Wu Jiayan, | Cuiliu Street: The Anti-Construct of Conflict and a Wonderful Mixture

Conflicting antisconstitutions and wonderful mixtures

□ Wu Jiayan

"I long to tell the story of my hometown in my own way, a more authentic hometown that has been blown by the wind," the phrase on the title page of Wan Ma Tse-dan's short story collection "Ugin's Teeth" can be seen as a confession by a Tibetan writer. He told us a series of real and unique stories, and tried his best to avoid the fate of Tibet being landscaped and viewed. There is a wind blowing through Tibet, which is the modern wind blowing on the plateau full of strong Tibetan cultural customs, which pries our inertial thinking and inherent cognition of the local and foreign, tradition and modernity, border land and ethnic groups, and also brings impact and confusion to the people in this land. Wan Ma Tse-dan describes the daily life and changes of Tibetan life from a localized internal perspective that integrates modern vision, respects the true feelings and experiences of individuals, and tries to retain the characteristics and culture of an ethnic group in this personalized writing, presenting a transcendent spiritual force and the beauty of human nature.

Wan Ma Tse-dan's novel narrative is simple and profound, and it can glimpse the shadow of Carver's minimalism, or conform to the Tibetan character expression method and folk oral narrative tradition. There is density and strength inside the text, the narrative rhythm is in place, the completion of the work is high, and there is a narrative style of "ten thousand sentences per sentence" or even "skinny bones". A large number of single sentences, large sections of character dialogue, almost white action details, the abrupt end of the narrative climax, and the sense of cinematic scenes and lenses all make Wan Ma Tse-dan's novels full of narrative and thinking power. The full text of "Guess What I'm Thinking" published in this issue is less than 6,000 words, but it is compact and powerful, heterogeneous and distinct, like a meaningful one-act play. The main scene is that Luo Zang, who has been missing for 99 days, returns from a foreign country and drinks with Fa Xiao in the empty courtyard. The story advances through the dialogue of the characters and the changes in the surrounding scenes: Why is the Lozang family surrounded by walls? Why did the villagers who were watching send back the things they had taken one after another? Among them, expensive barley wine is an important booster, implying that the debtor Luozang has changed from poverty to returning to his hometown to rebuild his personal glory, so that everyone can change from debt collection to the yearning for glory and wealth and the outside world. The magic of money and the change in interpersonal power relations are evident. However, the premise of the slightly drunken and inflated Lozang for people to taste the wine is to guess what he is thinking, reflecting on the reflection of man-made material service and the understanding and cherishing of life itself.

Just as it is produced locally and commercially packaged into various grades of barley wine, Wan Ma Tse-dan is good at extracting commonplace objects in daily life to excavate and reorganize the meaning, and uses this rich and contradictory imagery as a prop and promotion of the narrative. For example, the ordinary toy of "balloons" is a rare thing in Tibet, and condoms, a product of modern civilization, have become ignorant and shameful taboos in Tibetan life. When a child suddenly wants to blow the condom hidden by the adult into a balloon to play, the image of "balloon" condenses into the dual meaning of play and reproduction, which leads to the female reproductive dilemma. "Fruit candy" is not only a nostalgic thing, but also a gift from the living Buddha to girls. This made the girl's life after that both a Buddha's fate and full of suffering, and the two sons could not stay around, and finally they could only be reunited because of their serious illness, and they deeply tasted the taste of life and fate in the reliving of fruit hard candy. "Ugin's teeth" are a mixture of the sacred and the mundane, because the living Buddha Ugin was once "my" elementary school classmate, and after his death, the teeth hidden in the stupa were mixed with the deciduous teeth that "I" threw on the roof of his house when he was a child. The shepherd Tharlo's "small braids" are a symbol of personality and identity, but in the process of entering the city to apply for an ID card, they were cut off with small braids and cheated to sell sheep for money, which not only destroyed their personality, but also lost themselves and fell into various whirlpools of modern society. These images are a combination of figurative and abstract, a mixture of original intention and other intention, and various collisions between the local and the foreign, reality and belief.

Wan Ma Tse-dan is particularly adept at anti-structural conflict, that is, being gently handled or brushed over by him at the moment when the conflict should occur most, and containing great contrasts or reversals in the most inconspicuous or habitual places. Behind this are regional differences, differences in cultural customs, collisions of ideas and concepts, and complex human emotions, which are more related to his broad and diverse vision. These conflicts involve genders, intergenerational, and contemporary generations, as well as tradition and modernity, secularity and divinity, and are the real changes, inner pains, and confusion that the Tibetan people will inevitably encounter in the process of modernization. In Wan Ma Tse-dan's novels, love is no longer exclusive and exclusive, but becomes broad and compassionate. The two women who met each other in "Fruit Hard Candy" did not have any conflict, but waited for the man who cut the wheat to return and decided for himself, and the emotions of mutual tolerance were full of pain and compassion; the first wife of the old man in "Special Guest Actor" lived alone in the county because of illness, and also persuaded a girl in her hometown to marry the old man. The greater conflict arises from the question of how Tibetans perceive and deal with women's fertility, child retention, identity, material and spiritual, life and belief, under the influence of their own ethnic cultural traditions and the context of modernization. Both Balloon and Hard Candy Fruit are concerned with women's own situation. When a woman who has already given birth to three children and has difficulties in life accidentally becomes pregnant and is identified as the reincarnation of her relatives, "whether to give birth" becomes a huge problem in front of her. When a woman has always wanted to keep her son around because of the early death of her husband, she did not expect that the eldest son was a genius who read and the younger son was accused of being the reincarnation of a living Buddha, and "staying or not staying" became a torment in her heart that was lonely and had no choice. Wan Ma Tse-dan said that the cycle of cause and effect is the most important image for knowing Tibet and injects a modern perspective into it. Therefore, Tibetan religious beliefs and secular life are integrated, and there are times of contradiction and conflict. Therefore, women under the pressure of life and fertility will have doubts about the reincarnation of their relatives to their own homes, and the children who become living Buddhas also have a naïve and timid side and a desire for maternal love, and the brothers or classmates of the reincarnated living Buddhas will also have complex feelings of familiarity and awkwardness, closeness and awe. There is also the diaphragm and absurdity of the two masters and apprentices who prostrate their heads to Lhasa in "The Artist" and are used by outsiders as performance artists; "Temptation" and "The Death of a Shepherd Boy" both involve worldly ignorance and the pain of not being recognized and understood by living Buddhas. These layers of conflicts are the confusion and pain of Wan Ma Tse-dan's concern for his hometown, as well as the suffering and spiritual dilemma of human survival.

Wan Ma Tse-dan's novels highlight the beauty of human nature and human feelings that are transcendent. Transcending the self transcends the worldly and transcends the taboo, opening up life and death, heaven and earth, the mundane and the sacred. The carved stone old man in "Ma Ne Stone, Quietly Knocking" was entrusted by people to die, and after death, he had to carve the unfinished six-word mantra in the moonlight before he went to life. Wan Ma Tse-dan uses drinking and dreams to make the characters have yin-yang dialogues, life and death, which is not only an account of entrustment, but also a manifestation of great love by accumulating virtue and doing good. In "Eight Sheep", two strangers who do not understand language and culture and cannot communicate at all are human and human feelings that make them cross the barrier of expression and cry with their hearts in common. The old man in "SpecialLy Invited Actor" breaks the taboo to become a mass actor to solve problems for reality, which is the transcendence of faith and the sublimation of human nature. The woman in "Fruit Hard Candy" asks Mack to follow him home to find his wife and children and raise his young son alone, but every year after that, The Mai Ke couple came to help the woman cut the wheat, and after The mai ke died, his wife took two daughters to help. Such a transcendent relay of love and righteousness flashes the warmth and beauty of human nature.

Wan Ma Tse-dan's novel uses a unique tone to tell the life of Tibet under the contemplation of modern eyes, which is really desolate and magical. Every detail contains the cultural memory and spiritual imagery of the nation, and every story is like a realistic fable that is both true and illusory. This is related to his vast and rich mixes: the duality of identity, the broad and multidimensional vision, the mixture of imagery, the collision of the native and the foreign, the swing between tradition and modernity, the inheritance and integration of national language and culture, and the resistance of material and spirituality. The multiple mixtures bring wonderful chemistry, making Wan Ma Tse-dan's novels fresh, heterogeneous, unique and thought-provoking. Wan Ma Tse-dan's hometown narrative is open and diverse, with various paths to enter and interpret, but on the other hand, he has always taken Tibet as his spiritual hometown, opening from the inside to the outside, and the wonderful mixture and conflict of the anti-construction are all based on the preservation and transcendence of ethnic culture. Thinking of the Chinese writing of Tibetan writers, in addition to Wan Ma Tse-dan, there are also outstanding writers such as Alai, Tashi Dawa, Tsering Lob, Yang Zhen, Jiang Yangcairang, etc. Why does the Chinese writing of Tibetan writers stand out in the creation of the entire ethnic minority, and why are the works of Tibetan writers more outstanding and more textured and impactful than some Han writers? This is a meaningful and thought-provoking topic. In addition to the uniqueness of Tibetan life and writing themes, because of the support of their own national language and culture, Tibetan writers' sensitivity to Chinese, different ways of thinking, the transformation of language expressions, and the unique feelings and understandings of other things may become treasures of their literature and help their writing. Taking this as a lesson, we contrast the various inertias and fatigues faced by Han writers themselves in their own writing. Furthermore, in the context of the integration of the world, how to maintain the sensitivity to one's own language and life and even national culture, not only to retain the characteristics and increase recognition, but also to be recognized and accepted in a larger scope, is the situation and challenge that every writer may suffer.

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Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 2, 2022

▲ Wu Jiayan