Writer Guo Johnson's first old age: "The resonance of the wound after being patched up is finally heard"

Mr. Kwok graduated from the Department of Foreign Languages of National Taiwan University with a Ph.D. in Drama from New York University, and assisted in the establishment of the Institute of Creative and English and American Literature at Donghua University, taking the lead in awarding a master's degree in creative writing in the Chinese region. In June 2021, he won the 8th United Press Literary Award, and the judges recommended the novel "The Seeker" in the representative work to be published by the Republic of Chinese Simplified. (Pan Bohan /Photo)

Determining the identities of Juhath and Duras is like a decryption.

“...... Broken face, you come over..."

"Yes, you are now more beautiful than before..."

Briefly describing the beginning of the novel "Lover", the dialogue is clear, it is indeed a different translation of the same writer. Turning his interest in reading to Juhasi, Guo Qiangsheng spent a long time. Literature is like a curved labyrinth, "Zhang Pai", after the age of 35, read Zhang Ailing's works, those men and women, love and family are different. "I'm older than she is." Looking at the short stories she wrote in her twenties, Guo Qiangsheng felt estranged. He has been through a lot.

Later, from 2010 to 2018, Guo Johnson, who had been unpublished for thirteen years, launched three works of fiction in different genres. His "Children of the Night", which he came out at the age of 46, includes exactly one "Lover", written about Juhasi and her many lovers Yang Andrei, and the beginning of the novel of the same name. Together with the later "Confused People" and "Broken Generations", they form a "gay literature trilogy".

In his fifties, the regrets became more and more profound. Guo Johnson did not see Zhang Ailing write about her life at the age of fifty or sixty, "writing and writing is still writing about the things at home when she was a child." He observed that great writers often had difficulty writing about the confessions or self-analysis of this life. "After I was over fifty years old, I realized that what I really had was just persistence."

So Juhath is respectable. She experienced many difficulties, and kept writing, accidentally wrote "Lover" at the age of nearly seventy, and then won the Goncourt Prize, "Life goes on.". The sales of Lover were staggering, bringing her back to the center of French literature and her lifelong writing to the forefront.

Looking back at the age of thirty-five to fifty, Guo Johnson felt stuck somewhere. Now he is approaching the age of sixty and living the life of an "old orphan". He also remembered a sentence in "Lover": If writing cannot penetrate some unspeakable core essence of things, it is just advertising copy. The novella "The Violin Seeker," published in 2020, is his response to himself and literature.

An interviewer described "The Seeker" two years later as really light compared to the intensity of "Broken Generation". Guo Johnson believes that the difference has nothing to do with style, "Broken Dynasty" writes about the seventeen or eighteen-year-old years, groping for the life of homosexuals in Taiwan at that time; writing about the forty-something, silent tuner and the widowed man Lin Sang in his sixties, and then using that kind of brushwork is really ridiculous.

Readers' responses are more in line with Guo Johnson's emotions. They may no longer read novels when they leave campus, and the loneliness and pain in life are often not captured by writers. "Finally found forty to sixty years old, what silently endured in life." When classics such as "The Old Man and the Sea" and "One Hundred Years of Solitude" were published, Hemingway and Márquez were in their prime in their forties and fifties, and the lives of contemporary people were much longer.

"There may be thirty years to come, but we are in another kind of chaos, loneliness or fear." Guo Johnson faces relatively cold subjects, as if writing and understanding himself. He did not experience the "year of nurturing heaven" or "the year of obedience" that he read about forty years ago, but everyone ushered in the hardest and most troublesome "old on the top and small on the bottom" at the age of fifty.

In June 2021, Guo Johnson won the 8th United Press Literary Award, and the representative works recommended by the judges included "The Seeker", as well as two "private essays on life" - "Why Not Seriously Come to Sorrow" and "The Far Away I Will Go". In the hymn, the scholar Zhang Ruifen quoted Kafka's words: "We should only read the kind of books that bite and sting us, and the so-called books must be axes that cut into the frozen sea inside us." ”

In his acceptance speech, Guo Johnson first mentioned Taiwan's "vaccine shortage" at that time, and then talked about sherwood Anderson's famous work "Small Town Deformity" that he was re-reading: "Hidden behind the lonely and deformed people are a long wound that does not see the world. The author's pen is like a gentle needle and thread, quietly suturing the wound. ”

"The resonance of those wounds after being patched up was finally heard."

"Those who can still change may be free"

Guo Qiangsheng, who got along with his dementia father, has not left Taiwan for more than four days in the past eight years. Going to Japan to promote the Japanese version of his first novel, "The Man Who Confused the Country," he traveled to three cities in four days. He taught at Donghua University in Hualien and could only travel to and from Taipei by train. Because of the small number of shifts, he often can't go home that day, and "vaguely always hangs a heart."

Guo Qiangsheng had no relatives to trust, and he could not get along with his father for three months as a foreign nurse. He intuitively appreciates what aging is, "this sentimental, mysterious, but calm process." When vaccine supplies are tight, he thinks differently than others. The point is that if you are admitted to the hospital if you are infected, you must arrange your father before you die. This amused others, and the situation of two generations was finally presented by the "private essay of life":

"Although my father's memory has declined, he still has self-consciousness and is worried that he will look old and crippled, so he would rather not eat than eat badly and eat in a hurry."

"When I was old, I was with my father who was getting old step by step... I found myself at another starting point in my life. ”

Johnson Guo simplifies life as much as possible. "Taking good care of your father is the first, and the second is writing; things that are too irrelevant can be avoided, and too many socializing cannot be avoided." He describes his understanding of aging in The Far Side I Will Go: "Under his aging body, the self-consciousness within his soul has not disappeared, but he is trapped in a space capsule with some mechanical failures and frequent failure of buttons..."

In this book, Guo Qiangsheng also writes about a conversation with a senior sister in the publishing industry. She asked about the old man's condition, heard how to change the three caregivers, and suddenly inserted a sentence: "I don't know if you die before your father!" He admitted that he was really worried, and the eldest sister quickly continued: "This is the punishment for someone like you who does not marry!" ”

The eldest sister never married, and experienced her father's long-term bed rest. Her comment shocked Guo Qiangsheng and responded: "Why is it punishment? How do you know that this isn't going to make me a better person? Make me more patient, wiser, more independent and strong? ”

Words are like inspiration, Guo Johnson said his own words in the interview: "Those who can still change may be free." In the newly published "Writer's Life", he quoted Zhong Wenyin's words about freedom and commented: "She took her own wounds to collide, and in one after another strange and familiar regrets among my generation, the resonance resonated, perhaps finally allowing the elderly to get rid of the norms of social vision, so that the rest of the single person's life has the possibility of true freedom." ”

In the face of young friends, Guo Johnson jokingly told important things: when they were older, they would find that homosexual status is not a social situation, not an identity that only has a few days a month. "That's one of your cores, how to tie your work, career, ambition, family affection, friendship to it, how to work hard." 」 He thought of the former incompatibility, wondering about the marriage between men and women, "What jokes are your parents and elders, what kind of wife will you marry in the future?" I was at a loss when I heard this as a child. ”

Guo Johnson writes about homosexuals, but does not feel that the identity problem is over and has a fixed answer. The conclusion always involves many aspects such as class, economy, culture, education, etc. "Now I feel more and more that God has arranged for the existence of people like us to be a little reasonable, and those of us who have to be a little skeptical." He knew it wasn't just about marriage, and that young gays and lesbians shouldn't discriminate against fat, old, poor homosexuals.

Leaving is about too much of the past. Like his mother and brother, two of Guo's close colleagues died prematurely, just over two months apart. After retiring, Li Yongping returned to Taipei and wrote lonely until he died of cancer; Zeng Zhenzhen first lost her son and died unexpectedly at her home in Hualien. The "Iron Triangle" that put a lot of energy into the "Creation Institute" eventually disappeared helplessly. In 2015, he stayed on the job without pay and returned to Taipei to take care of his father. Three years later, he left Donghua University.

"After experiencing my own grief, I can better cherish and understand the sadness that I am willing to accept." Guo Johnson told the Southern Weekend reporter, "You have been discriminated against and scared, not that now I have a firewall, and other people's problems have nothing to do with me." "And the only thing left in his house is his father."

"What other failures are hard to face?"

The day after returning to Taiwan from New York, 36-year-old Guo Johnson arrived in Hualien by the "Ziqiang" train. With the help of the poet Yang Mu, the founder of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, he founded the Institute of Creative and English and American Literature together with translator Tsang Chung-jin and MCA writer Li Yongping. The Institute of Creative Writing was the first in the Chinese region to award a master's degree in creative writing, and at that time it was the only research institute in Asia that used literary creation as a graduation thesis.

"I saw these young kids in the academy, and I was actually doing tuning, which was pretty similar." Guo Qiangsheng used the behind-the-scenes tuner as a metaphor for the job, "helping them find their own voice and discover their own timbre." ”

"The hardest and most difficult part of writing is actually knowing yourself. It's not your skill level, or your sensitivity to the times, and so on. Guo Qiangsheng often reminds students, "Everyone should write something different, because you are you." Not surprisingly, he could conclude: "We all dedicated the best part of our lives to those years, the creator's paradise." ”

Guo Johnson wrote about the freedom of the past in "Writer's Life": "In the small square, the evening breeze in early autumn is refreshing, and we sit under the big banyan tree and drink beer. Now that I think about it, we are still children in our thirties. Only children can mix quickly, without the sophistication of restraint and exhaustion that will appear in a few years. ”

9/11 happened quickly. Guo Johnson, who had been on a plane late the night before, was postponed to the day of the incident due to mechanical failure and temporarily landed in Alaska. Returning from a strange place, he felt that Taiwan had changed, and this incident made him realize that the United States had already changed. He asked himself, "What kind of era do I live in, and what do I want to leave behind in this era?" ”

"Children of the Night" began with "9/11", and in "Lei", which was included in the novel collection "Sweet and Humble", Guo Johnson wrote about the psychological impact of the incident: "He hung up the phone in frustration, turned and walked into the opposite train on the same platform. Then on the subway, he staggered out of the tunnel and drove onto the suburban elevated highway, and the moment when the September sun suddenly sprinkled the carriage, the second brother not only dismissed the idea of suspending the wedding, but also ignored his tears in front of everyone..."

The wedding returned to romance, and the results were inevitably bleak. The weight in all directions pressed against life, as the novel said: "Even the World Trade Center building has collapsed, what failures in life are difficult to face?" ”

Soon after Guo Johnson returned to his hometown, his mother died of cancer. He directed the stage play "Desire can be desired, very desired", surviving the depressed time. When his father fell ill in 2014, he still promised the "Three Young and Four Magnificent Collections" in the Human Supplement of China Times, one article a week, often all night long. As long as he can write these 1200 words in five hours, he can be sure that he has not collapsed.

"Living life, these entanglements play out in the heart every week." Guo Johnson explained the background of the column, "I have to survive. Jokingly, I felt like a suicide note every time, and I really didn't know if something bigger was going to happen next. Not long after, his brother, who was ten years older than him, died of cancer, and the lover empathized with each other.

The editor-in-chief said that the manuscript could get four or five thousand likes every week, and Guo Johnson, who did not use social media, was very surprised. They are collected into "Why Not Take It Seriously to Grieve", and the narrative of father, mother, brother and yourself is reduced to "family writing".

"Everyone has a last resort and tragedy, and at that time I had an experience, and the more I wrote, the more I found that I felt deep sadness, and I was able to understand the sadness that my parents did not say to their children, and this kind of empathy you yourself did not experience." 」 Looking back, his parents lost their relatives and left their hometown in their teens, and Guo Qiangsheng was left with only his father. The feeling was difficult to understand, but it gave him strength.

In his thirties, he could not write freely, worked hard after the age of 40, and resumed "pure literature" at the age of 45. Guo Johnson has always believed that really good literary works are shaping more inclusive ethical care, "absolutely anti-vulgar and anti-flat" . The recent prose is more calm, and the mother's journey is more and more floating in the text.

The father went to Europe to study for five years, and the mother raised two children while attending university and working, and resigned because of gender discrimination. She longed to study abroad and decided to give up; she loved to write, and in the end she did not continue, "there is no room for a female writer in marriage." A year before her death, she took all the old photographs, accompanied by narration. Guo Qiangsheng knows from the understated narration that his mother lost her ideals because of her family. "Two people who are excellent, put together to become a family, but they have become each other's life's pain." 」 He wrote in the book.

Later, in her suicide note, her mother advised Guo Johnson again: "The family will be noisy, you don't want to be annoyed or afraid, or it is better to find someone to accompany you, otherwise you will be too lonely..."

"Incarnate into such a lightness, floating to the ground"

Guo Johnson went to work, wrote manuscripts, signed a book contract, and was 25 years old when he left Taiwan. At the beginning of "Broken Dynasty", he wrote about the earlier repressive atmosphere, "everything still has to be cautiously guarded against in 1985.". That was around the beginning of his memory of homosexual identity.

When he first arrived in New York, Guo Qiangsheng often sat on the street or in the corner of the park, laughing out loud when he saw the sight of the homeless and decaying. The Golden Lion-winning City of Sorrows attended the New York Film Festival and arrived at Lincoln Center late due to traffic jams. The theater was full, and the writer Zhu Tiantian waved eagerly at the entrance. Before the title appeared, he was shocked by the momentum of the overture and could not believe that it was a Taiwanese movie. "When I left a month ago, wasn't Taipei still the world of tertiary films and Hong Kong films?"

Since then, the story of "The Seeker" has slowly accumulated. Guo Johnson has few Asian classmates around him, so he is closer to the students of the music department and the art department. International students studying music or piano playing talk about how important a tuner is. Especially for the big performers, every venue, every piano, every day is different, so it needs to be adjusted. He only learned that a musician could not take the stage without a trusted tuner behind him.

Guo Johnson met a rather special person, somewhat similar to the tuner in the book. He did not attend a teacher or attend a music class, but was admitted to the music department after practicing for a semester with his own genius. This person seems to have great potential, but he is willing to only be a pianist and does not continue his playing career. He marveled at it, imagining that there was a common path between the writer and the player. Passion, talent or others are certainly not sure to go well, there are more factors, emotions, hearts, personality... A variety of elements shape life.

Snow also has important symbolic significance. The gloomy tuner plays Rachmaninoff's "Song Without Words" and is confronted with the pianist's question: What did you think of when you played it? The answer was snow, which he had never seen before, "just vaguely always falling around," or an unfathomable sense of drift. "In a strange city, it may be to be exiled by your own loneliness, or it may be to open up loneliness and let new possibilities come in."

When he first saw the snow, Guo Johnson was both excited and complicated. Now let him think back to New York, the scene is about the snow. The real snow scene of a foreign land subverts the impression formed by the film or Christmas card. Water vapor has different fates and can become rain, hail, or water droplets that reflect a rainbow. "It's a lot like an artist, a creator, not knowing what you're going to be in the end, and it turns out to be snow." He describes the unknown of life, "incarnated as such a lightness, floating on the ground, quite echoing the meaning of writing to me after a certain age." ”

Guo Qiangsheng also witnessed the immature stage of the Proud Moon, which later became an "imported product" again and again. He was touched by the fact that cocktail therapy had not yet appeared, and that the terminally ill AIDS had brought more stigma to homosexuals. In the shadow of death, Pride Month is a matter of their right to live. He watched it change again, with many more politicians added to the participants. "There are fewer and fewer whites above the middle class." He recalled the changes in the participants, "the protection that should be there has been, and the more positive ones left behind have become more minorities." ”

New York's ten years have given Guo Johnson the opportunity to repeatedly observe and think about identity, which is his most hesitant and difficult problem. Back in Taiwan, he was reluctant to "join in the fun" in his creations, nor was he willing to use his skills to avoid this part of his life experience. He understands that it's not just a matter of love: "Before you developed, you already knew that you were different from other children, and this thing must not be simplified to become sex." 」 ”

"If the person who writes is not honest and just uses the words as a package and a performance, that is not my belief." In the stage of frequent changes, Guo Johnson felt an outbreak. Suffering brought about a turning point, and he became the person who writes today. He didn't want to mumble.

The first lover died by suicide in the summer of 1996, leaving Guo Johnson's last words on the phone: "You must continue to write." For the next two years he suffered from depression. His first love came to an abrupt end, and a conversation with a Jewish psychotherapist— whose partner was also Chinese — made him aware of the more subtleties of his feelings. Identity, class, ethnicity... He left New York with mixed feelings.

Guo Johnson believes that all life can be like a piano, and it is literature that helps his soul tune. The tuner must learn to be self-contained and willing to be invisible behind the pianist. So, doesn't a tuner look like a teacher who teaches writing? "Yes, I've spent more than a decade perfecting others." He answered firmly, still very cheerful.

"There's always a chord"

Guo Johnson has been carrying the label of "the second generation of other provinces" since he was a child. He was once frail, sensitive and precocious, and "had the idea of dying at the age of twelve or thirteen." The first "Echo" of "Sweet and Humble" was written more than twenty years ago, depicting the wandering and sensitivity of a ten-year-old. The age of the book is scattered and re-stringed, like a novel depicting the life of a writer.

"We all hope that the incompatibility and self-doubt of adolescence will not happen again, and that the dilemmas and betrayals that were once crossed with closed eyes and clenched teeth will not be recorded, but I now come to believe that the second half of life is nothing more than a re-answer to the same test paper." 」 Guo Johnson wrote.

His literary career did start very early, and Guo Qiangsheng published a novel at the age of 16 in the special number of "Newcomer Recommendation" in the supplement of Lianhe Bao. As the Department of Foreign Languages of NTU approached graduation, he launched his first collection of short stories, "Companionship: The Story from Attached Middle School to NTU", which was soon republished by the famous Sansan Bookstore. After graduation, he worked as a middle school English teacher for a year and worked for nine months in the supplement of the JoongAng Daily.

The next step is to stay in the United States for more than ten years. Guo Johnson paved the way with one book after another, facing the identity of "the second generation of single and homeless comrades in other provinces". Now he felt that there was one less book to write, and no one knew how many more.

The Violin Seeker was not easily published. As the cover character for the November 2018 issue of Printed Literary Life, Johnson Kwok can write 40,000 words for the magazine. He thus wrote the first draft of "The Seeker", which was still unfinished, and added 20,000 words. "The syntax of the language I use is quite condensed and simple." He believed that the whole story was complete, but a novella often had difficulty becoming a book on its own. Fortunately, Chen Huihui, president of Trojan Culture, learned from the practice of the Japanese Wasagawa Award and bravely "picked up" the manuscript.

The novel is not warm, not inspirational, and focuses on the unpopular classical music theme, and catches up with the new crown epidemic. Guo Qiangsheng speculated that readers over the age of thirty could empathize with the book. The finalists of the United Press Literary Awards are tirelessly creating, and they have to test "whether they have continued to go to the next level in recent years." When the poets of the previous generation commented that the words of "The Seeker" were like poetry, he was particularly pleased.

"The interesting thing about literature is that it always has a voice, and it can be imagined that a soul is calling." Guo Johnson also wrote the stories of Emmanuel Riva, Yasujiro Ozu, Camus and other creators, whose works intersect with life and understand the connection between art and people. Like The Seeker, the deceased pianist accidentally associates the merchant with the tuner to gain a new awakening.

Guo Qiangsheng remembers his mother saying during chemotherapy: "When I am well, I want to go to Shanghai to see." This is the "dark scab" in his heart. The first time he went to Shanghai, he fulfilled this wish alone. A few hours before leaving, he went to the Changde apartment where Zhang Ailing and her aunt had lived. It was already a private house, and the sign "No visit" was posted on the glass of the gate. He seemed to understand why he was more impressed by the writer's Hong Kong. After this life, "without the onlookers and uproars, her Shanghai was boring—never to go back." ”

The Seeker also writes about The Story of Richt and Nina. The two were pianists and sopranos, and Richter was probably gay. This unique family has love and is like-minded. At the end of the novel, "I," the tuner, leaves the Richter house without playing the two pianos on display. Guo Johnson deliberately made the whole sentence like a rhyme, and the search ended here:

"Let them sleep quietly and I turn around and walk into the vast white snow that I have been like."

Southern Weekend reporter Song Yu