Liu Liangcheng: The longest companionship for writers every day

Jiang Xiaobin, a reporter of China Youth Daily and China Youth Network

In the rapeseed ditch village of Ingeborg Township, Mulei County, Changji Prefecture, Xinjiang, at 8 p.m., the sun has not yet set, which is a good time to take a walk after dinner. The sound of the wind, birdsong, and the sudden sound of the tractor engine became the background sound of Liu Liangcheng's speech.

In the second season of the documentary "The Daily Life of Literature", Liu Liangcheng brought his friends to the Mulei Academy he built in the village. Wearing a straw hat and carrying a hoe, take two steps and crouch down to grab a raw sativa or dandelion... Liu Liangcheng's appearance image, compared with other farmers in Caizigou Village where he lived for 10 years, cannot be said to be exactly the same, but also a big difference.

Everything in the academy was old, the old yard, the old house, the old doors and windows, the old trees, and the old people. Recently, the academy wanted to hang a sign of "Liu Liangcheng Literature Museum", he looked for wood in the courtyard that could make a sign, and finally caught an old manger, turned over, just right.

Born in a village on the edge of the Gurbantunggut Desert in Xinjiang, Liu Liangcheng is still living in the village for his book "One Man's Village", and is still living in the village.

China Youth Daily: Many writers like to write about their hometown, and they only write after leaving their hometown, and your "One Man's Village" is also written in the city. Why should a writer write after "leaving"?

Liu Liangcheng: First of all, I want to distinguish between hometown and the concept of hometown: hometown is the place where you were born in the geographical sense, a village or a neighborhood, you can find it through a road; and the hometown is a place in the depths of the soul. Hometown needs us to leave, go to a distant place, gain the ability to know her, pick her up again, and then, become hometown.

A writer's writing, mostly from his hometown, carries all his feelings for his hometown, and in the writing of his hometown, he arrives at his hometown step by step. Therefore, literary writing is a long journey from home and finally to your hometown. Many writers write about their hometowns for a lifetime, and write about their hometowns as their hometowns; but there are also writers who write their hometowns as the hometowns of the characters in the books.

"One Man's Village" certainly has the meaning of hometown, it was written during my work in Urumqi after I left my hometown, and it is a village that I have collected with my heart that has gone away. All my childhood, my teenage years stayed there, and she gave me so many stories. Talking about that village is like having a dream, and the already sleeping life is stimulated to wake up. For me, it is only when life becomes a thing of the past and I recollect it, that I will get closer little by little. When the distant life is suspended like a dream, I know that I can write, and writing is the second understanding of life.

China Youth Daily: Your life was very bitter when you were a child, why can't you see any darkness in this book, but make people feel sunny?

Liu Liangcheng: My early life was very unfortunate, my father was gone when I was 8 years old, and my mother took 7 underage children and struggled to survive in the village. That kind of life is written by some writers, and it may be written as a history of suffering. But when I look back on my childhood as an adult, all the suffering is digested by me. Instead, the winds of my childhood, the moonlight and stars of night and night, the grass and trees, the sound of insects, the endless meditation and dreams of a teenager in the village, became the most important things in my writing. Literary writing allows writers to return to their childhood, to understand those sufferings, to understand those things that can be put down.

China Youth Daily, China Youth Network: I have been writing books, how to make a documentary?

Liu Liangcheng: If it is a documentary that purely talks about literature, I may hesitate, but "The Daily Life of Literature" comes to a writer's place of residence, and from the daily intervention I like, I think it is very good. When I was shooting, I didn't outline it, and I talked all the way, but it was all the questions I wanted to say and think about. In fact, the daily life of the writer is also part of his literature, although the daily life will not be written into literature and will be forgotten, but the daily life is the longest companion for the writer.

China Youth Daily: Now that you have returned to the village and lived in Rapeseed Valley Village, what is your daily life like?

Liu Liangcheng: Yesterday I went to the county seat, met a few friends, went to a Kazakh family for a meal, and drank a lot of wine. Today I was busy with that piece of wood (the old manger), the words I wrote, carved with friends, and the day passed.

Usually I wake up in the morning, my energy is more exuberant, and I can write. Eat at 2 p.m., take a lunch break at 3 p.m., sleep until 5 a.m., get up and do two hours of farm work. There are often a few young volunteers in the college, most of whom are college students or literature lovers, who come from other provinces and we study together.

China Youth Daily: What was the original intention of building Mulei Academy at that time?

Liu Liangcheng: In fact, it was a very accidental walk, and I found such an abandoned old school at auction, and someone wanted to buy it as a sheep pen, so I decided to buy it on the spot. After buying it, I realized that I wanted to make a college; and the so-called academy, at the beginning, did not know what to do, then first as a vegetable garden, the land can not be deserted; planting, there are ideas, the old house is renovated, hang a college card, literati, there is always a pastoral dream of reading in the rain and the dream of the academy.

Liu Liangcheng

China Youth Daily: In the documentary, I saw that you planted a lot of things in the academy?

Liu Liangcheng: That's a must. The college has more than 40 acres of land, of which 3 acres are planted with vegetables, and in the summer we can basically be self-sufficient in eating vegetables. When I first came here, I planted a few acres of wheat, because I didn't use pesticides or herbicides, and half of it was grass, and there were a lot of grass seeds. They grew the same big and could not be easily distinguished, and finally both harvested, so we ate grass seed wheat noodles like sheep for a year, fortunately the wheat grains were the majority, and the taste was slightly bitter.

I've been living here for 10 years now, and 50-60 years old might be the last chance for a guy to do something. Without this academy, I might have done more other things, but I can't say that I was delayed, because these things may be good or bad, maybe go into business and then go bankrupt.

China Youth Daily: Do you still want to do business?

Liu Liangcheng: I've been trying to do business. In the early 1990s, when the whole people "went to the sea", I opened a store department for agricultural machinery accessories; I also opened a "one-man village bar" in Urumqi, but it went out of business for more than a year, and I lost all the royalties of the book, so I started writing again.

China Youth Daily: Today's young people say that they yearn for "poetry and far away", what was the "poetry and far away" when you were young?

Liu Liangcheng: I was born and raised in a distant village in distant Xinjiang, and I am writing poetry, so "poetry and far away" is all around me. Later, when I left my hometown to work in Urumqi, I never wrote poetry again, and "poetry and far away" disappeared from me. One is because poetry is a kind of writing in my adolescence, when I left my hometown in my 30s; another reason may be that I worked in the city, lived a too realistic life, the poetry in my heart was interrupted, and poetry became a blank existence.

China Youth Daily: Recently you published a new book , "Bemba," and you said that you were moved by the poem "Everyone Lives at the Age of 25" in the Mongolian epic "Jianger". What were you doing when you were 25?

Liu Liangcheng: I got married at the age of 24, had a child at the age of 25, worked as an agricultural machinery manager at a township agricultural machinery station, and worked with tractor drivers all day. At that time, life was very dazed, I didn't know what I could do, and I also wrote poetry, but I didn't think of literature as a big thing, after all, it was too far away from those famous poets, like Kitajima and Shuting.

A little older, began to think about life, so began to do business, the first business was done, in the "ten thousand yuan household" era earned ten thousand yuan, too powerful! So I thought that since doing business is so simple, why do I still want to do business, so I started writing again.

China Youth Daily: What is your favorite age?

Liu Liangcheng: I like every age, and sometimes I prefer my current age. By the time I was 60, I had 50, 40, 30, 20, prime, youth and childhood. For the person who writes, all ages have not yet passed, and it is possible to go back to any era in writing.

China Youth Daily: What age do you want to go back to?

Liu Liangcheng: Childhood. Childhood does not know anything, does not know hardship, does not know misfortune, feels that I have the whole world.

China Youth Daily: Writer Ma Yuan once said, "Everyone who writes has a place to grow old." Every thinking heart has a place to live." Where do you want to end up in the old age?

Liu Liangcheng: I have lived to be 60 years old in Rapeseed Ditch, and I can only live here slowly. Of course, I still like the village. It's full of things I'm familiar with: elms, poplars, almonds, jujubes... I was born with the smell of jujube flowers, and now I can smell them every spring. Although it is a thousand miles away from the village where I was born, the trees are the same as the birds in the trees, even the wind is the same. That's what I like.

China Youth Daily: I heard the wind over there.

Liu Liangcheng: The sun is setting, and I should go home. To the west of the academy was a small mountain beam, and the sun had already set behind the mountain beam, but it was still early to fall below the horizon.

Source: China Youth Daily client