Looking for the nostalgia and memory of the ancient villages of Prosperous China

——Feelings of reading Huang Xiaoji's eight-centimeter series of essays

Ouyang Chaoxi

Hunan vernacular prose writer Huang Xiaoji wrote faster than I could! A village called Eight Centimeters, in the Shonan region is just like this, how come he has so many words to say, so many things to remember, so many flavors to taste, so many fun to share, so many meanings to show? So many Chinese seeing the "eight centimeters" series have so many emotions, so many memories, so many remembrances, so many deep feelings? It seems that a writer wants to produce good works, to flow through the ages, and he does not have to go thousands of miles, as long as he remembers ten thousand things, he can also write endlessly.

Reading his eight-centimeter series, the chaotic and vague memories of childhood immediately came to mind, in the villages and lanes of white walls and green tiles in the deep alleys, three or three peasants, dressed in a faded coarse cloth short sleeves, tied up the bottom of the warehouse tube, barefoot, shoulder hoe, sunrise, sunrise, sunrise and rest. Year after year, the small bridges and flowing water people's homes, day after day, stepped on the stone road wet by the drizzle to the field, or hoeed the day at noon, or sweated like rain to pick up a big burden, or looked at the small river that passed in front of them leisurely east, or looked at the stone ridge shrouded in white mist in the distance... This is the existence of the writer's childhood ignorance, which exists in the smoke and rain jiangnan of classical poetry and modern prose poetry novels.

The fragrant aftertaste of the real water, the beautiful and dazzling yellow of the rapeseed flowers, the greedy and tireless sucking of nectar by three or two tireless bees, and the meticulous portrayal of the eight-centimeter series of prose by Huang Xiaoji, the son of the hometown of the earth, fills the pursuit of the forgotten rural memories and nostalgia in the current post-industrial era.

And this group of people who can be ignited with memory is the people born in the middle and late period of the last century, a little money, a little idle, a little culture, after forty years of reform and opening up, there is a strong sense of gain and bitterness before and after the contrast, is the deep induction of the soul, is the identity and imprint of the soul, is the collective mark of a generation, is the eternal topic of the times!

Huang Xiaoji told the ancient skills, methodically, did not miss a little bit of the material society, did not let go of the little love in his heart, rich emotions, massive materials, skillful tone, bright language, beautiful literary eyes, everyone's small story, a picture of rural ink Danqing, nourishing the heart and eyes. In terms of readers, it has become a relaxed reading, and for the writer, it is the responsibility and pleasure of spring silkworms, accumulating more and more, writing more and more beautifully, it is really a square inch of land, a dojo in a shell!

However, after a few years of hard work, Huang Xiaoji's eight centimeters soon entered a new era and became a phenomenon in the Chinese literary world, writing a cold door and earning a place in the lively Chinese literary world! This blew a gust of wind on the Hunan literary circle that had been silent for a long time, a gust of rural wind wrapped in the fragrance of earth and the bitter taste of rural gray.

Huang Xiaoji's village chronicle of The Smoke and Rain in Southern Hunan Susu Langlang is easy to remind people of Shen Congwen's Cuicui of the Xiangxi TuoJiang River and the Riverside Wharf Huansha Sticks and Mallets, the Shangluo Mountain Style in Jia Pingwa's Pen, and the Gull Herons and Lotus Ponds in Baiyangdian in Sun Li's pen. Literary creation really follows the principle that "the nation is the world, and the region is the whole territory", and Huang Xiaoji's eight-centimeter series will be included in the Grand View Garden of Chinese literary history sooner or later.

The reason why the memory of the countryside is so beautiful and romantic, yearning and nostalgic, is entirely the result of the material abundance and abundance of the moment. Our days from scratch, from have to excellent, from excellent and special, the pursuit of elegant emotional confession and narration, the nostalgia of admiring the ancient sages has become a kind of value existence and yearning of the contemporary social sages who have achieved fame! It's just that their memories are inevitably always in the memory and imagination of tearful smiles and gray aftertastes, and the eight centimeters of memory is only left with the obscure and original memories of that era.

The rapid pace of China's urbanization has shattered this gray memory to pieces! The minds of the new generation are like the techniques of today's obscure poetry school, like the handwriting of only the great imagery of the film artist. In their real nostalgia and memories, there is no old root holding bridge pier of the ancient camphor tree, no reflection of the stars and moon reflecting the water, no old father ploughing the field to catch cattle, no shepherd boy piccolo setting in the sunset, no hundred firewoods that smoke in the ruins, no sampan fisherman catching fish on the night of the moon, no mother calling for children and daughters on the grandmother's bridge, and no stories and telling stories and telling ancient stories on the stone slabs that are polished by the villagers!

A coat, a bucket hat, a basket, a pottery altar, a cow with cubs, a smooth stone road, three or two lonely old people, a few bouncing children. The main beam of the hall house is printed with the old traces of the swallow mud nest, and under the new mud bird's nest, the feces of a lump of swallows are dripping on the bluestone slab of the hall house. Through the outside of the bat flower window, the chickens flew above the bamboo fence of the vegetable garden, and the small cauliflower flowers in the vegetable garden were the most beautiful colors under the horse head wall of this high-walled house, swaying in the wind into the brilliant grimace of the little girl. The black dog raised by the old father wagged his tail and barked in the deep alley without a ride, a polished flat burden slowly slid down on the stone pier door, a large mud pond in front of the door of the hall house, the water surface was dirty, the lotus leaves were dead, the rain was particularly loud, and the drum was as deep as the drum... This is the scan of my hometown when I was a child.

The old story is buried in the soil along with Grandpa's beard and pipe, and the beautiful yearning of today's children lies in the rushing water of Grandma's mallet. The village girl who came out of the pavilion and the village girl pounded clothes and yarn under the moon, there was no news of the love brother for half a year, so she had to watch the flowers and shed tears but did not say a word, helplessly tears dried up in the spring flowers haggard, empty sigh youth has been empty! Tearful grievances, insincere relief, this is the life event of a rural girl: a woman is afraid of marrying the wrong man! All the sad and joyful emphasis of the accompanying wedding songs, the solemnity of the Yao "Dai Marriage" ceremony, the pampering and music of the husband singing with the wife in "Liu Hai Cutting the Tree", the instructions of the loving mother under the shade of the willow in the hometown, the choking sigh of "the repentant husband and wife looking for the marquis", and the spring prayer of "the success of the revolution to introduce a few early returns to the hometown"!

No writer can leave his hometown and childhood behind to create. Lu Xun's Lu Zhen, Mo Yan's Gao Mi, and Chen Zhong's BailuYuan were all ubiquitous in their respective writings. The famous writer Yu Hua once sighed when he met Heine's former residence: "Childhood experience determines the direction of a person's life. It was then that the first images of the world came into our impressions, and like the photocopiers of today, a flash of light copied the basic images of the world into our thoughts and emotions. ”

Huang Xiaoji, who has been out to earn a living for many years, uses pen as a plough and paper as a field, works day and night, turns the delicate thoughts that grew up in his hometown and childhood into a gushing spring, soaks the dry heart of the contemporary urban crowd with hurried steps, and caresses the softest memories in the depths of his soul: the urban white-collar workers born of farmers and the embarrassing situation of not being able to return to their hometown! Quietly fiddling with the rich words is accompanied by the occasional black humor, inexhaustible humor and flying memories lightning across the pen ends. Middle-aged Huang Xiaoji's dream hometown is a mountain cliff covered with purple roses, a poet under the stars like a poet watching the unbearable weight in the wheat field, searching the intestines and scraping his brains to pull out the inexhaustible words of Jiang Lang in his mind, expressing his own inspiration and desire that rolled in, and the look of prayer in front of him flashed through the picture of life experience, and the mixture of imagery and language inadvertently became an eternal song!

Eight centimeters of memory, very envious of your good luck, has been spread and recorded before it has disappeared into the dust!