Reveal the secret of this group of children in the Spring Festival Gala: they performed on the same stage with Mao Buyi, writing poems in the mountains

If the story begins with "the post-95s return to their hometown to teach", it will inevitably fall into some vulgar framework. For example, in the inspirational story of the difficult environment, the rural teacher Li Bolin led the students to set up a poetry club with his own efforts; The outcome of the story is much the same, and the people on and off the screen fall into a short and hurried touch.

Spring Festival Gala singing program "If you want to write the year"

Six years after graduation, Li Bolin, a rural teacher, doesn't feel that he is persevering. At the beginning of teaching children to write poetry, she only used poetry as a method to improve their language literacy. Writing and writing, she was moved by their free creation and expression in the poems.

In the past six or seven years, one layer of doubts has been adhered to one layer of doubts, and Li Bolin always has to answer the same question, "What is the use of writing poetry".

It is false to say that the environment is not difficult, the wind in the mountains, deep and shallow, left traces on Li Bolin's face, pimples on pimples, mountain roads connected to mountain roads, difficulties after difficulties. She said that at the beginning, when she watched her classmates gradually become the backbone of teaching in the city, and she was still correcting the children's sitting posture little by little, taking them through the structure of knowledge, and finding that it didn't work, it was false to say that she was not anxious - she fell into a long period of self-doubt.

Li Bailin and the children © Li Bailin

Li Bailin once assigned a reading homework and asked the children to post the video in the group. In the background of the mobile phone screen is their respective homes, and the dim light trickles down the wooden house. Li Bolin found that his understanding of the texture behind this land was still too shallow.

The village is crumpled and a place where mom and dad can't be kept. Its official name, Huitong, is part of Huaihua City, Hunan Province, and the news impression of it is that there are many left-behind children and a place that has just been removed from the country's poverty-stricken counties. Like migratory birds, adults fly to Zhejiang, or farther to Guangzhou, and then fly back in a hurry to stay for a short time on some days known as the New Year's Festival. There is multiple time flowing in the mountains, the long growth time of children, and the time when parents are flying through the sunset.

Once, when the Chinese New Year was approaching, Li Bailin asked the children to write a letter to the adults. In the middle of a bunch of crooked words, there was a sentence buried, "Dad, you don't want to beat your mother again, if you beat your mother again, I don't want you to be a father." ”

The comma and childhood are lost in the world of this sentence. Li Bolin suddenly realized that these scenes were their daily life. There is a child who will calmly tell her during recess, "The teacher passed away yesterday my father". He didn't know what it meant to die. People are whipped here by life and death and fate, and this is the truest and roughest life they are experiencing.

In such an environment, children grow like weeds. The process of waiting for happiness is too tedious, and the difficulties are so commonplace. Only poetry was an accident.

The clouds on the mountain were beautiful, and suddenly gathered in the sky, one after the other, and the golden and red lights rolled and chased on them. Li Bailin took the children out into nature, let them observe, and record the things worth remembering today. One child wrote, "At dusk, I stretched my waist and lay on my grandmother's back, and at dusk, I also stretched my waist and lay on the mountain." ”

The CCTV director was poked by the sentence "lying on the mountain at dusk", and brought the sunset, the moon, and the teachers and children to the Spring Festival Gala.

Why is the moon gone?

The first time the director of the Spring Festival Gala went to the meeting was the last day of 2023. The construction team is stationed in the school in all directions, and there are iron sheets piled up at the school gate, and a little girl who is less than one meter tall is walking around the school wearing clothes that are one and a half times her size. At the tea party, the children were grabbing the bench, a little boy fell to the ground, the bench was taken away by other classmates, and there was a mess around, but he kept laughing, holding a small tiger tooth. The directors were attracted by this natural joy of life and told them that maybe they could be on the show.

That program is called China Central Radio and Television's "2024 Spring Festival Gala". On this stage, which is followed by hundreds of millions of people, Li Bolin wants to take the children and singer Mao Buyi to perform a program called "If You Want to Write the Year".

"If You Want to Write the Year" © Spring Festival Gala crew

The original idea came from a widely sung song "If you want to write about the wind, don't just write about the wind". The lyrics read: If you want to write about the wind, you can't just write about the wind, you have to write about the wicker gently and softly floating into your heart, and you want to write about paper kites swaying and flying in the clear sky. Is it possible to use this sentence to create some expressions about "year"? When this idea was first pushed in front of Bi Bo, the leader of the Spring Festival Gala technical program group, he was a little uncertain and felt that the artistry was not enough. So the director team found the children around them, added some poems about the New Year that the children read, and inserted them into the demo, "with a little meaning", and the show was retained.

The audition lasted from October to December, and the director team collected more than 10,000 poems from schools around the country, which were neatly lying in the excel sheet of executive director He Zhongshi - he was ridiculed by his colleagues for being a dry count.

During these three months, Ho has been avoiding using students as propaganda tools for the school. The chief director of the Spring Festival Gala also mentioned to him that one thing should be considered clearly in the creative process, what such a program can bring to children.

Li Bailin is also thinking about this problem. Her answer was that she wanted the children to be seen. There are children in the class who have been transferred from other schools, and when they first arrived, they owed homework every day. Li Bolin read the poem he handed in, he said that the shadow is a particularly clingy guy, kicking it and hitting it will not leave, "I want a good friend like the shadow." ”

The integration of transfer students is a long journey, and Li Bolin reads loneliness from the poem. She read the poem five times on the podium and took everyone to read it with her. The boy's face turned red, and the next day, the homework that he hadn't written for a long time took the initiative to hand in. On the day the poem was published, the boy happily told the teacher that if I could write poetry, I could also write stories and do many other things.

Children here tend to take on a lot of responsibilities outside of their age. For example, to take care of a grandmother in her sixties and seventies, to take care of a younger sibling who has just learned to walk - the burden of life is rightly placed on them. In news reports, they are collectively referred to as "left-behind children", and their "seen" is often carried out with sympathy, pity, scrutiny, and condescension. What Li wants is for these children to "be seen as shining individuals, not just sympathetic."

Director Bi Bo told me that one of his most impressive poems was "Why Is the Moon Missing?" "Do you know that on the night of the Chinese New Year's Eve, there is no moon. He said he lived to be in his 30s before he found out, and this group of children observed it when they were teenagers.

The answer given by the children about where the moon went was that on this day, "the moon was invited to be a lantern for the New Year".

Observing the moon is the most generous gift from Dashan to this small school, which is a 6-hour drive from the county seat. In the playground at night, as soon as you look up, the whole starry sky is yours, and you can watch the time pass overhead slowly. On the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival, Li Bailin took the children out to play, and they jumped and screamed in the back. A girl saw the moon hanging in the sky and wanted to take it off and taste it. But unfortunately, she didn't think it tasted good and put it back again.

From more than 10,000 poems, Li and her students stood out. The director team also asked them to create a few poems with the theme of "year" and use them in the program.

In this way, Li Bolin took 12 children and took a six- or seven-hour car ride from Huitong to Beijing.

The children are backstage © at the Spring Festival Gala He Zhongshi

The excitement of coming to a big city was mixed with the excitement of being in the big city, knocking the children unconscious, and some of them even experienced nosebleeds for the first time in their lives. The CCTV studio was too big, and at first, they couldn't find a camera position and sat on the stool without saying a word. Let them smile at the camera, a child laughed and laughed and cried, Li Bolin hurriedly asked why he cried, and the child said, I laughed and cried.

The stage was so big, they didn't know what to do.

He tried to get the children to greet their brothers and sisters in the station, and took them to the backstage of another program he was in charge of, "We Grew Up Who Watched Cartoons", and tried to establish a connection between them and the scene. He asked them, what do you want to be when you grow up? Some people want to be a pilot, some say they want to be a painter, some say they want to be a designer. Some of the uncles and aunts at the scene were very happy and told them that they were designers.

"If You Want to Write the Year" is a song in the Spring Festival Gala, Mao Buyi sang it in front, and the children and Li Bolin performed on the stage. In order to adapt to the rhythm of the performance, Li Bailin took them to play games. The rule is to keep your mouth closed and tell others what you want through your movements and eyes. They slowly discovered that they could express themselves with their bodies and eyes when they were not talking.

Li Bailin and the children on the stage of the Spring Festival Gala

The poems written by the children about the "year" were also made into a form book and displayed in the program. This is a prop that is rarely shown on television. However, Jiang Yuhao, the visual director in charge of the stage presentation of the show, feels that their daily writing of poems is to write them in a book, which fits well with the image of the book, and can also make all the images in the poems and songs have a three-dimensional presentation. So Jiang Yuhao found Yue Xianghui, who designed a pop-up book for "Baolian Lantern", and it took more than half a month for the pop-up book to be made, and every page on it was written by children, including the poem "The Moon is Gone".

The pages of this book are made of screens, weighing two or three hundred kilograms, and they are transported from Tongzhou, and they will inevitably bump along the way. And to put it on the stage, put it on wheels, so that the children can pull it. Do you want to reduce the counterweight? Do you want to add more wheels? The props run back and forth, and before each rehearsal, you have to spend a lot of time checking whether it can be pulled away at once and whether the child can pull it off?

After more than a month of rehearsals, the program, people, and props were adjusted over and over again, and the stage screen was crushed many times. He Zhongshi described to me that once the screen is broken, the heart is also broken once, "fifteen or sixteen times."

At the very least, we can be a person who brings spring to others

The story of writing poetry begins with "cotton spits out a good harvest".

In the second-grade Chinese exam, Li Bolin asked the children to write figurative sentences, imitating "grapes are like a string of purple pearls".

There are children who write, "Cotton spits out a bountiful harvest". This is not a standard answer that can be judged as "correct".

"Who can think that the harvest is spit out of cotton?" Li Bolin asked rhetorically, it was white, fat, and with a mouth, everything was spit out by it.

On the test paper, Li Bolin crossed out. But later, she copied this sentence on the blackboard and asked everyone to read it, saying that it was well written, and that she had left the topic, and that this sentence was worth 100 points.

"Cotton spits out a bumper harvest" is like a pebble, hitting the middle of the lake, allowing Li Bailin to see the imagination of children hidden under the water. The ripple is that she began to teach children to write poetry, using it as a starting point to improve language literacy.

Writing poetry still started with imitation, but this method was quickly abandoned by Li Bolin. Imitation can only be written according to other people's ideas, and she doesn't want to do that.

She took the children to read poems and read Hu Shi's "Two Yellow Butterflies, Both Flying to the Sky." I don't know why, one flew back. "Tell them that great poets can also write such saliva poems. She wants the children to know that writing poetry is not that hard, so give it a try.

If you still can't write sentences, then turn the class into a thematic class. For example, in spring, Li Bolin asked them to talk about the characteristics of spring in turn, some people said that spring is a singing cricket, and some people say that spring is a peach that exudes fragrance...... In the back, some interesting words began to pop up, some people said that spring is the peach blossom that has just woken up, and some people say that spring is a grandfather covered in sweat.

Some children outside the class thought it was fun and added it, so Li Bolin simply set up a poetry club, with more than 20 people at first, and more than 40 people later.

Li Bailin hopes that they can pick up beautiful pieces from the trivial things of daily life. She once wrote a quote saying that she likes autumn when the sun goes down like a red lantern hanging in the corner of the sky. She read it to the children and asked them to go out into the autumn and find something that best represents the season. The children found the sky, the river, and the maple leaves, and fixed the time and seasons on the palm-sized leaf texture, saying that the autumn leaves are like a red mirror, reflecting the two seasons of spring and summer.

There was a small forest behind the school, and Li encouraged them to look for fallen leaves and write poems on it. So someone found a clump of burned banana leaves, crooked black characters, crawling on it, "On the small leaf, there is a caterpillar sleeping, and when you fall asleep, butterflies fly out." ”

There are also children who write, "I am a tree, and only the leaves accompany me, and in the autumn even the leaves cannot accompany me." ”

Children write poems © on fallen leaves by Li Bailin

"Who's at home now?" Li Bailin found the child who wrote poetry.

The child lowered his head and rubbed his feet, "Grandpa and grandma are at home, and mom and dad are working." The little girl jumped out word by word, and it was the longest sentence she could say.

Poetry has become a barometer of emotions, and Li Bailin will design some games according to the children's situation. In a game of bridges, several people sit side by side to form a bridge. Whichever bridge is placed first on the other side of the playground wins. The game should work well with each other, and the children try to take the first steps about friendship and cooperation.

The poems get better and better, and more and more words and secrets are filled in them.

Children's poems © by Li Bailin

Li Bailin has a cardboard box that knows everything. The poems that the children wrote in their notebooks, torn off, folded unevenly into small squares, and stuffed for her. Li Bolin was very happy, grabbed a handful and put it in the box.

"I don't want to go home every day because there is a stepmother at home who doesn't love me. When Li Bolin read this poem, he went to communicate with the child's mother, saying that the child misses you a lot, and that he is very uncomfortable now. Only then did the mother realize that she would take the child over from time to time. During the week at my mother's house, the children will be much happier, and Li Bolin can feel it.

"My mom is pathetic, she doesn't have a house or a car, but she still has me. "Someone wrote in a poem.

The darkness of life seems to be fading little by little.

On a Qingming Festival, Li Bolin received a poem, "Grandma took me to see my grandmother for the last time, I cried that day, like my eyes were burned by fire, but my grandmother never coaxed me anymore." "Grandma was the only one in the family who would leave the sugar for him to eat, and life took her and the sugar away.

Li Bolin knows that some problem poems can be solved, and some problem poems can't. She just felt that if reality must contain some blackness, at least it could change the way it is seen and interpreted. Literature can sometimes be one of the few weapons we have.

There is a spring story, Li Bolin likes it very much, and always tells it to the children. The class organized a spring outing, and one child was sick and couldn't go, and some of the others brought back a leaf, and some brought back a flower for the classmate who couldn't go. She knows that in addition to the black that is as heavy as lead, there is a lot of warm power in life that can be trusted.

Li Bailin said to the children, "At least, we can be a person who brings spring to others." ”

Accept the sun and the shadows openly

"Who do you think hurt Zhongyong, who hurt him?" During the rehearsal of the Spring Festival Gala, Li Bolin threw this question to the students who came to Beijing together.

Some children said that it was Zhongyong himself because he gave up studying. There are also children who say that it is his parents.

Is there anything else? Li Bolin asked.

After a long time, a child said, "And the guests." ”

"Yes, invite him here and there, but they don't seem to care if he's improving. So do you. ”

The Spring Festival Gala is approaching, and I will go back soon after the show. Li Bolin is worried that the children will not be able to adapt to their own small family after seeing the outside world. She doesn't want her children to be used as a tool for frequent performances after the Spring Festival Gala, "I still have to go back to normal growth." ”

On the day I met Li Bolin, there were still three or four days before the Spring Festival Gala, and the director gave them a holiday. Bi Bo is worried that if he overhearses, the innocence of the child will be squeezed dry.

In the hotel where Li Bailin lived, she showed me a painting on her mobile phone, which was a mountain drawn by her classmates.

On the mountain, a layer of green alternates with a layer of brown, and different shades are spliced together.

Why is there so many colors in a mountain? The child who drew said that green is daddy's love, brown is daddy's shortcoming, there are a lot of brown, but love will cover it.

The mountain © painted by the child Li Bolin

"When the perspective of the world changes, life becomes romantic. Li Bailin explained. Poetry allows children to live in different worlds for a short time, telling them how to accept the sun and how to accept the shadows openly.

Many children who have reached the sixth grade have less time to come to the poetry club. Staying at home and going to school or going to the city to find their parents is a tougher and more difficult choice of where to go in the future.

On the weekend, Li Bolin bought blank kites and asked them to write their ideals on them. The ideal was carried to heaven with the kite. This idea comes from "Dream of Red Mansions", Daiyu and the others fly a kite, and when the kite flies to a particularly high level, cut it off, and all the troubles are let go.

The children wrote their ideals on © the kite Li Bolin

On kites, there are children who write and want to be teachers, and there are children who write and want to be astronauts and write poems in space for aliens to see.

These words were typed into the computer by Li Bolin word by word. She laughed at herself for getting higher and higher in the past few months. After voting for a few publishers, there was no response, so she printed the poetry collection herself and sent it to her children.

Li Bolin told me about Yu Hua, and she always remembered the article "Buns and Dumplings". "I've lived for more than thirty years, and I don't know how many buns and dumplings I've eaten, and while my stomach digests them, my memory digests them. ”

Li Bolin worked hard to record these "buns and dumplings" in her life, helping her and her children fight some "stomach acid" and forgetting.

For six or seven years, she always had to answer the question "what is the use of writing poetry". Sometimes the question is reduced to: "Can writing poetry improve grades?" If utilitarian view, children who write poetry do not get worse grades than others, or even better. But Li Bolin always feels that grades are just a derivative of growth, and when children grow up, their grades will get better.

She knows that even if she goes to the Spring Festival Gala, in such an era, writing poetry does not constitute a profession, let alone supporting herself completely. Children also need to embrace a wider life beyond poetry. "But if one day, they can achieve their dreams, and at the same time write poetry, and save the perspective of the world romantically, how great would it be!"

作者 | 语冰 编辑 | 方奕晗 出品 | 腾讯新闻 谷雨工作室

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