is stationed. Lishu also created a "village" instead of a sound and righteousness, "wood" means building materials, "inch" means holding, and the whole glyph represents a settled house built of wood. Original meaning: noun, natural settlement of population gathering.

Villages, also known as villages, villages, villages, etc., are also known as natural villages or administrative villages, which are mass autonomous units and places of settlement. Villages are generally formed naturally by the concentration of one or more families, and the residents are engaged in agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, fisheries or handicraft production. The grass-roots mass autonomous organizations in the villages are called villagers' committees, which are established on the basis of the principles of the villagers' living conditions, the size of the population, and the convenience of mass autonomy.

China has been an agrarian society since ancient times, and villages are the most basic social cells in China, whether yesterday, today, or even in the future, the development of villages has special and important significance in terms of economy, society and culture. Through a book, we can establish a biography of our village, which also has unique historical, practical and future significance. It can be seen that "Out of the Ocean" provides us with a sample that can be used as a reference, as the introduction of the book says: "Presenting a slice of civilization of a village in the way of 'dissecting a sparrow'". My outstanding experience of reading the book for the first time is that it focuses on the three most basic and important elements of people, things and things, and combines vertical and horizontal, travels through time and space, and shows us the humanistic mirror image of the hundreds of years of history of Yakou Village.

People --

The first chapter of the book, "Echoes of History," and the first section is "The Footprints of Great Men Are Here Today." At the beginning of this, it is written about the great man Sun Yat-sen, and the reader knows that Sun Yat-sen's mother was a native of Yakou Village, and his sister also married into this village, and there are many people who are related to Sun Yat-sen. This is a glorious village!

From the first section of the second chapter" "Rural Watch", "Descendants of the First Village of Xiangshan", we can see that the ancestors of the original Yakou Village were in Shanchang Village (now in Zhuhai) in Xiangshan County, and they were old. The first section of the fourth chapter, "One Village, Two Systems," "The Last People's Commune," was written by the barefoot secretary "Uncle Man." Uncle Man is an iconic figure who can erect statues in Yakou Village, and it is he who has allowed Yakou Village to maintain the system of "people's communes", and at the same time, with the help of reform and opening up to implement the opportunity of the socialist market economy, has made Yakou Village embark on a different development path from the rural areas of the whole country and become a well-known special case.

The first section of the seventh chapter " Homestay Cultural Village " " Guangdong's Most Beautiful Homestay" tells that Tan Jian, who returned from Shenzhen, created Yakou Village and the first homestay in Zhongshan, from him the reader saw the sensitivity, wisdom and boldness of Yakou people, and also saw that Yakou Village entered a new stage of development. The book writes about many Yakou people, including various people introduced in the sixth chapter "Yakou Face", which is the most core carrier for understanding and understanding Yakou Village.

Thing --

Or back to the first chapter, the fourth section, "Cliff Red Memory", unearthed a moving story that no one knows. American journalist Edgar Snow once wrote a very famous book "The Red Star Shines on China" (also known as "Journey to the West"), and the cover character was Xie Liquan, a soldier of the Red Army during the Yan'an period, who was later sent by the central authorities to serve as a military leader of the Pearl River Column headquartered in Zhongshan, commanding a very important battle at the cliff mouth, leaving many moving stories. In 2015, to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, I planned for the descendants of Snow and Xie Liquan to meet in Beijing, which became a beautiful talk for a while. "Out of the Lingling Ocean" also takes this story as the beginning of the red cliff mouth, making the history of the cliff mouth village suddenly much thicker.

In the countryside, in addition to people, land is the most important resource and the rice bowl of rural people, so the author lays out the land issue as a chapter and a total of five sections of "land plot". From the "militia surrounding the sea to build a large village" in the 1970s, the great reclamation of investment in the 1980s, and the acquisition of land and villas in foreign villages in the 1990s, the words full of praise depict the extraordinary courage and wisdom of the people at the cliff mouth, which makes people feel respected.

The book also uses a whole chapter, that is, the eighth chapter, "The Third Eye", a total of seven verses, to tell the story of the cliff mouth with the eyes of outsiders in yakou village. Outsiders include photojournalists, text reporters, experts and scholars, as well as foreign civil servants who have worked in Yakou, and through observing the birds here, the insistence of The Yakou people on their own system, and the "soul returning to the cliff mouth" by the ashes of foreign civil servants scattered here, they interpret the complex that many outsiders have regarded this place as their dream home, and even a foreign land as their hometown, thus reflecting the powerful and unique charm of Yakou.

Things——

In China, almost every village has its own customs, which will be continued and passed on by some unique performances, and performances need to be pinned on some objects. The fluttering color of Yakou Village is such an object. In the second chapter of "Out of the Wind", "The Watch of the Countryside", two sections are used to depict the origin of the fluttering colors, the production and the process of the floating colors performance. This is the spiritual sustenance and bond of all Yakou people, and through the author's narrative, it has become a beautiful yearning for readers.

Zhongshan cuisine is the originator of new Cantonese cuisine. When I received the leader of the CCTV documentary channel, when I had morning tea, I suggested that he take a good picture of Chinese food, he felt that this was indeed a good idea, and when he went back, he began to prepare for the filming of "China on the tip of the tongue", but he did not expect to become a hit, and the year of the broadcast of "China on the tip of the tongue" almost became the first year of China's documentary. In recent years, the cuisine of Yakou Village has also become famous, and "Out of the Lingling Yang" uses the chapter and nine sections of "The Cliff Mouth on the Tip of the Tongue" to introduce the wonton, pot rice, and seafood street at the mouth of the cliff... In the whole book, it is very "camera-grabbing".

In the book, there are also "Yakou Hall", "Two Temples", "Empty Factory Museum", etc., one by one, beaded into chains, all of which are important objects that readers understand very vividly and thickly in Yakou Village.

Cheng Mingsheng dedicated a "Zhongshan sample of a high-quality well-off life" to readers by "digging into the spiritual genes behind the cliff mouth for 25 years", which is actually a sample of China, which is very respectable and congratulatory. I also solemnly recommend this book to a wide range of readers.

As a China from an agrarian society, villages have special and important significance in today's industrialization and modernization. In my opinion, more than seventy years ago, the Communist Party of China relied on the rural areas to encircle the cities to gain political power and established a new China; the implementation of reform and opening up also achieved world-renowned success through rural reform and urban reform. Today, China wants to build socialism with Chinese characteristics in the new era and realize the Chinese dream of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and rural revitalization has become an important entry point. Rural revitalization and cultural revitalization are the highest signs. So it's really time for us to give a legacy to our village. In a certain sense, to establish a transmission to the village is actually to establish a transmission to China.

In fact, in the north, there have long been "Tangyue Road", "China in a Village", "One Man's Village", etc., but in Guangdong, the atmosphere of writing has not yet been formed. I hope that the Pearl River Delta and Zhongshan can take this head. No, I just saw a news that another writer in Zhongshan, Zheng Wanli, wrote "Blood in the Mountains and Rivers: The Century-Old Dream of the Left Step People" in Zuobu Village next to the cliff mouth, which was also published.

One last word of advice. If "Out of the Wind" is republished, wouldn't it be more perfect if the author added some content in the following aspects? First, Chinese villages, especially those relocated from the Central Plains to Lingnan, generally have family names, which is their most important gene, but unfortunately, "Out of the Lingling Ocean" is not involved. Second, Zhongshan is a "small Guangdong", and among the registered population, 80% of cantonese, 10% Hakka, and 10% of Minnan languages. It seems that the people in Yakou Village do not seem to be clear in which category the people of Yakou Village belong, so the description of their demographic structure, language, customs, etc. is insufficient. Third, as the "last people's commune", readers and the outside world are very concerned about the future direction of the system in Yakou Village, and it must be of great significance to make some appropriate expositions and predictions in the book.

Yau ShuHong

January 27, 2022 in Zhongshan

Writer Qiu Shuhong: Member of the Chinese Writers Association, Member of the Chinese Musicians Association, Member of the China Soong Ching Ling Foundation, Librarian of the Guangdong Provincial Government Museum of Culture and History, Vice Chairman of the Guangdong Writers Association and Director of the Poetry Creation Committee.

Cheng Mingsheng, a member of the Guangdong Writers Association, is one of the first top ten journalists in Zhongshan City, and is currently the deputy editor-in-chief of Zhongshan Daily. Born in the countryside of Xiaozhicheng, Hubei Province, he resigned from his work in the organ in 1994 and went south to catch the sea, taking the news as his profession, traveling to Dongguan and Zhuhai, and looking for the hometown of Zhongshan. In 2015, he published the documentary literary work "Big Country Empty Village", which won the first Guangdong Province "Youwei Cup" Reportage Award that year.