An archive that looks back at the author's creative journey
Douban ID: The cat in the bookcase
Reading a collection of short stories is usually the one that is the title of the anthology first, because it undoubtedly indicates the editor's most important evaluation of the author, and it is also likely to be the culmination of the author's style. However, after browsing the catalogue, I chose to start with Bluetooth – after all, reading a story that isn't too far from the moment shouldn't take much effort in reading a story at seven o'clock on a weekday. The stage of this story is in Lijiang, whether it is team building or individual travel, it is always urban men and women who escape to Yunnan for a short time, but not all "to windy places" have a beautiful and dreamy result.
The second part reads "Archives", and the third part reads "Arcade". From the characters, the plot to the style of the language, it makes me feel like I am in the kitchen where I read the newspaper as a teenager. At that time, the kitchen at home was small, and in order to block the oil spots that burst out during stir-frying, the rice cooker always had a large open version of newspaper on it, and when it turned yellow and crispy, the next one would be replaced. So I was able to read some serials completely different from "Reader" and "Yilin" while washing the dishes, these "mature social stories" are always staged in "cheating on each other while preparing a surprise for your lover", but it is not more than that: there is no perfect person in the chicken soup for the soul, and each character is doing contradictory things, such as saying the most ugly things to the person you love the most, or falling in love with several people at the same time, or crying poor every day but escaping at the beginning of the road to wealth.
These are all relics of the "pre-mobile Internet era".
With this in mind, I searched roughly the year of publication of the selected articles in this book, and found them in a different order from the table of contents, from the most recent to the most recent time:
Arcade, 2003;
"Warm Death" 2007;
Archives, 2009;
"Golden Stone" 2011;
Over the Wall, 2016;
"Running the Wind" 2020;
Bluetooth 2021.
At the end of the book, the intuitive feeling is that the thickness of the works decreases in the order above:
Of course, "Arcade" is not about the fact that men and women in a small town are thinking differently, just like the describable gap caused by the prosperity and decline of water transportation to the protagonist's parents, the new high-rise and the old arcade have caused the indescribable confusion and scars of the new generation.
In "Warm Death", it is of course not the wife who turns a normal person into a 400-pound "behemoth", who is trying to satisfy her husband's desires, the real reason is under the blue sky and white sun outside the text, and many people still turn a blind eye.
"Archive" seems to throw out a question: which one do you choose to choose in the local brotherhood and metropolis of the same village all your life? No matter which one you want to choose, the tide will eventually push you to the only answer.
This feeling of "reading the times from the little people" is obviously weakened in "Running the Wind", and the feeling of reading more than 20 pages is similar to the experience of reading jokes such as "urban beauties returning to their hometowns and becoming cuihua" on Weibo during the Spring Festival every year. Later, thinking back to "Bluetooth", it is almost a tweet on the public account of the "Urban Emotion Account": The protagonist's reaction to watching Dongai in 1995 is no different from my reaction to watching Dongai in 2005, and "Sudden Love" has also suddenly broken into my ears at some junctures, but such a "complete element" story can't cause a trace of waves in my heart, after all, what is missing is not a star.
At a time when changes in the media, market orientation, and judging criteria are constantly eroding the seriousness of confronting the truth, it is necessary to look back at the real and serious concerns inside and outside the works of the past.
Popularity in everyday life
Douban ID: Literary and artistic science and technology man
Personal preference for non-fiction, novels except for famous books and Jin Yong, tried a lot, almost couldn't read it, give up, either there are too many people to distinguish, or the name is too long to remember, or the relationship is too complicated, or the logic is too chaotic to keep up, or the remote mountainous areas of ethnic minorities are too far away. For Huang Yongmei's several short stories, I was very surprised and refreshing.
First of all, it is easy to read, approachable, easy to understand, you can watch the excitement or watch the doorway. Unlike realism in writing big history, Huang's essays focus on everyday life, embodying human relationships, especially understanding the complexity of human beings. Reading her novels, one can get rid of the ideological framework, get rid of the grand narrative, enter life from the perspective of the individual, understand the world and human nature, and express the survival of man in today's era. Her protagonists have rich emotions and entanglements in life, and they are all good and not evil, reflecting the ambiguity, diversity and complexity of daily life, among which personal emotions and fate can best reflect broad empathy and deep identity.
There may be a lot of deviations in my understanding, and it is up to the benevolent to be different. What touches me the most is the contradiction between people's obsession and people's insignificance, most of them are stubborn people, and they are helpless about their inability to reach a certain point, such as Lao Cai facing the stone in "Golden Stone", Lin Qiu'an, who always thinks about whether he can be put into a coffin after death in "Warm Death", how can he be at ease, maybe only destruction, only death, otherwise he will never be able to compromise with reality. The second is the contradiction of people's identity transformation. As a social animal, human beings are constantly changing and developing, and whether people wearing masks and performing on stage can they get rid of their past selves? What is the real self? Just like me in "Running Wind", no matter if it is Mary Sani Emily in the city, I will never be able to get rid of Gao Jasmine in my hometown. Li Zhensheng in "Archive" is rich and talented, snobbish and ruthless, and his identity seems so obscene compared to the last smile between my father and uncle in the village. The third is the contradiction between people's feelings and spiritual needs and the loneliness and emptiness of today's era. In "Arcade", I pay silently in reality, and Xiaojun is still lonely looking for a safe haven, and the most fearful thing in reality may be that we are together every day, but we are lonely every day. In "Bluetooth", ideal love is becoming more and more difficult in today's fast food era, just like the Tokyo love story theme song in the disappearing Bluetooth headset. The physical distance is measurable, the emotional distance is difficult to measure, and it may be fate to meet or not. In "Over the Wall", Mr. Lu and his wife finally climbed over the wall of their late son because of the appearance of Xiao Xu next door, because they still have to rely on people, living people, to overcome emptiness and loneliness. Only with the vitality of people can the soul not be dead and the world be motivated.
In her article, I feel that I am writing about me and the people around me, writing about my heart, which is too close to me, empathetic, and can truly experience the feelings of people and people, people and society, people and the world. All kinds of contradictions are also all kinds of absurdities of life, against absurdity, against fate, the author does give us some food for thought here.