During the Spring Festival, I read a new long story "Shang Qing" published by Dong Libo (in "Harvest" Issue 1, 2024). Mr. Xu Dalong specially recommended to me that this is a great work from the west. Twenty years ago, when I was the editor-in-chief of Shanghai Literature, I advocated promoting the eastward expansion of literature in the western region, and Dalong was my most powerful assistant at that time. Through his threading, "Shanghai Literature" has successively launched "Ningxia Three Trees", "Gansu Eight Horses" and other western literature**; The works of Xinjiang writer Dong Libo were also recommended by Xu Dalong to Shanghai Literature for publication. At that time, many people praised me for "supporting" the creation of writers in the western region, but in fact, what I believed in my heart was that the outstanding writers in the western region strongly supported "Shanghai Literature". A strong wind blows from the west, and finally enters the soft and fragrant Shanghai Beach. I sincerely agree with the tough and healthy aesthetic style of western literature, and I hope that Shanghai writers can also write majestic and thick works. About this "Shang Qing", according to the writer himself, the original ** first draft was written to 300,000 words, not only wrote the life experience of the protagonist Shang Qing, but also interspersed with the story of the famous Han Dynasty general Geng Gong in the Western Regions to defend the stone city against the Huns, and later revised several times, cut off the historical narrative thread, and also cut off Shang Qing's second half of his life experience, streamlined to the current scale of 160,000 words. But even if it is treated like this, the style of ** is still not weak, or it seems more sophisticated. The story is about the legendary experience of an ordinary Han woman in the Western Regions, and her "legend" is to experience a premarital shock, visit a prison to save her husband, go to the countryside to teach, shoot and kill, frame the enemy, and redeem ......the soulThe ups and downs of life are like a wonderful TV series, this episode has passed, and I don't know how the next episode will start. The polyphonic structure of the historical generals who stubbornly defended the Western Regions has changed, but the narrative details still leave all kinds of clues in the Shichengzi Prison in Braco Village, Qitai County, Xinjiang, which has become a metaphor: the modern Han people in the Western Regions are the descendants of generations of Tunbian soldiers left over the past thousands of years, including the villagers of Braco Village, Old Man Wu, Shang Qing's fathers, etc., their blood is flowing with military genes, which can explain that although Shang Qing is a **woman who has received modern education, she still instinctively protects herself with knives and guns**, Even experience the pleasure of blood in the violent murder of bandits - this is also in line with the "Article 20", the true blood does not allow the bearded man. This is where Shang Qing is different from ordinary weak women, and it is also the special beauty of this **. If you want to use one sentence to illustrate the narrative style of this **, I think of the famous sentence of the Tang Dynasty poet Cen Shen: "Suddenly like a night of spring breeze, thousands of trees and pear blossoms." "The poet wants to describe the blizzard in northern Xinjiang, but he uses warm tones, and uses spring breeze and pear blossoms to write about the cold storm and snow, and the two completely different literary images are blended together, producing an unexpected aesthetic effect of mixing strength and charm, which is strong and charming. Dong Libo created the image of this strange woman, using this rhetorical technique of opening and closing. Shang Qing's first appearance, but an ordinary, gentle schoolgirl, she has received education in modern thought, but her thoughts have not been further fermented and matured, like all mediocre girls, she has no lofty ideals and family and country feelings, and her mind is full of plans to get married and have children, and live a small life as an ordinary person. Her patriotic act was simply "to participate in a demonstration against Japan's invasion of China, and to throw a silver dollar into the donation box in support of the war of resistance." But on the eve of the wedding, his lover Du Tao was arrested by plainclothes police on trumped-up charges and imprisoned in Shichengzi Prison. From then on, the prison was like Kafka's castle to Shang Qing, a nightmarish image, and she could never walk around again, and her life hovered here. In order to find a husband and visit her every month, Shang Qing resolutely gave up her high-paying job in the provincial capital and went to the prison side of Braco Village to become a rural private teacher. By popularizing modern knowledge, cultivating rural children, and even encouraging girls to read with modern ideas, she pursued equality between men and women, bringing a series of new cultural revolution effects to the ancient villages. But her own fate was destined to be consumed in this unjust case. The nightmare symbol of the prison not only cut her off from her lover, but also firmly control her mental will, trapping her in fantasies of revenge and frame-up. She had the audacity to assassinate Wang Shengshicai in Xinjiang - this reminds me of Tolstoy's Biel assassinating Napoleon, the same self-indulgence, the same naïve and ridiculous. There is also the admirer who framed and reported her, and his friend Cheng Feng, who has been helping her, causing Cheng Feng's family to be ruined and disabled for life. Although it is a misunderstanding, the act of informing and framing for the sake of revenge is itself a demon in the heart. Here, human nature becomes complicated, and Shang Qing, who was originally a victim, the crucifixion wife of a pure Decembrist, has now become a vile informant and framer—for which she sacrificed the rest of her life to atone for her sins, but only to seek the confession of her soul, which is itself extremely painful.
Source: Visual China.
It is worth mentioning that in Dong Libo's literary world, Shang Qing's personality is either a virgin or a demon, all of which are completed in one thought, without too much subjective hesitation and inner struggle, which is the heroism of women in the Western Regions, and it is also a typical example of the strong character that Dong Libo provides us. On the other side, the writer portrays a woman's hunger instinct and tenderness like bone marrow. Shang Qing and Du Tao were originally just boyfriend and girlfriend in love, and they were not married, but in Shang Qing's heart, since they promised each other, it meant that they decided to live for life, so they agreed to accompany Du Tao to suffer. This kind of Meng Jiangnu-style oriental female archetype who has gone through hardships and obsessively accompanies each other seems to be familiar in ancient and modern literary works, but with the development of the story, Du Tao's **, prison escape, escape, death and a series of blows, Shang Qing was put into a lonely situation, and the physical self-torture has also become a physical torture. Slowly, the character of this character becomes more complex and not so simple. **There are several descriptions of dreams in it, all of which are intriguing, one of the dreams, similar to Du Liniang's dream of Liu Mengmei, was about to make friends, and was woken up by a burst of thunder. The dream is gone, leaving Shang Qing to feel sorry for herself: she lies on the bed thinking about this dream, the more she thinks about it, the more aggrieved she becomes, and even God can't get along with her, so she can't make a dream ......Written poignantly and desperately. This is the charm of a woman from the Western Regions, which is not only the modification of her heroic character, but also transforms itself into a violent firewood fireworks. This is the charm of "the old woman does not marry, and the earth calls the sky" in the folk songs of northern China. It's still rare to see it in contemporary **. In this way, we can appreciate the function of the pistol as a prop in **. The pistol is undoubtedly a tool of violence, but a gift from a man has a different meaning, which is naturally ambiguous, ambiguous, and full of metaphors. Shang Qing, as a woman from the Western Regions, loves to play knives and guns, loves to ride horses, and has the style of a chivalrous woman. The writer designed two props for her, one was a sharp scissors, which later helped Du Tao escape from prison; There is also a pistol, which was given to her by her best friend's husband Wu Changming, and Wu is also the man she really likes. Although the scissors saved Du Tao, it also meant that it was broken; And the pistol became a substitute for men and women. ** wrote about the interaction between Shang Qing and Wu Changming three times, once when the professor shot at him, once to eliminate the wolves, and the third time when he was rescued in the battle against bandits. However, nothing happened, and the pistol replaced the rendition of the male ***. Later, the writer still wrote about the love between them, but this time the pistol did not come in handy and was absent. Shang Qing is still very simple, she just hopes to give birth to a seed of life, but in the end it is fruitless. The relationship between Shang Qing and Wu Changming ended. Finally, I have to analyze the image of Sheng Shicai that appeared in **. The writer used two sets of narrative intersecting techniques in **, one small narrative tells the story of Shang Qing and three men, and another set of big narratives as the background, that is, the history of Sheng Shicai's governance of Xinjiang. Xinjiang has experienced a total of three warlords in history, Yang Zengxin, Jin Shuren and Sheng Shicai, of which Sheng Shicai is the most famous. ** The year in which the narrative begins in 1938 is the year when Sheng Shicai and his wife visited the Soviet Union, were warmly received by Stalin, and joined the Communist Party on his own initiative. Since then, Xinjiang under Sheng Shicai has become a transportation hub between the Soviet Union and Yan'an, and pilots have been trained for the CCP. It is precisely because of the trust in Sheng Shicai that a large number of CCP cadres such as Chen Tanqiu and Mao ** will be stationed in Xinjiang to work. However, with the outbreak of the German-Soviet War and the Soviet Union's intention to change horses, Sheng Shi changed his face in just four years, and switched to the Chiang Kai-shek regime in Chongqing, broke with the Soviet Union, and then killed a large number of CCP cadres and progressives. Putting these aside, I would like to point out that the first half of the narrative, that is, the year when Du Tao was arrested and Shang Qing suffered a lot, was the honeymoon period between Sheng Shicai and the Soviet Union. The genius of the writer is that he did not avoid the sharp class contradictions and the actual living conditions of the people because of the progress and rise of the prosperous era of the rule of Xinjiang. Du Tao was convicted of drunken speech, which led to the fate of Du Tao, Shang Qing, and Cheng Feng were rewritten, and this oolong incident was directly related to Sheng Shicai's reactionary rule, so the writer said earnestly: A grain of ash of the times falls on a person's head, it is a mountain. In this way, the big narrative and the small narrative intersect, telling how a grain of gray sand becomes a mountain.
Chen Sihe is a first-class professor in the field of philosophy and social sciences at Fudan University and a literary critic.
Author: Text: Chen SihePhoto: Visual China Editor: Zhou Yiqian Responsible Editor: Zhu Zifen.
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