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More than half a century ago, the little girl Lin followed her parents across the ocean from Taiwan Province Province to Beijing and lived in an alley in the south of Beijing. The battlements in the ancient capital Beijing, camel bells in the sunset, back streets and alleys in downtown areas … all these make Eiko feel novel and fascinated. The crazy woman in front of the guild hall, covered in striped little female companions, thieves haunting in weeds, Ma Song, the wet nurse who accompanied her day and night, and her loving father who was addicted to dying underground ... all played, laughed and lived with Eiko, and their voices and smiles were still there, but they all quietly left. Why is the world so miserable? The unreasonable Eiko pondered for a long time but could not understand.

After more than 50 years, wanderers in Beijing are still obsessed with all this. That faint sadness, that heavy lovesickness, is deeply imprinted in her childhood memory and will never fade.

south of the old

Camel Team in Dongyang's Childhood —— Postscript of Old Things in the South of the City (Lin)

The camel team came and stopped in front of my house.

They stood in a long line, waiting for people to arrange. The weather is dry and cold. The camel puller took off his felt hat, and the bald ladle was steaming, and a white smoke melted in a dry and cold atmosphere.

Dad bargained with him. On the humpback of Shuangfeng, each horse carries two sacks of coal. I'm thinking, what about the "Nanshan High" in the sack? Or "black gold and black jade"? I often see these big black words written on the white wall of the coal pile in Shuncheng Street. But the camel puller said they were from Mentougou, and they came step by step with the camel.

Another camel puller is greeting camels to eat forage. They bent their front feet, pursed their hips and knelt down.

Dad has negotiated the price with them. People are unloading coal and camels are eating grass.

I stood in front of the camels and watched them chew grass: so ugly face, so long teeth, so quiet posture. When they chew, the upper and lower teeth grind alternately, the nostrils are steaming, and the beard is full of foam. I'm so surprised that my teeth are moving.

My teacher taught me to be a calm animal like a camel. See it never in a hurry, walk slowly, chew slowly, and you will always get there, and you will always be full. Maybe it should be slow by nature, occasionally running two steps to avoid the car, and its posture is ugly.

When the camel team comes, you will know that the first one will always have a bell tied under its long neck, and it will make a "clang, clang" sound when walking.

"Why do you want a bell?" What do I not understand?

Dad told me that camels are afraid of wolves, because wolves will bite them, so humans put bells on them. When the wolf heard the bell, he knew that there was a human being protecting him and dared not invade.

My childish mind is full of ideas different from those of adults. I said to my father:

"No, Dad! Their soft soles silently walk on the soft desert. Didn't you say that they walked for three days and nights without drinking a mouthful of water, but quietly chewed the food poured out of their stomachs? It must be that camel pullers can't stand the long and lonely journey, so they put bells on camels to add some fun to the journey. "

Dad wanted to think, smiled and said:

"Maybe your idea is better."

Winter is almost over, and spring is coming. The sun is so warm that people want to take off their cotton-padded jackets. Isn't it? Camels also took off their old camel hair robes! Its fur fell off its body in chunks and hung under its stomach. I really want to cut them with a pair of scissors because they are so untidy. The same is true of camel pullers, who also take off their sheepskins and put them on the top of the camel's back. The sack is empty, the "black gold and black jade" is sold, and the bell rings more clearly at a relaxed pace.

Summer has come, and there is no camel. I asked my mother again:

"Where do they go in summer?"

"who?"

"Camel!"

Mom can't answer, she said:

"Keep asking, keep asking, you child!"

Summer passed, autumn passed, winter came again, camel team came again, but childhood never came back. I won't do anything stupid like camel chewing in winter.

However, how much I miss the scenery and people who lived in the south of Beijing when I was a child! I said to myself, write them down, let the actual childhood pass and let the childhood of the soul last forever.

In this way, I wrote a book "Old Things in the South of the City".

I think silently and write slowly. Seeing the camel team coming in the winter and hearing the slow and melodious bell, my childhood came back to my mind.

"Old Things in the South of the City" expresses the psychological process of an era like "Childhood Past" with fresh and meaningful prose narrative mirror language. In the film, Xiaoying is the narrator in the story, but because of her young age, this will inevitably dispel the symbolic meaning of the deep meaning of the text, thus shirking Xiaoying's responsibility for social behavior.

The greatest charm of the film lies in the director's intention to separate the real narrator, that is, "Xiaoying" as an adult (or Wu or Lin) from the story being told, which makes the narrative style of the film covered with a layer of melancholy and hazy emotion.

At the beginning of the film, Xiaoying learned to chew camels, which not only reflected her inner innocence and childishness, but also established her narrative angle in the film. Most of the shots in the whole film were shot with a low-angle subjective lens of Xiaoying. In this way, with the trace of Xiaoying's innocent eyes, the sadness of "everything has left me" is particularly real and more sad and painful.

Judging from the content of the film, the fate of the characters told in the story can be said to be quite tragic, but the tone is still quite gentle. If Xiuzhen is crazy, it is because her lover's college student was arrested by the police for engaging in underground revolutionary activities, and his life and death are unknown. The director spoke with Xiuzhen's sad voiceover. The camera moves slowly in the house where the couple once lived, and the scarlet peeling walls and windows seem to print their feelings. All these provide rich audio-visual imagination space for the film and immerse the audience in a specific emotion.

Xiuzhen's free love with the college student is intolerable for clan etiquette, but the illegitimate child was thrown into the Seven Flowers Gate as a disgrace until the mother and daughter met, walked to the train station, and finally died tragically under the train boat, which seems to be the inevitable destination arranged for them by that society. In order to show the tragic fate of this character, the film carefully filmed the farewell scene on a rainy night, so that the white smoke from the train chimney swallowed up the whole long shot. Xiaoying, who saw her mother and daughter off in the heavy rain, fainted. There was a cry of buying a newspaper outside the painting: look, the mother and daughter were crushed to death by the train. The director didn't let Xiaoying's young mind suffer too much blows here, and he didn't want her pure eyes to be covered with too thick dust. All serious mental disasters have been pushed behind the scenes. This implicit expression is very intriguing.

On the contrary, the director intends to rely on the continuation and accumulation of various audio-visual images to render the diffusion and diffusion of inner emotional atmosphere. Through the four shots of the little oil chicken in the rattan case and the mirror description of the swing, it depicts their inner innocence, sadness and frustration, sadness and hatred of parting, and all kinds of bitter and lonely feelings, which have been running through the soothing and quiet rhythm of the film. Because of this, Xiaoying's sadness when she left was superimposed in the melody of The Best. She wanted to fall in love with the long swing and the furry chicken. In her nostalgic eyes, a heavy sigh gave birth to a delicate and sad poetry, just like the rain at night under the eaves in the film, which washed into a water circle and dispersed like ripples.

If Xiaoying was a carefree child in the first half of the film, and the cruel reality she felt was only novelty, then in the second half, it was a nightmare escape and breakthrough from Xiaoying's waking up in the hospital bed. From then on, Xiaoying began to mature, and she gradually understood the complexity and suffering of this world.

The world of naive Xiaoying. It should be as colorful as sea and the sky. The two scenes of chanting "Let's watch the sea" in the film are obviously the subjective wishes of the director.

Xiaoying met a kind and honest thief in the wild grass garden. The screams and noises of crows hanging over their heads seem to herald a tragic atmosphere of fate.

From several conversations between Xiaoying and the thief, we know that the thief is a good man, but social reality forces him to be a thief. The traditional cultural upbringing and unbearable pressure of life led to the double division of his spirit and behavior, which made him suffer great mental pain while stealing money from others.

But behind Xiaoying's innocent and kind eyes, she inadvertently harmed the thief. She gave a small Buddha statue (which can show the thief's inner need to find a way out) to a plainclothes policeman with a rattle, but it became the basis for the thief to be caught. In Xiaoying's tearful eyes, another friend left her. Before she could repent, her heart was covered with an emotional scar. As the famous poet Kosuke Kitajima wrote in Electric Shock, I once shook hands with an invisible man/screamed that my hand was burned/branded.

When the kind Xiaoying's heart was gradually infected by the pain and sadness of life, her family also suffered one after another. First, Xiaoying's father died peacefully and became a stone tablet in the cemetery of Taiwan Province Province. The scene where six red leaves overlap in her father's cemetery undoubtedly pushes the theme of parting throughout the film to a climax. Then Ma Song bid farewell to Xiaoying's family and rode on the donkey brought by her husband to go home, leaving this kind woman with the loneliness and loneliness of losing her child.

At this time, Xiaoying sat in the back seat of the carriage and said goodbye to her childhood home and spiritual nest with tears.

Xiaoying appeared as the protagonist in the film. When she found that there was a great contrast between the good wishes of adults and reality, her innocent and kind young mind became more and more fragile. The endless tragic cycle in the film is even more eye-catching and thought-provoking, which is also the key to the film's richness.

But this is not entirely true, because the "old things in the south of the city" we saw in the film can't be the original. She bears the brand of Xiaoying's childhood, but it is more the "south of the city" imagined by Wu or Lin, a lingering fragrance in their memory, and an old wine fermented in the depths of their emotions, so they moistened and nurtured that "south of the city" with their own hearts.

The "short stories of great times" described by them are no longer remembered with painful remorse, but with an open-minded and calm mind. Therefore, many details of life in the film are full of a deep attachment, and they all retain a rare warmth: like school bells and children's songs, as well as pulley wells, waterwheels, dogs sticking their tongues in the hot sun and quiet cicada-singing alleys ... After their artistic rendering and sublimation, they come alive.

When we unconsciously complete our respective destinies with the characters in the film, you will be pleasantly surprised to find that, with "one"

south of the old

Old Things in the South of the City is an autobiographical work by Lin, a famous female writer. It is a novel set in her life from the age of seven to thirteen, and it is also her masterpiece. It describes a warm and happy Eiko family who lived in a quadrangle in the south of Beijing in the 1920s. Through the childish eyes of the protagonist Eiko, the joys and sorrows of the adult world are shown to the world. There is an unspeakable innocence, but it tells the complicated feelings of the world. Old Stories in the South of the City was selected as "Top 100 China Novels in the 20th Century" by Asia Weekly. It was put on the screen in the 1980s and won many awards such as "Golden Rooster Award for Chinese Movies", which touched a generation. Full of nostalgic tone, it expresses its multi-level emotional color in a natural and seamless way. Everything in the book is so orderly. Slow flowing water, slow camel team, slowly passing crowd, slowly passing years ... The perfect combination of scenery, events, people, things and feelings is like an elegant and implicit poem. More than half a century ago, the little girl Lin followed her parents across the ocean from Taiwan Province Province to Beijing and lived in an alley in the south of Beijing. The battlements in the ancient capital Beijing, camel bells in the sunset, back streets and alleys in downtown areas … all these make Eiko feel novel and fascinated. The crazy woman in front of the guild hall, covered in striped little female companions, thieves haunting in weeds, Ma Song, the wet nurse who accompanied her day and night, and her loving father who was addicted to dying underground ... all played, laughed and lived with Eiko, and their voices and smiles were still there, but they all quietly left. Why is the world so miserable? The unreasonable Eiko pondered for a long time but could not understand.

After more than 50 years, wanderers in Beijing are still obsessed with all this. That faint sadness, that heavy lovesickness, was deeply imprinted in her childhood memory and never faded, which deeply touched me.

Reading "Old Things in the South of the City" makes my heart a little warm, because I rarely see such exquisite things, because she does not deliberately express anything, but calmly depicts old Beijing in the eyes of a child scene by scene, just like living and talking about herself. So relaxed, gentle and honest, so pure and indifferent, so long-lasting, so full of fireworks, but there is no pursuit of fame and fortune.