Look for Zhou Keqin again

Author: Yi Zhou

From Yunnan into Sichuan, landed in Chengdu Shuangliu Airport, in order to "find Zhou Keqin again".

I thought that the journey from Chengdu to Jianyang would take several hours - this is still due to the inertia of thinking, and I think that the distance between the two cities, no matter how close, is also across the city boundary. I didn't think it would take an hour or so to drive. It turned out that this city and the city were in the same "boundary".

In fact, it is already the same city. Only then did I learn that Jianyang, a county-level city in Sichuan Province, had been entrusted to Chengdu City three years ago, and at present, it is probably a district under the jurisdiction of Chengdu in terms of structure. Chengdu city construction "eastward", this advance, including Jianyang. Jianyang people themselves said that Chengdu's "eastward march" has brought a historical opportunity of "a thousand years of change" to Jianyang.

The way to make up lessons is not just to learn the materials sent down by the organizers. The driving car of personal experience, the correction of the inertia of the inner cognition, is already a lesson in the making up for the times. In such an era of "thousands of years of change", everyone has the need to make up lessons, and its drastic changes have updated not only the old administrative divisions, but also the reorganization and transformation of all the sense of time and space in the past.

29 years ago, even if Jianyang was assigned to Chengdu, it would be difficult to arrive in an hour between the two places. The roads are different, the means of transportation are different, and even, the mountains and holes are dug, and the earth is already different.

The important thing is that people's moods are different.

Why 29 years ago?

Because Zhou Keqin died in that year.

29 years ago, Zhou Keqin, who was dying, must have never thought that to go from his hometown to Chengdu, he only needed to lift his feet to get there. In this sense, the times have never been so beyond the imagination of a novelist as they have been in these decades. Zhou Keqin would not have thought that his hometown would build a large-scale international airport, making Chengdu the third city in the country to have a double airport after Beijing and Shanghai; Zhou Keqin would not have thought that his hometown would become a national-level e-commerce logistics hub, and well-known enterprises recruited his hometown children.

Zhou Keqin can't think of it, and we won't think of it. The world has changed over time, and today's Chinese miracle has not been conceived by the whole world.

But Zhou Keqin once once demonstrated what he could think of in a literary way. "Xu Mao and His Daughters", the top work of the first Mao Dun Literature Award, is a model of an outstanding novelist who warmly embraces real life and strives to grasp the pulse of the times. As a result, Zhou Keqin is known as one of the most important writers in the history of contemporary Chinese literature and "a monument to Chinese literature in the new era".

But I haven't read it.

Not only have I not read it, I think that many writers and editors in my peers have not read much. There must be a major literary proposition worth pondering in this -- what has blocked our encounter with "Xu Mao and His Daughters" for decades, and blocked us from continuing Zhou Keqin's literary world.

In this regard, the predecessor writer Liu Zhongqiao seems to have given a little answer in his article remembering Zhou Keqin:

The situation is moving fast. Western literary and artistic currents poured in, and a new generation of authors appeared on the scene.

Many writers who re-entered the literary scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s have been regarded as "laggards" on the sidelines.

But I think that the answer given by Liu Zhongqiao only speaks of part of the facts, but does not examine the complex logic behind the facts. When a new generation of writers is running, and even a country is running forward, what important thing, like Zhou Keqin, is quickly left behind by us and left cold?

When we go forward lightly, do we also throw away some precious weight?

The Tuojiang River is leisurely and long. For thousands of years, Jianyang, which lived in the middle reaches of the Tuojiang River, was born of water and prospered by water. This place was once ready to go. Nowadays, it is even more vigorous, and the "international style" has begun to emerge. The planning hall watched, the cultural lecture listened, and everyone sat on the bus and began to make up classes again.

The textbook prepared by the organizers for everyone is "Xu Mao and His Daughters".

I didn't expect that this textbook would be so sought-after, and soon everyone would have a copy, and the guys in the car who were most critical of books had some scrambling meaning. It is time, and perhaps everyone realizes that the times are once again marching at a moment when it is necessary to "find again", to re-make up lessons, to reorganize the context, and even to make new judgments and rearrange the mood.

Opened:

In winter, the harvesters on the remote gourd dam, when the dawn has not yet arrived, the day begins.

Flip it over again:

Yan Shaochun smiled, "Of course there will be resistance!" Tomorrow, no matter what, I will go to the fourth team to see Changquan's scientific research group, do some work there, and learn some scientific knowledge. In the future, if agriculture is to be modernized, it will have to take the road of scientific farming. Agriculture must rely on science to eat to have a future! Today's young people, let them always be like their grandfathers and grandfathers shoulder to shoulder grinding, of course, it is not OKAY! In the future, it will be mechanization, electrification, gardening, chemicalization, in a word, civilized production. - Think about it, how beautiful that is! At the beginning of this year, Premier Zhou made a government work report at the Fourth National People's Congress, you all studied it, think about it, how inspiring it is! ”

For a moment, I felt a little trance-like. Yes, the world described in this book is so far away from us. Outside the window is the construction site of Tianfu International Airport, and inside the window, we are looking forward to how beautiful scientific farming and civilized production will be. When such a two-fold world is juxtaposed, I am secretly moved to spring up—especially when I realize that the so-called world of the past, which is so far away from us, was originally just our life more than forty years ago.

The achievements of Jian Yang outside the window today instantly showed a certain magnificent picture.

This may be the meaning of "looking for Zhou Keqin again".

A "Xu Mao and His Daughters" reminds you once again that everything we have received today originated from where, how faltering its steps were, and how simple its ambitions were once, but it is precisely this stumbling hardship and simple loftiness that has made China and the miracle of Jianyang today.

"Xu Mao and His Daughters" was completed in 1979 and has been 40 years. It almost corresponds to the complete 40-year process of reform and opening up in this country. At an important historical node, Zhou Keqin, with the eyes of a novelist, pinpointed the pulse of an era, and at a time when the national economy collapsed, culture withered, and hundreds of industries were waiting to be revived after the chaos was rectified, such as the golden rooster announcing the dawn, which was the first forerunner for literature in the new period. This is the general writing of the times to create heroes, but this literary hero, first of all, must have the consciousness and insight to follow the times, and what he describes is the two most vast words of "era", which highlights the enduring power of realist creation.

At the beginning of 1979, "Xu Mao and His Daughters" began to be serialized in the quarterly magazine "Tuojiang Literature and Art", and at the end of the year, it was launched in full by the republished "Red Rock" magazine; in May 1980, the Hundred Flowers Literary and Art Society published a single book, and in June the Central People's Radio began to broadcast continuously; in 1981, the novel was successively put on the screen and stage; in 1982, it won the first Mao Dun Literature Award.

40 years at the end of the year, when I record this mood at this moment, the 10th Mao Dun Literature Award is being evaluated. The Si people have passed away, and "Xu Mao and His Daughters" may have been forgotten for a long time. But the pace of the country's running has not diminished, and she has entered a new era at a dazzling pace. Another important historical node is just around the corner. As a latecomer to Zhou Keqin, how will we respond to all that we have experienced? This can almost be compared to "Zhou Keqin's question", which interrogates our artistic ability, but also our historical vision and literary confidence.

"You should be indifferent and willing to be lonely... Only by suppressing the individual's desire for material things and vanity to the minimum standard can the spiritual flower be opened to the fullest. ”

The tombstone is engraved with Zhou Keqin's own words.

The road to this cemetery is still rough, as if the spiritual trek should never be as flat and straight as a highway. Should we say thank you, thanks to the rapid development of Jian Yang still for us to retain the only correct road conditions when visiting our predecessors? But I know that my thoughts still stem from the hypocrisy of the writer. Perhaps, in a short time, from the Tianfu International Airport to Zhou Keqin's cemetery in the deep mountains, a smooth road like a heavenly road was erected. This is not only an eternal dialectic between matter and spirit, but also a profound proposition in today's complex China.

The sound of the construction of the large airport outside the mountain seems to be still in the ears, and in the mountains, like the croppers on the gourd dam, the day of the day begins when the dawn has not yet arrived. In any case, in the past, Zhou Keqin left a picture of rural change and the world for his time, how will we describe everything we have experienced today?

A group of writers presented flower baskets, observed a moment of silence, and bowed.

On the way home, the car winds down the mountain, and the bottom of the mountain is a new Jianyang in the new era. I read the last paragraph of "Xu Mao and His Daughters" in my hand:

The children were still hesitating, unable to believe it was true.

Guangming Daily (13th edition, October 25, 2019)