Chen Jiming | the myth of all things and a man

I still remember when I was just a middle school teacher, I took students to participate in sports meetings, and when I saw that my students were lagging behind, I would be sad, Ahead, and I would be sad, I didn't understand what the reason was at the time, and then I gradually realized that it was actually a literary attitude. I must have seen the same thing in the winner and the loser: the relationship between the individual and the world. A person from childhood to adulthood, from family to society, from naivety to maturity, can not but face a basic problem, that is, how to enter the world, how to adapt to the law of the jungle, what kind of relationship between the individual and the world. Victory and defeat are bought with their own strength. Both aggressive and negative are reasonable outcomes. Sometimes, passive withdrawal and self-defeat are a more humane attitude towards life. From this point of view, everyone is lonely and vulnerable.

Later came into contact with the work of the British writer Lawrence, looked at some of his masterpieces, and knew that his main interest was in gender relations. He believed that the basic proposition of literature was the relationship between men and women. The relationship between the sexes is, of course, the relationship between a person and the world. A person's relationship with himself, all relations between a person and himself, to put it bluntly, is the relationship between a person and this vast world. Therefore, literature is about relationships. I distinctly remember that such a simple literary idea was formed after reading Lawrence and gradually became deeply rooted.

All the characters in the Ping An Batch are created under this understanding. The protagonist, Zheng Mengmei, was born in a wealthy family that was in decline, and his great-grandfather and brothers made their fortunes overseas together and became rich, but in his grandfather's generation, there was an accident, and his grandfather died in a fire in Malacca and has been devastated ever since. His father, Zheng A-nu, is tea-friendly, hospitable, and good-stone, and is extremely intelligent but idle. His brother Zheng Fusheng joined the League while studying in Japan, returned to China to join the revolutionary party opposed to the Qing government, and died in the assassination of the leader of the Janissaries who suppressed the revolutionary party, Aisin Kyora Ryobi. The burden of reviving the family voice weighed on Zheng Mengmei's head. He also had to solve the problem of figuring out the true cause of his grandfather's death. This is the "one world" that I have specially created for Zheng Mengmei.

So, at the age of 28, he went to Nanyang.

On the ship in the Lower South Sea, he met Chen Guangyuan and George. They became worshippers in Siam. Chen Guangyuan is a Chaoshan native living in Siam and is a wealthy merchant famous in Chaoshan. George, an Englishman and doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Cambridge, came to Chaoshan, China for anthropological research, where he had lived for ten years, fell in love with a local girl, Ah Tao, lived with her, and had children. His grandfather was the first British consul in Guangzhou, and later served as a consul in Fuzhou and Xiamen, and his great uncle was a Qing court official, who was the head of the "Tax Supervision Committee" composed of Britain, the United States and France, and participated in the negotiation of the "Tianjin Treaty" throughout the process, in fact, a double-sided spy. He left two diaries, in George's hand. The second uncle had bought and sold opium in China and had intersected with Zheng Mengmei's grandfather and brother. His relationship with Zheng Mengmei implies several other relationships, between China and Britain, and between the East and the West.

The relationship between Zheng Mengmei and George makes the space of the novel larger and the time farther away. The story begins in 1916, but thus goes back to 1841, and thus touches on the modern history of the world, especially the part related to China. In George's memories, there are many rare "real goods". These contents are mainly derived from the historical materials of Chao Customs, which is a new perspective on the relationship between China and the West at that time. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that I smoothly transitioned from the relationship between Zheng Mengmei and George to the relationship between China and the West, to the proposition of cultural differences and civilizational identity.

There is also a foreigner in the book, the American Dong Girl, who is also arranged based on the same considerations. Aunt Dong was an unusual missionary. She first lived as a person, an ordinary person as a missionary, in the remote countryside of Chaoshan for more than ten years, and spoke Chaoshan dialect. When she became friends with a bunch of Chaoshan women, she began to question her missionary status, saying she preferred to be a painter, translator, and historian. She translated "Yi Yunjia's Criticism" to the United States, and I asked someone to translate it back as Chinese (due to space limitations, this part was deleted when reprinted in this journal - Editor's Note). This part is fictional, but the basic appearance and thoughts of this person come from her three books: "A Corner of the Heavenly Dynasty", "The First Coming of the True Light", and "Chaoshan Night Talk". Three books are translated in Chaoshan Province.

The relationship between people and people, the relationship between the East and the West, the relationship between the state and the state, the relationship between civilization and civilization, I created such a background for the Chaoshan story in the "Ping An Batch", just like building a house needs a good foundation, a broad vision. They're not the house itself, but they can make the house shine.

The positive story in the book is mainly about men, in short, this book writes about how a group of men went out without hesitation and how they came back without hesitation. Between the go and the back is a vast sea. If the destination is Peru, six months adrift at sea, crossing the equator twice. Such a going is just as pathetic as such a return, with a completely equal taste of human nature. Any way of reading it is far from the truth. To the best of my knowledge, no other book has described the going and going of a group of people so completely and enduringly. The sociological and poetic implications it contain still burns to me.

Still out of concern for "relationships", I also wrote about a group of women who don't move their nests. I described such a group of women in a more emotional way. The farther and longer the men go, the more important the woman in the family becomes, and the more a presence that cannot be ignored. Elder sister, Wangzhi, Naizheng, Huang Bai, Zheng Huang, these women are themselves, each is their own, alive, but there is also obvious consistency. They are more tolerant of polygamy than any other woman, more toiling, more responsible, and quieter. They are the silent majority. Their quietness has a great meaning. These qualities in them have been passed down to this day and are still widely praised today. The most willing wife for men in the Pearl River Delta is a Chaoshan woman. But when they praise their virtues in their usual tone, who appreciates the absurdity and tragedy of them?

Zheng Mengmei likes to walk on the road, because the men in his family are short-lived and it is difficult to live past 50 years old. Some popular masters warned him that only by leaving the ancestral land could he escape his fate. In his opinion, Siam is also the ancestral land, so he likes to swing between Chaoshan and Siam, and he likes to walk forever on the road between the two places (actually on the sea). He eventually lived to be 90 years old, and before he died, he said an inexplicable sentence: "Oh my God, I am suffering on earth!" ”

A person is born, passively falling into a huge and complicated network of relationships, slowly moving with the flow of all things. A person dies, and finally becomes himself again, a clean and single person. Auden said that there are as many individuals as there are myths. Then, it can be said that "Ping An Batch" is a myth of Zheng Mengmei.

Chen Jiming

Contemporary writer, member of the Chinese Writers Association. He is currently the vice chairman of the Guangdong Writers Association and a professor at the School of Art and Communication of Beijing Normal University Zhuhai. He has published novels such as "Seven Steps Town", "One Man and One Heaven", "Fallen Poems", and a long essay "The Fire and Earth of Chen Zhuang". He is the author of the film script "Oda Into the City", "Beijing Monk", the novella "Chen Wanshui List", "Gray Man", "Holy Land", the short story "Dozens of White Bottles in the Moonlight", "Butterflies", "Bones" and so on. His works have won the Novelist of the Year Award, the Chinese Literature Selection Award, the China Writers Publishing Group Award, the Novel Selection Award, and the October Literature Award.