The recommended book | Zhou Xuanpu's "Silence Like The Land: A Record of the Great Zhou": Using Hometown as a Method

Zhou Xuanpu, "Silence Like Land: A Return to the Great Zhou"

This is a long non-fiction work that tells the origin, legends and stories of Dazhou Village, Linying County, Henan Province, a village with a history of more than 600 years and a population of more than 2,000 people.

The author was born and raised in Si, and spent his childhood in Dazhou Village. Human beings have a desire to find their roots. After 40 years of leaving his hometown, the author returned to the haunting Dazhou Village, listened, observed and interviewed, re-recognized and felt this familiar and unfamiliar land, captured its unknown bustle and coldness, listened to the noise of daily life, and felt the inner story of the villagers when they were silent, so as to achieve emotional resonance. The fluttering rural tone and nostalgia and inner nostalgia are entangled in the author's pen, which delicately presents the world's hearts and rural expressions behind the great changes in the countryside.

Dazhou Village, "a hot real world", is not only a photograph of the current style of the Central Plains countryside, but also a realistic epitome of China's vast countryside.

Returning to the Great Zhou Ji is the author's journey from the spiritual hometown to the original hometown of literature.

Take your hometown as a method

——Commenting on Zhou Xuanpu's "Silence Like The Land: The Return to the Great Zhou"

Kong Will Hero

For many writers, hometown is an important and special field. Many small corners on the map of China are closely related to the creation of writers and have far-reaching influence. The relationship between Dazhou Village and Zhou Xuanpu is like this. Once, in the early days when she could not find the direction of writing, it was aimless wandering in her hometown, allowing her to summon back memories, brew up emotions and tones, and write the masterpiece "Many Bays". Later, the hometown served as the fermentation ground for her novel character story, she placed the two fictional women of "The Day Near Chang'an Yuan" to the north dance ferry in her hometown, watching the river slowly go east, the character image was activated instantly, and their respective tortuous lives were like boats on the river, clear in front of their eyes. And this time, hometown is the method. Through it, Zhou Xuanpu touched the potholes at the vast bottom of society, recorded the fate of the countryside in the development of the great era, and accumulated his own understanding and reflection on life and human nature.

This "Silence Like The Land: The Return to the Great Zhou" is a documentary work, zhou Xuanpu depicts her experiences and feelings of returning to her hometown several times, and meticulously draws a true picture of the current rural situation in the Central Plains. The living system in the village has changed a lot: the new buildings in the bright hall and the old courtyards are mixed with the decadent old courtyards, the lively atmosphere in the village streets has faded at any time, and the cold haunts many corners; most of the people in the village go out to work, and the able people who stay behind are contracting a lot of land and working hard to make a living; in the past, people tried every means to hide from family planning, and now they can't count so many leftover men of marriage age around them with their fingers. The gap between urban and rural areas is getting smaller and smaller, and most of the children go to school in the city... This writing process allowed Zhou Xuanpu to further condense her as the core plate of the writer. She is an empirical writer in the spirit of realism, and the path of cutting into reality and judging the perspective of the world is the key to her creation. And this hometown with Da Zhou as the center and the surrounding villages as the radiation is her path and perspective.

In recent years, how works reflect the complex and unspeakable reality of China is something that bothers and inspires writers, and "non-fiction" is the response and attempt under this premise. For more than a decade, "non-fiction" has grown stronger and stronger, even beyond the boundaries of literature, and has been valued by many other cultural workers and social audiences in the face of affirmations and doubts, the fundamental reason for which is that truthful recording may be the best expediency when facing and sorting out China's problems. We are in the present moment, and we really feel a lot of trivial information coming from us, but our hearts are becoming more and more confused, even uneasy, unable to say the present, let alone the future. Obviously, the communication channel between the crowd is much more convenient, but the barrier between each other is harder and thicker. In the past, some of the theories or experiences that we used to explain China's development state have been stretched and difficult to explain, and some have lost the space for speech.

But it is very interesting that many Chinese writers have been shaped into a stubborn sense of realistic care and responsibility, not retreating to history or fantasy space to pin their feelings, but also having to stand on the shore of China's development process, staring wide-eyed and concentrating, to absorb the truth of the people's survival, and not afraid of too many hearings and witnesses, too much love can not help, will torment the soul.

There is an informative detail in the book that the author and his sister went to visit their cousin in Arazhang Village: the cousin was not an incurable disease, he was "still in the middle of the body, that is, he rode a tricycle three months ago to catch a meeting, fell down when he got off the car, stomped on the ground, and broke his waist bone." But he was already alone in the eyes and behavior of his family's disgust, waiting for the last moment to come. His "room" smelled bad, and there was a mess of things, a thick layer of dust, and it was impossible to touch it anywhere. They walked over to their cousin and saw "under the thin acrylic blanket on the bed, as if there were no one there." We called out to our cousins a few times, but no one answered, and then we went to the bedside and startled a few flies. The cousin woke up, waved his arm, and there was another flurry of flies. The cousin looked up, and then sat up slowly, pale and frighteningly thin. ”

This sad plot is very depressing, and life's numbness to life is terrible, but it has been staged in many villages and reported in many people's mediation columns or short videos. In addition to examining the truth of life, Zhou Xuanpu also boldly surveyed the truth of human nature, and even himself or his relatives were placed in the list of unavoidable scrutiny as an extension of the village. The hometown, the beginning of this life of "born in Si and grown up in Si", makes people attached to it and will comfort people when they are sad and frustrated, but the people in the hometown are carefully investigated, and like the people in the world, they are trivial, hide dirt and dirt, and show the true texture of many human natures, some simple and kind, and some bad. The things of the hometown are not only the things of the hometown. To investigate the truth of Chinese-style survival and the truth of human nature, it is impossible to peek through the whole leopard, and we can only focus on "a spot", and the hometown is undoubtedly the best perspective. Zhou Xuanpu was born and grew up in Dazhou Village, and since she turned to Xi'an around the age of ten, she has both emotional ties to her hometown and a sense of strangeness that she is no longer familiar with. Therefore, she can quickly integrate into the circle of relatives and friends, and "immerse herself" in discovering the situation in all aspects of Dazhou Village: changes in fields and rivers, changes in village streets and courtyards, changes in people's lives and thoughts... At the same time, she can be "out of the ordinary" and always maintain the vision experienced in the outside world, so as to make "looking back and observing more thorough and rational" and achieve overall, objective cognition and grasp.

In reading, I can always imagine her walking in Dazhou and other villages and towns, and I can always feel that her frank hometown is a dojo in the flow of history. For decades, every wave and tide in the process of China's development has left traces in the vast rural areas, and the lives and destinies of farmers are firmly embedded in the large chain of cause and effect. Therefore, the livelihood, entertainment, joy, and distress of the Great Zhou people are all figurative instructions for understanding the characteristics of the times.

This book is Zhou Xuanpu's conscious exploration and infiltration, she is eager to read her hometown, read the deceased, eager to achieve her closeness to China's reality, dialogue, so as to enrich her own experience and thinking. Therefore, I believe that the writing of this book is a transition, a pre-stage for her to enter another work or another stage of creation. She said, "Maybe, this is just the beginning," which shows that she herself perceives it this way.

So, what will she write next? I, like many readers, look forward to it.

Kong Huixia is an associate professor at Zhengzhou Normal University. Engaged in contemporary literary research, he is the author of "Li Peifu Commentary" and so on.