Rebirth 2004: A lone figure in the literary world

Chapter 327: "Hometown" is the root of restlessness

Zhang Chao stood by the Huangpu River for a long time, until the lights came on and the flow of people here began to densely populate. Then he returned to the hotel room, turned on his laptop, and prepared to start writing.

This laptop is no longer the Sony I bought in 2004, but a ThinkPad. The CPU model has also changed from "Pentium" to "Core", the memory is as high as 1024M, and the hard drive is a massive 160GB.

He has been running around for the past two years and finally decided to buy something sturdier.

After returning from the United States, he has been writing the novel "Homeland" intermittently. Recently, he has basically finished his work and plans to complete the entire novel before going to Japan.

Previously, Zhang Chao used "'Memory Album Organizer' Gu Feng delves into the spiritual world of his client Lin Xiaohai, and sees a large number of 'Lin Rongsheng' imagined and fictionalized by Lin Xiaohai in his memory" as the first dimension of the novel.

This belongs to the "spatial dimension" of the concept of "hometown". The "hometown" of Chinese immigrants has never been a simple geographical coordinate, but a cultural root that follows the migration and growth of footsteps.

It is like the aerial roots of a banyan tree, which can grow wildly in foreign soil while always maintaining nutrient supply with the mother tree.

When the people of Fuhai went to Southeast Asia, they would always worship the statue of Mazu, throw divination blocks, and carry their family tree with them, compressing their "homeland" into a portable survival kit.

When you make money, you go back to your hometown and build a big house first. This is to use money and material things to nourish this cultural root and prevent it from withering due to distance.

However, this kind of "repaying the debt" has resulted in a result - the places with the most immigrants leaving are often the most stubborn and conservative places in terms of culture and spirit.

When the successful immigrants return to their hometowns as idols amidst loud drums and gongs, blasting firecrackers and huge crowds of people, the rust on the already solidified cultural shackles is often deepened.

Those false symbols of nostalgia made of material things have become tools for maintaining clan culture. The remittances and exquisite gifts from foreign lands have formed a reverse "cultural colonization" of reality.

This was also what puzzled Zhang Chao himself during his childhood and adolescence - why could a few pieces of American chocolate make a classmate become the "king" of the class for a short period of time?
So he decided to continue digging and create the second dimension of this novel - the "time dimension".

[…Gu Feng’s fingers paused in the air for a few seconds.

This was an operational error that the system absolutely did not allow, but when he looked at the fragment of memory suspended in front of his eyes—the ten-year-old boy sitting on the cement elephant slide, the chocolate wrapper sticking out of his pocket was melting, and the dark brown syrup was slowly crawling over the rusty slide like asphalt.

——A strange sense of familiarity pierced the rational barrier that he was so proud of.

"The emotion is judged to be negative, it is recommended to block it." After waiting for his instructions for a long time, the system issued a prompt sound.

The voice resounded with the solemnity of a church organ, leaving no room for doubt or even hesitation.

He should have waved his left hand as usual, making the dusk of Chinatown in 1987 disappear like a pencil drawing erased by an eraser. But some instinct beyond the procedure made him extend the little finger of his right hand, which was the only missing part of his body, the knuckle he lost in the crack of his own door ten years ago.

The virtual space suddenly trembled.

The boy turned his head, and the melted chocolate dripped from his palm, gathering into a sticky stream on the street. Gu Feng was surprised to find silver spots floating in the syrup - they were the fragments of checks that Lin Rongsheng had sent back from 1972 to 2001, and there were faint fingerprints on the back of each check.

"Are you waiting for dad too?" The boy's Mandarin was soft with a Fuhai accent.

Gu Feng's rationality gave him a high degree of calmness, but also made him suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder - at this moment, his obsessive-compulsive disorder began to act up.

He tried to arrange the silver coin-like check fragments in chronological order, but suddenly the virtual space formed by this memory began to fold like waves. He vaguely saw the blood splashed when his little finger was pinched by the door when he was eight years old.

That was the result of his father violently slamming the door...

"Warning, the hippocampal cell loss rate has exceeded the threshold." The system's organ sound began to make noise.

He grabbed a fragment of memory in the torrent of data. It was a scene he had never seen before: Lin Rongsheng was curled up in the cold storage of a Chinatown restaurant, gnawing on frozen fish balls under the green light of the emergency light. The ice slag cut his gums, and blood flowed down, quickly solidifying into thin red flakes - that was the shape of the blood that flowed on the threshold after Gu Feng's finger was cut off...

"This is not the client's memory." Gu Feng felt his temples begin to heat up, "This is... mine?"

The system's collapse was more violent than expected.

When Gu Feng regained consciousness, he was kneeling on a beach covered with memory fragments. The tide came with the smell of salty sea water, and broke his tightly clenched right hand - he found that his fingers had become complete.

"So you are also a lost child." Twenty-two-year-old Lin Xiaohai appeared on the shore at some point, his pale groom's makeup turned into muddy gray by the sea water. The plastic red flower on his chest had begun to fade, and the cheap paint that spread made his chest look like it had been shot.

Gu Feng suddenly realized something. He untied his tie and found that the third button of his shirt was a micro memory crystal, which contained the dying memories of 327 past customers. When he tried to pry open the crystal with his fingernails, Lin Xiaohai laughed sharply.

"It's useless. We've already been marinated." The groom's red lips suddenly split to his ears, revealing his throat and tongue suspended by muscles and fascia. "It's like the chocolate my dad sent me. Do you think you can taste the cocoa beans by licking off the sugar coating? Dream on! It's covered with rust from the Chinatown sewers, ink from the immigration forms, and..."

Gu Feng popped the chip into his mouth——

A miracle happened. As the mouthpiece exposed to the air chewed on the chip, the wafers embedded in the flesh and blood suddenly began to play images: in the dark cabin of the container in 1911, a man who looked like Lin Xiaohai was carving a portrait of a woman and a child on the wall of the container with his fingernails;

In 1988, Lin Xiaohai spread melted chocolate on his homework paper to form a big smiley face...

At this moment, the memory crystal in Gu Feng's spine was growing a blue data stream like the aerial roots of a banyan tree, which was piercing into the ground in front of him little by little.

"It turns out that we once shared the same memory bank, and both of us have mental cracks about a father who suddenly disappeared from our lives..." Gu Feng finally smiled. He pulled off the lining of his suit, revealing the flickering nerves under his skin...

Amid the roar of the system crashing completely, Gu Feng did something that violated all training rules. He did not delete Lin Xiaohai's memory, but pressed his little finger into the red flower on the groom's chest.

In an instant, countless memories flew across the virtual electronic sky like a flock of startled egrets.

...]

In the film "Homeland", Gu Feng is not just a tool. He is not only the anchor connecting the past and the present, the spirit and the reality, but also the irreplaceable emotional light of human beings to human beings in the context of a highly intelligent era.

Gu Feng's obsessive-compulsive disorder-like orderliness (memories must be organized in time) and the chaotic memories of schizophrenia patient Lin Xiaohai form a corresponding mirror image - symbolizing that modern society uses rationality and discipline to cut out the chaos and violence of the countryside. The loss of control in the clip implies the essence of Chinese "countryside" that refuses to be disciplined by modern society.

Zhang Chao attempts to use this method to deconstruct the unspoken rules of the creation of "immigrant literature" from the perspective of Western culture for a long time.

First, "homesickness" is packaged as some kind of oriental wonder (such as Chinatown lanterns, women's cheongsam, opium dens, pigtails, etc.) to satisfy the West's desire to peek at exotic customs;

Then there is the over-exaggeration of the sense of division in cultural conflicts (such as the intergenerational war between mothers and daughters in Chinese-American female writer Amy Tan's novel "The Joy Luck Club"), and the neglect of the initiative of the Chinese community.

In order to break this narrative cage, Zhang Chao abandoned the traditional linear narrative and let the story of three generations unfold not in the flow of time, but through Gu Feng's leaping exploration in the memory album.

Because the Chinese people's perception of "hometown" is not passed down in an orderly manner from generation to generation, but rather presents a state of continuous superposition of many generational memories.

In the same time and space, local villagers and immigrants from different generations have completely different feelings and understandings of "hometown".

The "hometown" of the local villagers is constantly disintegrated and reconstructed under the ever-changing tide of the times, even if they resist stubbornly; while the "hometown" of the immigrants is solidified into an unchanging landscape in their paranoid watch.

The so-called "Chinese tradition" in Chinatown is actually the product of the Chinese people's reconstruction of the local area, and "Homeland" aims to capture the energy of this creative betrayal - when successful "overseas Chinese leaders" return to their hometown, what they often see are carefully packaged traditions and performed persistence.

The moment Zhang Chao figured out the core of this part of the novel, "Homeland" completed the targeted blasting of the cage of "immigrant literature".

The characters created by Zhang Chao do not perform angry roars or despairing sobs about cultural conflicts. Instead, they are just a group of Chinese people who, in an absurd yet solemn way, practice redefining "hometown" in their eternal drift.

This narrative does not seek certification from Western literary theory, but rather aims to let the world hear the roar of the self-evolution, self-antagonism, and self-rebirth of China's cultural genes.

Of course, in Zhang Chao's mind, the Chinese immigrant culture has not yet been exhausted in the "time dimension". He does not want to simply sing the praises of struggle and rebirth under suffering, nor does he want to repeat the values ​​of his teacher Yu Hua's "To Live".

As a native of Fuhai, he has a deeper thought about this - to some extent, time has refined the trauma of immigrants into a kind of "currency of suffering", which, driven by the Chinese people's strong sense of morality and special religious views, circulates in the spiritual market from generation to generation.

The inhuman torture on the smuggling boats is often interpreted as "saving blessings for future generations", which is tantamount to a kind of painful savings; and when Lin Rongsheng sent the check, he added the note "No matter how much suffering Dad has to endure in the United States, it is worth it", which actually became an emotional loan shark lent to his descendants.

When successful overseas Chinese donate money to support the construction of their hometowns, they are essentially exchanging their physical suffering and the value of money for a greater and more noble stake in their family's local ethics.

[When Lin Xiaohai locked the 47th registered letter into the iron box, the sea breeze was so wet and salty that it choked him. His father Lin Rongsheng's handwriting became more and more blurred year by year. The latest letter even wrote "New York" as "New Town", but the remittance slip was neatly printed with $2000. He arranged all the envelopes on the floor according to the postmark date, like he was putting together a puzzle without a pattern.

My mother burned incense in front of the altar at home. "Your father is a tailor in New York," she always said, even though the address on the envelope had long since changed from a construction site tent to a cheap hotel and then to an apartment on an unremembered street.

Lin Xiaohai suddenly grabbed the latest letter and rushed to the ancestral hall, letting the incense burn the typo of "New Town".

[…When Lin Xiaohai’s son Lin Shu connected his father’s brain to the global memory trading market, he discovered that Lin Xiaohai’s most valuable memory fragment was the scene of “being bullied by senior classmates and protecting the chocolate tin box sent by his father during a robbery.” He used an algorithm to amplify the sadness index of this fragment, making it a specimen of cultural suffering in the emotion trading market, attracting overseas Chinese to bid.

At this point, physical pain is transformed into some kind of religious sacred object. 】

Zhang Chao uses sharp brushstrokes to cut through the sentimental cloak of the "immigrant feedback" narrative, revealing its underlying pragmatic logic, which is a bit cold - but only in this way can the novel be pushed into the third dimension - the "ethical dimension."

After gaining a deep understanding of the culture of Chinatown, Zhang Chao discovered that the ethical system of Chinese immigrants did not rely on the gaze of God or the deterrence of the law, but achieved a certain neighborhood autonomy through the internal circulation of moral shame.

The ancestral halls that exist in every Chinatown, on the one hand, carry the traditions of clan culture passed down through blood, and on the other hand, are also a combination of court and jury.

Traditionally, Chinatown gangs have had an inseparable relationship with ancestral halls.

[…When Lin Shu opened the notebook, the musty smell startled the swallows on the beams. Below the name of his grandfather "Lin Rongsheng", where the date of birth and death should have been recorded, there were densely packed copies of remittance slips. The latest page was the diagnosis of his father Lin Xiaohai from the mental hospital. Under the photo of Lin Xiaohai was a piece of candy wrapper, which Lin Shu peeled off - it was an American brand of chocolate tin foil, all the wrinkles smoothed out.

"Your grandfather's debt has been paid off." Aunt handed over a tin box of chocolates, which was filled with unopened letters. "Before your father fell ill, he told you not to open them until he's gone." Lin Shu discovered that all the envelopes were marked "To Father," but the postmark dates were concentrated in the ten years after Lin Rongsheng's death.

The oldest one was written in crayon: "Today I learned multiplication. The teacher said that the 2000 yuan you sent back nine years ago is worth 18000 yuan now, right?" The newest one was written in fountain pen, with ink soaking through the letter paper: "Yesterday I was elected as a director of the hometown overseas Chinese association. They said that you sneaked across the border to pave the way for your descendants... In fact, you just wanted your family to have enough food, right?"

Firecrackers were heard outside the ancestral hall. Lin Shu put the candy wrapper back to its original place and suddenly realized that those remittance slips were not debt slips, but epitaphs written by his father to his grandfather. Each number was crying out: "Look, I have lived a life worthy of your suffering."

...]

When Zhang Chao finished writing this passage, light was already seeping in through the gap in the curtains - he had actually written for the entire night without realizing it, and no author has ever worked as hard as he did.

Zhang Chao stood up, walked to the window, waved his hand and drew open the curtains - he saw that the morning sun had climbed up the Shanghai city skyline, spewing its light in the mist.

He suddenly realized:

The "homeland" spirit of Chinese immigrants has never been the product of passive response to external culture, but a set of ancient cultural genes with their own mutation program. Just like the sun that is constantly undergoing nuclear fusion, its rise and fall is determined only by the heavy elements within itself.

Therefore, it can grow violently in any era through constant self-exploitation and reorganization - just like the words that Lin Xiaohai repeatedly scrawled during his mental illness:

【“Hometown is not for nostalgia, but for exile.”】

The novel "Homeland" will ultimately prove that the core characteristic behind the Chinese people's attachment to their native land yet their constant migration is that they never seek to "arrive at their hometown", but instead refine exile itself into a new cultural matrix.

The most extreme escapers become the most thorough defenders of their hometown!

Although Zhang Chao had only written about one-third of the novel, he had already thought of the ending of the novel. It was a short poem like a quatrain:

[“Homeland” is the root of restlessness,
Penetrating the frozen soil of all ages,

Bearing fruit that does not belong to any land...】

(Fuck, it’s so hard to write original works…)
(End of this chapter)