Rebirth 2004: A lone figure in the literary world

Chapter 394: Add Salt to the Readers' Wounds
Zhang Chao had stopped answering phone calls casually, but he had to answer this one.

The person who made this call was none other than Zhang Chao's teacher Yu Hua.

The great writer who wrote To Live, Xu Sanguan Selling Blood, and Brothers asked in a sad voice, "I have asked the editorial department of your Youth Magazine, and they said that you discovered Xu Lizhi, and you also proposed to set up this special issue of poetry.

After reading it, I felt uncomfortable all day... Where did you find him? "

Zhang Chao had no choice but to report to the teacher about his trip to Shenzhen to look for materials and his encounter with Xu Lizhi. He talked for more than ten minutes, but Yu Hua did not feel annoyed at all and listened to his story with great interest.

After Zhang Chao said, "This is probably what happened. Xu Lizhi is still working on the assembly line at the Foxconn factory," Yu Hua let out a long sigh and was silent for a while before saying, "I didn't expect... I didn't expect..."

What did you not expect? Yu Hua did not say anything, and Zhang Chao did not ask. The tacit understanding between the two of them made everything clear without words.

Compared to Yu Hua, Zhang Chao has a deeper understanding because of his memories from his previous life. The rapid economic development is the strongest pulse of this era and also the loudest voice.

It has created far more wealth for most people in this society than ever before and has changed the fate of hundreds of millions of people. No one can deny this.

However, in the torrent, there are indeed some neglected individuals or groups, whose pain is often ignored, and they are either dismissed by utilitarians as the noise of losers, or warned by pragmatists as attempts to deny the mainstream of society.

After all, if you use a long stick to knock a sparrow's nest down from a tree, the sparrow will chirp a few times - not to mention that it's a human.

Part of the mission of literature is to listen, to relay, and even to shout through a loudspeaker to tell others: “Here is a group of people like this…”

It is undeniable that because Xu Lizhi is a sensitive poet, all the pain is magnified doubly for him.

His co-workers would only curse the boss, manager, workshop director, pipeline... "Damn it" behind his back, and then extend their hopes and comfort themselves by saying "save enough money to go home and start a small business"; or simply numb themselves with alcohol and stimulate themselves with gambling...

This crude anger is essentially a dissipation of pain.

But Xu Lizhi would not do any of these.

With a poet's keenness, he perceived that hidden beneath the dull and uninteresting life day after day, the real pain people felt was the ruthless consumption of young souls - even if the youth and dreams beneath the souls were considered cheap or even meaningless.

These fragments of souls crushed by the times reflect a colder and more cruel fact: no one cares about their suffering, and everyone is concerned about the growing numbers and increasingly abundant material things.

People need a sense of existence and a sense of belonging.

However, due to the special attribute of modern cities where "everyone is an outsider", coupled with rapid development and frequent changes, the sense of existence and belonging is easily deprived.

This is one of the reasons why many years later, Eason Chan’s song "Fukua", which was released as early as 2005, suddenly became popular and widely spread, and it was not just because of his "exaggerated" singing.

As the lyrics say:
[If someone asks me/I will tell them/But no one comes/I am waiting to the point of frustration/I have something to say/But I can’t find the words/My mood is like a bottle cap waiting to be opened/But my mouth is growing moss/The quieter I am in the crowd/The less I am paying attention to…]

So although Xu Lizhi's poetry seems to be just venting the pain of himself or the group of assembly line workers, it also touches the hearts of many people.

When reading [Every time I open a window or a wooden door/I am like a dead person/slowly pushing open the lid of a coffin.] for the first time, these readers of Youth Non-fiction may still have a curious mentality, trying to peek into the lives of a group of young people who are generally regarded as "losers" through the cracks pried open by Xu Lizhi's poems.

But when they read the second, third, fourth, etc. poem, their hearts seemed to be grabbed by an invisible big hand.

They were cut by the sharp language of poetry.

A line of poetry is a wound.

When reading [Today's work should not be too heavy/and not too long/otherwise, to cross this threshold/it will take at least a hundred years of courage], a white-collar worker who had just worked at Yenching for two years closed the magazine.

He looked out the window of the small rental house he rented. He couldn't see the moon in the sky, but only the exhaust vents of other people's range hoods.

It was almost 11pm, and he had just gotten home half an hour ago. In addition to working overtime at the company, there was also the long commute. As the city grew larger and more magnificent, people's tolerance for traffic distances increased.

The current small house costs him one-third of his income to pay rent; even so, he still has to spend one-twelfth of his life commuting. Even so, his colleagues still envy him - because some of them live farther away.

Xu Lizhi's poetry suddenly made him feel that his daily life was actually no different from that of the poet - just one was screwing screws and the other was making reports.

But what is the essential difference between a life that is bound between two points and a straight line?

A teacher and head teacher at a key middle school closed the magazine when he read [I only look forward to the gray payslip on the 10th of every month/to give me belated comfort/for this I must smooth out my edges and my language/refuse to be absent from work, refuse sick leave, refuse personal leave/refuse to be late, refuse to leave early…]

She looked at her desk, which was piled with homework, lesson plans, work summaries, class meeting plans, and home-school contact records...

Her husband was already fast asleep, snoring softly; she could only light a dim lamp, and even dared not to put too much effort into marking the students' boxes. In the outer room, her mother-in-law and the child were sleeping.

She thought of "the most glorious profession under the sun", "the performance of the head teacher fluctuates according to the students' monthly test scores", "Teacher Liu, I'll leave my child to you", "What's the point of reading more books? You still have to be a teacher to earn a low salary?" "My father is working in Guangdong and can't come back. Can my grandmother do that?"...

Xu Lizhi's poetry made her feel that the meaning of life was suddenly erased, and everything was left with only gray polyphonic music in an endless cycle, with only an accentuated sound when she saw her salary.

She shook her head silently, not knowing whether she was making fun of herself or trying to drive these distracting thoughts out of her mind.

……

Then almost all the readers roared: "Youth is so inhumane. Is there anyone who wants to cause trouble for others like this?"

Xu Lizhi's poems are like a dagger pulled out from his own body, dripping with blood, and cruelly swung at the readers.

These readers, like masochists, would hide away (close the magazine) when they couldn’t stand the stabs, but after a while they would actively face the blade and enjoy the feeling of being stabbed. So this issue of Youth Non-Fiction was opened and closed again and again by everyone. Every time it was closed, the empty, staring eyes on the cover seemed to torture the readers: “Why don’t you even have the courage to look directly at reality?”

Yeah, why? Tell me why, baby, why?

When I open the magazine again, I can't help but turn to Xu Lizhi's poetry special and continue to enjoy the "pleasure" of being stabbed by reality.

This sour and refreshing feeling can make one's soul ascend to heaven!
What no one expected was that China's contemporary poetry, which was destroyed by the intellectuals themselves, was made to realize again by an assembly line worker with only a high school education that it has always been around us.

After all, just two years ago, the "Pear Blossom Poetry Controversy" caused the public to almost completely lose interest in contemporary poetry.

[If I can write poetry by pressing enter, then I am also a poet]

But Xu Lizhi told everyone that contemporary poetry has not completely entered the ivory tower and become the exclusive domain of a few cultural elites; at least there is someone like him who is willing to inject a full soul into poetry.

Almost overnight, Xu Lizhi's poems were typed into characters on the screen by enthusiastic netizens and spread all over the country through the vast world of the Internet.

Almost all netizens who read his poems were moved by these verses containing blood and tears. At the same time, it also aroused many people's thoughts: If an assembly line worker can do it, why can't I?
The torch of poetry, which had been fading among the masses, is being rekindled.

An ordinary peasant woman living in a rural area of ​​Hubei, who also has only a high school education and suffers from cerebral palsy, saw Xu Lizhi's poems on the BBS.

The poetic spirit that had burned to ashes ten years ago suddenly sparked. She begged her friends to register a QQ account for her and opened a QQ space named "Fang Xi". She then used her only hand that could steadily type on the keyboard to write the first line of poetry:

[When I noticed my body, it was old and powerless/Many parts of it were hurting in turn: stomach, arms, legs, fingers/I suspected that I had done many evil things in this world/and spoke ill of the flowers that had bloomed. …]

She spent two hours typing this short poem of more than a hundred words, which delayed her housework and earned her a severe scolding from her family.

But she smiled - even though to outsiders it looked uglier than crying.

……

Everything that happened within a few days after the release of this issue of "Youth·Non-Fiction" is why Yu Hua called Zhang Chao.

This writer, who is good at writing about suffering and violence, suddenly found that he did not understand today's China, which made him feel a certain panic.

The main theme of suffering is no longer hunger, poverty and those "chaotic evils", and violence does not only come from abused and distorted power.

Yu Hua seemed to have discovered a "new world"; the literary elements contained in it almost made this veteran who had been writing novels for more than 20 years jump up from his chair.

Xu Lizhi's poetry and Zhang Chao's commentary made Shenzhen's industrial area attract him like a magnet.

At the beginning of the call, Yu Hua did not blame Zhang Chao for making him sad about the "Xu Lizhi Poetry Special" launched by "Youth·Non-fiction". He just regretted leaving the sadness to the readers. It would be more satisfying if he did it himself...

At this moment, Yu Hua wished he could buy a plane ticket to Shenzhen immediately, dress casually like Zhang Chao, blend in with the group of migrant workers, and experience the world full of the cold smell of conveyor belts and the pungent "smell of blood".

He had not really felt the pulse of the times for too long. After writing Brothers, he clearly felt that his writing inspiration was running out.

Yu Hua is now in a high position. He is no longer the newcomer in the literary world who used to sit shirtless in a student dormitory without even a fan, competing with Mo Yan to see who could write faster.

Now, wherever he wants to go, someone will arrange it for him, and he will be received wherever he goes... He is even a "Knight" - the Knight of Arts and Letters of France.

Yu Hua knew that if no fresh creative blood was injected into his veins, he would enter a long "Middle Ages" and even have to go back to the era he had already written countless times to search for material.

But now he couldn't move - it was June, graduation season, and he had many graduation defenses to host; he had countless final meetings to attend...

Literary critics were simply going crazy with joy. Just as Zhang Chao came up with "Future Realism", Xu Lizhi came out and pushed modern poetry back into the center of public attention. Commentators who had been silent for a long time were almost typing away on their keyboards, desperately evaluating and analyzing the two's works in major media outlets.

This time, most people have learned their lesson and no longer find fault with their works. Instead, they try their best to "serve the readers" so that the general public can more clearly grasp the connotations behind their works.

After experiencing the "Zhang-Bai dispute", domestic literary critics have also understood one thing: there is no need to put purely theoretical academic disputes on the public stage, otherwise it is hard to say whose blood will be shed.

To give full play to the basic functions of literary criticism - to help readers understand the theme and meaning of the work, to analyze the structure and techniques of the work, to evaluate the artistic achievements of the work, to explore the relationship between the work and the times... to first say something that ordinary readers will like to hear, so that the entire industry can have a future.

Another half month passed before the wounds that Zhang Chao and Xu Lizhi had jointly torn open for the readers finally stopped bleeding a little.

On July 2008, 7, Contemporary was published on time. Readers who subscribed to the magazine were shocked to find that the "Recommended Works" on the cover of this issue only had a single line of words:

"Letter from a Stranger" - Zhang Chao
What the hell is this? Why is there no news at all? Is Zhang Chao planning to take turns to "visit" China's "Four Great Dan Actresses of Pure Literature"? What kind of strange habit is this of a great writer? Is the next book "October"?
But despite their doubts, readers couldn't wait to open the magazine, find "Letter from an Unknown Woman" directly, and start reading it eagerly.

As soon as I saw it, I saw a gloomy description——

[The cicadas in July are like rusty steel saws, pulling back and forth in the humid air. Xiao Yang squatted on the threshold of the main hall, watching the cigarette ash fall from his fingers. Grandma's portrait was yellowed by the low-quality incense and candles, and the edges of the photo frame were covered with mold spots, which made it look like a relic prepared twenty years in advance. The mourners had long dispersed, leaving only my uncle in the inner room counting the funeral money. The sound of coins colliding mixed with dialect curses crushed the last bit of sorrow into melon seed shells all over the floor.

Under the altar in the mourning hall, a tabby cat was curled up, licking spilled rice wine. Xiao Yang suddenly remembered that this cat was raised by his grandmother when she was alive. She always liked to lie on the cement wall and watch him being hit with stones by wild children at the alley. At that time, his grandmother would rush out with a bamboo broom, and the clacking sound of her tattered shoes stepping on the moss was exactly the same as the rhythm of the rain leaking from the eaves at this moment.

"Get away from me!" My uncle kicked over a plastic stool, and the copper lock on the chest of drawers jingled. "What's the password to your grandmother's bank account? Did she really not tell you? The police station said the death certificate..."

This novel is also not long, only a little over 2 words, but after reading the end, many people angrily threw the magazine to the ground and said, "Zhang Chao, will he ever stop? Why is he rubbing salt into our wounds?

Isn't it illegal for writers to abuse people with words?"

(End of this chapter)