Pang Yuliang
"Along the Shi Kefa Road to the east, in the city arts and crafts company to the south, is the oldest road in Yangzhou - Guoqing Road. I always walked to Xinhua Bookstore on Guoqing Road, and at that time I had just fallen in love with writing poetry...... "This is Pang Yuliang when he was a teacher in Yangzhou in 1984, and he used the money squeezed out of his teeth to buy books every weekend.
"Walking 30 minutes to work in the morning, walking home for another 30 minutes in the evening, two 30 minutes, the number of steps in WeChat exercise is exactly more than 10,000 steps. In 2023, Pang Yuliang, the winner of the 8th Lu Xun Literature Award, walks to work in Jingjiang every day, and he loves to use his mobile phone to take pictures of roadside plants on the way: zelkova, oak tree, camphor, ginkgo, black tree, and tung tree...... He "talks" with them in different seasons like an old friend.
For decades, Pang Yuliang's nights were almost similar, lying at the desk under a lamp: reading, writing.
On November 25, 2023, five writers from the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and other countries went to Xinghua to carry out literary exchanges. In the evening, five foreign writers and five local writers had a dialogue on "The Possibility of Literature and Self-Deepening", and Pang Yuliang acted as the moderator, quoting the imagery in the poem "Excavation" by the Irish poet Heaney as the opening scene, saying: "Chinese and foreign writers use a 'thick pen' to dig out life. ”
Writer Pang Yuliang's "pen" can be regarded as stout. Hei Tao, a writer who became acquainted with Pang Yuliang because of his poetry, described Pang Yuliang's vigorous creativity as "overflowing the river of poetry and surging into other fields of literature".
The little man Pang Yuliang does have a brute force. Whether he writes "Half a Father" and "Little Mister", or "Mint", "Ugly Child" and "Sadness on Paper", he explores and asks questions with a "digging" attitude, allowing his characters to "go to their own hearts", even if it is a small bug, he can write about its honest and cunning qualities.
The first line of poetry
"The fog is gone, leaving behind crystal hearts" - this is the first line of poetry written by Pang Yuliang, a 17-year-old normal student.
At that time, he had not yet learned to discern, only knew love, and would try his best to buy books about poetry and prose. He spent a penny to buy "Selected Essays of Famous Russian and Soviet Writers", and he still remembers that the plain cover was painted with two birches. This 79-page collection of essays includes 18 essays by 8 writers, including Turgenev, Bunin, and Chekhov. In the eyes of the young Pang Yuliang, the little book was a blue kingdom, and he himself was a shy cornflower, and he was slowly blown and swayed by the flame of poetry in it. He felt that the first poem he wrote was "involuntarily stepped out of the body", and that the crucial step was to connect the "narrow strip of bark" between the body of the "little birch" tree in Prishven and its roots. Starting from the first line of poetry, the birch trees of Pang Yuliang's poems are in the campus in the countryside, in the crops in his hometown, and in the bookstore in the small town...... In the process of constantly exploring the meaning of existence and questioning the value of life, it is becoming more and more prosperous and strong.
After becoming a rural teacher, Pang Yuliang trained himself in writing in addition to his education work, and began to submit articles. He cut out a corner of the envelope from which he sent the manuscript and wrote "Postage Lump Sum." After sending, it's all about waiting. The school is located in Xinghua Shagou Town, which is surrounded by water, and he often stands on the dock with the staff of the town's post and telecommunications office, waiting for the parcel from the county seat. In foggy weather, the mail boat will come late. Impatiently, he and the postman unwrapped the tin envelope on the parcel. "It was very happy, just like today's children open blind boxes. He said. Because, maybe the new "Poetry Newspaper" and "Fairy Tale Newspaper" will have his works, or new manuscript notices.
In the spring of 1987, Pang Yuliang's poem "The Season of Jointing" was published in Yangzhou Daily, which was his first published work, and coincidentally it was his 20th birthday. By 1988, his poems had been published in a large number of journals such as "Poetry Magazine", "People's Liberation Army Literature and Art", "Youth Literature", and some poems were selected into the second series of "Selected Youth Poems" of China Youth Publishing House. He remembered that there were poems by Haizi, Luo Yihe, Wang Guozhen and others in the same collection.
Published in 2023, "Five Kinds of Tiredness" is the first collection of selected poems written by Pang Yuliang in 30 years, and he looks back on his first line of poetry fondly in the preface titled "Looking at the Years of Loyalty".
Pang Yuliang said: "Poetry is a person's thousands of miles away. "His literary creation really started with poetry, and infiltrated the poetry with depth and appeal into the creation of different genres such as prose, novels, and fairy tales. As a result, he is known as an "all-rounder" in the field of literature. When others praised him for "switching between lines and sections, between imagination and non-fiction, between short, medium and long, he said sincerely: "Decades have passed, and I find that my favorite is poetry, which is the poetry that I have burned in my 15 years of lonely life in the village school." ”
The brightest years
The famous writer Bi Feiyu is Pang Yuliang's fellow villager in Xinghua, and he admires Pang Yuliang's observation angle: "Always towards the most lively and vivid life characteristics in life." The formation of this perspective may have an element of talent, but it is more related to Pang Yuliang's former experience as a teacher. Pang Yuliang said: "From a normal student to a little gentleman, I have always had a desire to grow taller. Such a desire makes me desperately absorb the vital nourishment in my life. Those things that are the liveliest and most vivid will always draw me in. ”
Hei Tao, who is also a writer from Jiangsu, once went to the rural primary school where Pang Yuliang taught, and he deeply felt that it was the upper reaches of Pang Yuliang's literary world. Pang Yuliang himself said: "From 18 to 33 years old, my 15 years as a rural teacher is the golden years of my life, and it is also the brightest years of my life. ”
"The loneliness of the village school is so huge that it is even boundless. And this huge loneliness and the emptiness of the countryside have become the "most abundant nutrition" in Pang Yuliang's literary growth. With children by day, kerosene lamps at night, and so many good books, he felt that his loneliness was plated with a thin layer of golden light. He liked Wei An's "Things on the Earth", so he wrote the story of what happened to him and his children in this tone. In Pang Yuliang's pen, the children of the countryside, the scenery of the countryside, and the people of the countryside...... All of them are simple and smart, and the seemingly scattered narratives often hit the reader with humorous warmth and cunning poetry.
These stories, written on the back of the preparation notes, condensed into "Dew Notes", which also became the original material for "Little Mister". The original material had more than 500,000 words, and Pang Yuliang spent about 15 years before and after polishing "Little Mister" into the current 120,000 words. He said that 15 years of experience as a rural teacher had taught him: "I learned to wait, I learned to accumulate, I learned to be patient, and I also learned to respect literature." ”
In 2022, Pang Yuliang's essay collection "Little Mister" won the 8th Lu Xun Literature Award, which is praised as "a paper classroom and playground of love and beauty, continuing the cultural context of virtue and spirituality since modern times".
Dig into the depths of life
After his father died, Pang Yuliang did not write anything for his father. A few years later, at the gate of Jingjiang People's Park, he saw an old man who had suffered a stroke on crutches, so he stepped forward to help him turn around the gate of the park. In the old man's body, he smelled his father's breath, because his father had died of a stroke. That night, he began to write the essay "Half a Father Is Hurting".
Since his father suffered a stroke in the spring of 1989, Pang Yuliang has been serving his father every day. "My father, who had been a hero in the village all his life, was trapped in his body after a stroke and his temper became even more irritable. Sometimes people are beaten with crutches. When he was bathing, he fell down because of his unstable center of gravity, and he began to scold, and I scolded him. Pang Yuliang said that in the five years after his father's stroke, he did not have any emotional communication with his father. But he still remembers that on the night when he started writing "Half a Father is in Pain", the keyboard jammed when he typed the word "father", and he thought that his father didn't let him write, but later he found out that it was actually he who used too much force to cause the keyboard to get stuck. After writing this essay, he began to re-experience and understand his father.
Essayist Zhou Xiaofeng reads enough sincerity and enough writer's strength in this prose. Critic Wang Zheng used "shock" to describe the experience of reading "Half a Father in Pain": "Family affection seems to be absent, and the pain of illness seems to exist more in the annoyance and even unbearable of family and relatives. For Pang Yuliang to write these calmly without fear of secular eyes, he felt the great courage of the writer.
In the excavation of fate, Pang Yuliang created a complex and ambiguous father figure. He said: "Actually, we all have a dead father in our hearts, and the dead father is in our sky - he looks down on us...... The evils of life always flicker like broken glass on the walls of humanity. "Oblivion is our heavy snow, and memory is the wheat wintering under the heavy snow. Pang Yuliang believes that by writing about the heavy snow and "wheat under the heavy snow", we and my father will not be separated in the vast world. In his opinion, this is the power of writing.
"Between my finger and thumb / That stout pen lay. / I'm going to dig with it. Heaney's poem is enough to describe Pang Yuliang's writing posture: he is accustomed to clenching the thick pen in his hand, writing about pain, digging for fate.
In 2000, Pang Yuliang moved from his hometown to Jingjiang County, on the Yangtze River, where he worked as a director of a legal program on a local television station. Those five years were the five years when I wrote the first draft of "Little Mister". On weekdays in those years, he often ran to the scene of various cases. He felt that he had touched another side of everyday life, and of course the life of a rural teacher. "I haven't touched the material in the five years I have been a journalist, so maybe I'll write about it later. He said.
In the article "The Mystery of the Fate of Crab Roe Soup Dumplings", Pang Yuliang wrote from the famous Jingjiang delicacy crab roe soup dumplings to the people who eat crab roe soup dumplings, and then to the people who make crab roe soup dumplings. A small article of less than 2,000 words was written by him vividly and vividly. Pang Yuliang is such a writer, even if it is a crab roe soup dumpling, he also strives to write its "sense of destiny": "I regard the crab roe soup dumpling dangling in the steamer as a big button of fate. He (referring to the master who made crab roe soup dumplings) is making the big button of fate every day. Every day we untie the big button of fate with our mouths and teeth. ”
For Pang Yuliang, fate gave him the poor days of his childhood, but he used hunger and loneliness to make himself a pair of damp wings. Therefore, we can see the "virtuous and spiritual" in "Little Mister" and capture the seeds of "virtuous and spiritual" in "Little Bug". Pang Yuliang sees these flickering lights in his childhood as a reward for his writing, and in the process of tracing his childhood and examining himself, he understands himself and his destiny more and more.
(Source: China Reading News, Author: Wang Jun, Pang Yuliang is a member of the Democratic Progressive Party)