▲Writer Chen Zhongzhong
Chen Zhongzhong's self-description of the literary road:
I grew up in a family that had been farming for generations, and I heard that one of my grandfathers (my father's grandfather) used to be Mr. Private School, and my father was already a pure farmer, one of the few farmers in the village who could even lift a brush and write.
I enrolled in the second year after the founding of New China, and until I returned to my hometown after graduating from high school in 1962, after which I worked as a private teacher in a rural school, a cadre of the township (commune) and the district, for sixteen years. I have some understanding of rural China and Chinese farmers, and it was this life that gave me.
It wasn't until the autumn of 1978 that I was transferred to the Xi'an Suburban Cultural Center. I repeatedly examined myself and decided to leave the grass-roots administrative department and transfer to the cultural unit, to study and reflect in order to convert to literature. In the winter of 1982, I was transferred to the professional creative group of the Provincial Writers Association.
After gaining complete control over time, I decided almost at the same time to simply return to my hometown, to completely calm down, to study, to chew back on the savings of twenty years of working at the grassroots level in the countryside, and to write my own novels. My experience is roughly like this.
I was not exposed to literature in elementary school, and I did not know that there were "writers" and "novels". The first novel I read when I was in junior high school was Three Mile Bay, the first novel I read in my life.
Zhao Shuli was unfamiliar to me, but the farmers and rural life in Sanliwan were all too familiar to me. This book brought back my memories of life in the countryside, and for the first time I validated my impressions and experiences of farmers in the countryside, like seeing photographs of the old life of myself and my acquaintances.
The surprise, joy, and floating that this resurrection and verification provoke in the naïve mind is inherent. I then borrowed all of Zhao Shuli's published novels to read.
At this time, Zhao Shuli was already the greatest writer in China in my mind; the first worship that occurred in the course of my life was at this time, he was Zhao Shuli.
It was also in the strong interest of reading Zhao Shuli's novels that I wrote my first novel in my life, "Taoyuan Storm", which was written in a self-selected essay class in the second grade of junior high school.
All my luck and misfortune in this life began with reading Three Mile Bay and writing this novel.
▲ The former residence of Mr. Chen Zhongzhong, a very ordinary, two bungalows, some agricultural tools, a few flowers and trees, is located in Xijiang Village, Baling Township, Baqiao District, Xi'an City, Shaanxi Province, located under the White Deer Plain, on the banks of the Bashui River, and is also the place where "White Deer Plain" was created.
As my reading expanded, my interest went beyond validating my impressions of life. A series of excellent literary works unfolded before my eyes a picture that had never been seen or heard before my eyes...
All these shocking books made my eyes break away from the narrow world of my hometown of Bahechuan Road and understand that beyond the cracks of this small Loess Plateau, there is a wider world.
I seemed to have a strong hormone infused into my spirit, and I was eager to make a career.
My father's teachings to me since childhood, such as that people should be loyal and honest, people should be responsible, and they should be diligent and thrifty, they no longer have the power of authority. I respect the norms of these virtues of man, but I advocate a spirit of enterprising spirit without hesitation, a stoic and fearless quality of striving for the cause and for the ideal.
My father's requirements for me were very practical, and he wanted me to read a little, to read well, to count the numbers without asking people to coax me, and he advised me to become a farmer and return to my hometown to plant crops, and he felt that it was most appropriate for me to continue the agriculture-oriented agriculture.
At first I listened to what I believed, and then I thought it was ridiculous, and let me dig up all my life's manure and only get a full bowl of food, and my life's years would be wasted.
I can't live like a pig like Alchin (Paul's brother) who only wants to feed and has no ideals. Around the time I was in my second year of high school, my ideal of literary creation was basically formed.
And the reality I faced was: the college entrance examination fell in the first place.
The first high school graduate in our village returned to his hometown to become a farmer, which made some people who provide children with education feel very excited. My stress added a lot to becoming a useless living specimen for studying.
Back in the countryside, there seems to be no choice but to plant crops as a farmer. In this situation of having no other choice, I chose a path of literary creation, which is actually tantamount to taking risks.
I have read articles on the growth path of some Chinese and foreign writers, and my overall feeling is that among those who have made important achievements in literature, there are far fewer lucky people than unfortunate people. In order to achieve more achievements and achievements than ordinary people, we must first pay more than ordinary people to work many times, and we must endure the unbearable hardships and even painful torture of ordinary people.
With this kind of life experience obtained from others, I have more effectively determined my own path, eliminating too many flukes that have easily achieved success in the past, which is to calm down and work hard to cultivate myself, or to strive for self-struggle.
I set a rule for myself to teach myself for four years, practice the basics, and strive to publish my first work in four years, even if I got a diploma at "my university". The result? After two years of struggle, I published my work.
Of course, I have endured many hardships and pains that are incomprehensible in my children's generation, including hunger and more taunts than encouragement, and even unexpected torture and blows.
In order to avoid too much irony and ridicule to bring psychological harm to me for no reason, I kept my studies in a state of secrecy, and I never talked about literary creation with ordinary people who did not engage in literature, and whenever I was asked, I just avoided or changed the topic. Even my father was no exception.
▲ Mr. Chen Zhongzhong wrote "White Deer Plain" on this small round table.
I was so confident and inferior that I barely had the courage to visit and consult the artists. Like Liu Qing, a writer I respect very much, I never had the courage to visit him during his lifetime, although I was an admirer of him.
At the same time that I fell in love with literature, I knew that there is a great difference in genius in human beings. This genius mixed me with contradiction and pain, and the first reaction to every rejection letter was to become more and more clearly convinced that I belonged to the non-genius type.
Especially thinking of the incomprehensible fact that Liu Shaotang became famous in the literary world when he wore a red scarf, I even became sad. I used Mr. Lu Xun's philosophy of "genius is diligence" to confront the shadow of the extremely threatening genius in my head, and finally persevered.
If Mr. Lu Xun is not a deception, I am willing to pay all the painstaking efforts and hard work that the most diligent person in the world can pay to make up for the innate deficiencies.
My first study was the essay "Night Crossing the Quicksand Ditch," which was published in the supplement of the Xi'an Evening News in early 1965. The publication of my first work first made me stand up from the painful torment of inferiority, confident that I defeated inferiority for the first time.
I still believe that I will not be a big deal, but as a pursuit, I can for the first time express my voice to the society, even if it is very insignificant.
I was convinced of Chekhov's words: "If a big dog and a small dog want to bark, they will bark according to the voice god has given it." I'm not sure I'm going to be a big "dog", but at least I'm a "dog"! Anyway I started barking!
In 1965 I published five or six essays in a row, and although I understood that I was still very far away from a writer, my confidence was undoubtedly stronger.
In 1978, the frozen soil of Chinese literature and art began to thaw. After seven disasters and eight difficulties, I finally entered middle age and was fortunate to encounter a pleasant spring of literature and art. When I first dreamed of being a writer, I imagined the creative activities of writers as sacred, mysterious, and romantic.
Even after I lived a professional life of creation, I experienced an unexpected emotion: loneliness. Endure this loneliness for many years. Sometimes I even wonder, how did I choose this profession in the first place? And now there is no choice.
Endure the loneliness! You can only endure, and if you don't tolerate it, you will abandon your previous achievements and achieve nothing. To endure is to fight against one's own laziness, to put down one's heart and one mind to sort out the beautiful things that tempt people.
Of course, loneliness is not a haze that never goes away, it will be constantly torn or washed away, and the joy after completing a new work will make the lonely heart get the most appropriate comfort, and it seems that no amount of loneliness is nothing.
Especially when life is impacted, when there is a fresh understanding and a philosophy of life, a strong desire to demand the expression of a strong irrepressible demand will forget all the pain and loneliness that have been endured before, and the heart is filled with a kind of enthusiasm: sit down, hurry up and write...
I was alone in the cabin. The manuscript paper spread out, and the characters in the novel I was working on, ghostly, drifted into the room. I could see their familiar faces, and I could see that she had changed into a new dress today, her hairstyle had changed, and I could smell the pungent smell of dry smoke on him.
▲ "Shirakahara" Manuscript
I was intimate with them and loved each other. They told me about their misfortunes and blessings, their joys and sorrows, their triumphs and setbacks, their laughter and their cries and their singing. My cottage of less than ten square meters is an imaginary world.
This world has everything I've seen in the real world, yet it's completely insulated from the real world. When I entered this world, I forgot everything in the real world, everything ceased to exist, the four seasons were not divided, and the insults were forgotten.
I was with the characters in my world, tracking their footsteps, listening to what they were saying, separating their joys, and even weeping for their grief. It is a wonderful world that makes people forget themselves.
The world can only accommodate me and them, not anyone in the real world. As soon as an acquaintance or a living person walked in, they all fled in panic, and the movie star was gone. Until the visitor left, they came back and forth, and even complained that I had been talking to him for too long, and I was in a hurry...
I heard the alarm bells of life very clearly as I entered the year of 44. I suddenly became acutely aware of the fear of the age barrier at 50, and if I could only write and write short stories, I would certainly not even have a book that could be used as a pillow when I died, and I would not dare to imagine how I would live after the age of 50.
At this time, the thinking on the great proposition of the fate of this nation, triggered by the writing of "Mr. Blue Robe", became increasingly intense, and at the same time, a strong creative ideal was born, and it was necessary to make full use of and cherish the golden life zone of the five or six years before the age of 50, to complete the thinking of this big proposition, and to surpass itself artistically in a large span.
When I wrote the first line of "White Deer Plain" on the draft, my whole heart felt that it had entered the heavy historical smoke cloud of this ancient mound where my fathers and grandfathers lived.
This was April 1, 1988. In the winter of the year I was about to step into the 50th year, that is, the deep winter of 1991, the joys of life and the sadness of death of the three generations of "White Deer Plain" entered the final destination. The smoke clouds that have traveled through the history of more than half a century in the past four years are finally coming back to me.
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Editor: Xu Jiaying