Ma Boyong: The attitude towards food is the attitude towards life

Southern Weekly

2024-05-23 17:15Posted on the official account of Guangdong Southern Weekly

Ma Boyong. Photo courtesy of the interviewee

In April 2024, writer Ma Boyong's novel "The Eater of the South" will be published. Before its official publication, he had already serialized nearly half of the book online for free for readers to try, which has been his habit for many years. Ma Boyong said in his personal social media: "Just like a fruit merchant will cut the fruit into small pieces and insert a toothpick for passers-by to taste, everyone thinks it is delicious, and it is not too late to buy it. ”

"The Eater of Nan" tells the story of the Han Dynasty "foodie" Tang Meng's envoy to Nanyue, and the process of being involved in the court of Nanyue by mistake.

Starting from the subtleties, Ma Boyong follows the consistent creative line of thought, "looking for possibilities in the cracks of history". is like a number on the account of "Da Ming under the Microscope", the small lychee in "Lychee of Chang'an", and in "The Disciple of the South", the corresponding is a "wolf sauce". This subtle taste connects a hidden legend of the history of the Han Dynasty and South Vietnam, and "leverages the political map of the whole China through food".

Fairy grass paste, black olive, mixed stew, Xu residual fruit...... Many readers shouted, "I finished reading this book with drooling", which also made people even more curious, wanting to explore the happiness on the tip of Tang Meng's tongue. Ma Boyong bluntly said that "the protagonist is myself", in order to write this novel, I didn't stop eating, I gained three or four pounds, and I talked about my "gourmet" experience.

In 1980, Ma Boyong was born in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, due to his father's job transfer, he traveled around the country since he was a child, and studied abroad during college. He had lived in Guangdong for a period of time and had a deep affection for Lingnan food culture, and many of the delicacies mentioned in the book still exist today, from his own experience. For example, "mixed stew" is beef offal, Ma Boyong said that every time he came to Guangzhou, he would go to eat beef offal, and once at four o'clock in the morning, he went out in a daze. Next to a slaughterhouse, the clerk cooks the freshly killed cows, and the memories are still steaming, "It's so fresh, and the food is really refreshing." He sighed.

Ma Boyong found that the key to food is "to be willing to find". In fact, not only the food, but also the habit of understanding the surroundings whenever he goes to a place, he has an extremely keen insight into the local customs. Not every clue will be used for writing, "this kind of purely out of interest to wander around, a lot of things can come out." Once, on the train from Nanjing to Chuzhou, he found a river called "Zhujiashan River" on the map, which was only a few kilometers long, but it had been built for hundreds of years in history, and the shortcomings of the bureaucratic system in the middle are worth imagining. This intuition is accompanied by an increasingly sinking gaze, focusing on the theatrical grassroots of ancient society, understanding the ecological and political operation of county-level society, and subconsciously collecting relevant information.

On the other hand, he is extremely strict in terms of evidence, and maintains high-precision requirements for writing. When operating ancient historical novels, he pursued "fishing in the dry water", exhausting all the materials, reading them in one go, and then filling in the blanks. Especially in the construction of geographical location, he has a clear sense of space, such as "The Lychee of Chang'an" describes the distance from Lingnan to Chang'an, Ma Boyong by consulting the map of the Tang Dynasty, considering the location of the post station, and finally estimated to be accurate to 5447 miles.

It is based on detailed information that Ma Boyong's novels present a different texture. Netizens commented that it reads "the thrilling time limit of life and death, the interesting interpretation of the brain-opening hole, and the subtle knowledge of the historical section". He has also gained the love of a lot of readers, but sometimes he will be a little helpless, "I go out to sign and sell two or three thousand signatures at every turn." What readers want is to experience the author lying on the spot and signing a name, which can only be said to be sweet pain. ”

In April 2024, Ma Boyong was interviewed by a reporter from Southern Weekly. On May 23, he will appear at the 20th Shenzhen Cultural Fair and participate in related activities.

I'm the one who eats above all else

Lingnan cuisine scallop wrapped in steam. Visual China

Southern Weekly: Why did you become interested in Lingnan when "The Eater of Nan" and "The Lychee of Chang'an" are set in Lingnan, and Panyu and Guangzhou are important stages for the story, respectively?

Ma Boyong: It's not that I'm interested in it now, and I didn't say that I specifically wanted to write about Lingnan, mainly because these two themes happen to be related to Lingnan. Like "Lychee in Chang'an", the origin of lychee was first in Lingnan. "The Eater of the South" is because I often go to Guangzhou, make an appointment with my friends on Beijing Road, and after eating, I take a walk by the way, visit the Nanyue King Museum, go to about seven or eight times, and I am very familiar with the things inside. I happened to see two unearthed wooden tablets there, and accidentally dug up an ancient melon by touching the melon, and it is rare to have such a theme related to food. In the past, we talked about how delicious food was, and at most it rose to the philosophy of life, but this story actually leveraged the entire political map of China through food, changed the geographical perception of Chinese, and had a great impact on China.

Southern Weekly: It was not until after the Ming Dynasty that the Lingnan region became culturally and culturally prosperous and densely populated. During the Han and Tang dynasties, historical material was still relatively limited, and it was often narrated as a marginal penal colony. Did you encounter any difficulties in recreating the historical scenes at that time?

Ma Boyong: The most difficult thing was actually the aspect of eating, because Zhang Jian had not yet reached the Western Regions at that time, and many cooking techniques were not available. When writing, we must carefully screen which ones can be written and which ones cannot be written, such as the action of "stir-frying", "stir-frying" appeared for the first time in the Northern and Southern Dynasties, and it really became popular after the Song Dynasty. If I write with a stroke of the pen at this time that he is going to scramble an egg, there will be a problem, and the Han Dynasty did not "scramble". First, there is no iron pot, there is no way to achieve uniform heat transfer, and second, there is no oil, there will not even be sesame oil, only animal oil. Under the premise that many cooking techniques cannot be used, it is quite difficult to write things delicious.

As for other details of life, it's okay, I'm more familiar with Lingnan culture, I used to live in Guangzhou for a period of time because of my father's work, and many things in ancient China have changed very little, although there is little information about the Han Dynasty, but I can do reference for other dynasties, at least its phenology, weather will not have major changes.

Southern Weekend: In your writing, the diet of the Chinese in the Han Dynasty ("The Eaters of the South") and the Tang Dynasty ("Lychee in Chang'an") is not as monotonous as we think, on the contrary, quite rich. In particular, there are very few materials from the Han Dynasty, what research work did you do to describe these foods?

Ma Boyong: The research mainly relies on the tomb murals unearthed in the Han Dynasty, which record a lot of content, such as barbecue, it has a very clear description of how to skewer meat, how to use a barbecue rack to grill, including many records of exotic flowers and plants and food mentioned in the Han Fu.

There are also some documents that are not in the literature, and they are borrowed from local snacks in Guangdong. For example, steamed bread was brought to us by a friend of mine in Zhaoqing at that time. Glutinous rice is used in the steaming, and a little fat is added, and all the ingredients and cooking methods can be done in the Han Dynasty. Although it may not be introduced in the book, it is not obtrusive to write it there.

Southern Weekly: Your food scenes are often vivid and mouth-watering, and you can imagine that you are a person who loves food. You were born in Inner Mongolia, went to Guilin and Shanghai with your parents, and studied abroad, the food culture of these regions is very different, can you tell us about your preference for food, or the history of being a "foodie"?

Ma Boyong: My taste is definitely northern, meat-based, salty and oily. However, because there are many transfers from childhood to adulthood, every time I transfer to another school, I will face a drastic change in taste.

I've experienced a few blows, for example, in Hainan I want to eat scrambled eggs, but no, only scrambled duck eggs. At that time, it was the early 1990s, and almost all ducks were raised in Hainan, and the scrambled duck eggs had a fishy smell. At that time, after the fry came out, I felt that this thing was wrong, but I couldn't help it.

Guilin is sure to put sour bamboo shoots, put peppers, after the proportion of eggs is not high, messy put some other things, I don't think this is the taste of scrambled eggs, once almost made me angry.

Later, when I went abroad to New Zealand and shared a house with many Chinese friends, I found that everyone is very humble in life, but when it comes to cooking, everyone's principles are unshakable. The Chinese have very strong principles of diet, and they vary from place to place. For example, one dish we often quarrel about is scrambled eggs with tomatoes. First of all, salt is put in the north, scrambled eggs in Shanghai are put sugar in the south, and my hometown Chifeng is even more terrible. Secondly, whether to scramble the eggs first and then take them out and continue to fry the tomatoes, or to put the tomatoes in and fry them, and pour the egg wash directly on the tomatoes, this is another practice. After frying, whether to dry it directly, or put some water to simmer, and start fighting again. Scrambled eggs with tomatoes in the Northeast should be cloved with garlic......

There is no local food in New Zealand, but I had a great time because I found a homestay mother. The old lady likes to cook very much, and she cooks for me every day after I went. She uses good ingredients, for example, she will buy some pork wrapped in a cylindrical circle, put it in the oven and steam it directly, after steaming, cut it into slices, sprinkle a little rosemary, sprinkle a little garlic slices, and then I eat it with salt, it is delicious. Like herself, she has a small garden where she grows small vegetables and spices, and then mashes these spices into a paste to make curry or sauce. Every time she cooks a dish, I think it's delicious, not only eat it up, but also praise her, so the more I praise her, the more energetic she becomes, and the relationship between the two is very good.

If you want to eat foreign food, the key is to be willing to go for it. If you look for a common restaurant near the hotel, you won't find anything good to eat. For example, the pizza in some small towns in southern Italy is not the same thing as the pizza we are familiar with, but it is very delicious. There is also Spanish seafood risotto, which I didn't like to eat at the beginning, and I thought it was hard. But after eating the real Spanish seafood risotto, I found that first of all, the seafood should be good, and secondly, the risotto is soft and delicious.

When I started working, I developed a good habit that I didn't make a fuss about any ingredients I hadn't seen before, cooking things I hadn't seen before, and I knew that it was a coexistence of values for a diverse diet, and what we had to learn was to adapt to the local tastes. In fact, the attitude towards food is the attitude towards life, we must maintain an open mind, to empathize, people have lived here for so many years, eating this thing has his reason. I now want to see things that I didn't expect at all, to eat things that I've never eaten before, and I feel fresh.

Southern Weekly: Fanyang Ling Tang Meng, the protagonist of "The Eater of the South", is a person who loves food and life, and at the same time he is full of curiosity, has the ability to reason, and in your words, is a "food detective". Do you empathize yourself with this character?

Ma Boyong: Yes, the protagonist is myself. A person who has no ambitions, just wants to eat and drink and wait for death, and eats above all else. No matter what kind of meal it is, I will eat first before I speak, and sometimes I will be ridiculed by people who say that you are really here to eat. In some social dinners, the leaders invite guests, and the people below are sitting, in fact, everyone eats two chopsticks casually, and the focus is still on communicating "social", but I am eating alone with my head stuffy. When I invite someone to dinner, I am happy to tell him what is going on with each dish, and I will talk about it after eating.

I have a category, foodies and foodies are not the same. Gourmets will carefully appreciate the style of each dish, its historical origin, its color, aroma and flavor, but foodies focus on eating itself, eating itself is a happy thing, and what you eat is not really that important.

I'm a foodie, not a foodie. I'm also very happy to eat instant noodles, and when I was in New Zealand, I developed a craft that made instant noodles very well. At that time, I wrote a "Instant Noodles with Seven Weapons for International Students", talking about different brands of vegetable packets and sauce packets for different noodles, and then whether to put the ingredients first and then cook the noodles, or put the ingredients in after the water is about to boil, when to put the eggs and when to put the ham sausages...... are all exquisite. My exclusive secret recipe is to put a slice of cheese when cooking noodles, and when the cheese melts into the soup, the soup will be very thick, and it will have a milky flavor and taste better.

Bridging the gap between the public and historical research

"Kunyu Wanguo Quantu", now in the Nanjing Museum. Visual China

Southern Weekly: I feel that the last few books you have written have paid special attention to the knowledge of ancient Chinese geography, which should occupy a very important place in your study of history?

Ma Boyong: Four keys to the study of Chinese history: officials, geography, chronology, and catalog. Geography is one of them, and if you don't understand geography, you won't be able to understand a lot of things in history.

In addition, I myself have obsessive-compulsive disorder, and in a place, I must habitually understand the surroundings, the direction of the south, south, west, and northwest, where I can go out of the city, and where there is water...... If you don't know, you're uncomfortable. I've been happier since I had my smartphone and GPS, and I would always take out my phone to see where I was, what was around me, and what kind of place names I had in the middle of my trip.

Once I took the train from Nanjing to Chuzhou, walked halfway, habitually took out my mobile phone to see, and suddenly found that there is a place called Zhujiashan River next to it, I looked at the place name and thought that the atmosphere was atmospheric. I just came out of Nanjing, which was originally the former capital of the Ming Dynasty, and then I looked at the "Zhu family", (like) the mountains and rivers of Zhu Yuanzhang's family. Later, I searched and found that there was a misunderstanding, the place is called Zhujiashan, and there is a river next to it, called Zhujiashan River.

Check again that this river is a canal, and it has been built for hundreds of years, very short, just a few kilometers, but it was repaired from the middle of the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. I wondered how it took me so long to fix it, and I found the local county chronicles and geographical chronicles to look at, and found that it could completely derive a new story.

Southern Weekly: At the moment, on the one hand, travel is very popular and convenient, but on the other hand, people are not necessarily able to appreciate the nuances of different geographical spaces, because distant places are erased by planes, high-speed rail, and the Internet. Do you want to reconstruct a more granular sense of geography through the writing of historical fiction?

Ma Boyong: Actually, it is also because of the influence of some predecessors. For example, when Huang Renyu wrote "The Fifteenth Year of Wanli", he put forward a concept called digital management, although he said that the Ming Dynasty lacked this kind of digital management, I think it has been overturned, but he still had a great influence on me at that time. I will habitually write the numbers clearly when writing, accurate to the point that this road from Lingnan to Chang'an is 5447 miles. I checked the map of the Tang Dynasty at that time, and also considered the location of its post station. After this habit was formed, I especially disliked the idea that the distance was 5,000 miles, which was a very vague concept.

I read some historical novels, such as Giovanni's Spartacus, Walker's The War, including novels written by novelists like Ken Follett, and they all have one thing in common, they will be written in detail about the local place names, where the protagonist goes and where he goes, which is a very important element to add to the historical texture.

Like Haruki Murakami, too, he writes extremely accurately, I am 10 centimeters away from you, I drank 1/3 of this glass of water, he will not say that I will drink the water in one breath and put it there, he will write that I have drunk 1/3 of the water and put it there.

Another point is to write from a subjective point of view, from a human point of view. For example, when I wrote "The Lychee of Chang'an", I wrote that the first thing Li Shande did after arriving in Guangdong was to wash his clothes, but he didn't dry his clothes the next day. Many of these details are his subjective perspective, and they are also my own experience. Stephen King said that writing should use more verbs, not adjectives, don't give the reader a definitive conclusion, tell the reader how hot and humid the place is, you have to tell the reader that your clothes didn't dry the next day after washing, and the reader will feel that it is really wet.

Southern Weekly: The Great Doctor series and Prairie Zoo are set in the late Qing Dynasty. What are the different pleasures and challenges of writing historical novels set in modern times and historical novels set in ancient times, in your opinion?

Ma Boyong: (Writing) Ancient creations will be a little freer, and the information to be considered in modern times is very complicated. The biggest challenge of writing modern historical fiction is that I have to carefully investigate each character, especially the lives of real historical characters and their descendants. Because modern times are too close to the present, and many people's descendants are still there, I can't just arrange other people's ancestors. It's also a sign of respect for real historical figures.

Modern materials are very dense, including private notes, telegrams, newspapers, magazines, ...... There's so much you need to look up. In ancient times, a person's record may be just that, and I can play where it is not written in the history books, but in modern times, some people obviously have diaries, and it is very inappropriate for you to make up a new thing yourself. But you can't finish reading the modern materials, so I can only do it selectively, and always warn myself not to look down, because if you look down, you will be stuck in and out.

Southern Weekly: Which historical works and historians have had a major influence on you?

Ma Boyong: Like Mr. Tan Qixiang's "Historical Atlas of China", which I always have on my desk. Like "The Fifteenth Year of Wanli", this is a book I liked to read when I was a child. Including Deng Guangming, Qian Mu, and some modern young scholars, such as Qiu Luming, their works have had a great influence on me. In the past few years, I have read relatively few history books, and most of my reading is essays and subdivided topics.

To put it bluntly, I can't actually make any contribution to the study of history itself, but draw nourishment from the study of history and relay it. Therefore, in addition to writing novels, I position myself as a "bridge", and my ability is that I can read the monographs written by these professional scholars. These monographs are a little less readable and are indeed not suitable for the general public, but my ability is to find the points of public interest in these difficult professional discourses, and to relay them to the public in a familiar and pleasant way, so that they can recognize the contributions of historians and the results of historical research, and can quickly agree with them.

In the past few years, my eyes have become more and more sunk, and I have become more and more at the grassroots level of ancient society, so I will also subconsciously collect relevant information. In the late Qing Dynasty, a county magistrate named Du Fengzhi in Guangdong wrote a lot of diaries, which recorded the grassroots situation in Guangdong in great detail at the end of the Qing Dynasty. This set of books costs more than 3,000 yuan, and it is generally in the collection, so I bought a set of books. After that, I posted a Weibo, saying that this book was very interesting, and it was discovered by the publishing house, and the editor contacted me and said that it might be you who bought it. Later, I went to Guangdong to meet with Mr. Qiu Jie and expressed my gratitude in person, because it was very difficult to sort out.

Southern Weekly: Your historical novels are very important to the authenticity of major backgrounds and small historical details, what do you think of the kind of time-traveling novels, alternate novels, or historical novels with random and crude details that don't work these aspects?

Ma Boyong: I think it's an evolutionary process. When I first started reading them, those historical novels were very rough, a kind of cool writing, and purely good at storylines. But now they have become more and more refined, and I think that in terms of the precision of historical fiction, this stage is the most brilliant and professional stage of Chinese historical fiction. I have been an online reader for more than 20 years, reading all kinds of book sites, and now the historical cognition and materials used in these online novels are very professional. Like "Dominating the World", it is relatively broken, written to the Song Dynasty, talking about the promotion and change of the protagonist's official position in the Song Dynasty.

Even many times after I see it, I don't know whether the things in the novel are historical facts or made up, ask the author or check it myself, and I will find that there is really this thing, and it is mentioned in a very unpopular and very obscure place in the historical materials, but people can expand this place and turn it into an article.

Southern Weekly: What do you think of the different functions and meanings of historical monographs, popular history books, and historical novels?

Ma Boyong: In fact, these three can be summarized into the same concept, which is called "public historiography"—we are facing the public, how should we explain the concept of historiography, and how should we popularize the common sense of historiography?

I think there are three levels, and historical fiction is a source, an entry, and it will make us interested in an era. For example, "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" has shaped the interest of the entire Chinese generation after generation in the Three Kingdoms, but it itself is certainly far from the truth. At the second level, non-fiction writing, the author uses a literary approach to express some more serious and rigorous historical concepts. For example, "That Little Thing in the Ming Dynasty" is definitely more rigorous than the novel, and it is a very good concept of communication, including Mr. Luo Xin's book. There is also Li Shuo's "Jian Shang", he can tell such an ancient and difficult dynasty as the Shang Dynasty vividly, which is also a very strong writing technique. The third level is the scholarly work, which is the foundation, the cornerstone. Few people read these things, but without these academic monographs, then the first two types of books are not valid.

Reality is an important undertone for historical fiction

The openwork dragon and phoenix pattern heavy ring jade pendant of Nanyue is now in the Nanyue King Museum in Guangzhou. Data map

Southern Weekly: Your novels are well-reasoned and have a kind of meticulous and layered science and engineering thinking, is this related to your previous study and professional background?

Ma Boyong: But I'm not a science and engineering student, I'm a liberal arts student, I studied business in college, and I work in marketing in a foreign company. Because I didn't do science well since I was a child, I have a heartfelt awe for science students. Especially if you are good at mathematics and doing experiments, I am very familiar with their methodology, and I will also know their rules of rational reasoning, and I can understand them. In ancient China, science and craftsmen were in a state of neglect, and it was rare to set up a monument for a craftsman, and there was almost no mention of technical details and records of the lives of ordinary technical talents. I've always felt that if I can write about them, if I can tell them, it's a merit.

Southern Weekly: Your historical novels often substitute the situation of many modern people into ancient people, so it is easy to arouse readers' empathy, such as the economic pressure, mid-life crisis, and bureaucracy encountered by Li Shande caused by lychees in "The Lychee of Chang'an", which can make some readers feel the same way. Resigning from a foreign company after 10 years of work, are you worried that full-time writing will weaken a richer observation of reality?

Ma Boyong: I joined the company in 2005 and resigned in 2015, and I have been an office worker for 10 years. I still keep in close contact with my colleagues at the time and meet regularly. Because many of my friends are office workers, I will also eat and chat with them when I go to various places, and my friends have them in various industries anyway, and they are not limited to the literary circle.

First, I am also worried that I will be ungrounded after a long time, and I will forget what the grassroots are like. Second, I think that if a work is truly dynamic, it must have a very close connection with the present and have a strong resonance, and this sense of resonance requires you to keep an eye on reality at all times. Even if you're writing a historical novel, reality is the most important layer of background. You have to know the current mainstream crowd, what are the things they are most concerned about? What have they been most anxious about lately? What are they most nervous about? What are they most happy about? So I often listen to my friends complain, chat, and complain. "The Lychee of Chang'an" is about human nature itself. The rules of society will change, science and technology will change, but human nature will always remain the same.

Southern Weekly: There is a lot of humor in "Lychee in Chang'an", which comes from parodies of pop culture: for example, Lingnan people like to say that "the most important thing to be a human being is to be happy"; "At this moment, he is not alone in the calculation, Chen Zi, Liu Hui, Zu Chongzhi, and Zu Xuan's soul possession", using Huang Jianxiang's "great Italian left-back" football commentary. What do you think of the humor of your novels?

Ma Boyong: I didn't specifically think that I wanted to be humorous or something when I wrote this, maybe it was just to look at the subject matter. With a theme like "The Lychee of Chang'an", some black humor will definitely emerge from the absurd officialdom of the little people. I watched Huang Jianxin's series of movies back then, such as "Back to Back" and "Black Cannon Incident", he didn't deliberately humor, but after you see it, you will find that there is a specific bitter black humor in it, which happens naturally, through the plot, not through the deliberately funny bridge.

On the other hand, I think the buried easter eggs should be as natural as possible, if you forcibly implant a modern word, everyone will feel particularly awkward and conspicuous, but if you put it on a specific scene to deal with, everyone will feel logical, but after reading it, I smiled meaningfully, I think this is a very interesting aesthetic.

Southern Weekly: Your language often has a bit of a literary flavor, such as official and place names, so you don't use many modern words, and if it appears once in a while, it is not so inconsistent?

Ma Boyong: I actually learned from these martial arts novel masters of the previous generation (from me), Jin Yong, Liang Yusheng, Wo Longsheng, Zhuge Qingyun, including the previous generation of Gong Baiyu and Wang Dulu, they actually have a very important contribution is to combine the ancient Yuan vernacular style with the modern style, so that you will not feel obscure when you read it, and it also has classical characteristics, which can make people feel that there is some cultural flavor in it, which is a difficult thing to do. These generations have integrated this literary language to a very good scale, and our younger generations have imitated them, and the effect has been very good.

Southern Weekly: Your novels have been increasingly turned into films and television in recent years, do you play any role in them other than being the author of the original book? What do you think about film and television adaptations, will you directly serve as a screenwriter or film and television planner in the future?

Ma Boyong: I don't play any role, I will try not to participate, because first, I don't understand, and second, I think as a writer can do a good job of the source, and the rest will be handled by professionals.

After all, film and television can reach more people, and it is of course a very happy thing for the author himself to convey (his work) to more people in this way. "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" can be regarded as a leap forward because of the film and television adaptation, but after this, I am a little afraid that I will be coerced by traffic, on the one hand, will it turn "black" to the extreme, and on the other hand, it will also have an impact on my own cognition, will I be lost in this kind of traffic. So after the release of "The Twelve Hours of Chang'an" at that time, I decisively did not continue to write "The Twelve Hours of Chengdu" and "The Twelve Hours of Shanghai", and took a step back and wrote a book "Da Ming under the Microscope", a non-fiction work. Every time I finish writing something that is commercially successful, I deliberately write something that I want to write about that niche and not so popular to cool myself down.

In the film and television adaptation of "Da Ming under the Microscope", I became a screenwriter, because it involves the tax law of the Ming Dynasty, and the general screenwriter can't write it, so I can only write it myself. I think it's almost the same if you do it once, it's more hard to be a screenwriter (than writing a novel) because it's part of a big industry, and you have to think about the director, the actors, the set, and the visual presentation. The screenwriter will revise it repeatedly and discuss it repeatedly. I write my own novels, and as soon as I turn on the computer, I write whatever I want.

Ma Boyong: The children's perspective mainly makes me re-examine a lot of things that I am familiar with. The first of Feynman's reading methods is called Concept, which asks you to assume that you are a child in front of you, and you tell the child what you have to know in the most simplified and popular way. When you talk in this way, you can't help but sort out your knowledge structure, find a lot of omissions in it, and then fill it up.

Southern Weekly reporter Li Heng and Southern Weekly intern Dong Jiadi

Editor-in-charge: Liu Youxiang

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