One afternoon at the turn of summer and autumn, I sat in my car from Dublin to Limerick, holding a book with old wheat straw paper. The Irish wilderness has a bitter, fresh fragrance mixed with the fishy astringency wafting from the Atlantic Ocean, which penetrates into the car. With the irish breath, I revisited the famous book of the beloved writer Frank McCourt, "The Ashes of Angela."
Born in 1930, Frank McCourt grew up in the slums of Limerick and sailed to New York at the age of nineteen. He spent his life as a teacher in New York and was a very ordinary man. After his retirement, he wrote the story of his hard growth in Ireland, and achieved great success beyond his own imagination. "Angela's Ashes" not only won the Pulitzer Prize, but also ranked at the top of the best-seller list in English-speaking countries for two and a half years, and was later translated into many languages and sold well in various countries.
Frank_McCourt (1930 - 2009) (Zhu is also available in/out of photo)
I remember, in June 1997, I bought this book that everyone was talking about at the Dimox Bookstore in Adelaide, Australia, forgot to eat and sleep, and read it in one night. It reminds me of "The Season of Gaffe", one of my favorites in Wang Meng's works. McCourt and Wang Meng have different backgrounds and different languages, but they have quite similar writing styles, the words are witty and wise, the rhetoric is wild and uninhibited, and they like to write long sentences that are almost hysterical and stormy large paragraphs...
I've traveled to Europe a few times, and this time I finally included Ireland in my journey. When I set off, I deliberately put Angela's Ashes in my suitcase.
Downstairs "Ireland", upstairs "Italy"
Arriving in Lee City, I pulled my suitcase out of the station, walked for ten minutes, and successfully found the homestay I booked on AirBnB. One of the common townhouses in the British Isles has a strong sense of age. I arrived early, almost two hours early. I wanted to call the landlord and ask him to deliver the keys in advance, but in the end he refused to cause trouble, so he went into the park across the street and sat down on a bench. The name of the park is particularly affectionate to our Chinese, called "People's Park" - which is the common name of the domestic park.
Sitting there, I was dumbfounded, because it suddenly occurred to me that People's Park was not the place where the teenager McCourt had a spring dream. No matter how unfortunate fate is, no matter how many ups and downs life are, magical hormones will still cast magic in young bodies. In the spring breeze, the famous flowers bloom and the wildflowers bloom. The bitter child McCourt grew and developed in rags and inexorably entered puberty. One day, he happened to read an article about sex written by Lin Yutang in English in the library, and he suddenly realized the affairs of men and women. The female librarian found him peeking at the "obscene book" and angrily snatched it away, asking him to go to the church to confess his "sins" to the priest. Confused, he walked out of the library, came to People's Park, lay down on the grass and fell asleep, and had a "dirty" daydream...
When I read this paragraph and saw Lin Yutang's name, I was very surprised. In an era when Chinese was relegated to the "sick man of East Asia" and "Chinese and dogs were not allowed", a (perhaps more) European teenager actually obtained sexual enlightenment from the writings of Chinese scholars.
McCourt has been dead for many years, and his youth troubles have happened even more recently. The throbbing and sorrow in the heart of the ignorant teenager, if it had not been written down, was as if it had never been. Flowers blossom and thank you, the cycle repeats, life is a pawn, generations change, as many people walk through the world, there are as many cardamom years that drift with the wind.
Pink-painted undershirt shop on the streets of Limerick (Zhang Hailu/Photo)
The landlord, Benjamin, turned out to be a young man, twenty-five years old at best. He has a bear's back, a freckled face, and is a very happy young man. "Mr. Zhu, you also came here because you read The Ashes of Angela, right?" He asked me as soon as we met. The Irish speak English both nicely and affectionately, like the Jiaoliao dialect spoken by Dalian people, with a warm taste of sea oysters, and a bit like Tangshan dialect, with its own comedic color. "Yes." I answered truthfully.
"Limerick was not a city that attracted tourists, and it was McCourt who 'marked' her on the tourist map, but..."
"But a lot of Limerick people don't want to see him, Ben, what about you?"
"I like McCourt a lot. People who don't like him are out of jealousy. He was so successful that Limerick had few characters as successful as he had. ”
TypicalLy British style dwellings, known as "two up and two down". (Zhu Yi/Photo)
This is the most typical English style dwelling, known as "two up and two down" – two bedrooms upstairs and a living room and kitchen downstairs. The bathroom is post-added, in the remote house picked up from the back of the kitchen. I love such an old homestay, the melancholy bay windows, the cozy fireplace, the tired staircase, the solemn chandelier... "two up and two down", full of touchable history, and give me a feeling of being a local, which is a precious experience that the hotel standard room cannot provide.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the McCourts rented a house that was a dilapidated "two up and two downs." McCourt's Lee City is a city forgotten by the sun, almost forever in the midst of bitter wind and rain. Cold and damp, lack of food and clothing, all day long, exhausted... The living conditions of the poor facilitate the spread of tuberculosis. In the era before antibiotics came, contracting tuberculosis was equivalent to the death penalty. In the narrow streets and alleys, the sound of coughing phlegm and coughing blood rises and falls, and men, women and children of all ages continue to walk to the grave.
Sunny southern Europe, especially Italy, is a fascinating place for the hearts of the people of The City. The water in the alley often overflows the threshold and floods into the house, and there is no place to stay downstairs, but fortunately it can be transferred upstairs. At the time, the McCourt brothers called the damp, moldy downstairs "Ireland" and the dry and warm upstairs "Italy"—one of the topics that readers who loved Angela's Ashes talked about.
I stayed in Lee for five days and hardly saw the sun. The first day was fine, just thin overcast, and it kept raining the next few days. God seems to confirm McCourt's description of the bad weather in Lee, but I still stubbornly believe that there must be good days in Lee. Even if the weather in Lee Is as bad as ever, today's Lee City is not the Lee City of eighty years ago, and the crumbling and dangerous houses, ragged children, and vicious and ruthless tuberculosis have disappeared.
Limerick, Ireland's third largest city, is located at the mouth of the Shannon River. (Zhang Hailu/Photo)
On the occasion of the relocation, Yang a handful of ashes
The rain washed the city endlessly, and the waves of the Shannon River rolled and rushed west to the Atlantic Covenant. The banks of the river are gray, the seagulls are low-spinning, and there are few pedestrians. The heavens are gray, the earth is gray, and the ashes of heaven and the ashes of the earth are stitched together by gray rain and become one. The rain is fast and slow, sometimes sparse and dense, sometimes oblique... The city in the rain hides the details, which are also real and illusory, like an impressionist sketch that highlights the mood and emphasizes the atmosphere.
It was inconvenient to ride on a rainy day, so I walked the streets with umbrellas. Fortunately, Licheng is not big, only equivalent to a small county in China, and there is almost no place where my feet can't reach. Walking down the street, walking in the alley, I can't help but make up the picture of McCourt walking through that year. A poor boy with yellow muscles and thin muscles and a hungry stomach and a penniless body, who would look at him more? Who would have thought that this poor ant-like child would write a sensational book many years later and become a figure with a profound influence on Lee City?
I found the Limi Elementary School where the McCourt brothers had attended, right next to People's Park, close to where I lived. Then I went to Barracks Slope to look for Rowton Alley, where McCourt had lived as a child, but I couldn't find anything. Catching an old man to inquire, he said that Rodon Alley was long gone, and pointed out to me its ruins. I stared through the rain at a field of houses that had been built later, and guessed the direction of Rowton Alley and the "two up and two down" location where McCourt had lived. The old man's eyes suddenly became complicated, probably seeing that I had come to visit McCourt's house, and turned away angrily, as if he had been hurt.
Limerick as a child at McCourt (Zhu is also available for photo/photo)
After some twists and turns, I found the old house that was once McCourt's grandmother's house not very far from the barracks slope, which was also a "two up and two down", and now of course lives in an irrelevant family. McCourt lived here in the days before he left for the country. He moved here not only to house his body, but also to house his self-esteem.
My father went to work in England and only sent two pounds to the family, after which there was no news. The five mothers and sons could not pay the rent, were driven to the street, and later defected to a cousin, becoming a presence under the fence. The cousin is obedient and extremely mean to the McCourt brothers. McCourt, who is in the midst of a rebellious period, is not a fuel-saving lamp. After a fierce physical confrontation with his cousin, he left his mother and three younger brothers and moved here. At that time, his grandmother had passed away, and he lived with his mentally handicapped uncle. His uncle struggled to make ends meet by selling newspapers and could not feed him. In order to earn food for himself, and in order to earn a ticket to cross the Atlantic, he went to work at the post office, became a "telegraph brother", and rode a bicycle around the city...
Standing in the alley, I imagined the day McCourt left Ireland, as if to see, in the drizzle, a nineteen-year-old boy carrying a small and broken box, taking a young and elastic step, walking farther and farther, and finally disappearing into the alley.
Limerick as a child, the alleyway in the drizzle. (Zhu Is also available for photo/photo)
For me, a tourist like Angela, there are several things to see on O'Kono Street in the heart of the city. I visited the ancient Church of St. Joseph, a place McCourt didn't want to go as a child but had to go. In addition to Mass, he went into the confession room to confess to the priest: "I lied; I beat my brother; I stole a penny from my mother's purse..."
I also sat diagonally opposite the church in the tavern, which had been an irresistible place for McCourt's alcoholic father. My father was an alcoholic, he couldn't do any work for long, and even if the family couldn't open the pot, he would go out to buy drunks. After the mother gave birth to her little brother, my grandfather sent a few dollars from Northern Ireland to the newborn, and the father took the money from the post office and went directly to the tavern to drink it. The McCourt brothers were often awakened at night by their drunken father. The father stumbled from "Ireland" to "Italy", told his sons to get up and line up, accept his review, forced them to swear, and grew up to defend Ireland with their lives...
In the tavern, I met a pair of middle-aged men and women from the "Maple Leaf Country". Jason is in his forties, wearing glasses and a white goatee, looking very weak, but he is actually a laborer on a construction site. Lisa is slightly fat, a female teacher with sharp eyes and sharp teeth, who seems to be a lot older than Jason, but her voice is as sweet as a girl. Jason told me he was of a quarter Irish descent and had come to Leigh City to find his roots. "Ireland now has only five million people," he said, "and outside of Ireland, there are tens of millions of Irish." The female teacher was logical and rigorous, and immediately corrected her man: "Not tens of millions of Irish, but tens of millions of people of Irish descent." There is a point, such as you. ”
We cannot talk about the history of Ireland's misery without talking about the darkest to darkest years of 1847. That year, the potatoes, the staple food of the people, were cut off due to disease (not a bad harvest, it was a bad harvest!). It caused a catastrophe on the island of Ireland, with more than a million people starving to death and more than a million others fleeing the wilderness. The exiled Irish were humiliated and, like the Chinese workers from the Qing Dynasty, could only get the hardest, most dangerous and lowest-paid jobs.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States began building a transcontinental railroad connecting the east and west coasts, employing tens of thousands of cheap laborers, with the Irish and Chinese being the two largest groups. Some have described the East-West Transrail as not laid on sleepers, but on the bones of Chinese and Irish laborers. A century later, in McCourt's formative years, Ireland, though no longer starving, remained the poorest country in Western Europe, and the wave of immigration continued.
"Irish immigrants are poor, and in order to survive, some people will stop at nothing, gradually giving the Irish a bad name like 'liar'." Jason laughed. His words reminded me of the Irishman in The Siege who sold fake diplomas. The novel is of course fictional, but it can reflect social reality, Mr. Qian Zhongshu set the character as an Irishman, and said that "the real estate of the Irish is said to be milk and ass", reflecting the stereotypes of the Irish people in that era.
Both Jason and Lisa had read Angela's Ashes and knew that McCourt was a controversial figure in his hometown. Jason said McCourt had exposed the sores of Ireland, especially the scars of Lee City, so it was resented by many Irish, especially Lee City people. I agree with him. Until the 1990s, Ireland had been a country that was a laggard in Western Europe. In the 1990s, Ireland finally took off, and its economic growth once led Europe, known as the "Celtic Tiger".
Salted fish turned over, iron trees blossomed, poor countries became rich, out of the shadows, in this context, McCourt produced a book that spread all over the world, telling about Ireland's unforgettable past, if the Irish are ashamed and angry, who can blame them?
McCourt spent his life as a middle school teacher. (Zhu Is also available for photo/photo)
Unveiling the scars of Lee City, is it ugly to beg Lee City?
Lightning and thunder, wind and rain, the night before I left Lee City, the weather was particularly bad. After dinner, I was about to pack the box when the lights suddenly went out. Looking out the window, even the street lights were extinguished, and the wind must have blown off the wires. I used my mobile phone lighting to find candles, tossed upstairs and downstairs for half a day, and did not find them. Called the landlord Benjamin, who said he lived on the other side and couldn't come over for a while, asked me to borrow candles from my next-door neighbor. “...... Lucy and Nancy are the kindest old ladies," Benjamin said, "and they live in House 31, the one to your west." ”
I went out with an umbrella, walked up to the porch next to the west, rang the doorbell, and thought, on a stormy night, the electricity was cut off, and the old man might not be willing to open the door. But Nancy immediately opened the door, warmly invited me into the house, and said that Benjamin had just called. Entering the living room, I saw her face by candlelight. It was a wrinkled face that had completely lost collagen, and a pair of light brown eyes that remained a little clear and agile, as if they did not belong to the dry face. From the dark side of the living room came another "Nancy", the scene was suddenly terrifying, for a moment, I thought Nancy was an old demon with a skill. "This is Lucy, my sister." Nancy laughed. Lucy and Nancy looked like two drops of water, arched their backs at the same angle, and wore the same clothes. Needless to say, it's twin sisters.
There was a housewife's house, and it was not surprisingly neat. The furniture in the living room is quaint and serene, as if it has been served for generations, but it is extremely well maintained. The sofa is made of cloth with tiger legs, the floor-to-ceiling radio and the two-meter-high old clock are bulky and luxurious, the velvet lamp umbrella is embellished with agate tassels, like the skirts of Victorian noblewomen... I intuitively judged that neither of the twin sisters had ever been married and had always been dependent on each other. They probably grew up in this "two ups and two downs" and never had another home.
Lucy gave me two candles, but wouldn't let me go, making sure I tasted the blueberry cake they made. So I sat down, my heart warm. In the flickering candlelight, Lucy stepped on the small shards to bring the cutlery, and Nancy stepped on the cake with the small shards. The tableware is more exquisite, but the cake is nothing special. Anyway, I'm glad I had the opportunity to chat with lee people again. There is no greater joy in people's travels than to interact with the locals.
Today's Limerick is no longer plagued by hunger and poverty. (Zhang Hailu/Photo)
Chatting with people in Lee City, it's hard to get around McCourt and Angela's Ashes. Unconsciously, I was already talking to Sister Nancy about McCourt and Angela's Ashes.
Entering this topic, the two old ladies were indignant. Nancy said that although the McCourt family lived in a slum, they were not as poor as he wrote in the book. Lucy said that McCourt had made enough tears in the world to sell hard and miserable, but he could not deceive the people of Lee City. "When the book first came out, our uncle was still there—he was the same age as McCourt. Uncle said mcCourt had also attended Scout camp. Nancy said. Participation in the Boy Scout Camp requires payment, clothing or something, and the children of poor families have the money to participate! Lucy said.
They also said that McCourt had changed a lot of people in real name. His cousin Lemon was knowledgeable, kind, and well respected in Lee. Lemon had taken in their family, and he should have been grateful, but in the book, Lemon was written by him as a bad person! Nancy said. Lucy gives an even more "heinous" example: McCourt writes of his childhood playmate Willie as a shameless clown, saying that he stood outside the window while his sister was taking a shower to "sell tickets" and that any boy who would spend a shilling could peek out of the window. "It's made up! Willie has neither a sister nor a sister! Lucy said sadly, tears in her eyes. Willie is still alive, and he dares to change people like that! That year he flew in from the United States to sign it, and Willie went to buy one and tore the book in front of him! Nancy said while doing the tearing action, very relieved.
The more Nancy and Lucy talked, the more they breathed, their noses fluttered, their breasts heaving, their hands trembling... It is really rare and precious to complain about people who are not relatives and not to be deceased, and to have such a high sense of honor for their hometown. However, if the two old ladies continue to talk, they may break the cerebral blood vessels, at least they will not sleep at night. So I quickly thanked them and left.
The Nancy sisters' condemnation and criticism of McCourt did not surprise me, and I have long known that there are many people in Lee City who resent McCourt. Hatred out of jealousy is a perfunctory simplistic explanation. I believe that most people who resent McCourt genuinely feel offended. Unveiling the scars of Licheng City naturally makes the people of Licheng unhappy, and after all, Licheng has scars to be revealed. To defame Li Cheng and the people of Li Cheng is to be guilty of another degree, because fabricating untrue ugliness has subjective malice. But I also thought, biographical literature is different from diaries, and it is also different from memoirs, biographical literature is a literary work written based on life experience, the framework is real, the details are created, some people are too sensitive and too real?
Although the Nancy sisters are locals, the "truth" they disclose is actually hearsay. They say that the McCourt family is not as poor as written in the book, so if nothing else, only say that seven children died three times, what does this survival rate illustrate? Needless to say, the book "Angela's Ashes" hurt some people, such as Willie, who was written so badly that if he really did not have a sister, it was even more wronged than Dou E. However, there are not many people who are popular, and McCourt must have been misunderstood and slandered a lot. He had confronted his critics before he was alive, but now he could no longer speak out.
Limerick's Ancient Cemetery (Zhang Hailu/Photo)
Frank McCourt, at the age of sixty-six, wrote Angela's Ashes. The fame and fortune and trouble that this best-selling book brought to him were unexpected by him. Originally a very ordinary person, but there is such an extraordinary old age. Whether McCourt is the pride of Lee City or the scum of Lee City, the people of Lee City are still arguing and will continue to argue. Those who hate him will not forgive him because he has passed away, just as those who love him will not stop loving him because he has passed away. Maybe I won't take McCourt's side, but I will certainly continue to cherish the book Angela's Ashes.
Zhu can also