Chen Huaji, | of the new site: rebuilding the spiritual home

Rebuild the spiritual home

——Interpretation of Lin Sen's "Homeland" series of novels

□ Chen Huaji

Lin Sen is a young writer in Hainan who has a solid creation and constantly seeks innovation and change. Born in 1982, since 2006, he has published more than 20 short and medium stories in literary journals, successively published three novels such as "Guan Guan Ju Dove", "Warm As Spring Breeze" and "Island", and the essay collection "The God of the Countryside" and the poetry collection "The Moon Sets and the Stars Return" and "The Melancholy of the Island", which is one of the few writers who focus on writing about the urban and rural life in Hainan. Lin Sen's works are mostly written about the life of his hometown and the fishermen on the island, and the short stories "I deliberately went to see the river", "There are several roads to fly to the wooden bridge", "The Wooden Man", "Ding Hainian's Disappearance", "Typhoon", "Strange Events of the Island", the novella "Town", "Holding an Ice Coconut to Spend a Long Summer", "The Sea Breeze Is Cold This Year", "On the Shore in the Sea", and the long story "Guanguan Ju Dove", "Island" are all related series of works, with strong regional cultural color. Lin Sen's works also often appear in the core vocabulary of "family", "genealogy", "ancestral hall", "demolition" and so on, so throughout his literary creation for more than a decade, Lin Sen's novels have always run through an important theme - the theme of homeland.

There is a distinction between a real home and a spiritual home. The real home can give people a warm shelter to shelter from the wind and rain, while the spiritual home can give people a sense of security, so that the soul of the person or god can be placed and kept calm. On the contrary, the demolition of the actual home will make people confused by the loss of safe shelter, and the lack of spiritual home will make people or the souls of the gods panic. Lin Sen is a writer who pays attention to both the change of the real home and the fission of the spiritual home. In recent years, the long story "Island", published in October, focuses on Lin Sen's in-depth thinking on the real home and the spiritual home. The real home in the isolated island town has a certain particularity for Lin Sen, and his works often appear in a very specific local term - Haikou Chengmai Ruixi Town, as the place where he was born and grew up, Ruixi Town is not only the realistic home in Linsen's geographical sense, but also the starting point of his creation, and also the object of his observation and thinking. At the same time, Hainan Island as a huge and isolated whole, because of its division and closure from the southernmost part of the mainland, Hainan people often compare it with local homes, so that the homeland in the geographical sense has a double direction for Linsen: not only to the local homeland, but also to the entire isolated and closed island. Therefore, the spiritual home derived from the sense of the realistic homeland in Lin Sen's works also has a dual dimension: it is not only a differentiated and local spiritual home, but also a spiritual home with a high degree of identity and regionality. This duality of the sameness and superposition of the spiritual homeland makes the spiritual homeland theme in Lin Sen's works more prominent and concentrated, and it not only has a strong degree of recognition in many homeland theme works, but also is widely praised by readers.

However, it should be noted that Lin Sen, who is at the forefront of reform in southern China, has completely experienced the chaos, chaos, shocks and pains of the early stage of reform and opening up, and his ideological consciousness has the distinct era of the era of reform, and the reform is tantamount to a large-scale invasion of modern ideology compared to the isolated, closed and simple indigenous people of Hainan, and the "courtesy" that maintains his original spiritual homeland everywhere he goes is overwhelmed and falls apart. Therefore, Lin Sen's homeland theme series works are not dedicated to the construction of the original rural spiritual home building through local and regional writing, on the contrary, his homeland theme series works begin with the collapse of the original rural spiritual home building, in Lin Sen's words, he pays more attention to the "some kind of inherent disorder" of people and things in the real home under the impact of urban expansion[1] and "how do we get along with this fission era" [2]. For more than a decade, Lin Sen has used many works such as "Guan Guan Ju Dove", "Holding an Ice Coconut for a Long Summer", "The Sea Breeze Is Cold This Year", "On the Shore of the Sea" and "Island" to outline the process of collapse, disintegration and reconstruction of Hainan's spiritual homeland layer by layer.

One

The collapse of the spiritual home

"Guan Guan Ju Dove" is a more important and mature novella in Lin Sen's early works, which is extended from his early novella "Small Town". The work tells the story of the tragic family fission of two families in Ruixi Town in the form of a family narrative structure, under the impact of many foreign things in the early days of reform and opening up. The protagonists of the story, Kuroi Yoshi and Lao Pan, are the leaders of the ancestors of the two major families, and they are also a pair of old friends who have been friends for many years, and they have "fished and touched shrimp together in the Nandu River and stole sweet potatoes from the production team" when they were young. After the establishment of Hainan Province, Heishou Yi and Lao Pan successively migrated from the countryside to Ruixi Town, "Many years later, Magusai Yi played the kung fu of wielding the shovel in front of the stove and took the lead in opening a restaurant in the town." Old Pan only moved to town some time later, in the late 1980s. In the early 1990s, Hainan was still a joyful and peaceful scene, and the two major families of Mafia Yi and Lao Pan gradually gained a foothold in the town, but with the establishment of the market economy, more and more tangible and intangible foreign things poured into Ruixi Town, and the atmosphere in the town began to change, and the landmark event was that the folk festival "Junpo Festival", which had lasted for thousands of years, would be suspended in the next year because of its original sin of "preaching feudal superstition". "After the loss of the 'courtesy', all kinds of chaos and uneasiness began to emerge one after another"[3], and Lao Pan had a strong premonition about it: "Casinos, drugs... Like the wind, it is spreading in all corners of Ruixi Town, it is gradually infiltrating the quiet days, it is removing the foundation of a built house, what will be in the future? Everything will collapse, everything will fall - even the way to make Crooked Mouth Kun lift his spirit is to make him a prostitute, what is the same? Subsequently, with the tragedy of the illegal fundraising of the three sisters and the sweeping away the wealth of the town, the two major families have been in a state of family destruction and disintegration, the young are forced to go out to work to find a way to live, and the elderly choose to leave because they cannot face the real predicament.

The collapse of the town's spiritual home in "Guan Guan Ju Dove" begins with the suspension of the "Junpo Festival", and Lin Sen's novel has a strong allegory corresponding to historical reality. One of the realistic fables, the suspension and restart of the "Junpo Festival" heralds the collapse and reconstruction of Hainan's regional spiritual homeland. The "Junpo Festival" is a folk festival formed to commemorate the southern heroine Lady Xian during the Southern and Northern Dynasties period, and its festival content is not only the "armored army" parade that the masses are keen to participate in, but also the performances of "iron rod wearing cheeks" and "crossing the volcano". In fact, the appearance of "Junpo Festival" in the novel is not optional, for ordinary people, "Junpo Festival" is not only a carnival-style folk festival, but also an important moment for them to witness the arrival of miracles - the "descending child" iron rod wearing the cheek, this moment is their reverence for the gods, worship and receive spiritual baptism, so the "Junpo Festival" in the people's regional spiritual cognition is like the existence of "Dinghai God Needle". From this point of view, the "Junpo Festival" is actually the spiritual home of the collective unconscious of the indigenous people of Hainan. Although its cancellation will not affect the lives of the locals too much, it will make them mentally empty, inexplicably anxious and restless. In the more than ten years that the "Junpo Festival" was cancelled by the county government and suspended, the disappearance of the miracle performance program caused the town to encounter an unprecedented spiritual crisis, when all kinds of cultural dross in the capitalist world took advantage of the void and eventually led to the collapse of the town's spiritual home. The novel concludes with the mention that the government is trying to revive the long-suspended "Junpo Festival", which is a kind of foreshadowing of its attempts to rebuild after the collapse of its spiritual home.

The second parable of reality is that the detachment and continuation of the genealogy of the ancestral halls among the same people indicate the lack and return of the local spiritual homeland. Mafia Yi attributed the derivation of all the disasters in the family to the incompleteness caused by the man-made destruction of the family tree, and Zhang Mengjie, the son of Mafia Yi's ex-wife, also attributed the unhappiness of his change of surname to the family due to the separation from the original family tree, and both of them had the desire to return to the family tree and re-straighten out the family tree, but when they put forward this appeal, they were unexpectedly opposed by the two sons of the mafia yihou wife, resulting in their disappointed wishes and becoming a heart disease that was difficult to solve. Zhang Mengjie's detachment and continuation of the spectrum indicate the lack and return of his local spiritual homeland, and likewise, the rejection and acceptance of Zhang Mengjie by members of the Mafia Yi family indicates the incompleteness and re-rationalization of his local spiritual homeland. Only when the members of the Mafia Yi family re-accept Zhang Mengjie's family members, will their collapsed local spiritual home be repaired and rebuilt, will they be protected by the ancestral gods again, and the well-being of individuals and families will come again.

Although the end of "Guan Guan Ju Dove" hints that the government is trying to restore the "Junpo Festival" that has been suspended for many years, that is, it hints at the reconstruction of the town's spiritual homeland in the near future, but this reconstruction is far from coming, and the crazy "half-brain transport" at the end of the novel acts as a "loaded army" walking on the empty streets of the town, solemn and funny, this scene may indicate the disintegration of the next "spiritual homeland" after the collapse.

Two

The disintegration of the spiritual homeland

The novella "Holding an Ice Coconut through a Long Summer" was published in the 9th issue of Yangtze River Literature and Art in 2014, and is a novel that Lin Sen Homeland has focused on. The short story "The Wooden Bearer" and the novella "The Disappearance of Ding Hainian" before this are both stories about the collapse and disintegration of the entire family due to the escape or disappearance of an important family member in the real home. In the story of "The Man Who Carried the Wood", due to the vietnamese mother's escape from the family many years ago, the brothers could only rely on stealing trees to carry them to the town to sell money every day to maintain their basic life, and then because of excessive persecution of the old father, asking for the minimum insurance allowance and causing the old father to be humiliated and committed suicide, resulting in the whole family going to the situation of family destruction with multiple uncontrollable factors. In "The Disappearance of Ding Hai Nian", the brother of the soldier suddenly disappeared in the army one day, and there was no news, and this news fermented for six or seven years and eventually caused every family member to unconsciously fall into a state of madness: the mother went crazy in July every year because of the unprovoked disappearance of her son; the grandfather had a nervous breakdown because of repeated requests to God for verification; the father became moody and more and more grumpy; and the younger brother was forced to drop out of school early and was forced to drop out of school early and wandered without roots. The disappearance of the brother's sudden evaporation makes the kinship line that maintains it equally uncontrollably trigger a domino-like chain reaction within the family, and the strong emotional core within the family gradually collapses.

"Holding an Ice Coconut for a Long Summer" continues Lin Sen's continuous attention to the theme of family affection, but it is slightly different from the previous two stories that tell the collapse of family affection and emotional collapse in the real family, in this work, peeling off the narrative cloak of the youthful restless desires of young men and women, Lin Sen uses the story of the demolition of the real home to extend the spiritual tentacles to the interior of the local family ancestral hall in Hainan, telling the alternative story of the family ancestral hall of a village in the city in the process of reform and opening up with real estate developers. This alternative story can be summed up in the following clues: real estate developers collude with villagers to take land and sell land from it. After becoming a real estate agent, the villagers became rich by selling more land, and they forced demolition regardless of the lives of other villagers, resulting in many human tragedies. The frequent sale of land eventually involved the location of the family ancestral hall, which punished the rich and the greedy real estate agent with its "divine power", cut off the black transaction between the real estate agent and the real estate developer, and finally was burned down by a fire retaliation.

The family ancestral hall is a public place for the descendants of the family to worship their ancestors, enshrines the gods of the ancestors of all dynasties, is a sacred and inviolable forbidden place, and is also the spiritual home shared by the clan and the ancestral gods. In Lin Sen's novel, we can see that the status of the family ancestral hall is constantly declining, and it is gradually defeated in the face of the interest game of urbanization, and even squeezed into an inconspicuous corner, but in the end it is inevitable to encounter the fate of being burned and demolished. The burning of the family ancestral hall is not only a portrayal of reality, but also heralds the disintegration and collapse of Hainan's local spiritual homeland. Since then, the ancestors of the indigenous people of Hainan have become homeless lone ghosts, wandering in all directions. Lin Sen had to perform a solemn soul-calling ritual for his indigenous ancestors— rebuilding their homes—to appease the many troubled souls.

Three

How to rebuild the spiritual home and how to rebuild it?

Published in October 2019, the long story "Island" is a representative work of Lin Sen's concentrated thinking on the real home and the spiritual home in recent years. With the deepening of reform and opening up, the degree of urbanization in Hainan has become higher and higher, and the demolition and reconstruction of urban villages and small fishing villages by the sea have also intensified. The canceled "Junpo Festival" and the demolished or abandoned ancestral halls have made the indigenous people of Hainan in a spiritual gap period for a long time, and a strong sense of "rootlessness" will make them mentally empty, inexplicably anxious and restless. And can the homes that are being rebuilt and about to be rebuilt take in the wounded hearts, soothe their past, and create a better future? "Island" tries to further explore the spiritual world of the indigenous people of Hainan, and provides us with a dual direction to rebuild our homeland: one is the reconstruction of the uncle's time and situation, and the other is the reconstruction of the island freak Wu Zhishan's self-preservation.

Born in 1943, his uncle was "a capable person who has experienced great events" in the eyes of the people of Haiya Village. He had a rich life experience, ups and downs, experienced many businesses and then many times the reconstruction of his home: the first time was when he was a teenager, he wandered alone from north to south to Sanya, and single-handedly founded the first fishing village in Yalong Bay; the second time was when he returned to his birthplace after the age of forty, bought a boat to catch fish and then married and had children; the third time was when he was in his fifties, he encountered Hainan Development, operated real estate in the city, and bought a property for each child in the city The fourth time was after the demolition of his ancestral home, he chose a small town near the provincial city to buy land and buy a house, and finally built a new residence. When he placed the ancestral tablets sealed in the chest in the ancestral house reserved on the roof of the three-and-a-half-story building, his uncle once again completed the task of rebuilding his home. He not only recreated the real home for his children, but also rebuilt a stable spiritual home for his ancestors. Although my uncle's life experience was bumpy and his life was full of ups and downs, his ability to judge the situation and his determination and efforts to rebuild his homeland enabled him to finally enjoy his old age and protect his children and grandchildren.

Compared with his uncle's expedient ability to deal with the world and his ambition to "create the world", Wu Zhishan, a strange island man, rebuilt his spiritual world with a stubborn and lonely force, thus creating his alternative spiritual home. The aspiring young villagers in Boji Village joined the army, married wives and had children, and should have a happy family, but they were imprisoned for ten years because they were falsely accused of rape. After his release from prison, Wu Zhishan's family was destroyed and fell into the abyss of despair with no heirs and broken lives. Wu Zhishan is difficult to find the opportunity to seek grievances in the human world, but he suddenly wants to find ghosts to seek revenge, and with more than forty years of ghost hunting experience to create another anti-life fracture of survival method: he constantly seeks ghosts from cemeteries, ghost islands, giant waves, and storm centers, and in order to seek ghosts with the heart of death, it promotes the extension of his life, the growth of fighting spirit and the sustenance of the spirit, this anti-life meaning of the meaning of searching for unintentionally breaking the temporal nature of survival, discovering the spiritual world of all things outside of time, Thus creating a spiritual home of non-temporality and non-secularity.

Lin Sen used secular and non-secular methods to rebuild the spiritual home in the secular sense and the spiritual home in the non-secular space, which greatly expanded the meaning and space of the spiritual home. Chen Peihao believes that "Island" "while witnessing the contemporary historical process, it also writes an elegy for the homeland that has changed China", and "Homeland Elegy" focuses on the distant departure of the old homeland, but it has become the starting point for Lin Sen to explore the new homeland in Hainan.

exegesis:

[1] [2] [3] Lin Sen is quoted: "The God of the Countryside", Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House, 2019, pp. 112, 135, 130.

—END—

Yangtze River Literature and Art, No. 2, 2022

Responsible Editor | He Ziying Xiong Mengrou

▲Chen Huaji |

Chen Huaji, Yangchunren, Guangdong, Doctor of Literature, Responsible Editor of The Journal of the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Lecturer of the College of Literature, Member of the Beijing Writers Association. His main research areas are the study of contemporary Chinese literary history, the study of literature in the 1980s, the study of Lu Xun, etc.; he has published the academic monograph "Lu Xun's "New Compilation of Stories" - "The Historical Narrative and Image Construction of Lu Xun's Circle", edited "Research Materials on Reform Literature" and "Research Materials on Cultural Prose", published more than 20 papers, many of which were reprinted in full by the National People's Congress, and participated in the recording of phoenix satellite TV's "Breeze and Breeze of China's Reform Literature Full Documentary" series in December 2018.