Zhao Zhenjiang/Text "Shengxiang, now we need you to build a cultural atomic bomb for the movement." Zhong Yongfeng, a Hakka child of Taiwan's Meinong who returned to his hometown and devoted himself to the anti-reservoir movement, said to singer Lin Shengxiang.
At that time, on April 18, 1998, Hsiao Wan-chang, then Taiwan's "premier", announced that the construction of the Meinong Reservoir would start within one year.
The Taiwan authorities have allocated huge sums of money to prepare for the construction of the Meinong Reservoir, claiming that it can solve the difficult problems of draught water and water use for industry and agriculture. But when the reservoir is completed, the people of Minong will lose their pride in the beautiful natural assets of the Sungai River Valley. In addition, potential safety hazards can also keep them away from where they used to be.
Previously, Zhong Yongfeng had led his colleagues to fight for the anti-reservoir movement for many years, and had tried to write articles, reason, and mobilize the masses, and Zhong Yongfeng realized that in addition to uniting the people of Meinong, such a method could only win the moral support of environmental groups in southern Taiwan and progressive academic circles in Taipei. He believes that "this is a small-town campaign against the government apparatus, and unless we can gain an advantage in public opinion across Taiwan, there is little chance of victory." If we can create works of art that convey the beliefs and emotions of the movement, we can reach ten times or a hundred times the social dimension of discourse and mobilization. ”
Many years later, Zhong Yongfeng recalled this scene in the book "How Chrysanthemums Marched at Night", "Shengxiang listened, the atmosphere sank, and his answering frequency became lower and lower. I felt embarrassed, as if the whole success or failure was on his shoulders. ”
"Shengxiang, if this work of art is music, what I imagine is not instrumental music that only serves sports. It must not only be artistic, but also be able to challenge established thinking in terms of musical methods. These songs should not only inspire the spirit of the sports scene, but also go home with the masses and become a part of their lives. I want to work with you not only on the music of the movement, but also on the movement of the music. ”
"So how?" Lin Shengxiang asked.
"The cultural atomic bomb is magnificent, but how to build it? Where are the raw materials? What is the method? If you create a sports music album, what kind of effect can it have among the public? After chatting with Lin Shengxiang, Zhong Yongfeng kept asking himself these questions, but at that time he pretended to say to Lin Shengxiang lightly, "I'll write some words first and pass them on to you." ”
Two months later, Zhong Yongfeng passed the first poem "Night Bus" to Lin Shengxiang, and three months after receiving the words, Lin Shengxiang also chose to move back to Minong.
They probably didn't think at the time what a glorious start it was, both in the history of music and in the history of social movements. It may not have been imagined that they would cooperate one after another in the future, releasing works such as "Chrysanthemum Night March", which reflects the squeezed rural conditions under industrialization, the hometown trilogy "My Village", "Wai Village", and "Wild Lotus Out of Zhuangzhuang", which describes urban losers.
Back to the background of Zhong Yongfeng's first poem, he had been engaged in social movements in Minong for many years, and went to the United States to further his studies in sociology, and returned from his studies. He has accumulated a wealth of experience in both theory and practice. Coupled with the nutrients absorbed by listening to American rock music, Taiwanese folk songs, and reading Third World poetry in his early years, his horizons have become broader.
As for how to compose, he summed it up as follows: first, we can refer to the relationship between progressive folk songs and social movements in the United States, Brazil, France, Japan, and West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s; Second, in Taiwan's social movements after the 1980s, the role of music has never been clear, and most of the music used on the scene is the revolutionary songs of the old leftists, the old folk songs of southern Fujian, or the march of the labor movement from South Korea. If we should take the music needed for the movement with a serious attitude towards social issues, then in the 1970s, "sing your own song" may be extended to "sing your own sports song." ”
Zhong Yongfeng chose the second path - singing his own sports songs.
Since his father taught him to drive an ox cart at the age of 12, Zhong Yongfeng, a tobacco farmer, has decided that he will become a farmer like his father when he grows up.
When he was tutoring in his third year of high school, he experienced the confusion of adolescence, and the method adopted at that time was to play volleyball frantically and read a lot. Van Gogh, Baudelaire's poems, Pasternak's novels, Chekhov's short stories......
He compressed his daily food expenses to NT$50 and bought back the translated novels with the author's name behind the author's name in the bookstore. "Some of the paths in modernist literature—symbolism, surrealism, stream of consciousness, futurism, and so on—all follow the same example, looking at themselves in isolation, writing frantically, trying to depict self-images with those imported techniques."
Admitted to the Department of Civil Engineering at Tainan Cheng Kung University, Zhong Yongfeng returned home and found that "the village has been degraded by agricultural land and the population has accelerated, and the loneliness has become a towering abyss." He asked himself, "If the purpose of rural modernization is to eliminate the rural areas, then isn't modernization education aimed at sweeping away my roots?" The civil engineering department I'm studying in the future will command those weird bulldozers, isn't it the first-line murderer? ”
In the engineering materials class, Zhong Yongfeng quickly understood: in the civil engineering department, cement is the protagonist. "Often, when I look up from the pages of textbooks about the composition and strength of cement products, my mind immediately becomes a screen, showing scene after scene of this suppressed land. Their souls are immortal and become homesick. This nostalgia carved a void in the young Zhong Yongfeng's heart. To fill the hole, he spent his days and nights reading poetry collections, novels, and decadent avant-garde rock by African and Latin American writers. I was dropped out of school in my junior year.
His sister, who is two years younger than him, is much braver, and Zhong Yongfeng describes that "in her freshman year, she turned into her heart, like diving from the surface of the water to the riverbed while swimming, found the hollow and gave it a blow." "My sister went to Lukang to participate in the anti-DuPont movement.
Zhong Yongfeng finally decided to go to the distant outer islands to self-exile - the land manifestation, he drew the list of troops from Matsu Dongyin Island and let the customs control. "Carrying stones and cement every day, working endlessly." Write to a friend and ask them to mail him something with words.
The friend wrote back that he remembered Camus's Sisyphus's endless boulder up the mountain, and attached a bag of books: Ba Jin, Mao Dun, Lu Xun, Zhang Xianliang, Zhong Acheng, and novels by Taiwanese writers Chen Yingzhen, Zhong Zhaozheng, Zhong Lihe, and Li Qiao. The interest in writing poetry that had sprouted many years ago returned, and Zhong Yongfeng felt that there was a feeling of roots growing on the soles of his feet and sprouts on his head.
In 1987, a year before Zhong Yongfeng was discharged from the army, his father died of a violent illness due to an overdose of pesticide heavy metal residues in his body at the age of 55.
After the anti-DuPont movement, his sister and her socialist comrades joined forces all over the island to train farmers, and Chung Yongfeng cut off his long hair and joined the ranks, after which he returned to Mino with his sister.
After returning to his hometown, how to know Meinong, his hometown and how to know his Hakka ancestors, became the first question in front of him, which also implied that he would settle down and settle down.
Under the leadership of fellow villagers and friends, he went to the foot of Lingshan Mountain to visit the first land Bogong altar in Meinong - the "Kaiji Bogong" enshrined in the first year of Qianlong. Looking at the inscription, Zhong Yongfeng imagined the scene and momentum of the refugee ancestors two hundred years ago reading the sacrificial text in authentic Hakka, and he was instantly excited. However, at the instigation of his friends, he was unable to pronounce Hakka—many words and phrases were beyond his Hakka ability. When he returned home, he sought advice from his uncle, a professional geographer and memorial student. "My uncle's teaching seems to help me point through the veins, and it sounds smooth and good." After reading it more than a dozen times, Zhong Yongfeng remembered it. After that, he walked and lay down, sitting, bathing and going to the toilet, all reciting it. "I kept thinking about the language, emotions and postures of the frightened peasant ancestors when they read the inscription in 1763. Every time I read 'the remnants of the mountains and rivers are the sect', my heart shakes, and I seem to have a sense of the history of the thousands of Hakka people who have drifted for generations. "It's a real recognisance of one's ancestors, finding one's way and making one's way clear.
With the understanding of emotion, culture and language, the next thing will be smooth, Zhong Yongfeng took Lin Shengxiang to study the traditional music of the Hakka people with the parents in his hometown, and opened an eight-tone workshop to learn Beiguan, Dongxiao, and suona......
In his early years, he was puzzled by a question for a long time: "Listening to rock music, it turns out that I only spin around on technical specifications, and I have never cared about what those things have to do with my growth and inner life!" It was also resolved, because he was in Meinong, standing on the land pioneered by Kaijizu, and entered the Hakka tradition.
During the World Cup in June 1998, Zhong Yongfeng heard a Cuban song "ChanChan", which revealed a sense of vicissitudes of life, which suddenly reminded him of the journey of taking a tour bus with an old farmer in Meinong to the "Legislative Yuan" in Taipei in 1993 and 1994 to present their feelings and protest. "In order to save the cost of the hotel, they went north at night, arrived in Taipei early in the morning, used the toilet of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall to freshen up and brush their teeth, and went straight to the 'Legislative Yuan' after a simple meal." Zhong Yongfeng recalled in the book, "Ask an elder who has participated in the action for two consecutive years, why is he willing to endure such fatigue? He said that he had been a farmer all his life and had been coaxed by the Kuomintang officials all his life, and he did not want to swallow his anger on the issue of the reservoir this time. ”
So Zhong Yongfeng wrote this story into a song, reviewing his agricultural career from the mood and eyes of an old farmer, and using this review to form his policy views.
What kind of language structure would a farmer in the same age as Zhong Yongfeng's father tell the story? He would express his anger in thick, black slang. "I have not forgotten that the peasants of my father's generation or more have fully received the influence of the tradition of farming and reading, and are full of respect for the teaching of literature and etiquette.
Zhong Yongfeng remembered the "Dong pair" on both sides of the ancestral hall. In this way, the first lyrics are about to come out:
Night Bus
(Remembering the mood of an old farmer)
Overnight on the tour bus it gradually north,
My head was dizzy, and I was stunned, and I looked at the night.
Dark clouds eclipse the moon again and again,
It reminds me of the old days.
Hard-working hard to make the field produce largely,
But the more you plant, the more miserable it becomes.
Ding more land and less brothers fight out,
Leave me in this house to support my parents.
When the pain of the joints is weakened,
New things change old things.
My brother, who works in the city, told me:
Say that if you make a reservoir, Meinong will become a big treasury.
Alack! I said afterlife
Are you a fool and want to eat sheep testicles?
If these governments really have a trick,
The cultivators have long since come out.
Don't wait until I'm in my early sixties now,
Changing jobs too slowly and dying too early.
The east turns the white sun out of ten thousand whips,
The high-rise buildings in Taipei City stand tall and hold up the sky.
I think my life is going to be ineffective,
But this time I'm not going to be in the bag again.
Today I must go,
Tell the government about so longevity:
If the reservoir is done,
can be eaten.
(The original lyrics are Hakka)
A cultural atomic bomb has been ignited.
Many years later, Chung Yongfeng mentioned a concept in his speech - backwater. "When the river is flowing, sometimes it passes by a rock, and there is a whirlpool called backwater. This is the most dangerous place, and you may be sucked in if you swim through. So when I was a child, the little ones who drowned in the river basically drowned in this place. It looks fascinating, as if there is a call, and there is a danger in that call, and there is a temptation in the danger, you want to jump, but you are afraid, if you don't jump, you will be said to be a bad seed, but if you really jump, you will die over there. Zhong Yongfeng said, "There is temptation and danger hidden in this, and I think the folk song is to seize this matter." ”
Meinong is Zhong Yongfeng's backwater, and Zhong Yongfeng is also Meinong's backwater.
As Zhong Yongfeng's translation of the poem by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca wrote:
Every song / is a return of love
Each star / is the return of time / knotted / time
Every sigh / is the backwater of a shout
There is also a similar expression in the tradition of the Chinese ancestors, in "Chu Ci, Qu Yuan, Shijiang", there is an expression of "flooding back to the water and stagnating". Backwater is when water flows upside or backward due to obstructions, backflows, or currents.
Zhong Yongfeng's idol Du Fu, with the self-knowledge and expectations of a public intellectual, traveled in the turbid years, like a reporter and writer, constantly recording what he saw and heard on the way and expressing his concerns. Looking at the course of the folk song movement, Du Fu used himself as a medium to connect literati literature and Yuefu poetry traditions, resonating into a vast and magnificent dialogue.
Zhong Yongfeng continued the classical tradition, absorbed the living water of other nations in the world, and had a dialogue with Kaijizu in his hometown of Meinong, stirring up a new echo in a new era.
(Thanks to Zoe for polishing this article, the reference books for this article: "How Chrysanthemums March at Night" and "I'll Sing Mountain Songs")