Record the most heartwarming and touching worldly changes
——Cao Rong's "Shambhala Over There" Reading Notes
◎ Zhang Deming
"Shambhala Over There" is a careful work depicting the whole process from poverty alleviation to rural revitalization in poor mountain villages. The work focuses on a village on the clouds at an altitude of 3500 meters, Shangjiadou Village in Yangge Township, Seda County, Ganzi Prefecture. It is not only the incomparably holy "Shambhala" in the heart of the writer, but also the place where the writer has been concerned for years.
This village is a deeply impoverished village in the hinterland of Ganzi Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, a beautiful and bitter cold place, poor and suffering, strange and distant. For a long time, many materials and time sequences circulated in this closed environment according to their own established rules, and the long-term hardships, weaknesses, and blockages here became the biggest obstacle for the people to get rid of poverty.
With the start of the overall battle against poverty in the country, a group of young cadres from the metropolis, together with local cadres and the masses, after three years of arduous and unremitting efforts, sincere and practical efforts, made this ancient village completely bid farewell to poverty and changed its old appearance to a new look.
The work very deeply tells the dedication and self-dedication of the participants in this poverty alleviation attack, the practice of the original mission of the communists with beautiful youth and the affection of relatives, and the triumph of the century of rural revitalization in the new era. This is the writer's faithful record of the solemn promise and on-schedule fulfillment of a political party to the people, and it is also the best commemoration of this epic revolution that changed the fate of mankind. This historical upheaval is based on a yearning for a new life.
Cao Rong, "Shambhala Over There"
As a powerful writer in Sichuan, Cao Rong's literary gaze has always focused on the land of Shuzhong. She has constructed a literary territory with her own unique emblem with excellent rural narrative texts. "Shambhala Over There" is 110,000 words long, in the form of prose, with sincerity and responsibility for the hot land of Seda.
Based on the simple and sincere love for the Kham Plateau, the writer writes and deeply understands the contemporary Ganzi Tibetan Village with rare courage and unique perspective, showing readers another new cognitive possibility; the work not only writes about the beautiful and colorful plateau villages in beautiful words, but also explores the geographical characteristics and historical origins of that magical land, integrating knowledge, interest, aesthetics, sociality, and the times, showing the strength of the people in the Chinese works of poverty alleviation.
The nine chapters of the work have a distinct symbol of meaning: on the one hand, the work presents the reader with a rich and colorful, three-dimensional and highly contrasting plateau Tibetan village built on the writer's personal vision; on the other hand, it shows the reader the writer's mental journey - her regional choices, cultural interests, aesthetic feelings and spiritual origins.
"Over There Shambhala" inherits the calm and atmospheric characteristics of Cao Rong's previous prose writing, the language is simple and kind, the narrative is soothing and smooth, and it has the general appeal of a novel. In the specific implementation process of writing poverty alleviation, the writer stands at the height of the development of the times and the process of civilization, uses real steps and literary thinking to trace the cultural origin and civilization development history of the Tibetan countryside on the plateau, and praises the charming mountains and rivers and the land;
The writing of the work becomes a connection between civilizations, that is, between the past, the reality, and the future situation, it finds the Tibetan origin between a continuous change. The writer uses a sociological eye to look at the remains and changes of this plateau Tibetan village, providing a new perspective for writing the humanistic scene of the countryside in ethnic minority areas.
Edited by Li Jie
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