Hongliang: Why do we always love and kill the people closest to us?

Hongliang remembers that in the past, my father woke up at 6 o'clock every morning, pacing back and forth in the yard in a white shirt and singing loudly.

"Feng-lian hu, make a boat, table home, sad ci, call a sound, tian childe, you listen to me-"

"My family lives on the river bank, and my mother gave birth to many men and many women. I gave birth to a woman named Fenglian. Unfortunately, the old mother lost her life and left her father and daughter to go fishing to spend the famine year. "

My father died two years ago. She hasn't heard this familiar melody for a long time.

She wrote this play into the novel "The Light of Liang", and let the protagonist Liang sing every morning.

Between father and Liang, between truth and fiction, there is always some overlap of words and deeds and spiritual interweaving. In the past two years, Hongliang wanted to approach the light step by step, feel the light and the shadow behind it, and get to know the shining person.

Father and Liang

Hongliang is seldom with her father, and she doesn't know him. "He has always been my problem. The biggest problem is his white shirt. "

Hongliang recalled seeing his father when he was a child.

At that time, the old road from Zhenwu, Henan Province to Liangzhuang was plump and flat, with tall and straight poplars on both sides. Father is on his way home from Zhenwu, and Hongliang, who is in middle school, is going to class in the town. They met on this road.

He smiled at her, looked at it and said in surprise, "Hey, it's so big."

Father's white shirt is clean, decent, soft and shiny under the green forest tree.

"I was blinded by the light. Actually, I was blinded by tears. In my heart, my father is so different from others. I admire him very much and am full of pain. His white shirt shines brightly, and I don't know how much ridicule and contempt he has received. "

The only real detail in the book is the white shirt.

Like his father Liang, he always likes to wear a white shirt.

He is a different kind of farmer. He doesn't like farming and wears a dazzling and clean white shirt all day. He engaged in "speculation", was imprisoned as a fugitive and stole soybeans; He has been starting a business all his life. Despite repeated defeats and wars, we have repeatedly lost and fought.

He has never been an official for a day in his life, but he has been struggling on the road to being an official, and the crimes suffered by his family have also started.

Village cadres want to introduce projects to buy villagers' land. Liang believes that the ultimate victims are farmers and will have an impact on the environment, so he will unite with the villagers to oppose the project landing. Someone in the village was bullied. He took the lead in helping others to file a lawsuit, but in the end he lost the lawsuit, leaving nothing at home.

He is also a man who longs for love. At the beginning of the book, Liang willfully dragged his four children around looking for relatives. We should not only look for distant relatives who haven't been in touch for a long time, but also strangers who have helped us by accident, and we should also look for Man Zi, an old lover whom we haven't seen for years.

After his wife fell ill for seven or eight years, Liang Guang lived alone to save Man Zi and her son Xiaofeng who were almost killed by domestic violence.

His three children made mistakes in taking care of them. Xiaofeng was badly burned, so Man Zi left with Xiaofeng.

Like the scars on the surface of the moon printed on Xiaofeng, everyone's heart is buried with abyss-like pain.

Liang Guang was seriously ill, but after she was discharged from the hospital, she secretly called her old lover Man Zi and asked him to meet her at home without telling her children.

Man Zi has arrived. Suddenly, Liang reached out and grasped his chest firmly. People around us, whether shocked, ashamed or puzzled, all fell silent, as if Liang Guang and Man Zi were the only ones in the whole world.

After struggling for a few times, he hugged Liang and comforted him. "Okay, okay, don't feel bad. What are you worried about when you are grown up and married? You should enjoy it. " Liang Guang sucked Man Zi's breast like a baby.

Liang's inner burden is heavy. He wants to raise four children by himself and earn money to take his paralyzed wife to see a doctor, but he refuses to give up his human dignity and fight against all unfair things.

He longed for true feelings all his life, but in middle age, he couldn't even do a complete love.

"I want to make up for him, or let everyone read his rich heart, his appeal for love, and his concern for children."

At this moment, the children suddenly found that they had always regarded Liang as their father and forgot that he was also a person. Some people's secular desires, "It turned out that our existence also hindered Liang's existence as a person."

Many media commented that Liang Guang was a Don Quixote figure in China. This idealized sense of justice and optimism in him led to a series of ironic tragedies.

In Hongliang's view: "The white shirt is a symbol. He is a person who has higher requirements for himself and wants to surpass the identity of farmers and become a person with higher significance. "

Writer Li feels that this work surpasses Yu Hua's novels in some sense and consciousness. To live is to despair of life, and the light of the beam is the light from a lower place. In the dust, the light from the lowest place transcends despair.

Family feuds broke out in the great era.

Apart from the white shirt, Liang Guang and his father are similar in personality and always humorous in the face of difficulties.

Liang started his economic plan ambitiously every time: planting Ophiopogon japonicus, beans and rape, but all ended in failure. However, he is always so humorous and optimistic that he doesn't take difficulties seriously and continues to plan his next plan with great interest.

This humor and optimism can also be found in Hongliang.

In interviews, Hong Liang often sends out a series of "ha ha ha" laughter and squints his eyes. During the interview, she will also take the initiative to chat with us.

But in her youth, her personality was "relatively closed and marginal, and she was in a state of self-roaming".

This is inseparable from the family environment and the background of the times.

Drama is like life, and the operas that my father sings every day are like a true portrayal of a family.

Among the six brothers and sisters in the family, Hongliang ranks fifth. When she was 6 years old, her mother got cerebral thrombosis. One day, she was writing on a small table and saw her mother lying on a stretcher and being carried back.

"People in a village are watching the excitement behind them, and their eyes are full of pity and unspeakable contempt for me."

It was in the late 1970s, and the annual medical expenses of nearly 1,000 yuan dragged this rural family into the abyss of poverty.

"Mother lay there, weak, thin and stiff. Her face was twisted with illness. Every day is gray, and every day is superimposed with unspeakable darkness. "

In the third year, my mother died.

In order to pay off the debts and support the family, my father has been running around all the year round, always ignoring this "crying five brothers".

Without company, Hongliang learned to get along with himself. Occasionally, she played truant and ran to the swift water behind Liangzhuang, staring blankly, watching wild ducks frolicking in the water, crossing the arc and smelling the refreshing fragrance of purple flowers. ...

? rapids

Family relations in extended families are always complicated. Everyone wants to be loved and is afraid of being hurt.

Said: "I am close to the combination of two daughters Dong Yu and Dong Zhu in the book. I am weak and hope my family is good, but there is nothing I can do. "

When the mother is away, the eldest daughter is like a mother. Liang's eldest daughter is worried about her life. When Liang is restless, she has to gush out at him. Dongxue loves her father the most, and hopes that this family will be good, but in the wrong way, the heart of the family is farther away.

The relationship between the eldest son Yong Zhi and Liang has always been ironic and tense.

Yongzhi is smart, likes to analyze, and can see through the contradictions and the profound meaning behind Liang Guang's behavior.

So he has always been in awe of his father, and of course he is dissatisfied. Before Liang died, he kept calling Yongzhi and asked him to come back to see his father for the last time, but Yongzhi didn't go back.

At Liang's funeral, his coffin could not be buried smoothly. His son Yong Zhi and his stepson jumped into the grave and carried the coffin to place their father.

Seeing that their father was buried in the ground and left them forever, for an instant, their emotions could no longer be suppressed and surged out like a flood. Yong Zhi, Xiao Feng and Dong Yu are three brothers and sisters, kneeling on the edge of the tomb pit, hugging each other and kowtowing and crying together.

Until his death, Liang was still directing the children's actions with his own will, making them work hard in one place and twisting their hearts into a rope. At this time, the child has a little understanding of his father.

Literary critics say that the Liang family is a typical China family in the process of China's modern transformation, and most of them were born in the 1960s and 1970s.

At that time, the whole family was very poor. The total income of parents was more than RMB 100, and five or six brothers and sisters were raised.

"But the relationship between brother and sister, and the relationship between them and their parents, is a drama. Love and hate, hurt each other, entangle each other but never tear. "

Hong Liang has long been concerned about China's kinship. She said that in the deep layer of China culture, there is an essential deficiency, that is, the loss of personality.

Due to the pressure of order, economy and morality, everyone is in a state of high depression and cannot confidently express their feelings, needs and personal wishes. Everyone tries to sacrifice himself in a distortion and become a family, and rely on this sacrifice to produce a profound emotion.

However, whenever this sacrifice is not complete or changes halfway, conflicts and cracks will arise. Everyone is tied by an invisible rope and can't tell them apart. Once contradictions break out, they are often extremely harmful.

"China father and son, father and daughter, husband and wife, always ambiguous, at arm's length. Even love can't be fully expressed, and hate is incomplete. They are constantly drifting between love and hate, loving each other and killing each other, and finally stirring up such a deep kinship. "

"Now, I feel more and more that my father's optimistic, humorous and brave attitude towards life is slowly reflected in me."

During the interview, the photographer needs to take some loud exterior shots, so we came to the library of Renmin University to take photos.

From far away, I can hear loud laughter from time to time. When he speaks, he occasionally bursts into excitement and warmth in the bleak air in winter with the rising ending of Henan dialect.

Listen to your inner voice.

After so many years, Hongliang gradually found that his indomitable spirit was more and more like his father. "Our name is' Don't prick your head', and we are always thinking about our own affairs."

199 1 year, Hongliang, 18 years old, graduated from Rang County Normal School in Henan Province and was assigned to a township in the county as a primary school teacher.

Other normal students are teaching honestly, but she feels that her life can't stop there. "I want to do something extra." She persisted in her studies and was admitted to the Teachers' Training School.

"Many people come to study for diplomas, and no one studies hard. Every afternoon and evening, I am the only one studying in the classroom, but I live a full life and enjoy this feeling. "

Not satisfied, she went to full-time junior college one after another and taught herself undergraduate courses. Later, she was admitted to the master's degree of Zhengzhou University and the doctor's degree of Beijing Normal University, both of which were reported to the Chinese Department.

After graduating from Ph.D. in 2003, Hongliang taught in the Chinese Department of China Youth University for Politics and became a critic and scholar, writing purely professional papers and expositions.

Although the research was done smoothly, she gradually developed a strong sense of emptiness and felt that she was getting farther and farther away from reality and life. "People are confined to their careers, unable to break through the invisible wall or enter their own hearts."

?

With difficulties, in the summer of 2008, she returned to her hometown of Liangzhuang and lived for five months. During this time, she observed the changes of villagers and villages, found various practical problems, and wanted to write the story of Liangzhuang.

In contemporary academic circles in China, there is a deep gap between doing research and creating works, which means taking great risks.

Hongliang told her family what she thought, and the whole family listened to her plan seriously and quietly. They all think this is a serious good thing. Father said, you can't "pull out the seedlings" (pull the family), you have to accompany me.

In the later period of his father's life, he accompanied Hongliang, visited every family in Liangzhuang, followed the footsteps of Liangzhuang people, went to more than 20 cities, and walked on the most remote and desolate land in China.

"It is no exaggeration to say that without a father, there would be no two books, The Liangzhuang of China and The Liangzhuang of Chu. My father is more worried about my new book than I am. When he was lying in the hospital bed, he called me to urge me to take out the book quickly. " In the process of interviewing Liang Zhuang, Liang got to know his father better.

20 15, Hongliang became a professor at China Renmin university. It was also this year that my father passed away. Hongliang always sees her father's optimistic, self-deprecating and childlike image. If she doesn't write about him, she won't sleep well

It is also a bold attempt to create non-fiction works to write novels.

For a long time, China local literature has been deeply influenced by Lu Xun, and most of the peasant images described are ignorant and backward, indifferent and heartless. Ah Q, Sister Xianglin and Kong Yiji have been deeply rooted in people's hearts.

When he wrote Liang Zhiguang, he began to write according to his inherent habits. After writing, she found that she was still not divorced from Lu Xun's ideological framework.

She reinvented herself, read the books of Kafka, Faulkner and other writers, and studied the works of many minority writers, while learning and rejecting them. She abandoned the academic accent, adopted the life-oriented and local language, and wrote Liang's story in a dramatic way.

"If I hadn't been so stubborn and persistent, I might not have written" The Light of Liang "or written a character like Liang."

Even after writing hundreds of words, Hongliang still didn't fully understand his father.

"I only know that he is our father. Their experience may not have been experienced by us, but the road they have traveled, the things they have done, the hardships they have suffered, and the humanity they have shown deserve our deep consideration. "

Some netizens said on Douban that after reading this book, I remembered a relative I hated, and now I should think about him.

Many people told Hongliang that she had done what they always wanted to do. "That's because I don't know what boundaries are, and I'm always eccentric. In the eyes of others, it is brave, but it is actually because it is relatively simple. My deviance actually comes from nature, from life instinct, a bit like Liang Guang. "

Writing, for Hongliang, is a challenge to himself again and again, and it is a learning process. "I absorb new things extensively and then integrate them, gradually forming the background color of my life and thoughts. Maybe one day, I will write something that makes me satisfied. "

From a rural teacher to a professor at Renmin University, from "China in Liangzhuang" to "The Light of the Beam", I face life tenaciously and optimistically, listen to my inner voice and explore the unknown distance. Perhaps the road is slow and long, but the creation will not stop.