China News Agency, Beijing, March 11th, title: Ye Zhaoyan: Sit on this stool in Nanjing
"China News Weekly" reporter Qiu Guangyu
Writer Ye Zhaoyan has a study in his home that is the envy of all scholars.
Dozens of wooden bookshelves full of books are lined up to the ceiling.
Looking out from the window of his house, you can see the Yangtze River flowing by.
Sometimes, he gets up before dawn to write, and when the sky changes, he can see the pedestrians by the Yangtze River in the twilight of the morning. After seeing a lot, it is inevitable that he will feel a sense of confusion, which makes him sigh with emotion that "the dead are like this".
Ye Zhaoyan has many works, and it takes a lot of time just to read the chronology of his works.
In addition to the reputation of writing for more than 40 years, he also has a very unique family heritage: his grandfather is a well-known educator and writer Ye Shengtao, and his father is a playwright and editor Ye Zhicheng.
Today, his daughter Ye Zi is also engaged in literary creation.
The four generations of the family are all writers, which is rare in the literary world.
Ye Zhaoyan.
Picture/Jiujiu Scholar
Although his family never wanted Ye Zhaoyan to make a living by writing, and did not want him to be an "empty writer" in Lu Xun's mouth, since he discovered his love for writing more than 40 years ago, he has been looking for those who are interested in him in history and reality. People and things, written down day after day, become stories.
Not long ago, he published his latest novel "The Gate of Yifeng", which tells a story about how the city of Nanjing entered the modern age.
He has been guarding the city of Nanjing and being the storyteller.
Ye Zhaoyan's new work "The Gate of the Phoenix".
Picture/Jiujiu Scholar
still want to go back to Nanjing
At the end of 2022, the 65-year-old Ye Zhaoyan was infected with the new crown. In the first few days of his illness, his smooth writing was interrupted.
He was a little anxious, and began to get up early every day and sit at the desk to write something.
When he couldn't continue writing, he felt that he was putting on an act, and even felt that this effort was a little tragic.
Even so, he insisted on sitting there.
As he once said, if his grandfather and father have any influence on him, it is the back view of his grandfather and father sitting there all year round, writing for seven or eight hours.
Ye Zhaoyan's life is really simple. He doesn't drink or smoke, and rarely participates in dinner parties. Apart from writing, he spends time with his family every day. His only hobby is swimming.
Day after day, only in October 2022, the regular writing life was slightly broken by a small incident.
Ye Zhaoyan, Su Tong, Yu Hua and several other writers were invited to participate in the filming of the literary documentary "I Study in the Island". He will go to Sanya, Hainan to record, and he rarely leaves Nanjing.
He and the program team agreed to only participate in one day of recording, so as not to be too nervous.
After one day of program shooting, when he was about to leave, the flight from Sanya to Nanjing was suddenly grounded. If he wanted to leave, he had to wait four days in Sanya, or take a car to Haikou to catch a flight back.
When he found that he could not return to Nanjing, he became anxious again, and finally chose the second method. Although the journey was tiring, he still returned home as planned.
After the show was broadcast, this group of writers who thought they were "clean and old" actually received unexpected praise. They played football on the beach, walked their dogs, ate barbecue, held concerts, and played puzzle games that young people like. At the same time chatting about their era and - literature.
In the camera, Yu Hua and Su Tong are bickering with witty words, while Ye Zhaoyan is smiling happily beside him, occasionally answering a few questions.
Seeing the charcoal fire, everyone was very excited, and he was able to think of Xu Zongqian's "Ode to Charcoal" and recite it: when it is blindly black, it still has bones, and when it is very red, it turns to ashes.
In the eyes of young audiences, this kind of Ye Zhaoyan is gentle and profound, eloquent, and has a kind of thick charm.
After the show ended, more people became curious about his works.
But Ye Zhaoyan is still worried, worried that the audience will think "a writer who doesn't write well, why go to the island to make a name for himself" when they see him.
Anyway, he would most like to go back to his study, sit at the desk and turn on the computer.
It reassured him to keep writing, as if there was always something waiting and beckoning out there.
He couldn't leave that study room, and he couldn't leave Nanjing either.
Ye Zhaoyan participated in the recording of the literary documentary "I Study in the Island".
(Video screenshot)
Nanjing: A "stool" for writing
In the past, many of Ye Zhaoyan's well-known works were written with Nanjing as the background. Among these stories, the stories of the Republic of China period are the most abundant and well-known, such as his "Qinhuai Trilogy" novel: "1937 Years of Love", "For a Long Time", "Unforgettable".
This gives people the impression that Ye Zhaoyan is good at writing stories about Nanjing and the Republic of China period.
In fact, Ye Zhaoyan also has many works about the life of modern people.
What he cares most about is not the city itself, but the people in the story.
He is not an expert on culture and museums, and his readers also understand that the Nanjing described by Ye Zhaoyan is not about local customs, special products, or even Nanjing in reality.
Nanjing is different from Macondo in Marquez's writing, and it is also very different from Mo Yan's Northeast Gaomi Township.
It is the ancient capital of the Six Dynasties, has experienced ups and downs, and now it has developed into a modern city. Its destiny has become a frame for viewing the history of the whole of China and even the world.
Ye Zhaoyan has lived in this city almost all his life. When he was in college, he happened to be admitted by the Chinese Department of Nanjing University among several volunteers. He had no opportunity or motivation to leave.
But when he thought of his hometown, what came to his mind was not the rich products and snacks, nor the desirable scenery along the Qinhuai River, but a stool.
Nanjing is the stool where he sat, observed the world situation, and reviewed history.
Now that he was sitting on this stool, he naturally began to think about how the development of this city was different from other cities.
He found that Nanjing has been a land of prosperity since ancient times, and has been the "seven inches" and key point of China's economy for a long time.
Therefore, during the Opium War, the British army chose to sail directly to Nanjing to force the Qing government to sue for peace.
It is precisely because of this incident that Nanjing, which is near the river, did not become an open port during the first Opium War.
Following these clues, Ye Zhaoyan found some interesting time coordinates.
All thinking contributed to his desire to express, which made him want to stop writing after a long work, but started to write again.
The "Yifeng Gate" in Ye Zhaoyan's latest novel "The Gate of Yifeng" refers to the North Gate of Nanjing.
Since ancient times, officials going north and troops going out for war have all entered and exited through this city gate.
Near this key point, he put in another key figure, Yang Kui who often shuttled around in a rickshaw.
This character is extremely complex: he has studied, worked as a coachman, worked as a revolutionary party, and has done big business. He has a clever, brave, affectionate and righteous side, and a betrayal of the family and selfish side.
People seem to follow his perspective to see the city's appearance during the period from 1895 in the late Qing Dynasty to the end of the Great Revolution in 1927.
Like a determined explorer with a map in his hand, Ye Zhaoyan is looking for those key moments, key places and people that can touch the historical organs in the city of Nanjing.
He made historical turning points converge on a city, a door, and a person, and in this way he used real history to promote the fate of these fictional characters.
Ye Zhaoyan.
Photo by Sheng Jiapeng
Focus on the reverse side of history
Ye Zhaoyan has never been clear about how he became a writer.
Others are envious of Ye Zhaoyan's family education, but only he knows the ups and downs.
Reading and writing are not entirely his personal choices, but the influence of family and society on him.
During the 10 years of adolescence, Ye Zhaoyan spent the "Cultural Revolution". After graduating from high school, he was unable to enter the university and was trapped at home. He seemed to be thrown on a closed train and moved forward with time.
At that time, some novels at home were handed in by my father, but because some foreign translation novels were not read and they took up too much space, they were returned inexplicably.
He has nothing to do, looking around, there are only endless books on this "train", so he reads those foreign novels to pass the time, inadvertently laying a huge amount of reading.
In 1974, Ye Zhaoyan, who had nothing to do, ran to Beijing and spent a year at the home of his grandfather Ye Shengtao.
There, he met his cousin Ye Sanwu. Ye Sanwu was a poet as famous as Guo Lusheng at that time. A large group of literary and artistic youths gathered in his living room. At that time, he and the people in the "living room" secretly Writing poems and playing photography, these people gave him his initial enlightenment.
Ye Zhaoyan was with his grandfather Ye Shengtao when he was a child.
(Video screenshot)
Later, Ye Zhaoyan was admitted to the Chinese Department, but he still did not aspire to be a writer.
It’s just that all his friends at that time were talking about literature, writing poems and novels.
Later, the poet Han Dong's father and writer Fang Zhi encouraged him to write a novel, so he wrote "The Murderer", which was not published until 1981. magazine, and in those two years he published a total of five novels, thus setting foot on the literary world.
Then for a while, he went five years without publishing a novel.
But he still has a normal mind, because sitting on the bench is in line with his introverted personality. When he was a graduate student, his research direction was modern literature. He can do things that ordinary people think are boring, such as going to the library and looking through old newspapers. With relish.
In this state of not paying much attention to writing, Ye Zhaoyan suddenly felt that he fell in love with writing. He found that writing itself could let him use his imagination to create one after another free world that only belonged to him.
Growing up among writers and books, Ye Zhaoyan has more normality than others.
He knows more than anyone else the real side behind writing, not those lofty illusions, but exhaustion, exhaustion, and endless labor.
The way he thought of was to use his efforts like an athlete to write every day to fight against the possible decline.
Ye Zhaoyan cares about the experience of individuals in social changes.
He loves to write about the kind of eccentric little people, and their ups and downs of life at any time. Those people sometimes fall into the abyss, sometimes climb to the peak, all involuntarily, and he is full of sympathy for them.
The river was still flowing, and Ye Zhaoyan didn't want to talk about his expectations for him.
Before he knew it, more than forty years had passed, and the fictional city of Nanjing in Ye Zhaoyan's mind had already become exquisite and complex. It existed together with the real city of Nanjing, as if space and time, history and modernity had all been integrated in his home. Converged into a point in the study.
(over)