Zhu Xiaojun's reportage "Chinese Peasant City": The legendary Longgang creates a new epic of the people

Zhu Xiaojun's reportage "Chinese Peasant City":

The legendary Dragon Harbor creates a new epic of the people

Wen 丨 Ding Xiaoyuan

A former fishing village with "a population of less than six thousand, no electricity, no running water, not even an inch of road." The folk song sings the poignancy of the millennium: "Only people walk by, no one stays"; in 2019, it has become the first "town reform city" approved for establishment in more than 70 years in New China, and today there are 400,000 people here, with a GDP of more than 30 billion yuan, and a new institutional mechanism of "global urbanization, rural communityization, local citizenization, and equalization of services" has been established. This is the legendary Dragon Harbor of Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, and the myth it deduces! Recently jointly launched by the People's Literature Publishing House and the Zhejiang People's Publishing House, "China Peasant City" tells the legendary story of the great changes in the development of Longgang in the past 40 years from village to town and from town to city. The story is rare, and the narrative of restoring history reveals the legendary code thoroughly.

Reading Zhu Xiaojun's long new work "Chinese Peasant City", I naturally thought of the important speech made by General Secretary Xi Jinping at the opening ceremony of the 11th National Congress of the China Federation of Literary and Art Circles and the 10th National Congress of the Chinese Writers Association not long ago. General Secretary Xi Jinping hopes that the vast number of literary and art workers will be concerned about the great cause of national rejuvenation, enthusiastically depict the magnificent atmosphere of the new journey in the new era, adhere to the people's position, and write an endless people's epic. This "Chinese Peasant City" is a wonderful chapter in the great cause of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and it is a magnificent legendary epic created by the people in the great historical process of China's reform and opening up. It can be said that "China Peasant City" is a practical practice of General Secretary Xi Jinping's important exposition on literary and artistic work, and it is also the latest important harvest in implementing the spirit of the General Secretary's speech.

Excellent reportage is a true and vivid report on the great history created by the people, and at the same time it can become a historical work with important historical documentary value. Obviously, the full historicity of the object of the report and the certain historicity reached by the construction of the text of the work have to a large extent achieved the unique and significant value of "Chinese Peasant City". This work will surely enter the historical narrative of Longgang New Town itself, become a reference document that must be read to understand the past and present lives of the city, and may also become an important material that scholars can directly cite in the history of modern urban development.

This is a work that allows history to enlighten the present and tell the future. The works record the history of city-building, entrepreneurship and creation of the people of Longgang, Wenzhou, Zhejiang. Longgang has transformed from a poor seaside fishing village with nothing, and after 40 years of independent construction, it has transformed into a splendid modern city on the coast of the East China Sea. This is a myth, but it is a real existence of reality. This is a legend, but also a people's epic of the creation of the century by the fathers and fellow countrymen of Longgang. At the same time, the legend of Longgang in Zhejiang is a classic sample of contemporary China and china's reform and opening up, which reflects the magnificent creative power of the Chinese people with typical cases, and reveals the self-improvement pioneering spirit of the Chinese nation that is not afraid of difficulties and obstacles.

The city is a product of modernization and an important symbol for observing the level of modernization. There are two miracles in the history of Urban Construction in China, one is the long-famous Shenzhen in Guangdong, and the other is Longgang in Zhejiang. Longgang naturally cannot be compared with Shenzhen, but Longgang has its own uniqueness and value, which is a city independently established by the people of Longgang. Such a miracle created by Chinese peasants in the history of world urban construction is a subject of great weight and rich significance in the creation of reportage literature. The non-fiction nature of reportage means that the quality content of the writing subject itself has a certain basic significance for the realization of the final value of the work. Obviously, the legend of Longgang is a rare good subject for reportage writing, but a good theme must be carefully worked by good writers to become a good work that can be read and can enter history. From the internal narrative of "China Peasant City", it can be seen that Zhu Xiaojun can be said to have lived up to his mission and lived up to expectations, and wrote an excellent work with a non-fiction epic character. This reflects the professionalism and exceptional writing ability of a good reportage writer.

Zhu Xiaojun's reportage writing field is relatively extensive, but he can firmly grasp his original literary intention and adhere to the stylistic spirit of documentary writing. "Chinese Peasant City" highlights the consistent character and style of Zhu Xiaojun's reportage, which is solid, thick, honest, real and material, but not lacking in vivid images. The writing of reportage has transformed from an objective and free work to a non-fiction narrative work, which first depends on the author grasping the writing object through solid interviews and full cognitive understanding and then internalizing it in his heart, and then externalizing the real internalized writing material into a work with non-fiction narrative charm in language art. It was on these two key points that Zhu Xiaojun did enough to show his skill. He was an honest writer who was willing to spend his time conducting hundreds of cross-corroborating interviews. The process of writing for him is a fieldwork and social investigation. Zhu Xiaojun is also a well-intentioned writer with literary skills. Although the title of the work is called "Chinese Peasant City", Zhu Xiaojun does not simply carry out a linear narrative of the history of urban construction, but is people-oriented, focusing on the special interaction between miracles and strange people, committed to the deep excavation and perspective of the legends of strange people and strange people in the legend, with specific stories and expressive details, reproducing the touching image and lofty spirit of a generation of Longgang people such as Chen Dingmo, the leader of the city," and Chen Zhihui, the participant of the dragon road blue wisps. "A man like a migrant worker carries luggage and carries a net pocket containing washing supplies into the town government", "It will be open until four or five o'clock in the morning, and the sound of the hammering of the poles will be heard downstairs, go down to a bowl of wontons, eat and go to work", the work with such a sense of shape and expressive description, truly and vividly portrays the image and spirit of entrepreneurs in the years of passion burning, opening up the city's invisible past glory time. The work focuses on the development history of China's peasant cities in the combination of the Chinese and local nature of the environment, not only writing about the possibilities created by the background of China's reform and opening up for the generation of longgang legends, but also showing the historical initiative of longgang people to take advantage of the situation. In this way, it is more essential and more realistic to reflect the unique meaning of the Longgang story in a special context.

"Chinese Peasant City" is a kind of Zhu Xiaojun-style simple writing that closely follows life itself. The works are not gorgeous, not extravagant, not arbitrary; there is no tone of the experience summary report, there is no novelization of big truth and small fiction, but there is no lack of fun and meaning in introspection. "After the ebb tide of the plump imagination, the reef of reality is revealed" "The city is like a gorgeous mirror, reflecting the embarrassment and shabbiness of the entrepreneurs of Jiangnan Yuan's generation", these freehand languages truly convey the hardships and difficulties of the characters in a specific environment, telling us that the legend is struggled. All these things make the work have an inherent full of literature, and realize the ideal of reportage writing that has both reporting and literature. Needless to say, "Chinese Peasant City" is Zhu Xiaojun's new reportage masterpiece, and it is also an important work that deserves our full attention in this kind of writing in recent years.

Creative talk

Dig out the truth and reproduce the historical drama

Wen 丨 Zhu Xiaojun

Zhu Xiaojun

Longgang is the only town in China and even the world where farmers have raised funds to build it. In the early 1980s, it was still a tidal flat, a small fishing village in Wumu, and the reeds on the riverside swayed with centuries of desolation. In southern Zhejiang, where the famous poor are, it is one of the places to escape the wilderness and beg for food. The local organization of farmers to raise funds to build a city, three years later poked up a town, five years to become the first township in Wenzhou City with an industrial output value of more than 100 million yuan. As General Secretary Xi Jinping said, the people of Longgang "made a great leap from the backward era, keeping up with the times and then leading the times, and created a great historical drama in human history that shocked the world and wept ghosts and gods." ”

The truth, concreteness and vividness of literary works should be presented through the characters, plots, details and scenes that can be known and felt, and rely on the narration of witnesses, that is, interviews. However, for the writing of Longgang, more than 40 years have passed since the fund-raising and construction of the city, and most of the witnesses have been more than ancient, some have suffered from Alzheimer's disease, and some have passed away. The study of false memories has found that human memories are not only easy to pass away, but also misled by external interference information, and will be spontaneously changed by association. The past is like smoke, and the long years will wash the memory or wash it to pieces, or like old photos that have been soaked in water, become blurred, and even lost, deviated, misplaced, there is a crown Li Dai.

In order to excavate the truth and reproduce historical dramas, I had to increase the number of interviews, successively interviewing nearly a hundred people, sometimes Hu Wanli, secretary of the county party committee, and Liu Xiaohua, county magistrate, interviewing Chen Dingmo as many as a dozen times, interviewing more than a dozen town party committee and town government cadres at that time, and also interviewing dozens of peasants who raised funds to build a city, and there were many small people, such as Chen Xirui and others who went to Longgang with their families with empty fists in their hands.

For the creation of reportage, reality is the other shore that can never land, and it can be infinitely approached. For the writer, truth is both the highest state and the lowest bottom line, so it is also a great pleasure to be close to every minute. For the controversial plots, details and scenes, by expanding the search, most of the plots and details of the pen are obtained by asking three or five people, seven or eight people, such as what Longgang was like when Longgang Town was founded, whether there was electricity, whether there was running water, paving several sections of road, the controversy was very large, and more than a dozen people were interviewed for this purpose.

"Seeing is not necessarily true, and hearing is not necessarily true." Memory is selective, narration is subjective, and may be false. I interviewed each interviewee at least twice, and asked twice about important plots to find out whether it was true or false. If the two times say differently, there must be one time is false, which is true, and interview several times. In addition, it is necessary to analyze, identify, and try to get close to the truth. In addition, it is also supplemented by fieldwork methods such as file inquiry and field investigation, consulting and remaking a large number of red-headed documents and important meeting minutes of Cangnan County and Longgang Town, as well as the minutes of meetings of the Longgang Town Party Committee and the town government, observing, feeling, experiencing, imagining and associating the natural environment or scenes involved in the text, even if the time has passed and the appearance is completely different, it is also necessary to go to the scene to feel it.

I've always used the most stupid approach to writing, and I've always done stupid work. For example, the interview recording was listened to over and over again, and the text was sorted out according to the original words. Combing according to time and logic, this is a habit I have developed for many years, otherwise I will not find the feeling, just like walking in the clouds, the heart is hanging, not steady. Longgang interview recording is the most difficult to sort out, those years of rare interview subjects in Mandarin is not good, I often listen to a sentence repeated several times still do not know what to do, so I have to listen from the beginning, a day can only sort out one or two hours of interview recordings, like ants gnawing bones to sort out hundreds of thousands of words. For this reason, I also bought a copy of the Dictionary of Barbarian Words.

Since it is certainly not possible to write about peasants raising funds to build a city, it is certainly not possible to write about five or six people, and eight or nine people cannot reflect the magnificent city-building, and they must adopt the method of group carving. Most of the interviewees have no direct relationship with each other, it is difficult to get together, and if they are not good, they will disperse and become a collection of stories, which is contrary to the original intention. Finally, chen Dingmo, secretary of the town party committee, was selected as the main line, Li Qitie, Chen Zhizhi, Yang Enzhu, Yang Xiaoxia and others as the secondary line, and several narrative lines went forward in parallel, interspersing people and things outside the narrative line as the background to ensure the integrity, orderliness and conformity of the narrative arc.

There is also a change in the writing, that is, as far as possible to give the interviewee, especially the small people the right to speak, choose more words that can best reflect their personality, emotions, and views. Therefore, in this work, you can often see the expression "In the interview, he said". It took two years to finally complete this work, and despite a lot of effort, I think it was worth it.