Sunrise in Rapeseed Ditch (Photo by Mu Zhen)
When we are tired of grabbing vegetables and hoarding goods every day,
Attention is held back by all kinds of information,
When you fall into restlessness,
We connected Liu Liangcheng, who was far away in Xinjiang's rapeseed ditch.
8 years ago, he moved his family from the city back to the countryside.
Resumed farming,
He was busy growing vegetables, ploughing the land, and doing carpentry.
Liu Liangcheng photographed the scenery of the four seasons in the countryside
Liu Liangcheng is 60 years old this year,
At the end of the last century, because of the collection of essays "One Man's Village"
Fame
The book sold well for 24 years and touched 80 million people.
Among them, 5 were selected for chinese textbooks in secondary schools and universities.
Lin Xianzhi praised him
"The Last Chinese Essayist of the 20th Century".
As a writer who has experienced desert escape, the loss of his father, and various upheavals,
In his writings, there is almost no depiction of suffering.
He talks about suffering, war, and epidemics
regarded as an "abnormal state", one day will subside,
He is more willing to write about the ordinary daily life of the countryside.
Liu Liangcheng in the wheat field
The rise and fall of the sun, the wind after wind,
Even a cloud, a grass, an ant,
All are given meaning to life.
These things that have been forgotten by urban people,
He praises without reservation,
And these, in the times of the epidemic, are particularly precious.
We want to know,
How he harvested the strength to resist "abnormal" through the land.
Self-description Liu Liangcheng
Editor Yu Xuan Editor Ni Chujiao
Liu Liangcheng in rapeseed ditch
A corner of Mulei Academy
As soon as spring this year began, Liu Liangcheng could not sit still, and he began to grow vegetables in the yard.
The vegetable seedlings are bred in the winter, first throw the vegetable seeds into the wooden pot one by one, sprinkle water every day, wait for them to grow, and then move away one by one. Eggplant, spicy, tomatoes, celery, onions, cabbage... He grows almost all the dishes.
Liu Liangcheng's vegetable field is 3 acres large, just in his Wooden Lei Academy. In 2014, he moved from Urumqi to Rapeseed Valley Village on the northern slope of the Tianshan Mountains, bought an abandoned local school and converted it into a college, invited more than 30 artists to live here, and began a life of farming and writing while farming.
During the epidemic in Xinjiang in July last year, Liu Liangcheng happened to be sealed in the academy and did not go out for a month. He took three volunteers and worked in the fields every day.
A year earlier, he had visited relatives during the Spring Festival and was sealed in a unit building in Shawan County because of the epidemic. Because there was nothing to do, the main body of the novel "Bemba" was basically written, and the original half-year plan took only more than 40 days in the end.
Liu Liangcheng planted pumpkins in the yard
In Liu Liangcheng's eyes, whether the epidemic is closed or closed, it is a relatively short-lived thing, and sooner or later it will pass.
"Eventually people will still return to the earth, pay attention to the four seasons of the year, pay attention to spring ploughing and autumn harvest, and then have children, year after year, which is the norm for people."
Now his seedlings had only grown a stubble high, and it would take another month to be planted in the field. At that time, you can see which vegetable has grown a flower bone, and the next day it blooms, and there are bees and butterflies flying around on the flowers. Then, the eggplant and spicy seeds grow out, and after a while, you will be able to eat these dishes, which is a life full of hope.
Therefore, every day at breakfast, he thought of grabbing the shovel and going to the ground. "Once you begin to work, the weight in your mind is liberated. If I really wanted to work, I wouldn't even want to write. ”
Liu Liangcheng's dog he said: In the village, we have raised pets into animals
Liu Liangcheng is well known for his 1998 book One Man's Village.
This is a very different book from most rural literature. "Almost a century of vernacular literature has been writing about the suffering of people on the vernacular land, and one war after another and movement are crushing human nature."
Liu Liangcheng has experienced the persecution of his father and has also experienced "three antis and five antis", "But when I understood that life is ultimately going to be normal, I chose those relatively eternal things in life, things that will not become obsolete." ”
In his books, donkeys pulled in the yard, ants carrying bran by the stove, and dogs raised by every house in the village... Every ordinary life is depicted in detail and endowed with divinity.
Winter in rapeseed ditch
He wrote about the life of a bug:
"I just patiently waited for the dying time of a little bug. In the never-ending clamor of life, I saw the land that had been lonely since the death of a small insect. Other bugs are barking. Other birds are flying. When the earth was revived in pieces, in the full perception of a small insect, the earth dimmed. ”
When it snowed in the countryside, he sighed:
"The snow that falls on a person's life, we can't see it all. Everyone spends the winter alone in their own lives. ”
Famine, turmoil, war, and epidemics rarely occupy his heart for long, because:
People often complain about life, about society, and even about the times. It is always believed that these general environments have caused their own bad fate. In fact, the role of those often overlooked tiny things in life on people is the greatest. Maybe it's the ones that affect you, create or destroy you, and you never know it.
On Douban, "One Man's Village" rated 8.9, with the highest-like comment saying: "If there is any essay that still lingers in my mind from my youth to adulthood or even older, it must be this one." ”
Liu Liangcheng inspects the village of Old Sheep's Head Quanzi in Mulei County
Liu Liangcheng has been writing about the countryside all his life. From leaving the country to returning to the countryside, it took him 20 years.
A year before Liu Liangcheng was born, because of fleeing the wilderness, the family moved from Jiuquan in Gansu to a small village under Shawan County in Xinjiang, and then to the desert.
After finishing primary school on and off, he was finally admitted to secondary school. At that time, it was the 80s, and his job was to work as an administrator at an agricultural machinery station on the outskirts of Shawan County, making reports twice a year, and the rest of the time was riding around the fields, working very leisurely.
It was then that he began to write poetry, writing for ten years, and publishing it in the poetry journal "Stars" and "Poetry Newspaper".
Later, the rise of self-employed people, using spare time, he opened a agricultural machinery accessories store department, less than a year, earned 10,000 yuan, "with the same as ten thousand yuan households, at that time felt that it was so easy to make money, he sold the accessories store department, quit his job, and went to Urumqi to work, then called this the sea." ”
Working as an editor at a newspaper in Urumqi and earning a salary of four hundred and fifty yuan a month, Liu Liangcheng began a life in the city.
Because he was too busy to survive, he could no longer write poetry, so he began to write prose, and spent 10 years writing "One Man's Village".
Liu Liangcheng picks the fruit from the old apple tree in the yard
At the age of 40, relying on the first royalties of the book, Liu Liangcheng opened a bar, which took a year to renovate, and opened for less than a year, and then went out of business. A friend said to him, "You call it 'One Man's Bar,' can you not go out of business?" So he honestly went to write, and the two novels "Virtual Earth" and "Chiseled Void" were written after that.
At the age of 50, halfway through life, seeing the old age, Liu Liangcheng thought, I have to find a livelihood for my old age.
He took a fancy to a Taoist temple, wanted to be a Taoist leader, take a group of disciples, and live his old age there in the morning. "But it's a cultural relic, and you can't buy it or rent it."
The dao chief did not finish it, and went to the rapeseed ditch in Mulei County. The second half of his life, once again, unfolded in the countryside.
"When you were young, everyone longed for the distant cities, but when you live to the age of your father and mother, you will find that you are back again, back to where you set out.
The countryside was once one of the most poetic places to live. It can settle your body, let you work on the earth, have something to gain, but also settle your death, your soul, this beauty has become a cultural gene cast in our hearts. ”
Here's what he had to say:
Rain over sunny canola ditches
Seven or eight years ago, when I came to Canola Ditch, I felt that it was too similar to the village where I was born.
The houses of those people, along the creek and the mountain, are arranged in pairs, and from any point of view, they are all landscape paintings.
Many villagers have moved away, leaving more than 100 families in more than 400 farm compounds. The remaining empty house may soon become a pile of wood, and I was so distressed that I decided to move my family here. I recruited more than 30 artists, and together I bought dozens of farmhouses to live here.
They paint a lot of homes, as well as writers, designers, photographers, and so on, most of them have reached my age, retired, come here to clean up a broken yard, spend a lot of energy and a lot of money, build their own home in this place, and engage in all kinds of dishes to create.
Liu Liangcheng "visits relatives and friends" in the village
I saw an old school here, which is full of towering ancient trees and has 40 acres of land. When I bought it, all the classrooms and offices had a thick layer of sheep dung. We shoveled out sheep dung, found the classroom floor, found the podium, and found the tin pencil case left by the students of that generation.
I made this school into a Guoxue Academy, called Mulei Academy, and gave myself a "dean", which is to find a livelihood for the second half of my life. From then to now, it has been busy for nearly 10 years.
However, the academy only spends money and does not make money, and I also raise a few people to help me manage the yard. Occasionally, there are some training courses, which may have a little gain, which may not be enough to pay the chef's salary.
But I'm not in a hurry, I'm in a hurry. One Man's Village has been a bestseller, with tens of thousands of copies sold every year. And I keep getting new books out, and I can feed the academy with royalties.
A fence tied with volunteers
Every year, I recruit 3 to 5 volunteers to come and live and study with us. I would arrange some more interesting work with them, such as building a fence wall in a vegetable field, or building a road, or making a thing by hand. Because I was a good carpenter, I took them with me.
Most of the volunteers are college students, as well as graduate students and the like. Because they've read so many books in school, what they need most is to get their hands dirty. When they get started, they forget to learn, which is the best state to learn in the hands.
I remember that three years ago, a doctoral student, a theater student, was writing a script, and he couldn't write it, and he came here to study it.
It was spring and I bought some saplings and he helped me plant the trees. He had never dug a pit, and planting a tree first had to dig a small pit with a shovel, and then plant the tree into it. After digging a few pits and planting saplings into them, he felt very rewarding, and he finally learned to dig pits. I think in his script in the future, he will also learn to dig pits.
Winter snow in rapeseed ditch When the snow clears, the grass begins to grow
After my articles were included in middle school textbooks, I often saw some students' messages on Weibo.
Especially in the article "The Cold Wind Blows Through", a girl left a message saying that she would not help but cry and cry when she read it in class.
I think for the children who are moved, they have read it. But the children then left a message saying that once they started doing questions and answers about the article, it was painful.
We are now teaching language education when mathematics is taught. Language should allow the child to form his own unrestrained, broad emotions, and countless imaginations.
Now tighten it into a narrow passage, which is called "tie-in," which means to tie up the cattle. How is it possible to cultivate a writer in this way.
Liu Liangcheng in the Gobi
When I was studying, from elementary school to the first grade, my father was persecuted and was gone. Before the second grade was finished, the school in the village stopped, and the school in the next village was too far away, so I just stayed at home. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I went back to school.
At that time, I liked to look at the vast Gobi Desert in Xinjiang, I could see the horizon, and the sky like a dome overhead, the endless Gobi Desert was rarely green, and the bare desert brought people a kind of desolation. Over and over again, I couldn't get bothered.
After my father died, I had another stepfather, who was a storyteller.
In the evening, many villagers gathered in our house. At that time, the house was also very small, adults sat on the kang, children squatted on the ground, or sat on a small bench, listening to my father talk about "Three Kingdoms", "Yang Jiajian", "Xue Rengui Zhengxi". Paragraph by paragraph, I can remember it when he says it, and I can tell it to other children.
Although I didn't read many books at that time, my stepfather made me hear some of the stories in the books very early on and learned to tell stories.
Liu Liangcheng and his granddaughter Zhizhi
I think the most important thing in education is to give children a childhood.
Our little granddaughter, you almost don't have to care, put her on the ground, sit in the middle of a lot of toys, she will make up all the toys into a story, this heart is filled with a lot of spiritual things, she will know what she does.
Some people ask me, I have written so many bugs, dogs, can find beauty in it, is it that I am particularly sensitive, different from ordinary people?
In fact, no child will not be in a daze at a worm or a flower when there is no child.
The adult didn't know what he was looking at, but he certainly saw something far richer than the adult saw, and that was childhood. It's just that when many people grow up, they forget it.
When I went back to writing about my childhood, I found so many things that I would never see again.
Rapeseed furrow harvested wheat field
Young people are anxious now, I think that's because they don't know what they want to get, maybe their desire to earn money is stronger than we were then, and the pressure of life is greater.
But I think that matter can change the superficial self, but it cannot change the inner self. A man's ultimate wealth is his heart.
The inner world is a building, parents have long given us a heart, the only thing that children can change is to continue to learn, constantly cultivate, and constantly know the richer content of this world, from literature, philosophy, various artistic disciplines to obtain their own spiritual nourishment, to complete a more noble inner world.
Have a mind that can settle itself, and you can grasp both pleasures and unpleasantnesses. Even if you encounter major setbacks, this self-grasping mind can calm you down and make you start again.
The kittens in the academy in winter
In the face of the waves of fate, I think ordinary people should have an ordinary focus.
I have also read the reports of the Russo-Ukrainian war in recent days, including some hot spots on the Internet, but I have never paid too much attention to it.
Of course, those big things always have to be cared for, but if you lose your concern for the big things around you in order to care about those things, you are a vain person, a person who hides from idleness.
Last year I joined the Xinjiang Wild Camel Protection Association. In April or May, I'll take the time to see the wild camels. Wild camels in Xinjiang are on the verge of extinction, and I want to record some videos and call on everyone to pay attention to such a thing.
If I can help the wild camels to do something to make this population from endangered to surviving, I think it's a big thing.
Because I think a lot of things are happening around me. We lost a cat in the yard, and an old man was hospitalized two days in front of the village. In your life, all around you, very big things are happening all the time, but you turn a blind eye, you treat it as a small thing.
The pictures in this article are provided by Mr. Liu Liangcheng
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