Liang Xiaosheng hopes that "In the World" can bring two aspects of thinking to young people today, one is the education on goodness, and the other is to help contemporary youth make up for the historical cognition since China's reform and opening up.
Liang Xiaosheng is close to the shadow
Throughout the Spring Festival evening, the writer Liang Xiaosheng was in front of the TV set at home in Beijing, watching the TV series of the same name "The World of Man", which was changed according to his novel, and the stories of the Zhou brothers and sisters and Zhou Father in the play had the shadows of Liang Xiaosheng's brothers and sisters, himself and his father, constantly tapping Liang Xiaosheng's heartstrings, making him unable to stop the tears.
Liang Xiaosheng hopes that "In the World" can bring two aspects of thinking to young people today, one is the education on goodness, and the other is to help contemporary youth make up for the historical cognition since China's reform and opening up. "I write both about how people are in reality and how they should be in reality. Through 'how it should be', it embodies the temperature that realism should also have, and pins my ideals on people themselves. ”
Write with a pencil, with a command
"My father was a construction worker who supported the third line, and I grew up living in the light-character street mentioned in the novel."
Liang Xiaosheng said that the Zhou brothers and sisters and Zhou fathers in the novel all have the shadows of Liang Xiaosheng's brothers and sisters, themselves and their father.
The novel "The World of Man" takes the life trajectory of Zhou Bingkun, a commoner's son, as a clue, and shows the development and changes of Chinese society in the past fifty years. Running through it, there are not only the "glory and dreams" of China's social development, but also the difficulties of the reform and opening up process.
When communicating with a good friend, Liang Xiaosheng mentioned that he wanted to write a very long novel. As a result, I didn't expect my friend to remind him: don't write that long, it's best to write two or three hundred thousand words, good pricing, good sales. You write such a long novel, today's fast-paced era, people have no patience, who buys who out who reads?
Liang Xiaosheng thought for a moment and replied: "I am so old, I still think about how I should write this book, and what do people like to read?" How many more copies can be printed, how much more fees, that is also too sad. I don't want to cater to the market in this way, I just want to do what I want to do. ”
Liang Xiaosheng only had one wish left in his heart: "I have been writing for such a long time, and I am about to write for a lifetime." Write a good work and pay tribute to literature. Literature has influenced me, and I believe it will affect others. ”
This novel, in the 57-year-old Liang Xiaosheng's mind brewed and conceived for 3 years, before gradually matured and landed. In 2010, at the age of 60, Liang Xiaosheng began his personal marathon writing run. Every morning, I took a tool knife to sharpen a barrel of pencils, spread out a pile of 400 words of manuscript paper on the rectangular table of the studio, bowed my head for 10 hours a day, and for five consecutive years, in the simple studio, Wrote 1.15 million words of "The World" behind closed doors.
"Those three years were really bitter, written with a pen and paper, 400 blocks of manuscript paper written in the box, and each punctuation was clearly marked. Writing and writing, my cervical spondylosis is getting worse and worse, my eyes are spent, my hands are not so obedient, the words have not been written in the grid, and finally, I simply write directly on the A4 paper with a pencil. In the process of writing, due to malnutrition, or due to anxiety, the nails will be twisted at that time, and they will be in a state of semi-falling off. There are also 'ghost shaved heads' on the head. ”
"The World of Man" wrote three drafts before and after, and the first draft wrote more than 3600 pages. Liang Xiaosheng revised before and after, writing a total of 3 drafts, nearly 10,000 pages.
When the lower part was not finished, Liang Xiaosheng's body could not stand up, went to the laboratory department of the Third Hospital of Beijing Medical University for examination, and soon the hospital telephone noticed that the situation was very bad, it was recommended to re-do gastroscopy, found stomach cancer, and operated three months later.
Later, Liang Xiaosheng was transferred to the cancer hospital, and the doctor discussed surgery with him, suggesting that all resection be done to prevent spread; before that, Liang Xiaosheng's father was an advanced stomach cancer. Liang Xiaosheng considered that the novel had not yet been written, and if the stomach was removed, it meant that everything had to stop.
On the way out of the cancer hospital, he smoked two cigarettes. Later, Liang Xiaosheng chose not to operate and treated conservatively.
In the following years, he not only completed "The World of Man", but also wrote several books and several film scripts.
Li Shidong, editor-in-chief of China Youth Publishing House, is Liang Xiaosheng's disciple, both of whom are graduates of the department of Chinese of Fudan University, and when he saw a 100-word "inscription" written by Liang Xiaosheng for this long article, "There are three words that have pierced my heart." I blurted out: The world! As a result, "The World of Man" became the title of the novel.
The little brother is the prototype of Zhou Bingkun
The popular TV series "The World of Man" was initiated by Tencent Pictures and others, directed by Li Lu, written by Wang Haiyu and his son Wang Daou, and starring Lei Jiayin, Xin Baiqing, Song Jia, Yin Tao and so on. The protagonist, Zhou Bingkun, is written by Liang Xiaosheng based on his little brother and friends.
"Zhou Bingkun is a worker in the soy sauce factory, my little brother is a worker in the soy sauce factory, he also took the retirement salary of the soy sauce factory when he retired, he also made mistakes in his work, ran two tons of soy sauce due to mistakes, and later he joined the party and became the secretary of the Discipline Inspection Commission." The stories of the coworkers as a group are marginalized in many works, and there are almost no stories about them. ”
"My father was a construction worker who supported the third line, and Zhou's father joined Guizhou, and many of the details came from life; the light character film street I mentioned in the novel was also written for the prototype of the area of our family."
Liang Xiaosheng, whose original name was Liang Shaosheng, was born on September 22, 1949, at No. 13 Anping Street, Daoli, Harbin, to an ordinary worker family. "Father is illiterate. My grandfather was also illiterate. Liang Xiaosheng described his family in his autobiographical essay "Life Like a Dream": "My mother is also illiterate. My grandfather had studied private school for a few years and was a man known as 'literate hyphenation' by farmers before the liberation of a rural area in northeast China. ”
This big family living in poverty lived in a large courtyard in the bungalow area at that time. The exterior scene in the TV series "The World of Man" is redesigned and constructed on the outskirts of Changchun, Jilin Province, based on the geographical scene described in Liang Xiaosheng's novel.
"In my novel "The World of Man", I wrote about the fictional characters in my pen, and there were neighborhood contradictions in that era, but the main body may be that the more people at the bottom of the courtyard, the more they will reflect a state of hugging and warming."
"The characteristics of the three children of the Zhou family, I have some in them. My intellectual friends and I are like the eldest brother Zhou Bingyi in the book "The World of Man". For example, the friendship between Zhou Bingkun and his buddies is the same as my feelings for my friends when I was a Zhiqing, and in the face of the bad fate of Zhiqing's friends, I can stand up. The rationality in Zhou Bingyi was gradually learned by me later, and as I grew older, I myself slowly matured, and the maverick behavior of Zhou Rong was also what I liked. ”
The little brother has read the novel "The World of Man", but unfortunately, when he died, the TV series was still in post-production and was not completed. Liang Xiaosheng originally expected that his brother could see the TV series, but he failed to do so.
Has always been the top pillar of the family
In 1977, he graduated from Fudan University and was assigned to the Beijing Film Studio, changing Liang Xiaosheng's fate. He has an 11-square-meter single dormitory, and in addition to work, he writes and reads every day. His early literary masterpieces "This is a Magical Land", the novella "Tonight There Is a Blizzard", the short story "Father", this series of representative works of early novels, were written in that dormitory.
When he first joined the work, Liang Xiaosheng earned 49 yuan a month and had to send 20 yuan a month to his parents to adopt his younger brothers and sisters. Even if you later get married, you must continue to help your parents support your family. His father fell ill, and he came to Beijing with his mother for 2 years, and Liang Xiaosheng was the only pillar of the family and the economic pillar, and he was duty-bound.
The eldest brother suffers from mental illness, and the long-term medical expenses are all borne by Liang Xiaosheng. By the end of the 1990s, the two younger brothers and sisters were laid off, the children had to go to school, Liang Xiaosheng had to help, and the annual funding of the family cost 40,000 yuan, which was a huge amount of money at the time.
Liang Xiaosheng and his lover's unit salary is not high, and they can only rely on Liang Xiaosheng to write novels to earn writing fees. Due to staying up late writing for a long time, Liang Xiaosheng was not in good health, suffered from liver disease, stomach disease, and also had symptoms of premature heart beats.
Later, after the death of his parents one after another, Liang Xiaosheng consulted with his wife and took his brother to Beijing to take care of life. The eldest brother has to stay in the hospital for several months every year, and it costs 30,000 or 40,000 yuan to treat the disease.
The 2021 that has just passed has been a difficult year for 73-year-old Liang Xiaosheng.
First the younger brother and younger sister died, and then the third brother and sister died. In addition to the pain and sadness of life, Liang Xiaosheng was busy writing while doing his best to find ways to help these families, solve life difficulties, and live a good life. In the free time, Liang Xiaosheng will unconsciously think about family affairs. What will the niece's life be like after losing a loved one? What difficulties will the third brother's family have, and what preparations will he have to make? Liang Xiaosheng is accustomed to taking on the burden of the head of the family, just like in the past many years.
A conversation with yourself
Liang Xiaosheng said that his writing is a dialogue with himself. "When I write about Zhou Bingkun coming forward, I ask myself: Do you believe that people should do this? Can you still do that now? Do you still think it's right and worth it? I'm in my 70s, and from my life experience, I think Zhou Bingkun is right to do so.
I think no writer can write out the values he does not believe in just by experience and skill, and what he can write must be expressed from the heart. ”
When Liang Xiaosheng wrote "The World of Man", he was doing his best to pay tribute to realism. Through his characters at different levels, he conveys his perception and vision of society. "In China from the 1960s to the 1980s, young people know very little about it today. They should understand how their parents' generation came to be, how they viewed the relationship between interests, friendship, and affection. There are so many meaningful things in this world that we can believe in something other than money. ”
After winning the Mao Dun Literature Prize, Liang Xiaosheng came up with a novel "My Life and Me". In the book, Liang Xiaosheng expresses many views on society, fate and "living" through the mouth of the protagonist. In the novel, people have "three lives": one is given by their parents and given by their original families, which is called "Mandate of Heaven"; the second is determined by their own life experience, called "real life"; the third is given by culture, called "self-cultivation". The sum of man is clearly closely related to these three lives. Liang Xiaosheng pours out his deepest concern for "fate" in the novel. He wrote about the inviolable decisive role of fate, and also wrote about the powerful force that human struggle and self-cultivation can change destiny.
"Why do humans need literature? The value of literature lies in the fact that it can give people spiritual nourishment, whether human beings ultimately need literature, or whether it prompts us to improve and improve spiritually and in character. It is for this reason that literature has a relationship with human beings, and it has the power to lead people to goodness. ”
Life is still complicated, life is still high, and the struggle is still tenacious.