Before I came to Lanzhou, I recited this overriding verse over and over again, imagining what the northwestern city would look like.
It was written by a Lanzhou poet named Ye Zhou. In Lanzhou, you can catch four or five drinking sessions in one night, non-stop and passionate. He often tirelessly from one table directly to the next table. Then, or go to KTV or go to the bar, drink and sing loudly.
This is the most common state of many Lanzhou men's night. This is a city soaked in alcohol. "Entertainment basically depends on wine", Lanzhou people boast that they drink down a brand of wine a year. Lanzhou people like to "break in", one person to beat the world, six games to determine the winners and losers. I remember the first time I went to Gannan Road to drink, I think the city's bars are so low-grade, there is no Chengdu People's South Road's prosperity, Xi'an Defu Lane's smoke and rain, there is just a big mouth to drink, a big mouth to eat meat. Mutton noodle slices, garlic, grilled meat, you would think this is in the bar?
In the summer, beer stalls of all sizes pop up around town. The most famous is the Yellow River Beer Plaza, which Lanzhouers call the "Ten Thousand People's Pit." Thousands of plastic tables are crammed into the sand. Thousands of plastic tables are crammed onto the gravel floor, the sound of punching is constant, and stumbling drunks come and go. Whether it is Jiuquan Road night market or Gannan Road or Maijishan Road, the night out of the individual staggering. The paddling is a big punch small punch, there are fifteen fifteen twenty all kinds of punch. color, the harem and the newly opened Cc no matter whether you are a dance bar or slow shake bar each drink is beer, unlike Chengdu and Xi'an delicate make up to drink foreign wine. Here there is only a big mouthful of the Yellow River.
The whole city seems to be inebriated. Yan Jun, a music critic from Lanzhou, said: "Drinking is the daily life of most male citizens in Lanzhou, because alcohol creates hallucinations, the drinking table is the jianghu and the stage, and drinking is like comparing swords, and shaking hands is worshipping. In Lanzhou to eat roasted sheep, a touch of surprise, Lanzhou, there is such a wild way to eat, hands with a knife, directly down to cut, and then it is a big mouthful of meat, and then, the Century Jinhui, Hanwu Royal and other kinds of white wine on the way, and then, you don't know what the beer grows into. Suddenly remembered a colleague who once worked in Gansu Zhongye Da, he said that he came to Lanzhou for three months, more than the previous thirty years of drinking wine.
The first time I saw a meal can drink away a dozen bottles of red wine, here red wine goblet drinking method is to pour a full cup, then, dry dry dry. Slowly savor red wine, there is no market here, no matter how expensive you are, no matter whether you are Australian or French, the drinking method here is a mouthful.
This is a city of some Jianghu Qi. Ye Zhou is called "Big Brother" by many poets in this city. "Writing poetry is like being a gangster, you have to have a big brother to cover you. Like the triads, to write poems, you have to play hard to hit a few docks, that is, you have to find a few magazines that distribute things, which is like a mixed look." Now far away from Jiangnan Lanzhou writer Zhang Hailong is his little brother.
Sobriety after a hangover begins with a bowl of beef noodles. Every morning, millions of Lanzhou people run to this bowl of noodles. They may be students, migrant workers, hawkers, or white-collar workers, university professors, or leading cadres. They coincidentally sit at the oily table, or squat on the dirty concrete floor, road teeth, holding a large porcelain bowl, the beef noodles like a waterfall poured into the stomach.
In Lanzhou, there is a beef noodle shop just a few steps away, with different flavors. Everyone has their favorite store. However, the best-known stores are the small ones with only one or two stores, where the noodles follow the soup, and the shop closes at around 2pm every day.
The people of Lanzhou are easy to satisfy. There are countless "authentic Lanzhou beef ramen restaurants" all over the country. But the two words labeled "authentic" are basically not authentic. Most of these beef ramen restaurants are opened by their neighbors in Qinghai Hualong. "Lanzhou people plant trees, Hualong people cool. The poorer Lanzhou people smoke black Lanzhou. Out of the black Lanzhou auspicious Lanzhou flying Lanzhou, can not think of Lanzhou also sell what cigarettes.
The people of Lanzhou guard the Yellow River and are not willing to go far. Because leaving Lanzhou is not the flavor. Ye Zhou had eaten hundreds of beef noodle halls in Beijing, but unfortunately the taste is all gone.
Two years ago, he went to Nanxun, Zhejiang Province, on a business trip, raw seafood ate his appetite. A friend specifically for him to find a Lanzhou beef ramen restaurant. The first time I saw the signboard, I was ecstatic. But when the chef brought out the soup, he cried and laughed - the soup added shrimp and seaweed.
The people of Lanzhou say that beef noodles don't work after they leave the city. Zhang Hailong searched for the reason, may be because "out of the Lanzhou like a coarse dialect, food stimulation, impatient character of the city, beef noodles character will be softened, sometimes even do not even put the chili and instead of sweet and spicy sauce, it is a waste".
Writer Han Songluo was once robbed of his cell phone on the streets of Lanzhou. He felt that there was a savagery in the depths of the city.
In the movie "New Dragon Inn", Maggie Cheung, who was a master of her craft, was almost cut into pieces of meat and roasted into lamb kebabs by a butcher. The butcher spoke authentic Lanzhou dialect.
Two, "Lanzhou, every street corner, there will be someone to play with your life; Lanzhou, every public **** car, are crowded with pickpockets ...... Some young girls speak in tongues, and most of the guys hide the murder weapon.
Tang Xin, a friend of Ye Zhou, once described the three years in Lanzhou this way. In the pen of a poet, violence takes on an aesthetic meaning, turning mundane life into legend. The poetry here is as painful as the people here. They act on intention, on emotion, often drunk and spiritually wild.
I remember when Zhang Tong first told me about the legendary Gonglin Road, said that the place is known as the Somali of Lanzhou, I do not believe that the center of a provincial capital city, will be messed up into what kind of, to go to Lao Cai that after the delivery, I think this road, not Somalia, is Baghdad, and Baghdad, the only difference is that there are no American soldiers on the road, only sheep pens, and the garbage is on fire.
Lanzhou girls are even more wild, for Lanzhou girls, smoking, drinking, boxing, must be one can not be less.
Lanzhou girls drink, size fist, what will not play, what play is not good, the Third Plenary Session, white beer red mixed with drink, white wine two and a half pounds of beer, casually whole. The left hand tattoo God is the dragon, tiger and leopard, the right hand is Astro Boy.
Like the shape of the city, the people here are straight, love is love, hate is hate, not so much bending around.
If I had known that the water of the Yellow River was going to dry up, what would I have done to build that fucking iron bridge? If I had known that the heart of my sister Ga was going to change, what was the point of falling in love with her? These are the lyrics of "Early to Know" by Lanzhou rock band Wild Child. Every time I listen to it, I can't help but laugh out loud.
If you arrive in Lanzhou in the middle of the night. The plane landed in the middle of nowhere, which is the farthest airport from the city in the country. 70 kilometers away from the rare lights. On both sides of the dark, barren mountains stretching, in the moonlight cold and pale. The road signs point to Qinghai, Xinjiang and Tibet. The faraway places are reminiscent of the heart.
Then, a city suddenly appeared in front of us very magically.
The land here is barren, but the more barren it is, the more it stimulates the imagination. The only magazine in the country that researches UFOs, UFO Quest, is located here.
Lanzhou is at the westernmost tip of the Loess Plateau, sandwiched between two bare mountains and a thirsty yellow color. From the 1950s, generations of Lanzhou people back ice on the mountain, planted tree by tree point by point.
In order to realize full of green faster, Lanzhou once wrapped green cloth around the mountains to make the mountain ranges look green. Others wanted to put green mosaics all over the hills or paint them green once a year.
Lanzhou is a weak basin, and in the winter, the airflow is not good, industrial pollution and exhaust gas in the basin above a "pot cover". As a result, Lanzhou has become one of the most polluted cities in China, invisible even to American reconnaissance satellites.
So, some people have proposed a huge program of placing huge blowers on the north and south hills of Lanzhou, like a huge air conditioner for the city, and the air will flow freely and freshly. But how big a blower is it?
People also look to the Great Green Mountain: it is just standing in the Lanzhou east of the mouth of the channel, move it away, the wind will naturally blow in, right? Lanzhou people seriously discussed for a while, and invited experts to do the argument, and finally resolved to "Yugong Yishan". However, the Lanzhou people's solution was to bring up the Yellow River and use the water to wash the loess mountain. Suddenly, one day, the whole project was involved in a lawsuit, and the Lanzhou people's feat came to an end.
These moves are almost performance art, with a bit of a playful flavor. Every winter, the dry branches on both sides of the river road are wrapped in colorful plastic flowers, never wither in the snow.
Lanzhou city is dotted with large and small indoor bonsai garden. Any you outside the yellow sand sky, or full of pale, people sitting in the greenhouse, enjoy the flowers and trees, drink a cup of three bubble Taiwan.
Yunnan spring tip tea bubbling in the water, large chunks of rock sugar sink under the tea. Add to that red goji berries, jujube from Linze, cinnamon from Fujian, and Li Guangxiang apricot from the West. In some places, a few rose buds are added. After three brews, the buds bloom like a lotus flower. Jujube nourishes blood and nourishes the spirit, wolfberry is sweet and flat and moist, nourishes the liver and kidney, rock sugar nourishes the middle and strengthens the qi, harmonizes the stomach, moistens the lungs, and has the effect of generating fluids and clearing away heat, cinnamon yuanyuan nourishes the heart and spleen, nourishes the blood and calms the spirit, raisins can replenish the qi and blood, strengthens the tendons and bones, and is good for urination, and chrysanthemum clears away heat and detoxifies. So say drink scraping bowl of sub tea to grease and generate fluids, nourish and strengthen the body 。。。。。
In fact, the rose is the city flower of Lanzhou. The place where roses are produced in Lanzhou is called Bitter Water. Bitter water in Lanzhou dialect refers to the pupil of a person's eye. Lanzhou is named for a kind of orchid grass growing on Gaolan Mountain, and it is also a lily township.
Every spring in the streets and alleys of Lanzhou, you will always meet the flower seller, in the middle of the yellow sand rolled up, take a bouquet of flowers home. Thus, the romance and poetry of this place has a little more coarse texture.
Sandstorms are a long-standing topic here. People in Lanzhou joke that sandstorms are rich in nanomolecules, and that those who have experienced them for a long time will live more vigorously, even though most people don't know what kind of rice a nanometer is.
Such is the optimism of the people of Lanzhou. In the midst of the increasingly violent sandstorms, Lanzhou people have spent three decades slowly stewing a "chicken soup for the soul" for the Chinese people - The Reader, which has influenced the worldview and outlook on life of countless young people in China's cities and towns. This point, is to let me the most most depressed, why the reader of this book, actually grew in Lanzhou, the most wild place.