Liang Hong: Seeing all beings in fiction
China News Weekly reporter/Mao Yijun
Issued in the 950th issue of China News Weekly, 2020.6.08
The second winter of his father's death, Liang Hong went to see him in the cemetery. On the bare field, a dozen sheep chewed fine grass, wild chrysanthemum, and wormwood at the grave. In the distance, someone was sitting on the edge of the river slope and dreamed. Liang Hong imagined that the man would stand up and turn around to command his sheep, but he never did. People have been sitting for a long time, and the sheep keep eating grass, as if the time has stopped.
This picture grew into a story in Liang Hong's mind and became the novel "Four Elephants". The undead under the tomb is still continuing another life. They watch the river flow to the distance day after day, and let the four seasons reincarnate, listening to the sound of all things and future generations on their tops. Han Xiaoxian appeared in the story. He sat on the slope of the river and murmured with sheep, and he suddenly fell apart. He saw the wandering undead Han Liting, Han Lige and Han Lingzi.
The ancestors never forget the past, they want to seek answers and continuation of history in this world. Nowadays, in the process of approaching them spiritually, the awakening of self-awareness has arisen, and after accepting it, it is also forced to get rid of it. In the novel, Liang Hong opened up the space and time of the world, let each other influence each other, and finally returned to the natural order.
This is Liang Hong's third fictional work. She tries to explain the internal logic of society in a non-realistic way. Under the aura of two non-fiction works in "China in Liangzhuang" and "Exiting Liangzhuang", her fictional creations are constantly being compared and compared within and outside the literary circle. There are also comments that she is difficult to break through herself, but she consciously, both writing It is the most important expression in the completion of the heart, and it also shapes the existence of the writer itself.
metaphor
The perspectives of the four protagonists, like a jigsaw puzzle, piece together the continuation of Liangzhuang's history. This is the logic elaborately designed by Liang Hong.
Han Lige was a reformer at the end of the Qing Dynasty. He studied abroad in the West and returned to the county to become the county magistrate. He wanted to realize county autonomy, promote democracy and science, and was finally executed in the movement. He became a lone soul ghost under the tomb, fixed his head back with a cane, and lay down for a period of time until he met Han Xiaoxian, the current local college entrance examination champion. After graduating from university, Han Xiaoxian stayed in the provincial capital to work, suffered from schizophrenia under various pressures, returned to the village, and inexplicably saw the old man of another world. Han Lige seemed to be the most powerful promoter of the plot. He kept telling Han Xiaoxian about his own experience and death, helping him return to his current village to find the answer to his killing. He also imposed the seeds of revenge in Han Xiaoxian's will.
Another wandering soul, Han Liting, and cousin Han Lige, are two extremes. They used to be Christian elders. Finally, because of cowardice and hesitation, they betrayed their believers and beliefs in the movement and lived to the 1990s, although they died , But unable to obtain inner self-redemption. His story continues to enrich the history of Han Lige.
This is the historical view that Liang Hong wants to express. With the help of such a collision of time and space, she looks at the local autonomy in the 1930s from the perspective of modern people.
Putting history in a modern environment and making objective observations, and many details are metaphorical in the novel. This is the first time she has tried this way of writing beyond reality. She was a little fascinated by the feeling of breaking the boundary and symbiosis between heaven and earth.
Pessimistic background
In Liang Hong's story, there has always been a river. That's where Han Xiaoxian spoke to the tomb, the direction that Han Lige was lying on the ground looking at.
As a teenager, she walked along the river bank countless times. Across the river bank and another street, we arrived at the school. After school, go back again, below the river bank is home. The memory is broken, only the loneliness is particularly clear, and it runs through for a long time. Sometimes, she walked backwards while telling jokes to her classmates, but she fell into the water.
Recalling this, it seemed to reflect the pessimistic background under her optimistic appearance, which has always been burned on her body. Most of the time, she doesn't like to talk to people, because in reality there is no suitable person to talk to, and she can only mumble to the river, about the poor family, about the mother's illness and death.
Many years later, she suddenly turned to her diary at that time, probably in the fifth or sixth grade, which was full of "I want to be a writer". She completely forgot about this idea. Just remember that when I was young, I love Shen Congwen and Zhang Ailing, probably this is the concept of a writer-as long as I write something to express myself, regardless of prose or novel.
At the age of 18, graduating from a normal school, Liang Hong went to a remote elementary school to teach. The vast crops surrounded the school in the middle. As soon as school was over, it seemed that there was only her left in the world. In the distance, there was a big river flowing, and the voice was like the rustling of the corn field, with a kind of gloom and darkness, as if to devour her.
Suddenly she found that there were always equally lonely and sad eyes around her. That was his fourth grade student, a girl about 11 years old. The girl always stares at her, whether in class or on the corner of the road. There are too many teachers flowing in the village primary school, coming and leaving, the girl is worried that Liang Hong will do the same.
The parting is still in the summer of the third year, and students are all caught up in Liang Hong who gets along day and night. One day, they walked around the village to chat and the girls were among them. They went to the big river to pick up stones, watched the river flowing, and walked to a new apple orchard. The girl stood under an apple tree and said, "Teacher, don't go. The apple will bear fruit after three years. Wait until you eat the apple."
These words penetrated into Liang Hong's heart deeply, and became clearer and sweeter day after day. She even remembered that the girl's eyes were saying this, with a little shyness in her innocence, and full of expectations that she could wait for Liang Hong to respond. This image, the apple orchard behind it, and the big river became the driving force behind Liang Hong's novel creation. They are a kind of metaphorical seed. Liang Hong feels that this is "a kind of eternal thing with a soft and tough image".
She planned for ten years, which started before the non-fiction of the Liangzhuang series, and has now written tens of thousands of outlines intermittently, but has never written.
For this reason, every time she returned to her hometown, she had to go to that village and see the girl, a common peasant woman who was already a mother. Liang Hong wants to understand the growth part of her consciousness, hoping that one day, "can have enough ability to explain all the emotions behind those eyes in the creation". In Liang Hong's eyes, those eyes are pure, but they must contain more complex qualities, that is the beauty that must be written.
Thirty years later, the original elementary school has been transformed into a tall building, next to a wide road. Liang Hong wants to let the little girl under the apple tree live forever. This is also about her own growth and about the Chinese village. She wants to write the internal thought pattern and logic of contemporary society.
Fictitious practice
When thinking about the story about this girl, the design of the architecture is like peeling bamboo shoots layer by layer, as if slowly approaching a certain core. There is Liang Hong himself in this core, but she does not take herself as the protagonist, she is still a rural teacher of girls, an auxiliary role.
Liang Hong summarized his experience, that is, he went out of the village and became a university teacher-an extremely simple story line. If you take yourself as a prototype and put it in a novel, it is not enough to carry the fate of a character. Fiction has given her more freedom of expression, and she can try to build more hierarchical characters to realize her complex observation of human nature. Some pictures stored in my heart for many years have also been nourished.
Character sketching became her instinctive self-training for many years. She is used to observing others in the crowd. She likes to be both a member and a bystander in all living beings. It feels like everyone is eating, playing cards, and chatting together. She is safely hiding in such a fresh life scene, and she can freely look at everything without being concerned.
Compared with Liang Hong's unfamiliar non-fiction writing, the difficulty of fiction writing is that he must construct a logic by himself, which is where Liang Hong feels strenuous. In the fictional writing, to enrich the complexity of the characters, Liang Hong felt that he could only approach indefinitely.
The growth of creation is also like the growth of her own experience and thoughts in life. My son is on the third day of the year. This stern eye makes Liang Hong have to be nervous. The original social method of the Buddhist department does not work. I have to actively join the parent group, communicate with the teacher often, and even facilitate the learning of the children. Rented a house in the school district. Everything changes with the characters in her story in an intricate state.
"China News Weekly" No. 20, 2020
Statement: The publication of the "China News Weekly" manuscript is subject to written authorization