At 3:42 a.m. on July 28, 1976, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck Tangshan, China, killing 240,000 compatriots.
Today, 45 years have passed since the disaster, but when it comes to the earthquake, many people still remember the tragic scene at that time.
In 2010, Feng Xiaogang put the film "Tangshan Earthquake" adapted from Zhang Ling's novel "Aftershock" on the screen.
In the movie, a mother can only choose one of the siblings, and finally chooses to save her brother Fangda, but the sister Fang Deng miraculously survived and was later adopted by the People's Liberation Army.
32 years later, the Wenchuan earthquake occurred, the family unexpectedly reunited, the rift in the daughter's heart is difficult to repair, through this disaster, the daughter finally realized the smallness of the disaster, and finally forgave the mother's story.
Now, 45 years later, the "aftershocks" of this great catastrophe have not subsided. Survivors who were several times more numerous in casualties were scarred.
Mental torture, that kind of pain hurts to the extreme—in the words of the writer Zhang Ling's book "Aftershocks" about the Tangshan earthquake, this "pain is like a ball rolling into the world, rolling over the years, and contaminating other pains, and finally the ball rolls bigger and bigger, almost beyond life itself."
The "pain" of the heart
Zhang Ling once summed up this novel in one word, that is, "pain".
The physical pain that the little lamp suffered in the earthquake when he was seven years old was soon healed, but the pain of the heart continued to be thirty years later, and there were many windows in that nightmare, one covered with one, "gray, covered with soil, as thick as cotton wool", the small lamp pushed open one after another, and when it reached the last one, it could not be pushed open, and there seemed to be rust on it, all rusted.
To remove the rust of the soul, if you only stay in the psychology textbook, there is about a calm and calm on paper, but once it is implemented, in the face of the survivors of the pain, the dogmatic rules will not help, what we need is heart-to-heart treatment and comfort. And the help of external forces is only for the skin, and the bell must eventually be injured by the injured person himself.
Little Lantern has an indescribable knot in her heart, which affects all aspects of her life, such as her career, because of her pain, she can't continue to deal with people, so that many jobs are not related to it, and becoming a writer is the only choice.
Writing may relieve some of the painful fragments, but the sharpness cannot be suppressed, because it is a pain that is almost beyond life itself.
Returning to Tangshan seems to be the salvation of Xiao Lantern, in fact, this also stems from the kindness and helplessness of the author Zhang Ling, who "has not been able to find a complete cure."
Breaking the mirror is the expectation of each of us, but not every time it can be achieved, because the stubbornness of pain exists.
The pain that goes almost beyond life itself is incomprehensible to us living in a normal environment, because we have not experienced the pain of lying under the ruins of the catastrophe and tasting the heart and lungs of human nature. "Natural disasters push survival to the limit, and in this limit a seven-year-old soul prematurely sees the fox tail of life."
After the disaster, the pain of the heart did not disappear, perhaps the "fox tail" caused a young life to be unable to survive normally in a normal society.
Therefore, Zhang Ling's metaphor of "pain is like a ball rolling into the world" is a helpless accuracy, touching or not touching can not be imagined, this "aftershock" in "under the tight wrapping of time", faintly attacked.
The entanglement of human nature
At the end of the film "Tangshan Earthquake", a person who witnessed the Tangshan earthquake rode a bicycle and passed in front of the memorial wall, and the names of the victims were densely engraved on the twelve memorial walls.
The whole film style is dark, at the beginning of the film locust flood, laying the entire foundation of repression, through the characters of the Fang Deng family, describing the pain caused by the Tangshan earthquake, the plot seems to be bland, but it is extremely shocking.
The tone of the film's picture, at the beginning, is a soft gray-yellow tone, like an old photograph symbolizing the years that have passed;
Then when the great earthquake occurs, the tone turns to a somber black and white tone, and there is almost no other color except blood, suggesting that the great earthquake erases all beauty, cruelty and horror;
After that, throughout the play is a faint gray and white tone, like a wisp of mist in the abyss, symbolizing the long-term sadness that people have suppressed in their hearts.
The most shocking scene portrayed in the film is the sisters and brothers being pressed under the stone slab, and the mother's tangled choice. The terrible earthquake crushed the two children to death, and the little girl, with a desire for life, kept knocking on the stone and letting people find themselves.
However, the mother chose to save her brother, and the girl left tears in her eyes and closed her eyes. That tear was a despair for the whole world, and her world was her mother.
The mother said in a hoarse voice that both were saved countless times, but in the end the others said that they would have to save the others without choosing. You can imagine how painful it is for a mother.
As a little girl who was only a few years old, how did she know about this kind of behavior, she only knew that her mother did not want her, and chose her brother.
An earthquake has taken the lives of countless people, but also taken away the lives of countless people, only now, live well, peace and security, no regrets, is the greatest respect for their own lives!
Perhaps, the best way to relieve the pain of the heart caused by the disaster is not to hide and bury it in an impermeable place, but to dig a few small openings, so that the breathing mind can get the perception of pain, no matter how much release, it can always soothe the trauma of the heart slightly.
The great earthquake in literature not only allows us to enter the complex historical situation, touch the branches of the ruins, but also feel the "aftershocks" of the soul and the entanglement of human nature.
That piece of warmth
One day in late July 2006, the author, Zhang Ling, was waiting at the Beijing airport for a flight to Toronto.
The flight had been postponed again and again by heavy rain, and in her bored waiting, she remembered a bookstore in the airport. There were a lot of people in the bookstore that day, and there seemed to be a hand that gently swept her through the crowd, so that she saw a gray-covered book placed on the high ground, "The Personal Experience of the Tangshan Earthquake", and she suddenly remembered that it was the thirtieth anniversary of the Tangshan earthquake.
Sitting in the waiting room, she began to read the book. The noise around her gradually left her, and she felt her heart begin to sink little by little, into the past that had been yellowed.
In the year of the earthquake, she was still in an ignorant age. When the news from the north was filtered through the layers of sophisticated propaganda machines, when it finally reached the small town of Jiangnan, only a set of figures with vague meaning and some high and empty slogans remained. I have also hurt those numbers, but it is a pain that is far away from the mountains and seas, and there is no skin feeling. It was also stirred up by those slogans, but the excitement of emotions like the wings of a bird could not always perch on a solid ground.
Tangshan in 1976 was far from Wenzhou.
But that day at the Beijing airport, the book erased thirty years of time and thousands of kilometers of distance in three strokes, and brought some past events straight to her eyes. She was hit and she felt the pain. Pain is often a harbinger of inspiration for her writing.
After returning to Toronto, she used all her resources to investigate Qian Gang's "Tangshan Earthquake", Zhang Qingzhou's "Tangshan Warning" and all the information she could collect about the catastrophe, and talked with many earthquake witnesses living in Toronto.
Her eyes were like hungry eagles, searching through the pile of rock-like pictures for some bodies, some with a certain sense of surprise (such as the ruins of Pompeii). But no, not one.
She stubbornly believed that there must be something else, something about the "later" after the earthquake, filtered out in the years and people's wishes for kindness.
So this woman named Wang Xiaolan survived strongly.
Natural disasters push survival to the limit, and in this limit a seven-year-old soul prematurely sees the fox tail of life.
After seeing the truth, Wang Xiaodang no longer has the ability to have all the normal feelings in the world.
Her childhood, which had been full of everything, was shattered by an earthquake. Even if she retrieved every piece, she couldn't put it back together to bring back a childhood. She longed to have it again, but the earthquake taught her only one way, and that was to hold on tightly to everything in the palm of her hand: love, affection, friendship.
But the tighter she pulled, the more she lost. Wang Xiaodeng is not a phoenix reborn from fire, and there is no causal relationship between fire and birds in the real world. The destruction and change of buildings and even the landform brought about by natural disasters will eventually gradually calm down. And the scars left by natural disasters on the hearts of children may be secretly retained for a longer and longer time under the tight wrapping of time.
The novella "Aftershock" follows such a line of thought.
The author said: "At the end of the novel, I can't bear the pain anymore. ...... I still want to have even a thin piece of hope in this world, so that you can faintly see a little light in front of you as you walk through the long tunnel. ”
This light comes from our hearts, and pain cannot be destroyed, because hope does not equal delusion.
At the end of "Aftershock", the small lamp sent a fax from Tangshan: "I finally pushed open that window." ”
At this point, we are relieved to know that she feels the warmth.