A group of young writers from the northeast shook the literary world with their writing.
Shuang Xuetao, Ban Yu, and Zheng Zhi reconstruct the connection between literature and life, unfolding narratives in the continuity of history, and defending true emotions and human nature.
Their writing creates a novel realism, and their novels are a calling in both thematically and aesthetically. Summoning the continuity of history, summoning the moral mission of the novel, summoning true art.
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Self-prologue out of the Northeast Chronicle
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Text/Huang Ping
The day I left the Northeast, I was struck by lightning.
It was no joke, and the classmates who took me to the train station at the time testified. If the station book of Changchun Railway Station is sufficiently detailed, relevant records can also be found.
But I can't remember what day it was. Is it the end of June 2006, yes, June 28, 29, or 30? I only remember the weather that day, there was a kind of heavy industry gloom, heavy rolling thunder, ink-stained skies, and lightning bolts like plums on the edge of the sky. Starting from the avant-garde south district of Jilin University, where I lived for seven years, I went through Renmin Avenue to Changchun Railway Station, and there was no word all the way. When it came to the end, I was distraught. The music played by the taxi driver is "If the wine is dry and sells nothing", "How many years of wind and rain accompany me", which is about the awakening of the negative righteous. Isn't it too coincidental, but, too, is true.
The moment the thunder came down, after I pitted. After passing through the security check and boarding the elevator, I found the waiting room, took a breath behind the black pressure team, and thought of saying goodbye to the two classmates next to me. At that moment, the electric fan buzzing in the hall suddenly froze, and all the lights suddenly went out, as if they had been hit by a bullet at the same time. In the extremely short silence, a thunder sounded like an explosion on the ground. Later, it was learned that the lightning bolt landed on the roof of the train station like a shotgun.
This accident became a joke in the mouths of the students. I had thought that the moment before leaving was the rolling smoke on the platform, and the sail-like arms suddenly flipped up at the moment when the whistle sounded. The real departure turned out to be awkward, with stuffy waiting rooms and blurred vision lenses. I vaguely look forward to a breeze that will come before this storm, tearing me apart like a piece of rice paper gently—I have repeatedly rehearsed the sadness of graduation, but until this moment I realized that I was actually expecting.
Born in the Northeast in the 1980s, he was destined to witness the layoffs of his parents' generation in the 1990s and was destined to leave in the new century. So far, this is a story of millions of people. Lightning struck the train station, and lightning split the Red Sea.
But in the 1980s, who would have foreseen the Thunder? When you live in a factory house, watch the factory director push a bicycle past the door every day at the entrance of the courtyard. The house I lived in as a child had the same yard as the villa, and like the backyard of the villa, we had animals —a goose. I have always not understood that on the Internet now, geese are said by netizens to be the most powerful animals. Is the toughest animal a big city kids encounter is a goose? If you grow up with a northeastern goose, you will find that the goose is not scary at all. You crouch down, beckon, and it will flap its wings and run into your arms, resting its neck on your shoulder. Many years later, I saw a black swan that was more than a man tall by the lake in the French town of Yval. Tourists around did not dare to come closer, scattered to take pictures. Only I stood in front of this black swan, so close that it could rest its neck on my shoulder. The wind blew over the lake, and we were silent with each other.
I don't know if the black swan's cry is loud or if it can paddle across the surface of Lake Geneva. I only know about our big goose, and its sound can easily reach the factory. Not because it is a maverick goose, but simply because two places are not far away; but also because it is hungry, and its hungry cry carries the temperament of the working class, with unquestionable legitimacy. Above the factory, above the instrumentation factory where my parents worked, often like this chicken barking and barking, but it makes people feel at ease. I can't remember the factory anymore, and all I remember is a pile of memory fragments: brown lenses, military coats, half-human-high green paint on the walls, Jianlibao and lychee drinks stuffed into my hand, which are my father's office; and my mother's workshop, the rumbling vibration of the lathe, the smell of engine oil and metal coils, and Tian Lianyuan's "Yang Jiajian" on the radio — it is said that I am the smallest "storyteller" in this factory. At the age when my daughter read the Wonders textbook over and over again, I could tell the story of Blood Battle golden sand.
I used to think that time was as slow as childhood, just as we used to think that the plains were stable, the vast, sun-drenched black land, mixed with the atmosphere of pastoral and socialist industry. Many summer evenings, I sat at the sorbet stand in front of the post office, ice cream balls soaked in sprite (the local popular way of eating), and bought a copy of the Ball Newspaper at the newsstand behind me. It seems that no one can foresee how long the summer sun is: at some point in the future, the snow will slowly fall on the plain, like a heavy curtain on the stage.
I will not tell the story of the layoffs next, Shuang Xuetao, Ban Yu, Zheng Zhi, these writers, they have already told this story. I just remember that one New Year's Day at the turn of the new century, in the cold air, I volunteered to go to the market to buy vegetables. Twenty years ago, without navigation, stepping on the snow and crossing the short road, I walked into an abandoned factory in Tiexi. The rusty factory door, the waist-high weeds that spread from the gate to the road, quietly seemed to hear the wrench of many years ago suddenly falling to the ground. This road, from beginning to end, I did not meet a single person, they were buried in the wild grass. I later read Shuang Xuetao's "Seesaw", and Shuang Xuetao probably walked this road that year.
There are no people buried, only to leave. Lightning struck the train station, but did not hit the rails. The moment the train starts, time gets so fast. The next stop, Beijing; the next stop, Shanghai. Suddenly I became a critic, but it became less and less clear to me what "art" had to do with our lives; all of a sudden I was a university professor, but I was reading fewer and fewer books seriously. Also, my language is changing. For example, "second floor", I will pay more attention to say "two floors"; if I can use "goodbye", I will avoid saying "goodbye". When did this happen, I don't know.
Thanks for the past journey. Just like in the first autumn after arriving in Beijing, standing in front of the door of the renmin university library, standing in the shadow of the locust tree in front of the door, I called my mother and told her how many institutions came to me to give lectures, like Beijing Geely University, which offers eight hundred yuan a day. For the first time, I knew that it was good to have money, I had a lot of membership cards, and I could go to renyi like a movie; I took a taxi to the gym to run, and after running to eat steak; I listened to Kenzaburo Oe's speech at the Japanese Embassy, and I didn't know that this kind of speech would also be equipped with simultaneous interpretation headphones, so I listened to it with a smile; I watched the premiere of "Three Gorges Good People" in the lecture hall of Peking University, and squeezed in the front to shake hands with Jia Zhangke, "Salute to you" - this flashy everything. Thank you to Renmin University, and also to thank you for the fifty kilometers from the West Gate of the Renmin University to Beijing Geely University. Later, when I heard that the campus of Geely University was assigned to Peking University, I was in a trance for a while, and I didn't know whether I was an alumnus of Jida University or an alumnus of Peking University. I may be a non-editorial alumnus of Peking University, and I often go to Peking University to rub classes. I was also in Mr. Dai Jinhua's class when I met my future wife, who was also in Peking University. Again, thank you Beijing.
Chinese the south side of the graduate apartment of Minmin University
Shanghai, never teach you the story of personal struggle, this story does not have to be taught in the city. I'm in Shanghai, like living in mid-air; it's a great city because it's possible to live in mid-air. Everything here is very thoughtful, just like the service of tong sou. In the sense of work and settlement, this is an extremely ideal city. Life also becomes rational, unfolding like tables in turn. This is the middle age that came early, the ads pushed by the algorithm on my mobile phone, or about hair transplantation, or about the "unlimited purchase, unlimited loans" around Shanghai.
The works discussed in this book are first of all an opportunity for me, the opportunity to connect my yesterday and today, and it turns out that Chongming Island can also grow Northeast rice. I don't need to say anything about these works here, I've said a lot and it's become today's book. By the way, some friends in the literary circle said that I listened to "Wolf Disco" with tears in my eyes, no, I laughed until I listened to it with tears.
But I'm not quite sure if that smoky night was a plot from their novel or a part of my life. It was a cold night mixed with the smell of shoddy second-hand smoke and military coats, and I seemed to understand as I watched a group of people, including my father, passionate in the rout, like the last charge of a group of remnants. Their most distant vision of the times is to rebuild their factories off-site. They are still in the track of ended history, with tea-stained cups and iron-stained souls, and a misconception of reality, and old and vain dreams of the future.
Defeated, the last thing left in place is literature.
Directly related to the book in front of everyone, my father, who was about to leave, took me to the library and got a borrowing card. I went into the library and borrowed a stack of Screams in the dusty sunlight. The most enjoyable novel I've ever read before is "Tianlong Babu", and I thought that the more famous "Scream" was bound to be a more magnificent production. At the moment when the familiar world began to crumble, I began to read until a real world was reconstructed through fiction.
My father and co-workers went far away after the Lantern Festival of that year. There is a strange custom in my hometown that on the day of the Lantern Festival, a red candle is lit on the windowsill of all rooms. Although it was a cold day, the courtyard door was also to be opened that night, and when I walked out of the courtyard door, on both sides of the path outside, every household lit candles on both sides of the courtyard door. The world of snow and glass, on the windowsills of every road, every house, the shadows of red candles flicker. I remember that I dripped the wax little by little on the windowsill and then carefully glued the candle to it. The candles were like lighthouses, reflected on the frosted glass in the night, and also reflected my face.
August 2021
Table of contents of the book
Chapter 1 Overview of the "New Northeast Writers Group"
Chapter Two: Aesthetic Characteristics: Shuang Xuetao's "Moses on the Plain"
Chapter Three: The Allegorical Structure: Ban Yu's Novel
Chapter Four: The Psychological World: Zheng Zhi's Novel
appendix
Chapter Five: Civilian Literature: Wang Zhanhei's Novel
Chapter Six: The Age of Algorithms: Artificial Intelligence Writing
postscript