(At the event site, editor and writer Cheng Yongxin answered questions)
Cheng Yongxin's "If Only the First Sight" × Fudan MFA × creative writing at East China Normal University
The influence of individual experience on writing is deeply rooted in the bone marrow (I)
Zhang Shiyang: Hello everyone, hello students in the audience, watching the live broadcast, hello everyone! I am Zhang Shiyang, the editor-in-charge of Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House's latest novel collection "If Only The First Sight", and today I am the host of the scene to preside over everyone's questions about the careful reading of Mr. Cheng Yongxin's novel collection.
Now let's first introduce the author of the book, the editor-in-chief of Harvest Magazine - Teacher Cheng Yongxin, "If Only the First Sight" is a newly completed novel collection of Teacher Cheng Yongxin, which contains five novels, and the order of the process can be discussed one by one according to the order of the cataloguing of the novels.
It is composed of five novels, namely "If Only First Seen", "The Shape of the Wind", "The Tale of Mount Qingcheng", "Mahjong World", and "My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teresa".
Starting with "If Only the First Sight", I think it is a novel based on individual experience, describing a very cold, passionate, typical eighties and nineties feeling of the novel, about the protagonist and a girl named Qingqing.
"The Shape of the Wind" is a thrilling novel about some of the things that young people encounter after entering the library.
"The Tale of Mount Qingcheng" and "My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teng" are two novellas with a relatively long novella. "Qingcheng Mountain" tells the story of the ancient Ming Dynasty, and "My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teng" talks about Teresa's influence on a generation.
"Mahjong World" is also a very avant-garde novel, and it is also a way to immediately return to the atmosphere of the 80s and 90s from the 21st century.
After I finished this book myself, it seems to be five novels, but I think it is an expression of literary love written by teacher Cheng Yongxin.
First of all, the themes of the five novels are different, and it can be seen that Cheng Yongxin is interested in exploring novels of various themes, and I think that Cheng Yongxin's many years of editing experience, as well as the experience of standing on the scene of contemporary literature, have finally become fictional expressions, which are reflected in a novel collection.
This is my introduction to the collection of novels, and now I can start a discussion of one article after another, starting with "If Only the First Sight".
"If Only the First Sight" is a novella, and I like its inscription, so I chose it all on the waist cover. "I wandered around the province, with the moon and the stars, chased again and again by the clouds of the old days, lost in endless dreams." Each section of the novel is distinguished by musical means, such as the "slower than slow" approach, which tells a love story.
Regarding this novel, if students have any questions, they can raise their hands.
Question 1: I think that the work "If Only the First Sight" and the subsequent novels adopt a narrative method similar to wandering and wandering, which can be said to be the appearance of wonders everywhere and the appearance of stingrays. Is this a conscious continuation of the techniques of traditional Chinese novels or Western tramp novels? Thank you!
Cheng Yongxin: Good afternoon, students! Sitting next to me is Shi Yang, today I am also the first time to see this book, very happy, and in such sunny weather, let us sit in the elegant Julu Road Writers Bookstore to talk about my novel, very happy.
The question asked by the students just now, I was interviewed by Chen Cang's "Youth Daily Life Weekly" a few months ago, which talked about my relationship with the city of Shanghai.
Because I was born in Shanghai since I was a child, but because of the social, historical, and personal and family situations, I always wanted to escape, and from childhood to adulthood, I wanted to leave Shanghai, there may be more complicated reasons, and it is unlikely to slowly unfold.
Because every classmate and everyone will have their own hometown, I grew up feeling that I didn't have a hometown. Shanghai was a relatively developed city in the world 100 years ago, and it was a city that attracted more attention in the world in terms of culture, commerce and trade.
From childhood to adulthood, hometown is always associated with mountains, rivers, and rural areas, I think the city is so big, but the individual experience of growing up and growing up from small to large gives me a kind of depression, not so healthy, not so happy to grow, not such a feeling.
I grew up living in the slums, but there was a wall across from us, where the sound of pianos and violins was heard every day, and I secretly climbed up to the wall to listen to others playing and playing the piano.
At that time, my family was very strict with me, not allowing me to interact with individuals, and I lived in a relatively closed environment, so I wanted to escape from adolescence to youth.
I am the 75th class of middle school, going to the mountains and going to the countryside has reached the end, I can not go to the countryside in the year of graduation, I can stay in Shanghai. Because at that time, according to some conditions, I had an older brother in Shanghai, and if I had a sister in the countryside, I could stay in Shanghai in a one-to-one situation, but I personally chose to go to Dafeng (an enclave in Shanghai). Shanghai Farms were established there.
Shanghai Farm is a laogai farm, Zhiqing is on the edge of the laogai farm, leaving Shanghai to take the initiative to go there, at that time there were many people, as if it was a team, I seemed to be a head, in fact, as soon as I got there, I was completely desperate. Because it is on the seashore, there is no grass, it is all saline and alkali land, after all these years of seeing, you can now grow grain and plant crops, which is after decades of transformation of the land. At that time, the land was full of white flowers, and at first glance it looked like snowy land, and it was necessary to slowly transform the land soaked in seawater (saline land).
The first time I worked in the summer, I passed out on the field, without the strength of a chicken, and I couldn't see the future or the future when I went there, so it had something to do with my personal experience and the environment in which I grew up. At that time, the society, our lives were like this little by little.
Did the individual experience and individual feelings that the students just talked about have an impact on my writing? Of course there are, and this effect is deep in the bone marrow.
Why? A man without a homeland. My father died when I was one year old, and when I graduated from high school, I went to my mother's hometown, in Dongyang, Zhejiang, mistaking my mother's hometown for my hometown, and finally I was driven back to Shanghai by my mother's aunt and uncle. Because at that time I was in love, I fell in love with a small fang in the countryside, in fact, I did not understand the emotions, that era was relatively closed, it should be said that it was very closed, the elders saw you: "Aren't you about to leave Shanghai for the countryside?" How can you come and go with girls here. ”
We went far away, and this village ran dozens of miles to another village, and at night we played movies, and the brigade played movies on the threshing ground. When the elders found out, they finally sent me to a wooden wheelbarrow, and a person behind you was pushing you and forcibly pushing you to the county seat. It was also because of this incident that I felt that my mother's hometown had nothing to do with me.
I think that such an experience must have a close relationship with my writing, and I began to fall in love with the city of Shanghai slowly after middle age, because of its norms, its management, its history, and its cultural connotations. When I was young, I officially registered in 1983 and interned at the Writers Association in 1982, and I wanted to go out at that time, and the complex of not treating Shanghai as my hometown was still weird. In the years as an assistant editor, I traveled almost all over the country's border areas, Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan, and so on.
I remember when I went to Yunnan to take a long-distance bus, there was no place, I sat on the steps, and sat until Dali to participate in the Songkran Festival. At that time, we were all young people, and when we participated in the Songkran festival in Dali, we met Luo Yihe and the poets in Beicun, all of whom were very young people.
After these experiences, after roaming or wandering, looking back, slowly following their own maturity, slowly moving towards middle age, I know shanghai's attitude to life. I think that in addition to the management of the city of Shanghai, in addition to the humanistic spirit, the most important thing is to talk about the rules, these seem to be the conventional things, it is placed there, you have to abide by, it is not a rule, it is not through the law to restrain you, but a constraint on the interaction between people.
For example, if you borrow money to repay, when I was young, some of my friends borrowed money and did not repay it, and if I did not repay this person in the circle of friends and in the crowd, he would never be able to raise his head, and finally he disappeared, which is the subject I have been thinking about. He couldn't do anything about it later, because they couldn't afford to lose this face, and there was something to be observed among the people of Shanghai and among the residents of this city. After making comparisons, we found that this kind of constraint and this ethics are particularly needed.
For example, when I was a child with other people on the road, I didn't think much about it at that time, but more about personal experience.
Individual experience determines that when writing, you can't help but integrate your relationship with the city into the novel and the text.
(To be continued)
"If Only the First Sight"
Cheng Yongxin
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
This book is a collection of novels recently completed by Yongxin, the main programmer of harvest literary magazine. The novel of the same title, "If Only the First Sight", starts from individual experience and shows the soul of the 1980s and 1990s; "The Shape of the Wind" tells the story of a college student's encounter after knocking on the iron door of an old house; "Qingcheng Mountain" explores the relationship between ideas, dreams and human nature; "Mahjong World" tells about friendship, love and life; "My Chiang Mai, My Teresa Teng" writes about Teresa Teng's relationship with an era. The five novels have different themes, which is the author's long-term understanding and practice of literary work.
Shanghai Culture Publishing House
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