A friend recommended me to read Feng Lili's new book "Room Attendant". The novel is nearly three hundred pages long, and when I first read it, it felt a little strange, so trivial, flat and direct, almost like a running account; around the daily work of a hotel room attendant, the plot of the whole book is almost all unfolded in this narrow space; there is no dramatic conflict of ups and downs, no heroic legends; but it is that there is neither a grand narrative on the tall, nor a work of love, espionage and other condiments that are now popular, but I read the whole book with great interest.
I think because this is a real and touching work, the realism has reached a realistic and amazing finesse. The author is not written as an outsider to understand and observe, or rely on the results of consulting materials and interviews, but as a member of the real experience directly experienced and felt. In other words, this is a record of the life of a hotel waiter, and it is an almost diary novel. The content of the work begins with the waiter going to work, entering the guest room to clean, changing the sheets and towels, sucking the floor, brushing the toilet, washing the sink, wiping the glass, and so on. Day after day, the cycle repeats, but there are new things that attract your attention, even if it is trivial, it makes you want to understand. For example, Xiao Feng, who is new to work in the hotel, learns to throw the sheets, from not straight and uneven to skilled. Glass windows should be polished transparently, and some places often use their mouths to wipe them clean. Floors, sanitary ware, etc. must be wiped clean. I have to clean up one or two dozen rooms a day, sometimes overtime, often tired and hungry. Then it is also subject to the inspection of the foreman and the manager in turn, and everything that is thought is not good enough to be redone. In severe cases, wages are deducted until dismissal. Managers and foremen are also part-time workers, and if the waiters do not do well, they will also be punished by their superiors. In this way, a set of governance structures and methods have been formed by layer after layer. The key is the rice bowl. Disobedience or dissatisfaction with the performance of the dish will be related to the rice bowl. For the individual, this is the great thing of survival.
When you read the images of these waiters coming alive one by one, and seeing that all their spirits are focused on that basic salary, they are driven and controlled. Their lives, the content of their speech, the quality of their work, so that food, clothing, and fun are all closely centered on calculating how much they can get paid every month, but what they are thinking about is only a few pieces, a few tens of dollars. The author uses this most plain brushstroke to write out the living state of such an "ethnic group", which is invisible to ordinary people and is easy to be ignored.
Nevertheless, they are no different from ordinary people, they will both fight with each other and take care of each other; they are both selfish and clever, and they are also righteous and diligent; they are often complaining and unfair, and they are also easily satisfied because of small benefits. The complexity and multifaceted nature of human nature are vividly expressed in the details of their daily lives. Among them, the foreman Yang Jie is one of the more successful writers, she tries her best to do a good job, try her best to please her subordinates, buy them breakfast, invite everyone to eat, help them clean, and solve their difficulties in front of the leader. She often claimed: "With me here, I will not let you suffer losses." But she was also very unconfident, lest someone say bad things about her and suspect that someone was behind her back, so she asked around for others' reactions to her, threatening people who were not compatible with her, and threatening that she was not easy to mess with. People seem to love and annoy her at the same time. In fact, she also has an unfortunate life. The more complex and rich side of this character's heart and personality is vividly depicted, and it seems to be a member of our lives that is both strange and familiar.
Such an environment constitutes a unique small society, and the characters in the book naturally breed a mood and even rebellious emotions and ideas. However, they found that the remuneration of other hotels and guesthouses was not much better than their own, and even worse. They dare not fight with the management for their rights and interests, so no matter how unfair they are, they can only restrain themselves from accommodating, only hoping that when the peak season comes, they can get a little more salary to masturbate.
"Room Attendant" describes the survival and inner white depiction of this group of people, most of which is narrated through straightforward narration and dialogue, so that those realistic details and daily spoken language full of life atmosphere impress readers. And such a popular and vivid language art and such a realistic and realistic description are just a very distinctive artistic feature of this novel.
Depicting and reflecting the lives and characters of the people at the bottom, paying attention to and sympathizing with the fate of "little people", and profoundly analyzing some unfair phenomena in society are a very prominent phenomenon in the history of modern Chinese and foreign literature. The author herself was once one of them, and she did not write the book sympathetically from the standpoint of a bystander, but told it based on her own experience. The book is full of vivid civilian consciousness and breath, and then shows an aspect of a certain class of life in this forced scene, which is very unique and rare.
Of course, if we are demanding, this novel is not rich and thick enough, some details are repetitive, the words described are not flexible and diverse, and at the same time it is too trivial at the same time, some characters seem to be less accurately outlined, and the thinking about the phenomena of social life is not deep enough. However, for such a specific work, on the whole, it is still relatively good to complete their creative intentions; I believe that the author will mature to write more wonderful works of art after accumulating more writing experience.
Author: Chen Danchen
Editor: Guo Chaohao