2023-11-05 05:39:00
original title:
Yan Ge: Building a bustling and lonely “Pingle Town” more than 8,000 kilometers away
Chengdu Commercial Daily-Red Star News reporter Mao Yuchuan
“I wrote “Pingle County Chronicle” like a lunatic.” In the conversation with Yan Ge, she said bluntly.
When she started writing, she had been away from her hometown for many years. The distance of more than 8,000 kilometers left her “without any Chinese voice around her.” She needs to build a space to isolate herself from the surroundings, throw herself into it, return to her hometown in literature, and continue to write the story of Pingle Town.
So, outside the room was Norwich, the “Literature Capital of the World” in the English-speaking world, and inside the room was Yan Ge who kept yelling at her in Sichuan dialect. She used this to let her soul cross the mountains and seas and reach the sky above Pingle Town.
She said: “Out of this door, I am just an English speaker. My friends just call me Yan. No one knows that my name is Dai Yuexing (Yan Ge’s real name), and no one knows about Pixian County.”
In this way, after “May Queen”, “Our Family” and “Collection of Sad Stories from Pingle Town”, Yan Ge’s literary “Pingle Universe” has “Pingle County Chronicles”.
01
He couldn’t figure out what his wife was writing
Yan Ge has left her hometown of Pi County (now called Pidu District) for more than ten years, first in the United States, then in Ireland, and now in the United Kingdom. Her creations have slowly switched to English mode, and her English works have been selected for the Irish National The first short story collection in English, Elsewhere, is also on the long list for the Book Award Short Story Prize and will be published this summer.
Her “Pingle County Chronicle” started in 2012, but was abandoned halfway. In the spring of 2021, Yan Ge saw the nearly half-written “Pingle County Chronicle” in the folder again many years ago. She found that facing the once-familiar Pingle Town, she felt as if she “can’t write Chinese anymore, or even completely.” I can’t write Sichuan dialect.” She stared at the computer, and for three or four months, she didn’t know how to write at all.
Yan Ge said that for writers, when the language changes, many things have changed. To write Chinese overseas is like conveying yourself back home with your thoughts. This process is like a painful split personality. “When I was writing English, it was like living a whole life again and being a different writer again; but now that I’m back to write ‘Pingle Town’, it’s a bit like I’ve returned to my previous life and continued writing.”
Later, Utopia republished Yan Ge’s “Pingle Town Trilogy” (“May Queen”, “Our Family”, and “Pingle Town Sad Stories”). The editor sent the reprinted books to the UK, and Yan Ge Watching it over and over again, she also searched for old Chengdu videos and Li Boqing’s “Sanda Pingshu” on the Internet. “It seemed that she had reacquired this language and got to know this person named ‘Yan Ge’ again.”
Creating the story of Pingle Town made Yan Ge feel lonely. For other English novels, she can have in-depth conversations with her writer friends or her husband, who is in the media industry. But “Pingle County Chronicle” cannot. “This is the only thing I can’t communicate with my husband. Every time I tell him about it I get angry.”
After all, “Pingle Town” described in three novels and a collection of short stories is already a complex world full of warmth and warmth of human life and Chinese local culture. Yan Ge doesn’t know how to explain it to his friends in the Western English-speaking world, even if It is translation, and it will also face communication loss due to translation. Over time, “Pingle Town” became a secret for Yan Ge. “All my friends, my editor, and my husband all knew that Yan was writing her Chinese novel, and they would wonder why she was still writing it after taking so long. But No one knows exactly what was written.”
After three months of “reviewing” Chinese and Sichuan dialect, Yan Ge locked himself in a small room and finally wrote the first sentence tremblingly. Regardless of whether he is satisfied or not, he has finally connected to the track leading to Pingle Town. While she was writing, she acted out the plot she had just created over and over again in Sichuan dialect loudly in the room. In her mind, she imagined returning to Pixian County. Which alley in Pixian County did this character go home after buying groceries today? , what that alley looks like, and when I think about it again, I can’t help crying because of homesickness. While crying, I had to perform this drama “Pingle Town” in Sichuan dialect by myself, “It’s like dancing to a master, to arouse this ‘thing’.”
During those days, Yan Ge was writing upstairs, while her husband was cooking downstairs. He couldn’t figure out what his wife was writing, so he just finished the meal and went upstairs to take a peek. If Yan Ge was still in a creative state, he went downstairs silently and settled the children to eat and sleep. Fortunately, Yan Ge has the “own room” described by Virginia Woolf to hide in and create without being disturbed. It was not until the beginning of 2023 that “Pingle County Chronicle” was completed. It was “particularly difficult”. Writing about Pingle Town in a world without Chinese, Yan Ge said, “it took my wildest imagination.”
02
The protagonist actually appeared in “Math Olympiad Class 1995”
Opening “Pingle County Chronicles”, it is easy to find that the protagonist Fu Danxin in this novel actually appeared as a story in Yan Ge’s short story “Math Olympiad Class 1995” (collected in “Pingle Town Sad Stories Collection”) in 2014. Fringe characters have appeared.
In “Math Olympiad Class 1995”, Dan Fu, who is in the third year of junior high school, has starry eyes and sharp eyebrows, and is fair and fair. He has a photographic memory when he reads when he is young. He can memorize hundreds of ancient poems before entering school and can also speak English. He is a “child prodigy” that every parent and teacher cherishes. The most legendary thing is that Fu Danxin took the unified examination for junior high school without even attending elementary school for a day. The teachers were so angry that they deliberately gave him a set of test papers that were difficult for the second and third grades of junior high school. As a result, Fu Danxin not only did it easily and deftly, but also got full marks, causing a sensation in Pingle Town.
However, how can handsome boys and girls not be passionate? At the end of the short story, the protagonist Liu Qihua encountered his daughter and Fu Danxin hugging and kissing under the osmanthus tree in the park. For a moment, he “really heard the sound of his heart breaking… The sound was like someone shouting from the roof of the building.” When she jumped down and hit the ground: ‘Bang!’ Her eyes were white and she couldn’t see anything.”
“Pingle County Chronicle” continues this originally open-ended ending. Later, Liu Qihua’s family took Fu Danxin, who was 14 or 15 years old, to court, accusing him of “molesting a young daughter.” Not to mention that the Fu family lost tens of thousands, but the important thing is that this matter made a big fuss, and the Fu family’s reputation was completely stained. His father, Fu Qihong, was transferred from the county government office to the Qingshui Yamen of the county magistrate’s office. He was so angry that he threw bowls at home and beat his wife during the day. He couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night, and he wanted to arrest Fu Danxin at every turn and write a review. “Prodigy” Danxin Fu could only attend a vocational high school in the end. After graduation, he opened a shop selling computer accessories.
“Writing this short story is to help me better understand the characters.” For Yan Ge, the “Collection of Sad Stories from Pingle Town” is like the fragments of “Pingle Town” she spelled out. “It’s like ‘opening a map’. This is one of my writing habits.” Yan Ge said that if she wanted to write a novel, she would first have a story concept of “what is the protagonist/main line”, but she did not Write about the center of the story immediately, but start writing from the periphery. For example, “Math Olympiad Class 1995” is a prequel to “Pingle County Chronicle”, while “Trinity Tea Party” (a short story also included in “Pingle Town Sad Stories”) is an experiment in ancient Chinese writing for “Pingle County Chronicle”.
Yan Ge calls himself an experiential writer. When she writes about characters, she does not write and charge for the purpose of “writing characters”, but pretends to be him, and then places the characters in the torrent of fate, imagining their reactions to the things around them, and how their life experiences have shaped them. “It’s like the growth experience of each of us in real life. The way we grow into the people we are now is also our reaction to the surrounding environment.”
“What Danxin Vo is talking about is the fall of a genius. There is a contrast between his childhood and his later life. He was first lifted to the sky, and then suddenly fell. Now in his 30s, he is basically in the state of ordinary beings. But In his body and memory, he still has the feeling of being lifted up to the sky as a child, and he may particularly want to return to that feeling. This may be his struggle, he is now a person walking in the dirt.” Yan This is how Song talks about her Danxin Fu.
But it is sad to say that if a world like Pingle Town really existed, in 2014, the child prodigy who was still praised by the stars in “Math Olympiad Class 1995” did not know that his aura at this time would become a shackles in the future. The rest of his life is destined to be miserable.
03
Reading a story is like a storyteller waving his fan and commenting on life in the play
Although the story is a continuation of Pingle Town, the writing method is very different from before. Previous works, whether short or long, mostly used a market tone, mixed with Sichuan dialect and some swear words, which were lively and lively at first glance; this “Pingle County Chronicle” is full of “three words” from beginning to end. The writing method of “Er Pai” is consistent with the narrative tone of Ming and Qing scripts.
First, “Dear readers, take a look at Ye Xiaoxuan’s idiotic appearance,” and then “To be fair,” and then interspersed with common sayings, rhymed poems, and limericks, saying, “Look at this: you can’t make enemies without fighting, and you can’t get married. “Good sons and daughters come in pairs, and crazy parents care about each other without saying a word.” He also said, “I want to cuddle up with him, but I know that he has been in countless scenes. We have only been apart for an hour and a half, and it is like three summers and ten frosts.” When reading a story, it seems like a storyteller is waving his fan and commenting on life in the play.
“When I started writing “Pingle County Chronicles”, I was already abroad. In those years, I had been in the Western literary system, but the expression methods in Chinese and English are different, including many novels nowadays, there will be a kind of ‘translation’ “Ti”, borrowing the set of rules from Western novels. I just thought, what is our Chinese language? What is a real Chinese novel?”
The answer Yan Ge came up with was Ming and Qing novels. This way of writing can not only deepen the literary quality of the novel, but also simulate a storytelling context, distinguishing the story from novels in recent years that are generally like social news. “The novel written in this way will be more ‘elegant’ and more depressing. But it is actually in line with the identity of the protagonist – a traditional literati in modern society.”
Talking about the poems that appeared frequently in the article, Yan Ge laughed: “This is so difficult to write! Sometimes I sit there for a whole day and can’t even make up a single poem!”
Putting aside whether the writing is wonderful or not, the emphasis on confrontation in Guangrhythm poetry troubled Yan Ge who was learning it from scratch. “I search a lot of questions like ‘how to write quatrains’ every day. But this part also gives me a special sense of accomplishment. For example, if I write a poem with neat meter one day, I will feel very happy. I also like it Do challenging things, and if it’s not difficult, I won’t do it.”
This is exactly the same as Yan Ge’s original intention of writing “Pingle County Chronicle”. After finishing “Our Family” with an outward style in one go, Yan Ge decided to write a more challenging topic. He wanted to write about a character who “tucks in” in “Pingle County Chronicles”, “like an ugly monster.” Or it’s easy to write about a beautiful woman, but it’s difficult to write about an ordinary person with no distinctive facial features.” During this process, Yan Ge once thought, “I don’t have the energy to write it anymore, I might really not be able to finish it.” But in the end, from the initial conception in 2012 to 2023, the story of “Pingle County Chronicles” took a full The 11-year period came to an end, and she said with a smile: “Until the end, I feel that my sense of Sichuan dialect has come back.”
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