(Biodiversity Conference) "The King of Chinese Animal Novels" Shen Shixi: Yunnan Opens My Road of Creation
China News Service, Kunming, October 8th, title: "The King of Chinese Animal Novels" Shen Shixi: Yunnan opens my path of creation
Author Liu Lihui
This year, the northward movement of Asian elephants in Yunnan has aroused global attention and made "chasing elephants" become "the king of Chinese animal novels" Shen Shixi's daily routine for a period of time.
Shen Shixi, who has lived in Yunnan for nearly 36 years, has returned to Shanghai for 17 years.
According to his memories, in the late 1970s, in the deep forests of Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, a dozen Asian elephants migrated southward day and night, only a hundred kilometers away from the border between China and Laos. At that time, Shen Shixi, a propaganda officer in the Xishuangbanna Military Subdistrict, was a propaganda officer. After reporting the incident in the internal magazine of the army, he used this as the material to create his first animal novel "When the Elephants Are Migrating", which began to make a splash in the Chinese literary world.
"Old Elephant" is a screen name he has used for many years.
The writer Shen Shixi has published more than 5 million words in more than 40 years, involving more than 50 animals, and his readers have exceeded 100 million.
In the natural ecological field of Chinese children's literature, his animal novels occupies almost half of the country.
Among them, most of the works focus on wild animals in Yunnan, especially elephants, such as "The Elephant King's Tears", "The White Elephant Family", "The Elephant Mound", and "The Last Elephant".
"Without Yunnan, there would be no'old elephant' like me. It can even be said that there is no pattern in the natural ecological field of Chinese children's literature today." Shen Shixi said.
Shen Shixi's fate with Yunnan began in 1969.
That year, Shen Shixi, who graduated from junior high school, responded to the national call to join the team in Xishuangbanna.
"Before jumping in the line, I saw a documentary depicting Xishuangbanna as a kingdom of animals and plants with bananas on top and pineapples on their feet." Although there are many places to choose from, the 16-year-old boy resolutely chose two thousand kilometers away. The border land.
First took a train from Shanghai to Kunming, then took a bus for three or four days to Xishuangbanna, and then took a carriage to Manguang Nongzhai, where the queue was jumped.
"On the first day I arrived at the stockade, I saw someone riding an elephant and pulling wood up the mountain!" Shen Shixi said, recalling his journey up the mountain and the countryside. "From the bustling metropolis to the borderland, it feels like another world."
In the historical torrent of young intellectuals going to the mountains and the countryside, Shen Shixi started a different life for a Shanghainese.
"(Kunming), more than a thousand miles in the west, there is the Chengxiang Kingdom, which is called Yunnan and Yue." The "Chengxiang Kingdom" recorded in historical data is the kingdom of the ancestors of the Dai people.
Shen Shixi, who jumped in and settled in the queue, lives in "a land sheltered by auspicious elephants" like the Dai people.
All kinds of "Arabian Nights" happening around him nurtured his creative life.
"Jumping in the line for three years, my daily job is to follow the farmers to plough the fields and work in the brick and tile factory. During the slack, they carry shotguns and hunt in the mountains with the farmers. But elephants cannot be beaten, and the Dai people have elephant totem worship." The memory of Shen Shixi At that time, in the Dai villages at that time, pictures of human elephants coexisting harmoniously can be seen everywhere-a family in the nearby village found a baby elephant in the woods and took it home to care for and grow up; there was an old elephant slave in the local area. , Raised elephants for a lifetime, raised war elephants when he was young, and was able to talk to wild elephants; and so on.
"In the early 1980s, the local government began to advocate environmental protection and prohibit hunting of wild animals." At this time, Shen Shixi had been working in the army for many years, and he had traveled almost all corners of Xishuangbanna and had a better understanding of what tropical rain forests gave birth to. Colorful world.
At almost the same time, the Yunnan "Sunbird Writers Group" turned out to be "a rising new mountain" in Chinese children's literature.
A group of children's literature writers, with Shen Shixi as one of their main forces, set their sights on the natural ecology of Yunnan and created a number of outstanding works.
In the age when road traffic and the Internet were still underdeveloped, these works opened a door for children and young readers to understand Yunnan and nature.
“As long as everyone writes, they will almost always involve the theme of ecological harmony.” Shen Shixi said that the reason why this group of writers have set their sights on the natural ecology of Yunnan just shows the richness of Yunnan's resources in this area.
"It can be said that if there are veins in literature, Yunnan's rich ore is ecology." He said.
Today, Shen Shixi, who is nearly 70 years old, is still working hard.
He is co-creating a collection of novels about wildlife rescue with his son and nephew. The background of the story is the "world species gene bank"-Yunnan Gaoligong Mountain.
A writer's love for Yunnan's biodiversity will continue in his works.
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