Zheng Zaihuan: Born in 1990 in Zhumadian, Henan Province, Zheng Zaihuan lived in Beijing. He is the author of "Zhumadian Sad Stories Collection", "Killing enemies all night tonight", "Reunion is always before separation" and other works.
Hometown has never been a landmark of my writing, talent is, people move with time, and stories flow
Liu Xinyue: Hello in Huan, I have long wanted to find an opportunity to talk about your novel creation. Reading your two most recently published novel collections last year, "Killing enemies all night" and "Reunion is always before separation," it felt like watching you turn back to your hometown of Zhumadian and spell out a time-consuming and enduring puzzle. "Reunion is always before separation" and the recent work "Separation and Disturbance" both write about returning home, and many of the neighbors you once wrote about have reappeared. But the protagonist has been away from home for too long, and when he returns, he will always encounter all kinds of moments of sitting and standing. The cooling of human feelings after the neglect of contact with your hometown inevitably occurs, and it also weakens the emotional temperature of your writing. As written in "Departure and Disturbance", the protagonist who returns to his hometown to mourn is trapped in the old people and new things that "cover his face like hail", and the story ends in a confused and desolate atmosphere. The act of mourning is originally an open inquiry, and the protagonist seems to have no idea what he is looking for or creating when he returns. If you count from the time you left home at the age of 16, this year has happened to be another 16 years. Like years folded in half, the time you say goodbye to Zhumadian has been as long as the time you once lived there. This puzzle is probably not yet finished, and continuing to tell the story of Zhumadian is still waiting for some kind of echo that cannot be predicted by itself?
Zheng Zaihuan: Hello Xinyue, I don't have a feeling of waiting, for life, it is better to wait than to collide. I'm willing to bump into things that excite me, things that I really care about. The stories I am willing to write are almost all like this, when the incident occurred, people were moved, and after the incident, the heart was still moving, so I had to think, and the things that did not make sense became stories. It's like always having one or two unprovoked lyrics echoing in your head, and you're tempted to complete them.
So, I'm afraid of getting things understood, and the more I understand things, the less stories there are. Of course, people must grow up and see more, and it is not strange that they see more, many things are already known when they happen, or because of the inertia of "knowing", you think you understand, and you are too lazy to think about it again, so the story has no breeding soil at all. Saying this seems to explain why I wrote a series of stories about my hometown as a teenager.
At that time, I was lonely and full of hope for the future, when the incident occurred, I was shocked, and after the incident, I wondered: How did it come to this? The stories written after the age of twenty are actually the doubts of teenagers. After writing this batch intensively, I have not written anything about my hometown for a long time, although I go back every year, but I can't join life in just a few days of going back, I can only be regarded as examining, and the examination is arrogant and indifferent.
The two articles you mentioned, one wrote about going home for the New Year, and the other about going home for the funeral, I hadn't written anything about my hometown for at least five years before that. Interestingly, the year I wrote about the New Year, I happened not to go home for the New Year, I lost interest in going back, I had to wonder why I no longer longed to go home, so the story began to come together again.
Ben Funeral is written for the funeral of my grandmother, and ten years ago I just refused to run for my grandfather's funeral, ten years apart, why do I have a different attitude? Coupled with the absurd farce that happened in front of me after I went back, those few days lingered in my mind, and eventually grew into a story that I was willing to write and share with everyone. So I want to clarify again, my hometown has never been a landmark of my writing, talent is, people migrate over time, and stories flow.
What is poetry? It is part of the ultimate ideal of mankind, where there is pure beauty, there is the perception of reality, but there is no shackles of reality.
Liu Xinyue: One of the most used words people describes your Zhumadian as "magic." But if you look closely, the so-called "magic" is at most a bizarre and strange short dispute between life, old age, illness and death and neighbors. Or rather, it's the original situation of life, but you tell them in an absurd and humorous way. I'm more inclined to think that what you write in fiction is a reality that people have forgotten or lost. This reality has not disappeared in today's China, but only because it is too far away from the daily life of some people, it shows an incredible sense of distortion. Calling it "magic" is itself magical. You're more like, with doubt, trying to understand the logic of a living reality and inviting the reader to participate.
Zheng Zaihuan: "Magic" is now a commonly used adjective in people's mouths. People use this word to describe things that are inappropriate and contrary to common sense, and when they are used, most people know why those things are not appropriate and why they violate common sense, which contains a helpless explanation - since everyone knows that it should not happen, but why does it still happen?
Therefore, "magic" does not point to any kind of literary technique in the mouth of the public, but only when the word is used. In my opinion, reality is also a technique, writing can not restore reality, reality is too complex, and it is exhausting. When reality is written, it is only to create poetry with the help of a familiar mirror image. What is poetry? It is part of the ultimate ideal of mankind, where there is pure beauty, there is the perception of reality, but there is no shackles of reality.
Liu Xinyue: Just said "wait better than bump", I remembered that you are a walking enthusiast. In the homeless wandering of the young protagonist, the countryside sometimes shows its cruel, desolate and terrible side. But then you write about returning home, and the gesture of people walking in the fields is always stretched. The ease and familiarity in the bones of nature, seasons, crops, and customs seems to have never left. You've lived in Beijing for a long time, and you still often see trees, rivers, and night skies in your circle of friends. In this spring of home isolation, I was envious and touched. While wandering around is about aimless, would a walk around the city be a way to "bump" and discover?
Zheng Zaihuan: This long-term home life will inevitably make everyone aware of the necessity of the outside world. I was supposed to be a lazy sleeper, but every time I came home, I would wake up early the next morning, and it should be a familiar awakening. The birdsong in the woods, the leaking curtains, made me habitually awake. Usually I would get up and walk around the village. Our village is big, and it takes about an hour to go around, and I'll take some pictures and say hello to people who recognize me.
In this silent early-rise atmosphere, seeing the familiar ditches and woods, of course, I think of my childhood, but my starting point is not for nostalgia, I just want to see the changes. Strangely, although most of the people I see are new, when I walk around, my heart is always filled with a gray old. It seems that nostalgia is difficult to control, even in the midst of great changes, the past years are still heavy at every intersection.
Walking in the city, first of all, is physical needs, living in the steel jungle, it is too lacking to moisturize. I grew up in the countryside where the door is the world and the earth, the city needs to go downstairs, just one more action, going out has become a very directional thing.
You come out, you always have to do something, so you take a walk, in fact, this thing in the countryside is just to stand at the door for a while after eating, watching the stars blowing the wind, and chatting with your neighbors. The cultivation of lifestyle depends on the experience of comfort, and going out for a walk after eating is a kind of comfort in my place. So I went for a walk, without any meaning of "exploration" and "discovery", my life is also, comfort is the premise, discovery is an accident. For example, when you meet a person singing out of tune on the road, the way you run out of tune just makes you laugh, this is an unexpected discovery. When walking, the chance of laughing is not very large, but it is also possible.
Liu Xinyue: I noticed that you prefer to talk about "poetry" and "beauty", which at first glance seems to be a bit out of place with the rough, despicable, and cruel world you wrote, especially from the labels of suffering and left-behind children repeatedly rendered by the media. Sometimes, you seem to want to use "aesthetic" methods to transcend the social problem attributes that your novel naturally carries, but aesthetics does not mean degrading the latter's weight. This logic of lightening the heavy, or turning evil into beauty, also has an inherent consistency with your habit of using comedy to balance the tragic core. One of the comedic forms of this comedy is pranks, and you often make characters suffer pranks, which appear in "Kill Enemies All Night", "Wall-Bumping Game" and "I'm Just a Ghost, I Can't Do Anything". Faced with deeper dilemmas, pranks are like a "positive way not to take the world seriously," a trade-off joke that, even if it teases them, is well-intentioned and intolerable.
Zheng Zaihuan: Thank you for noticing my prank. I love pranks, pranks are pure fun, but also point to evil. Unlike profit-driven evil, the prank-driven evil is fun. What's the fun? Especially in difficult circumstances, fun is a means of self-regulation. Just as people have more or less addictions, behavioral addictions are the way to fight nothingness.
People use some addictions to avoid confronting nothingness. In general, addiction is certainly bad, but addiction will produce fun, just as pranks will produce happiness, although it also has side effects. In my case, beauty arises, and this beauty is richer and more resilient than profit-driven beauty, although ultimately it all points to survival. Survival itself is not interesting, and the direct expression of the problem of survival is not beautiful in my opinion.
Moreover, coarseness and contempt are not the opposites of beauty, they are the opposites of good looks. Of course, what looks good is beautiful, but that is not the work of art, it is the work of heaven, the creation of heaven, and we can just praise it. Anything that is chosen by art must be developed in its opposite. In ancient times, there were many beautiful scenes, and poets casually chanted, and then we found that the beautiful scenery was given to melancholy.
In good artistic creation, the pure beauty I can think of is the elf queen in The Lord of the Rings, who is fairy and fluttering as soon as she appears, but she can be so beautiful in the audience's heart, thanks to the crumbling world of Middle-earth. The more dangerous the world was, the more beautiful she looked.
I don't like breakthroughs, at least in the matter of writing, writing should first and foremost be a comfortable mental activity
Liu Xinyue: Your latest novel "3" also tells a story about women's beauty, or women's pursuit of beauty. It seems that this is also the first time you have a woman as the protagonist, and it is in the first novel that you write about the growth of three girls in one breath, who run away from their respective three-sister families and enter the city to seek independence. What struck me most about the novel was that you wrote about the girls working in the countryside. After entering the city, through the fermentation of the nail art business, the body of labor turned to the body transformation of mixed labor, aesthetics, and consumption, and after I read it, I was confused about "who prescribed the standard of women's beauty". This confusion points not so much to the gender order as to the problems of consumer society and class. In recent years, you have also written a lot of stories in the context of the flow of the city, is "3" an adventure to break through yourself?
Zheng Zaihuan: I don't like breakthroughs, at least in the matter of writing, breakthroughs are too purposeful, and writing should first be a comfortable spiritual activity. Like everyday walks, reading and writing are about creating a comfort zone for yourself, not about progress (of course, I must state that I am talking about fiction, not reference books). I never feel that staying in the comfort zone is to stand still, the comfort zone will be self-renewing, the same type of novel read more, just want to see other, you have to discover, to create a new comfort zone with new reading materials. In the same way, I don't write for breakthroughs, I just want to create a new comfort zone where you can continue to have a soul massage.
Writing about the flow of going into the city is also a trend, because everyone around me lives this life. Entering the city is an irresistible torrent of the times. In the countryside when I was a child, the roads were not very good, the Internet was not popular, and I really lived a closed childhood. At that time, the value created by labor was defined by parents, and the beauty presented was simpler and more rigid.
Later, everyone went to the city as a teenager, wherever they went, and the Network was developed, and the labor at this time, like you said, will inevitably mix the various components of consumer society, and thus become more complex and more difficult to stereotype. Which is better I don't know, what can be determined is that integration is inevitable, and since it comes in, it must be integrated. The so-called success, that is, to integrate thoroughly enough. Of course, the joy of success has nothing to write, and the price of integration is worth a big book.
Liu Xinyue: I wonder if there are any questions that are most exciting or confusing for you in this kind of "homeopathic" writing? Your writing speed is really not too fast, but you are always exploring in different directions. "Reunion Is Always Before Separation" also makes a variety of techniques, forms and types of experimentation, which are more infused with urban imagination and media experience than the previous "hometown affairs", and sometimes I feel that I am watching independent passages in miniseries. Speaking of comfort zones, I think of "Bedtime Stories – Fantastic Three and Their Contemporaries," published this year, which is said to be a long-term creative project to be continued. You can see that when you write, you are in your most relaxed state of "making up stories". These short chapters have a light sense of fairy tale and allegory, and the country experience is deformed, like a jumping modern short poem.
Zheng Zaihuan: In the process of writing a thing, it is certainly not smooth sailing, I am often stuck by a sentence, sometimes a card is a few days or even accompanied by the entire writing process. I know how to write it down, and I know that this sentence has played a role, but every time I see that line of sentences that have been temporarily "let go", I feel like a fish in the throat, no matter how many times I change it, as long as I change it badly, it is not comfortable anywhere.
This has greatly changed my view that the essence of writing should be "form is greater than content", and the same is true of the puzzle, which is exactly the opposite of what I understood when I first started writing. The purpose of the novel is never to tell the story, but to tell it beautifully, and I demand that my sentences must be rhythmic, rhythmic, and flexible. I do not pursue rhetoric and metaphor in sentences, but I pursue the repair and metaphor between sentences, which are modified by rhythm and rhyme, and metaphors come from the elasticity and resonance of sentences.
At the same time, the sentence is also responsible for laying out and advancing the story, which is where it is difficult. For example, I wrote a sentence in order to lay the groundwork, but this sentence can't get the rhythm, no matter how to change it, it can't be stuck, but it will sacrifice the story, so I am stuck.
The writing of "Bedtime Stories" has a premise, that is, the language must be comfortable, in order to achieve this comfort can be regardless of the layout of the plot, so here I can avoid the above problems, I just manage the sentence, regardless of the overall situation. In this way, the effect it achieves is like casually telling a story, thinking about where to talk about, what to say. I make the protagonist's face change all the time, and it is also convenient to tell various types of stories.
For example, in the chapter "The Decision of Grass and Trees", the two heroes let their faces turn into plants and communicate with grass and trees. The story that is told casually is no worse than thoughtful, but it must be premised on the fact that the use of language has been fully practiced.
Liu Xinyue: "Zhumadian Sad Story Collection" is about to be revised, you have re-adjusted the whole book from beginning to end, can you share in advance what are the differences in the new version?
Zheng Zaihuan: In fact, there is not much difference, I changed things too long ago, a little afraid to move, always feel that it is the will of another person, now I am not qualified to drink five or six. This book is written in a hurry, it is written in one go, the narrative is inevitably rough, and I polished it as a whole to enhance the subtle reading experience. There are also places that can't help but add, such as the "Sending the End of the Old Man", the previous version said that he and "my" grandfather had a festival, this time did not hold back, I spread out this festival, added about fifteen hundred words. There are also a few additions, but few words have been largely absent.
"Kill the Enemy All Night"
Zheng Zaihuan
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
Shanghai Culture Publishing House
Shanghai Story Club Culture Media Co., Ltd
Shanghai Chewing Character Culture Communication Co., Ltd