Writer Liu Liangcheng: Be the slowest person in the big era
He has been working in the wilderness of Northwest China for a long time, using simple and quiet words to write about mountains, rivers and vast lands, and about people and all things on the earth. He presents the splendor of art in the place where the epic stops, and constructs the naïve and philosophical world of "Bemba".
His hometown is his spiritual home and his starting point to the world. He uses dreamlike Chinese stories to show the world the rich dimensions of contemporary Chinese literature. As a result, his work has a profound Chineseness, cosmopolitan character, and the possibility of a literary future. He is the new person of the year in the "2023 China Annual New Talent List" of New Weekly-writer Liu Liangcheng.
On December 20, 2023, the "2023 China Emerging Talent of the Year List" will be launched in Beijing, so stay tuned.
Author | Fu Miaomiao
Title Picture | Provided by the interviewee
On the day he agreed on the interview time with writer Liu Liangcheng, he sent a WeChat message - "It's okay in the afternoon the day after tomorrow". Out of Xi, I asked if two o'clock was convenient, and he sent a smiley face and said, "After the lunch break, it's half past three." ”
It was only then that I realized that Beijing belonged to the 8th East Region and Xinjiang belonged to the 6th East Zone, with a difference of two hours. On the day of the interview, Liu Liangcheng just woke up from a nap and said with a smile: "I am talking to you now, my brain is still in a dream, not very clear, this feeling is similar to my book Chinese characters, half dreaming and half waking up." ”
In August 2023, the winners of the 11th Mao Dun Literature Award were announced, and Liu Liangcheng's novel "Bemba" was on the list. After winning the award, his phone, mobile phone, and WeChat kept ringing at home, which was many times more lively than usual. In November, Liu Liangcheng was invited to Wuzhen to participate in the "2023 Chinese Literature Festival - Mao Dun Literature Award Night", and returned home in the dust.
Bemba
Written by Liu Liangcheng
Yilin Publishing House, 2022-1
Liu Liangcheng talked about his hometown and literature so much that he was somewhat tired, and he described it as "a wind blowing in autumn" that soon calmed down.
For him, these are far less interesting than everyday life. When talking about his little granddaughter, the peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes grown in the yard, his tone and emotions are obviously much higher, and when he talks about his hoe and dealing with the real world, but his mind is already wandering in the world, imagining many details in the novel, he will laugh out loud. It can be seen that even if he lives in Xinjiang, which has a two-hour time difference, Liu Liangcheng will have his own time zone. That time zone is a bit slower.
Liu Liangcheng's slowness can be called a luxury - when everyone is busy moving forward and striving to be the first, he is busy watching a group of ants, studying the dog's life, pondering the mood of the donkey, and even spending a noon to fill a dirt bag in order to prevent a good shovel from rusting on his shoulder.
People who are far away in the city, after reading Liu Liangcheng's words, feel a lot of emotion, as if these words help them find the innocence lost in their childhood, sweep away the impetuous atmosphere in the bustling city, and feel like undergoing a spiritual massage from afar. But the actual village is far less romantic than people think.
Liu Liangcheng will extract inspiration and experience romance from rural daily life, and will be wary of excessive beautification of life, inadvertently pointing out the cruelty of life. As the poet and critic Kenji Hayashi commented: "His works, full of sunshine, are reminiscent of Gauguin's Tahiti, but without that primitive romantic mood, there is a kind of hardship, a crisis, a kind of helplessness, joy and happiness in destiny." ”
In Liu Liangcheng's view, many times people want to escape from reality, longing for poetry and distance, but they just want to live a literary life, and they don't want to live in real life. "Poetry and distance belong to life in literature, but life in literature can only exist in our hearts, not reality. ”
For Liu Liangcheng, a person can choose to grow old anywhere, whether in the countryside or in the city, people can wait for their old age anywhere. He said: "Many Chinese literati want to have a clean place when they get old, but they want to be closer to nature, between the mountains and rivers, among the insects and birds, and the chickens and dogs barking, and slowly grow old." The years are clearly visible here, and the 10 years of the village are actually very simple, that is, the wheat on the opposite hillside has turned green 10 times and yellow 10 times. ”
"That's the home that the spiders built with us"
Liu Liangcheng lives in Mulei Academy in Caizigou Village, Mulei County, Xinjiang, and lives a life of half-cultivation and half-study. He raised a lot of chickens, but he was reluctant to eat them. The purpose of raising them is mainly for the few rooster crows in the morning.
Every morning at 6 o'clock, the first time the rooster crows, Liu Liangcheng opens his eyes, wakes up for a while, and then falls asleep; the second time the rooster crows, about 7 o'clock, the sky is basically bright, many people in the village start to get up to work, Liu Liangcheng has to sleep for a while, and wait until 9 o'clock, when it is time for him to really get up. "I have to set aside a lot of time every day to sleep and dream, and if I don't have that much time to sleep and dream, I can't do anything in the day. ”
After getting up and eating breakfast, Liu Liangcheng will be busy writing for a while, and after lunch, he will take another nap, and when he wakes up, he will go to work in the field. Liu Liangcheng's yard has a total of more than 40 acres of land, and sometimes he can't finish it himself, so he has to find some helpers. "I don't have much time to write every day, I write a little in the morning and go to work in the afternoon. I once wrote in "One Man's Village" that if you don't do some work, you won't be able to do it, and once you do it, you won't be able to finish it for a lifetime, which is really the truth. ”
"One Man's Village"
Written by Liu Liangcheng
Yilin Publishing House, 2022-1
Liu Liangcheng has a vegetable cellar at home, and every year he will reserve winter vegetables in advance to prepare for winter. In February of the following year, he will prepare to plant vegetables, and sow seeds in large and small pots in the room like planting flowers in spring, and the rapeseed (seedlings) will grow in his house for 3 months. At the end of April and the beginning of May, he moved the small vegetable seedlings into the vegetable field, "Until the last moment, you can't know how many spicy seeds can grow from a pepper seedling."
It takes several months to move the seedlings from the pot to the vegetable patch. In the meantime, they have to keep watering and weeding, and in July and August, when some harvest begins, they can eat the peppers, eggplants, and tomatoes they have grown. By the end of September, the temperature plummeted, frost began, and winter vegetables had to be stockpiled. "Country life sounds romantic, but when you actually get to work, you find that it's far from easy. I spend a lot of time growing vegetables, but I don't have a lot of time to enjoy the fruits. ”
To live in the countryside, to live according to the concept of the countryside. First of all, you have to learn to accept dust, as long as you farm, your feet will get mud, and secondly, you have to be able to tolerate insects on the windowsill. Liu Liangcheng never sprays pesticides in the yard - "where can I listen to the insects when I spray them to death?" and he will not destroy the cobwebs when he sees them.
Liu Liangcheng's yard is full of trees, the branches and leaves are flourishing, and even look a little messy, so he found a reason for himself: "Pruning the branches is the idea of human beings, not the idea of the tree. ”
The courtyard wall was crooked, Liu Liangcheng didn't care about it, waited for three or five years, collapsed, collapsed, and then completely knocked it off and rebuilt a courtyard wall. "If I keep tinkering, it's really endless, and I can only tolerate these things as much as I can, and try not to create new jobs. ”
In the first class here, Liu Liangcheng would tell the children: "There are a lot of small insects in the academy, I didn't kill the insects, I left it for you to listen to the insects." If a bug lands on you, just give it a gentle pat. The insects and you are all on the road, both walking towards autumn, we are all the same life, and we must accompany each other along the way. ”
Liu Liangcheng and the children. (Photo/Provided by the interviewee)
Mulei Academy did not have street lights, as soon as it was dark, darkness completely descended on this small courtyard, Liu Liangcheng asked the teacher to turn off the lights in the room, so that the children could adapt to the darkness.
Liu Liangcheng told the children that there is no need to be afraid of the night in nature, the night itself is safe, "How many animals are protected by the night! In fact, it is the same for us humans, but the lights of the city are too flooded, and the surroundings seem to become dark." The darkness became a dream, it became a nightmare, but it should not be feared".
"You stomped on my footprints"
When I was a child, the production team raised sheep, and the team would send people from the village to herd the sheep, and people joked, "Whoever is short-tempered will be sent to herd sheep for two months." If the sheep walk slowly, they will be slowed down by following the sheep, no matter how impatient they are. "You see, though the sheep has four legs, it walks half a step and half a step, and each leg drags the hind legs of the other, and the man walks after the sheep, and it is impossible to go fast. ”
Liu Liangcheng wrote in the book: "Many years later, when you look at it, people who gallop on fast horses and people who sit on the back of oxen and walk slowly are the same old as they return to the village, and they age at the same rate. Time doesn't matter how fast or slow anyone runs. ”
When he was young, Liu Liangcheng worked in agriculture, learned to make furniture from a carpenter, learned to make iron from a blacksmith, and also worked as an agricultural machinery administrator, and wrote poems when he was 20 years old. At the age of 30, Liu Liangcheng closed the sales department of agricultural machinery parts, left his hometown, and came to the city of Urumqi.
At that time, Liu Liangcheng looked back at the place where he found out that it was his hometown after leaving, and at the age of 30, he wrote "One Man's Village"; In the book, he depicts a 5-year-old child who opens his eyes in the early morning and finds the people in the village, who have lived his whole life, as if everyone has come to the world, and his life has long been lived by others, and all that is left is dreams.
"Imaginary Earth"
Written by Liu Liangcheng
Yilin Publishing House, 2022-1
Liu Liangcheng was 60 years old when the novel "Bemba" was published, and he continued to go back with the epic "Jianger" as the background. In the novel, some people don't want to grow old, some people don't want to grow up, and some people don't even want to be born, and they always stay in their mother's womb. Everyone stays at the age they want, and everyone lives in a dream that they don't want to wake up to.
In the world of the novel "Bemba", there are herds of cattle and sheep, abundant water and grass, and people drink and enjoy themselves all day long, living a carefree life. The Khan King "Jangar" of the "Bemba" country made everyone live to be 25 years old and not grow old. People are full of energy, day after day, driving cattle and sheep from one pasture to the next, as if driving cattle and sheep from one pasture to the next is just a game.
Li Bai sighed in the poem: "Those who live in heaven and earth are also the countertravelers of all things, and those who have passed through time are also passers-by of hundreds of generations." And floating like a dream, for the joy of geometry?", and Liu Liangcheng's pen is one after another "floating like a dream" stories. The 11th Mao Dun Literature Award commented in the award speech: "In the symphony of singing and narration, the magnificent and splendid poetic realm is shown with the wind galloping horses and dreamlike imagination." ”
"Bemba" is a novel full of dreams, the whole story is all fiction, but it is so closely related to Liu Liangcheng's life, almost every detail is true, especially the part where the cattle and sheep are transferred, full of rich life details. Liu Liangcheng said: "Only through these details of real life can I create a literary world. ”
"Bemba" is the most enjoyable novel written by Liu Liangcheng, it is the epic of his childhood written to himself, and it is the most naïve in the history of his writing. "When I write to the deepest part, there is always a child sitting alone inside. He has always been small, unwilling to grow up, and from time to time he jumps out and takes control of my heart. ”
(Photo/Unsplash)
"Childhood is a stranger to us, and although everyone comes from childhood, it is true that we don't know childhood anymore. Liu Liangcheng said with emotion. He recalls that when he was a child, there was only one door in the barn at home, "Every time my mother brought a basin in and brought rice and noodles out of it, I would look into the barn and see my mother locking the barn door." I never knew how much food was in it, until one day, when my family was left with nothing to eat, I realized that my barn might also be empty."
The warehouse at that time was like a dream at this moment. The people in the village don't know how much food is left in his storehouse, just like they don't know if his family has eaten and whether they can survive. "With this barn, even if I am hungry, I can walk with my head held high in the eyes of the villagers, just like a dream that is suddenly magnified and materialized at a moment, and it becomes a kind of life support. ”
Liu Liangcheng observed his little granddaughter and saw her sitting on the bed alone and playing at home, taking the things that didn't exist seriously, and pretending to see those things that didn't exist. "She would give me a bag of salt that I didn't have very seriously, and I would take it in my hand and smell it, and she would ask me if it was salty, and I would make a very salty face. This is literature, literature is the real world out of nothing, and children are born to be writers. ”
As soon as people grow up, it is difficult to believe in what they don't have, fortunately there is literature, fortunately there are dreams. In winter, Liu Liangcheng took his granddaughter for a walk in the snow, his granddaughter walked in front, Liu Liangcheng followed behind, and his granddaughter turned around and said to him: "Grandpa, don't step on my footprints, you have stepped on my footprints." ”
Stay tuned for December 20th
China's annual emerging list