Hungry souls in the shadows
Li Li
I read a Japanese scholar Muramatsu Kazeki commenting on Chinese cuisine, and he said this:
"For them, eating is a happy and glorious thing, and they have to let others see it." From this, we can imagine how the majority of the Chinese people have struggled with hunger for a long time."
To be honest, seeing these words, my mood is really mixed. You cannot but admit that the so-called bystander is pure, Chinese eating is this attitude: as with the faith of life, full of extraordinary enthusiasm and piety.
The people regard food as the sky, the common people take the grain as the sky, and eating is a matter even greater than the sky. Always, solving the problem of the people's food is the most urgent problem, and it is also the most important task to calm people's minds. What is happiness? When eating, everything is prepared and put on the table, not necessarily a big fish and meat, green vegetables, tofu, rice noodles are also very good, and then turn on your favorite TV, this is happiness, reassuring full of happiness. Waking up, eating, going out, working, getting tired, and so on and on from day to day. A piece of pastry, a bite of food, a bowl of hot soup, with a gentle fragrance lightly stepped on the tip of the tongue, hard-working life, it suddenly became related to the beauty, love burst out in the chest, the whole person is stable. Those who cook and eat well can be seen on their faces, and they have a warm breath on their faces.
Chinese so love to eat, open the circle of friends QQ space, more than half of them are in fancy po food, basically everyone has sunbathed food. In the writings of Shaanxi writers, Qindi men always eat with lipstick oil and sweat profusely. The Qindi women cooked with all their strength and sweated profusely. This vivid description, this moving picture scroll, is all from a "eat" word. Why is it so vigorous, why is it so thrilling? The same is true for the whole country. "China on the Tip of the Tongue" has been filmed season after season, as well as "Flavor of the World", "A String of Life", "Breakfast China", "Taste of the City" and other similar food documentaries, each launch is a hit. These documentaries that have been completed throughout the country are very "pyrotechnics", the copywriters who walk the heart, the pictures of the stomach, and the people who can watch more than 10 minutes on an empty stomach are all haojie in the world. Why are there so many successful phenomenal food documentaries? Because this is the heart of the Chinese people! Not to mention the food feature film, domestic family ethics dramas are often frequent shots of eating every five minutes. Chinese delicious, the meals are not sloppy, the southerners must have a pot soup on the table, and the northerners' table must be a small stir-fry with thick oil and red sauce. Even ordinary people have to put at least four or five plates on the table and talk while eating. From international news to meat prices, from important family resolutions to children's milk powder diapers, the "table meetings" of Chinese have always been so hot and fresh, and the various dog blood conflicts and climaxes of domestic family ethics dramas are often completed at the table.
The most hearty meal in Chinese is Chinese New Year's EveChinese New Year's Eve night. The Spring Festival is a product of an agricultural civilization, and in the old days, when the farmers were idle, they had a lot of time to make all kinds of meticulous preparations for the New Year. The wanderers who travel far and wide over the mountains and mountains, through hardships, embark on the road back home of wind and snow, congestion, scalper fares, and their hearts are often a reunion feast. For Chinese, the deepest memory of the Spring Festival is a greasy large table, only to wipe it clean, and then put on a plate of dishes, cups and plates, foraging and staggering. The people who cook, the people who eat, are so excited, almost abnormal excitement and full of excitement, like a demonstration and negativity to life: to work together to live a good life, to live happily, to live decently. Chinese New Year's Eve night is always the most lively, it is abundant, and this year is so lively and abundant, it is not like it is for myself, it is like I am living for life.
Remembering that there was a popular meme in 2009, a netizen published a post called "Jia Junpeng your mother called you home for dinner" published by a netizen in The World of Warcraft Tieba and actually got more than 8 million hits and more than 300,000 followers. There are also many netizens who borrow the title to play, deriving all kinds of secondary creations and spoof pictures, and this slogan has appeared everywhere. The "Jia Junpeng Phenomenon" was selected as "Ten Events in the New Century" of New Weekly. Why is such a simple sentence so hot? Because someone brushes up day and night, this can be seen. The post was posted in the World of Warcraft post bar and may be related to World of Warcraft. But also because this sentence is so present, immediacy and present. How necessary it is to eat, and someone telling you to go home to eat proves that there are still people who are in charge of you and take care of you. It is a very familiar and lifelike language, and it also contains great appeal and storytelling. It is catchy and evokes the extremely common childhood memories of everyone. Many netizens believe that this is the miracle of "Chinese network", this sentence can be copied and multiplied infinitely on the Internet, because this is a universal emotion rooted in the psychological archetype of Chinese.
When the psychologist Jung proposed the concept of "archetype", he said: "Archetypes are a collection of primitive human experiences, which accompany each person like fate, and whose effects can be felt in our most personal lives." The Chinese people eat enough to lose weight, in fact, it is only the situation of these decades, and the things in the bones caused by the history of extreme material scarcity and hunger culture for thousands of years cannot be cleaned in decades. What is it like to be hungry? Haruki Murakami once described it very literarily in a short story. He paints hunger as a picture: "In a leaf boat, floating on the surface of the lake." Looking down, you can glimpse the reflection of the volcano in the water. "I don't think he's very hungry, is it that the Japanese don't eat much?" Hunger itself has no poetry, no dignity, and hunger is similar to pain. In a long and persistent hunger, the stomach juice burns, the stomach wall rubs, and you will feel real pain. Dieting is difficult because it is against the most basic and primitive desires of man. The result of confrontation is often anxiety, depression, collapse and madness, deep emptiness, emptiness and powerlessness.
Go to see the film "1942" based on Liu Zhenyun's novel "Wen Gu 1942" and directed by Feng Xiaogang, and you can appreciate the hungry "naked life" that returns to its original state, the helpless struggle to survive and the final death. In the harsh war, in the long and seemingly endless escape, they have to face a kind of abandonment and despair. Ultimately this despair comes from the absoluteness of hunger. The film turns hunger into one of the most important protagonists, devouring everything, shaking people's basic values and ethics, and turning people into indescribable beings. In the process of watching the movie, I always had a kind of trepidation, I did not dare to look at the pain, but I had to face it squarely, because the Great Famine in Henan in 1942 was a real event in history. The fate of these ordinary Chinese is closely related to us, flesh and blood, they are actually our common ancestors, and their suffering is inseparable from us. This film is not an epic in the traditional sense, but it is a real life experience that stirs our souls.
The strength of Chinese worldly desires may lie in the lingering hunger of this historical accumulation. Hunger is not only a state of life, hunger is the hunger of the whole body, to resources, to life, to everything. There are profound psychological motivations behind the behavior of hoarding vegetables and hoarding grain and even snapping up salt as soon as the wind blows. Don't look at some people who are old and heavy, light and breezy, they are just afraid that their desires will be perceived, so they hide their desires deeply, and once they have an exit, they will be irrepressible, and their fanaticism is beyond the reach of ordinary people, which is the principle of spring. Chinese, who have suffered from famine and war, have inherited from their ancestors the fear of hunger and the fear of survival, which is the part of their life that is lacking, or the part of psychological scarcity, and you cannot persuade a hungry person to put down the rice bowl in his hand, or not to eat the bowl in the pot. There was no way, this fear was too heavy, dragging the shadow of a long history. Even in the era of seemingly material abundance, the Chinese people still lack a sense of security to some extent.
We all have to eat well and live well. However, after all, people do not live only by eating, and people with thin spirits are doomed to a lackluster life. You say that living on the earth for this lifetime, just by completing the endless stream of three meals a day, how can we prove that we have lived in this world? It can be said that the social construction in recent decades has brought about unprecedented and tremendous changes in China, and this overall scarcity of Chinese society has come to an end, but thousands of hungry souls, which are more hidden than the hungry bodies, are still hiding in the shadows, trembling, panicking, and not saying a word.