1978 Synthetic Writers

Chapter 322 The prototype location of the novel

"Qianqian, why did you pee on the bed again!"

A few people were sitting and smoking when Jia Pingwa started shouting in the room.

Chen Zhongshi smiled and said, "Look, how can this family survive without a woman?"

Jia Pingwa was having a headache making the bed, while Lu Yao picked up Jia Qianqian, who was sucking her fingers at a loss.

"Qianqian is the same age as my daughter, and we are both born in the Year of the Sheep."

After he said this, Jiang Xian realized that Lu Yao was already married at that time.

And what’s very interesting is that Lu Yao’s real name was Wang Weiguo, but he did not let his daughter take his surname Wang. Instead, she took the surname of his pen name, Lu. She was his only child.

It is said that after Lu Yao passed away, what he left to his only daughter was not a huge inheritance, but a pile of IOUs.

From the perspective of a writer, Lu Yao is a great writer, but from the perspective of a father, he is not a qualified father.

Moreover, just three months before Lu Yao's death, his wife forced him to sign a divorce agreement while he was lying on the hospital bed, dying of ascites due to liver cirrhosis.

Being betrayed by the person you sleep with before you die is a pain that not everyone can understand.

The double blow of poverty and illness made Lu Yao's "later years" a complete tragedy.

But we cannot blame Lu Yao's wife. After all, Lu Yao's extravagant and wasteful lifestyle clearly showed that he was irresponsible for his family.

But we can't blame Lu Yao's lifestyle habits, because he had a really miserable childhood.

His figure can often be seen in the characters created by a writer.

There is a very vivid description in "Ordinary World":

The protagonist, Sun Shaoping, did not dare to go to the cafeteria to get food like his classmates. Instead, he waited until all his classmates had left before secretly picking up his black steamed bun, because he did not want his classmates to see that he was eating so poorly and was afraid that others would laugh at him.

This is both Sun Shaoping's life experience and Lu Yao's own past memory.

How poor was Lu Yao's family when he was a child?

Jiang Xian wrote "Red Sorghum". In the novel, Dai Fenglian's family did not sell their children and raised her to adulthood.

Lu Yao's family was so poor that they could not take care of him, so they had to give him to his uncle for adoption.

It is said that when Lu Yao was a child, his classmates often made fun of his poverty and dragged him to the middle of the street to laugh at him, which brought about inferiority in Lu Yao's heart.

In order to finish junior high school, he even had to go to the wild to dig wild vegetables to fill his stomach. The hunger and poverty in his childhood left a deep mark on his heart.

In addition, there is another plot in "Ordinary World" where the poor boy Sun Shaoping falls in love with Tian Xiaoxia, the daughter of a high-ranking official.

This fairy tale-like story of a poor boy and Snow White is completely detached from realistic love. Many people criticized it as Lu Yao's fantasy.

But in fact, this is exactly what happened to him.

Lu Yao's lover came from a middle-class family in the capital. Compared with Lu Yao, a young man from a rural area in Shaanxi, she was a rich girl.

So some tragedies are really destined and there is no way to escape them.

Jiang Xian stayed in Xi'an for a while and stayed in the Yanhe guesthouse.

The yard next to "Yanhe" is the territory of the Shaanxi Writers Association. Using their reference room, Jiang Xian looked through a lot of local information and history of Shaanxi.

This is both superficial work and a form of learning.

After all, before this, Jiang Xian used the two inspirations of "The Romantic Sinner" and "Northern Shaanxi" to independently synthesize the novel in his mind that carries the profound culture of Shaanxi.

The novel is very long and covers a very long period of time. In his previous life, Jiang Xian had read some family-style immortal cultivation online novels, such as "Xuanjian Immortal Clan".

There is also a foreign movie called "Time Traveler".

The novel in his mind gave him the feeling that it was somewhat similar to those family-run online novels, like "Time and Space Love Traveler", from which he could feel the vastness of time. He was shocked to the point of his scalp numbing, and his eyes were filled with tears without him noticing when.

This novel has such power.

But before it came out, Jiang Xian, a foreigner from Shaanxi, had to create the rationale for his ability to write this novel.

You can't really write such a novel out of thin air, you have to leave some traces for other people.

In addition, the second half of the novel seemed a bit sloppy due to the author's limited writing ability. While Jiang Xian was looking up information, he was also trying to fill in and supplement it, and further rewrite the original content.

Jiang Xian stayed in Xi'an for a while, and then went back to his hometown with Lu Yao to experience the real rural areas of northern Shaanxi.

At the same time, thousands of miles away, in the eastern part of Shandong Peninsula, in the heart of Jiaolai Plain, an unknown county-level city called Gaomi was shaken by a novel.

Zhang Shijia is from Gongpo Miao Village, Gaomi County. He works at the cultural center.

The cultural center is a mass cultural institution at the county and city levels. Its function is to disseminate cultural knowledge and enrich people's lives.

The work is also very easy.

Didn’t Yu Hua talk about his experience working there?

"It was my first time working at the cultural center. I was two hours late on purpose, but I was the first one to arrive. I knew I had come to the right unit."

That day, after Zhang Shijia came to the unit, he found a newly arrived issue of "People's Literature" No. 1982, 6, and began to read a novel titled "Red Sorghum".

"On the ninth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar in 1939, my father, a bandit, was a little over fourteen years old. He followed the troops of Commander Yu Zhan'ao, who later became a legendary hero, to ambush the Japanese motorcade on the Jiaoping Highway.

"

"Nineteen thirty-nine?"

“Jiaoping Highway?”

Zhang Shijia watched and muttered.

"The world was in chaos, the scenery was indistinct, and the sound of the troops' footsteps could be heard far away.

A blue-white mist hung in front of my father's eyes, blocking his vision. He could only hear the footsteps of the troops, but could not see their shapes or shadows. My father tightly grasped the corner of Commander Yu's clothes and moved his legs quickly. Grandma was getting farther and farther away like the shore, and the mist was getting more and more turbulent like the sea. My father grabbed Commander Yu like he was grabbing the side of a boat.

In this way, my father ran towards the blank bluestone tombstone belonging to him standing in the red sorghum field of his hometown.

There was already withered grass on his grave. Once, a naked boy led a snow-white goat here. The goat nibbled the grass on the grave leisurely. The boy stood on the tombstone, urinated angrily, and then sang loudly:
The sorghum is red—the Japanese are coming—fellow countrymen, get ready—start firing—

Some people say that the boy herding shepherds is me, but I don’t know if it is me.

I used to have extreme love for Gaomi Northeast Township, and I used to have extreme hatred for Gaomi Northeast Township. After growing up and studying Marxism hard, I finally realized: Gaomi Northeast Township is undoubtedly the most beautiful and ugliest, the most transcendent and secular, the most holy and filthy, the most heroic and the most bastard, and the place where people drink the most and love the most on earth.

"

When Zhang Shijia read to this point, he was shocked by the ups and downs of the novel and couldn't help but frown.

"where?"

"high density?"

This was a serious matter. Zhang Shijia wiped his nose and read the text again with great concentration.

"high density."

“It’s really high density!”

The Zhang family had never heard of Northeast Township, but Gaomi was the name of their county.

Adding the Jiao-Ping Highway and Gaoliang mentioned earlier, Zhang Shijia had a strong feeling that the author Jiang Xian was writing about them.

Zhang Shijia continued reading.

The story of the novel is very jumpy, and it is about a man named Yu Zhan'ao who organized an anti-Japanese movement. Why did they fight against the Japanese?
There was a man named Luohan who was skinned by the Japanese.

That day, the women and children cried particularly hard, their cries were deafening, and the men had tears in their eyes, and there was a fiery glow of hatred in their eyes.

"We are alive and cannot be slaughtered like livestock by the Japanese."

So the brave men in the sorghum fields are about to rise up in resistance.

The team led by Yu Zhan'ao consisted of no more than 40 people, including the deaf, dumb, lame and crippled.

The guns they carried were of different lengths, and some even carried an iron-toothed rake on their backs.

When these people are in the village, they can cause chaos in the village, but when they come out, they act like tough guys.

Yu Zhan'ao led them through the tall and straight sorghum fields, across the Jiaodong Highway built with the flesh and blood of the common people, and launched a battle on the banks of the Mo Shui River.

It was an ambush, and it was extremely successful.

The people of Gaomi, who had been badly bullied by the brutal Japanese army, had reason to cheer for this battle.

Yu Zhan'ao and his brothers fought hard to achieve all these victories.

But in this war, Yu Zhan'ao's most beloved woman, Dai Fenglian, died, shot to death by a Japanese machine gun.

Yu Zhan'ao continued fighting with anger and sadness.

He led his brothers to fight bravely, fought desperately, and even killed a Japanese major general.

However, the Japanese attack then became even more severe.

Almost everyone in the village was killed.

The massacre left hundreds of dogs in the village homeless.

They were hungry and wanted to pounce on their owners' corpses to feast on them. Their green eyes were full of desire to devour.

Yu Zhan'ao gritted his teeth in hatred and kept shooting at the dogs that came to eat the corpse. The gun was hot and his hatred emanated from the muzzle and spread between heaven and earth.

There were mass graves of thousands and tens of thousands of people, and bones were everywhere, one after another, ice-cold.

The fire of hatred in Yu Zhan'ao's heart burned more and more fiercely.

He will take his son and lead a group of farmers to continue the fight against Japan!

They had never been influenced by advanced revolutionary ideas, nor did they have a clear direction for struggle. They only knew how to move around in the sorghum plants, set up nets, and avoid ambushes.

Beat, beat.

After reading to the end of the novel, Zhang Shijia felt his blood boiling and even felt his teeth trembling.

He had reason to believe that a bloodiness deep in his bones had been activated.

Because he is absolutely credible, this novel is about Gaomi and the stories that have happened on this land of Gaomi.

Because what Jiang Xian wrote was the history of what happened in Gongpo Miao Village.

"The In-laws Temple Massacre."

Zhang Shijia was from Gongpo Miao Village. One of his relatives was injured in the massacre, so he would know the incident well.

In mid-March 1938, the guerrillas buried a chain of iron rakes at the bridgehead of Sunjiakou Village and ambushed the Japanese motorcade. After a bloody battle, they killed 3 Japanese devils, including Major General Nakaoka Yataka.

A few days later, a large group of Japanese devils came to retaliate, but they were directed in the wrong direction. Instead of surrounding Sunjiakou, they surrounded Gongpo Temple and massacred more than a hundred unarmed civilians. The entire village was almost razed to the ground.

This is just as it is written in the novel.

[August 15th, Mid-Autumn Festival. A bright moon rises slowly, and sorghum stands silently all over the ground. The sorghum ears are immersed in the moonlight, as if dipped in mercury, gurgling and shining.

My father smelled a sweet and fishy smell under the shattered moonlight that was countless times stronger than it is now. At that time, Commander Yu led him by the hand and walked through the sorghum field. More than 300 villagers were lying dead with their legs crossed and arms resting on their heads. Their blood irrigated a large area of ​​sorghum, soaking the black soil under the sorghum into mud and making them slow to move.

The sweet and fishy smell was suffocating. A group of dogs that came to eat human flesh sat in the sorghum field, staring at my father and Commander Yu with sharp eyes.

Commander Yu took out his pistol and flicked it, and two dog eyes went out. He flicked it again and blew out two more dog eyes. The dogs scattered and sat far away, whining and growling, looking greedily at the corpse.

Commander Yu shouted, "Japanese dogs! Japanese bastards!" He fired all his bullets at the dogs, and the dogs ran away without a trace.

Commander Yu said to my father, "Let's go, son!" The old man and the child walked towards the depths of sorghum in the moonlight.

The sweet and fishy smell that filled the fields permeated my father's soul, and it stayed with him throughout the more intense and cruel years that followed.

]
It has been so long that Zhang Shijia didn’t know how long it had been since he last thought about this.

It should have been a flame of hatred that was burning more and more, but he was somewhat numb to these things.

As the author wrote at the end of the novel, "I am your unworthy descendant."

Zhang Shijia truly felt the degeneration of his species, which made him ashamed and angry. He wished he could bite his finger and write in blood to prove his will, just like Zhao Mengsheng, who was criticized in public by Thunder God in "The Garland".

“Great novel!”

Zhang Shijia held the People's Literature in his hands and looked at the Red Sorghum on it, his heart filled with passion.

Because this is about the story of Gaomi, he has more emotions towards this novel.

He rushed into his leader's office, where his leader was smoking and reading a magazine.

"Good stuff, I found something good!"

"What good stuff?" The leader looked at him.

Zhang Shijia took out "People's Literature".

“This magazine.”

The leader laughed, "Lao Zhang, don't make a fool of yourself.

I don’t know that People’s Literature is a good thing? "

Seeing that his leader disagreed, Zhang Shijia became a little anxious.

"It's a novel here, about our Gaomi."

"What?"

The leader stood up and said, "You mean there's an article in People's Literature that talks about Gaomi?"

"It's a novel."

"Let me see."

After hearing this, the leader immediately became excited and took the "People's Literature" to read the novel "Red Sorghum".

"Great! What a great article on Red Sorghum!"

"I am worried that there are no suitable literary and artistic works to enrich the lives of the people of Gaomi."

"Then you should immediately order copies of People's Literature for every commune in Gaomi, and promote the novel Red Sorghum in Gaomi as soon as possible!"

"Okay, okay. I'll do it right away." Zhang Shijia agreed.

The leader was still full of energy. After thinking for a while, he said:
"Jiang Xian is a great writer. He wrote about Gaomi, which shows that Jiang Xian understands Gaomi and has feelings for our land."

"I will write a letter to the author, Comrade Jiang Xian, and ask People's Literature to forward it to us."

(End of this chapter)