Works in this issue
Party of Tomorrow
Zhou Jianning
Author of this issue
Writer, translator of English literature. He has published novels such as "In the Jungle", "Deserted City", and the short story collection "Basic Beauty".
Special Guest: Huang Dehai
Associate Editor of Sinan Literary Anthology
What brings together the characters in Party of Tomorrow is a love of pop music. This group of people did not form a solid and targeted group, but only created a field related to love. In this field, young people are constantly gathering, discussing, exuberant, and lost, interspersed with expected or unexpected combinations. They are full of youthful sexual light, full of curiosity about music and the world, energetically thrown themselves into it, going all out, doing their best, and participating in the development and promotion of popular music in their own ways. At the same time, they are ignorant of their future and do not demand immediate worldly returns from the world.
Perhaps because there is no clear purpose, the atmosphere of the whole novel is a little bit decadent, and the young people seem to rise and fall passively in the tide of life, Pepsi has no heart, but just lives a leisurely life. However, this is not comprehensive, because beyond the slight decadence, this group of young people clearly has some invisible positivity, as if the inner eyes are open and they see the unique vitality of the depths of the world, and any external bondage is not enough to bind them to the other side.
Any place where "Party of Tomorrow" is written, including the love, decadence and positivity in it, may be regarded as a clean and bright place, enough to settle the dazed and eager youth of a group of people, who are longing and lost, perked up and depressed, whispered here, and shouted here. Thus, the slight sense of decadence in the novel does not turn into a cloudy negativity, but rather because it washes away the anxious atmosphere usually contained in the positivity, it reveals a certain inner clarity that is worth cherishing. So, although the tomorrow's party in memory has long ended, there is no going back and no part in the future life.
Gao Xiang
Ph.D., Chinese Min University
"Tomorrow's Party" is Zhou Jianning's review of the radio era based on the podcast era. Benjamin, who worked as a broadcaster in the 1920s and 1930s, viewed the medium as a means of mass education and guided it into "judgment training." Based on the nature of technology and the form of broadcast medium, Benjamin has hinted at certain principles of the era of broadcasting, and even podcasting. For example, "it calls for a comprehensive transformation of materials and rearrangements from a popular standpoint." At the same time, he discovered the dynamic masses, "whose real interest is always dynamic, which transforms the essence of knowledge and has an impact on the pursuit of knowledge itself."
Zhou Jianning's intention is obviously not here, but Benjamin's discussion of the broadcast medium constitutes a background, or reference, that cannot be ignored in "Tomorrow's Party". In a way, "real interests" constitute new potential forces and impulses. The influenced masses, while also shaping the culture they understand and identify with, invest great enthusiasm, patience, concentration, and "self" in the cold medium, which makes the Benjamin-style "teaching" evolve into a "sharing" full of individual experience, knowledge, and emotions. In this novel, Zhou Jianning extends from the radio station with a strong emotional summoning ability, and builds a spiritual "community" formed by youth groups such as windbreaks, command headquarters, and music parties, and their once heterogeneous and marginal identities have long been transformed, and new possibilities and trends are constantly being nurtured. In the novel, Zhou Jianning also tries to redefine the failure and success of youth, in her view, the end and the ebb and flow no longer mean loss. And the so-called success is no longer a harvest in the secular sense, it is so simple and pure - "the desire to concentrate on it finally gets a response from the universe."
Zhang Hui
The "Party of Tomorrow" is not a gathering toward the future, but a fond look back at the romantic lyrical subject that is about to end as a relic of the history of the last century. As one of the themes of the novel, rock and roll culture swept the world with the "anti-war" wave in the 60s, and in the context of the reforms of the 80s, it was introduced to the Chinese mainland in the form of "enemy" radio, transcription tapes, and mouth discs, and triggered a wave among young people. As a musical form that originated in the black "Blues", the pain and melancholy contained in this sound make it easier to be selected as a hidden art that carries the confusion and youth turmoil of the turn of the century. It is called "hidden" because in the Chinese mainland of the 80s and 90s, this musical culture supported a huge space that could not be said or needed to be said, a spiritual utopia. With the help of the outdated "devices" mentioned in the novel- radio stations, abandoned warehouses, bomb shelters left over from the war era, and abandoned school and peasant bases, it produces a sense of fringe isolation from history and the times: the subject abandons the search for individual identity and social position from the real world, and transforms the external cold reality into an internal and spiritual search, so as to avoid the competition mechanism and elimination law between people, and restore a kind of sympathetic and pure "comrade love" within the group, so as to regain itself and the "world" The imaginary connection... In a way, this can be seen as the reason why rock and roll is more easily chosen by the youth group. But the danger of such a discussion is to vacate the connotations of the era that the rock and roll boom carried in the 80s and 90s, and the historical content it is meant to respond to. In this sense, the "rock 'n' roll" in "Tomorrow's Party" is closer to an empty signifier, a vessel that carries the cruel story of youth. It lacks a specific historical counterpart, so it can also be replaced by poetry, film, sex, violence, drugs... Become a "kaleidoscope" in the Benjamin sense.
Li Yuxin
Master of Chinese University
In every way, this novel is very similar to 2020's Landscape of Waves. It is still the turn of the century, still young people in a state of chaos, still broken after the economic and social situation, still "easy and free" after the break. In fact, a similar way of writing began in 2015, and in several short stories included in the novel collection Basic Beauty, we can find some familiar structural elements: the juxtaposition of the two protagonists, a shining and untouchable "d'Artagnan of the 20th century", the sincere and fiery collective friendship... Whether it is the character shaping, language expression, plot setting, or the author's own creative state, it seems to be the continuous practice of the "basic beauty" of "walking around casually, playing and roaming". This is a record and tribute to the fading chaotic years, the writing and excavation of a state of youth that has not yet been defined and has unlimited possibilities, and a reversal of our era of cheap success and social Darwinism—the mechanism of production that eliminates strong desires, frees itself from endless hierarchical progression, and occasional success is worth rejoicing in, and inevitable failure is not necessarily unacceptable.
But the more I write, the more I see, and the more aesthetic fatigue.
Jin Tingyue
Master of Capital Normal University
"Party of Tomorrow" continues the experience of the spiritual life of the literary and artistic youth at the beginning of the century. At a time when the "Party of Tomorrow" becomes the yellow flower of tomorrow, the youth life, which is stained and expanded by personal memories, acquires a colorful and changing color and some kind of uncertain boundary under the reflection of "capital history". Similar to "Basic Beauty" and "Landscape of Waves", an era of chaos and full of possibilities can amplify and resonate with the "self-sufficiency and wandering" and "decadence and brilliance" of adolescence; and the memory and social participation of youth preserve specimens of fragments of the spirit of the times.
Based on this similarity, Ming helps readers understand the content of the previous works, especially those "disappointment previews" that are suddenly inserted in flashbacks. Because some of the previous "disappointments" and "failures" have been explained in some abstract and general, in "Ming", "I" and Xiao Xiao's withdrawal from school, the enthusiastic radio program, the "Wheat Field Watchman" Zhang Zhou, the friendship of the nascent Internet world, the music boom in the bomb shelter - when these have passed away due to various changes, the lingering loss, confusion and exhaustion have become concrete and have a reason. However, while illuminating each other with the previous work and continuing the youthful state of mind, "Ming" also shows the lingering wandering of the imaginary space—it intercepts the world in the first few years of the 21st century, when the gaps spoken of by the author have become increasingly solid, and at that time, the outline has not yet been fully revealed. The atmosphere of the early century and the state of youth interaction preset by the previous text bring to the Ming the inertia of dealing with the direction of events and the relationship between the characters. The parabola of "excitement-disappointment" crosses the first half. Therefore, in this reserved time and space, the performance can still be held smoothly, and the young people of the mainland have just entered the outside world, and they have not touched the "borders of friendship and the areas that they are reluctant to explore" ("Basic Beauty") because of the difference in concepts.
Shao Shuai
Zhou Jianning was once a "new concept writer", and the youth narrative was easy for them at that time. However, twenty years later, the youth of Zhou Jianning's millennial youth, in the chaos and disorder, conflict and confusion, because of its clear and calm narrative and treatment, there are a few more dilutions of peace, and under careful consideration, the solid support of the background of the times can also be seen. Everything became mature and mellow, and a pot of dog blood, or chicken blood, was refined into a wine mixed with tea, and when tasted, it could taste the pungency of the nose, and above the taste, there was the accumulated bitterness and astringency.
Gathering and dispersing sometimes. From the emergence of the topic "Tomorrow's Party", it is in line with the occurrence of the dispersal, and the "tomorrow" is in the future time, which pushes the dispersal to a more ambiguous deadline. The article talks about the end more than once, the day before the party, we burn things in the campfire, "it seems to end some things, but we can't say what exactly"; Kyo's departure also "makes us shake everyone's original ideas, want to end or start something". We know that even if we behave like an apocalyptic carnival with no tomorrow, we still need to return to an orderly track to mourn the death of our youth. But, indeed, the time of the show is unknown, we only know tomorrow, the next tomorrow, and many parties, and the end of the party is just after the party of tomorrow. Several times we have made up our minds, hoping that the end will happen, ignoring that it is involuntary and must be accompanied by external forces. For example, After Jing was determined to face the winter in Moscow after the loss of love, the commercialization of radio was redesigned, I was forced to lose my job and face the difficulties of life, and Wang Lu finally had a formal job and was no longer living without a place to live. Bomb shelters symbolize the forgotten corners of the world, and the young people who hide in them and indulge in music cannot escape the fate of being chosen. Do young people really have the right to choose the world? Or is there only limited freedom in a glass house? In the end, Zhou Jianning leaves the reader with a poetic ending, perhaps a faint but not negligible flash, where there is comfort and hope.
Edit | Duan Jiarui
Image source network