Zhou Daxin
"Los Angeles Flowers" focuses on divorce and explores the current marriage situation of young people. Writer Zhou Daxin uses the faithful record of four court trials to tell the big and small problems that a marriage may face.
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In China's contemporary literary scene, Zhou Daxin can be called a "labor model", starting from "Lake Light and Mountain Color", which won the Mao Dun Literature Award, he recorded what he saw, heard, thought and thought in a down-to-earth manner with the rhythm of a novel every three years. Recently, he suddenly announced that "Los Angeles Flowers" was the title of a long novel. In this work, he chose "marriage" as a story carrier, using the cells of "family" as a society to present the strangeness of life.
Critic Li Jingze said that "Los Angeles Flowers" reminds people of Flaubert's "Emotional Education", which is an emotional education novel that Chinese; it is not the novelist who wants to educate you, but the novelist uses a story to take each of us to carry out emotional self-education.
This may be the long-term "routine" of Zhou Daxin's novels, he is only responsible for telling stories, as for what readers think after reading the story, that is the task that readers themselves complete. At the end of 40 years of novel writing, Zhou Daxin said in an exclusive interview with a reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Network: "When I wrote novels, I only thought about how to make the story look real. ”
China Youth Daily: Your novels have always been concerned with social reality, is there any opportunity for the creation of "Los Angeles Flowers"?
Zhou Daxin: The novel was conceived from 2018, and it was written in 2019, and there is no specific thing, mainly because I have heard and seen more marriage tragedies in the news over the years, some because the husband and wife do not resist with the woman and kill the husband, there are also men who kill their wives, and there are self-harm. The children of acquaintances around me also went to court because of divorce... These things prompted me to focus on divorce and explore the current state of marriage among young people.
China Youth Daily: I heard that the title of "Los Angeles Flowers Fall" comes from Ouyang Xiu's "Yulou Spring" in "Straight to see all the flowers of Los Angeles, the beginning of the spring breeze is easy to say goodbye", how to think of using this sentence as the title of the book on the topic of divorce?
Zhou Daxin: Ouyang Xiu is a literary predecessor I have always liked. When I was a teenager, I read "The Tale of Drunken Pavilion" and was very impressed; when I read his "Sheng Chazi" in my youth, I felt that writing love was particularly in place; later I read "Yulou Chun" and wrote about the sadness of the separation of lovers, which I felt particularly good. When I wrote this book, I thought of naming it after the mood in this poem to express a sad emotion about marriage.
China Youth Daily· China Youth Network: The story in "Los Angeles Flowers" is very realistic, involving the work pressure of young people, the pressure to buy a house, the education of children, the support of the elderly... Do you think this generation of young people is under more pressure than their parents?
Zhou Daxin: Yes, the pace of life today is particularly fast, and the pressure on young people in big cities is particularly great. The pressure is greater, and it is likely to consume the love part of the marriage, so that the unbearable side of life can be revealed more quickly. What tests marriage is never the reality of the difficulty itself, because the feelings of two people are in trouble, and reality makes it worse.
If marriage is likened to a house, it is certainly not reinforced concrete that can live for 70 years, it may be a thatched house, three or four years must be repaired, and it must be repaired by two people. I've seen loving couples in their eighties and nineties who are masters of repairing houses.
China Youth Daily: What is your "rational marriage guide" for today's young people?
Zhou Daxin: Today's young people have higher requirements for the quality of marriage than previous generations. People in the past may have lived together when they got married; modern people have higher emotional requirements, less tolerance, and once they find each other's shortcomings, personality or body defects, they may produce disgusting emotions.
No one has a special way, I as an old man, I think that marriage is only a day for ordinary people, and it does not guarantee a certain happiness; but if you want to get a happy married life, you must learn to operate, and you can't be careless at all after marriage.
More importantly, learn to be tolerant. Two people initially fall in love with a sense of mystery, once they live together, it is impossible to always have a sense of freshness, various problems are exposed, and they will not be completely harmonious. Therefore, two people with different backgrounds who want to live together for a long time must allow each other to have shortcomings. Just like I also have a lot of problems, my wife often complains about me.
China Youth Daily: Recently, women's topics have been very hot, do you have any consistent attitude towards women in many works?
Chow: I rarely criticize women in my works, and I think they deserve to be celebrated.
I grew up in the countryside, and the women in the countryside—those aunts and wives, and my mother—made a really good impression on me. I think they're more engaged in "constructive" work, like childbearing and raising children, working as nurses in hospitals to care for patients. In contrast, men have more "destructive", such as alcoholism.
When I grew up, I found that women were suppressed by men for too long, especially before the founding of New China, many rural women were used as objects, and men decided their fate, and only a small number of women could make independent choices about their lives.
China Youth Daily: "Lake Light and Mountains" talks about escaping from "North to Guangzhou", "Dark is Slow" talks about old age, "Los Angeles Flowers" talks about divorce, your novel tells other people's stories, but readers seem to be reading their own stories, how do you do this?
Zhou Daxin: In fact, novels are designed by the author "heart to heart" to design the development of the story. The story comes from life, then the author must first sink into life and understand these things; how to lay out the text next, it is necessary to "compare the heart to the heart".
For example, I write about the love of young people, and I also come from a young age, and I mobilize my life when I was young from the memory warehouse of my brain. If you want the reader to seem real, you must participate in yourself and incorporate your own life.
China Youth Daily: "Los Angeles Flowers" adopts the form of "trial record", have you really heard it?
Zhou Daxin: I've heard it, but I'm not the one in question. Why use a writing structure like "trial record"? On the one hand, it is to serve the content, only during the trial, the two parties hire a lawyer, through the mouth of the lawyer and the parties, can fully and clearly express their opinions, the court encourages you to say so, we can express our views on love, marriage, divorce from all angles, it is difficult to have such a centralized debate environment on other occasions.
On the other hand, this kind of writing structure is also an innovation for me. A very important point of novel innovation is structural innovation, and the use of new structures to tell the story can cause readers to read freshness. Structural issues were also the most painful and annoying thing when I conceived the novel in my first year. Fiction writing requires writers to surpass themselves.
China Youth Daily: You also used "clan historical materials".
Zhou Daxin: If the novel is only about the present, it is easy to be light. I hope that the novel will have a sense of heaviness, not only about the divorce of the two protagonists, but to build a historical context and lead people to think about these issues about marriage.
The history of divorce in China, especially the history of divorce initiated by women, does not go back much. I design a little bit of a plot like this that might help people understand the fate of women. Now, women's opportunities and rights to express their opinions are infinitely magnified than in the past, which is the progress of society and the result of the struggle of all women.
China Youth Daily: You are known as the "Secretary of the Times", using novels to record the times, compared with "non-fiction" such as reportage, what are the advantages?
Zhou Daxin: The "secretary of the times" did not dare to be. But the advantage of the novel is that it can be fictionalized, to make life a story, to make life typical, which is a task that is difficult for other genres to complete. And the novel can bury the author's thoughts behind the story, so that the reader only reads the story at first, only finds it interesting, and then falls into contemplation after reading it. I initially liked to read novels, but also because I liked the stories in novels, which gave me interest in creating later works.
China Youth Daily: What books did you like when you were a child?
Zhou Daxin: When I was a child, the first book I read was "One Thousand and One Nights", and I didn't know how to pass it on to my classmates, so I borrowed it to see it. Later, I began to read some novels of that era, "Red Rock", "Fighting Youth", "Red Flag Spectrum"... After becoming a soldier at the age of 18, I came into contact with Tolstoy's Resurrection, and the emotional entanglement between Nekhlyudov and Maslova deeply touched me. From that time on I was determined to write, and I wanted to write a book like this.
China Youth Daily: You used "Wanshou Park Dusk Cool Week Activity" in "It's Dark Slowly", and this time you used "trial records" and "clan historical materials", why do you like the form of "quasi-documentary"?
Zhou Daxin: When I was writing myself, I didn't think of any "quasi-documentary", I just thought about how to make the story look real. Because since it is written in reality, only if you feel that the story is really happening, you will be interested in reading a novel of more than 200,000 words.
China Youth Daily: There are so many realistic topics, how do you choose?
Chow: Be true to your heart, based on my own life and psychological experience. After my children were gone, I wrote Requiem; as I grew older, I wrote "It Gets Dark Slowly." I wrote "Los Angeles Flowers" because I saw so many people who are divorced now, including my acquaintances, which will cause me a great psychological impact.
I don't think about social hot spots, that may be the attention of friends of journalism majors. There is a saying that "articles are written for the sake of time", which may refer to prose, and writing novels should be "written for the heart".
China Youth Daily: Will novels that depict the current reality lose the next generation of readers?
Zhou Daxin: Whether a good work can withstand the test of time and whether it can go beyond the boundaries of the country and the nation, in the final analysis, depends on the problems it thinks and conveys the meaning of the feelings, and whether all mankind should pay attention to it. I write about life and death, aging, marriage... I believe that this is something that people will still face and think about many years later, so there will still be readers.
China Youth Daily: "Los Angeles Flowers" is your novel sealed work, what will you write next?
Chow: I will choose essays and essays, and I may also pick up the film scripts that I loved to write when I was younger. The record of the novel is very artistic, and the prose and essays will be very direct, not through the characters, the story, directly tell the author's thinking.
Although I decided not to write novels because of my physical strength, my love for words is still the same, and I have dealt with words all my life, and I have blended with it. Unless in the future I completely lose the ability to hold a pen because of physical reasons, then even if I can't write an article, I will write calligraphy, and if I can't write calligraphy, I'll see if I can draw - now start to learn slowly.
China Youth Daily, China Youth Daily reporter Jiang Xiaobin Source: China Youth Daily ( 2021-04-20 11 edition)
Source: China Youth Daily