The Shanghai culture that lacks the fate of workers is incomplete, and the development of Shanghai is closely linked to the word "industry". For 50 years since the workers' writer Guan Xinsheng published his debut novel in the supplement of Liberation Daily in 1971, he has been doing the same thing with the pen in his hand: tirelessly depicting the changes in the city and measuring the spiritual world of the people living in the city. The "Self-selected Novels of Guan Xinsheng" (three volumes) launched by Shanghai Culture Publishing House includes mostly Guan Xinsheng's novellas and short stories, and the most recent works were written during the epidemic last year.
Pictured: "Guan Xinsheng Novel Self-Selected Collection" Network Diagram
Writing 50 years ago, has the image of the worker half a century ago changed from today? Where are the workers going? How to get out of the swamp of history? And how will the glory of the working class be recreated? Guan Xinsheng said, I admit that I have a worker complex. This complex has become too thick to dissolve.
This is not only because Guan Xinsheng was assigned to the factory in the year of graduation from junior high school, and for thirteen years in front of the furnace where the fire was rushing, "became a note that was burned in front of the furnace", and then transferred to the factory education department to start a chalk career of making up for the workers' evil Chinese and high Chinese, and then went to the factory union with a wider contact with the workers... The most youthful and beautiful time of his life was spent in the factory, whether it was joy, sadness, sweetness, pain or sweat and tears, all of them were with the team, the rolling mill, the casting together to bear the same burden and cheer and cry together, it can be said that every rhythm of the factory is tightly involved in his heartbeat and breathing.
Pictured: Guan Xinsheng worked as a pre-furnace worker in the Shanghai Aluminum Factory in the early 1970s Network Diagram
"These stories of workers in Xinsheng's writing can only happen in Shanghai, a heroic city, because Shanghai is the founding place of China's industrial workers, and the Chinese Communist Party was born in Shanghai precisely because of the class foundation of industrial workers." Writer Jian Ping said at a reading party held by the Sinan Reading Club on May Day for guan xinsheng new works, "From the 1950s to the 20s of the 21st century, the concept of workers has undergone great changes. But every change tube new student was captured. ”
In the early 1990s, Guan Xinsheng was "seconded" by the Shanghai Writers Association to get a professional creation and leave the factory, but every month he still returned to the factory without moving- "I want to fulfill the duty of the editor-in-chief who signed the factory newspaper, and I want to talk with the worker brother Hai Fushen in the team to drink wine..." He often fell out of his sleep from these smoke-like pictures, woke up, and could no longer sleep. What could not be picked up and put down was a scene that was permanently frozen: that year, around the spring, workers from all walks of life flocked to the Shanghai Workers' Cultural Palace to vote for the first "Top Ten Workers' Artists in Shanghai". Countless brothers of workers who came from the factory where Guan Xinsheng was staying were in a dusty manner, and quite religiously drew circles and ticked under the names of the workers' own artists.
Illustration: Tube freshman network diagram
At the moment when her daughter Guan Yancao was not very sensible, there were two pictures that were deeply engraved in her mind like a brand. "In the small attic of the alley, which is only a few square meters, on those summer afternoons when the temperature exceeds 37 degrees Celsius, in the era when there is no electric fan, there is a pile of light green manuscript paper on the table, and next to the table is the sweaty and pen-working father. His father was accompanied only by a washbasin filled with tap water and a towel. When the sweat soaked through his father's shirt again and again, the father would wet the towel and wipe off the beads of sweat from his body, and then continue to write. "As they got older, they moved into public housing." My father went to work during the day, and at night, when my mother and I were both asleep, my father was still sitting at the table, and in the quiet room there was only the sound of the "rustling" of the pen tip touching the manuscript paper. When I was young, I would often wake up in the middle of the night, open my sleepy eyes, and a small orange lamp and the back of my father sitting at the table would be printed into my eyes- oh, it turned out that my father had not slept, looked at the clock, but it was always one or two o'clock in the morning. ”
Reading the workers' novels created by Guan Xinsheng in various different periods is almost like appreciating a magnificent picture of workers - out of the long night of the special era, running to the sunny day of "reform and opening up", encountering the "laid-off diversion" of the big bend of the times train, and then being splashed by the tide of materialistic goods, the clothes and shorts of life, and the era of instantly changing Internet WeChat has been ushered in non-stop.
The new era of workers is very different from the past, "I hope that in the future there will be more workers writers with me, with the city." Guan Xinsheng said. (Xinmin Evening News reporter Xu Yisheng)