In the summer of 1979, Chawan Village released an open-air movie, "Railway Guerrilla".
The villagers took their place early. In the crowd, there was 15-year-old Cha Haisheng and his brothers.
People watched intently. However, when the train appears in the movie, a voice of excitement suddenly burst out of the audience:
"I'm going to take the train in a few days."
This sound cut through the tranquility of the moment, and also cut through the calm that Chawan Village has always had.
Cha HaiSheng was the first person to take the train in Cha Wan.
The tracks of the train are a road that the people of Chawan yearn for, because it connects the unknown and advanced material civilization world.
15-year-old Cha Haisheng wants to take a train to Peking University to study, which has become the big news of Cha Wan.
Everyone projected a kind of gaze that resembled "the hope of the whole village".
However, 10 years later, it was the ashes of the 25-year-old poet Haizi who returned to Chawan along the tracks to take root.
▲ Haizi (1964-1989). Image source: Network
To Peking University
On the train to Beijing, Haizi was excited.
Dressed in a Zhongshan suit sewn by his father, he carried a flower quilt made by his mother, and as the train whistle sounded, he waved to his father who came to bid farewell to him to say goodbye. In his excitement, he didn't even hear his father's advice: "Write a letter when you get to Beijing." ”
At this moment, the 15-year-old teenager is looking at the gradually unfamiliar scenery outside the window, full of expectations for the future.
Naturally, his expectations did not fail.
"Peking University is a well-known university, and I have a great time living and studying here." (Haizi Family Letter)
▲Haizi Beijing photo. Image source: Network
Haizi studied law at Peking University.
Regarding this choice, it has nothing to do with him personally.
Before being admitted to Peking University, Haizi was actually just a child with good academic performance. He studied step by step, achieved excellent results, and accepted arrangements from all sides:
At first, I went to the science class, but because the school took into account the coordination of liberal arts and sciences and the results of the college entrance examination, it changed Haizi to the liberal arts class.
In this regard, he only grieves at his father's misunderstanding of "is it because you are not studying well that you are transferred", and does not resist in the slightest.
After becoming a liberal arts champion in Anqing, he originally followed the advice of others to apply for the Fudan Journalism Department, but later followed the advice of the other party to apply for the Law Department of Peking University.
Regardless of the choice, Haizi had no objection. Because he did not have a clear direction of interest in his heart, he was vague about everything in the future.
▲Peking University Law Department 79 grade 2 class group photo, the front row of the second left is Haizi. Image source: Network
Before leaving Chawan Village, Haizi had always been such a "well-behaved" person.
But after arriving at Peking University, everything was different.
In the early 1980s, China, which was in a period of transition, was a society where poetry flourished. The poet Nishikawa later recalled that you were a fool when you didn't write poetry, and you wrote all poetry.
The rich "obscure poems" spewed out, and the poems of Kitajima, Shu Ting, Gu Cheng and others changed the traditional poetry style of simply depicting reality in the past, and instead pushed poetry to the direction of exploring life. This concern for "man", built on a humanitarian basis, is consistent with the desire of the human heart. So everyone wrote poetry, especially young people.
Peking University in the early 1980s, according to the memories of Haizi's friend Chen Zhiyun, was simply the Peking University of poetry.
It was in this atmosphere that Haizi came into contact with poetry.
That was his junior year, in 1982.
Haizi first watched the poems written by his roommate Liu Guangan read aloud by his classmates, and was criticized, attacked and appreciated by his classmates, very envious, thinking that his writing was not bad, so he secretly imitated others in his notebook and wrote his own poems.
Until one day, Liu Guangan saw Haizi's poems and found that the poems written by Haizi were better than his own, so he recommended Haizi to the most famous literary society in Peking University, the May Fourth Literary Society.
Although Haizi did not join in the end, she met many important friends through the Literary Society, and in the continuous exchanges, she went deeper and deeper into the path of poetry.
▲Haizi took a photo in front of the Peking University Library. Image source: Network
Haizi and poetry are just the right collisions, meeting each other in the best years.
Some people think that this is an unfortunate encounter, but for Haizi herself, it is not necessarily.
Over the past three years of her studies, Haizi has always focused on reading. One is that his thin stature has allowed him to reduce his participation in sports activities; the other is that his poor financial conditions have prevented him from having too many recreational activities. Not to mention that the era was so simple and the learning atmosphere was strong.
When I met Luo Yihe, Luo Yihe was amazed at the wide range of books that Haizi dabbled in.
Because of his study of law, Haizi also entered the philosophical world of Hegel and others early. Nishikawa once recalled that when he first met Haizi, it was Haizi's mention of Hegel in the conversation that caused him to have a blind admiration.
▲ In 1989, Nishikawa, Luo Yihe and others took a group photo. Image source: Network
Haizi's reading accumulation is very deep and wide, which is probably one of the reasons for the slow awakening of poetry in his body.
Unconsciously, about to graduate, Haizi decided to leave some written commemorative works. Thus, with the help of several classmates, Haizi's first mimeographed poetry collection "Little Station" was born. The booklet was not much in number, and was only distributed to some of Haizi's poets, but the students rushed to read it and were greatly shocked.
To this end, Luo Yihe specially held a seminar for Haizi in the May Fourth Literary Society, so that more people knew Haizi.
I was very young
No need to say goodbye to anyone
A bit sentimental
I allowed myself to sit quietly for a moment
Then I set off
Carry a yellow satchel on your back
Contains a thin collection of poems
The title of the book is a secluded little station name
——Haizi "Little Station - Graduation Song"
In the matter of graduation, it was finally Haizi who made her own choice.
In the fall of 1982, Haizi interned at the Shijiazhuang Intermediate People's Court, and toward the end of his life, he wrote to his parents to ask for his opinions on his graduation assignment, a total of three choices: the Anhui Provincial Department of Justice, the Nanjing Intermediate People's Court, and the China University of Political Science and Law.
His parents' opinion was to let him go to the Anhui Provincial Department of Justice because it was close to home. Later, we all know that Haizi went to the editorial department of the school journal of China University of Political Science and Law.
At that time, his explanation was that "at the beginning, it was more troublesome to ask for local work, and it was more troublesome to change big cities later, but it was relatively easy to transfer from the capital Beijing to local cities." His parents thought it was right and followed his advice.
But after getting drunk at the New Year's Day in 1989, Haizi confided that perhaps the choice at that time was related to a divorce case during the internship: the husband cheated, the wife did not agree to the divorce, according to the previous judgment, he could not agree to the divorce, but because of the man's strong background, the court finally decided to leave. This made Haizi feel dissatisfied and confused, and he seemed unable to balance the contradiction between years of theoretical study and social reality.
It is also said that he was reluctant to stay away from Beijing's poetry circle.
Anyway, in the end, he came to Changping, the new campus of China University of Political Science and Law.
To Changping
On September 12, 1983, the fourth edition of the "China University of Political Science and Law News" published "Message to New Students" written by Haizi, which said:
"Young friends, to achieve their ideals, we must base ourselves on reality, recognize our mission, and find the fulcrum of struggle."
At this time, Haizi is also a young man who wants to work well.
After receiving her first salary, Haizi first remitted it to her family, attaching two short sentences: Mom and Dad, hello. Salary has been paid, and 60 yuan is sent to you. I hope to take care of my body and wish the whole family good health.
This 60 yuan made Chawan Village unstable again. According to his younger brother, Zha Shuming, this incident became a sample of the simple villagers educating their children at that time: "The eldest son of the tailor of the Zha tailor worked at a university in Beijing, ate public grain, and sent money to his parents." ”
The family feels very happy, and for Haizi, it seems that she has finally achieved the "fighting spirit" that she has always longed for.
But that's just the excitement for Chawan Village.
In fact, Haizi's heart has slowly fallen into poetry and love.
▲ Haizi. Image source: Network
In September 1984, Haizi was transferred to the Philosophy Department of the Department of Political Science, where she usually gave students courses on aesthetics.
For this change, Haizi is not necessarily very excited, because this is not what he is good at:
Why should a single-winged bird fly?
Why am I
Drink your own shadow
Pull your hair as wings
leave
I don't know if it's dark
It's harder to walk through your own palm than through someone else's wall
Single-winged bird
Why fly
—Haizi, "The One-Winged Bird," September 1984
Haizi has been writing poetry since she worked and will also participate in some poetry activities.
In the winter of 1984, at a poetry reading at the school's Stardust Poetry Club, Haizi read her poem "History" at the request of her students.
BC we are too small
After the Common Era we were too old again
No one has ever seen it
That time was a really beautiful smile
But I still raised my hand and knocked on the door
Bring hieroglyphs
Sprinkle on the ground
- Haizi "History"
After reading aloud, a female classmate next to the seat took the initiative to chat with him.
Later, they fell in love.
This is Haizi's first love, a girl from Inner Mongolia whose parents are high-level intellectuals. The girl is interested in poetry and falls in love with Haiko.
I was with you
Sat in the twilight
At dusk in a yellow wheat field
At dusk in the spring
What should I say to you
- Haizi "To You"
But poetic love was soon hit by reality.
Around the winter break, the girl's parents, knowing about the relationship, showed disdain for Haizi's peasant family origins, and they would not allow their daughter to be with a poor poet. Subsequently, the girl began to have a gap with Haizi, but Haizi still silently insisted.
In perseverance, he has been experiencing the torment of material pressure, and he has to look directly at his own poverty. This gaze may have been fierce, burning so that he had nowhere to escape.
Born on March 24, 1964, Haizi, as the eldest son of a family of six, has always had an indelible memory of hunger: whether it is when she is still swaddling, she relies on the brown sugar that her father begged to buy to "survive", or after elementary school, in addition to studying, she does farm work for the family and earns work in the production team. Chawan Village has always been poor.
Material deprivation not only permeated his childhood, but will continue throughout his life.
Two years later, in 1986, the relationship ended forever. This loss of love is a great blow to Haizi.
In his November diary, he mentioned suicide:
Two years of emotion and the shackles of boredom, in these two weeks (especially the previous one) appeared in the fully revealed face of the Grim Reaper... I wrote the sentence calmly: He is dead. I have ended his life in many ways. But I survived, I, a stronger man, survived, and for the first time I experienced the dignity, happiness and sacredness of the strong.
Although in the diary, he said that he would make great strides forward.
It was just that he strode toward the poetry.
Haizi once told others in the canteen: "I will write 10,000 lines of long poems and write all Chinese myths into it." ”
However, his exploration and dedication to long poems plunged him into another kind of spiritual fluctuation.
In May 1987, the Beijing Writers Association held the Xishan Conference, at which someone listed Haizi's two crimes of "engaging in new romanticism" and "writing long poems", which made Haizi feel sad.
"I always had to write long poems. Out of some great element calling to me. (Haizi's "Defense")
Someone said in his article that Haizi, "Now is my friend, and will be my enemy in the future." This made Haizi so sad that she ran to Luo Yihe and cried. The poet Wofu said: "Haizi's identity as a poet has been questioned everywhere, resulting in his poetry not only being snubbed, but even being devalued in Beijing's poetry circle, which has repeatedly hit his habitual thinking hard." ”
Loneliness is a fishing basket
It is the spring water in the fish basket
Place in spring water
……
Pulled to the shore is still a fish basket
Loneliness is indescribable
—Haizi, "Loneliness in Changping", 1986
In Changping, he is lonely day by day.
This loneliness is also a little more vividly described.
One day, Haizi walked into a restaurant in Changping and said to the boss, "I read my poems to everyone, can you give me wine?" ”
The restaurant owner said, "I can give you a drink, but don't you recite it here." ”
To the far side
It was always lonely in Changping. He had to figure out how to continue to plunge into the arms of poetry.
In 1985, his friend Nishikawa completed a long journey for half a year, crossing the desert and crossing the grasslands, and wrote the famous work "Looking Up at the Stars in Hargai".
When Haizi saw it, he was very envious, so he decided to take the train to the west as well to see the "entity". This time it didn't go far, but it made him begin to understand the importance of the long journey to his poetry writing.
Crucial to Haizi was the two later times he entered Tibet, especially Tibet.
▲Haizi travels. Image source: Network
In the summer of 1986, Haizi took a train from Beijing to Xining, Qinghai, and then walked along the Xining-Qinghai Lake-Golmud-Lhasa route, and on the way back, he went around Qilian Mountain, Jiayuguan, Hohhot, etc.
This time on this long trip, Haizi described it like this:
"My dream bears the fruit of happiness in the plateau at an altitude of 4,000 meters, that is my dream, that is the fruit of my own."
This trip to the west has broadened Haizi's vision and mind. In December, he wrote many poems about the west - "Big Dipper Seven Stars", "Golden Grassland", "September" and so on.
These traveling poems, full of Haizi's unique life experience, add a lot of bright colors to contemporary Chinese poetry.
The steppe where the gods died was a field of wildflowers
The wind is farther away than the far side
My piano whimpered and there were no tears
I return this far away to the steppe
One is called horse head and the other is called horsetail
In the distance, only in death there is a condensation of wildflowers
The bright moon is like a mirror hanging high on the grassland to reflect the millennium years
Riding a horse alone across the prairie
- Haizi,"September"
In July 1988, Haizi went to Tibet for the second time.
But this time, his state was very different from two years ago.
Tang Xiaodu, who met Haizi at the Tibetan Cultural Palace compound at the time, recalled that Haizi's gaze was "not the kind of firm, peaceful, but clear and confused gaze, and he wouldn't focus on you when he looked at you, as if he were bypassing you and seeing behind your back." He has been immersed in his own state.".
During this journey, Haizi wrote an extremely famous poem:
Sister, tonight I'm in Delingha, and the night is shrouded
Sister, I only have the Gobi tonight
Sister, tonight I don't care about humans, I only want you
—Haizi,"Diary", July 1988
The sister in it should be the female poet H who is famous for his poem "My Sun" that he is going to lhasa to see, and he is excited and fascinated by the fact that someone has found the image of "sun" at the same time.
But after meeting, H rejected Haizi. Haizi was once again frustrated, which had some effect on his mood.
Later, he saw the heavenly burial in Tibet and picked up some Buddha statues and brought them back to Beijing.
After returning from Tibet, Haizi no longer talked about poetry to the students in class, but talked about the content of Buddhism and what he saw in Tibet, such as a lama who cut his abdomen with a sharp blade in public, sorted out his intestines and stomach, and then sewed it back, and not a drop of blood flowed. He also talked about his "Little Zhou Tian" practice of qigong, which he had also shown to Nishikawa two years ago.
The students thought that the teacher was very mysterious, but the class was not interesting, just holding a book or lecture notes to read a paragraph and let everyone remember a paragraph.
His excitement about his second trip to Tibet was reflected not only in class, but also in friends. He told Chang Yuan with great vigor that he had "stolen" a buddha statue from Tibet for practicing function; he and Sun Libo held a large picture album of Tibetan customs and talked about it while turning it over. But none of my friends doubted this unusual exuberance.
▲ Haizi and Sun Libo. Image source: Network
In fact, something has happened in the past two years.
After her first love left, Haizi developed feelings with several women in succession, but all of them ended without a problem. What kind of feelings does Haizi need? Presumably, he didn't understand it either.
In addition, his body also had obvious problems, hallucinations, auditory hallucinations. Some people attribute it to Haizi's practice of "qigong", which was one of the booms in human science research (research on specific functions) in the 1980s.
He became increasingly dependent on alcohol because of his poetic and emotional unsatisfactory feelings, and tried to fight with others in taverns.
Haizi's mental state was indeed getting more and more inappropriate.
From this moment on, his life seemed to have pressed the accelerator button and was rapidly dying out.
The poet's brain is overused.
Back to Chak Bay
In the Spring Festival of 1989, Haizi returned to Chawan Village for the Chinese New Year.
He said to his father that his poetry collection was going to be published, there might be a large amount of money, and his father's reply was to work with peace of mind and not think about making a windfall.
Later, he proposed to his father that he wanted to resign and go to Hainan with a few friends to run a newspaper. The father was very angry when he heard this, and sternly refuted him.
Haizi's enthusiasm for her career was suddenly extinguished, and her mood was very low, first she cried bitterly with her mother, and then shut herself in her room and wrote poems for more than twenty days.
By this time, Haizi was already coughing and coughing up blood.
This winter break was not enjoyable.
After returning to Changping, it was early March 1989, and Haizi wrote letters to many friends. Among them, his friend Shen Tianhong received a letter with only six words:
"I'm still alive with you."
It's a bit confusing.
Later, on March 16, Haizi met her first girlfriend again, and she told him that she had married in Shenzhen and was going to the United States.
Hearing this news, Haizi suddenly fell into a coma after returning home in the evening. After that, his auditory hallucinations and hallucinations became more serious.
On March 24, at night, colleagues were woken up by Haizi's shouting "I have no point in living", and everyone ran to care, but he only said one sentence:
"Sorry to bother you, I just had a nightmare."
On March 25, in the early morning, Haizi went out with the Bible, Walden, the Raft and Conrad's Selected Novels, dressed neatly, and set off from Academy Road to Shanhaiguan.
The people who saw him on the road joked that Haizi was going on a blind date?
No one saw him again that day.
A day later, on March 26, Luo Yihe and Liu Guang'an received notice and went to Shanhaiguan to meet Haizi for the last time.
Haizi, 25, quietly committed suicide on the tracks of Shanhaiguan.
A suicide note was said to have been found on his body that read: "My suicide has nothing to do with anyone." ”
▲One of Haizi's suicide notes. Source: Excerpt from "Haizi Commentary"
In this regard, the university of political science and law's handling opinion is: Zha Haisheng suffered from schizophrenia and died by suicide. According to the relevant regulations, the funeral fee of 500 yuan is subsidized, the salary of 10 months is re-paid, and the matter is handled at one time.
With the help of Nishikawa and Luo Yihe, Haizi's parents took care of the aftermath and then returned to Chawan Village with Haizi's ashes.
However, according to custom, "early returnees" cannot be buried immediately, but can only wait a few years in a small temporary fortification before they can be buried.
In this regard, the poetry critic Liao Yuan said that this seems to be a kind of concern for the "early returneer"—there must be a time limit to familiarize themselves with each other, and finally to embrace each other and obtain eternal peace.
At the age of 15, the railroad tracks brought Haizi from the countryside to the city, and since then, the poetry in the body has slowly awakened. Later, he made successive long journeys through the railroad tracks. These long journeys became his wanderings:
In the night
I have suffered three times: wandering, love, and survival
I have three kinds of happiness: poetry, throne, and sun
- "Night", 1988
And in the end, he passed through the railroad tracks and returned to nothingness, to the land of his hometown. Although his poems have been circulated to endless distances.
After his death, his poems remain alive.
Live in this precious human world
The sun is strong
The water waves are gentle
Layers of white clouds covered it
I stepped on the grass
I felt like a completely clean lump of black earth
- Haizi, "Living in the Precious Human World"
End
When writing this article, I heard a song "Far Away" and felt that the temperament of this song was somewhat similar to that of Haizi.
Much later I pointed to the same night sky
I said I wanted to go on a long trip
You smile and still don't speak and look at me
Like the sound of cicadas chirping on a summer night
Thankfully, I'm not afraid
I gave the fear to the cloud
Let it take you to the endless forest
I walked towards the distant mysterious starry sky
Fortunately, I am nothing
I'm just a tiny amount of smoke
Floating around you
- Song "Far Away"
In the song, it seems to see Haizi walking away step by step.
Hai Zi's long journey, probably riding the wind, ran to the endless darkness he wanted to explore.
There is infinite freedom, endless possibilities, endless answers.
The only one who could embrace the darkness so warmly was probably Haizi, and it could only be him.
In November 1987, in the third diary of Haizi's life, he wrote:
But the darkness is always eternal, always filling my turbulent heart. It is more beautiful than the days themselves, the poetry of the days. The man who created the sun had to live forever with darkness as brothers, for himself.
Previously, he had been writing the Seven Books of the Sun.
The pursuit of the "sun" may be a release of Haizi's own life, and later intoxicated with the "night", probably because he wants to explore all the difficult and unknown areas.
Night rises from the earth
Obscuring the bright sky
Desolate land after the harvest
The night rises from within you
You come from afar, I go far away
The long way passes through here
The sky is nothing
Why comfort me
Flocks of black raindrop-like birds
Fly from dusk into night
The night is nothing
Walking on the road
Sing loudly
Strong winds blow over the hills
Above is the boundless sky
——Haizi, "Poetry of the Night: Dedicated to the Daughter of the Night", February 1989
We don't have the powerful perception of Haizi, nor do we have the sensitivity of him, and we don't need to ride the wind.
We just need to ride on his exposition and feel in our minds what beckons us in the distance.
Like Haizi's family, they only began to read poetry after Haizi's death and began to understand Haizi's spiritual world.
Haizi's mother, Cao Caiju, recited the most, and it was a poem "Snow" in the group poem "To Mother":
Mom sat on a low stool in my hometown and thought about me again
The stool seemed to be my snowy roof
She recited it word for word every time, tears as she read. It was this recitation that made her feel that Haizi was not dead, but had always lived in her heart.
▲Haizi's mother. Image source: Network
And thousands of readers in the world, also in the year after year, in the continuous recitation, feel that Haizi is still alive, listening to him talk about "facing the sea, spring and warm flowers."
We often forget his death day, but we always think of his poetry. As he prophesied:
In the spring, all ten sea sons were resurrected.
bibliography:
Haizi, ed. Nishikawa: The Complete Poems of Haizi, Writers Publishing House, 2009
Liao Yuan: Haizi Commentary, Writers Press, 2016
Bian Jiansong: The Biography of Haizi: Illusion and Truth, Henan Literature and Art Publishing House, 2018
Zha Shuming: "Remembering My Brother Haizi", Jianghuai Literature and History, No. 4, 2019
Zhang Hou: "There are lights without candles - interview with the poet Woofu"
Documentary: Haizi: Blood Ladder