Writer Zhang Dachun: Between parents and children, each generation has its own resistance

In the 1990s, Zhang Dachun once returned to his hometown in Shandong to trace the family past, telling his unborn children about the rise and fall of the five generations of the patrilineal family history. (Photo provided by the interviewee)

Zhang Dachun is 66 years old. He is a writer, a radio host, and a storyteller. Every Monday to Thursday, he goes to Taipei to record or broadcast programs on News98 radio station. From two to three o'clock in the afternoon, Zhang Dachun talked about Journey to the West, interspersing Wu Chengen's "Journey to the West" and mainland scholar Qian Wenzhong's "Xuanzang's Journey to the West" for interpretation. On Monday, "Our Old Taipei," Zhang Dachun invited some Taipei people who were about the same age as him to "describe his life and life stages, what things are worth remembering and reminding, not limited to eating, drinking, having fun, eating, clothing, housing, and transportation"; on Tuesday, he talked about life sciences and astronomy; on Wednesday, he talked about entertainment, performances, and various exhibitions; on Thursday, he talked about legal issues, and there was also a section called "Theme Pavilion" to discuss hot news topics. The content of many radio stations was carried by netizens to station B.

Radio is a special medium for Zhang Dachun, who has listened to radio since he was a child, with personal feelings. "I have always felt that the imagination brought and triggered by sound, conversation or telling is very different, it has a kind of creativity, and the listener has to cooperate with the speaker to obtain some inventive or creative perceptual content, and this content is not necessarily expected by the speaker. Zhang Dachun told Southern Weekend.

His father, who took Zhang Dachun to listen to the radio when he was a child, is no longer alive. In 1997, when his father fell ill, Zhang Dachun told his unborn child: "I don't know you, I don't know your face, posture, temperament, personality, even your gender, especially your fate, it is the most mysterious and most often arouses my imagination." A few years later, the long essay "Listening to Father" was published, which is a long story about speaking and listening, with the memories of my father, the narration of the six masters, and the legend of my father's childhood partner Teng Wenze, from my great-grandfather Zhang Guanying and great-grandfather Zhang Runquan until my father left home to join the gang of the old society.

Zhang Dachun's father was the seventh oldest in the Jinan family in Shandong, like the mysterious K in Kafka's novel "The Castle", he worked as a land surveyor, carrying large and small plates, levels, and theodolites, and repeatedly walked a route of more than ten miles more than ten times, in order to measure something called a "baseline". Baselines do not exist in this world, but they are the scale of the world. During the war, my father and mother came to Taiwan by mistake.

When Zhang Dachun was in middle school, his father drew some strangely shaped instruments in the margins of his textbooks, and Zhang Dachun often stared at the accurately proportioned telescope and vertical dial on the map in a daze, forgetting to listen to the class, he guessed that his father, a person who had neither talent for sketching nor interest in painting, could have this kind of painting skills, and the plan was the result of training to the point of being idle to the point of going crazy. Apart from these two or three instruments, anything else he paints is illegible. Before the high school exam, his father took him out for a walk on a hot afternoon and told him two life mottos: "If you don't do well, it's nothing, and if you do well, it's nothing." ”

In 1988, Zhang Dachun returned to the mainland for the first time, and it was also the first time he went to Jinan, and every day he chatted with the six masters, the fifth masters, and his aunt in the hall of his hometown on Chaoyang Street in Xiguan (which had not been demolished at that time) and the Jinan hotel where he lived. Zhang Dachun brought it back and put it for his father and mother at home every day, "as an after-dinner entertainment". In addition to the precious oral history in the tape, which provided the material for the story of "Listening to My Father", there was also "Family History Talks" sent by the six masters, which was written on a small manuscript paper of 500 words per page, and wrote seventy or eighty pages.

In "Listening to Father", there are three timelines intertwined: one is the past of the family, writing about the simplicity and breadth of the generations of the ancestors, and the intertwined fates of the father's brothers, until the mother carries two burdens, A huqin, crammed into a train full of fleeing people, a line of his own memories of how he grew up in Taiwan, followed his father on a bicycle, detoured through Taipei, and crossed streets named after various Chinese provinces until he became a writer, and another line stretched into the unknown future, as if Zhang Dachun harbored a belief that the fate of his children would be aligned with his ancestors in the dark.

The storyteller's skills were also passed on to Zhang Dachun by his father, "When I was still a child, I sat on my father's lap and listened to "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", "Journey to the West", "Water Margin", "The Legend of the West Chamber", "The Legend of Children's Heroes", "The Biography of Jingzhong Yue" and part of "Strange Tales from Liaozhai"...... For a long time, I have always believed that if I can't tell my child stories every night enough to remember in his dreams, as my father did, I would not be able to fulfill my father's duty. But can I do it?"

In October 2023, when "Listening to the Father" was republished in the mainland, Zhang Dachun's son and daughter had grown up, but according to him, they had never read the book, at least not mentioned it to him.

They don't equate me with knowledge they hate

Southern Weekly: The essay collection "Listening to the Father" will be republished in mainland China in 2023, 20 years after it was first published. The origin of this book is to tell your children family stories, both for you to listen to your father and for your children to listen to your story. Now that your children have grown up, how is your relationship?

Zhang Dachun: My son was born in 1998 and is now 25 years old, he is studying in the Department of Architecture, and his professional study time is one year longer (than the average major), plus changing departments, so it takes two more years, and he is still studying for the last few credits. The daughter is two and a half years younger than her son, studying film and television, has graduated, and is about to go to Australia for further study.

I was lucky that they didn't get too distracted from me when they were young and in school, and they didn't equate me with knowledge they hated. It is difficult for a person to grow up, not only to be guided and nurtured by his parents, but also to maintain a kind of independence. Their curiosity for knowledge, or their intellectual curiosity, was not greatly affected by me, and the two children were more or less willing to discuss intellectual issues with me until now.

Southern Weekly: What kind of intellectual issues are discussed, are they related to literature?

Zhang Dachun: I'll give you an example, which happened recently, my daughter was watching an American drama "Shameless", about a small town in the United States, low-income, low-status families, many children face some difficult problems in life. Suddenly, there was a scene where a female professor had a romantic relationship with her student, and then the professor mentioned Simone de Beauvoir. So I told my daughter, "This Simone de Beauvoir, we have her books at home." Then my daughter would stop the TV and ask me what book it was, and I thought she was interested and told her that it was called The Second Sex.

My daughter temporarily stopped chasing American dramas and found the books at home to read. I think at least I can contribute a little bit of knowledge. Two weeks ago, she asked me for a book by the French essayist Montaigne, and after reading it, she felt that the translation was terrible, so she wanted to read it in the original language. Because of her, I also compared Montaigne's essays with Dante's Divine Comedy mentioned by Montaigne, and made me look at books that I might not have looked at very carefully. From what I've heard, it's not easy for fathers and daughters, fathers and sons, to enter an intellectual topic at any time and find the content of books that can be exchanged.

Beauvoir, a French writer, published "The Second Sex" in 1949, has had a profound impact to this day. (Visual China photo)

Southern Weekly: Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" and her biography "Becoming Beauvoir" also have many readers in the mainland. Will the younger generation of Taiwanese, like your daughter, also pay special attention to feminism?

Zhang Dachun: Different from my time, in the past 20 years, whether it is women, gender, or disadvantaged (groups), or all kinds of very anxious and developing conflicts in the world, the discourse of resistance behind it has been very common.

But precisely because it is something that can be popular, it will inevitably have some effects that I call "fashion trendiness", and even the danger of forming a more consolidated ideology, which you can know when you look at the United States, to emphasize all kinds of conflicts or antagonisms within society in order to be able to form an academic label. If the purpose is to form an academic label, I don't particularly agree with it. But I believe that young people will have their choices, and they must also take responsibility for their own pursuit of knowledge. So I should say that I have less room to interject, and sometimes the discussion is quite intense.

Southern Weekly: Does the heated discussion refer to you and your children?

Zhang Dachun: Yes, different generations will emphasize different values, and when we discuss two values, there must be a factual basis behind these values, such as my experience and her experience. So when I am a person with 66 years of life experience and a person with only 22 years of life experience, it is not possible to exchange understanding of the facts with each other on an equal basis.

For example, there is a story "Mountain Road Monkey" that many people discuss in Taiwan, about a young man riding a motorcycle and having an accident in the mountains. In the eyes of us old people, these young people have no hope and no purpose in life, and should they have a more worthy and valuable purpose in life. Taiwanese young people don't think so, and they may look back and say that it is the unfair competition in society. There will always be a different focus.

Southern Weekly: But your contemporaries, if you put it in the West, just lived through the hippie and counterculture movements of the sixties and seventies of the twentieth century, and it was a very rebellious generation.

Zhang Dachun: In the past 60 or 70 years, young people who are dissatisfied with the environment in which they grew up or the conditions in which they live have been looking for the rebellious genes of the 1960s that you mentioned in themselves or in their living environment.

There is a novelist in Taiwan named Qiong Yao, she used to have a very well-known book "Several Degrees of Sunset Red", about the Anti-Japanese War, several pairs of men and women made up a marriage in the war. Okay, but what is the second half of the story? The children of these couples have become emotionally connected, and they themselves have become very conservative, hateful-looking old-fashioned, and do not allow their children to fall in love freely, and you were originally a fighter, but later you became a tyrant. It cannot be said that only the old people are right, or that only the young people are right.

Southern Weekly: What topics do you discuss with your son?

Zhang Dachun: Including the architecture he studied, including NBA basketball, Formula 1 racing, as well as major social science issues, such as colonization, American hegemony, world order, and international disputes, these seem to be quite lively, big things are happening in the world, my son also has various opinions, as well as international economics and finance, which he is interested in. They live in a pervasive and pervasive world, an environment that inspires intellectual curiosity and intensifies curiosity.

Stills from the Taiwanese TV series "Several Degrees of Sunset Red" adapted from Qiong Yao's novel. (Data map)

Turning away from one's ancestors, and looking for the remains of one's ancestors

Southern Weekly: During the May Fourth period, there was also a wave of narratives of rebellion against the family and father, and you traced the family past in Shandong in "Listening to the Father", do you have anything to do with the May Fourth generation when you deal with the experience of your father and grandparents?

Zhang Dachun: I don't take May Fourth out as a background. I have been studying the history and culture of the early years of the Republic of China for many years, and I spent more than two years and nearly three years in my own program, based on different sources, to talk about a long program called "This is the Republic of China", from the Xingzhonghui to the Northern Expedition in 1926 and 1927. So what happened in the early years of the Republic of China, I don't want to simplify it too much.

Each generation of young people may have their own identity for the pursuit of a kind of independence and individual identity. My father did it, it doesn't mean that I can't do it, but on the contrary, my grandfather may have done it, but I think that I want to kill my father now and make my father rebel, which seems to be a very normal and common thing in history.

So if we look at it from this point of view, there must be a common trend of detachment or reneging from one's ancestors, and there is no difference between the ages. But relatively, I especially want to emphasize that it is relative, to go back to find their ancestors or the remains of their ancestors, to understand their origins, I am afraid that many young people who have left home have to look for it. He had to know who he was, where he came from, and where he was going. From the review of each chapter of "Listening to the Father", we can see the process of pursuit.

Isn't that contradictory, why did he turn his back on his family in the first place? Without doing so, there is no way to find out what kind of universe he is in, and if he wants to have a status, he must go outside. If you don't have that trip, trekking through mountains and rivers, thousands of miles, far away from your original orbit, you can't see which universe your original orbit is in. I believe this is a very critical cognitive process.

Southern Weekly: This kind of contradiction between rebellious and rebellious runaway, and looking back and looking back, is indeed a contradiction that every generation has to experience. You're a novelist who is good at storytelling, why do you tell a family story in prose?

Zhang Dachun: I started writing this work in 1998, when I went to the United States to participate in a writers' workshop, about three months before and after. At that time, my father's condition (after illness) was relatively stable, and he was gradually recovering, although he could not stand up and walk, but it seemed that it was a matter of time, so I took a run. In this process, it should be said that I am not only relieved, but also feel that I have an obligation to record the process of surviving all kinds of great tribulations and trials with my humble life in my family. So I didn't think about how to write a novel, it wasn't my intuition.

I have confirmed the whole material, including bringing the materials of my father's sixth brother, my name is the sixth master, to the United States, and I have completed about 50,000 words in my free time while participating in the workshop. Therefore, from the moment I wrote the first word, I decided that if I didn't have the technique of fiction in it, it would be impossible to suddenly turn it into a novel after writing 50,000 words. Many friends, including readers who don't know each other, will say to me that these things in your family are more exciting than dramas.

It is precisely because its material is so legendary that at the beginning, after reading "Family History", I knew that as long as it was written truthfully, it would be a very wonderful story. To be honest, compared to the stories that the whole era has given to our family, my talents, or my imagination, are far behind, and the truth is always the most glorious and brilliant.

In Zhang Dachun's current life, the most important activity every day is writing. (Photo provided by the interviewee)

Southern Weekly: Are your children interested in Shandong, which you write about in your book?

Zhang Dachun: They always talk about it, but what arouses their interest and curiosity may be the life they have to develop now. For them, looking at their ancestral home or hometown, looking at it from a distance, still seems to have a strange feeling.

Southern Weekly: What new responses do you expect from the republication of "Listening to the Father"?

Zhang Dachun: After 20 years, if this book is still on sale, it means that it can reach more readers. For me, when I'm talking about my ancestral home, not to mention what distant friends will say, my own readers in Taiwan, I don't seem to be thinking about how to communicate, integrate, and maintain a cultural tolerance in the long run, which is really worrying.

Southern Weekly: Do you have any novels or other books that you plan to write right now?

Zhang Dachun: The most important activity in my life now is writing, because when I was about 30 years old to a little over 40, I wrote very little, almost nothing. At that time, of course, there were many reasons to be busy, but unfortunately, in my 30s, when my spiritual beauty, learning ability, and will to exercise were at their strongest, I didn't write well. But before that, when I was in my teens, 20s, and later almost 45 years later, when I wrote a lot, I think it should have started earlier, and then endlessly.

Then you must be surprised, why novels, essays, these things, I don't mention these things, only mention writing. Now my most important activity every day is to write one or two thousand words, including writing letters, reading notes, writing poems, and even sometimes transmitting information on various social media interfaces, as long as the content of my text message is more than 100 words, I must pick up a brush to write a letter, and then take a picture of it, take a screenshot, and then send it to my friends, this is my main activity, every day and again. For me, it's completely a practical life, and I don't see these words as works, it's just my daily life.

Southern Weekly reporter Li Heng

Editor-in-charge: Li Muyan