When Lu Yao won the Mao Dun Literature Award, he even borrowed the travel expenses to receive the award. Many people lamented this, feeling that Lu Yao's embarrassment was inconsistent with his fame. In fact, there is no need to make this feeling. In the 1980s, the average monthly income of workers was only 60 yuan, and the income of farmers was even lower. As a successful writer, Lu Yao has a manuscript fee on the one hand, and on the other hand, there are state and local allowances, and his income is definitely higher than most people.
Take the famous work "Life" published in 1982 as an example, its manuscript fee of 1300 yuan is equivalent to the income of the working class for two years. After the publication of "Ordinary World", it received 30,000 manuscript fees and 10,000 prizes. You know, at that time, a family that could have ten thousand yuan would be called "ten thousand yuan households" and envied by people.
Therefore, the reason why Lu Yao has no money is not low income, but that he spends too much money. Lu Yao's addiction to smoking is very large, he likes to drink coffee, and he only smokes good cigarettes and only drinks good coffee. When he went to the meeting, he put the free breakfast instead of eating, but went to the coffee shop to eat a Western-style breakfast.
In the general impression, those who are poor and afraid of the older generation should know the most about frugality, but why does Lu Yao, who was born poor, have such a concept of consumption?
It all started with his childhood.
In 1949, Lu Yao was born into a poor rural family in northern Shaanxi. At that time, the lack of clothing and food in the countryside was the norm, and every household tightened its pants and belts, broke its fingers and carefully calculated its life. And Lu Yao's family is even poorer than the average family, and they can't live a long time.
So among the 7 brothers and sisters, the father chose to pass on the road to his uncle to reduce the burden on the family.
At the age of 4, Lu Yao would cut pig grass and collect firewood for his family; at the age of 7, Lu Yao began to live under the fence. No matter how sensible a child is, how well he understands his parents, when he lives alone in an unfamiliar environment, he will also have the grievance of being abandoned.
Poverty brought lu yao not only separation from his parents, but also humiliation among his peers.
When he was a student, Lu Yao did not study stationery enough, often could not afford to buy a few cents of paper and pencil; he was hungry, he always needed to go to find some wild vegetables and wild fruits, and even steal vegetables from other people's fields to eat; torn clothes, never dared to stand in front of his classmates, and he could do everything in two words.
And these are not the most painful, the most painful is that the most sensitive age of Lu Yao's self-esteem is also the age when teenagers are most ignorant and unrestrained.
They once threw steamed buns on the ground for Lu Yao to pick up and eat, and they also pulled The ragged Lu Yao into the crowd to laugh, and at the same time, there were kind teachers and classmates who sympathized with him and helped him.
Lu Yao is a very good and strong person, so whether he is ridiculed or sympathized, what he brings to the young Lu Yao is humiliation, and he wants to shake off all this upward motivation.
In such an environment, Lu Yao did not complain about himself and gave up on himself, and finally went to Yan'an University in 1973, and then became famous for his literary works in 1982.
In the past 30 years, poverty like a maggot of the tarsal bone has accompanied Lu Yao's childhood, adolescence and youth all the way, and has become a scar engraved in his heart. At this moment, Lu Yao was finally completely freed from poverty – from a material point of view alone.
Nabokov once said that poverty and coughing cannot be hidden, and the more you try to cover it up, the easier it is to expose.
The traces of a person's poverty cannot be hidden in any way, and the poverty of the writer is clearly revealed in the work.
For example, in the same martial arts novel, Jin Yong's food is complex and exquisite, while Gu Long's protagonists chew on big fish and meat, fat chicken and fat duck. The reader can see at a glance that Gu Long should not have lived as well as Jin Yong when he was young. The actual situation is indeed as the reader guesses.
Similarly, Sun Shaoping in "Ordinary World" also has Lu Yao's shadow.
When Sun Shaoping sneaked to get his two black-faced steamed buns that represented poverty in the rainy and cold school playground, when he drank the remaining vegetable juice, he suddenly burst into tears...
In fact, at this time, Lu Yao was already living a very profligate life. When he wrote these episodes, he may have just finished smoking a pack of cigarettes worth half a month's income and drinking foreign coffee that many people had not seen at the time.
Unfortunately, none of this can heal the wounds left by his youth, and "poverty" has become a hidden pain in his heart that cannot be eliminated: "The biggest enemy of people like us who are born is that they look down on themselves." It takes an extra bit of bravado to counteract extra inferiority. ”
Therefore, Lu Yao spends a lot of money, just like a kind of retaliatory consumption. From a spiritual point of view, Lu Yao has never been freed from poverty.
Guan Lu is far away from this life, the first half of the hard humiliation, the second half has been shrouded in the shadow of the first half, before it has time to be healed by time, and died early at the age of 42, which can be regarded as an unfortunate life.
But in this short life, he was tenacious and hardworking, changed his destiny, regarded literature as life, and created a series of excellent works. His spirit of not fearing hardship and his strong perseverance have inspired generations of people.
Everyone's life is just a few decades of borrowing in the endless time and space. Lu Yao, this meteor, had burned himself as hard as he could, and it was not worth it.
Source: Cang Yiwei
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