Abstract: For more than ten years, I have been scaled and wounded in the workshop, and only in the ancient and dilapidated Wenyu River, in the withered weeds swept away by the west wind, in the large yellow leaves withered in late autumn. Here is the last desolate and grand poetic view of the industrial city.
We live in the eastern outskirts of Beijing, close to us in dirty villages, weeds, garbage dumps, instantly falling stars, and utopian dreams.
If you really think about it, sometimes life is not only boring, but also single. If I hadn't lived like this, then I would still be a three-point and one-line worker, processing qualified products and processing waste products in the workshop day and night for ten years; going to work and commuting in the roaring factory area; and gradually numbing myself and losing myself in loss and tiredness. It can be concluded that it is a path that seems to be a life of redemption, but it is actually a road to despair.
I have walked on the brink of mental collapse in different cities, sprinkling my pain and panic on every different workshop assembly line. What I felt more was that I fell under the assembly line and was swept into the trash by the cleaning aunt. Just as the skin and blood-stained dreams of all people in life have been swept away, and finally piled up into a super garbage mountain of cities. There is me and I have no self, like dew and like electricity.
In fact, here, I do not want to dwell on the uniform life of those hundreds of millions of workers as a whole. In those days, only one's own personal experience will know: how neurotic labor pains and numbness, platelet damage and imbalances circulate in everyone.
My becoming a young man in the eastern suburbs was an extremely unexpected event. But it was also like the most appropriate accident I had in more than thirty years.
The hot June wind blew my cheeks, and the dust of the demolished houses at the door and the white clouds in the air intertwined and rolled deep in my hair. Like the tide, the wave is higher than the wave, and finally it suddenly disappears without warning, leaving the sigh of the wind of youth in vain. Some of the tidal sounds echo in my body late at night or in the afternoon, and it also leads me to anticipation, disappointment, contradiction, helplessness, anger, and confusion.
After all, a person is lonely, especially for an older young man like me who slowly loses his lofty ideals and can't stand being lonely more and more, finding an object has become a very important thing, even if it is a man.
Fortunately, I met some interesting young men and women in the eastern suburbs. Of course, there are many young men, and there are very few young women. I embraced my ideals with them, and I faced reality together, and there were many things happening between us that were full of enthusiasm and seemed to be far from real life.
The first thing worth mentioning, of course, is the Pi Village Literary Group. The Pi Village Literary Group is like a magical place, full of warmth and magic. Under the guidance of volunteer teachers, Li Ruojie, who has worked for more than ten years and has never written an article, actually writes non-fiction stories as natural as probing for things. More than a decade of setbacks are told in her pen, and the key is that her writing is still very sophisticated and simple. Although she didn't even know the textual concept of "non-fiction" before attending the lecture.
Two years ago, an article by the elder sister of Fan Yusu, a domestic worker, called "I am Fan Yusu", touched the nerves of major media to think about discourse. Just hours after the article was published, dozens of media outlets came to Pi Village to report on our mud-legged story and grassroots literature. Here, we find our kind, write our own joys and sorrows, and gain some spiritual liberation.
In addition to the literary group, the place where I work is also very meaningful. I work at the One Heart Mutual Charity Store. We sell used clothing at low prices to reduce the cost of living for our co-workers. The people I go to work with are ordinary workers who do the hardest work. Sometimes even though they want to make a price for eight dollars a pair of pants, I can understand them. We live together in the rising water level of our necks, and we experience the same warmth and cold.
There is also a public library in our store, which provides free books for workers to read. We thought: the children of workers and children of migrant workers can learn a little, learn more things, they may see a little farther, swim in this sea of life may be a little longer, so that they will not be flooded by the sea and do not know where the water comes from.
But after work, sometimes I find myself still lonely. I know this is because I have been in the workshop for too long, so I have the after-effects of workshop loneliness. Just like some people in "The Shawshank Redemption", when you are subtly accustomed to abnormal days, you will have more inexplicable pain points on normal days.
Another way I address mental pain is to express unspeakable emotions deep within myself in the form of images. More often, I would take pictures, take photos with Wanhuashan and Mo Xiaoming, and talk about literature. The urban village where they live is very close to the urban village where I live, and whenever I have been lost for too long or feel that there is a good place to take pictures, I will meet them, we will drink and chat together, have a conversation, and then go to take some exaggerated photos to comfort my restless heart.
Sometimes we were as scrappy as chicken blood, and sometimes we were decadently feeling the heat and cold of being a north drift. More often than not, we are like caught up in absurd weirdness, living in utter nothingness.
In the middle of the night in the summer, we put a moving lamp on the iron fence of the window, sat outside the door of Mo Xiaoming's rental house, and read Yu Xinqiao's poem "Epitaph". We would get up at five or six o'clock in the morning and ride our bikes to the far away wheat fields to take pictures and feel the mood of the suburban wheat field watchmen.
Sometimes we eat chilled watermelons and drink cold beers on the island around Pi Village, discuss the phenomenon of Pi Village or discuss tenants who are on the run after work.
Everyone lives like a migratory bird and an ant, migrating en masse and having their own inferiority.
We listened to the New Workers' Orchestra's "The road in my life is far from over" and cried out helplessly and unyieldingly.
Late at night we got drunk in Zhaixinzhuang and went to Bifu Road to see the vehicles driving on the main road. While we were drinking, we talked about the literary and artistic works of 7788 and the various magical phenomena of living in Beijing.
We talk about Jang Seung-chi, Van Gogh, Kafka and Hölderlin, and all the artworks about answers wafting in the wind.
Sometimes, I feel that there is a similarity between the temperament of my bones and the eastern suburbs, and we all have a huge desolation and nothingness. For more than a decade, I have been injured all over the workshop, and only in the ancient and dilapidated Wenyu River, in the withered weeds swept away by the west wind, and in the large yellow leaves withered in late autumn. Here is the last desolate and grand poetic view of the industrial city.
I paced back and forth by the first blooming peach blossoms on the banks of the Wenyu River in spring, as if I had finally waited for a long-desired dream to bloom, even though it was only a beautiful moment of emptiness.
In the summer, I learned of the wretched woods of the eastern suburbs park, and the last gorgeous sadness of adolescence was after grazing herding fresh clothes and angry horses.
I found my own sad figure in the reeds of the autumn grass, which was more like my years of uprooting life, but from one workshop to another, from one ruin to another.
I slid alone and frantically on the thick ice of the wild lake in winter, dreaming over and over again of the tragedy and vastness of "the moon is sparse, the black magpie flies south, three turns around the tree, and the branches can be relied upon".
The birds betrayed the village, and I betrayed the sky. The sky does not have me, why do the stars burn? why? why?
We have drifted to this northern city, to dedicate our hearts and youth, although we cannot print even a single ideal footprint on the road of constant wandering.
I love rock 'n' roll and I prefer the poetry of the Beats. I think it bears some resemblance to my enigmatic, contradictory, wasted, vast expanse of youth.
For many years, I have often felt for no reason that life is completely absurd, crazy and neurotic, but I still have to continue to be stubborn.
I have been wandering on the land of my motherland for sixteen years, but I am still empty. Although I wrote a few poems that I thought were enough to make my youth crazy, those things did not seem to have anything to do with me at the moment. Knives in the wind are slashing my heart, piercing my flesh, and cutting me one by one on every sleepless night.
However, I never gave up completely. I've been looking forward to the two-year documentary film,"Eggs Under the Plane," even though for some reason I had to change its name to "Our Quartet." I hope that this film can be seen by more dream-driven, confused and painful people like me: there is no unprovoked shouting, just like there is no calm as water. Because I was in the workshop for many years convinced of the Rolling Stones lyrics: "What can a poor kid like me do except sing in the same rock band?"
Do you think I'm crazy? Do you think I'm going to be admitted to a second mental hospital? You only guessed half right. On a sad summer afternoon, I still have to point my index finger at the poisonous sun, slam my chest and say to myself: I live, I break free, I am angry!
The future can be expected, I have a lot to do, ah, ah, ah...
"It can be said that as long as I am free, I will frantically watch his lyrics translate. Even if you are working, you can't help but take out your mobile phone and secretly look at it. Do a little more work, look at it and do it for a while. ”
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