On April 21, Nandu Book Club invited the famous overseas Chinese writer Zhang Huiwen to share her latest novel collection "Beauty" online. This is the first sharing session of the "Nandu Reading Month: 72-hour Reading Marathon" - "In the Name of Beauty: Our Destiny and Ideals". Zhang Huiwen's gentle and patient answers were like a spring breeze, and the discussion atmosphere in many WeChat groups of Nandu Reading Club was active and enthusiastic, which kicked off the "Nandu Reading Month: 72-hour Reading Marathon".
Zhang Huiwen, a powerful writer born in the 70s. Born in 1978, his ancestral home is Henan. He graduated from the Business School of the National University of Singapore and now lives in Boston, USA. He has published a collection of short stories, "The Bird and the Fish in the Pond", "Two Encounters", "A Moment of Light, Color and Shadow", "In the South", and a collection of essays "When I Was a Teenager". He has won many awards, including the Singapore Golden Pen Award, the People's Literature Newcomer Award, the Overseas Chinese Zhongshan Literature Award, the Shanghai Literature Award, the Chu Jiwang Literary Award, and the Cao Xueqin Chinese Literature Award.
The novel collection "Beauty" is the work of writer Zhang Huiwen who has lived abroad for more than ten years, looking back on her homeland, with the legendary life and series of stories of beauties in small towns in northern China, reflecting the great historical changes since the transformation of Chinese society at the end of the 20th century, tracing the unique growth process and life experience of a generation of Chinese women, and awakening the flexible and unbreakable female power from the simple vitality.
Essence Record——
Awakening people's memories and feelings is the most important meaning of the work
Nandu: The title of the novel is "Beauty", which intends to show the lives and fates of three beauties, and throughout the book, you mainly use pen and ink to depict their emotional experiences.
Zhang Huiwen: The first two articles do focus on the heroine's emotional experience, and the emotional clues of "Night in the South" are not so obvious, it uses several encounters between "me" and Hongxia as clues to describe the ups and downs of her fate, and the turning point is mainly Hongxia's failure in business. Why focus on emotion?
Literally speaking, "emotion" is very private and very personal. To do a job, everyone does the same thing and follows the same professional standards, but the emotions have a deep personal imprint. In the ultimate experience of "emotion", especially when people are faced with emotional dilemmas and choices, it can best reflect the deep things in a person's heart. That's why a lot of literature uses emotion as the theme. For example, our Chinese "Dream of Red Mansions", although it is written with a very grand background, writes about the decline and demise of aristocratic families, it is also based on Bao Dai's feelings. Not to mention the classics of the West, "The Red and the Black", "Madame Bovary", "Anna...... It's all about love stories.
And from the logic of reality, the small county town is a society of acquaintances. As "beauties" in a small town, they are in a normal state of being watched and discussed. For this kind of onlooker of beauty, it must be tinged with desire. Let's think about it, what are the rumors about these women in small towns? It must be mainly about their love lives. So, the same is true of the logic of reality.
In the way of telling still water, you can better feel the details and subtleties
Nandu: Whether in terms of language, content or narrative rhythm, the whole book seems flat and bland, why did you choose such a style to tell the life stories of three beauties?
Zhang Huiwen: This is probably the usual style of my novels. I like this calm style of writing, or rather, this more restrained way of writing. I am a little evasive about the style that is too intense, because if it is too intense, it may degenerate into sensationalism, and it will also cause unnecessary and emotional guidance and interference to the reader. Choosing this style doesn't really have much to do with what I'm going to write or the story I'm going to tell, I think it's more like a kind of control over the rhythm of the text, so that it goes on in a calm rhythm and has a certain concentration. Chekhov said a principle of fiction: good and bad, don't scream. I share that principle. In the way of telling still water, I think people can get a kind of quiet power that goes deep into the words and immerses themselves in them, to better feel the details and subtle things.
"Three beauties", their fates are typical and representative
Nandu: The book "Beauty" tells the story of three beauties successively. Did you make any structural considerations when you created it? The stories of He Li, Lina and Hongxia have something in common, and in the end, they end up in different places. From the creator's point of view, do the three of them have different symbolic meanings?
Zhang Huiwen: I first wrote the first "Beauty", which is the story of He Li, because her prototype is the one that impresses me the most, and it is also the one with the most twists and turns in fate: my father has been bedridden for a long time, my brother was shot dead during the crackdown, my first love was fanatically pursued by the children of bureaucrats but was abandoned in chaos, and I found a husband who loved her and treated her well, and the husband had an accident...... Her fate is so embarrassing and closely related to the times, many years ago, I told this story to a friend, and he said, you must write her story. That's when the seeds were planted to write this novel.
However, in the process of writing, I recalled the county seat in the eighties and nineties of the 20th century, trying to restore the scene and people at that time, so more and more things and more and more memories emerged. The images of the other two county beauties in my impression have also become distinct. The process of creation is like this, it often evokes more memories, and sometimes, at the beginning of writing, you don't know that you can recall so much, remember so clearly, so deeply. Therefore, the stories of the other two beauties have gradually taken shape, each of them is so unique, but it is closely related to that big era and that small town. So at the beginning, there was no structure planned. Later, the stories of the three women were written, and I found that it was a bit like "three beautiful pictures", with a certain sense of structure.
The three of them have very different personalities and destinies. I didn't deliberately give it a symbolic meaning when I wrote it, but I think it's still very representative. For example, Lina is enthusiastic and unrestrained, although she lives in a small county, she is very open-minded, dares to show her beauty and sexiness, dares to take risks and fall in love with outsiders freely, and is not afraid of other people's rumors. Hongxia was one of the many women who went from the north to the south, especially to Guangzhou and Shenzhen, from small cities to big cities in that era, they wanted a broader vision and a more exciting life, and wanted to get out of the dull comfort zone of a small county, of course, it was very likely to encounter more twists and turns in a turbulent life, and even ended in failure. He Li seems to be the most passive, the most gentle and weak of the three, as if she is completely coerced by life and the times to live, but if we understand it more deeply, we will find that she is actually very tenacious, if she is replaced by someone else, she has experienced so many hardships, it may be difficult to live, and she may have already fallen and given up on herself. She tried her best to survive and still pursue her love and happiness. And, if we look closely, we will also find that within the scope of her control, she always strives for autonomy. It's just that in her fate, there are too many things that she can't control. The fates of these three women are indeed typical and representative.
Nandu: You mentioned that you like to write about the things that are intrinsic and interconnected to human beings. And this precisely echoes the requirements of world literature to some extent. The beauties you depict have their own specific contexts, and the predicaments they face are not personal problems. How do you deal with the relationship between universality and particularity in the process of creation?
Zhang Huiwen: Yes, the predicament they face is by no means a personal problem. When novelists write, they strive to make each of the main fiction characters both specific and universal. Particularity is generally to highlight the personality of the character, and universality is to make people feel that the character is actually closely related to themselves and the people around them, and there is a feeling of "being related and having a common fate". In the three novels of the book "Beauty", in addition to their different experiences, I may consider more about their "commonality", not only between beauties, but also between them and other women.
I don't think there is any special skill to deal with this kind of relationship, and a real, flesh-and-blood person is naturally both special and universal. As long as the author respects the truth and human nature, and writes about her very sincerely, he can't use the characters as the author's puppets and microphones to express some of the author's advanced concepts. So, sometimes people ask, why don't I write the heroine as how-how, that is, someone who conforms to a certain ideological trend or standard. I think I have to make this clear: the author is writing about real people, not the right people.
Nandu: You mentioned in the afterword that all three beauties have passed by in your life. And now you choose to leave their figure in words. What do you think the story of Beauty means for today's readers, especially women?
Zhang Huiwen: Authors don't think much about what the work will mean to the readers. For myself, the images of these three characters are closely related to the era in which I lived as a child and teenager and the environment of my hometown. Therefore, by writing about them, a lot of past memories are involved. I believe that today's readers will also touch many of their memories when they read it, and with the work, many forgotten memories may be awakened. Memory is related to the present and the future, and it is a part of who we are. Awakening people's memories and feelings is the most important meaning of the work.
Moreover, the era written in "Beauty" is not too far from us, from the late 80s of the 20th century until the first decade of 2000. The pressures and difficulties faced by women at that time are still being faced by women today. For example, the double standards of emotion and "morality" between men and women in society, such as the control of women by men in power, and the temptations and humiliating spectators that women face...... These problems persist today. Moreover, there are new problems today, such as the dull sense of true beauty, the pursuit of a beauty that is too false and deformed.
Nandu: Is there anything you can tell us about your next creative plan?
Cheung Wai Man: I think I'm going to write some stories set in Singapore. I lived in Singapore for 15 years, from the age of 17 to 32, where I went to university and worked briefly...... I spent my youth and maturity there. It's a place that's important to me. So I wanted to write about the city and some people and things that remained in my memory, and of course in the form of a novel.
"Beauty" by Zhang Huiwen Published by CITIC Publishing Group in April 2024
Reader Interaction –
"These novels basically restore the appearance of the hometown at that time"
Reader Kawaii: He Li goes through emotional twists and turns, ending with marrying Song Bin, and Hongxia rises and falls in the waves, and finally ends up with Mr. Zheng, who is much older than herself. Do you think this is the best ending they can have under the coercion of times and fate?
Zhang Huiwen: I don't know if this is the best ending. For He Li, it should be very good, because she loves Song Bin. But for Hongxia, I don't know, because we don't know what she experienced after her lover was sick with cancer and she went bankrupt again, and we don't know what kind of relationship she had with Mr. Zheng, whether Hongxia was with Mr. Zheng out of affection or out of gratitude or something...... We don't know any of that. But it is also a kind of home, and it is a kind of destination that we often see in reality. As for whether it is good or not, this is left to the reader's imagination and judgment.
Reader Su Yang: The three articles "Lina Photo Studio" and "Night in the South" are all written from the perspective of "me", and the beginning of "Beauty" is a little different from these two articles, the beginning is the perspective of "me", then the third perspective, and the end mentions "I", is it because "Beauty" is the longest, if it is only in the first person, it is difficult to write it all, or are there other considerations?
Zhang Huiwen: It is based on a literary consideration, and this structure introduces "me", which makes it easier for readers to substitute this perspective of looking back on the years and watching other people's stories when reading. Many friends say that when they read this, they think of the beauties in the small towns they knew when they were young or in their childhood. If we read Flaubert's "Three Stories", some of them have this structure, and it is more obvious that in "Madame Bovary", the beginning and end are entered from the perspective of "I", but the middle part of the theme is narrated from the perspective of God in the third person.
Reader Z: "Beauty" not only depicts the legendary lives of three women, but also the author's nostalgia for his childhood hometown. For you, what does the hometown you remember through the telling of these stories is like?
Zhang Huiwen: That's what I described in the novels, I think these novels basically restore the appearance of my hometown at that time, and its changes from the 80s of the 20th century to the 2000 years after 2000. As I wrote in the afterword, this is a lyric poem written for my hometown. Of course, there may be some kind of error in my memory, but I feel that most of the descriptions respect the reality of the time.
Take He Li's story as an example, for example, her father worked in a fertilizer factory, until the end of the 80s of the 20th century, as a legacy of the planned economy, there were various state-owned factories in the small town, such as fertilizer factories, thermal power plants, and cotton blanket factories, which closed down one after another in the 90s. This change in the small county town reflects this change in the era from a planned economy to a market economy. Of course, this is a relatively big change, and it involves political and economic aspects. At the level of market life, for example, from the Hong Kong and Taiwan pop music in the streets and alleys in the 80s to the popularity of ballroom dancing in the early 90s, to the popularity of karaoke singing in the back, the life of that kind of small town is described in the novel.
Written by: Nandu reporter Zhou Peiwen intern Chen Yutong