Son of loess
Wang Anyi
25 years ago, when the old version of the "Ordinary World" TV series was popular all over the country, the writer Wang Anyi traveled to northern Shaanxi with the help of Lu Yao's introduction letter. After Lu Yao's death, Wang Anyi wrote this article, recalling Lu Yao's tears, Lu Yao's "life", Lu Yao's anger... This article was included in the book "Lu Yao Fifteen Years Festival" in 2007.
Going to northern Shaanxi was an unforgettable experience for me. I held a bundle of "road strips" that Lu Yao had given me, and then I got on the wind and dusty shuttle and went on the road. It was in the early spring of 1990, and Shaanxi Television was broadcasting the TV series "Ordinary World", based on Lu Yao's novel. Everywhere we go, we can hear people talking about The Ordinary World. Every day after dinner, after broadcasting the news, the theme song sung by Mao Amin sounded, at this time, whether it was the secretary of the county party committee, the university teacher, or the workers and peasants, they all put down their things and sat down in front of the TV. If we were talking to someone at the same time, the person would say, "Wait, I'm going to see The Ordinary World." The route to northern Shaanxi was planned for us by Lu Yao, and he said that you should first take a shuttle bus to Huangling and find the secretary of the county party committee, and then he would send you to Yan'an, and then to Yan'an University to find the president, and he would arrange for you to go to Ansai, Suide, Mizhi, and then go north to Yulin. He wrote letter after letter and asked me to put it away, meaning that with these letters, I didn't have to worry. Later events proved to be true. Wherever we went, as long as we showed Lu Yao's letter, we were greeted warmly without exception. Except for the journey from Xi'an to Huangling, we have never taken a shuttle bus again, and all the friends of Lu Yao use the car to send one stop at a time, like a relay race. They said, we don't care who you are, we only know that you are Lu Yao's friend, and if you write a letter in the future, just write Lu Yao's friend. Most of them are grassroots cadres, who have nothing to do with literature, and for them, there is only one writer in the world, that is, Lu Yao. They said in that proud and loving tone: Our way is far away.
I went to northern Shaanxi with my good friend Lin Hua, a reporter for a magazine in Shanghai. Like those of us who grew up in the city, we live in a recreated world, we are already very separated from nature, and books are our good companions. We are particularly good at understanding life and dealing with life theoretically, and we see life as a reconstructed nature like a book. This actually makes us lose a lot, and this loss is mainly due to natural emotions. We always interact with nature through the medium, and the city is full of this kind of medium, and the city itself is a big medium. Our emotions gradually become a form that comes from our rational understanding, not from feelings. Our minds are not bad, but our hearts are gradually numb. When we heard about the poverty and isolation of northern Shaanxi, we put forward such a scientific and bold suggestion to Lu Yao: Why not migrate people from the high slopes of the loess soil? These words actually stabbed Lu Yao's heart, he showed a brief moment of shyness, and then a gentle and tolerant smile appeared on his face, and he said: How can this be? We have a lot of affection for this land! In early spring, walking in the mountains, full of loess, suddenly the peak turned around, and a pink peach blossom stood on the cliff, at this time, tears flowed down.
Later, we witnessed the peach blossom on the cliff, which was always a lonely tree, with sparse branches, and the little pink was almost drowned by the surging loess color. The sky on the loess is exceptionally blue, and it seems to be specially designed to illuminate this loess, making this desolation even more shocking. I don't understand why such a delicate pink peach blossom can burst out in such a desolate and desolate land. It seems to have emptied all the pure virgin emotions of life, and with all its strength, it has opened the flower. Without Lu Yao's prompting, we would not have noticed it, it is only an understatement from the rich background of loess and blue sky, and it is a scenery that will always hurt the heart and lungs in Lu Yao's eyes.
The days when we went to Shaanxi were still the days when the "fortune-telling" boom arose in the Writers' Association. There is always a decadent atmosphere under this kind of lively scene, and this is a deeply dazed year. Literature in the new period has walked the initial vigorous road, and has come to the confusing halfway point where there is no way to go before and no way to come. Our childhood in literature motivated by sincere and simple emotions has passed, and we have a feeling of emotional exhaustion and exhaustion. This is another period of eight winds, and various trends and ideas in world literature and art are coming, interfering with our judgment and adding an air of doubt. The "fortune telling" boom of the Shaanxi Writers Association is actually a spiritual scene of the entire literature of this period. In a place with a long history and ancient civilization, such as Shaanxi, there are various ways of fortune-telling, and even the profound metaphysics of the "I Ching" is generally mastered by ordinary people, which makes us dazzled. We had no choice but to show two moves to resist them for a while. Our way of fortune telling has the face of a westerner. Supposedly from Freud, it was actually a psychological test. We ask the other party to be measured to quickly report an animal, and then report the adjectives that the animal remembers, and report one animal, and then report another animal, and report three until it is reported. We say that the adjective of the first animal is your depiction of yourself; the second animal is the depiction of you by others; the third is actually yourself. We can see that Lu Yao accepted this test out of the intention of not disappointing us and with the intention of being hilarious. With a gentle and tolerant smile on his face, like a good obedient student, he answered our questions one by one, and then patiently waited for us to decipher them. When we said that the adjective of the third animal actually meant actually ourselves, Lu Couldn't help but "Oh", the smile on his face disappeared, and his eyes became serious. I remember that the third animal that Lu Yao thought of was a cow, and he used words like heavy and hard work to describe the cow. There is also a question in this game that involves attitudes towards death, and I have forgotten Lu Yao's answer. At this time, none of us ever imagined that this problem would really come to us.
One day, we were the editor-in-chief of Yanhe at the time, Bai Painter, doing another kind of fortune-telling thing. Pushing the door in a man, slender and long, with his hands behind his back and a slight hunch on his back, he said: Yo, here comes the guest? Just come to us. He is Zou Zhi'an, and he is the "Divine Calculation" among the many "divine calculations" in the Writers' Association. When Bai saw him coming, he humbly gave up his place and asked him to explain our lives. Our destiny is to copy it from a book like a word and a codebreaker. Zou Zhi'an is a natural authority, depicting our future word by word. He said to me, "Your forehead is good, and your good fortune is all on this forehead." He also analyzed the position of this forehead horn in detail, which means that if you lose every point, you will be thousands of miles away. Zou Zhi'an gave me the impression of a rural confidant, he was the kind of wisdom that was implicit, everything in his heart was like a mirror, but his face was clumsy. The next morning, Zou Zhi'an came to the guest house and knocked on my door, saying that he would invite us to eat lamb steamed buns. Sitting in the snack bar, we chatted and asked him, "How old are you?" "We Shanghainese ask people how old they are, regardless of whether the other party is old or young, they ask "how old", which seems to be very loose and unruly. Listening to our question, Zou Zhian did not correct it, and said very earnestly: "I am three years old." Then, once again, we uttered a startling remark, and we said, "You're fifty, aren't you?" He smiled modestly and said, "Soon." "Later, we learned that he was actually a high school student in the sixth and sixth grades, and he was forty-three years old. He said that when he went to Shanghai to connect, he got sick and was taken to the hospital as soon as he got off the train, and he still remembers the Shanghainese words when the nurse took his temperature, imitating it beautifully: thirty-nine degrees three! Another great impression of Shanghai is bread. When he was handing out bread in tandem, he tied the cuff of his pants and filled it with a whole pair of pants. He said this in a mocking tone, and there was a sad place in this face, even if it was frivolous, we couldn't laugh. His old age also weighed us down, but we didn't expect death to come. After eating the lamb steamed buns, he and I slowly walked back to the courtyard of the Writers' Association. He carried his hands behind his back, like an old farmer. Then the sun rose, shining into the courtyard, shining on his eyelids, and he narrowed his eyes slightly. This scene has been in front of my eyes, and there is a silent sadness rising. He walked in the sunlight grid separated by the courtyard wall, as if he were a little dazed. He said goodbye to me and stood where he was for a moment before walking toward the building where he lived. Later, when the news of his death came, I always remembered the scene of him standing in the sun in the courtyard, which gave me the impression of doing my best. Yes, go the extra mile.
The night we were leaving, Lu Yao became angry. It was in the canteen of the Western Film Studio, and Mo Shen invited guests, which also counted as the meaning of our resignation. At the dinner table, I don't know how to say that some predecessors have experienced a lifetime of ups and downs, but at the end of the day, they still can't put down the two things of fame and profit, and they deeply regret it. Speaking of this, a friend at the table pointed to Lu Yao, Mo Shen, and the so-called young writers who said, "Don't say these words first, then you will become like this, this is the law of nature, no one can get by." Mo Shen and I listened to this, and although we had objections, we could still maintain a calm attitude, but unexpectedly, Lu Yao stood up steeply and said: No, what you said is not right, people are different! But the friend persevered, and said in a loud voice: That's it! Lu Yao once again said to him: People are not the same. But he didn't listen to Lu Yao, So Lu Yao went to pull on his sleeve, and he had to listen, and he said: People are different, I didn't wear pants when I was a child, how is this the same? The friend just didn't listen to Lu Yao, but just said: Walk and see! This time Haruka was really angry, he hated not being able to prove himself immediately, but the language seemed so weak. This was the only time I had heard Lu Yao speak loudly, and what I couldn't understand was why this joke-like hypothesis would hurt Lu Yao's heart, and he would be so excited, while his seemingly unsatisfactory defense of "I didn't wear pants when I was a child" made me feel sad all the time. In later days, I couldn't help but think that Lu Yao couldn't prove this to people. Lu Yao could not calmly walk through life and prove this to people. He was too old to grow old, so he left.
It is said that Lu Yao and Zou Zhi'an both shed tears during their serious illnesses, expressing their unwillingness, which really made people break their intestines. They all died in the forty days of confusion, far from reaching the age of knowing the destiny of heaven. Not being confused is actually the most deplorable, everything is as clear as water, nothing can deceive them. It is the time when their wisdom is the clearest, when their vitality is the most rational, and they are on the way to the deepest philosophy. And they died in the middle of the way, which has a sense of robbery, a sense of raw and raw.
I will never forget how Lu Yao's heart was stirred when we walked in the loess ravine, like a crack in the ground, the peach blossoms on the cliff reflected in the distant sky. I think he never actually wrote in the grid of the manuscript paper, but on the loess soil, with his painstaking efforts. I think it would be too frivolous to use the word literature to name his labor, which is actually a trek as arduous as "life". It is said that on his deathbed, Zou Zhi'an once said that literature is already a monster for me. I think he was absolutely right and sad to say that this sentence actually speaks of the false truth of literature. Life is so heavy and pressing, what is the black and white word? Lu Yao and Zou Zhi'an died one after another, staining literature with a layer of mourning. Life is like a battle of resistance, first the ancestors fell, then the father fell, and now the brothers also began to fall. We are losing more and more cover, facing the cruel truth of nature, some people have exhausted their efforts, what reason do we have to play? In fact, this world was originally made of barren loess, and the green space was only a superficial decoration. There are more and more decorations in this world, and the truth is deeply covered up. In fact, when you break through the green space, the bottom is loess; the wind blows up the loess, the bottom is still loess, the road is remote, we are all children of loess.
One point number Yin Yanzhong