English Bay Beach, Vancouver. Visual China|Figure
Today is the second day after the Qingming Festival, which is not bad with the day when Su Shi wrote "Wangjiangnan, Transcendent Taizuo" in the late spring of the ninth year of Xining of Song Shenzong (1076). The scenery and feelings expressed by Su Shi in the lyrics are the day after the Cold Food Festival. In ancient times, the Cold Food Festival was the day before the Qingming Festival. When I go out for a walk these days, Vancouver is sunny and rainy, and the wind is slanting and the willows are slanting. Suddenly, I felt that I was in North America and instantly traveled through the millennium, and I could look at and smile at Mr. Dongpo on the transcendent stage, and find a kind of self-consistency in his words and the reality of the situation. During this time, when the sun is shining in Vancouver, the temperature is still very low, the wind is blowing with a trace of moisture, and the bright sunlight shines through the texture of glass. A row of sturdy cherry blossom trees in front of the door, with a charming face a few days ago, is now full of flowers. However, Sakura herself will not feel sorry for her short-lived beauty, she leaves the sentimentality to human beings, as Wang Guowei's "Butterfly Loves Flowers" said: "The most important thing is that the world can't stay, and Zhu Yan is a mirror and a tree." Walking on the pavement paved with pink petals, I thought of beautiful things, and after a little hesitation, I passed away, but fortunately, the flowers have a cycle, and next spring will bloom as scheduled, and my years are gone. So, I walked home, made myself a pot of new tea, picked up the Song Ci on the desk, and once again walked into the artistic conception of Mr. Su, a thousand-year-old Internet celebrity, who was graceful and broad.
This is a two-tone song "Wangjiangnan". Shang Yan wrote the scene: "Spring is not old, the wind is thin and the willows are oblique. Try to look at the transcendent platform: half a trench spring water and a city of flowers, smoke and rain and dark thousands of homes. The transcendent platform in the word is in the north city of Mizhou (now Zhucheng in Shandong), which is a place for viewing and recreation. Su Shi, who was 41 years old at the time, was demoted to Mizhou, and as soon as he arrived here, he asked someone to repair the Chaoran Terrace. The word describes the author's climb on the transcendent platform and look into the distance, seeing half of the moat rippling in spring, and the city full of purple and red. And in the Qingming season, although a hundred flowers compete for beauty, there is also a light rain from time to time, the sky is gloomy, climb high and look far away, thousands of families in the city, but no home of their own, this is the melancholy mood shared by strangers, especially in special seasons. A "dark" word, pun on the environment and state of mind, brings out the sentimental atmosphere of Qingming, and turns into the lyrical nostalgia of Xia Yan. After eating cold, he woke up and sighed. Hugh thinks about the old people and the old country, and will try the new tea with new fire, and take advantage of the young age of poetry and wine. After all, the author was degraded and exiled to another country, and it coincided with the day of tomb sweeping, and he was alone in a foreign land as a stranger, and it was inevitable that he would be sad and sad, just the year before, Su Shi wrote the famous poem "Jiangchengzi" for his deceased wife who had been dead for ten years.
I don't know how many immigrants like me, who are far away from their home countries, have not been allowed to go back to see their loved ones for the last time during the three-year pandemic, and have been separated forever. On the occasion of Qingming reading Su Shi's sorrow after cold food, it is easy to empathize. The person the author thinks about has already been "ten years of life and death"; the homeland he thinks about has become a memory. These expressions have a strong sense of substitution for immigrants who are far from their homeland. Although modern transportation has long been very different from the boats and saddle horses of the ancients, communication is audible and visible every second, and old immigrants like me, who have moved to Vancouver for more than 20 years, have long passed the stage of homesickness, but the death of family affection and lingering cultural nostalgia that did not see my father for the last time during the epidemic period cannot be dissipated by a plane ticket or a video phone. Although Vancouver, where I moved to Vancouver, has become a part of life, there is always a disconnect and even fragmentation between social identity and self-identity. As for the mother country, the familiar place has been elsewhere, and occasionally returning to the hometown is a stranger, which feels like being stripped and suspended from the familiar social group, as the Nobel Prize winner and Tanzanian writer Abdelrazak Gurnah, who settled in the United Kingdom, said, "You can't get in, you can't go back".
However, Su Dongpo's loveliness and preciousness lies in the fact that he will not blindly indulge in lamentation, "Hugh thinks about the old country", a "Hugh" word immediately frees the emotions from the low sorrow, and then further writes the action "and will try the new tea with new fire", and finally settles on the "poetry and wine while the years are young", returning to the brightness of the beginning, implicitly fitting "spring is not old", its detachment and open-mindedness, but also shows the meaning of this poem named "transcendent platform", which can be described as an inspirational poem for modern people. The word "new fire" refers to the ancient customs, the cold food festival does not raise the fire, and the fire is raised after the festival, so it is called "new fire"; new tea refers to the tender tea picked before the rain or Qingming Festival, that is, "tea before the rain" and "tea before the Ming Dynasty", which is particularly fresh and delicious, and the color and fragrance are good. Of course, when we read this poem today, new fire, new tea, poetry, and wine, all of them have transcended the specific reference of solar terms and their things, and have a broader and richer meaning. Like Su Shi's poems, which are full of open-minded and detached attitude towards life, this poem is quite healing to modern people, especially empathetic and inspiring to Chinese immigrants who are far away from their homeland and in a heterogeneous cultural context.
However, the "new fire" and "new tea" in Su Zi are becoming more and more difficult in today's Vancouver reality, and it is more of a romantic feeling and inspirational spirit in the aesthetic sense. Why?
The proportion of Chinese immigrants in Canada's total immigrant population is second only to that of European immigrants. Although the number of immigrants from India has risen to the top in recent years, and the number far exceeds that of new Chinese immigrants, the number of Chinese living in Vancouver is still the largest ethnic minority. According to Statistics Canada's 2022 report, Vancouver accounts for 21% of the city's total population with Chinese descent, followed by Toronto, which ranks second. The reason why Vancouver attracts Chinese immigrants is first of all because of its unique pleasant climate, natural scenery and bustling urban style, and has been rated as one of the "most livable places in the world" by the United Nations for many years. But at the same time, the booming population, the indelible contribution of foreign investors to the surge in local home prices, and the slow economic development that has not matched it have made Vancouver a city of difficulties in finding jobs and living. According to the 2023 Population International Housing Affordability Report, Vancouver has ranked third in the world's most expensive real estate market in 2022, behind Hong Kong and Sydney.
When I first arrived in Vancouver in 2001, I rented a detached house in Vancouver with an entire floor on the ground floor, two bedrooms and a living room with a kitchen and bathroom, with a spacious living room facing south, and a row of large windows like a wide screen looking out of the quiet and beautiful cherry blossom streetscape, with a monthly rent of 600 Canadian dollars. Today, similar housing rents more than $2,500 a month, and it is a basement or semi-basement, with a high and narrow window, reminiscent of a prison cell. If you have a high-rise apartment in a better area, the monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment will be more than 2,600 Canadian dollars. Both the buyer's monthly payment and the renter's monthly rent have left Vancouver residents breathless. At the same time, the inflation of prices, from food to daily necessities, has doubled, and under the burden of such an expensive cost of living, the job market is even more porridge and less porridge, and the poor situation of the job market after the epidemic has broken through the expectations of professionals who help the unemployed. In British Columbia, where Vancouver is located, there is a government-affiliated agency called the B.C. Job Center that helps residents find jobs, and an account manager I know with him said that he alone has nearly 200 applicants for jobs, and an expert in the same agency who is responsible for recommending job seekers to employers said that she has more than 80 job seekers, and only two of them have secured jobs in the past year, and many people have sent out dozens or even hundreds of job applications before getting two or three interviews. In Vancouver, a beautiful "habitable place" for human beings, how many people are sad, toiling, and at a loss for cooking a pot of "new tea".
Among the many New Year's wishes received during this year's Spring Festival, one of the most impressive ones is that he wishes Wen Siquan a bumper harvest of creation, and the ending sentence is borrowed from Su Shi's famous sentence in "Looking at the South of the River": Poetry and wine take advantage of the year. At that time, I felt happy and embarrassed, and I was happy that in the eyes of my friends, I was not yet old, and I still had a good time to take advantage of. The embarrassing thing is that you know that your life has reached the second half, like a person who has retired or is about to retire, and people encourage you to work hard and have a great future, so I have to smile bitterly in my heart.
The sentence "Poetry and wine while the age is young" is too beautiful, like showing the beauty that can be seen at the front desk, and "new fire to try new tea" is a backstage covered by a big curtain, where it is busy and smoky, and it is not for people to see. I prefer to reminisce about the experience of trying new tea again and again, and record it in black and white.
For middle-aged immigrants, it is not a transition between cities, but a cross-border, cross-cultural and cross-language migration, as if uprooting an adult tree and transplanting it to another place where the climate, water and soil are completely unfamiliar, and everything has to start again, and they have to rewind themselves to ten or twenty years, forty years old to twenty years old, fifty years old to thirty years old, this is not an old cucumber painted green paint - pretending to be tender. Imagine moving to a completely unfamiliar place is like facing a blank sheet of paper, you must have the ignorance and fearlessness of a child, no matter how you draw, you have to start with your pen. Of course, I don't include those owners who follow the real estate agent to the mountains to buy a luxury house as soon as they get off the plane, or the idlers who have earned enough money and retired to retire.
However, most skilled immigrants and wage earners, even after a year or two of emigration, still have to constantly light a "new fire". Half or more of the unemployed registered in the Provincial Job Centres are residents who have lived locally for more than five years. According to the Canadian Employment Statistics Survey, fewer and fewer people can live their lives in a fixed occupation, let alone new immigrants across the ocean, not to mention that their original academic qualifications are not recognized by the country of emigration, especially the intellectual immigrants in the social sciences, whose cultural capital and social capital are basically zero. For me, immigration was a complete reversal of my life. In the more than 20 years since I moved to Vancouver, I have worked as a Chinese school teacher, a wedding photo studio image consultant, a salesperson for children's clothing, bedding, and a high-end fur store, a restaurant hostess, a real estate agent assistant and translator, as well as a newspaper columnist, a cultural event planning organization, a literary account host, a volunteer for a service organization for the disabled, etc., and sat in the classroom again and again as a student to obtain certificates and adapt to various job positions. Such a variety of roles is something I could never have imagined before I immigrated, so I am more concerned about the sentence "and try new tea with new fire" before "poetry and wine take advantage of the youth".
Going back more than 20 years, for new immigrants, "new fire and new tea" is a reality visible to the naked eye, but anyone who has the courage to take their own steps. And if you want to light a new fire today, where to get your salary is a serious problem. If I founded a Thai restaurant 17 years ago to create my own firewood for reality and raise the fire of life, then literature is the fuel to keep the spiritual fire alive. I think of Mr. Love, a great poet who once had a year-old friendship with me, in the poem of "no wine, no stove" to warm up on a snowy day, thank you Muse, in the bleak days of unpaid fire, at least I have a manuscript of poetry to burn, even if it is only a momentary light, like a match tearing open a hole in the dark night. Thinking of Su Dongpo - the most optimistic and interesting soul among the ancient literati, he lived his life in the ups and downs of the sea, traveled in all directions, and when he was degraded and exiled, he made bold and expansive words, and lived a chic and happy life.
Drink a pot of new tea, walk out of the east slope "transcendent platform", push the window to overlook the sea blue, near the new green, can't help but feel full of heart, a person, no matter when and where, age geometry, as long as there is a fire burning in the heart, there will be poetry and wine like a song, is the year in hand.
Yuxiu-hsien
Editor-in-charge: Xing Renyan