Text | Reading Jun
In the world, all those who have experienced suffering and have a keen insight into things have long been different from ordinary people.
Writer Lao She's "Camel Xiangzi" shows people a cruel human tragedy. The protagonist of the story, Shoko, came from a poor background, "he grew up in the countryside, lost his parents and a few acres of thin land, and ran to the city when he was 18 years old."
Although he is in the city, he lives on the bottom floor. A poor peasant who goes to the city, who cannot read a single character, has no conditions to make too many choices, and can only live by coolies:
"He has done almost everything that he can eat with his strength."
In a city where there is no land to produce and no place to really belong to his place of residence, his life is no different from that of a "tramp" in the city.
However, although the life was hard, he was full of longing and enthusiasm, and he hoped to live an ideal life by being a coachman.
However, not everything in this world is satisfactory.
When hope is ignited again and again, and it is poured out, do you continue to struggle forward, or do you choose to numb and degenerate?
Shoko chose the latter.
Of course, it is not so much a choice as it is a helplessness forced by life, and it is fate that chooses him, and it is also his own choice of fate.
The cruelest part of life is often not to give you a direct blow to the head, but like a frog boiled in warm water, let people in one disappointment after another, and eventually lead to tragedy.
The history of the struggle of "peasants entering the city"
In the 1920s, it was in the dark and cruel era of China's old society. However, despite being born in a difficult era, the young Shoko is full of energy and vitality.
Shoko in the novel, like most young people, is tall, young and powerful, and has an inexhaustible strength. He neither smokes, drinks, nor gambles, has a strong sense of dignity and self-pursuit, is passionate, scrappy, and is significantly different from second-rate and.
Isn't that also true for us who are young?
A man who has come to the city from the countryside and has no education or background, but he is still full of hope, hoping to change the status quo by working as a rickshaw puller.
Eating bowls, striking iron requires technology, and of course a car is needed to pull a car. Shoko's first wish is to have a car of her own.
Toward this dream, he desperately pulled the cart to work, did not smoke, did not drink, did not visit the kiln, and saved every cent of the hard-earned money he earned.
In the end, it took him three years to finally realize his dream and become a self-reliant and superior driver.
A high-class coachman, for Shoko, was already the most decent job he envisioned. Although they are all pulling foreign cars, some people have pulled foreign cars for a lifetime, but they have never been in the limelight. The quality of a car is not only related to speed, but also related to face and efficiency. A good car can naturally attract more customers and make more money.
However, in such an era of war and chaos, it is not easy to keep oneself and do one's own work in peace. Finally, just in the first half of the year, the first car owned by Shoko was snatched away by the soldiers.
A low-level person without any social status and power, when he encounters such things, he can only be dumb and eat Huang Lian.
The second time, he still longed to buy a foreign car, he worked harder, with the strength to break the mountain and break the axe, and all the hard-earned money he had saved was stored in the stuffy gourd jar he bought, and he planned to buy a car when he had saved enough.
However, it seems that the heavens never take extra care of anyone, and a driver like Shoko, who has lived a pitiful but industrious and self-motivated life, still has not received a trace of "partial protection".
Desperately saving money, the car has not yet been bought, But Shoko has been arrested, all the savings have been extorted and looted by the detectives, and the vision of buying a car has been shattered.
When he pulled on his own foreign car for the last time, he exchanged it for a deformed marriage with Tiger Girl.
Married by "seduction and calculation"
Tiger Lady is the daughter of a rich family, and her father, Liu Siye, is a veteran of the rivers and lakes, with rich experience, who has served as a soldier, opened a casino, done human trafficking, robbery, and is by no means a good person. Finally, after years of turmoil and chaos, he opened a depot to survive, earning enough money for his daughter to squander.
However, Liu Siye, who had not read any books and relied only on his strength to spend his life in the rivers and lakes, his eyes were limited to the scale of his heels, and he was deeply poisoned by feudal thought, and he never thought of sending his daughter to school.
Under the influence of her father, Tiger Girl has almost become the second version of her father, whether it is personality or behavior, she is almost the same as her father, doing things vigorously, her personality is spicy, her rogue nature is fierce, and she is a gangster, "She is the same as men, even scolding people has men's cheerfulness, sometimes more tricks." ”
Because of the lack of mother's upbringing, it seriously lacks feminine soft characteristics in her body, coupled with her ugly appearance, so that she lives to almost forty years old, and is still an older leftover woman.
Tiger Girl looks down on the men in the factory, in the impression of Tiger Girl, although there is no shortage of men in the depot, but almost all of them are brutal and rustic driver workers.
The men in the factory did not dare to marry tiger girls. She was strong, ill-tempered, and ugly-looking, barely able to treat her as a brother, but not the one to marry home as a daughter-in-law.
Poor families want to marry an honest, kind, and virtuous wife; rich families want to marry a wife who has a good looking temperament, is knowledgeable, and has the right door, but unfortunately tiger girls do not have it.
However, even so, Tiger Girl has never given up her desire for love. Until the appearance of Shoko, she seized hope.
Tiger Lady fell in love with Xiangzi at first sight and would rather sever ties with her father than marry Xiangzi.
However, the honest Shoko, although poor, is equally full of longing for love marriage, and the woman he hopes to marry is soft and virtuous, innocent. And tiger girls were born in an exploitative family, full of oppression and exploitation of poor people. Moreover, Tiger Lady was more than ten years older than him.
He could sense the enthusiasm of the tiger girl, but he preferred to believe that it was a "misunderstanding", and he tried to avoid her. He was afraid of other people's gossip, and he was even more reluctant to marry a tiger girl. For him, "door-to-door" is even more of a shame.
Shoko also yearns for love, and he also has a "belonging" in his heart, that is, a weak and lovely "little blessing".
In order to get Xiangzi, Tiger Lady seduced Xiangzi, forced Xiangzi to marry her, and had a big fight with her father, going out to rent a house by herself, in order to get rid of her father's control.
In the end, Tiger Lady got on the flower palanquin as she wished and married Her Favorite Shoko.
However, marriages exchanged for deception can already foresee their future outcomes.
Degenerate from a "high coachman" to a dirty and skinny "low-class coachman"
After marriage, Shoko went out to pull the car every day as usual, and Tiger Lady was accustomed to a luxurious life at home, and after marriage, she still went her own way, eating snacks while pimping.
Two people with different living habits, different consumption concepts, and different people's biological concepts live together, and the days are naturally noisy.
It wasn't long before Tiger Girl became pregnant. After pregnancy, the tiger girl is still delicious and lazy, her body is getting fatter and fatter, the fetus in the abdomen is also very large, and it is an advanced age. When the baby was born, dystocia died.
This may be a relief for Shoko. However, the mere liberation expended all his strength.
In order to bury tiger girls, Shoko sold the car and almost ran out all her savings. In the end, he became deprived of everything and had no money.
When people are in this despair, they often lose their vision of life.
After Tiger Girl's death, Xiaofuzi wanted to live with Shoko, but looking at Xiaofuzi's drunkard father and two younger brothers, the drag of the big son, he was shaken.
He dropped a sentence: "Wait! When I'm mixed, I'll come! Definitely coming! "Gone.
It was his helpless bowing to reality, and it was also a mockery of himself. In such a dark and cruel society, a short sentence is the most helpless cry for the injustice of fate at the moment.
Who knows when he will be rich? Will you come back to her?
He couldn't even vouch for himself, let alone the woman who had been tortured by life.
He left, leaving Xiao Fuzi, who was forced to sell his body to support his brother, to continue his unbearable life in despair.
Shoko, who has just arrived in the city, is bent on realizing all her dreams in life through the profession of rickshaw puller.
After being hit by the cruel life again and again, he "figured it out" and stopped trying to hit the wall and knocked himself into a "blue nose and swollen face".
He is still the same as before, doing the old job of pulling a cart. It's just that he's become "freewheeling.".
He is no longer the self-motivated, enthusiastic, and everywhere thinking of struggling to live a good life.
But whenever there is a little wind, a little rain, and some soreness in his body, he rests for a few days.
Other people gamble money, and he occasionally gambles, not to win or lose, but to fit in.
He became sleek, and others said to pull wherever he went, and he couldn't take any more than one step, unless he added additional money.
He also learned to fight and learned to swear. In the eyes of the patrol, he is the first-class "thorn head".
Until the cart met Liu Siye, he drove people out of the car, and after a long bad breath, he felt extremely comfortable.
He tried to start over, and he found Mr. Cao again, who promised him that he could pull the moon there, and agreed to let Xiao Fuzi come to Cao's house to help and give up a house for the two of them. Shoko regained a glimmer of hope.
However, when he came back again to find Xiaofuzi, he was waiting not for the woman's happy smile, but for the news that he had died.
It turned out that two months ago, Xiaofuzi hanged herself because she could not bear the inhuman life of a prostitute.
When he found XiaoFuzi's grave, he completely lost hope and completely lost the sanity of survival.
He began to indulge in depravity, eating, drinking, gambling, playing treacherous and slippery, and even more giving up his dignity and the moral bottom line of being a man. For that little money, he betrayed others and lost his life.
He lived as a walking dead, a numb man who ate and was lazy, a spectator of life.
Zang Kejia once said: "Some people are alive, he is already dead; some people are dead, he is still alive." ”
For Shoko, there is no doubt that he belongs to the latter.
How is Shoko's life not a portrayal of all sentient beings?
A person's life, the beginning of all stories, is full of hope. However, later, the story gradually changed.
Xiangzi, a typical low-level person in society, in that era when the economy withered and the peasants lost their land, Xiangzi chose to go to the city, only because his heart was still full of hope and longing for life.
Although he is poor, he has a strong body and the strength to be strong and not to lose.
However, he did not know that his labor and the hard-earned money he had earned were all coveted by the dark society.
In a person's life, he has two important things. However, even so, he still failed to live a happy life.
Why? The answer is already obvious. Of course, in addition to the injustice of fate, there are personal choices.
Seeing this, many people think of themselves. Xiangzi is undoubtedly the "North Drifter" in the Republic of China period, and most of us today, in order to survive, for the dream, left in the city to work hard, what is the difference?
Is the difference between diplomas, academic qualifications, vision, abilities, patterns? maybe. But even so, it is still "drifting".
However, why do some people "drift" successfully, but some people are on the road of "drifting" and go to tragedy?
There is a saying that "character determines destiny", "There are two kinds of tragedies in life, one is the tragedy of fate and the other is the tragedy of character." ”
Shoko's tragedy stems from the inherent tragedy of fate, and the most fundamental reason is the influence of her character and the result of her step-by-step choice.
Shoko's life has experienced three ups and three downs.
At every critical moment of choice, he tried to preserve his immediate interests.
But without exception, he pushed himself into a more miserable abyss.
Step by step, he went down to depravity.
Later, he was still pulling the car, but he was no longer willing to exert a little more strength.
He still survives on the industries handed down from the old society, but he no longer abides by the rules of the internal industry.
He is wandering every step he takes, blindly, marrying Tiger Girl, there are forced and helpless choices, and there is also a subjective mentality of wanting to lean on a rich woman, "sit back and enjoy its success", and struggle for decades less.
After that, he married Tiger Girl and bought the car of his dreams, but he has been struggling with his reputation.
Even if in the end, Xiao Fuzi wanted to marry him, he hesitated, did not want to suffer with her, and chose to "escape".
He eats, drinks, gambles, and lives only for the sake of his will.
Shoko, who has been strong all his life, has gone to the city with a positive and enterprising mentality to start the road to make a living, and there is nothing wrong with it.
In the end, he did not get rid of the shackles of fate, because he was confined to the consciousness of the small producer, because he indulged himself, passive, numb, and willing to degenerate.
Shoko, a typical example of a small person at the bottom of society, a person who has gone from hope to despair, the tragedy of his life is not so much caused by the social environment as it is the result of his own choices.
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