The tide of workers' new village construction, which once raged in Shanghai for 40 years, has now become quite distant in memory, or rather, overshadowed by another narrative of "Shanghai culture" and "modern Shanghai". Guan Xinsheng persistently uses his personal experience in the new book "Workers' New Village" to awaken the common memories of countless "Workers' New Village Children". In the view of Chen Sihe, a critic who also lived in the workers' new village, Guan Xinsheng "wrote out the collective memory and common feelings of an era and a region."
As the earliest workers' village in China, Caoyang Village, which was built in 1952, welcomed more than 1,000 labor models that year. This was the first batch of workers in New China to live in "workshops", and their housewarming was regarded as a great symbol of "the working class being the master" at that time, known as the "1002 household project". Subsequently, Caoyang New Village has a well-known "20,000 households" project - the government has built a number of workshops in a short period of time, solving the housing problems of more than 20,000 workers' families and more than 100,000 people. In the following 40 years, workers' new villages expanded to all parts of Shanghai, such as Sunway New Village, Gongjiang New Village, Anshan New Village, Jiangning New Village, Dalian New Village, etc., with a total of more than 200 built. These houses are what the Shanghainese later commonly known as "old workshops".
To this day, if you ignore the darkness and crampedness of the interior of the residence and only look at it from the outside, Caoyang Village is still a "livable community". The new village is a unified three-story spire building, and the renovated milky white façade and red roof make these 60- and 70-year-old houses look "younger". Each row of houses is spaced equal in height to the house, and can accommodate a green belt, which looks sparse and open, neat and uniform. Outside the new village, along the road, there are urban sculptures and carefully manicured green belts, and on both sides of the road are dense and stout plane trees.
More than half a century has passed, and the appearance of the workers' new village houses has not changed much. But scholars' research tells us that the residents of Caoyang's new village have changed dramatically – it has become a popular place for migrant workers. Only before the end of work at three o'clock in the afternoon, when the whole new village is at a low tide of crowds, can you get a glimpse of its former situation. In addition to the couriers who shuttled back and forth, sitting in several street gardens were white-haired elderly people, playing mahjong or talking about what they had seen in the vegetable market — in Shanghainese.
Children of workers:
Restore the memory of a group
This group of old people and Guan Xinsheng are of the same generation. In 1954, as the children of the first generation of industrial workers after the founding of New China, 5-year-old Guan Xinsheng moved to The New Village of Gongjiang in Yangpu District on a flatbed rickshaw. Just left the Shikumen Lane where "toilets are to toilets, briquette stoves are squeezed into briquette stoves", between the weeds as tall as him and the three-story houses that are exactly the same, The new students who sneak out to play are lost.
Houses with wooden floors, plumbing gas and flush toilets, were the most enviable places in the workers' village at that time. However, the most direct feeling of the new home of the new student as a child is the game. The cramped spaces of the old alleys in the city center are full of marbles, scraping tablets, rolling iron rings, and nailing olive cores, all of which have faded out of the "arena" of the children in the workers' new village. The hordes of "eagles catching chickens" and the endless "escape from the country" in the new village have become a new trend.
From moving into The New Village of Gongjiang with the tide of construction until leaving in 1986, more than 30 years of workers' new village years have determined the general trajectory of Guan Xinsheng's life. After graduating from high school, he was assigned to the Shanghai Aluminum Factory. With the idea of changing his destiny, and because of his hobbies since childhood, he gradually became a quasi-professional writer until he became the executive deputy editor of Yangshupu Literature and Art.
In Guan Xinsheng's creative career, "Workers' New Village" can be regarded as the aftersound of the 1 million-word novel "Worker". In the novel, Guan Xinsheng and his daughter Guan Yancao write a century-old story of a workers' family that stretches from 1906 to 2010. This novel was written for 12 years, and Guan Xinsheng consulted countless historical materials for this purpose, outlining the changes in the details of the lives of many industrial workers around 1949. What impressed him deeply was the difference between the rich and the poor of the Shanghai workers at that time. "Many workers in Shanghai fled from northern Jiangsu before liberation, and after they arrived in Shanghai, they built a lot of grass huts along the river and did not have houses to live in. Only the workers of Yangshupu, through the struggle, got some dormitories. But he also found information that in the 1920s and 1930s, there were indeed workers of the French and Commercial Tram and Electric Light Company who could get high wages. There are also several cafes, also dedicated to the working group. After the contractor takes the workers out of the countryside, he takes them into the factory, and when the three-year contract expires, he can generally become a formal textile worker, with a salary of about 20 silver dollars and a good life.
The new village life of the new Chinese workers, which is experienced by the new students, is much more equal and simple. "People in the alley come here and may think there's gas and a bathroom, but I was never proud or inferior. It can only be said that everything in the workers' new village was given by the Communist Party and was not earned by earning money on their own. The meaning is different. ”
After graduating from high school and working in the Shanghai Aluminum Factory, this peaceful and carefree mentality was broken. "After working, I felt some inequality, and it can be said that at this time, there was a qualitative leap in thinking." The temperature between the furnaces of the aluminum factory was constant at 72 ° C, and Guan Xinsheng wanted to leave, but his superiors did not let him move, and he felt that he had become "a note of roasting in front of the furnace": "Why do I have to do such strong and hard physical labor?" Can I change my destiny? "Writing, which he loved since childhood, became his way to change his destiny. These questions swirling around in the furnace room at that time became the driving force for Guan Xinsheng to publish 7 million words of novels in succession.
Shikumen and Workers' New Village:
The double world of old and new Shanghai
In pre-liberation Shanghai, residences included garden houses, Shikumen, new lanes, apartment buildings, and scattered shantytowns scattered around every corner. There is no place for workers to live.
Guan Xinsheng's wife was born in Shikumen, and he himself once lived in Shikumen, and in his memories, Shikumen was mixed with seventy-two tenants of three religions and nine streams, hiding many past events that could not withstand scrutiny. Depending on the rent, the economic conditions of the residents of the former lane and the latter lane are also very different. The place where the cultural people, the people who drive the planes, the people who drive the ships, and the coolies at the bottom live only a few lanes apart.
The households in the workers' new villages were relatively single, especially in the early days, mainly labor models and technical backbones, who were "more revolutionary, and it can be said that they are more obedient to the party." For a long time, the environment there was very simple. "Therefore, the knowledge and vision of the children in the old city and Shikumen are definitely broader than those in the workers' new village," Guan Xinsheng said.
Zhang Yiwei, a "post-80s writer", was born in Caoyang Er Village in 1987 and later lived in two workers' new villages in Xuhui and Pudong. Her novels, Feast of the Little People, and The Night You Don't Know, are set in a workers' village. In the eyes of the Chinese department teacher at Fudan University today, life in the workers' new village "has equal warmth, but also training for hard work, tenacity and perseverance." Until now, she still lives in that atmosphere. When her grandmother died, neighbors came to her house all night to help fold tin foil and taught her many ways to fold. Such a neighborhood relationship is unlikely to exist in the later newly built commercial housing community.
As a worker's child, Zhang Yiwei feels that she is familiar with the life and emotional structure of workers, and these understandings also give her basic emotional identity. In the past 20 years or so, the "Shanghai workers" who were originally a very important political force in Chinese society have decreased a lot with the relocation of industry and the death of the population. But Zhang Yiwei's best friends are always the children born in the working family, because there is "a feeling of carving a boat and asking for a sword."
Workers' Village Stream:
American architect, Soviet expert and Chinese characteristics
Like Guan Xinsheng, many of the "aborigines" and their descendants have slowly moved out of the workers' new villages. In large part, it is because the living area here is too small, and once they have the opportunity, they are of course more willing to live in commercial housing. However, at the beginning of its construction, Caoyang New Village was criticized by some Soviet experts precisely because it was too big.
However, the criticism from the socialist "big brother" was not fully adopted, and the construction plan continued to be implemented.
The different views of the experts in the two socialist countries reflect their subtle differences in their visions of workers' lives. The tension between these two ideas is what interests a private worker researcher on the history of the new village.
In the view of the researcher, who did not want to be named, the design plan of the workers' new village can well reflect the construction ideas of the rulers at that time - China's socialism has always been different from any other country, and we have our own ideas. He mentioned a lyric that had been widely sung: "Our motherland is a garden." "Soviet experts seem to criticize the word 'garden', but our construction ideals have actually always carried a yearning for a comfortable life. This is exactly the opposite of the habitual perception of many scholars who criticize socialism. ”
In the eyes of researchers, the appearance of Cao Yang Xincun later appeared closely related to Wang Dingzeng, the first and second in charge and designer of Shanghai at that time. Wang Ding was a graduate of the Department of Civil Engineering at Jiaotong University, studied in the United States, and received a master's degree in architecture from the University of Illinois in 1938. His design of Cao Yang New Village, based on the "neighborhood unit" model born in the United States, was proposed by Clarence Perry in the 1920s. In Perry's vision, the "neighborhood unit" is "a plan to organize a community where family life is organized," and it involves not only housing, but also the surrounding environment and public facilities. These facilities should include at least one primary school, retail shops, and recreational facilities. He also believes that in the era of the prevalence of automobiles, the most important issue in the environment is traffic safety, so the "neighborhood unit" model advocates that car traffic is completely arranged outside the residential area to ensure the safety of residents, especially children. When such architectural concepts entered China, they were popular internationally for more than 20 years, but in the eyes of researchers, they were "still very advanced, especially matching the identity of the advanced producers who live in them."
However, although China and the United States have practiced the "neighborhood unit" model to a certain extent, their original intentions are different. "Americans have adopted this model, with anti-urbanization overtones, and China wanted to do the best with as little resources as possible."
Workers' Villages, a somewhat utopian model of architecture and urban planning, were popular around the world for a long time in the 20th century. But decades later, they faced a similar fate – the people who had originally lived in them gradually dispersed, and generally flowed to more comfortable homes. In the researcher's observation, perhaps only Germany may be an exception. "Most people are hedonistic, but Germans prefer 'masochism', and some German intellectuals are willing to live in workers' villages and have some kind of social ideals."
Whether the narrative of "Haipai culture" should be included
Left-wing literature and workers' literature?
From 1949 to 1978, Workers' Village shaped the lives of generations of workers in Shanghai. In the past 30 years, of the 17.56 million square meters of housing area added in Shanghai, 11.39 million square meters are workers' new villages, accounting for nearly two-thirds, which makes the total construction area of workers' new villages far exceed Shikumen. However, what is not commensurate with the actual function of the workers' new village is that there are very few literary and film works related to the workers' new village. Nowadays, when people talk about the literary image of Shanghai, the most likely thing to think of is the "Shanghai Beach" in the 20s and 40s of the last century, or the noisy, windy and snowy Shikumen, new-style lanes and small bungalows. Workers' Village, however, rarely leaves its own words or images.
Since 2005, scholars such as Wang Xiaoming and Luo Gang have conducted a long systematic study of Cao Yang Xincun, one of the purposes of which is to respond to this problem. When introducing the background of the research to the media, Luo Gang once mentioned that the Workers' New Village is the deepest trace of socialism left in the city, but one of the characteristics of the "Shanghai fever" set off in the 1990s after the publication of Li Oufan's "Shanghai Modern" is that in the narrative of Shanghai's history, the history after the opening of the port in 1843 is directly connected with Shanghai, which reopened after 1992, and the premise of this docking is the intentional oblivion and suppression of Shanghai as a socialist city. This kind of forgetting made the narrative of Shanghai history from 1949 to 1979 almost a blank.
Many years ago, in a great discussion on "Shanghai culture", some scholars proposed: "The 'Xintiandi' narrative has restored the collapsed civic memory, allowing the latter to recover the capitalist dream of the colonial era in the restored images of Shikumen", and "The victory of Shikumen over the workers' new village means that the working class has withdrawn from the ideological center of the city after the 'domination period' from 1950 to 1976, and has become a marginal class in Shanghai, replaced by a more complex and dynamic citizen class." In this regard, Guan Xinsheng said that he did not know whether the theoretical experts were accurate in opposing Shikumen and the workers' new village. He just felt that the so-called "Shanghai school culture" should at least include left-wing literature and workers' literature, and Yu Dafu's "Spring Breeze Drunken Night", Jiang Guangci's "Shorts Party", Xia Yan's "Contractor", Mao Dun's "Midnight", etc., are all important parts of it. "The theoreticians' stories are told by the theorists, but now there are indeed very few works that focus on the workers and the workers' new villages."
However, the researcher of the workers' new village, who did not want to be named, had a different view on the suggestions of cultural scholars to include the workers' new villages in the narrative of "Haipai culture". He believes that to say that the workers' new village belongs to the "Shanghai school culture" is actually "wronged it." "What the workers' new village represents is a new historical culture and ideology, which has little to do with the common sense of 'Shanghai culture.'" If we have to say that this part of the culture also belongs to the "Haipai culture", then we must enlarge the concept of "Haipai culture". "It is no longer just a culture centered on the life of the British Concession and the French Concession within the inner ring of Shanghai, but has expanded to a history related to Shanghai's manufacturing industry." In this way, 'Shanghai culture' should at least include the industrial pattern of Shanghai since the Jiangnan Manufacturing Bureau and a whole set of lifestyles related to it. ”