Things: The boy who poked the roof tiles
The temperature in Lingnan is high. In Nanning, the capital of Guangxi, majestic and tall kapok trees, blazing poinciana and Bauhinia, and gushing bougainvillea and worry-free flowers like waterfalls, all show the unique vitality of the south. Even in the same season, when people in the north wear coats before going out in the morning and evening, it is already hot and humid here. Even the osmanthus flowers that are thought to bloom only in autumn are always in full bloom in the streets here.
The above lush vegetation can be seen from the 12th floor of the library of the Xiangsihu College of Guangxi University for Nationalities. The plants of different heights show various shades of green, and the flourishing branches almost submerge the red roofs of the campus buildings. The news said that it was precisely because of the good ecology here that the world's reddest bird, the American scarlet ibis, appeared by the Xiangsihu Lake this year and settled down.
Time here seems to have its own independent rhythm. Dongxi said that in Guangxi, the heat and maturity of all living things seem to be at double speed. Including stories, they always ferment in this "hot, humid, and easily deteriorating climate, and fantasies and illusions grow like grass." This heat is full of wildness, breeds vitality, and also contains the life code of Dongxi's journey.
In the summer of 1982, Dongxi, a country boy named Tian Dailin at the time, shaved his head into a shiny new shape after he walked out of the examination hall of Tiane Middle School. This was to save water in the mountainous area and to make it more convenient for him to help his parents with farm work when he returned to his hometown.
When his hair gradually grew longer and all the corn in the family was stored in the barn, his brother-in-law, the only one in the family who had attended junior high school, strode into the house and took out an admission letter signed by Hechi Teachers College.
The boy jumped up and yelled. He remembered the moment he accidentally cut his finger, as if commemorating a birth. From that moment on, this child with nothing climbed step by step until he stepped onto the highest podium of the Chinese writer's dream.
When the latest Mao Dun Literature Prize was announced, Dongxi won the award for his work, the emotional reasoning novel Echo. This is also the first time that a Guangxi writer has won this highest honor in the field of Chinese literature. In the award speech, Dongxi's Echo "explores the spiritual state of contemporary urban life in an artistic form that is rich in cognition and expression. In the structure of society and family advancing in parallel, it unravels the complex entanglement of human heart and human nature. Reality and psychology, illusion and truth, distress and redemption, the conflicting dialogue constitutes a drama of the soul, which effectively verifies and confirms the cornerstone of our lives: truth, understanding, love and justice."
When receiving the award, the first words he said were "I am Dongxi, from Guangxi."
This boy who came from a mountain village in Guangxi stood in the spot where the lights were focused. He said that writing "is not just a technical issue, it also includes experience, fate and the thoughts stimulated by fate, just like making soup, you have to simmer it slowly over a low fire. Don't be in a hurry, creation also needs to grow naturally." Just like the banyan tree hanging down its roots to become a small forest, he has grown up to become an elder who supports the younger generation.
After returning with honors, the special exhibition bookcases in the library of Xiangsihu College of Guangxi University for Nationalities are filled with Dongxi's works over the years. This university has also held the "Xiangsihu Literature Competition" since the same year when the writer Dongxi was introduced. Each session has attracted more than 30 colleges and universities in Guangxi to participate, with a total number of participants reaching more than 100,000, discovering many outstanding young creators.
Sitting on the campus, the warm wind carried the laughter of young students on the road. Dongxi talked about a small thing: when he was a child, he helped his father repair the roof of the old house during the slack season. He stayed indoors, holding a bamboo pole and looking up. Whenever he saw a little light, he poked the tiles there, and his father on the roof knew where the light was leaking and needed to be repaired.
This young man, who was unwilling to be ordinary, used literature as a stick to break through the limitations of his life.
Weekend Weekly: The timeline for the gestation of "Echoes" is very long, but the actual writing of it is related to your experience as a resident writer at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in 2017. You mentioned in the postscript of the novel that you were thinking about the beginning of the novel while writing it on a campus in a foreign country. Some people say that separation is the beginning of true love. When you look back to your hometown from a place far away from your hometown, what does the word "hometown" mean to you? How do you introduce your hometown to your Singaporean friends?
Dongxi: Hometown is an enlarged concept. For foreign countries, China is my hometown; for Guangxi, Tian'e County on the edge of the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau is my hometown; relative to Tian'e County, Guli Village is my hometown. The big trees at the entrance of the village, the muddy land after rain, the golden green forest in winter, the wild flowers all over the mountains in summer, the heat rising from the ground, the sound of wind, the chirping of insects, the singing of birds, and the mountain fog that rises from the bottom of the mountain and submerges the roof like a flood on humid days are all my memories of my hometown.
During my stay at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore for half a year, I communicated with more than a dozen students of the advanced training class who came to learn Chinese writing. I also met many overseas Chinese. During the communication, I felt that they had an imagination of Chinese villages, which was based on the text and was a pure and beautiful artistic conception similar to the Border Town written by Shen Congwen.
But for me, the countryside where I actually live is full of difficulties. The farther you are away from it, the more beautiful it seems when you think of it, but when you are really in this landscape, in addition to the beauty, you have to face the reality of the predicament.
Things: First, it is the isolation from the outside world. When I was a teenager, Guli Village had no hardened roads, no water, and no electricity. It took about an hour to walk from my home to the village office, and more than two hours to walk from the village office to the township commune, which later became the township government. The mountain road was very rugged. It is an extremely closed place. This spatial reason always makes me feel that I am an isolated person, living in an unknown corner, unable to hear news from afar, and unable to convey my own voice, so I often feel lonely. At the same time, this isolation is not only in terms of geographical environment, but also brings extreme material scarcity.
My mother told me that my grandmother died of starvation. During the famine, the villagers saw a bright mushroom growing in the woods and picked it to cook. However, the mushroom was poisonous, so in order to survive, they had to drink feces and vomit immediately. When I was a child, I often faced hunger, so I would listen carefully to the loud noise of every grain of food falling to the ground, and I would have a strong fear of every behavior that would return us to poverty.
Weekend Weekly: Where did your imagination of the world outside the village come from?
Dongxi: When I was a teenager, it was already the end of the Cultural Revolution, and sometimes some grassroots cadres and teachers who were engaged in propaganda work would come to our village. I clearly remember that they spoke a different language from us and wore snow-white shirts. The whiteness was very dazzling, representing a kind of modern civilization outside the mountains.
When I was 11, I went to the township government to watch a movie. My friends and I hid it from our parents, skipped dinner, and walked 12 kilometers back and forth on the mountain road. When the movie was over, we found that the path home was completely dark and we could hear the sounds of wild animals in the grass beside the road. We were starving and risked rolling down the hillside. What was the purpose? Just to watch a movie and listen to the outside world.
The villagers all work hard in the fields. I myself have to do farm work during the summer and winter vacations, such as hoeing, weeding and harvesting corn. Sometimes after finishing work during the summer vacation, my arms are tanned and peeling. When I return to school, it takes another month or so for my skin to return to its original color. This kind of high-intensity physical labor stimulates you and makes you realize intuitively that if you want to live a more relaxed life in the future and want to change the status quo, the only way out is to study.
Weekend Weekly: Were there any predecessors or role models around you who changed their destiny through studying?
Dongxi: At that time, my brother-in-law Man was the only one in our village who had finished junior high school. He became a barefoot doctor and was the only one in our family who had been to Nanning, the capital of Guangxi. He often listened to the radio, read newspapers and watched the news. When I finished junior high school, he began to have in-depth exchanges with me. Sometimes when we worked in the fields together, he would tell me about his experiences and the latest news. He later became a doctor at the county epidemic prevention station, and it was achieved step by step. I was the first person in our village to change my destiny by passing the college entrance examination.
Weekend Weekly: Brother-in-law Man, means the youngest brother-in-law, right?
Dongxi: Yes. I have three older sisters. My mother was 46 years old when she gave birth to me. She loved me very much. When I was young, my mother always carried me on her back, whether she went up the mountain to chop firewood or went to the fields to plant rice, or even when she was digging ditches at a water conservancy construction site in the heavy snow. She only put me on her chest when she was carrying stones. Later, when I could walk, she took me wherever she went. It was not until I went to elementary school that she let me out of her sight, as if she was holding a lamp seedling, fearing that I would make the slightest mistake. Once when a teacher visited her home, she killed the last hen without hesitation to entertain the teacher, just to ask the teacher to supervise the children in our village to walk safely across the reservoir after school.
The village is not all idyllic and simple. The Zhang and Li families’ affairs, quarrels, disputes, bullying and oppression are really a daily progress and update, just like a TV series. As long as you prick up your ears, you can listen without an antenna. This high degree of transparency made me know the difficulties of being a human being and the dangers of human feelings too early. Sometimes my mother talked to me while walking, and I was the only listener on the long mountain road. Sometimes I fell asleep while listening, walked a dozen steps in a daze, and woke up with a start when I was about to fall. This relationship between listening and talking profoundly influenced my understanding of novels later.
Weekend Weekly: When you were a child, did you ever think of becoming a writer one day?
Dongxi: I never thought about it. I just vaguely felt that I wanted to go out of the mountains and see the outside world. My parents were illiterate and suffered a lot of hardships in their lives. They also suffered a lot of grievances when getting along with others, so they forced me to study hard.
Weekend Weekly: The writer Faulkner once said: My hometown, which is the size of a postage stamp, is worth writing about. Moreover, even if I write for a lifetime, I cannot write about all the people and events there. So Faulkner spent his entire life writing about his hometown, the "postage stamp-sized" town of Oxford, and placed the fictional "Yoknapatawpha County" in a vast historical landscape. What kind of "postage stamp" is your hometown to you?
Dongxi: Faulkner also said that his feelings towards his hometown were sometimes mixed with love and hate. No one can really leave their hometown. Physically or psychologically, hometown shapes people. For me, the advantages and disadvantages, dialect and way of thinking of my hometown have all entered my blood, forming my personality and my imagination. But my literary ideal did not start from my hometown, but gradually developed after I went to school.
Sometimes, for writers, hometown not only warms them, but also stimulates them in another way. As Hemingway said, the best early training for writers is an unhappy childhood. Colombia once hurt Garcia Marquez, and he was even forced to leave his homeland. Lu Xun experienced the contempt of his neighbors when his family fell from a well-off family to a difficult situation in his hometown, and thus understood the fickleness of the world. Shen Congwen wrote about his hometown with such beautiful writing, but before he became a writer, he had always longed to leave Xiangxi. The shortcomings of a hometown sometimes make a writer successful.
For a writer, no matter where he goes, his writing bears the mark of his hometown. No matter how far he goes, he is writing about his childhood. There are many things that he needs to correct slowly in the process of growing up, keep the good things of his hometown, and slowly remove the shortcomings. If hometown is a "stamp", it is it that "delivered" me out.
Weekend Weekly: You said that when you were a child, your family had to sweep the courtyard and repair furniture on the eve of the Spring Festival. One of your responsibilities was to help your father confirm the location of the roof tiles. Your father climbed up the roof tiles, and you stayed in the house, holding a bamboo pole, looking up and poking wherever you saw light, indicating that your father should repair it. This is a particularly vivid image: a teenager, in a dim room, is the one who looks for a ray of light.
Dongxi: The first ray of hope I found was definitely when I was admitted to Hechi Teachers College.
When I was studying in the junior high school affiliated to the village office, there were only politics, Chinese, and mathematics, but no physics, chemistry, or English. I was admitted to our county high school based on my scores in politics, Chinese, and mathematics. I was the only one among more than 40 classmates who was admitted to the county middle school. After arriving in the county, I met more professional teachers, saw the physics laboratory, saw the chemistry laboratory, and saw English words for the first time. My Chinese teacher was transferred from Shenzhen, and my mathematics teacher was from Guilin. Their teaching level was very high, and I benefited a lot from them.
I then began to seriously read some famous works, such as those of Lu Xun. I remember that the textbook included an article called "Tianshan Xing" written by the writer Bi Ye. The exquisite and gorgeous writing was a real enjoyment for a middle school student. The article was well written and the teacher explained it well. He analyzed the details between the lines and the principles of the layout of the article, which made me think that I should write articles in this way. I wrote essays according to this method and the teacher took them to class to read.
Actually, I have liked Chinese since primary school. Many of my classmates disliked Chinese, especially composition classes. They felt a headache when they were in class. But I was very happy when I was in Chinese class. I thought this class was more interesting than other classes. By the time of the college entrance examination, I had read a lot of novels and began to have some impulses. I thought maybe I could try to be a writer in the future.
Weekend Weekly: What was the first thing that came to your mind and what you wanted to write most?
Dongxi: I want to write about my parents. Why do I have this urge? Because I have a lot of grievances in my heart. I have seen my parents' hard work, diligence and kindness, and I have the urge to express them. I feel lonely, and my heart has fantasies because of longing. At the same time, the affirmation from the people around me also makes me realize that I have a little talent for using words.
Weekend Weekly: I saw a photo of you during your teachers’ college days. You were very thin, wearing a basketball uniform, and looked energetic. You didn’t look quiet enough to be working at a desk all day, but you did have a spirit of not admitting defeat.
Dongxi: I still play basketball and watch basketball games. In 1982, I was admitted to Hechi Teachers College to study Chinese. At that time, I was determined to make a living by writing. I began to squeeze out my spare time to write novels, essays and poems. I also won essay awards and published several articles. After becoming a Chinese teacher in my hometown middle school, I wrote more diligently, submitting one article after another to the newspaper supplement, and my publication rate increased. Because I published articles frequently, I was transferred to the office of the Hechi Regional Administrative Office to write commentary for feature films. Later, I was transferred to the Hechi Daily and Guangxi Daily as a supplement editor. Finally, I decided to find a unit to write full-time.
I love writing and I believe it can be a way out for me. Another very realistic consideration is that writing does not cost much, just a pen and a manuscript paper. Compared with big cities, the resources in mountainous counties are relatively scarce, but everyone is equal in imagination and language expression ability. The life of the lower class and the suffering of the family can sometimes become a rich mine for artists to understand human nature.
Weekend Weekly: You said that writing is like climbing a mountain. The higher the mountain you climb, the better your novel will be. Only in this way can you have the motivation to write. You have also always emphasized that writers who grew up in the 1990s have "innovation obsession". How do you view this internal driving force?
Dongxi: That is our writing gene. Novels need to have magic, something unconventional, a kind of ghostly aura. The more imaginative a novel is, the more magical it is. This is also what distinguishes novels from reportage and correspondence.
In the 1990s, when telephones were just becoming popular, only the director's phone in the office could make long-distance calls. The editors tried every means to make calls, but the director locked the phone. One day, an editor took the phone on her desk, unplugged the line of the director's phone, and plugged it directly into her phone to make a call. I was stunned. A person without imagination can only think about the keypad of the phone, while an imaginative person can replace the locked phone. A good writer must have the imagination to replace the entire phone.
Weekend Weekly: You once said that your confidence in writing comes from the belief that there are no two identical leaves in the world, but there are countless identical psychological feelings. When you write out your inner secrets, the readers/authors will be delighted, angry, and sweat.
Things: Our hearts are like a complicated filing cabinet, with popular reading materials on the top, internal references in the middle, and top-secret documents on the bottom. If I were a lazy person, I would stay on the top layer, copying life, selling common sense, and recording what readers know in words. However, a true writer will continue to drill down until the secrets at the bottom are uncovered. This does not seem to be talent, but courage, just like Kafka dared to turn people into beetles, just like Nabokov said that literary creation is to show the magic of human imagination and creation. Good works are like being able to turn down the filing cabinet layer by layer.
When writing "Life Without Language", I put a blind father, a deaf son and a mute daughter-in-law in the same family to see the feasibility and difficulty of communication. It takes imagination to put the dilemma of not being able to see, hear or speak in the same family. I was only 31 years old when I finished writing this "Tower of Babel". Teacher Wang Meng liked it very much after reading it, and this work won the first Lu Xun Literature Award. When I wrote "Echoes" this time, I spent a lot of time preparing knowledge in criminal investigation and psychology. When a writer wants to write about 10 characters, he has to "become" these 10 people. Each character is a slice of the writer's soul. The slice of the character is shaped by the writer and slowly becomes a full person.
Weekend Weekly: Your early famous works often unfolded in secluded mountain villages and county towns, but in "Echoes", it is completely exploring contemporary urban life, and it does not use Guangxi dialect at all. After reading the whole book, it is almost impossible to see the regional color. It focuses more on the structure of the dual progress of society and family, unraveling the complex entanglement of human hearts and human nature.
Dongxi: After living in the city for nearly 30 years, I am afraid that my feeling about the countryside is no longer as accurate as before. I started writing about city life, and at the same time, the regionality in my articles has also decreased. In the era of globalization, the differences between cities are also shrinking. What I care more about is the commonality of people's hearts that transcends regions. After "Echoes" was adapted into a TV series and broadcast, some female viewers communicated with me and felt that their anxious feelings in marriage were the same as those of the heroines in my works. Some readers also decided to learn a little psychology after reading my novel. This shows that the characters I wrote resonate with readers. So I hope that my creations will maintain a close connection with the changes of the times, reality and the soul. In addition, I am very grateful to the directors and producers I met along the way. They are the best readers of contemporary Chinese novels.
Weekend Weekly: Since 2005, you have been teaching graduate students in film and television literature theory and creation at the School of Media, Guangxi University for Nationalities. In the same year when you were introduced, the University held the "Xiangsi Lake Literature Competition". Now, the competition has developed into a literary brand event in Guangxi, discovering many outstanding young creators, and you also recommend their works to be published in core journals. I thought of a sentence: The child who has been caught in the rain now holds an umbrella for others.
Dongxi: Writing in Guangxi is a natural growth. Although you are under great pressure in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, the media resources and attention in big cities are naturally high, and the ways to publish works are more diverse and smoother. Authors in our marginal provinces often need to endure slowly.
But this is also a good thing. Things that grow quickly tend to decay quickly, while wild things have stronger vitality.
Dongxi, whose real name is Tian Dailin, was born in Tian'e, Guangxi in 1966. He is currently a professor at Guangxi University for Nationalities. He has won the first Lu Xun Literature Award, the "2005 Novelist" Award at the Fourth Chinese Literature Media Festival, the Sixth "Huacheng Literature Award·Outstanding Writer" Award, the 2021 "China Good Book" Award, the 2021 People's Literature Award for Novel, the Fifth Shi Naian Literature Award, the Fourth Wu Chengen Novel Award, etc. His major works include: novels "Echo", "Tampered Fate", "Regrets", "Loud Slap", and short stories "Life Without Language". In 2023, the novel "Echo" won the 11th Mao Dun Literature Award.
