Recently, the latest work of writer Liang Xiaosheng, the novel "Chinese Tao Li", was launched by writers publishing house. On April 22, Beijing, the publishing house held a meeting for him in the group conference room in the Beijing + online media earnest talk - the meeting was originally scheduled to be held on the 20th, did not want Liang Xiaosheng's health treasure to be suddenly hit by the pop-up window at noon on the 19th, and the convener of the event excitedly notified the media to reschedule goodbye! In the silent prayer and waiting, everyone hoped for the good news of his negative nucleic acid results.
This small "episode" glimpses the uncertainties in life and work under the epidemic. But for the 73-year-old writer himself, one thing is particularly certain: since the TV series "The World" hit at the beginning of the year, the activity platforms that could not be pushed apart and the media interviews that flocked to Liang Xiaosheng have long been physically and mentally exhausted. Rao is that after graduating from fudan Chinese department in 1977, he worked as a screenwriter in two state-owned film studios in Beijing, "grasped artistic creation" for many years, to say that he is not unfamiliar with the film and television circle, but also frightened by this "traffic era".
Writer Liang Xiaosheng Surging News Reporter Wang Yitu
How sad and heavy is it? "I'm not one of those people"
"I hope you can read my new novel, and this time I will not talk about "The World of Man."" Before the April 22 earnest discussion meeting, reporters from various media outlets received this message and replied with confirmation.
And the writer always observes life all the time, "In the past few months, I have noticed a problem, no matter which media, most of them come up, as soon as I say that I am so tired, he immediately said a short video is good, just two minutes, but two minutes I also have to pour an hour." Please spare me and show me compassion. At this time, most of the boys are speechless at first, and you suddenly feel that he really sympathizes with you on the other end of the phone, although you can feel that he is also very lost. But the girl's aggressiveness and grasping at the stalking of not letting go is really irresistible. I have a question, what about girls giving up? Does it have a big impact on her life and career? There was no impact, in the past, the 'half of the sky' did not come up, and now when it comes up, this extremely strong, successful, rising (feeling)..." At the meeting, Liang Xiaosheng looked helpless.
Coincidentally, today's workplace mapping also appears in his new work "Chinese Peach and Lee". This novel as usual has no preface and afterword: In the new millennium, two post-80s Chinese college students, male student Li Xiaodong and female student Xu Ran, from the joy of the campus era to the society after marriage, "Beijing Drift" was made a chicken feather by life. The boy finally returned to his hometown because of filial piety before the bed, and the girl and then the husband sang with the woman, and the two found the value of life and the destination of the soul in the hometown together. The novel is developed from the first perspective of "I", Li Xiaodong, considering that the writer himself has a son after the 80s and the experience of teaching at Beijing Language and Culture University, the sense of substitution is very clear.
(duǐ), vividly showing the first glimpses of the lives of the two college students in the novel, is also the key word in the first chapter. The first question that the surging news reporter threw at the writer on the spot: "People" and "mutual" are the mantras of the post-80s generation, and I was surprised to find that you actually paid attention to it, can you tell me how you found the usage of this word and the fashion behind the vocabulary?
Liang Xiaosheng first froze, "This word seems to be used in colloquial language, and I have also made a few moves with the editors, because I can't figure it out, we generally use the word 'duì', and the subtitles on CCTV are also this word." But is 'tosay' a verb? It seems that more use as an adjective is our current incorrect use of Old Chinese characters. Together with the editors, I found the correct way to write this tone, ''. ”
"One more thing." Liang Xiaosheng continued, "After writing "The World of Man", I want to relax a little and write a novel that is not so heavy, otherwise everyone thinks that I am a person who does not know how worried and heavy it is, but in fact I am not. In "Chinese Peach and Plum", there is often a small humor hidden between the lines, which is also the state I am more willing to be in in my life. ”
He publicly announced that the film and television adaptation of "Chinese Tao Li" has been put on the agenda, and even asked the reporters present for advice - Professor Wang, the university teacher of the two protagonists of the novel, has his favorite candidate, "What do you think of Fan Wei?" When he heard someone say that Fan Wei had won the Golden Horse Award for Best Actor for "Not a Problem", the writer would smile heartily.
The relatively relaxed mentality when writing "Chinese Tao Li" is also reflected in the fact that the writer does not mind the name of "Liang Xiaosheng", which appears in the novel with a ridiculous brushstroke. On February 15 this year, Liang Xiaosheng wrote the novel "Chinese Tao Li", "That Liang Xiaosheng, if he is like my Ran, he often transfers to the second scene of life and death (in the novel, Li Xiaodong's wife Xu Ran returns to his hometown, works as the director of the retired old cadre service office under the municipal government, and often presides over the operation of the memorial service), it is estimated that he will not sell his dog skin plaster everywhere ..."
"Actually, I went through the 1980s, and people like us read a little bit of books out and had a long period of time when I took myself too seriously. We pretend to be profound, and this profound appearance is also very difficult, the most arduous work, the words are not easy to say, and the novel has become obscure. In fact, the novel is not so big, it should be said that many people pick up a pen to write about life, as long as the text is good, it can be called a literary work. You have to look at the Internet, at every turn to comment on the 'top ten novelists', in short, still carrying the novel to a high place, as if how mysterious, are nonsense. You write a novel and the former bootsmith customized a good pair of boots, customized a high-end bag, I personally think it is similar, and people brew world famous wine, make the world brand perfume, can be placed on the same level. Therefore, I do not think that the profession of novelist can be shelved in today's human society, as if it were higher than other professions. That's probably what I'm trying to say, and I'm joking. Liang Xiaosheng said.
Fiction writer and time recorder, "I have also experienced a state of tearing"
In 2017, the novel "Human World" was launched, and in 2019, it won the "Mao Award", which is compared with the huge attention brought by the current TV series adaptation, most people in the world have not noticed that Liang Xiaosheng has launched three novels in one go in the past three years: "My Life and Me" (2020), "Pastoral Endowment" (2021) and the current "Chinese Tao Li".
Since he ascended to the literary scene in the 1980s, Liang Xiaosheng has always adhered to the Taoist system of realistic writing, and readers familiar with his works know that his "high prolific" state is not only the old Ji Futuo after the ancient rare years. In addition to his fiction and literary creation, he has published the sensational "Analysis of All Levels of Chinese Society" in 1997, and in the past decade, he has also published books on the shelves of bookstore "social sciences" such as "Depressed Chinese" (2012), "Nervous Chinese" (2013), and "Chinese Survival Apocalypse" (2014). In 2014, after participating in the literary and art work forum, Liang Xiaosheng launched two books at the beginning of the following year, "Our Times and Society" and "I Believe in China's Future", which were both worried and hopeful. From this, people saw Liang Xiaosheng, who defined the identity of intellectuals as "social conscience".
In "Analysis of all classes of Chinese society", he describes the "contemporary middle class" in this way: China's middle class, in China's modern history, has almost never formed any class that cannot be ignored, let alone have almost no social influence. In contemporary Chinese society, because this class is new, there is no class of consciousness tradition to speak of. It's like a three-year-old child, crying hungry, laughing, peeing, feeling comfortable being touched by a gentle hand, and obediently falling asleep after a few taps. The instinct of its class consciousness is, at best, to react so mediocrely.
In "Depressed Chinese", he borrowed Hugo's three sentences to express his current reading of the spirit of the university: "The first step to equality is justice." "Reform consciousness is a kind of moral consciousness." "Progress is the phenomenon that people should have." At the end of "Nervous Chinese", Liang Xiaosheng asked about humanistic feelings? "More civilized people influence and lead the consciousness of social civilization with their own civilization. High-tech can be bought from abroad with foreign exchange, but the humanistic spirit cannot buy it. I hope that in the future, you will become a person with first-class professional ability and humanistic feelings. ”
Of course, these remarks can be regarded as the preface and afterword of the writer in the novel work, but what is more interesting is how Liang Xiaosheng has made an identity transition between novel creation and "social science" writing for more than two decades, or the transformation of personal writing status? This is the second question raised by the surging news reporter on the spot.
Liang Xiaosheng sighed slightly, "In fact, before the Analysis of All Levels of Chinese Society, I also wrote "The 93Th Assertion", "Gazing at the 97th" and so on. In fact, after the beginning of China's transformation period, there was a similar inflection point in a year, and there were many phenomena in society that year, and my impression was that Beijing suddenly had many more companies, leather bag companies, and in addition to a lot of similar comprador people in society, layoffs and unemployment also appeared. ”
When the social inflection point came, Liang Xiaosheng said that he defined the writing as the era recorder, "I am not directly recording, so it becomes like Lu Xun, it is an essay, at this time I did put down the novel conception, remembering that the essay is close to the combat state, maybe this state lasts for a long time." By the time I wrote "Analysis of All Levels of Chinese Society", it was relatively more macroscopic and had a little cross-border feeling. ”
At the scene, he thoughtfully thought, "Such a big cross-border is not too much among contemporary Chinese writers, maybe Mr. Wang Meng sometimes crosses between literature and essays, but it is I who directly cross over to write so many 'social essays', and I will not feel shy because of my own span of a period, I think those are also worth writing." I even sometimes feel complacent, thinking that I can still write well, because all levels of Chinese society, when our leaders went to the Academy of Social Sciences, they still listened to people, you see what we have to do let Liang Xiaosheng do, indicating that what I wrote still received attention. I published an article in guangming daily called "Confessions of the Old Land Tax Collector", which was almost a full page, and then a local tax expert said in class, "You see we go to class to discuss these issues, and the novelist wrote it there in a few thousand words." ”
Liang Xiaosheng frankly said that when those writers write novels and read novels, they only have novels in their eyes, and they are different from them. "I think there have to be more things, more phenomena in the eyes of novelists. If we look back at the history of literature, so many good novelists, so Tolstoy, so Hugo, so dickens, so so Turgenev, even the poets shelley, Byron, Heine, they have always been like this, I think they still put themselves in the state of being both poets and intellectuals at that time, and they began to become relatively peaceful later. It's about age, it's about age. ”
In addition to his status as a writer, Liang Xiaosheng also served as a member of the Haidian District CPPCC Committee for two decades and a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference for three years. He said that after he was in his forties, he began to contact "another kind" of intellectuals, "they may still be officials, listening to them talk about the country." On this platform, everyone participates in the politics and makes suggestions - so long that I have learned at least a little: as long as you are right, of course, there must be operability, and almost all levels of government will adopt it. This forces you to look at society more comprehensively and objectively and ask questions. ”
Liang Xiaosheng said that at the meeting, he also had a "high voice", "the voice is so high, after you have expressed your worries and opinions, you feel that your temper has been released, and you may not feel torn when you write a novel again." (On the contrary) you start to make dark energy in the novel, and I think such a novelist lives a more screwed life. He laughed and said that he had more "paragraphs" at the CPPCC, "I have said everything I have to say, I have already expressed, and I can not do that in the novel." I have also experienced a state of tearing, to a state of gradually not tearing, more like an intellectual. ”
In the face of media questions, he sometimes threw his own questions to reporters, "How long have you been in Beijing?" Do you have your own house or car? "When a peking university graduate wondered why he couldn't let himself choose a job if he returned to his hometown, Liang Xiaosheng brought the problem back to his original intention." Let me give you an example, my master's student returned to Chongqing after graduating that year to work in the news department of the local television station. He cried when he went back, if my son I would kick him, too pretentious, crying, what happened to Chongqing? What happened to Chongqing TV? What happened to you in Beijing? Moreover, what awaits him in Beijing is not a good job, and there is no unit (household registration). I think in my life planning, this plan will definitely include which city I live in, but to say that Beijing is the focus of my planning, it would be too fatal. ”
The following is a shorthand compilation of the entire meeting (with sequential adjustments and abridgements), presented in the form of Liang Xiaosheng's dictation.
Writer Liang Xiaosheng Surging News Reporter Wang Yitu
Professor Wang in the novel is "I"
In the 1980s, Chinese was a very beautiful major, a department, once talented people and talented women were Chinese department, a school if there is no Chinese department, then how to get? Like the Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Dance Academy, the students at that time also ran literary publications and wrote poetry. Almost all the newspapers rushed to run supplements.
Later, literature began to be marginalized, and by the time the protagonists of the book began to learn Chinese, the situation was different. Chinese department seems to have become a "basket" - in the past, it was like to read Chinese, but now it may be a temporary consideration, and it may be that in science, it is not able to gain an advantage with boys in competition, which is a helpless consideration. Although there are many girls in your reporters, I think that especially girls, are now eager to enter the Chinese Department, and when they go to graduate school, they will quickly change and jump out to get rid of Chinese. We experienced this, and later they will be grateful to Chinese, because in the end their professional ability depends on Chinese.
The Professor Wang in the novel is me, and the content of his lectures is basically the same class I have taught. What do I have an idea for that? Everyone is hard to get into the university, sitting in the university classroom, especially the children of the family who are not very well-off, but also to bear the pressure of tuition fees, if you just come to the Chinese class to take everyone how to read a novel, it will seem too unintelligent. I personally feel that if it is an ancient Chinese class, it must be discussed by teachers and old gentlemen. Modern literature does not need to be taught by a teacher, and students almost do not have modern literature books that they cannot read after high school, but they are different ways of understanding. Therefore, I think that a better form of class is to think about what kind of thinking is triggered by a literary work, and it is valuable to think about the topic of thinking and the extended discussion.
Chinese is actually a very special profession, and the peculiarity is that even if I am half a bottle of water, I can swing very strongly and pretend to be particularly profound, which not only sometimes makes students do this, but also may involuntarily do so when the teacher lectures. Therefore, when we listen to the speeches of intellectuals who have studied literature, history and philosophy, we always feel that sometimes they seem profound, and when we think about it carefully, we feel out of tune. You see now when some intellectuals speak, many occasions have become entertaining, and the opening remarks are not as hot as talk shows, as if they can't get on the topic. A class of 45 minutes, the time is for people to pay tuition to be eligible to sit there, this situation may be a problem we face now.
When I was in the big class, sometimes students from the surrounding forestry universities, geology universities, and mining universities also came to listen to the lectures, and they had not read many novels, and now who had read "War and Peace"? There was a version that used to be six volumes, and I read the upper, middle, and lower three volumes, but who read it before the graduate school? I took them to the movie "Taxi Driver", and the last two discussions would make the classmates go out to buy drinks, bread and candy, and everyone could lie on the table with sugar to listen to the lessons, how to be comfortable and how to come, but the teacher walked around with chalk on the podium alone. I think that's the right way to talk about literature classes, but it may not be allowed at other universities.
I went to Beijing Language and Culture University in 2002, when there were nearly 10 boys or more in the class, they were all against the two words "Chinese", you can't stop his passion, to run a journal, the Beiyu publications did well that year, absorbed the surrounding college students also came to submit articles, and they also ran their own columns, there were comments, there were creations, there were poems, I also issued them certificates.
Sometimes I take classes with more than 200 people, and my classmates from around me also come. Later, there were fewer and fewer boys, and at least there were only two or three boys in a class, which should have started six or seven years ago. Boys are so few that if they are very introverted and don't speak, in fact the discussions you hear are all the same gender perspectives, which is a pity for the discussion itself. Discuss the problem can be said to be this voice, that kind of voice, different views, in fact, there is another point - gender, how do men see it, how do women see it? This collision is also very meaningful.
In the novel, the two protagonists, Xu Ran and Li Xiaodong, walked out of the school gate, worked hard in society, and also came to Beijing together. In fact, I also wrote in the book that it is not that becoming a Beijinger is the best life choice, which is definitely a ridiculous life direction. It is not necessary to get ahead, this peace of mind is my hometown. There are three layers of scenes in the novel, Linquan, the provincial city and Beijing, and what I want to express is that the protagonist's final choice is not called right or wrong, it is just a pro and con, a trade-off. Of course, if the housing prices in Beijing are very low, I still agree with everyone in Beijing (laughs).
In reality, all my students who have returned to their original hometowns are now relatively moist. The so-called return to the original place of origin is mostly in the provincial capital. The first provincial capital city has better jobs, although the Beiyu language is neither 211 nor 985, but it is OK in the humanities, and they talk about their teacher was once Liang (Liang Xiaosheng), and it is relatively easy to find work back (laughs). Housing prices are also low, you can buy a big house with less money, and soon you will rise in the workplace, becoming a loyal and strong executive backbone, and then having children there, driving in the car, and often going to Beijing to see the teacher.
Of course, my students who stayed in Beijing are also very good, some have become civil servants, some are publishing houses, but the real pressure of life is obvious. Teachers want students to be happy, and when my students come to Beijing, I will ask them, did they buy a house or rent it? I suggested they buy it, and I would ask very specifically how large the area was? In my impression, the bottom line is 120 square meters, 120 square meters in Beijing may get 12 million, not necessarily a particularly good location. I think this is life, and as for the other aspects, it starts on this material basis. Isn't there a point that is considered very vulgar? Not romantic, not passionate.
Novel "Chinese Peach and Plum"
The heroine's life is "reportage"
The heroine of the novel, Xu Ran, said that life can be divided into songs, poetry, prose, reportage, and epic, and I can't remember how I wrote it, but Xu Ran finally said "reportage.". I am in my 70s, and people in their 70s may have some religious feelings about life and literature. Some scientists, after a lifetime of scientific work, sometimes end up confused about so much incomprehensibility, and in fact the humanistic intellectuals are the same.
In "The World of Man", I also wrote about it through the role of light. "In the World of Man" wrote that Guangming finally became a monk, I discussed this issue with the two editors-in-charge, before the novel was published, I wanted to add a paragraph here, that is, Guangming was already an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old youth at that time, when he went to The Road to Beiputuo, he did not expect that it rained heavily in the middle, he was blind again, and then lost. There was always a picture in my mind, and I was very touched when I thought about it: lost and encountered a torrential rain, lightning and thunder in the sky, this eighteen- or nineteen-year-old blind boy was sitting on the ground, between heaven and earth, and he didn't know where to go. He was carried back by the monks of The North Putuo Monastery with a fever, and the old monk asked him: Where did he come from and where did he go? He said I was going home. The old monk listened and said, "You've arrived home."
When I write this, I have personally gone through a life of more than 70 years old, and I have always had the idea that what people are pursuing in this life, and what is the most important thing? Come to think of it, in addition to the truth, goodness and beauty, the others are indeed over the clouds. I may have been thinking about my own life since I was a teenager, this life is "reportage", realism can not be half romantic, abstract, hypocritical, because your family is so difficult, the father is in the province, the mother is weak and sick, she supports this family, you have a sick brother... Although I read a lot of novels, I did not romanticize at that time, and this romantic feeling of mine may have appeared in some early Zhiqing novels at most.
In fact, from the very beginning of my writing, I was writing about "love", but this "love" is not just love. When others ask me which places in "The World of Man" move me the most, I tell them that the love between men and women will not move me, from the earliest reading, it may be because of boys, how can we be moved by Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu, Tang Minghuang and Yang Guifei? That's your girl's business. I personally may be more touched by the friendship between men and men, what will the friendship between women and women be? Xu Ran is the daughter of a vegetable farmer, so her life is destined to be "reportage", and the male protagonist Li Xiaodong has a little bourgeoisie.
"Chinese Tao Li" also writes about the marriage concept of two generations. In my opinion, the door-to-door pair is the commonality between all living things on this earth, plants, animals and humans. You rarely see that two very large plants grow very closely in nature, and one plant is definitely competing for nutrients. Marriage is not only a matter of two people, it is a matter of two families, the door is not right, it is almost a result of Zhou Bingyi. Of course, I personally feel that Zhou Bingyi does not exist among young people today, and the other half is almost from his own class.
The partner of life, of course, is more important than your choice of work, the choice of the city. Of course, you can also dedicate yourself to work, we have such typical people. The revolutionary martyrs of the revolutionary years were devoted to their faith, but they were also getting married, so I felt that a partner was more important than anything else.
Novel "Chinese Peach and Plum"
"'Chinese Peach and Plum' is my penultimate novel"
To be honest, there is a wonderful thing, something that exceeds the wealth of any one family, and is left to the vast majority of children of ordinary and ordinary families like us, which is books. No individual or family can monopolize it, and if you think about it, they don't care what kind of energy we get from books. If we examine it carefully, quite a few children of ordinary families have gained strength from the source of cultural books left by their ancestors, and someone will bear it from generation to generation. There are many such people among writers, and at the time of the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, writers were aristocratic professions, but later they were not, returning to the commoners, and here were writers, scholars, professors, and their works belonged to us, depending on how far you read them.
Post-80s are now in their 40s, and people in their 40s, there is very little stress in life. Post-80s writers, I have seen the writers of the three eastern provinces, especially Shenyang, have read their novels, and there are very few others. Therefore, I want to write about the love of young people this time, but this generation gap is not that we want to have nothing, it does not mean that we must go deep among the masses, go to the people, go to the young people, and there is no generation gap in mingling with them every day. For example, I am still not familiar with the Internet, I just learned to use my mobile phone to reply to text messages the year before, and now I will not use my mobile phone to ride and pay. But the generation gap does not affect us to communicate in the aspect of the absence of the generation gap, you are on the "ditch" side, I am on the "ditch" side, or you can communicate intimately, provided that you can not think that what you know, understand is right.
I see writing a novel as not much different from opening a noodle shop with a pastry teacher, to ensure the environmental protection of the ingredients, to do a lifetime, and to this extent. Sometimes people still have to put it down, and people don't have to be too stubborn and let go of some things, but I still have a ball of noodles in the tank, and this dough cannot be wasted. I write a book for the post-80s students, for the students I have taught, it is always a mind, and writing this novel is largely a complete idea.
So in the narrative, I have a sense of closeness, empathy, just stand in their point of view. In addition, when writing "My Life and Me", the novel is also developed from the perspective of "me", but it is written about girls, so there is always a state of incomplete match between language and gender. Although I am in my 70s, I feel that I can write about boys. I am not willing to rely on love clues and love content to support a book, but sometimes I am complacent, although I am in my 70s, I can still write about the love of young people. Of course, writing about the younger generation is a challenge for me, first of all, the language is different, and now the language has changed too much, especially after the emergence of online language, I have no way to integrate into that language. But the post-80s are fine, that is, my son's age, he has some closeness to my language.
I actually found that many writers after the 80s and 70s wrote about their contemporaries, they all have more or less stubborn temperament, as if they don't write like their own contemporaries, writing girls almost all have the appearance of Girls in Liu Sola's pen, and when it comes to writing, there will be an intentional intergenerational labeling. But in life, when I come into contact, I will find that especially my students are not like this at all, I prefer these post-80s people in my writing, they are also joking and humorous, but they do not have the temperament of a stubborn master.
Honestly, I don't like the boss in real life, no matter what age, I don't like it. Life is life, and there are many things in life that should be taken seriously, and if you mix into the game when you should think and recognize problems solemnly, mix it into flattery, and have the idea of pleasing the audience and the audience - at least in "Chinese Peach and Lee", I did not use such a bridge. The last work Xu Ran did was something I liked more, and I suddenly felt a bit like Chunyan's son in "The World". This is a coincidence, when I wrote "Chinese Tao Li", I completely forgot about Chun yan, and probably I was thinking more and more about what life and death were, so I arranged a job like her. A person who often attends memorial services, I think she should be able to understand many things.
"Chinese Peach and Lee" unfolds the story with a first-person "I" narrative, and because what I am doing now is a very important thing for myself. "Chinese Tao Li" is my penultimate novel, and there is another one in writing, and after that book is written, no matter what the level, "Liang Ji Noodle Shop" will be closed. There is no next one, and the next one, I am an old man sitting on the side of the road basking in the sun.