【Writer's Profile】Huang Guiyuan, graduated from the Department of Chinese of Nankai University in 1982, first-class literary creation, former vice chairman of Tianjin Writers Association, judge of the 8th and 10th Mao Dun Literature Awards. He has published about three million words of literary works and critical articles in more than 100 newspapers and periodicals at home and abroad. Some of his works have been reprinted by Xinhua Digest, Novel Monthly, Prose Overseas Edition, Book Digest, Selected Essays, Writers Digest, Reader, etc., and have been selected for various annual Chinese prose or essay anthologies more than ten times, and have won the 18th Hundred Flowers Literature Award (Prose Award), Literature Newspaper · New Criticism" Excellent Critics Award, etc., published eight kinds of novels, literary criticism collections, and prose essay collections.
"Interpersonal Jianghu" series essay thirteen:
Urban Ye Gong
My daughter returned from the United States to visit her relatives, and in the small talk, I mentioned homesickness, and my daughter's face was confused. In hindsight, the problem was mine. Not to mention that the daughter went to Los Angeles with her mother when she was only 10 years old, so far 26 years, she has already taken a US passport, and the cultural separation between them has become a fact, even if the domestic "post-80s" and "post-90s", and even their fathers such as me, how many people understand nostalgia? In this era of globalization that constantly creates urban myths, the gloom of nostalgia, homelessness, and the end of life are already a reality that is difficult to reverse.
Nostalgia culture has a long history in China, China is not only an ancient farming country, but also an agricultural power, this fact determines that the nostalgia of Chinese is almost grown in the bones. John Wayne said, "Childhood memories are poetic lies", the lies spoken of here are not deceitful and hoodwinked, but refer to childhood memories often have subjective overtones that span time and space. Nostalgia is the poetic complex of man and land, green field streams, fields playing, childhood partners, mud house cooking smoke, marriage and funeral, folklore, and the natural chicken crying, bird song, sheep crying, cow mooing, horse hiss, pig hum, dog barking, one by one precipitation, crystallization into the distant childhood memories of rural people, the longer the years, the more unforgettable, poetic leisurely.
At the end of the last century, I lived in the United States for several months and came into contact with several old Chinese who were floating overseas. They have moved to a foreign country for various reasons, they have been old, they have gone through vicissitudes, but their hometown sounds have not changed, their habits are still the same, and the sense of floating, loneliness, and rootlessness bred by physical distance and time span in their hearts is often lingering and like a shadow. They claimed to have a "nostalgia disease" and were hopelessly ill. However, when they returned with tears in their eyes and stumbling, they were shocked to find that the original homeland of those haunting dreams no longer existed, and there was no trace of them like the tide, and instead they were strange and similar towns, with buildings lined up, the streets were noisy, the shops were adjacent, the vehicles were crowded, and the changes were as great as the vicissitudes of the sea, and they suddenly realized that they had become people without a hometown. Many of my friends who came out of the countryside around me went home to visit their relatives, but the rural ecology in their memories was already unrecognizable, the countryside had lost its carrier, it was uprooted, the nostalgia was scarred, there was nowhere to store, it became a broken memory shell, and there was no possibility of recovery.
Today's countryside is shrinking and desolate, and young and middle-aged couples are going out together, preferring to drift away to work rather than farm, leaving only the elderly with children to make a living. The neglected land has become depressed, barren, and dilapidated, people are afraid to hide, the elders who were once respected and supported have been marginalized in the agricultural cultural order, and the countryside has become the object of everyone's escape. The biggest dream of children who are still studying is to change their peasant identity as soon as possible and go high. At this time, if anyone says that nostalgia is difficult to give up, the homeland is difficult to leave, and the leaves fall back to the roots, it is not just ignorance of current affairs, but pedantic, absurd, and makes the world laugh.
Modern human beings have lost control to the point of thinking that they are omnipotent, believing that the growth of industry, science and technology is the only way to develop society, and they will not hesitate to encroach on large areas of rural land in a way that exhausts themselves and fish, accelerating the process of "urbanization" with each passing day. A large number of villages are like huge construction sites for post-war reconstruction, with acres of land full of devastation and land. With the dust flying, the tower crane towering, the concrete mixer turning day and night, the new city mythically broke out of the ground, opening up a cookie-cutter face. In a daze, the owner of the land left the hometown where his ancestors lived for thousands of years, bid farewell to the familiar cooking tobacco, crops, wells, markets, ancestral halls, dialects, temple fairs, and turned to urban household registration. The villagers moved into the enclosed community, single-family, self-contained, breathing in the turbid air, with a gray sky overhead and artificial turf under their feet. At the same time, the expansion of the city's borders has intensified, and the old streets, old alleys, old courtyards, and old buildings in the past have been planned one by one, and after several demolitions and transformations, they have magically "changed their faces", and finally they have been assimilated into a mold carved out of the "cement jungle", which stands like a dotted place in the north and south of China.
At this time, we find that while praising Darwin's theory of evolution, human beings habitually regard the straight-line view of history as a natural and unchanging iron law, which brings about a misunderstanding. For example, when we no longer worry about eating enough today, we will take it for granted that the agricultural civilization is too backward, inferior, inferior, and that rural life will certainly be incompatible with the future world, and can only be the transition of human society from low to high-level development, agricultural civilization will inevitably be replaced by industrial civilization, and industrial society will inevitably give way to high-tech civilization.
Seventy years ago, the American anthropologist Aldo Leopard wrote in the Annals of Shah county: "If you don't have a farm, then you will face two spiritual dangers: one is to think that breakfast comes from the grocery store; the other is to think that the heating comes from the stove." Today, more and more "urban control" do not even know the purpose of the farm, for them, the rooster morning cry is just a long legend, spring ploughing and autumn harvest is similar to the pastoral fable, and the identification of grains requires the help of textbooks. They only know that bananas and bread come from "Carrefour", eat hamburger fried chicken to "KFC", and drink extreme coffee to Starbucks. They live in the nest of the city, indifferent to the change of seasons, accustomed to staying in an air-conditioned room in a constant temperature state, using the weather forecast to perceive and regulate their body cold and warm. Their reliance on mobile phones, the Internet, e-reading, light rail, high-speed rail, scooters, and hypermarkets is almost indistinguishable from fish and water. At the same time, they are keen on all kinds of tourist projects, applying sunscreen, holding parasols, end cameras, full of interest, wind and dust, haunting the scenic spots in the north and south of the world, making blog photo albums, in order to express the surprise and fascination of nature and rural scenery, but do not know what nostalgia is, called these "urban leaf gong", can be described as deserved.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, only 3% of the world's people lived in cities, and two hundred years later, the number of urban people on earth has exceeded 60%, and this number is rapidly refreshing. Urbanization is like a wild horse, and reinforced concrete separates the communication between man and nature, and also blocks the wanderer's way home and home dream. People have no homeland, and the nostalgic back of exile is gradually drifting away and disappearing into nothing. In the face of the surging "future", all we can do may be to send the last homage in the direction of our hometown, and then embed the poetic memory of our homeland in the pale yellow history file for future generations to decipher.