China News newspaper page on March 2023, 3

Luo Lujiao, author of China News, reported: "This is my "Insect Notes" and a record of the vigorous growth of Chinese children. Recently, Lu Xun Literature Award winner Pang Yuliang's new long prose work "Little Bug" was launched by the People's Literature Publishing House, and he regarded it as a childhood prequel to "Little Mr.".

At the age of 18, he became "Mr. Xiao", based on his 15 years of rural teacher life, Pang Yuliang wrote "Mr. Xiao" and won the 30th Lu Xun Literature Award. His new work "Little Bug" is a childhood prequel to "Little Mr.", and the two works together outline Pang Yuliang's more than <> years of rural life.

On the evening of November 2022, 11, the "Chinese Literature Festival Lu Xun Literature Award Night" was held in Beijing. Photo courtesy of the organizer

In 1967, Pang Yuliang was born in a small village surrounded by water in Qianyuan Town, Xinghua, Jiangsu Province, and his childhood life and memories are an inexhaustible source of literature.

Pang Yuliang is the tenth child of his parents. When he was a child, he was nicknamed "old pest" by his family, and he had nowhere to go but to be friends and enemies with the little bugs. "In poor families with many children, the discrimination, the hunger, the love and being loved buried under the dust, all need me to chew slowly." The pain of childhood was integrated into the new work "Little Bugs" by Pang Yuliang in an artistic way, and every prose in the book seems to be writing about bugs, but in fact, Pang Yuliang is using bugs to express reconciliation with his childhood past.

Fireflies are like silver hairpins on their mothers' heads, cotton bollworms make people feel the pain of drilling their hearts, grasshoppers with yellow teeth, and lice, gadfly, ants... They exist in the lost world, they fly away, and they are all an important part of Pang Yuliang's childhood.

On the evening of November 2022, 11, at the "Chinese Literature Festival - Lu Xun Literature Award Night", Pang Yuliang delivered an acceptance speech. The middle speaker is Pang Yuliang. Photo courtesy of the organizer

When he was in elementary school, Pang Yuliang had no books to read at home, so he held the only set of "Chairman Mao's Quotations" in the school and "gnawed" the annotations little by little. At the age of 11, knowing that he could not escape his mother's beating, he also secretly hid in the grass stack of a threshing ground and finished reading Yang Mo's novel "Song of Youth", because the book was borrowed by him after three days of "hard grinding".

"The book turned me into another person, no longer from our village, but from afar." Pang Yuliang, who loves to read, seems out of place in the entire village, and while books bring him vision, they also deepen his loneliness. In high school, Pang Yuliang often went to "curry favor" with the village brigade accountant, because only his family had a newspaper. Pang Yuliang's favorite thing to read at that time was the "earth" supplement of the People's Daily, and every time he had to "cheekily" borrow the newspaper, and then cut out the poems and essays in the supplement and read them one by one.

In addition to his obsession with reading, teasing bugs became another obsession in his childhood. Those bugs who are both honest and cunning are sometimes the culprit behind his mother's beating, sometimes the trophies he proves to be "useful", and sometimes the antidote to the contradictions between him and his loved ones. More often, bugs are his toys, he calls the long-tentacled Tenniu "Sun Dasheng", and he imagines dragonflies as airplanes. When bored, he shouted at the dragonflies flying in the air, "Take me away!" "The excitement is like every time an airplane crosses the sky.

At the age of 18, after graduating from Yangzhou Normal College, Pang Yuliang was assigned to a rural primary school in Xinghua, Jiangsu, where he began his 15-year journey as a rural teacher, "There are many bugs in rural schools, and when these familiar bugs came back to me, I suddenly felt that I had to watch "Insect Notes" again."

Pang Yuliang read "Insect Notes" as a scientific investigation report, "Because I have not received systematic scientific training, if I write a scientific investigation report on insects, it is difficult to write Fabre 800 years ago, so I began to explore whether I could write my own "Insect Notes" that also belonged to Chinese children."

Shi Zhanjun, editor-in-chief of People's Literature, said: "Little Bugs is a book that many people want to write, but have never written; Even it is a book that many people have not written well, but Pang Yuliang wrote very well as soon as he wrote it. ”

Pang Yuliang's latest collection of essays "Little Bugs". Photo courtesy of People's Literature Publishing House

While Pang Yuliang's many literary works have produced good social repercussions, they have also won the recognition and respect of the academic community and all walks of life. Not long ago, Pang Yuliang received a message from Zhu Yongxin, vice chairman of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and executive vice chairman of the Central Committee for Promoting Democracy, inviting Pang Yuliang to join the "Enlightened Library" with his work "Ugly Child".

The "Enlightened Library" series of books is planned and published by the Enlightened Publishing House, which is under the supervision of the Central Committee for Promoting Democracy. "I am very proud that my works can be included in the 'Enlightened Library', after all, the 'Enlightened Library' has included the works of Shen Congwen, Zheng Zhenduo, and Ye Shengtao!"

In December 2014, on the recommendation of Huang Beijia, a first-class writer and vice chairman of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee of the People's Republic of China, Pang Yuliang joined the Taizhou branch of the Democratic Progressive Party. In the past 12 years, Pang Yuliang has participated in a large number of cultural exchange activities organized by the Jiangsu Minjin Provincial Cultural Branch, and the platform of the DPP has provided Pang Yuliang with a rich creative soil, and at the same time, Pang Yuliang has felt the warmth of "home" here.

He said: "I look forward to the day when my new work "Little Bugs" can also infect more people, let them cherish their childhood more, and let more 'bitter children' like me be able to harvest their own 'spring' with their own efforts." ”