A lonely back - reading Li Hongyan's prose collection "Traces"

After reading the first few articles in "Traces", I remembered that Li Hongyan originally learned Chinese. It seems normal for Chinese to write prose, but it is not necessarily. If you become a professor or a scholar, this matter should be a different matter. With my limited reading experience, scholars' prose is prone to lack of spirituality and lack of nourishment, so it is inevitable that it will dry up and be boring.

Probably because the scholar's mind is full of concepts, materials, logic and other things all day long, over time, the ability to feel and imagine will decline. Language will also be transformed, and academic papers pursue the singular accuracy of language, which is the natural enemy of literary language. It's like a ballet dancer walking into an outer figure-eight foot, although she didn't walk that way, and it wasn't pretty if she didn't walk like this on stage, but there was no way to do it.

Li Hongyan has been a scholar for many years, but her spirituality has not been lost. The article "New Arrival" is only a few days after I first arrived in the United States, handling some of the matters that should be done, some are very smooth, some are helped by others, and so on. With some such materials, it is probably okay for middle school students to write an essay, right? Li Hongyan wrote with great interest. Those trifles also seem to have become meaningless.

At the end of the article, it reads:

"When I woke up this morning, the jet lag wasn't quite good yet. Sitting in the house, looking at the sun, lake, and forest outside, there is a feeling of leisure. ”

There is no good jet lag, and the body is of course not very comfortable, but this does not prevent Li Hongyan from "leisurely" enjoying the scenery outside the window. Most of the articles in this collection of essays are narrated calmly and emotionally stable, which are related to this mentality.

When there are so many spring breezes in life, when experiencing ups and downs and encountering adversity, they still do not forget and can appreciate the beauty in daily life, which is Li Hongyan's consciousness and attitude.

My favorite article in Traces is the article in the series "Nostalgia". The first article in the series, "Words to My Hometown", said:

"Life is like a clean filter, filtering your knowledge, books, your vanity, your exhaustion, and always giving you the happy memories and traces of your survival in childhood." 」

Apparently, this group of articles recalls childhood memories. As a writer, Li Hongyan took a big advantage, and her childhood was spent in the countryside. Chinese doesn't seem to be very likely to write about the city, either very "dry" or very "floaty", and it is always not very kind to read.

The title of this group of articles is very interesting, except for the first one mentioned above, which is a product of the countryside. Old corn, lamb steamed buns, tobacco leaves, spinach, twist flowers, pumpkins, and pigs. These things that the peasants grow, feed, and make seem to appear one by one in the smell of firewood and smoke, and in passing also write about the peasants, their days, and the ordinary and true wishes of the long days. Naturally there are authors themselves.

"In times when things were not very rich, pumpkins were our daily must-have vegetables, and it grew like my brother and like my friends, and at my rhythm. Before each meal, next to the steamed bun lay quietly, very cowardly, and very small standing, often I would not ignore it, very energetic to eat a lot, and thus full. (Pumpkin)

I don't know of anyone else who compares pumpkin or other food to brothers and friends. This metaphor is not just a novelty, but naturally and subtly reveals the author's blood connection to rural life, the fusion of water and milk, and the association of a peasant with dirt in the seam of his clothes as ordinary as a pumpkin. Their hard work, their sweaty bodies, the crops they grow nourish us. The "very cowardly" and "very small" one is not so much a pumpkin as a farmer.

Li Hongyan's prose is calm and calm, and the night talk around the stove generally tells the past things slowly, even if there is an evaluation, the attitude is tolerant and gentle.

In the article "Lamb Steamed Buns", it is written that eating lamb steamed buns from a foreign country, "the same sea bowl, in addition to a few pieces of lamb, is the clear soup, naturally there are your own cakes to eat." What was on the table was not chili mutton oil, but a sauce of some kind. Half eaten and came out. "It's not the taste of hometown, don't eat it, that's all." But there is a deep emotion lurking in the insole. She wrote that when she saw her grandmother, who took care of her as a child, lying in a coffin, she only said, "I actually felt that life was very desolate." The word "actually" is written so well, accurately and implicitly expressing the stimulation and vibration that a child who is new to the world and does not understand the world for the first time when he sees his relatives die, and the pain and confusion in his heart, more than a thousand words.

"When I grew up, on campus, when friends gathered, sometimes I would occasionally taste a cigarette, never knowing whether it was good or bad, only knowing that it was a cigarette, and the taste of tobacco leaves in the sun would no longer be contained in my mouth." Tobacco is still as pure and loyal as it looks, but are my relatives in my hometown still hanging tobacco leaves in the alley? ”

This group of articles looking back at their hometown is like a person who does not smoke, and if you want to capture the taste of your hometown through the smell of tobacco, you will always feel that there is a difference. That taste never reappears, just as spiritually and emotionally people will never return to their homeland, a lingering pity, a shallow and deep sorrow. At that time, the author left the countryside and went to the strange big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, and even Berlin in Germany, during which there should probably be discomfort and hardship, and the hometown became a distant place of cordiality, warmth and quietness. Therefore, this article is like a sigh of five tastes and miscellaneous chen.

I've read more than one collection of essays dedicated to visiting museums, and my knowledge has increased a bit, but I always find it a little boring. The articles in the "Art Essays" series of "Traces" are also written about visiting museums or art galleries, from which of course we can also see the artistic cultivation of the author's history. Visiting the museum, without a little related cultivation is not OK, otherwise it becomes a "visit here". Only learning is not enough, your artistic feelings are easily suppressed by knowledge, and the articles written have become art science popularization without personal experience.

Li Hongyan's artistic feeling is very good. She painted a picture like this:

"The Return" depicts a sad family member carrying the coffins of their relatives home in a carriage. The grass after the rain is flooded with water vapor, the drivers on the picture are not happy or sad, their faces are expressionless, the alps in the distance are faintly contoured, and the snow is melting. The family was in the car, the domestic dog was looking down in thought, not rushing forward. ”

Instead of writing about the sadness of her family, she wrote about the house dog who bowed her head and pondered, and wrote that the house dog did not run fast. The dog also felt the sad atmosphere, and with this description, the depression and sorrow of the whole picture came to the face, as if it could be smelled.

In these articles, the author has a lot of discussion, all around the art in front of me, but after I read it, I feel a little sad, perhaps because the art itself is sad, or maybe because the author is in a foreign country, his discussion is particularly cold.

In fact, every writer is simply painting a portrait of his own soul, clear or vague, and so on.

In "Traces", I only saw a lonely back, facing a huge colorful world. (Author: Xu Xiaocun)