Youth Rambling Project
This issue of "Youth Talk Project" comes from a conversation between writers Lu Yinyin and Youyu and critic Liu Xinyue. The trio shared topics such as urban life, the state of writing, and the impact of social media on the lives of modern young people.
01
"It's the edge of the city, but it's not the edge of life"
Liu Xinyue: Today's theme is "People Living on the Edge of the City", and both writers have written and lived in foreign cities. Youyu's hometown is in Henan, and he now lives in Guangzhou; Yin Yin is a native of Shanghai, but has lived and worked in Beijing for 10 years. Whether it's Guangzhou, Beijing, or Shanghai, these cities appear in your writing in a very concrete way.
Personally, I grew up in Guangzhou, studied in Beijing and then came to Shanghai to work. Reading these two novels side by side evokes a wonderful sense of folding. I would like to ask Youyu and Yinyin, as novelists and as lifers, what are the things that impress you particularly in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou?
Youyu: I put Shanghai and Guangzhou together, because I have lived in Shanghai for many years. I woke up yesterday morning and went to the riverside and rode all the way to South Wharf. I used to live in South Pier for a long time. While walking there, I suddenly felt a little afraid to go back to Guangzhou, because I found that my feelings for Shanghai were a bit like "cheating", so I didn't dare to go back to Guangzhou now. I used to live in Shanghai on Dongsanliqiao Road, and when I saw that each of their small vegetable shops was selling fresh spring bamboo shoots, I would recall my previous experience of making pickled tuk xian, and recalled a lot of details of my past life, which did not get better or more embarrassing. We often have a kind of blind confidence in time, but in fact, no, those people and things in the past have always been with us.
While resting in the neighborhood where I used to live, a truck driver passing by asked me where the exit of the neighborhood was. Actually, I had forgotten, but I still told him the direction of the exit by feeling. Strangely, I still seem to want to act like a stranger who actually lives here, which seems to be a very complicated state of mind. Previously, my place in Shanghai was not located in the center of the city, so it was geographically on the edge of the city, but it was by no means on the edge of life, and I felt that life there was also in the center.
The situation in Guangzhou is more complicated for me, and my relationship with Guangzhou does not seem to be so compatible and deep. Although I have walked a lot of streets and visited many places in Guangzhou, when I am there, I always have another place and other streets in my mind - whether it is what I have seen in film and television works or what I have lived in the past, but there is never a single impression that belongs only to Guangzhou. This makes me very confused, if all my feelings about the city arrive at my past, or my life elsewhere, then what is my relationship with Guangzhou?
But lately this confusion has been somewhat resolved. Last November, I moved from the remote Huangpu district to the old town in the heart of the city, living on the top floor of an old residential building. When I first arrived, an old lady in the neighborhood came out to talk to me, and she told me in very difficult Mandarin that her husband had died, and that she had not determined the time at the time, and that she had been counting the months since she had passed away. Afraid that I wouldn't understand, she still said word by word in Mandarin, "I, Lao, Gong, can you understand?" "Because the window of my kitchen faces the corridor, every time the old lady in the neighborhood passes by the kitchen, she will chat with me, talk about my cooking, talk about her own things, and always speak to me in Mandarin word by word. Later, I was stressed and would close the windows when I went to the kitchen to cook. Moreover, there will be a land god of wealth at the door of the old house in Guangdong, and every time the incense is burned, the whole corridor is filled with a smell of water-green, old, and damp incense ash. I feel that these are the moments when life opens its cracks in Guangzhou, and it is the moment when I perceive their existence.
Liu Xinyue: When Youyu talked about revisiting his hometown, he paid special attention to the small vegetable shop selling spring bamboo shoots, which resonated with me very much. Because I have a definite understanding of Shanghai, it starts with the seasonal food and the flowers that gradually bloom in spring. In 2022, I couldn't go anywhere, so I could only go around the community. That year I suddenly realized that from magnolia, early cherry blossoms, late cherry blossoms to wisteria, and then a little later pomegranate and moon season, they bloom according to an internal order of their own, and naturally there is no transfer of human will at all. At that time, some residents of the community said, "I want to eat broad beans when the season comes", and I realized that everyone has a clock in their bodies, which will evoke the corresponding ingredients when they are in season. This is something that I have felt very obviously after I arrived in the Yangtze River Delta region. It is precisely in plants and phenology that we have a reliable landing point to attach to the recognition and memory of a place.
In Youyu's sharing, you can feel that you have been waiting for the moment when the "crack opens" and the real relationship between people and the city lands. The reason why this process seems a bit time-consuming and a little scattered, because people have to listen, see, and smell with their physical bodies. We now unconsciously allow the screen of our mobile phone to suck away our attention and sensibility, and the way to give it is to put down the mobile phone and hand over the unfamiliar city to the body, to seek our own special connection with a place.
I also want to hear Yin Yin talk about her feelings about Beijing and Shanghai.
陆茵茵、宥予作品
Lu Yinyin: Actually, in my novels, I rarely write about a specific place. Because I feel that once I confine it to one place, it seems to be too fixed and concrete. Maybe it's because I don't have a particularly strong affection for any city, on the contrary, I'm more interested in what people have in common, and the same is true for cities. I think that wherever there are people, there will be similar events, and the cycle will happen to different people over and over again.
Let's go back to the city where I lived. I'm actually a Shanghainese who likes Beijing very much, but I probably like life in Beijing more than I like the city of Beijing. On the one hand, I feel that Beijing is a city that can accept a group of people who are different from the mainstream and can allow them and their creations to survive, and I envy the living conditions of this group of people, and I want to be close to them and become one of them. On the other hand, I don't have a family life in Beijing, all my family networks are in Shanghai, so my life in Shanghai is actually relatively trivial, and my parents and relatives will interfere in your life to a certain extent, especially when I was younger, I really have a sense of freedom to let go of myself when I arrive in Beijing.
What I like about Beijing is also its roughness. For example, if you've just finished a very elaborate dinner, and then you walk out of the restaurant and turn a corner, and you're next to a very rough road, I think I like the feeling of being delicate and rough at the same time.
02
"On the edge" penetrates the border and arrives at the equality of writing
Liu Xinyue: We were just talking about all kinds of life, and I thought of Qian Zhongshu's "Written on the Edge of Life", in which he advocated "criticism on the side", like an off-center marginal note, "just note a few words on the blank space on the edge of the book, and write a question mark or exclamation mark." In this way, it conveys alienation, questioning, and tension from the mainstream rules, and it is more likely that something of value will be pulled out from the periphery. So the phrase "on the edge" is very interesting, of course, it is not to stick to the edge, but to penetrate the border to have a literary dialogue. What emerges in the dialogue is a kind of equality in writing.
Speaking of the key word "life", let's get into some of the internal details of the novel. In "Crashing into the Sky", "You Don't Have a Life" deeply hit He Xiaohe, and I believe it also hit many readers with the same power. This sentence is accompanied by a constant pile of questions, what is real life? What is a life worth living? Who controls the standards for all this? Do we have the right to decide how to live for ourselves? When Youyu wrote "Hitting the Sky", how did this philosophical sentence "bump" into your heart?
Youyu: This sentence was actually told to me by "Chen Xiaogang" (a character in the book, the hero's ex-girlfriend). When it comes to the standard of living, I've always been very confused, on the one hand, many times the life we talk about is actually just a way of life, for example, everyone now has a lifestyle that conforms to the imagination of the city. But on the other hand, when it comes to each person's life, it is difficult for us to judge whether a person's life is right or wrong. For myself, I'm not too attached to a specific way of life, but I'm more comfortable taking root like a seed and growing slowly.
As far as writing is concerned, I often feel empty and bored in the gaps between different works now. I still hope that writing is just a useful supplement to real life, that my writing can return to its most natural state, and that I can continue to discover the richest, shining, and lovely essence of writing.
Lu Yinyin: I think the last problem that Youyu said is a problem that all people who do art have encountered for a long time, that is, the relationship between the artist and his own works. If you don't put in a lot of effort, you won't be able to finish a good work. If you put too much effort into your work and dedicate almost all of your life to your work, you will be devoured by your work. Such a balance is actually difficult to achieve, because people who are shocked by the work often have to be pushed to a limit to complete, but this is a great consumption for the author.
I saw Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, give a talk at TED before, and I found it interesting that she thought that the question of "work or author" is fundamentally a question of how strong the author's self-will is. Today's creators seem to be very narcissistic and think that their work is entirely the product of their own will. However, in ancient Greece, all creators would think that they were just a "conduit" between gods and humans, and all the creators had to do was to keep this conduit clean and able to convey the will of the gods smoothly. Therefore, the creators of ancient Greece did not have the question of "work or author", because they thought that the work they created did not belong to them in the first place.
Stills from "Staying in School Alliance".
Liu Xinyue: Modern creators will put more emphasis on self-awareness and subject consciousness, how to live a good life and "maintain self" while writing.
When I read "Crashing into the Sky", I felt that all contradictions are highly internalized, and there are no signs of abnormality on the outside, only a huge amount of inner feelings all the time. But it is precisely in this kind of life that seems to lack contradictions and violent friction that He Xiaohe suddenly collapsed - this halfway jump is a thrilling choice in terms of plot and writing. When Yin Yin talked about the state of the ancient Greek creators, it occurred to me that this might be some kind of ultimate belief collapse, people no longer believe in any certainty, and "suspicious" constitutes people's general perception of the world.
If one of the manifestations of "not living" is "pretending to live", "acting life" may be a state in which many people are in it but may not be aware of it. "The Performer" writes about a lot of people who "perform life" like this. How does Yin Yin view the issue of "performance"?
Lu Yinyin: Actually, "performance" can be divided into conscious performance and unconscious performance. For example, if I choose to obscure some of the facts or tamper with some of the facts to achieve my goals, this is one of the performances. Just like in "Mother Says", when the mother helped her daughter go on a blind date, she deliberately concealed some factors that were unfavorable to her daughter, hoping to use it as a weight to attract more suitors. But the "performances" I'm interested in are unconscious performances, which may be motivated by some implicit motives on our conscious level, such as social or cultural conventions.
I've been doing a dance called "contact improvisation" lately, which is an improvisational dance where you can do whatever you want as long as you keep yourself and your peers safe. But when dancing, you'll find that almost all the movements you make are old and "indoctrinated", they may come from ballet or modern dance. So, when others tell you that you can dance freely, you can't actually achieve the complete freedom you imagined. It's hard to realize this, and it's even more difficult to break through it after realizing it. I'm interested in this kind of unconscious performance, so I fit it into the broader concept of "performance" as well.
03
Social media "covers" the lives of modern young people?
Liu Xinyue: I think that in modern life, the programs that we interact with without knowing it while wearing masks are also largely shaped by social media. We don't always know how we present ourselves in our daily lives. "The Performer" reflects on social technology and the existence of people, and also writes about the death of the blogging age, but the Internet relics it leaves behind heals younger people in a "late" way. In your observations, how have young people's emotional expressions and interactions changed over the past decade or so, and how many of them are media-related?
Lu Yinyin: This is a big question, I don't dare to say what young people are like now, but according to my observation, young people today are more self-conscious than we were back then, and they are more likely to think about whether I want to live a preconceived 9-to-5 life, and be more self-consistent on some issues. For example, when doing activities in Hangzhou, some readers will talk about the "hitchhiking" culture, they will split their friends from one person to many people, I will eat with this person today, and do something of common interest with that person tomorrow, so there will be many different clones to meet their needs in all aspects. I think that young people today have found solutions to many problems that we didn't find at that time, so they are more self-consistent than us.
But at the same time, young people nowadays seem to be overshadowed by something stereotyped. For example, before eating, I will take out my camera and take pictures and post them on social media, and I will use a lot of Internet terms when chatting. On the one hand, I think a lot of the memes on the Internet are very creative and new, but on the other hand, I am wary of using fixed sentence structures in fixed situations, because I feel that our expression is limited in this mode.
A still from "The Social Network".
Liu Xinyue: Both of them wrote about the action of "shutting down" in their novels. Our bodies have long been inseparable from mobile phones, and technology can even become a phantom limb pain. I had a cold sweat the other day. I find that the things I remember most vividly are from the time before smartphones became popular, and the dividing line was probably around 2012. Mobile internet and social media seem to have "stolen" my life. I think it's about restoring the connection between physical people and things. This is what touched me very much when I wrote about moving and cleaning up things in "Basement", and if there were no physical objects that could be attached, people would be in a very suspended state.
Yoyu: I think there is a process when people accept new things, first of all, they are eager to look forward to it, then they are questioning, and finally they are reflecting and rethinking. But there is still a longing for the new world that technology will bring, so we may need time to lead us to think. In this new state, how can man determine his own worth and dignity? I don't think it's a question that can be answered right away, it requires many generations of personal experience and constant reflection.
Liu Xinyue: The evolution of technology is much faster than the evolution of people. Perhaps people's demand for social media is approaching a certain saturation, and when the tipping point comes, people will get bored. Some changes can already be seen, such as the fact that young people are now more likely to visit parks and wilderness, and to regain their physical and mental concentration offline and in nature. When I was young, I always felt that the park space belonged to the older people.
Luk: When we use social media, even if we are doing something of self-expression, it is a divergent thing, not a thing that comes back to ourselves. It's only when we're offline with friends and family, like visiting the park and going for a walk, that we feel "back to ourselves".
Liu Xinyue: Finally, I would like to ask you a question outside of fiction, because Yin Yin and Youyu both have experience in painting. Do you have a different state of expression when you draw and write novels?
Yoyu: I think it's definitely a different state. When I paint, I always want to find a painting language that is unique to me, that can make people recognize you at a glance and make your paintings unique. For example, when I visited the new Guangzhou Museum more than a month ago, I was touched by a painting from afar, and when I looked closer, I realized that it was the work of Mr. Wu Guanzhong. I think what touched me was the pictorial language in this painting. Although I am still in the stage of "blind painting", this is also something that I hope to slowly find and explore.
Lu Yinyin: For me, I deliberately didn't want painting to become a demanding thing, because I just wanted to make painting a hobby for me, as a way to relax. I'm very wary of my own pursuit of painting, because once you pursue it, it's easy to get stuck in the "good or bad" dilemma - you start to judge your own paintings, and let others evaluate your paintings, and enter into the system of values and judgments about paintings. This makes drawing a tiring task.
Liu Xinyue: This may also be the "danger" of the world in front of us: when we want to do something seriously, we always accidentally fall into the trap of some kind of evaluation system. We now seem to have more diverse resources than the previous generation, but many of these resources are highly standardized, and when we try to reach for them, we will always quickly get caught up in some kind of existing evaluation system, so it is important to be aware and try to jump out of these walls that are pouring in from all directions. In the words of Yin Yin's novel, it is "to be able to use yourself as a feeling at all times". Rather than looking at the world in rigid scales and rigid words, trust your own eyes and feelings. When a conflict comes, it is even more important to carefully look at your own movements, whether it is dancing, drawing or writing, this is something that needs to be practiced repeatedly.
New Media Editor: Yuan Huan
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