Gaze at the thin hometown across the shore

Gaze at the thin hometown across the shore

Li Li

The internationally renowned "sixth generation" director Wang Xiaoshuai has a personal essay called "Thin Hometown", which tells the true story behind the creation of his films "Long Days on Earth", "Qinghong", "I 11", "Intruder", as well as many old photos of the cabinets, childhood paintings, parents' family letters, friends' letters, diaries, scripts, etc., jointly bound to form this private notebook. As a "third-line" child, Wang Xiaoshuai was born in Shanghai for 4 months, followed his parents to Guiyang to "support the third line", moved to Wuhan at the age of 13 due to his father's work transfer, went to beijing at the age of 15, was assigned to Fujian after graduating at the age of 23, left Fujian two years later, began "North Drift" and independent film creation career, and is now in Beijing, but the hukou is in Zhuozhou, Hebei. Whenever someone asks him where his hometown is? Wang Xiaoshuai himself can't say it clearly, so his expression of his hometown is "thin"—a shallow, spread out, diluted hometown.

This feeling should be felt by many people. The migration and flow of small people in the context of big times is the collective encounter of one generation or even several generations. The thin hometown, the relocation of several places, the scattering of memories, the irregular footholds, and the shaky growth, all of which cannot stop Wang Xiaoshuai's obsession and remembrance of his hometown, and the place where the heart once inhabited is the hometown, right? However, the hometown is indeed thin, and what remains is a vague fragment of memory. This is the nostalgia of the involuntary wanderer, displaced by the torrent of the times. After reading this book, I understood that the famous director was so obsessed with shooting stories about the "three lines" precisely because he wanted to find his hometown. People who do not have a hometown are the most nostalgic. People who do not have their hometown cannot go back elsewhere, but here they are not, so they are sandwiched in the middle, and they do not fall at both ends. This instability of the inner foundation will lead to more meaningful thinking.

In the book, Wang Xiaoshuai tries to find his "hometown" through words. He wrote about his father and mother, the neighborhood of the past, the loneliness of the youth, the confusion of youth, the details are full, vividly remembered, and at the same time, he rummaged through the boxes and cabinets to find the photo materials, picture works, as well as parents' family letters, friends' letters, diaries, scripts... Let people feel this real and sincere memory. This is the spiritual return of a man without a hometown, but all he can return to is a thin hometown woven of light and shadow. The binding design of the whole book is very clever, and the pencil printed text is accompanied by the author's notes, illustrations, and alterations, which gives the impression of an original manuscript, reflecting the nature of a personal autobiography, but also showing a certain uncertainty of memory. The cover is covered with a thin layer of sulfuric acid paper, vaguely visible handwriting, as if to the memory, to the past, to the thin hometown of the shore gaze, but in the end a layer apart, this hometown is still faintly visible, not real.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the collective migration of families and mouths, the large-scale population movement from the countryside to the city after the reform and opening up, and the people who experienced this kind of drifting should have their own thin sense of hometown - a sense of alienation that cannot be integrated into the region and changes from time to time, alienation from the land, alienation from the surrounding crowds, and alienation from their own memories. "Where your memories have been preserved, where is your hometown." This is the final conclusion in Wang Xiaoshuai's book. Repeatedly recalling the three words "thin", let me touch the sense of life under the plain words, and I can't help but feel thin and desolate in my heart. What is a thin bleakness? It is that the individual is like a drop of water in the torrent of the times, unable to determine his own destiny, all the love, hatred and sorrow in the world are happening, but they disappear in a flash, leaving only a helpless, unspeakable confusion, like smoke like fog, gradually floating into the heart.

It suddenly occurred to me that even if a person did not have such a toss-and-turn in childhood, but when he grew up, he left his hometown and broke into other places, experienced a lot of people and things, and slowly became alienated from his hometown, when he ran around for half a life and looked back, what he looked at was also the thin hometown lost in the smoke, right? I think of some old things but can't remember time, as if those old things didn't really happen. I think of some deceased people but can't think of the details, as if those deceased people did not really meet. As if a pen of the years had been lost, it fell into the finger gap of time, and since then it has been emaciated, crushed in the dirt along with the past.

I agree with what Wang Xiaoshuai said, the "sense of hometown" of modern people has become more and more diluted, everywhere is the same, more of the meaning of hometown can only be found in the memory, but not all people are as sentimental as he is, good at memories, when the sleepless night, there are thin clouds in the sky, there are moonlight reflected in the clouds, the thin light illuminates the mirror, but also illuminates the people who remember, not all of them are as lucky as he is, the things of the past echo with him, are thinly sucked full, when the wind rises, The hometown of the drum hidden in the body.