"Aurora Train" is the latest collection of novels by American writer Gu Yan, which consists of 18 short stories. Gu Yan uses a unique perspective and thinking, concise and cold words, revealing the deepest loneliness in the hearts of people in the immigrant society, whether it is husband and wife, lovers, sisters, spiritual sustenance and yearning between mother and daughter, or the breeding and destruction of emotions, she uses sometimes sharp and sometimes warm brushstrokes to dissect the burden, helplessness and tenacity of reality, and restore discrete to the normal state of life, creating a unique landscape of new immigrant novels. As He Shaojun, a professor at Shenyang Normal University, said, Gu Yan's novels are a duo of intellectual and poetic, and most of the protagonists of these novels are Chinese immigrants to the United States.
>> Creation Talk:
Hold up a piece of the sky
Gu Yan
Speaking of writing, I was a marathon runner, but there was a pause in the fall of 2009, when I visited the East Asian Department at Stanford University, and then went to Cornell University to study creative writing. I resumed writing in March 2020 and started writing mainly poetry and prose, and three months later I started writing short and medium stories. In the past three years, 41 novels have been published alone. Some time ago, I selected 36 novels and compiled two collections of novels: one is "Aurora Train" and the other is "Ali's Sky".
After returning to writing novels, I basically went in two directions: one is the North American life series, and the other is the domestic life series. The collection of novels "Aurora Train" consists of 18 short and medium-length stories, which basically focus on Chinese who have studied and immigrated to the United States, as well as their various experiences of settling in the United States and integrating into society.
In this collection of novels, "Downstairs" is a novella urban novella. Two years ago, I moved from the small town of Lexington to Washington, D.C. In the past, my perception of the city came from news reports and later visits to this city, but the feeling of actually living here has a different flavor, and I also deeply feel that "Chang'an rice is expensive, and it is not easy to live in a big place". Therefore, I am particularly concerned about the fate of Chinese immigrants and students in this world capital.
In the early years, I paid more attention to the poetry and philosophy in my novels, as well as the exploration and questioning of beauty and evil in complex human nature. For example, the novella "Homeless", the novels "Hangzhou Woman" and "The Dance of the Soul" are all urban poetic and philosophical novels. Today, I still feel that it is very necessary to maintain a pure poetic and philosophical spirit with the spirit of the novel.
Of course, the atmosphere, mood, and rhythm of the novel are crucial. Emotions are not only the characters, but also the different emotions generated by the environment and time period, and the rhythm is what makes the novel like a symphony, with both movement and allegro, adagio, etc., with these elements, if you do not dig deep into the complex human nature and have no sense of redemption, then it will seem too dark, obscure, simple, just a story. A novel needs to have a good story, but a good story is not the same as a novel, and a story needs to be raised to a certain level before it can be called a novel.
Nowadays, the literature of new immigrants is also a beautiful scenery in the mainstream literary circle in China. Writers have their own perspectives and expressions, but due to their different talents, they express different things. In the final analysis, every writer can only be handy and unique when he or she grasps his own "me", his own talent and honesty.
"Downstairs" is a novel that focuses on the story that takes place in an apartment building in Washington, D.C. The original form of the hero and heroine in the novel is my only Chinese neighbor who lives in an apartment building in Washington, D.C. Of course, the story is fictional, and the exterior environment of Washington and the internal structure of the apartment building are real. If I don't live in a Washington, D.C. apartment building, many of the details of the hardware parts can't be experienced firsthand.
The heroine of the novel, Gong'an Mi, is a university professor and a very confident woman, while the male protagonist, Xiaoyang, is the opposite, he is timid, decadent, cowardly, and weak, which makes a big difference. In the face of the law of the jungle, the survival of the fittest, and the law of the jungle, the hero Xiaoyang will definitely be eliminated.
When I came to the United States, I thought about the relationship between races. At a time when multiculturalism was prevalent, whites still had a hierarchical mindset entrenched in conservative ideology, and minority ideals had not materialized and had been rejected from mainstream society. Therefore, the self-confidence and strength of the hostess Gong'an Mi is indeed the way for immigrants to survive.
If we say that our Chinese society is in a process of urbanization, with cities getting bigger and bigger and less farmland, then the United States, with the exception of some cities such as New York, Washington, and San Francisco, is basically a small town and a rural area. I've lived in the small town of Lexington for many years, and I was a little confused when I first moved to Washington, D.C. First of all, the sirens in Washington, D.C., are annoying every now and then. Secondly, if the apartment building is large, there is a "bang" sound of running water in the sewer pipe that runs to the end, which makes people unable to sleep peacefully. Although I have become accustomed to turning a deaf ear over time, I am still annoyed when I think about it, and I must protect my own rights and interests, so I put forward my opinion to the property department.
The Washington, D.C. subway that I wrote about in the novel was not familiar to me, who only drove and didn't take the subway. For this reason, I bought a monthly pass and made the red, blue, orange, yellow, green, and silver lines clear. Sometimes when I am tired of writing, I take the subway to go to scenic spots, museums, or shopping malls, which will bring me unexpected surprises. Once, I met a black boy who liked to dance in a subway car, and another time I met a painter friend and his wife who immigrated to the United States in the West Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Later, we saw Renaissance paintings from Florence and central Italy, as well as Spanish and French paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries. These two encounters, after the two characters were transformed in my mind, gave rise to the green hair in the novel.
The pursuit of art requires a lot of passion and enthusiasm, and I gradually fell in love with the city of Washington, D.C., and its greater Washington area. In every aspect, the city has always given me a great view and a keen sense of smell.
Looking back, let's talk about the male protagonist Xiaoyang, the accompanying man, who can't speak English and has a crooked body, ups and downs in life, and finally went to the detention center because of beating. In the eyes of his wife, he is a useless nest man, but he does not sink because of this, but redeems himself. He studied English in the detention center and kept a diary every day to save his soul and get reflection.
Downstairs is where all the people who live in the high-rise residential complex in Washington, D.C., go every day. There were people walking, people walking their dogs, people sitting in the coffee bar on the side of the road, people just cars coming in and out, but either way, the downstairs was much warmer than the huge stone boxes of the residential buildings.
In this collection of novels, I also involve elderly people who immigrated from the mainland to live in the United States or live independently. For example, the short story "Coconut Tree by the Sea" shows the life of a Chinese grandmother in the United States. Chinese grandmothers are a large group in the United States. In the early years, when I was at Stanford University, I met a lot of Chinese grandmothers. They came from their hometown to the United States, where they were unfamiliar with their lives, to help take care of the children. They don't speak English, they can't drive, and the worst thing is that their children are tired when they come home from work, and they don't want to talk to them much. Their wait was in vain, and they were inevitably frustrated. Some of the old people tolerated it, and some of them had conflicts with the children. As the days go by, the estrangement grows deeper.
The grandmother in "Coconut Tree by the Sea" is a collection of grandmothers in one, mainly expressing a kind of family affection that blood is thicker than water, and interpreting the artistic image of the heroine's grandmother through dense and overlapping details, and revealing that it is not easy for Chinese students to fight hard overseas. The grandmother in the novel is a Shanghai woman. Coming to the United States for the sake of their children, they are responsible for disciplining the third generation in a foreign land where they are not familiar with their lives, but living overseas is even more difficult for the elderly. My grandmother, like most Chinese grandmothers in the United States, had a language barrier, couldn't drive, and was lonely with nowhere to speak. After experiencing the pain of losing a loved one twice, my grandmother overcame many psychological obstacles and remained committed to this broken home, holding up a piece of the sky.
However, my grandmother's posture was always the kind that went down to the dust. Grandma is a traditional Chinese woman in her bones, with perseverance and spiritual strength. In front of the children, she is also the softest heart, and at the same time has a rich and sensitive heart. The role of grandmother is the final journey of a woman from birth to growth to aging. They have a wealth of life experiences, either sad or happy, but in the end, they can't exist alone. They must live with their loved ones, with the world, until the end of their lives.
In addition to "Downstairs" and "The Coconut Tree by the Sea" mentioned above, the collection also includes "The Man Who Played the Saxophone", "The Aurora Train", "Jasmine, Jasmine", "Autumn at Stanford", etc., all of which are good novels, and their characters have an inner spiritual depth and soul conversion in the spiritual world.
It's not easy to write a short story well, I think about it and work hard. Every time I write, I want to improve my thinking and skills. This requires vision, taste and pattern. I wanted to write the novel as delicately as poetry. Of course, I prefer to write long novels than short and medium stories. In the novel, my imagination can be very enjoyable. I can communicate with my characters, and I don't need to be as restrained as I am when I write short stories, but restraint is an ability, and short stories are designed to develop that ability as a writer.
Recently I revisited Henry James's short stories, and "The Original" is a very intriguing novel. It reveals through the story that "the truth of life is not equal to the truth of art, in other words, the truth of art is not the same as the truth of life", and through this novel, it verifies its own theory of art: "Beyond the depiction of life, the obvious and mundane things are brought to a higher level." ”
Henry James's short story takes psychological fiction to the extreme. Some of his theories are also something I admire. Indeed, a good novel should not only show (rather than tell) dynamic social landscapes and life scenes, but more importantly, it should be vivid and interesting, so that readers can get the pleasure of reading with aesthetic significance. At this moment, I think how to use the art form of short and medium stories to better show the spiritual confusion of modern people, as well as the vivid record of various occasions in society, is what I need to work hard and explore.
In fact, there are not many times when a real writer is happy, mainly from within life, or sentimental things, often making people inexplicably depressed and lonely, but writing can make me lonely and vigorous, and my heart is full of strength. I spent more than three years writing novels of more than 600,000 words, essays and essays of more than 200,000 words, communicating with the characters in my pen, as if I had countless confidants, which filled my heart. At this point, I lifted the curtains, and the sky over the Potomac River was blue, and spring was coming towards me.