Chen Chongzheng
Born in 1983 in Chaozhou, Guangdong Province, he holds a master's degree in literature from Beijing Normal University, vice president of Guangzhou Literature and Art Newspapers and Periodicals, vice chairman and secretary general of Guangzhou Writers Association, and author of novels such as "Beauty City" and "Levitation Technique". He has won the Liang Bin Novel Award, the Guangdong Youwei Literature Award, the Silver Medal of the Chinese Science Fiction Literature Competition, and some works have been shortlisted for the Blancpain Ideal Country Literature Award, the Huadi Literature List, etc.; he has served as a writing tutor in many colleges and universities.
I understand New South writing
One
I prefer to go back to square one and discuss the issue. For example, why a writer writes, where he first stood, what force made him fly like a dandelion, what force made him fall, take root, grow leaves, and feel the wind, frost, rain and dew, pain and warmth. It's a complex issue, but it's all about the soil of the beginning.
Like me. I was born in a small village fifteen kilometers east of the ancient city of Chaozhou in eastern Guangdong, and in the early 1980s, when my village was not yet energized, I was familiar with the smell of kerosene lamps and amazed that the beam of a flashlight could penetrate the night. In the years that followed, television, computers and mobile phones lined up into my life, and now that I am almost a year old, I have begun to understand that such an experience is not an individual experience - with the Pearl River Delta as the center and the radius of three or five hundred kilometers as the radius, the vast number of rural teenagers have similar encounters with me. So, for a long time, I was in it, thinking that teenagers in other places were like me, slowly becoming middle-aged uncles, and the years in between were long and lackluster, until I had a period of reading life in the north, and I began to rethink the difference between the south and the north, which was my surprise to find that the literary south reached Jiangnan, and compared with the position and weight of Jiangnan in contemporary literature, the vast southern hinterland became an easily forgotten imaginary number, or an outlier. Perhaps only at the magical time node of the 40 years of reform and opening up, after Guangdong's population and economic volume have experienced 40 years of growth, it is possible to re-identify the characteristics of Lingnan culture from the cultural point of view, and then see the "New South" as a new cultural existence.
Why does it take time? Forty years after the reform and opening up, the benefits of information dissemination to literary creation are obvious. I have talked to some old writers in Guangdong, and it was a difficult thing to write in Guangdong in the early years (I believe the same is true in other border areas), because of dialects, but also because the information is not smooth, it is already exciting to be seen in newspapers; and now, we are facing the fading of dialects and the overload of information, the times have changed, a writer writes in the border areas, as long as there is excellent literary talent, it is actually difficult to be buried. Especially after the emergence of the mobile Internet, the pattern of literature has actually quietly changed. In other words, "New Southern Writing" has always been, but it has been ignored, not called, and there will be no review and gaze.
The wheel of time never stops, and what solidifies my idea of the north-south direction is space, or more specifically the map. "Up north, down south, left west, right east", every time I read it is catchy, we are always used to looking at the globe, to see the map of China. But one day, if you pick up an accidentally dropped globe and look at the map of China from different angles, such as looking horizontally, or looking backwards, you will see the location of today's Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, in fact, there are wide seas in the south, so as to understand that this area for the land of China should no longer be regarded as a southern barbarian land, nor should it be south of the south, it is the hinterland of the south, the sea and land meet here, the Tropic of Cancer is crossed here; after the middle of the nineteenth century, this place is no longer silent. Instead, it actively participated in the pulse of Chinese history. Therefore, the new nature of the South lies in the need to revisit this land centered on the Greater Bay Area and the stories that have happened and are thriving in this land.
Thinking about the differences between North and South literature gave me new coordinates. I first thought about the cultural characteristics of Guangdong, I looked back at this land that went out of Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, south of Nanling, where WeChat and Huawei were born, and I asked myself, what power is contained here that has not yet been detected? I think of a scene that my Filipino friend talked to me about, he once talked to a northeasterner, a Shanghainese and a Guangdong person at the same time, the northeasterners were saying how many friends he had from beginning to end, shanghainese focused on emphasizing the advantages of the brand, only Guangdong people directly talked about the price and construction period. He concluded that this place full of foodies is very real. Is it true that the cultural characteristics of Guangdong are real? Such a summary is obviously sloppy, but it seems to make some sense, after all, it is easy to see bald uncles wearing flip-flops and large pants on the streets of Guangzhou, but they are invisible rich people casually.
Continue to think along the north and south of literature, it is easy to think of the "Northern Qiao Feng South Murong" in the Jin Yong martial arts world, if you ignore the negative impression of Murong Fu's role, from the style of such an overview is still quite accurate, Qiao Feng's arrogance and dry clouds are full of friends, Murong Fu is born in a famous family with a personable life, which is indeed in line with our imagination of the north and south styles. So, what is the aesthetic imagination south of the South? If I had to put forward an image, I think it would be a "sweeping monk." Jin Yong, who is in Hong Kong, has set up countless masters in his martial arts world, and the master of the master is undoubtedly the sweeping monk who resolves xiao Yuanshan's feud with Murong Bo. Sweeping monks mean an absolute power that abandons external forms. Can it be said that from Jin Yong to Zhou Xingchi all the way to The Five People, there is a rebellious force with a sea breeze, from the pursuit of true sincerity, from the admiration of absolute strength, because this is the necessary gesture to complete the counterattack. In the face of the opportunities of the times, the sense of rhythm brought by the small fishing village of Shenzhen is "not playing virtual", which is a direct professional dismantling of the target; simple and direct, does not require too much sense of ceremony, so behind Dongguan becoming a world factory, it is a reality that turns everything into an assembly line; so the fire cloud evil god, Su Qi'er, Shaolin Kung Fu, and Sun Wukong in Zhou Xingchi's movie all represent the pursuit of an absolute strength, which is the aesthetic prototype buried in the nonsense. This is the jubilation of the heterogeneous south, and under the spring breeze of reform and opening up, the rebellion to remove the sense of ritual directly promotes innovation.
However, it is a paradox that serious literature still requires the necessary sense of ritual. For a while I often lamented that young people in Guangdong don't write. In this regard, my Filipino friends also have their own conclusions: but whenever there is a grocery store at home, young people in Guangdong will not think about writing.
Two
It stands to reason that the sea of stars of literary youth is movies and rock. Only in these years, Hong Kong's films and rock and roll have not regained their former scenery, but a wave of aesthetics has passed through time. The north is full of grand narratives, and after "The Ordinary World" and "White Deer Plain", the model of literature seems to be a collective photograph, a family, a century, and a majestic mountain. Writers south of the South are even more obsessed with the colorful imagination. If the north is the Sword Sect, then Jiangnan is the Qi Sect; however, compared with the south of the South, Jiangnan will become the Sword Sect, and the New South will be closer to the Qi Sect. It is naturally imprecise to make such an analogy with the concept of martial arts, but what does it matter? The New South means that the world must accept pluralistic heterogeneity and uncertainty. So we see Lin Bai's "North Stream" re-using the Cantonese dialect, see Chen Chuncheng looking for the coins that Borges threw into the sea in "Night Submarine", see Zhu Shanpo gaze at the light of life in Africa through "Sahel Wasteland", and Lin Sen's "On the Shore in the Sea" to re-excavate the story of the sea, Lu Yiping's "White Mountain" In the multiple metaphors of the blue-skinned warrior, Wang William's reflection on human technology in "Wild Future", Lin Peiyuan's "Small Town Life Guide" presents the experience of life in the Chaoshan Plain... These stirring writings require courage, and writers are on the side of imagination.
Such imagination is not a figment of the imagination, but is based on the complex and diverse realistic themes of the New South. For example, Lin Sen is on the theme of the ocean, the so-called patron eats the mountain and relies on the water to draft, Lin Sen is in Hainan, of course, to tell the story of the sea, to tell the waves between the waves and the intestines presented in front of our eyes. Another example is Zhu Shanpo, who has always used his imagination and poetic language to forge a "slope-style tone", and Qiu Huadong has long noticed the unique new southern flavor in his novel creation: "Zhu Shanpo has developed a novel style that focuses on and is exclusive to the southern part of Guangxi, which is purely a southern novel. This kind of southern, unlike Jiangnan, is the novel of Guangxi, the land of miasma in the southwest, and is a unique and strange novel, like the taste of snail powder and yellow peel fruit. "Therefore, New Southern writing should be regional and transcendent; it cannot be separated from the excavation of a specific culture, but it cannot become a rigid label." The new southern concept of "writing" is itself an awakening to talent, after all, we live in a new era in which talent is still admired. Looking at the New South in the context of the new era, there is a literary texture that is different from the northeast, northwest and jiangnan, which is a once obscured operation, waiting for a new coordinate to assign a value to it.
Liangguang and Hainan have been southern barbarians since ancient times, at the bottom of the chain of cultural contempt, and long-term repression has allowed them to form their own cultural characteristics; cultural frontiers such as Fujian and Yunnan-Guichuan may be more colorful. Therefore, the New South writing as I understand it is not a fixed value, no one will try to string beef and lamb together with a bamboo stick; it is not to draw a prison and separate you and us on the same cookie; New South writing should give an unknown variable X like a solution equation, so that all the values in the new coordinates have an upward force to complete an aesthetic solution. As the critic Chen Peihao said: "Especially after the reform and opening up, when people imagine the south, the object has been expanded, and the core area may expand from Jiangnan to Lingnan." Therefore, the New South represents a new economic life and the new style of life it has spawned, represents the huge tension formed by high technology, new cities and human life, and represents many 'local narratives' south of the South that have not yet been mainstreamed... It should be said that 'New Southern writing' is a summoning concept, not a ready-made concept waiting to be perfectly described and packaged into history. As the discussion of "New Southern Writing" gradually deepens, Yang Qingxiang's article "New Southern Writing: Subject, Territory and the Sovereignty of Chinese Writing" more systematically discusses the ins and outs of this new concept, and puts forward four key words for the characteristics of New Southern writing: geography, oceanicity, criticality, and classicity, which provides a clearer explanatory framework for New Southern writing. The writer Wang William wrote about the New South as a "new root": "In addition to the mainstream context of Jiangnan, 'New South' is another unique magnificent landscape, and when its hoarseness and silence are illuminated, it will definitely bring a new aesthetic quality to the Chinese context." If Jiangnan aesthetics gained a counterforce in this dialogue and produced reflective new changes, it undoubtedly belonged to New Southern writing. "The reason why I want to find the roots of the context is because the current commentary discourse is really old and even decaying, and I have seen more than once some critics use the same set of commentaries to deal with different seminars, and in the face of different writers and critics using the golden oil label to conduct careful analysis, and the listeners all nod their heads and say yes." In this sense, the establishment of the concept of New Southern writing itself provides a new tool and possibility for the twilight theoretical system. Happily, keen critics and writers quickly realized the value of this concept, and Yang Qingxiang, Chen Peihao, Tang Poet, Zeng Pan, Yang Dandan, Zhang Yanling, Song Song, Jiang Shuzhuo, He Zhongming, Dong Xi, Liu Xiaobo, Li Chao, Liu Shiyu, Liu Xinyue, Zhang Jing, Lin Yuanliu, Feng Na, Tian Zhonghui and others also joined the discussion of New Southern Writing, enriching the scope of this concept from different dimensions.
My Filipino friend, who has read Li Zishu and Huang Jinshu, said that after reading it, the whole world is wet, so he is full of confidence in Southeast Asian Chinese writing, he said that the flexible New South is indeed essentially a kind of local writing with its own world vision. I am also deeply convinced of his conclusion.
Three
There is an economic center and an economic hinterland in the economy; in the vast south of China, if there is a literary center, it is even more necessary to build a literary hinterland. Compared with the aesthetic tradition established by Jiangnan in the centuries of the New Culture Movement, because of the chain of contempt and poor information, the hinterland of the South has not been able to establish an effective dialogue system with Jiangnan and the North. It should be easy to see that the New South is complementary and enriching to Jiangnan, rather than diverging and opposing. The real significance of the current re-examination of the New South is to revitalize the inventory of writing, change the stock into increments, and only if it is really beneficial to activate or clarify the creation of writers, the concept of New South writing is effective.
A writer buries his head in code words, he will naturally stare at the heart, but also hope to respond to the times. I am a native of Guangdong, and I firmly believe that everyone is a specimen of the times. As Kafka said, "Not everyone can see the truth, but everyone can be the truth." "The greatest truth of writing is to write what I see with my own eyes and think of the mind, and this degree of discernment does not require an external yardstick, but more of an inner reflection. In a sense, New South writing is like a boat, and the people who become the truth are always on the boat, so they sing whatever songs they see. A person can not leave his era to discuss creation, for example, more than ten years ago we could not refuse the color screen mobile phone, today we can not refuse WeChat and express delivery, since people follow the boat, no one can stop in place to carve the boat and ask for a sword. At present, with the development of information dissemination, the information environment we are in is easily homogenized, and hot news is always easy to attract attention and is immediately forgotten. Because of this, it is very important to gaze at the here and now, to gaze at the environment in which you are. Writers imagine the future because they have solid ground under their feet, but their discoveries of themselves often need to look back and forth in a higher, farther, deeper, and more futuristic dimension.
Writing is a knife-inward craft. Sometimes gazing into one's own small universe leads to the big world outside. The re-examination of the New South brought me a sense of self-awareness in the direction of writing, and this process made me understand how to extend the roots of writing, so as to strengthen the base of my writing. From Half-Step Village, to Bihe Town, to my two novels, Beauty City and Levitation, I am moving from the Chaoshan Plains full of witchcraft to the more open technological altars, from the magical myths of Black Mirror To the wild imagination of the future of post-humanity, and I am constantly updating my system of contemplating the world; what remains unchanged is the transition from a fable to a new southern fable, and the avant-garde charm that I have always adhered to.
If I were to summarize my writing over the past decade with a single picture, I imagine that it was probably the setting sun, and an intelligent robot standing in the field could help villagers build ancestral shrines. This kind of experience is actually not magical, it is the reality around me. For example, at this moment, at the end of the year and the beginning of the year, there are many experts who study drones in high-tech enterprises in Shenzhen, as well as code farmers who develop meta-universe programs, who will board the high-speed train to their hometowns to participate in the ancestor worship activities in the ancestral halls. There were sacrifices reflected by candlelight, and people knelt indiscriminately and prayed for protection. We don't feel any contradiction in the middle. So don't imagine the sci-fi future as a new and beautiful world, and the iron arms of robots are also allowed to rust. As a writer, I focus on the rust on the iron arm, not the beauty of high technology and glass.
The so-called sweeping monks are that there are fallen leaves and dust everywhere, and the place where they stay is the temple and the monk's robe, and the place where the sleeves fly is the absolute divine skill.
My Filipino friends agree with me. He feels that the futurism of standing in the field still needs someone with a broom to clean up the spider's web on the robot, and he says that such a cleanup has a more beautiful name for computer programmers called iteration. The "New South" to complete the iteration of the "Old South" means the wisdom of survival of the fittest and the courage to face decay. I said to my Filipino friends that next year I will be forty years old and believe that there is another better self on the way.
(Originally published in Young Writers, No. 3, 2022)