Writer Rainbow Shadow
When it comes to Rainbow Shadow, many people will look at her legendary life with an inquiring eye.
Recently, Hongying launched a new essay "Women's River: Rainbow Shadow Dictionary", the former is a summary of her own writing, and the novel "Moonlight Samurai", the latter presents the spiritual changes of the city of Chongqing through the growth of a teenager.
Wuhan, Beijing, Hong Kong, Prague, Rome, London, New York... Born in Chongqing, Hongying has been writing about other cities for decades, and this time her writing geography returns to Chongqing, "Chongqing gives me nourishment that many books can't give."
Looking back on her personal growth journey, when asked by the reporter if she had found the "moonlight samurai" who protected her, she smiled and replied, "I have always been my own moonlight samurai." ”
Summarize the writing with four key words
Yangcheng Evening News: Is the book "Women's Rivers: A Dictionary of Rainbow Shadows" a summary of your personal writing?
Rainbow Shadow: I quite agree with your statement, this book is a summary of writing, creation, life, all aspects are involved, see this book, you will have a basic understanding of me. If you want to sum it up with a few key words, the first is "out of wedlock", the second is "feminism", the third should be "gravitational rainbow", and the fourth is "moonlight samurai".
Why is "Moonlight Samurai" a summary? Because moonlight represents an illusory, romantic, or imaginary space. The samurai is a very realistic image of a blade. The "Moonlight Samurai" is the image I have been looking for in my creations between reality and fantasy.
Yangcheng Evening News: Why did you write the book "Moonlight Samurai"?
Rainbow Shadow: The story of "Moonlight Samurai" is derived from a folk song, a long time ago there was a teenager, he rode a jujube red horse, dressed in red, in the moonlight for people to fight uneven, is such a samurai. Once he saved a girl whose parents had died and rescued her from the terrible abyss, but found that the girl did not want to live, so he took her to see the river under the moonlight, to see the flowers blooming in the moonlight, which gave her hope to live.
I wrote this book in the UK, in 2020, when the epidemic was particularly severe, and the roar of ambulances outside the window was incessant, and I was worried about my friends and family in China, watching the news every day. In this state, I continued to write a little bit while writing in China, but it didn't go particularly well. I spent a year and a half in the UK, and during that time I thought about where I came from and wanted to write a story about Chongqing and my life.
I often pause when I write, and when I pause, I am actually thinking, so I joined another book, "Women's Rivers: A Dictionary of Rainbow Shadows." This kind of pause, this kind of thinking, is very suitable for fragmentary writing, allowing me to go back to the past, but I go back to the past not to find, but to identify, but also to recognize what kind of state the teenager who was once or who was once us, who was once in 1976, or who was only 14 years old at the time, was.
Yangcheng Evening News: What is the breakthrough of "Moonlight Samurai" compared with previous works?
Hongying: The book takes an omniscient perspective and is a multi-line narrative that shows the changes in the city of Chongqing over the past two decades through the life of two gangsters on a street. In Dou Xiaoming's body, you will see the shadow of the times, and what I want to express is that a person is strongly swept by the times, with scars on his body, his heart is very contradictory, and his body is also distorted. I designed a lot of characters, the lineup is relatively large, as if I used to write a platoon, now I write a military, so it is particularly difficult to write.
Literature should be appreciated by both the common good and the common
Yangcheng Evening News: Why start writing about Chongqing now?
Hongying: Mo Yan wrote Gaomi, I think I want to write Chongqing. An author has his literary map, or a gathering point of his imagination, from which he sets out, like a gravitational rainbow. As soon as I arrived in Chongqing, I heard the sound of the river breathing, heard the chirping of the boat, heard the sound of the countryside, and all the stories surged forward, and I seemed unable to resist, and it was a book to grab a story to write.
I think God gave me a bowl of rice to eat, because before I became a writer, I especially liked to listen to stories and was particularly fascinated by stories. The ghost stories I heard when I was a kid, the manuscript "A Pair of Red Embroidered Shoes", many of these stories were heard here, and in the summer because there was no air conditioning, everyone splashed water on the ground, eating porridge and kimchi while listening to people tell stories.
The years in Chongqing gave me nourishment that many books could not give, and when I learned more writing skills from books, the stories I had heard before seemed to give me a second education and made me more accurate when writing. As a novelist, the ability to tell stories needs to be tempered again and again. When I write about Chongqing, my heart will be very excited. The story should be told well, and you must first be hi, and then you can make the reader hi.
Yangcheng Evening News: When the name Rainbow Shadow is mentioned, everyone will think of your origins, your marriage and love story, how do you think of this kind of hunting gaze of the public? Will this mindset and preference of the reader be catered to in writing?
Rainbow Shadow: I don't think I will. I never cared what readers or the media or critics thought of me, even though I was already a public figure, and I spoke by my work anyway. In this regard, I have written so many books, and I hope that each book has its own characteristics, and every book has its value in existence, first of all to meet my personal purpose of writing.
Yangcheng Evening News: I heard that you usually like to read online literature?
Rainbow Shadow: Yes, I like to read online texts, but I also read books that I like, more philosophical, more poetic, because I am a pure literary writer. But my writing also needs a buffer and pause, not always in a violent thought, so I read a lot of online literature, and even added the WeChat of online authors to discuss the direction of the plot with them. But I will pull a line for myself, the web is not a literary work, I can not go in this direction.
The network article has its own merits, such as the plot is particularly concentrated, will tell the story, even if he made up all the loopholes, but he made it down. One of its drawbacks is that it is not meticulous enough, all are a skeleton, a type.
Many writers in our pure literature don't tell stories, and sometimes after reading a novel for half the time, they don't know what they're talking about. Literature still has to be appreciated by both elegant and customary, light "elegant" is still not enough, but also to be able to tell stories, I was particularly fond of martial arts novels when I was a child, like Gu Long, Jin Yong, Liang Yusheng, they will tell stories, the characters are very plump, better than the foundation of the network text, the context, the main line branch, to go back.
Yangcheng Evening News: Have you found your own Moonlight Samurai?
Rainbow Shadow: I think I've always been my own moonlight warrior. In the place we passed in elementary school, there were a lot of particularly bad boys who would attack girls. At that time, I especially hoped that a moonlight samurai could appear in front of me, but it did not appear, so I created such a person myself, that is, Dou Xiaoming, who appeared. I had to face all the problems of growing up as a girl, because it was a time of mental and physical hunger.
Of course, in my life, in the process of my growth, there are many people who are my moonlight warriors, such as my adoptive father, my mother, Zhang Mama, and so on. Many of my teachers in the process of writing literature are also my moonlight warriors. In life, there will be many people who have helped me, all of them are my moonlight warriors.
The birth of a daughter has led to a great change in life
Yangcheng Evening News: You once said that "all my novels can be explained by 'illegitimate daughters'", from the autobiographical "Hungry Children" to the current "Moonlight Samurai", how many personal shadows are there in your writing?
Rainbow Shadow: "Hungry Daughter" is purely my personal life, it is realistic. Moonlight Samurai is fictional, with almost no personal shadow of me in it, but it's a familiar life for me.
"Hungry Daughter", "Good Child Flower", "Little Girl", these three are completely related to my own life, and all the other books actually have nothing to do with my own life. For a writer writes with a brain, and this brain is made up of what he saw and thought in his childhood, and then there is book knowledge, and all his experiences, including what he has seen, the people around him or what he has seen and heard in his travels. This brain is like a big computer, and when you turn it on, it's hard to tell which characters are relevant to yourself and which aren't. At the time of writing, all these experiences, perceptions, book knowledge, life perceptions, and failures in life may constitute his words.
Yangcheng Evening News: Do you make up for some of the shortcomings in your personal growth in your writing?
Rainbow Shadow: Yes. I don't have maternal love, and I think my mother is actually afraid to express it to me. A relationship like Dou Xiaoming's relationship with his mother, and Qin Jiahui's relationship with his father, is actually a kind of compensation. Our family only came back on weekends because my mother went out to work and do manual work. At that time, the weekend was only one day, and it was Sunday, so she came back and only stayed for a day and left again. Therefore, I especially envy those adults and children in the family who sit together and eat together, eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which I think is too happy.
Yangcheng Evening News: You said before that the birth of your daughter is an important opportunity for your life to change, and even after having a daughter, you have made a real reconciliation with your past life.
Rainbow Shadow: Before my daughter came, I definitely didn't want children and didn't want to be a mother. And after I wrote "Hungry Daughter", in fact, I still have a part of the fear of this world in my heart, and when I wrote "Good Children's Flower", I became pregnant with my daughter. Some people say that "Good Children's Flowers" is better written than "Hungry Daughter", and I totally agree, why? Because the structure, the character style change, especially the fear in my heart is gone, it seems that the full love for my daughter has transformed into a new understanding of the world, that is, this world is not so terrible, it is not only something that makes you terrible, it has its beautiful side, which is the biggest transformation. If you see beauty, you have the possibility of reconciliation. I'm going to break up the world I've constructed, and reconciliation isn't enough, I'm going to break it, I'm going to rebuild a world.
I recently wrote a novella called West End Zoo, which seems like a thrilling story, but there's a particularly warm side to it. Since Moonlight Samurai, I may be more concerned about the precious memories in the characters' hearts, or their vision of the world, I hope is different from before.
Yangcheng Evening News: I heard that you can be in a state of writing 24 hours a day? How do you balance family care, writing, and everyday interactions?
Rainbow Shadow: That's right, that is, once I got into the project I wrote, I didn't stop, just like I gave 1/3 of my brain to this project. So when I talk to you like that, maybe I'm thinking about writing too. In the morning, I make a very simple breakfast for the children, and then I start writing until noon, and then I go and make them some salad, or make a cake or noodles, and then start writing again, until the afternoon. In the afternoon, start answering questions online. In the evening, the meals are a little more, and when they are done, they may watch movies with the family. When the pace is tight, I don't watch the movie and write. While I am writing, I can also buy food online, including cleaning and washing clothes, which are all connected with writing.
Source: Yangcheng Evening News