Author: Tan Jingru
Editor in charge: Xie Wanfei
WeChat editor: Wang Xinyuan.
When we discuss the aesthetic construction of a piece of countryside or a city in literature, there are no more than two ways of writing: one is to scatter the fate of the "little self" on the geographical space, and use the journey of the individual walking in the river of time to measure the tolerance, absorption or rejection of people by the locality; The second is to bury one's soul deep under the earth, using rivers, mountains, plains, and seashores as the radiation, and digging out the depth of the land in his writing—this is often the boundless dream that human beings have for a piece of land. Under the pen of Liu Zhenyun and Zhang Chengzhi, the former gave birth to a homeland where human intelligence and divine thought are in harmony; The latter's act of dreaming for the land is enough to remind us of a series of independent place names: Macondo, Yoknapatawfa, and the northeastern ...... of GaomiIf you could add a name to them and find an accessible place to stay in the anxiety and loneliness of the present, then "On the banks of the Ana" would be the perfect fit.
The charm of the frontier, the plate embedded in the map and the farthest boundary touched by the state power, lies not only in the "periphery-center" binary structure constructed by the people who write the frontier for the reader, but also in how the writer who was born and grew up in Si walks out of this structure with an unpretentious attitude, builds an unfamiliar meaning in the familiar system, and does not lose his familiarity in the unfamiliar surroundings. For most people, the "strangeness" of Xinjiang stems from the climate, landform and language of the land, which are very different from those of the Central Plains. Xinjiang photography in China National Geographic magazine, those snow-capped mountains like animal ridges, river valleys full of sea buckthorn, and sandbanks embedded in yellow and green seem to flash in dreams from time to time, but they are not as common as Yan Zhao's tragic songs and the lewd rain in the south of the Yangtze River. Writers such as Liu Liangcheng and Li Juan have long been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people in the aesthetic construction of this vast land, and the Xinjiang they tell always has a mottled texture, where there are fragrant grasses and green mountains everywhere - people's hearts are always inclined here like the snow on the roof of a house in winter, as if they are in Xinjiang, so they move with the sky, sensitive and complicated.
In contrast to the above, Asher's "On the banks of the Ana River" is not obsessed with building the joy of the individual's heart, but her Xinjiang carries the arduous tasks given to local families and individuals by the times, and all kinds of interesting souls gather here to write a double epic of the frontier and the heart.
At the beginning of the story, tens of thousands of people flocked here in the years of passion, the fertile land on both sides of the river was opened up as farms, and the Corps, locals, construction experts, and intellectual youths gathered in the valleys on both sides of the river to pay tribute to the voice of the times they admired.
The core of the story revolves around two families of immigrants: Ming Shuangquan, the commander of the Fourth Company from Shandong, and his wife Li Xiuqin, and Shi Yongqing, a doctor from Hunan, and his wife, Cheng Xinxiu, a water conservancy expert. The Ming family has 3 children, the eldest son Ming Zhongqi, the second son Ming Qian'an, and the daughter Mingzhu. Among the three, Ming Zhongqi enlightened Meng earlier, and his knowledge and talent are also quite high, and he is determined to become a person like Teacher You, who has influenced his life, to stay on the farm to teach and educate people, and to cultivate talents for this land where educational resources are scarce. Naturally, with the passage of time, only Zhongqi stayed on the farm wholeheartedly among the three children, married Shi Zhaomei, the daughter of the Shi family, and continued to work on the construction of the farm. **From the perspective of Ming Zhongqi and Shi Zhaomei, it connects the turmoil, anxiety and happiness they experienced from childhood to middle age, and secretly illuminates the confusion and perseverance of the lush farms on the banks of the Ana River from land reform, people's commune and other political movements and economic construction to the early stage of reform and opening up. In this grand epic of contemporary Xinjiang farm life, the most touching people are not only the young people who came from all over the world for their ideals, but also the belief of that generation in the face of hardship and self-consistency, turning wilderness into abundance.
Asher doesn't just see Xinjiang as a landscape unlike any other, but delves into the various markings on the map to explore how the "landscape" came to be in shape in the long second half of the 20th century. At the end of the story, the previous generation that had gone through the ordeal was born and died, and the scene of a thousand sails had passed did not crush the Ming Zhongqi and Shi Zhaomei who stayed behind. They are like poplars rooted in dry land in the desert, and a new generation of farm builders is thriving under the lens of their two daughters playing, "the smell of the sun and the wind, the smell of food and water, the glow of night and morning, the color of the earth and houses, the sound of greeting or talking, ......."All these from the lush farm will not leave them in a breath, they are soaked in their **, memories and the depths of life". The "epic" has a day when the narration is interrupted, but the spirit of constructing the "epic" and the perseverance of turning a foreign land into a local land have never come to an end in the unremitting pursuit of the Ming and Shi families.
The background of the story of the land and the family can be a relocation of the land, or it can be magical, but it can be boiled down to the author's description of the complex heart of each family member. There are many characters in "On the Banks of the Ana River", and because of the intervention of many outsiders, its story threads can be described as ups and downs: Shi Yongqing, who is courting for thousands of miles, and Cheng Xinxiu, who married to repay his kindness, the emotional connection between Ming Zhongqi, a child of the farm, and Lou Wenjun, an intellectual youth, how Shi Zhaomei and Ming Zhongqi face the complicated past after marriage, etc. The huge story line not only outlines the interpersonal appearance of the lush farm, but also constructs the unique emotional structure of the characters for the reader.
In the first half of the narration, the triangular story of Cheng Xinxiu, Shi Yongqing and Xu Yinran is the main clue of emotion. Whether it is Cheng Xinxiu and Xu Yinran who got married in the crisis and respected each other like guests, or Shi Yongqing's childhood sweetheart Cheng Xinxiu who entered Xinjiang and finally got a good match, the heroine Cheng Xinxiu encountered psychological pressure outside of high-intensity work all the time. In Asher's writing, the emotional innocence in the lush farm is as solid as a stone, and the three of them fulfill each other in a tacit mutual understanding. This tacit understanding does not depend on the interests known to the world, but only on the conscience and simplicity that the three men have in each other.
Later in the story, Shi Zhaomi replaces her mother, Sung Shinbu Hide, as the main creator of emotional value. She first struggled to recover from the suicide of her "father" Shi Yongqing for a long time, and then gradually understood the past between her mother and Xu Yinran, officially accepted her biological father, and lived with him. In her marriage to Ming Zhongqi, she inadvertently discovered her husband's lingering crush on Lou Wenjun, the "educated youth" in Shanghai, and pushed herself to the precipice of her heart; But in the journey of falling and galloping towards despair, Shi Zhaomei surrendered to the web woven by life, stroked her daughter's head, and moved towards the story of the future. The enthusiasm, determination and innocence of the two generations of women of Cheng Xinxiu and Shi Zhaomei towards life are the sincere and enthusiastic yearning and admiration for the emotional life of that generation that the author showed when writing about the construction of the frontier. If the life journey of the children in the lush farm is that of stepping across the river and constantly walking ahead, then their emotions are as deep as a forest, witnessing the birth and loss of life, the difficulty and unhappiness of choice, and the desire for reunion.
The dual grasp of the frontier and the hearts of the people in the frontier has set up an indelible biography of the past and the deceased, and also created a long dream for that mysterious land.
Review: Yang Yue.
Reviewer: Zhou Wei.
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