Lin Nabei's new masterpiece "Digging the Ground Every Day": a contemporary allegorical family novel

Modern Express News (reporter Zheng Wenjing) Lin Nabei's new long-form masterpiece "Digging the Ground Every Day" was recently published by Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House. The novel uses the intangible cultural heritage "Daqi" as the carrier to tell the story of a peculiar family in the coastal area of Fujian: the Qingjiang Village near the sea is the location of the descendants of the royal family who were sent to Fuzhou before the collapse of the Northern Song Dynasty, and there is a rare Uwa compound with traditional lacquer as the door in the village. At the end of the year, Zhao Dingli, the owner of the compound, went to Fuzhou City to see a doctor, and after returning, he began to dig the ground non-stop. A family story unfolds...

Rare samples of civilization

"Lower Nanyang" runs through the beginning and end of the story

Fuzhou City, Fujian Province, is the place where the story of Lin Nabei's latest novel" "Digging the Ground Every Day" takes place. One of the famous population migration events in modern Chinese history, "Lower Nanyang", runs through the beginning and end of the family story in the novel.

From the Ming Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty, ordinary people in Guangdong and Fujian, forced by the needs of livelihood or business, often went to the "South Sea" area including the Malay Archipelago, the Philippine Archipelago, the Indonesian Archipelago and other places on a large scale. The novel perfectly shows the colorful landscape of Fujian's history and culture with exquisitely crafted and natural depictions: the Central Plains culture and Southeast Asian culture, farming civilization and marine civilization blend here, forming a rare sample of civilization with strange customs.

At the same time, the intangible cultural heritage "big lacquer" (that is, raw lacquer, commonly known as "earth lacquer", also known as "national lacquer" or "big lacquer", is the paint of lacquerware handicraft products) is an important carrier of the novel story.

Fujian in the Qing Dynasty was famous for making birth-free lacquer and wood carved gold lacquer. In the middle of the Qianlong Dynasty, Shen Shao'an's original Shen lacquerware was an important process in the history of mainland lacquerware culture. The process of making lacquerware involves a large number of technical problems, and is an extremely difficult field in literature, where writers need to face both professional and general readers. In this novel, Lin Nabei shows us the possibility of using the usual fun and style of her novels to resist the difficulty of reading history and cultural relics.

Three generations of the "Uva compound"

Half of China's modern history was shaken off

Starting from the protagonist Zhao Dingli's grandfather Zhao Licheng, what happened in the Sea of the South China Sea was inextricably linked to this family. Grandfather Zhao Licheng went to Nanyang to make a living in Penang, and has been away from his hometown for many years, and his whereabouts are unknown. Grandmother Xie Shi built the unique Uwa courtyard in Qingjiang Village through a stroke of "Fan Batch" from her grandfather, and used her lifelong lacquerware craftsmanship and painstaking efforts to make a beautiful lacquer door for the Uwa courtyard.

Grandmother Xie Shi is a well-deserved soul figure in this family, and her actions and thoughts have an impact on the fate of everyone in the family. In the hundred years since the Uwa compound was built, she and her lacquer are among the most vivid and eye-catching colors. Her two sons, the second generation of the family, Zhao Congsheng and Zhao Mingming, two brothers, had very different fates, one ran away and eventually became unheard of like their father; one lived his whole life under the care of his mother and eventually died of a genetic disease in the family.

The narrative of the novel starts from the "disease" of the third generation of the family, Zhao Dingli, and interpolates the story of three generations or even four generations in the Uwa compound in the past hundred years in the narrative of the current time and space. The novel contains three levels of text at the individual, family, and history levels, one is the impact of the family, family affection, etc. in the violent social changes, as well as the personal survival dilemma, especially the strong feeling of physical pain; the second is the family story more than a hundred years ago, with "big lacquer" as the clue and highly related to half of modern Chinese history; the third is a longer history and a deeper cultural inheritance. The pain of the individual's body, the scars of the family, and the memories of the nation overlap and overlap, and the three are concentrated and explosively presented in a specific time and space and character.

From this point of view, "Digging More Than Every Day" obviously has the structure, momentum and time and space feelings necessary for classic masterpieces. Starting from the small pain points of individual life, half of the curtain of Modern Chinese History has been shaken off. War, wealth, and disease correspond, respectively, to the highest form of politics, the nature of the rise and fall of the family, and the basic state of individual life—such a simple, almost straightforward choice of the main line is both a writing ambition and a writer's belief.

Start with "illness"

With the character and posture of contemporary allegory

"Digging the Ground Every Day" began with Zhao Dingli's "illness". This is a tall, thin old man who loves to drink tea and is often silent. The pain of the illness stirred his body and mind, and he invented a large tin can full of ancestral treasures buried somewhere in the underground of the Uwa compound, and things began to develop in an irreversible and uncontrollable direction. Imaginary wealth and real desires intertwine to spark a series of absurd events.

The pain of the individual body brought about by the disease is magnified and considered as never before in the novel, and secretly stirs up the direction of everyone's life. The psychological depiction of illness in the novel is unique, and the character of contemporary fables, black humor, is ubiquitous in the novel.

The writer uses cold absurd stories to expose human nature to desires, feelings, history, and reality, and writes the eternal literary proposition of how small individuals guard the essence of life, and the personality interests he describes have thus gained an extremely full and profound appearance.

In addition, the bright, exquisite, delicate and powerful Linnabei language style in the book shows a strong literary inclusiveness and the vitality and contemporary sense of the local language. It can be said that this book is a confrontation between avant-garde literature and family fiction. It combines the expressive techniques of avant-garde novels with the narrative tradition of realism, and in a contemporary allegorical posture, it will lead readers to explore the unknown realm of Chinese literature.

(Photo courtesy of publisher Li Weiwei)