Yang Benfen is 83 years old, and she is still writing, this is not a miracle, just a person who is used to working hard and continues to work hard. Her fourth book, Beans and Sesame Tea, was officially launched by Guangdong People's Publishing House in October 2023.
The little things she wrote about the world may be just beans and sesame seeds, but these beans and sesame seeds have the most painful memories and the most tender farewells, they are related to marriage, life and death, and love. ”
"Autumn Garden" mainly recalls the life of his mother, "Driftwood" writes about the ups and downs of the people at the bottom in the torrent of the times, and "My Fragrance" tells about his 60 years of married life. This time, she turned her attention to the ordinary women of the same generation around her.
- Editor
Yang Benfen/The picture comes from the Internet
Struggling in the torrent of life comes and goes silently
In 2020, I published my first book, Autumn Garden, about my mother's life. My mother is from the north and married to my father, who was originally a foreigner to her, but eventually became her hometown. Lieberthal, a native of Miluo, was very attentive, and after reading "Autumn Garden", he and some friends visited the places mentioned in the novel: Huangnichong, Wuchang Temple, and Cifu Mountain...... They are all places where my parents lived, and this is where the novel "Autumn Garden" originated. In Shifukusan, our house is next to a monk's temple, so we have always called that place an andongri.
My mother spent most of my life there, and I spent my childhood and adolescence. Now the earthen house has collapsed, the grass is green, my mother has been dead for many years, and my beloved brother passed away three years ago. These people and things that are so dear to me have disappeared, divided and disintegrated in time.
I'm aging myself, and my time on earth is limited. This is the law of nature that everyone must accept, and we must accept our own dusty fate.
But is there really nothing that people can't do? That's something I can't resign. When I started serializing my mother's story on the Internet, a netizen left a message, saying that no one has the patience to read the history of ordinary people, and only celebrities and upper-class people can have color and their history can be preserved.
But I can't agree with that. I'm interested in the things of ordinary people, the utterly nameless beings who struggle in the torrent of life, come and go silently. They were my mother, my father, my brother, my neighbors, and myself.
Unexpectedly, my clumsy strokes touched countless readers, and "Autumn Garden" scored as high as 9 points on Douban. When I saw that many readers shed tears for "Autumn Garden", and I saw many young people leaving messages, saying, "I also want to listen to the stories of my grandmothers and elders", I felt very grateful. I realized that an ordinary life, when presented as it is, can also radiate the power to inspire others.
Following "Autumn Garden", in 2021 I published "Driftwood". The most important part of "Driftwood" is called "Township", which is written about the people who left a deep impression on me when I was in my hometown.
Some of them were my childhood playmates, some were neighbors in the upper and lower houses, there were the kind town doctors who took care of my mother's teeth, and there were also the people who borrowed our Jiangxi chai knife and lost it without the slightest apology. I have always been interested in people and people's lives, and when my mother was still alive, every time I visited relatives, I would ask her about the whereabouts of the Hunan fathers and villagers I knew, and my mother always told me with great interest.
Their images come and go in my mind, and I long to take note of these ordinary people. That's what I want to do, to let the nameless leave their names.
This is the value of literature, and literature means paying attention to the fate of the little people with compassion.
They are their own resilient beings under the sky
The cover/picture of "Beans Sesame Tea" comes from the Internet
In 2023, my fourth book came out, and its full title is "Bean Sesame Tea - The Last Chatter with Mom". It is particularly meaningful to launch this new book in my hometown.
In "Autumn Garden", I have already written about bean sesame tea. Hunan people, even if they don't eat, beans and sesame seeds must be prepared, and if a guest comes to the house, if they can't serve beans and sesame tea to entertain them, then the guest will be criticized as unvirtuous. "Autumn Garden" has been loved by many readers, and along with the bean sesame tea, it has also aroused the curiosity of readers. It's the fourth book, even if I offer readers a cup of bean sesame tea for our Hunan people.
The book consists of two parts. The first part, "Past Marriages", is three short stories, all of which are related to women's married life, and the protagonists are all low-level people: an old lady who picks up rags, a female worker who tries to escape domestic violence but can't escape, and a peasant woman who gets love and loses her husband prematurely...... These women are easy to ignore in real life, and novelists don't pay much attention to them, but I wanted to write about them because they represent the real life of ordinary Chinese women. They are themselves, active and resilient beings under this sky.
This kind of strength and resilience is built through a lot of hardships. I love my three heroines, they are not perfect at all, but the appeal is in this imperfection.
The second part, "The Limit of Sadness", consists of two long essays, one of which is my whisper every day at her sickbed when I accompanied my mother through the last 26 days of her life. At the age of 89, my mother fell on the ground, fractured her hip, and died after 26 days in bed. I rushed to take care of her, and when she was conscious, we kept talking, and the words came out naturally. Death was already standing at her bedside, and we were still talking with great interest about the vivid past of the world, and I felt that this last chatter was worth recording.
Another long article is about my brother Yang Ziheng. My brother was born in Nanjing, and when he was 5 years old, he went to the countryside of Hunan with his parents, and has been a Chinese teacher in a township middle school all his life. He has a deep foundation in classical literature, can recite poems and write well. My brother is the eldest son in the family, and I am the eldest daughter, and together we help my mother support a family that is in turmoil. My brother and I have a deep affection, and for me, he is a symbol of kinship. His departure means that a part of me is also gone, and it is not only death that takes life, but when the person you love leaves, a part of yourself will also die. When I write, I struggle with fate, because I want to keep the people I love, and I want to drive away my own despair.
I'm going to cross the ocean and drag back the skeleton of the big fish
I am also working on a fifth book, and the theme is "Pain".
Pain follows aging, and they are all terrible, long, helpless, and must be endured. And writing about the feeling of pain, writing about the taste of aging, is a way to fight against them, and this is how I struggle against fate. As a result of this struggle, man is destined to be the losing side, but the value of man and man's will are embodied in this struggle.
I'm the fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, and I'm going to end up crossing my ocean and dragging back the big fish with only skeletons left.
Source: "Qunxue Academy", "Reading Times" 2024 Issue 04
Author: Yang Benfen
Editor: Pan Xi
[Disclaimer: This number is the official public welfare account of "National Reading Promotion", and this article is reprinted for the purpose of conveying more information. If there is a source label error or other inaccuracies, please contact us. We will correct it in a timely manner. Thank you]