The epitome of contemporary vernacular China

"Homecoming"

By Jiang Zi

Guangxi Normal University Publishing House

December 2021

●Jiangzi

Editor's note: The Spring Festival is a festival for families to reunite. Today, with the great social migration, "Spring Festival homecoming" has become a new folk custom. This fieldwork report "Homecoming" with the theme of returning to the hometown takes the history and reality of the area west of the Ganjiang River in Jishui, Jiangxi as the research object, and comprehensively investigates the peasants' entry into the city, the preservation of traditions, the foreign land and the hometown, the exodus and return, the responsibility and fate of the Xinxiang sage, etc., in order to present the history and reality of a classic rural land in an holographic way, and leave a testimony for the current rural China. China is now in a period of major changes unprecedented in a century, and this change, the change of the countryside, is its symbol. Jiangxi is one of the most representative provinces of agricultural civilization, and by writing about the constant and change of jiangxi countryside at a new historical node, it can decode the current China.

In this book, I first focus on my hometown, Xialongzhou Village, Fengjiang Town, Jishui County, Jiangxi Province, on the Ganjiang River. I write about my grandfathers, uncles, fathers, brothers and sisters, neighbors, their past and present, about everything that has never changed, has disappeared and is growing in this small village.

The characters in this book all have archetypes, or rather, I write about real-life people, and I can identify them one by one if need be—most of them relatives who are related to me by blood.

Bloodline is still one of the most reliable things in the world. The reason why I have taken the trouble to write down the stories that happened on the ancient road of blood is to ensure the authenticity of the testimony I have provided.

I don't shy away from this: from the very beginning, my writing has put myself in the position of a witness.

In addition to citing historical figures, the oldest person I write about is my grandfather. He was born in 1913, so he's 108 years old—and although he died in 1982, I'm still wishful thinking about letting him live in my pen.

The youngest man I wrote down was my little nephew. In "House Purchase", he has only a few strokes, because we successfully bought a house for our parents in the county town, "two nephews, dancing happily for a house that can write homework with peace of mind." To celebrate this, they also pretended to have a fight in front of us. The little nephew's cry of complaint in front of his parents was exaggerated and festive. "The little nephew was born in 2009. He is 12 years old.

From 108 to 12 years old, almost a hundred years in between. In this way, what I am looking at is the hometown of about a hundred years.

Then, I also wrote about the west of the Ganjiang River, to which the village of Xialongzhou belongs. It was a large area of almost half of Jishui County, with townships such as Pangu, Jintan, Huangqiao, Shangxian, Futian, and Fengjiang. Unlike the areas east of the Ganjiang River, the villages there are often migrated by northerners, and most of them are clan-like, and most of them are large villages with more than 1,000 people.

According to rough estimates, this area was once the hometown of more than two hundred scholars, and it was the hometown of officials, writers, poets, martyrs and hermits, and the Southern Song Dynasty national hero Yang Bangqi, the poet Yang Wanli, the note-taking novelist Luo Dajing, the Ming Dynasty's five envoys to the Western Regions diplomat Chen Cheng, the theorist Luo Hongxian, the Bingbu Shangshu Li Banghua, and so on were her heirs.

In this land, there has been a grand situation of three jinshi and one eight shangshu, and in the long river of history, she has also formed her own cultural character of reverence, martial arts, blood and domineering. Like almost all of China's homeland, this southern countryside has been wrapped up in an era of unprecedented changes in a century, withstood the pain of development, and ushered in a new life in unprecedented reconstruction.

I strive to document and present the history and reality of this land because she is part of China. Or rather, she is China.

But what I wrote about is more than just the countryside? I'm actually writing about the human world where sorrow and joy intersect—

The departure and return of the world, eternity and variation, bustle and coldness, hometown and other places, past lives and present lives, suffering and hope, persecution and vastness, love and death...

May the mountains and rivers be unharmed.

May there be warmth on earth.