By- Xie Youshun
Share the bitterness of life:
Zheng Xiaoqiong's Writing and Its "Iron" Analysis
You don't know, my name is hidden in a palace card.
My hands became part of the assembly line, and my body was signed.
Contract, the hair is turning from black to white, leaving noise and running around.
Overtime, pay ... I see through the silent incandescent light.
See the tired shadow projected on the machine and move slowly.
Turn around, bow your head, and be as silent as a piece of cast iron.
Ah, the iron of dumb language is full of disappointment and sadness of strangers.
These rusted irons in time, trembling irons in reality.
I don't know how to protect a silent life.
This life without name and gender, this life supported by contract.
Where to start? On the iron bed in the dormitory for eight people in the moonlight.
Illuminated homesickness, silent flirting love in the roar of machines.
Or the young man parked on the payroll, how impetuous the world is?
Comfort a weak soul if the moonlight comes from Sichuan.
Then youth is ignited by memories, but it goes out on the assembly line seven days a week.
The rest, these drawings, iron, metal products, or white.
Qualified list, red defective product, incandescent lamp, I can still bear loneliness.
And pain, in a hurry, is warm and long. ...
-Zheng Xiaoqiong: Life [1]
Zheng Xiaoqiong, the poet who wrote this poem, has aroused widespread concern in the literary world, because she sincerely told us about another painful life. Born in the early 1980s, this Sichuan girl worked in a hardware factory in Dongguan, Guangdong Province from 200 1 year to 2006, and wrote poems and essays in her spare time. In recent years, she has published a lot of works in Poetry magazine, People's Literature and Tianya. A young woman who works at the bottom has written many sharp, thorough and explosive poems in just a few years, and has continuous creative ability, which is a meaningful poetic event in contemporary times. In the face of Zheng Xiaoqiong's writing, some people tried to name her with the concepts of "working poet", "bottom writing" and "female writing", but these terms were obviously not suitable for Zheng Xiaoqiong. Naming always lags behind the reality of writing, just as life is always ahead of imagination.
True writing is always individual and cannot be classified.
Zheng Xiaoqiong's writing is even more so. Her outstanding talent, strong writing passion and strong sense of language, as well as her deep involvement and keen description of contemporary life are of symbolic significance in the writing of a new generation of writers. Perhaps, her language can be more concise, her emotional statements can be more restrained, and she needs more thinking when grasping such big themes as the times and politics, but as far as poetry writing is concerned, she has done well. I respect such writers. In a lonely and difficult situation, I rarely stick to this kind of hand-to-hand writing with reality, and touch readers through my humble experience and loyal shaping of this experience, at least in my reading memory.
I haven't met Zheng Xiaoqiong (note: I didn't meet her when writing this article), but through her writing, I can imagine the worrying life she wrote. Life is really an ancient word, but after reading Zheng Xiaoqiong's poems, I deeply feel that the fundamental problem that affects and tortures today's writing may still be the word "life". In my opinion, the poverty of life, the paleness of imagination and the falsification of spirit are three common problems in contemporary literature, and the core dilemma lies in the fact that many people's writing has been unable to open up new life possibilities for us. Under the guidance of the will of the times and consumer culture, more and more people's writing is entering a new publicity. Even behind the seemingly personal experience, there is a thousand people's writing thinking: in the trend of "body writing", the body full of desire and body fluids may be used; Under the banner of "private experience", you may read similar emotional privacy and boudoir details; There are not a few writers who fabricate the same type of officialdom stories or love stories. Behind the personality, what is active is actually more subtle publicity-the real creative spirit is often absent. Especially in the writing of the younger generation of novelists, the boundary of experience is getting narrower and narrower, which is nothing more than a small love story, which has been designed and told repeatedly, and has become nothing new for readers; And the wider crowd and life, in their works, did not make their own voices.
(Habermas)
This kind of writing simplifies and rewrites contemporary life, which, in Habermas' words, turns the rich life world into a new "colony". In his book On Communicative Behavior, he especially talked about the rational development of contemporary society, which expanded some aspects of life and encroached on other parts of life. For example, money and power are only one-sided in life, but their excessive expansion has turned the whole living world into its colony. "This kind of colonization is not the colonization of one culture to another, but the colonization of one life to another. ..... If writers invariably write about this luxurious life, but collectively remain silent about another life, there is actually writing violence behind this writing trend-it turns another life into a colony of luxurious life. In order to cater to consumer culture, people and stories that are not favored by consumer culture are refused to enter their own writing vision, even ignoring their birthplace and spiritual origin. He writes what others write and what the market needs. This is not only a simplification of contemporary life, but also a betrayal of my heart. A few years later, when readers (or some foreign researchers) come to read China literature in this period, they will have an illusion that young people in China are clubbing, drinking coffee, wearing famous brands and traveling around the world, and the experiences of the bottom and damaged people are completely absent. This is the colonization of one life to another. " [2]
-I would like to regard Zheng Xiaoqiong's writing as a resistance to this new colonial life under this background. She is a post-80 s writer, but her life experience, experience track and spiritual vision are essentially different from other post-80 s writers who only have urban memory. In addition to the luxurious life created by her peers, she constantly reminds us that there is another life, a life with a large number, weak voice and painful expression, waiting for writers to describe and claim; Their generation, in addition to constant love and lovelorn, also has the fear of hunger, blood and tears and living on the streets; In addition to campuses, bars and office buildings, their living areas also include factories, assembly lines and iron shacks; Their memories of youth, besides love, video games and petty bourgeoisie, include unpaid wages, the boss's supercilious eyes and the blood of "nearly 40,000 fingers a year" [3] ... Zheng Xiaoqiong said, "I don't know how to protect a silent life/this life without name and gender, this life supported by contract" ("Life"), and she had to rely on written records and statements.
I am in the hardware factory, like a lonely piece of iron.
From last year to this year, water was in my body.
Their white noise brings my ideals and longings.
Arrive from far away and return to far away.
Left an echo, like a lonely bird singing in the litchi forest.
-Zheng Xiaoqiong: "Water" [4]
Small iron, soft iron, the wind is blowing
Rain, iron with a rusty timidity and shyness.
Last year's time went backwards ... like the time dripping in a pinhole.
How many irons are still at night, in the open-air warehouse, on the machine ... them?
Where are you going? Where are you going? How much iron
Ask yourself in the middle of the night, what is it?
Rustling, who is at night?
Declare the past and future of life in Life of Steel.
-Zheng Xiaoqiong: "Iron" [5]
The night is so vast, how many people live in the tin?
Standing on this cold iron, because of poverty.
Walking around in bitterness, how much love is balanced in iron.
The earthly heart is as hard as iron, and it is a simple and bitter labor life.
She doesn't know, these stars, darkness, these shadowy things.
How long will it take to fall off and reveal that sensitive and tender heart?
-Zheng Xiaoqiong: Machine [6]
"Iron" is the core element of Zheng Xiaoqiong's works, and it is also one of the most imaginative and penetrating literary symbols she created. "When I keep writing about my work and life, what I write most is iron." "I always wanted my poems to be full of iron. Sharp and hard. " [7] The rich memory of "Iron" is related to Zheng Xiaoqiong's years of working experience in hardware factory. She observed the process of "iron" being burned, perforated, cut, polished and broken, and felt the hardness, sharpness, indifference and fragility of "iron". "Iron is broken in the machine, there is no sound, no resistance and no struggle. It is conceivable how fragile a piece of iron is for a machine with great destructive power. I saw iron being cut, pulled, pressed, planed, cut and ground. They are broken, ground into various shapes and lie quietly in plastic baskets. I feel that my hard life has been changed and modified by a powerful external force. It no longer has its previous shape, angle, appearance and configuration ... it has been completely changed by external forces and has become the size, shape, function and characteristics required by powerful external forces. Since childhood, I have been used to the hot cry and sharp pain of blacksmith's iron under the action of external force. Now, it is so fragile in front of the machine. " [8] Zheng Xiaoqiong said that the smell of iron is loose, dazzling, hard and has a sense of falling; Iron is also soft and fragile. It can be punched, slotted, carved, bent and folded ... it is as soft as earth, and it is silent-all these impressions about iron are metaphors of its oppression on people, and it can also be said that it is squeezed by modern industrial society. People are small and helpless in the face of material, power and interests. Especially in China, the labor system at the bottom of society is not perfect. Once cheap labor is sent to machine tools and assembly lines, it becomes a part of the machine and cannot have its own emotions, will and imagination. I work 16 hours a day, and I can only leave the factory once or three times a week. I can't get my due compensation for work-related injuries, and the closed factory can't pay my wages ... This trampled and undignified life, which we could only read in media reports in the past, is now written into poetry and prose by Zheng Xiaoqiong. Because she is a member of migrant workers, she can deeply feel that this kind of migrant workers' life is being occupied, divided and even shattered by "iron" day by day. "The pain is huge, and it is difficult for people to get rid of it, just like iron across the throat." What is even more frightening is that this life full of great pain is silent in the vast social noise:
I put my head out of the window and saw wide roads, crowded vehicles and pedestrians, dazzling billboards, factories with closed iron gates, and a scene of singing and dancing. No one will care that one or even a group of people's fingers are swallowed by machines. No one listens to their groans of pain, and no one will listen to them. Just like the iron of the raw material chuck of the automatic lathe I control, they are cut, divided and polished by powerful external forces in silence, and everything is silent, because the powerful external forces have swallowed up their cries. [9]
Even, no one will care about this pain:
Pain pressed her thirsty throat, pain pressed her white gauze, pain pressed.
Her broken finger, painfully supporting her eyes, painfully supporting.
She stared, and the pain forced her to cry in a low voice.
The pain is oppressing her. ...
No one will help her unload her body, heart, reality and future.
yearn for
Not the machine, not the boss, not the newspaper,
Even the fragile labor law.
-Zheng Xiaoqiong: Pain [10]
I believe that after witnessing blood, tears and pain, Zheng Xiaoqiong must have a desire to speak, so she has been trying to describe and identify with this life in her writing. She is compassionate and thoughtful; Sad and strong. She wants to use her unique language to freeze this vast and unknown China experience on the curtain of the times; She wants to make a silent voice and let the powerless people move forward. "It is precisely because of the identity of migrant workers that I have to submit the true physical and mental state of this group in my writing." [1 1] She also said, "Words are weak and can't change anything in reality, but I told myself that I must witness this and write down what I saw and thought." [12] So she found "iron" as the outlet of her soul, and established a secret writing relationship between her humble life and the hard "iron".
-"Iron" became a symbol. It is cold, lacking human temperature, indestructible and densely distributed in every corner of modern factory life; Once it is made into various industrial products for trading, it is more valuable than the living in the eyes of capitalists; It allied itself with machines, work cards and systems, and gained harsh and offensive power; It is a thorn in the mind of the injured worker, and it hurts when touched. Iron, iron, iron ... Zheng Xiaoqiong used a series of poems and essays related to iron to describe to us a world surrounded by iron, a life crushed by iron, a heart suffocated by iron-just like iron rolling, deforming and bursting in the calcination of fire, and one crushed by iron. "Life has gradually made me sensitive and fragile, and my heart is like iron softened by fire." Zheng Xiaoqiong pointed out this tragic process to us with his real and sharp experience in his works. In her poems, such words as "life as steel", "existence as steel" and "working life as steel" appear repeatedly. She feels that she is "counting her life for these gloomy irons (rust)" and that her earthly heart is as hard as iron (machine). "Fragments of life are like an abandoned iron" (Dialogue) The image of "iron" has expanded and become magnificent in Zheng Xiaoqiong's works, but the people at the bottom seem small and isolated under the oppression of "iron". Even if he has great shame and pain, he will be easily erased by the industrial system represented by "iron" In the end, people become a part of "iron":
I am like a lonely piece of iron in a hardware factory (life)
This is really a thrilling rhetoric. Life becomes homogeneous with "iron" and even becomes "a lonely iron"; Life is only green is just a clean onion (rental house). How did this tragedy happen? Zheng Xiaoqiong made an in-depth revelation in his poems. The significance of her writing comes from this-her reflection on an industrial system, her testimony to an anonymous life, with deep and vivid personal feelings, and at the same time, she analyzes this reflection and testimony in a broad realistic context; Her strong personal feelings are connected with the thick nerves of the times. Her writing is no longer an expression of one's private interests, but an important evidence to understand the living conditions of anonymous people in this era; What she wants to defend is not her personal life, but a more hidden life force. On the surface, the development of this life force is completed by machines and industrial assembly lines. In fact, behind the machine and the assembly line is a system design that needs to be re-demonstrated and a person alienated by this system. In other words, behind a great power in life, there is always a greater power, just like a "lone iron", which always comes from a greater "iron". Individuals have no voice because of collective silence; Individuals live an "iron life", because the "iron" system is to erase the expression with personality:
Every time I go to work, I will draw a work card with Zhang Gong number 245 and Zheng Xiaoqiong's name on the iron card machine. The sound of "card" is crisp, without any hesitation, and the noise is sharper, which is unique to time. My life is stuck like this, January, a year, just let it swallow. [ 14]
As individuals, their temperature, emotion, charm, wisdom, physical pain and joy have all disappeared. As a work station of a certain process on the assembly line, the standard requirements of this work station are gradually taking shape. The bearings of the assembly line keep turning and creaking. In this slow and uniform sound, those unique personalities are gradually worn away and made by assembly line like products on conveyor belts. [ 15]
It can be seen that Zheng Xiaoqiong's writing shows deep anxiety and anxiety: on the one hand, she doesn't want this little individual life to be in a state of aphasia all the time; On the other hand, she deeply felt that this open individual life could not be comforted fundamentally. She is indeed a poet with great talent for language. Her bumpy and heavy experience has effectively expanded the boundary of life in poetry writing, and at the same time illuminated the dark corners of those long-neglected existence. Her words are full of vitality, and the details and images she uses have an honest spiritual scale. She is not making up a life, but recording and witnessing a life she has experienced personally with a sensitive and strong heart. Therefore, her writing can arouse our great trust and be deeply moved by it.
This way of writing reaffirms a truth to us: literature may not make us live better, but it can make us live more wonderfully. Many of Zheng Xiaoqiong's poems can be said to bear witness to these more anonymous lives. In her writing, she shared the bitterness of life. In this painful writing, she showed the recognition, analysis, narration, commitment, resistance and sympathy of a person who loves life. When reading her poems, I often think of Camus' evaluation of Dr. Leo in Plague: "According to his honest conscience, he consciously stood on the side of the victims." He hopes to stand with all people and the people in his city on the basis of their only belief, that is, to love, suffer and go into exile together. Therefore, he shared all their worries, and their situation was also his. "[16]-In the spiritual sense, Zheng Xiaoqiong had the experience of" people in the same city "and" common love and common misery and common exile ". She also looks at and thinks about "their situation" together with her own personal situation, so she also shares the "troubles" of many people at the bottom. This is also her most cherished writing quality. Her writing has just begun. Although she still needs to clean up too many miscellaneous experiences more accurately and be wary of the blind expansion of language ambitions, her rough, tough, energetic and life-oriented writing style and open and simple writing feelings are undoubtedly rare among the writers of the "post-80 s" generation. In particular, her discovery, description, thinking and creative expression of the life element "iron" have found an accurate and vivid spiritual outlet for caring for the humble existence like dust. At the same time, she also left eye-catching language signposts for her writing.
Of course, I also know that Zheng Xiaoqiong's works are huge. She wrote not only "iron", but also plastics, hometown, rivers and sunset, hospitals and Juteling. She not only wrote many excellent essays and short poems, but also wrote many powerful long poems, such as Shame, In Hardware Factory, Pedestrian Overpass, Guo Weiji, Struggle, Total Darkness, Living Memory, What Survivors Say, Beast, Beast and so on. -this essay can't comprehensively discuss her writing; Other research can only be written later.