"Takeaway poet" Wang Jibing recently launched his third poetry collection "Flying Low Place". In order to create this collection of poems, he interviewed more than 140 riders and used their real-life experiences as inspiration to complete this collection of poems belonging to laborers.
Face-to-face communication, interviews are not all smooth sailing
"To tell you the truth, I wouldn't have been able to get to where I am today without the aura attached to me as a delivery person. This kind of kindness makes me think about what I should do. After much deliberation, the idea of writing a book for this group came to mind. Wang Jibing said in an exclusive interview with reporters.
According to the original idea, Wang Jibing came up with a book of poems and a non-fiction work at the same time. He went deep among the riders and did find several people with stories, but almost none of them wanted to be written into the book, and Wang Jibing's non-fiction plan had to be put on hold in the end.
When creating "Flying Low", Wang Jibing distributed questionnaires to many riders, and he contacted the captain of the riders with whom he had a good relationship, and used the gap between their meetings to send the questionnaires. Wang Jibing knows that every rider is a race against time, so he provides 50 yuan for each person who participates in the questionnaire to lose work, "but the effect of recovery is particularly unsatisfactory, because they write extremely simple, some just write a few words, and I can't create without details." Wang Jibing said.
The questions in the questionnaire were all designed by Wang Jibing himself, "What is the most painful thing you feel", "What is the warmest thing you feel", and Wang Jibing found that most of the pain of delivery workers is similar, such as customers not answering the phone, such as being badly reviewed; And the warmth of the delivery people is different.
The feedback from the questionnaire was not satisfactory, so Wang Jibing decided to go to the scene for an interview in person. It doesn't matter if it's an interview, he interviewed more than 100 people, some of whom were former assembly line workers, some were bosses with failed businesses, and some were young people who claimed to be graduate students. The interview process was not all smooth sailing, a TV reporter followed Wang Jibing's interview process, a takeaway brother felt offended, and even scolded.
Face-to-face with the takeaway brother again and again, Wang Jibing also has a deeper understanding of this group, "Our group is indeed very hard, everyone has everyone's difficulties, and everyone will repeatedly encounter a common problem, such as being helpless in the face of customers' difficulties." But to tell the truth, our group is still a group that needs to improve its quality, a group that should test itself. Wang Jibing said that in the face of the impolite behavior of some takeaway brothers, he was actually very sad, because he always believed that everyone was a whole who shared weal and woe, and advanced and retreated together.
Inspiration to reveal the inner world of the rider
"Flying Low" was published by the Writers Publishing House, and under the pen of Wang Jibing, the simple laborers in his poems are a grain of dust and a high mountain.
Communicating with his peers again and again, Wang Jibing captured, felt, and realized their ups and downs, and he used his voice to record the inspired poems, and he used poetry to touch the inner world of a person, revealing the truth of life.
Wang Jibing wrote a poem for the foul-mouthed female rider, and he said that she must be a person who loves her family very much, because if a woman does not love her family, she will not be a rider. "Our job as a delivery boy may have created a sense of insecurity that led her to take a way to protect herself. She chose to use expletives to make herself strong and make herself look like a bad person. ”
Wang Jibing also wrote a poem for a takeaway boy who was worried about his children. He and his wife divorced, during the conversation, he lost control of his emotions for a while, crying and saying "The child doesn't want to go to school, he wants to come and move bricks with me", at that moment, the poem "Tears" was born, "When it comes to the past, two stones fell in his eyes/A strong man/Even sadness/It seems to be torn out of the wall/It took him decades/Build himself into a castle/Two pieces that were torn down/The rebellious child is one/The divorced wife is one/Now the wind can blow in/The rain can pour in/ The sun and the night can also shine in."
In Wang Jibing's poem, the one-armed takeaway brother is a one-handed Buddha, "the one-handed one he holds on his chest / is more like a kind of compassion of the Buddha"; And the Bodhisattva may also be a delivery person in a hurry, "I even often feel that the Bodhisattva / is also a delivery person in a hurry / has to give many wishes / to different people every day."
As always, Wang Jibing writes a personal story, his own past life experience, and his understanding of life are all watering these poems. Once, he observed a little brother lying on the battery car crying, his shoulders shrugged, and finally, he wiped away his tears and continued to work. Wang Jibing said: "His movements made me instantly think that when I used to press the well by hand in the countryside, I pressed the water down with my shoulders moving, and I wrote these feelings into the poem." ”
Afraid of disappointing others, I worked harder to write poems
In March last year, Wang Jibing launched his first poetry collection "People in a Hurry", which became popular all of a sudden. His life was quickly filled with various literary activities, satellite TV programs, and media interviews, and then he joined the Chinese Writers Association and was invited by Tsinghua University to go to the United States for exchange. He said that he has come to Beijing to participate in activities more than a dozen times.
The sudden explosion changed Wang Jibing's life. In December last year, he spent only three days in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, delivering three takeaways. Since the beginning of this year, he has sent more than a dozen times a month, and seven or eight times a month. He admits that food delivery is no longer his main source of income. "In the past, the sense of urgency and anxiety of food delivery was very serious, and I would set myself a goal of 200 yuan a day, and I would rather work overtime until the early hours of the morning. But now, I'm not going to be so anxious. ”
For Wang Jibing, he cherishes his current state, he said, every time he participates in an event, he can bring some new works, "A new life is especially important for a writer, it will inspire more novel feelings." He said that when he went to Yixing to participate in an event a few days ago, he wrote several poems along the way. He was waiting for the train at the high-speed rail station when he observed an elderly man's daughter chattering all the time, insisting that his father raise his arm as instructed by the doctor. This scene was frozen by Wang Jibing in poetry, "An old man has been beaten by the years / has become more and more silent / and at this moment / he keeps raising his hand in the crowd / asking questions about the world / as if he has something to say."
Because of the explosion, Wang Jibing worked harder to write poetry, he was worried about embarrassing the organizers of the event that invited him, and he was also afraid of disappointing the media reporters who interviewed him. Last year, he immersed himself in the state of poetry creation every day, and wrote 120 poems a month at most.
"We have such a hard time, and we can't live unhappily for this kind of good thing to happen." Wang Jibing is firm in his beliefs, he said that his wife was also anxious in the face of a series of media interviews, and even feared that he would change his mind. But Wang Jibing expressed his loyalty with practical actions, and he took home the souvenirs he distributed at every meeting, and he felt the surprise and indifference of his wife's unpacking, "She is now more and more down-to-earth and more and more at ease." Wang Jibing thought that this was also the mentality he should have.