In Li Jing's online article, the male protagonist is strong, humane, and cherishes feelings at the same time, just like a reliable husband and father. And the heroine is independent, sober, not half-hearted, and treats feelings very purely. Such a role setting pins on her expectations for her ideal partner: the male protagonist loves the heroine in every way, and puts her first in everything, "not persuasion and blind obedience, but respect".
Text | Xie Ziyi
Interviews | Xie Ziyi, Chen Jingxuan
Edit | Golden turns
Operations | orange
The treasure mother outside the online text
Try again. Li Jing decided.
Before she really started earning manuscript fees, she had no income for more than half a year. In the first online article, she wrote 300,000 words and earned less than 100 yuan. She was impressed by the frustration. After another month of fighting, she waited for the debut of the second book with trepidation. When she saw that her daily income gradually increased from a few dozen yuan to 300 yuan, she felt that she had found a way. After getting the first manuscript fee, she finally replaced the mobile phone that had been used for 4 years and the speaker was broken.
35-year-old Li Jing is an online writer, more precisely, she is a special type of person in the online literature world - Bao Ma author. The main scenes of their life and work are at home, writing online articles as part-time or full-time, and playing the fixed roles of wives and mothers.
There are a lot of class sales marketing on the market under the guise of "Bao Ma writes online articles and earns tens of thousands of dollars a month", which also confirms their most direct anxiety - lack of money. Mo Yuanyuan, a mother of two children, said that she didn't like the label of "full-time mother", and when she decided to write an online article, she felt ashamed to ask for money with her palms up. In Guangzhou, when Mo Yuanyuan's second treasure was born, she had experienced three years of the epidemic, because her husband was working in a different place, and she was left to take care of the children full-time. She always felt that one day, when she grew up, her children would ask her, "Mom, why don't you go to work to earn money?"
▲ Mo Yuanyuan writes in a café. Photo / Courtesy of the interviewee
"Writing online articles is a job that we can do at home without worrying about being cheated out of money, although we don't earn much, but at least we can subsidize a little bit of the family. "Anhui's Bao Ma author Li Mengting told me.
Writing is the continuous paid labor of mothers, while housework and taking care of children are the unpaid "second shift". Li Jing's life is simple and regular, taking her 5-year-old son to kindergarten every day, and writing between grocery shopping and cooking. At night, after putting the child to sleep, she has to think about the next day's writing outline to make sure that each chapter has a wonderful and intriguing plot, commonly known as "burying the hook".
In three years, Li Jing wrote five online texts, nearly 2.6 million words, of which 1.5 million words were typed out with a mobile phone. Before the child goes to school, during the day, she will take the child to play in the park, and she will stand next to it and type. When she slept, she held the child in her left arm and typed out heavy words with her right hand.
After all, behind the title of "Bao Ma", there is a set of gender division of labor by default. Chen Shasha, who is also a mother author, in her early 30s and has been writing for 12 years, said: "I don't know how to define this group, but when female authors reach a certain age, most of them will be mothers." ”
It is difficult for us to be precise about how many mothers are in this group of online writers, but the distribution of male and female authors in the online literature industry was once relatively balanced, and a new trend is that female authors are gradually increasing. According to the report on the development of online literature in recent years, in 2019, the proportion of female authors exceeded that of male authors for the first time. In 2023, the scale of online authors will reach 24.05 million, of which the number of female authors will be at least 12 million, which is equivalent to the total population of Zhengzhou.
It is difficult to really rely on online articles to make money, and you need to pass the editorial, reader, and market levels. When Li Jing wrote her first book, she only earned a few cents a day, and because she really couldn't see hope, the editor also asked her to close it and rewrite it. Mo Yuanyuan tried to write an online essay two years ago, and she wrote more than 100,000 words at the beginning, but all of them were rejected. She used to be in a novice group of 400 authors, until now, there are only 4 people who can support themselves by writing online articles full-time.
According to the reading preferences of readers of different genders, the creative tracks of male and female authors can be divided into male frequency and female frequency. Male frequency essays on themes such as cultivating immortals, fantasy, and history have a large number of words and long serials, and the corresponding subscription and publication income is large. In contrast, the commercialization process of female frequency is later. In 2002, Qiqi Chinese Network launched paid reading, opening a paid model for online literature. But it wasn't until 2008 that Jinjiang, which focuses on female frequency, launched VIP payment.
"So when girls first started writing on the Internet, they all had the mentality of a hobbyist, generating electricity for love. Xiao Yingxuan, an associate researcher at the School of Literature of Shandong University, is a researcher of online literature, and she said that by about 2014, more and more film and television dramas will adapt female frequency novels, indicating that after entering the IP era, the influence of female frequency literature is greater. Like a prairie fire, this further boosts the creative enthusiasm of female authors.
▲The homepage of Jinjiang Literature City. Picture / Screenshot
In addition to pulling the children and daily housework, the only way for the mother author to fight for income is to keep plowing. Li Jing writes in Tomato novels, and in order to get a full attendance award of 600 yuan per month, she has updated 4,000 words every day for 5 consecutive months. This means that on the keyboard of her mobile phone, she used her fingers to press the volume of the first 80 episodes of "Dream of Red Mansions" for 150 days.
Due to the long-term use of mobile phones to write online articles, maintaining the action of holding the child with her left hand and pressing the buttons with her right hand, Li Jing's left arm muscles were stressed for a long time, causing frozen shoulder, and she often felt pain, numbness, and swelling. After the child can speak, she is often interrupted in the "mother" after voice, and can only wait for the child to fall asleep before coding words.
Lack of sleep is the "common problem" of Bao Ma authors. Chen Shasha from Jiangsu said that most authors are more inspired to write books at night. After having a baby, writing at 3 a.m. is the norm. The long-term sleep deficit led to the formation of "brain fog", and she always forgot to put pen to paper, knowing what it meant, but she couldn't find the right words.
Giving birth to children itself is already a great drain on female authors. Before Chen Shasha got married, she had an online article that was being updated, and she got a maximum of nearly 500,000 manuscript fees. Two years after she became pregnant and gave birth, she suffered an income waterloo. Because she writes slowly and revises frequently, she needs to sit in front of the computer for five hours. "I had a nervous breakdown, the baby couldn't sleep, every day was muddy, and the book could no longer be written. ”
In the reader's field of vision, there are many female authors who are buried in family trivialities because of marriage and childbirth, either for a long time, or completely withdraw from the stage of online articles.
▲ Photo / Visual China
A cool script from another world
Before becoming authors, mothers were also readers.
The uniqueness of online literature is that it is a cool world where fantasies and desires can be satisfied. The popular male and female frequency scripts tirelessly tell the story of how the male protagonist relies on the "golden finger" dick to counterattack and ascend to the sky step by step, or the heroine slaps her face and abuses the scum, and falls in love with the true son.
In Reading Romance Novels, the American scholar Radway writes that romance novels read by women offer a utopian vision that is very different from the repression and emotional isolation they endure in real life. There, the reader satisfies his imaginary needs to be cared for by breathing the same fate with the heroine.
Online texts are dream-making. Li Jing regarded it as a spiritual world created for herself. "I have the final say on everything inside, as long as I am in this world, no one outside can cause harm to me. ”
In her cool script, the male protagonist is strong, humane, and cherishes feelings at the same time, just like a reliable husband and father. And the heroine is independent, sober, not half-hearted, and treats feelings very purely. Such a role setting pins on her expectations for her ideal partner: the male protagonist loves the heroine in every way, and puts her first in everything, "not persuasion and blind obedience, but respect".
The "respect" she longs for corresponds to the disrespect in the reality of marriage. In the park next to the Drum Tower, Li Jing told us the story of herself and her husband: she has been in love for more than ten years, but after getting married, she often feels "wronged". She always remembered that on the day of her wedding, there was no official wedding, and she didn't even change the sheets and covers on the bed. "I consoled myself many times that I had married my husband. He was a few years younger than me, he got married too early, and he didn't understand a lot of things, but now he is slowly getting better. ”
As a foreigner who married to Beijing, obviously did not ask for a bride price, and he also pasted a dowry upside down, Li Jing was still discriminated against by the identity of the man's family. She once heard her husband being reminded by his family that "Henan people will steal money" and asked him not to spend money on Li Jing. Once, when Li Jing had a period, her husband's grandmother didn't let her sit on the sofa, but moved a small shabby bench, saying that "girls don't have clean menstruation." Because her husband was on her side, the marriage in the next few years became a war between them and her mother-in-law.
▲ Photo / Visual China
Li Jing grew up in a loving family. She said that because of this, there are no bad parents in her novels. In her love story, she also avoids the relationship between her mother-in-law and daughter-in-law that embarrasses her - her mother-in-law and daughter-in-law will never meet for various reasons.
The years after giving birth were the most isolated. There is no one at home to help, and the husband naturally accepts the model of "male protagonist and female protagonist inside". Li Jing began to pour out fantasies again, and she decided to let the men in the novel also experience what it is like to be a mother.
In the field of male and female creation, there will be some hidden gender differences. For example, male frequency texts can "open a harem", a male protagonist can have a chance to have many girls fall in love, and in female frequency texts, at the end of most plots, the female protagonist can only be with the male protagonist, and it is even more impossible for a man to have children.
To a certain extent, mothers who give up their workplace jobs and hope to dig gold in the online literature market will also face the tilt of the balance of wealth towards men. According to the "2022 China Online Writers Rich List" released by China Literature, the top five online writers Tang Jiasanshao, Tian Silkworm Tudou, Chen Dong, Mao Yu and Ergen are all men, and their annual income exceeds 100 million yuan. In 2023, China Literature Group will release the annual online literature model writers, and the 12 authors on the list are also all men.
In addition to the fact that the income of male frequency is generally higher than that of female frequency, male frequency has a wide range of themes, strong inclusiveness, and a higher rate of getting out of the circle, and the creation rules of the platform have also internalized a set of basic "male rights settings".
Li Jing wanted to break through that setting. She tried her best to first "use the knife" on the male protagonist's personality to turn him into a person with some femininity, and then designed an accident to make the male protagonist's belly accidentally bigger. After the male protagonist's stomach was cut open, a large stone was taken out. A few years later, the stone broke, and a child came out of it. In this way, men will also be willing to take children.
"Femininity is the novel that women write to themselves, and it serves their own desires. Xiao Yingxuan participated in the establishment of the Peking University Internet Literature Research Forum and served as the editor-in-chief of Nu Frequency, and she further defined a kind of "female-oriented" Internet literature from Nu Frequency's novels.
The earliest female frequency essays were mainly romance, writing about the ideal love of the hero and heroine, and also writing about women's emotions and desires. Later, female frequency began to write personal values, and women can also intervene in the world and history. For example, it is also a trip back to ancient times, and it is no longer just about falling in love with my brother, but how the heroine becomes a female general step by step. With the manifestation of gender consciousness, the female frequency essay presents a narrative of women's pursuit of individuality, self-perception, and independence.
▲ Tomato novels can choose the type of novel you want to read. Picture / Screenshot
Weiwei is the author that Li Jing met after writing, and is a second-married mother. Because I was hurt too hard by my last marriage, I couldn't write a sweet love. She writes chronicles, about how the heroine travels back in time and becomes stronger and stronger in the tide of the times, "nothing can be crushed, and she can use her ingenuity to dissolve it".
But an invisible wall lies between the real world and the world of online texts. The reality is that in the second marriage, Weiwei is the only person in the family who earns money, and she not only has to pay off her husband's debts, but also has to treat her father-in-law. Because of the shoulder pain caused by long-term writing, she spent 1,000 yuan to get a card in the massage shop downstairs in the community, and her husband quarreled with her for this, saying that she spent money indiscriminately.
The mothers' labor may not be seen by their families. When coding words in the bedroom, Li Mengting's children often bang on the door to find their mother. Her family will say that as a mother, raising her children is the first priority, not making money, and the family does not regard online authorship as a formal profession. "If the money given by the family is too much, it will be considered that it is not saving. I earned my own money, and they felt that I couldn't devote myself to playing with my children. So sometimes it's hardest to resist the gaze of your family. ”
Once, Li Jing received a link to an article shared by her husband, with the title "She has a child and can still earn xxx a year". She read a subtext - other people's mothers can make easy money while taking care of their children.
If there is intertextuality between the real world and the online world, the world of online literature already has a variety of rich female images, but in real life, as mothers, women must assume the role of running a family and raising children. They play the role of wife and mother, a set of stereotypes of how women should be in a patriarchal family.
▲ Photo / Visual China
Get out of the bedroom
Asking a woman why she writes is essentially asking why she has to make her voice heard.
Li Jing's journey to becoming an online writer is not only dissatisfied with the status quo of her marriage, but also her family's financial situation. These factors converge into a pressure cooker, and she has to rely on her own strength to find an exit that leads to a place of her own. In Li Jing's original words: "Actually, we all want to be independent, we don't want to be restricted, and we don't want to look at people's eyes. ”
After becoming pregnant, Li Jing quit her previous job as a designer on an e-commerce platform. One day when the child was 6 months old, she paid a down payment of 380,000 yuan and bought a suite in Zhuozhou, Hebei. It was an impulsive and helpless choice - another quarrel between the mother-in-law and the daughter-in-law, and the mother-in-law threatened to drive her and the child away. That night, it was raining heavily outside the house, and Li Jing couldn't get a taxi to the hotel, so after coaxing the child to sleep, she sat outside all night and took all her savings.
In Beijing, the life of three generations of the family continues to go on. After that turmoil, Li Jing planned to take her children back to her hometown in Henan for a few days, but on the afternoon of her departure, her husband was defrauded of nearly 300,000 yuan by telecommunications. "I don't remember how I survived. I just remember borrowing money everywhere to repay the loan, he reported the case, and negotiated with the bank and Alipay for an extension, and finally after these things came to an end, I began to think about how to make money. ”
At that time, the child was still breastfeeding, and Li Jing began to look for a part-time job that she could do at home. She first taught herself illustration, then went back to her old job of design, taking on some online orders for posters, albums, and long pictures. This allows her to earn thousands of yuan a month, but because she needs to ensure that she can change the map at any time, the time is still not free. Later, thanks to a friend's recommendation, she started a second-hand platform "piano moving intermediary", the customer found her online, she called a professional porter, a single to get 100 yuan, but a month at most only a dozen orders.
After a recommendation on social media, Li Jing began to try to write online articles. The first book, which undoubtedly hit the streets, began to specialize in the various popular elements of online texts. Seeing that there is a popular type of sick Jiaowen on the platform, writing how possessive the male protagonist is, and often locking up the female protagonist to take it by force, she feels a little ironic. There is no way to imagine the life of a wealthy family, and she is afraid that historical themes will go wrong, so she has imagination and decided to write fantasy, "make it up as you want".
I still take my children during the day, record my inspiration with my mobile phone at any time, and write articles at night. When she was lying on the bed, she even dreamed that she had a spell, and when she touched the skill, she would fly in the sky. "People say that to become a novelist, you need to have the potential to daydream, and I write all daydreams as a way to escape from reality. ”
▲ Photo / Visual China
Once they are in creation, it is a time and space that belongs to them alone. Last summer, Li Jing went back to her hometown for a few days, because she was a little overworked, she fell ill and took a drip for a few days. At that time, she had a needle in her hand and typed with her other hand. The phone was unstable, so she bought a keyboard and plugged it into the phone, "I can't lift my arm on the typing side, and I've gone crazy." When she was having dinner with her family, her parents saw that she was silent, and they knew that she was thinking about the plot again. Until the end of the book, she felt reluctant.
Continuous writing is the source of Bao Ma's strength, and the manuscript fee brings the most direct sense of security. When I wrote the third book, I saw that up to 300,000 people were reading it, and Li Jing's daily income exceeded 1,000. At that time, her husband would also show off to outsiders that she earned a lot of money. After knowing that she joined a certain writers' association, her mother-in-law also had a little more respect for her.
When the mother who writes online articles is no longer limited by housework, there is a sense of seeking multiple identity explanations and stepping out of the bedroom. In 2012, Chen Shasha, who was still in college, started writing online articles, and the first book she officially signed a contract earned 10,000 yuan. After graduating, she worked as a white-collar worker for several years, but "I couldn't get any interest in it except writing books." In 2018, with enthusiasm, she resigned from her job and decided to write full-time, and she persevered all the way to marriage and childbirth.
Many times, there are still situations in the house: the socks have been on the floor for a month and the husband can't see them, and the husband is asked to wash the dishes, but he won't wash the pots or wipe the stove. After a few years of running-in, Chen Shasha came to the conclusion, "You can't let him guess, he can't guess, and he can't wait for him to take the initiative to do it, he can't think of it." Rather, it is a direct command, with clear tasks and goals. She has a mentality of treating herself as a "big heroine" - taking care of the baby is not the responsibility of her mother alone, but also her father's.
▲Chen Shasha's code word results in 2023. Photo / Courtesy of the interviewee
Li Jing wrote online articles and met Weiwei, an author who can earn up to 500,000 yuan for a book. Weiwei's husband is also married for the second time and has a 14-year-old son. After getting married, they had another boy. Weiwei writes at home, and her husband is also resting at home, and they are almost inseparable. Because she was worried that her husband would be suspicious and unhappy, she slightly declined the request for voice chat and chose to type instead.
After a failed marital relationship, Weiwei has become more and more conservative. "Who can guarantee that if the second marriage is not good, the third marriage will be good? My son is still so young, I really don't want him to live in a divorced family. She also had her wanderings, but the thought that her husband had learned to cook for herself, and that when she was sick, he had taken her to the hospital in the middle of the night made her feel that he was a good person to herself.
Because her husband didn't have a job, Weiwei asked her husband to try writing online articles, but he couldn't stick to it. Later, they changed the division of labor in the family: Weiwei wrote to earn money, and her husband occasionally helped with the children and cooking. Now, she just wants to run this marriage well, and believes that as long as the two of them are willing to work together, they can go on.
Part of the liberation
Xiao Yingxuan's research team will regularly scan articles on platforms such as Jinjiang, Starting Point Girls' Network, Red Sleeves Reading, Xiaoxiang Academy, and Tomato Novels, write sweeping reports, and annual observational reviews. They found that in the past two years, the biggest change in female frequency is that the consciousness of "loving women" is rising. "Loving daughter" corresponds to not being misogyny. This wind has blown into the online literature industry, showing that women are strong and independent, and the heroine and strong woman have further developed and expanded, and the focus of women's frequency writing has shifted from intimate relationships to women themselves.
The mothers write online articles, which does bring them some gender liberation.
Compared with the original confinement of her family, Li Jing has gained a bigger world. On the day she was at the park, she told me that because she had fans, they would talk about the plot together in the fan group that readers had built, which gave her a sense of accomplishment. In a small group of fellow female authors, they have many topics in common, and they have become friends who can often talk together.
But the day after I went back, I received another message from her, "Sometimes I'm actually a little self-defeating." In this family relationship, she learned to hide her emotions more often. In the absence of essential conflicts, the relationship between her and her husband will be relatively stable, but when it comes to housework and practical issues, they will have conflicts.
The marriage relationship is maintained by children, and it is more like living in partnership.
▲ Photo / Visual China
In the past, when the family was in the most difficult financial situation and the relationship with her husband was in crisis, Li Jing created such a story: the heroine is the true god of heaven, because she was framed by other gods, she became the object of Qianfu's referent. The deceived people stabbed knives on her one after another and dipped her blood in steamed buns. After eating "human blood steamed buns", the people were able to ward off evil spirits and eliminate disasters, but the heroine's soul was scattered. When reincarnated again, the heroine knows about her past, but she still decides to forgive everyone.
"At that time, many readers scolded me, saying that these people should go to hell and be tortured, and they all said that the heroine was too virgin to read it, and she wanted to abandon the text. ”
But Li Jing endowed the heroine's sacrifice with divinity, and she designed a miracle - the people who had hurt the heroine, recognized the mistakes they had made, and the souls who longed for redemption were twisted into a force to open up time, so that the male and female protagonists who were separated by 300 years crossed this tunnel and got to meet.
Even if it is sacrificed, hurt, or deprived, it must always be a happy ending. In the world of Shuangwen, the mechanism of Shuang Feeling has indeed undergone a change from abuse to sweetness, and at the end of the love story, it is rare to end with separation.
"In the afterglow of 30 years of reform and opening up, the whole reality is in a state of getting higher and higher, and we can accept something to adjust our emotions. But since then, the economic situation in the world has deteriorated, and a series of social scenes have emerged, which have brought more and more difficulties to the path of professional women, and the society hopes that women will return to the family and become more responsible for the family. Xiao Yingxuan said that this has something to do with the fact that women's situation has become more difficult in reality.
In reality, those emotional needs that cannot be fully met make the authors of Bao Ma use parenting as an alternative source of emotion. "I wrote a paragraph before when I was more depressed, and I hated my children very much. Li Jing will also be envious, there are some popular mothers on the platform, and they can afford to hire someone to help take care of their children. But after thinking about it, when she gave birth to a child, she was in pain for a day and a night, and almost lost her life, she felt that the child was her deep life connection, and hoped to accompany him with more lives.
There are still some positive changes. After more than a year, Li Jing's two online articles earned 130,000 yuan, and her husband's debts had been paid off, so she used her own money to decorate the new house in Zhuozhou. Her husband will hand over her monthly salary and never ask for her money, which is Li Jing's advantage that she can bring out. Creatively, she won't push herself as hard as she used to. "I know that I have the ability to keep creating, and I can make money even if I don't have to go to work, so I don't have to be so scared. ”
The sisters in the author's group occasionally chatted and cheered each other up. While there was still some money in hand, everyone persuaded Weiwei to make a down payment and buy a house for himself. There is also an author who announced the news of his engagement. It was a romance girl who was good at writing about the sweet romances of the urban elite and had published a physical book. In everyone's opinion, she has a certain economic strength, and like a little girl, she has all kinds of beautiful and romantic fantasies about love.
Li Jing and the others only blessed and sighed from afar - another young girl was about to enter into marriage with joy.
(Except for Xiao Yingxuan, the names of the other interviewees have been changed.) ）
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