In his essay "My Elementary School," he says that a storytelling mother and a life of poverty as a child were the precursors to creating a writer like me. Poverty didn't just mean for him an unsatisfactory childhood; it drove him to maturity, it drove him from childhood to question life, to think about life. Recognize life, intervene in life.
Liang was in the second grade of elementary school when the language textbooks as his earliest reading books, and it so happened that a language teacher, who advocated flexible teaching methods, found and gave him the opportunity to show his storytelling talent in front of the class, such a valuable opportunity to satisfy his lack of vanity.
Suddenly, I remembered that when I was a kid, I also loved the language class and the language teacher. The first time I wrote a diary was in the second grade, I remembered that I used 50 words to describe the dog's tail grass on the side of the road, and I was praised by the language teacher for observing it carefully and describing it vividly, and my inner vanity was satisfied at the same time that I loved to write even more. So, poetry, writing, reading and so on the hobby of literary deep rooted in the heart.
Liang's first love occurred in the North China Great Wasteland, he said he loved the gentle, kind, introverted, emotionally pure women. In that more conservative era "cheerful and lively character, for young women, when it is too easy to become the target of blame and criticism. In the confrontation with the times. The ultimate compromise is probably their own."
Love in those days, shy, innocent, beautiful but also full of shackles and baggage of thought.
"We fell in love. We hugged and kissed and swore. Both childishly believing that their respective hearts were henceforth securely attached. We were both so touched by ourselves and by each other. Think in this big world, can love a person and be loved by a person, how happy, how beautiful! But neither of us ever thought or talked about marriage and being a wife and husband so far away. It seemed to be too far in the future indeed. Even love is "treasonable", and the idea that it is reasonable, but it seems to be a fairy tale ......"
-- "First Love".
Yes, as Liang said, the reason why the first love is unforgettable, because of the pure love!
Later, I read Liang's "Marriage", and read about his kind and lovely wife, active, simple, the only big girl who was not scared off by his "confession" of a poverty-stricken and miserable childhood. After the marriage, he was open to her without privacy, mutual respect, she to him "nothing to do", and he learned from her "family policy" in a married man how to self-respect and self-love...
This is the first time that I have read about his kind and lovely wife. ...
A white horse flies, I do not know what kind of mother or father we will become after a number of years, I think the beam in the feeling of being a father to write in the heart of the moment must be a mixture of flavors.
"His growing maturity is exactly what I am so happy and sad about at the same time."
"A son like this is a constant reminder that I am nothing more than the father of a second year boy. And beyond that, perhaps nothing more, much less anything to be proud of."
-- "What It's Like to Be a Dad"
Talking about his family of origin, in Leung's consciousness, his mother is like a tree and his father is like a mountain. They taught him a lot of simple truths about how to live in the world, which has benefited him throughout his life, and the populist tendency of his works is closely related to the education and influence of his parents since he was a child.
Writer Mo Yan also talked about his mother's indispensable and important influence on him, and how it changed his life, in his Nobel Prize speech.
Liang was born in Harbin City, a construction worker family, five siblings, his father in his very young age in order to support the family to work abroad, his mother to take care of the life of the five children, very hard. His mother gave him the impression that she was like a tree, the kind of tree that doesn't shed its leaves in the fall, but waits until the following spring for the new leaves to grow before they fall.
In the days when food was scarce and shoes were hard to protect the feet, Liang once stole the only piece of bean cake beside the old man because of hunger, and his mother not only stopped him from this action in time when she learned about it, but also gave him all the leftover potato nests, and when she came back to the house after all the children came back to let Liang tell her behavior again, she began to teach him a stern lesson. And these lessons benefited him for the rest of his life.
Despite her poverty, his mother was very supportive of his studies. She used her hard-earned money to buy new books for Liang. His mother worked as a laborer in a factory where there was no ventilation or sunlight, and it was cold in winter and hot in summer. He wrote many times about his mother's difficult environment in his articles about her, and his heart was full of guilt and gratitude.
"The factory was very hot, everyone wore thick masks, the whole workshop was like a yarn factory, the air was flying with red cotton wool, all the masks worn by my mother were covered with red cotton wool, in her hair, on her face, and on her eyelashes, and it was hard to recognize which one was my mother."
-- "Parents are the plainest humanity"
"Seventy to eighty broken sewing machines, arranged in rows, seventy to eighty women, none of them young, busied themselves behind their own sewing machines. Because of the gloomy light, a light bulb hangs above each woman's head. It was a hot summer, the window could not be opened, the heat emitted by the bodies of 70 to 80 women and 70 to 80 light bulbs made me feel as if I were in a steamer basket. The women were so hot that they wore only undershirts. Some had fat undershirts, some had thin undershirts, and some wore men's undershirts, exposing a considerable portion of their ample or shriveled breasts in a variety of ways. The felt flakes were like a brown mist, like roiling snowflakes, fluttering among the women mothers. And they had to wear masks one by one. The women's mothers had three solid brown circles on their masks. That was because the breath from their nostrils and mouths had moistened the masks, and the felt wadding had adhered to them. The women's mothers' hair, arms, and undershirts were almost all brown, shaggy brown. I felt as if I were among the women men of the caveman period. "
-- "A Loving Mother's Love"
The most touching thing for Liang was during a three-year natural disaster, when his mother made a lumpy soup with the remnants of flour, gave her share to a beggar who came to beg for food, and served him washing water and carried a stool to him, which the neighbors Mistakenly thought that his family has more food than they can eat, since the Liang family no longer have food subsidies, but the mother did not regret it. She taught her children by word and example and influenced them implicitly.
"The parents of our generation have hardly had a day of happy old age. Lao She said when writing about his mother, my mother did not wear a good dress, did not eat a good meal, what I take to write about my mother, I can feel the writer's feelings at that time. When Xiao Qian wrote about his mother, he said that he finally joined the workforce and brought his first month's salary to buy canned food for his mother, and when he fed the canned food to his mother in the hospital bed, she had stopped breathing. Remembering his mother, Ji wrote, "I regretted going to Beijing to study at Tsinghua; if I hadn't, my mother wouldn't have worked so hard to train me to study. When my mother was sick, she didn't even tell me, and by the time I got home, she had already passed away. I was so desperate to bang my head on my mother's coffin and go with her ...... There are a lot of parents like that."
-- "Parents are the most simple humanities"
Write a little less about first love and depression, a little less about popularity and fashion, and think more about your own parents, and if you don't even know your own parents, how can you talk about understanding the world.
Liang's father is also very simple, "when my father came home, his legs were swollen and swollen to the point where he pressed a pit, but he was so happy. Twenty-some frozen hard buns, half of the upper side left the father's teeth marks. Three pairs of labor insurance shoes are tumbled buffalo leather, each one has a worn place, but also by the father with a piece of leather to make up for the good, that is, he picked up from the construction site. Bring back to me, my brother and my third brother to wear. "
Liang's father never drank tea, but did not forget to bring a packet of tea from a foreign country to share with the neighbors to taste; in order to repay the favor, he brought the packet of tea back from Sichuan and back, after several years of ups and downs, no matter how much difficulty can not stop him from expressing the heart and the heart of gratitude.
-- "Father and Tea"
Liang's father has been a serious man and a serious man all his life, and even as a crowd-pleaser, he's serious to the point of being adorable.
"Father sat in a very special way. It was a kind of sitting upright. The actor's costume he was wearing was a brown silk robe. He took the back hem of the robe and lifted it up to rest on his grief, while he rolled up the front of the robe and placed it in his lap. He did not lean against the wall, nor against anything, just like that end of the sitting, do not know how long has been sitting. Clearly, he was afraid to stain or crease the robe."
"In the darkness, I heard my father sigh. After a long time, he heard him say 'Hey, I'm worried about our director wow! He's just afraid of the rain these days ......'"
"Today's Chinese people, serious work serious people, is not too much. Today's Chinese people, as if everything is no sense of responsibility. Even when the official, are less willing to be serious about being an official. Some things, in me, also gradually began to not be very serious. It seems that seriousness is first of all a very disadvantageous thing for oneself."
-- "My Father's Career as an Actor"
Seeing the words in the face, when I read Leung's letters to my elder brother and sister, a warm current ran through my heart, as if he were also my elder brother, giving me sincere advice and help.
"Sister, be forever cheered up for the sake of living a small people's life! The life of a little people is a life that is close at hand and within reach. It is this kind of life that belongs to us. Holding on to this life, we should not fantasize about any other life. Recently, I have often thought that the majority of people on this earth are actually living the lives of ordinary people in different countries and at different standards of living. The most essential thing in life, I think, is the word "cozy". Without coziness, what is life? Warmth is some kind of comfort, but not just comfort. Warmth often belongs to a small life situation. And coziness is even a life situation that can be presented in a poor man's small house. Warmth is experienced and enjoyed by small people ..... Remember when we were children, how brightly we painted and cleaned up a shabby home! And how difficult things were in our homes when we were kids! But weren't there also many cozy moments?"
-- "Living the Life of a Small People"
In fact, although Liang was a reputable writer, his burden was very heavy, not only did he have his own family, but he also had to take care of his mentally disturbed elder brother, who lived in a mental hospital for many years, as well as rescuing his own sister, and taking care of his parents.
"The brother's illness, completely by a "poor" word sad cry out. A 'poor' word, that year destroyed the brother who was elected president of the whole student body as soon as he entered the university ......"
"For someone who spent most of his forty-eight years in a mental institution and is still under house arrest for mental illness, I don't think my prayers are excessive. If there is a God, a Lord Buddha, or any other deity, I would like to make a pact with the gods: if my prayer is granted, even if my life shall end the day after my brother leaves this world, then I would rather, never regret it!"
"It is not true that within China, not all psychopaths have in their family a novelist with a fee income, or a famous movie actor!
I prayed again: God, there are some responsibilities on earth, even the most natural kinship responsibilities, and not every family can afford to rely on ethical feelings alone! You favor them, you save them .......
This time, in my consciousness, God is not any god, but - our country ......"
-- "Elder Brother"
In Liang's writing, Er Xiao is an underclass character who begs for a living but is lucky enough to be relieved by Liang, who is kind and simple, with all the tenacity and bad habits of the "grassroots race".
"Sometimes when I look at our country of 1.3 billion people, 'grassroots' abound; it seems to be increasing. And it's growing by the crop.
And I, being from them, am connected to their roots. It's a mess. I am superior to them, but I am only superior to them in vain, and I have failed them again and again.
This is the first time that I've seen the world's most popular movie, and I'm not sure if I've seen the world's most popular movie.
I can only write down some words of labor, sacrificing which kind of broken flotsam of life that I and they used to share the same root, and consoling my own inability to do anything ......."
-- ""Weed Roots" Offering"
I like Liang Xiaosheng's writing very much, the simplicity of the ordinary narrative, the life of the neglected people and things in his pen vivid and full, overflowing emotions and writer's feelings. No pretense, people ****ing, as if it is what happened around them.
"The street first became dirty first of all that type of ready-to-sell food stalls - pancakes, doughnuts, congee, fried liver, fried spring rolls, chaos, roasted lamb, plus selling vegetables, plus killing chickens and slaughtering ducks and dissecting fish ...... The morning market is over, the street is full of mess, sidewalks and street surface are greasy, walking sticky shoes. A rain, the street flowed like a brush pot of water, black water floating on the rotten leaves, or floating oil flowers. "
Dirty, crowded, noisy, smelly, such a street many people would like to collect money to buy hundreds of bags of strong laundry detergent, dozens of wire brushes, and then hire a sprinkler truck, launched a voluntary labor, this greasy dirty street thoroughly wash again. However, even the street committee and the city administration can not do anything about such a small street.
But surprisingly, Leung's writing takes a turn for the worse: "This is a street that feeds people! Renters and renters have 50,000 to 60,000 yuan of income per year, and either the bottom of the city, or compatriots from the countryside, this is the hardest reason on top of all the reasons ah! Should not all other reasoning obey this reasoning? "
That sell big slag congee Northeast rural girl, a bowl of 3 yuan, corn is very fresh, porridge is also very fragrant, she only occupied a little more than a square meter of sidewalk pavement; a peasant woman with a three-wheeled flatbed truck to sell soybean milk, bean curd, insisted on more than a decade; with the kitchen frame car to sell baklava husband and wife, during the summer and winter vacations, or the children of the school children come to help the adults busy! The girls' faces are all full of color. The girl's face, are showing the vicissitudes of early maturity through the ages.
"Strained for more than ten years of this small street, it is naturally generated a character, that is, the compassion between people. The so-called harmony, for this small street, first of all, but tolerance.
Some of the compatriots livelihood, life, survival of the difficult hard, in this small street presents a vivid. There is also an elementary school on the street - tiled walls, inlaid with Tao Xingzhi's head machine "love all over the world" four big words. The low holly bushes at the base of the wall hide dirt and often have phlegm on their leaves. Mr. Hsing-chi looked at this small street from the wall all day long, I did not feel that his gaze seems to be more and more hesitant, cut also seems to be more and more gentle. "
'For the unseen, the rule of the unruly.' --Old Ran This is better than a thousand words!"
-- "Tight Little Street"
Liang Xiaosheng used the words to narrate his ordinary and unusual life, there is no lack of ****ing between the lines, delicate emotions and thinking about life, reverence for life, but also that a sense of compassion for the people at the bottom and a sense of simple social responsibility.
"And I myself, nowadays seem to understand more and more - the novel should essentially be very ordinary, very ordinary, very ordinary. In an era when even philosophy is becoming popular, the so-called sophistication of the novel is either a show of the writer or a boring and vulgar boast of those who eat the bowl of "criticism". I do see through such an illusion - the so-called writers who study for the sake of literature actually do not exist today. It is naturally very wishful thinking and very Don Quixote to think that one is an enlightened man of the masses or a fighter with a mission for the times."
-- My Mission
Excerpts and insights from reading Liang Xiaosheng's "Past Lives and Present Lives" in March 2018