Chapter 109 postscript

I have lived in that world since I was a child. If the country is a pot with ancient patterns, I am a timid bonsai; what if it is a transparent fish tank?I should be a little swimming fish.The sun shines on me, and love covers me. In my life, the sadness of the adult world should not have been injected early. …Through the basin with rippling water patterns, one can peek at the wider world outside the native land, as if it is not a real entity, but hazy with unclear outlines, white or black. I always dream that one day I can poke my head out from the edge of the ancient and interesting basin, or hope that some great force will break the fantasy basin so that I can touch the entity of the imaginary hazy world.

This is not to say that I am tired of the nurturing and deep love of the country, but the natural expansion of any life during the growth period; there is a strong wildness in my life, and the result of this wildness beyond age makes me have to rely on Some sporadic and fragmented hazy impressions are combined with associations. The impression is hazy and incomplete, but it still comes out of life—a life bounded by natural surroundings.These early life impressions and inner feelings are the most important foundation to support my life. The most unforgettable thing should be the strangers drifting past in the countryside!They came from afar, hovered like fallen leaves, and then drifted away again. Their eyes and smiles contained an inexplicable sense of desolation from afar, and their bodies were full of dust from other places.Although I don't know any of them well, and although I don't dare to chat with them like I would treat my uncles and relatives, I always feel that there are tens of thousands of their own stories written on the faces of every person who floats by. .I often read the wind and sand on the tiny hairs on my cheeks with my eyes wide open as if I were reading a textbook, and I began to have a great desire to pursue such a deep, implicit and unsolvable story, and felt Its intoxicating attraction.

Day by day, year by year, silently drifting away, my desire to catch something in the emptiness is getting stronger and stronger; no one can answer my inquiry, except life itself.And life itself is complicated and messy, and what I can grasp are only the sporadic impressions left on me by those phenomena, not any rational words. Those who go to the rivers and lakes to play circuses, those who play with bears and sell plasters, those who play the piano and sing,...the blurry shadows like smoke often appear in the dark tea background, and even the seasons are not very clear.Only the outlines of the faces that emerged in the tea-black dream were relatively clear, so clear that even after more than twenty years had passed, their eyebrows could still be distinguished.

I don't understand why they always wash their faces with wind and sand?Why do you always love to float and float on the wild road leading to the sky?They also had smiles on their faces, always laughing into weary residual flowers, full of helpless and unwilling resentment.I have dreamed of those people many times, and I dreamed that I became one of them, trekking on the boundless wild road; ...In this nation that is not used to drifting, I am not reconciled to them, but also worried about my future—what I may encounter in the future, drifting involuntarily. ... I don't know when I started, but I have been familiar with those people who walked the salt!It is not surprising that many years ago, in the Jianghuai area, selling salt has become a common industry for adults in the turbulent years; although the salt lords have more miscellaneous products, they are not as brutal as the general legends, most of them are from the countryside. The poor people in the wild are easy to recognize from their clumsy movements and simple conversations...the ragged and dirty clothes have a sour smell mixed with salt and sweat; no matter what season, the men who walk the salt will float in groups Crossing the street in front of the door, there are salt baskets or stacked salt bags on both sides of the strange-shaped rooster cart, screaming all the way, not to mention the hard work of the salt people pushing the cart.In the hot season, their shoulders are bare, and their copper-colored shiny shoulders and arms are exposed. The large muscles bulging due to excessive heavy pressure are shaking between the shoulders and arms, which reminds people of the old man who plows the dry hard black silt. Cow, it's just that there is a tangible whip behind it!The cart loops made of thousands of rags, carrying the full weight of the car body, sunk deeply into their muscles. When pushing the salt cart, they raised their shoulders and leaned forward, as if struggling desperately, just for that A little bit of profit that may not be obtained, - on the long distance of hundreds of miles, there are risks everywhere, and there are difficulties at every step. …In the cold winter season, they only wore greasy and tattered short jackets and trousers. They walked in the wind and snow on the uneven ice edges. Their faces, arms, and ankles were all frozen into a bluish maroon, cracked and striped. moire pattern.

Their life is primitive and rough. I prefer rigid legends, which describe the colorful lives of these salt owls in the past hundred years; the legends have been circulated, and inevitably contain some exaggerated elements. Although exaggerated, they are not absurd. Never disappeared.Those legends shook me and caused ripples in my mind during my childhood. The legend describes the chaos of the salt administration in the late Qing Dynasty and the Beiyang period, the collusion between officials and businessmen and the dark monopoly; …Taking salt for profit is just one of the adventurous careers that poor people trapped in a desperate situation are forced to come out of.

Compared with the general legends, I can find the reason for my preference, because the general folk legends in our country are mostly gentle, slow, beautiful and sad, either from "Xijiang Moon", which leads to some children's sorrows, or from "Purple". "In this furnace" picks out some clouds of sorrow and stubbornness; those characters floating in the clouds have no ability to control their fate and change the environment, and they lack that kind of awakening; even some characters have certain traditions. This kind of hypnotic will, such as "Looking for a Husband from a Thousand Miles", "Crying Down the Great Wall", "Resisting Thieves and Preserving Virginity"...Nine times out of ten, they are all women. I don't even have that hypnotic will, it seems that I only deserve to be in trouble in the capital, and receive money in the back garden: lingering on the sick bed, writing poems of death in the dim candle shadow.It seems that only those who have the courage to jump off the wall can write stereotypes.The wish to swing on the skirt of the prince's beloved daughter. ...It is really a group of typical white-faced farts who are overwhelmed by the environment and fate!But once these soft-bodied insects pass through the narrow gate of utilitarianism, they will become high-ranking officials and rich salaries, and become more typical bureaucrats who "only share the world with the big officials", pretending to forget all the difficulties they encountered in the first half of their lives. . . . the source of the greatest tragedy of the nation is buried here.

I have been deeply in love with the rigid wild rumors and those outstanding wild characters since childhood; especially the various legends about the salt owls and their real lives are more concerned by me. According to legends and their actual lives, I found that they once lived in an extremely isolated state; especially during the Beiyang separatist period, the guns were the law, the generals were the law, and they were only the party being persecuted.The environment is difficult, and the fate is even more desperate; various human factors form a noose to hang their sweating necks.They pushed heavy salt carts, started from the salt-producing fields along the coast, and traveled through the wilderness of northern Jiangsu and Anhui. There were several checkpoints along the long distance. Second, sometimes the tax money will exceed the value of the salt; what about the struggle?A knife tore through the salt bag, the white salt is the red blood, it is more painful than the blood to eat away the wealth and starvation of the wife and children.

Even though the living environment is so isolated and difficult, they still gang up and travel the rivers and lakes, facing the Beiyang warlords, and defending their survival with brute force against brute force.At that time, the Beiyang anti-smuggling team captured Yan Xiao, tortured them, and killed them wantonly. Are the salt owls barbaric?All of this was forced out.I can say: On the side that is forced to defend, the only humanity is selfless struggle. In the Spring and Autumn Period, Guan Zhong once used it to make Qi rich. This policy was extremely correct. It has been practiced throughout the dynasties, benefiting the people and enriching the country. It rarely caused public resentment. Only from the end of the Qing Dynasty to the Beiyang separatist period, the salt policy was a human factor. Destruction, the salt owls are all over the place, and howls of resistance.

Among several legends, I found two incidents that were beneficial to the Northern Expedition of the National Revolutionary Army, and these two incidents, both directly and indirectly, were closely related to the salt walkers.First, in the early days of the Republic of China, the Thirteenth Association of the Qing Army stationed on the Huai River was dissatisfied with the torture of salt lords and the embezzlement of salt taxes by its superiors, which caused a mutiny. Running away with weapons caused the entire association to collapse.The second is that the Northern Expeditionary Army went through the bloody battle in Longtan, and the year before the restoration of Huaihe River, the salt lords spread the news of the revolutionary army's northward march. The cooperation of several sporadic Beiyang garrisons resulted in a large-scale and magnificent change in Caohe. (*commonly known as Zhan Dacao.)

During the Caohe Incident, it was rumored that there were at least 10,000 people who resisted the riots with the salt lords. Sun Chuanfang sent heavy troops to suppress them, and regarded the people who resisted the riots as bandits. .) After the suppression, the people’s anti-violent forces scattered in the four townships, and sporadic anti-riot incidents continued until the Northern Expeditionary Army regained Huaishang. This should be the basis for my "history" when I wrote the book "The Wind and Sand". The difficulty is that the time I want to describe is before I was born, and the legends I heard in my childhood, after decades of turbulent and displaced life, have long been blurred; I only remember the blurred shadows of the salt owls. The sporadic fragments in the story told are just a small part of the salt owl's special code words. It is impossible to build a world out of thin air, and it is extremely difficult to resurrect and reproduce an era. I can't have illusory ambitions and give up enough Cognition of life, to construct a work with concepts as the main body out of thin air.

And the group of people who have survived with difficulty in that past time and space are always shouting in my heart, making me think about them in silence.Because I feel that the background of that era is the same as that of the current Scarlet Continent. The pain suffered by the salt owls in the past is still pressing on the compatriots behind the scenes. The unfortunate history is reincarnated, and the tragic tragedy is repeating itself. I am really worth writing A book like this recalls the real situation of that bygone era, uses it to inspire the suffering crowd, and even uses it to strike violence itself. As far back as the forty-fourth year of the Republic of China, I had the idea of ​​writing it. I know that it is difficult to write this book. It has many characters, and its life is both deep and wide. It is by no means what I can describe or express with my immature pen. It needs a huge space and a long time. And a relatively stable environment, and this is what I lack; in fact, the main difficulty is not here, because at that time, I still did not find a complete vertical line for the whole book, and I also lacked a unified intention. Until the summer of the previous year, my friend Tang Ling (i.e. the poet Tang Jingyu) often came to the house to chat. He talked about the legend of Guan Baye, and the fact that his eyes were cut alive by the young Gu Ye of the Wan clan in order to save a weak girl in Wanjialou. After passing by, Li Yan said that this is not a legend, but a fact that happened in the north.At the same time, he encouraged me to make further arrangements based on this fact and write a novella. I have weighed the facts narrated by Tang Ling, and found that the original material is very moving, not only rich in color, but also has a wild sense of sorrow, but to construct a work, it is not important whether it is true or not, the main thing is whether the author can In the flesh that enriches its life in the works, endow the works with real flesh and blood.Although the material provided by Tang Ling is very likely to be true, it is only a vertical line of the story. Due to repeated narration, it gradually became exaggerated. Revenge against rape is the most legendary. I am willing to absorb the simple beauty of folklore in my works, but I don't want the spirit of the work to fall into the stereotype of ancient legends. After several considerations, I still decided to take this material as the vertical line of the book "The Wind and Sand", and combine it with another part of the legend about the salt owls' rebellion, so that it has a relatively solid "historical" foundation. I not only describe Guan Ba, but also describe the group of lowly people in the world who feel the pressure of life.The preliminary construction of this outline is actually a combination of three parts.First, it is based on the half-life experience of Guan Baye provided by Tang Ling.Second, it is based on the sporadic legends of the Caohe incident that I have heard in the past.Third, it is based on personal understanding of the Yanxiao group and the rural society in the north, but these three parts are relatively weak. That said, my ambition far outweighed my combined experience in constructing the outlines of this work.While building, I've spotted this.But this kind of situation is common in creation. I know that the only way to overcome it is to keep nurturing, absorbing more relevant life experience, and collecting more information so that my expression will not become empty. In the autumn of that year, I visited Mr. Tao Yongkang, a fellow villager who grew up in Yanshi and had handled salt affairs for many years, and asked him to come to the house often for long talks.I decided to use his experience to enrich the life of the book "The Wind and Sand".Mr. Tao, with gray temples, has lived in that state for half his life, and the state expressed by "The Wind and Sand" is exactly his living state.Most of the appointments are at night, with thin wine and no food, and the lamps and candles are turned off, creating an atmosphere suitable for retrospect; Mr. Tao Yongkang is very eloquent, especially when he is slightly drunk, his descriptions are more vivid; From the operating conditions of the trough, to the past prosperity of Yan City, from the chaos of the salt administration, to the oppression of the Yan lords; He knows the prices of vegetables and vegetables, the numbers of each salt store, the chant that the salt boats call out when they set sail, and the lives of people from all walks of life engaged in salt work. After many long talks, Mr. Tao also told many local legends in Yanshi, such as the story of the lotus Wang Laoyuan, the experience of the red prostitute Xiaohehua and Xiaojiaotian. It is said that after the Caohe Incident, Yanshi also pulled guns Self-defense, resisting the insatiable oppression of the Beiyang Defense Army, but the scale is extremely small, and the Beiyang Defense Army has been flattened. At the same time, they set fire to some warehouses and detained some suspects. I think the Caohe uprising incident is the most important part of the book, and I know the least about this part, so I amended the outline of the initial construction and moved the incident with the Caohe wilderness as the background to Yan The city is used to describe, because the background of Yanshi is familiar to me, so I am more confident in handling the scene. Thanks to the enthusiastic help of Tang Ling and Mr. Tao Yongkang, I decided on the writing outline of "The Wind and Sand", taking Guan Baye's half-life experience as the scriptures, taking the resistance of the suffering people in the north as the latitude, starting from a single line, proceeding to double lines, and finally Full cycle. After the outline was determined, I still felt that such a huge construction exceeded my actual ability of expression, and I felt uneasy; when I was traveling in Alishan, I repeated the content of this book to Zhu Xining and Ni Luo. Think about the details of the expression.Because in this huge book, if I want to recall a past era, outline its entire face, and give life to those characters, I must use their own living language as much as possible, using strong local customs, It is a big problem to try to avoid using common vocabulary in modern civilized society for plain and wild characters. Secondly, the handling of Guan Baye, Judge Zhu Si, Dai Wangguan, Fang Sheng, Tang Liubao, Zhang Erhuaxie and other characters is also deeply confusing. If I portray them from the perspective of modern novels , the plot of the whole book will overthrow the whole.I found that the events caused by characters in some Chinese rural legends have a natural conflict with some modern viewpoints, unless I give up the exaggerated and simple beauty in the original legends.What if I follow the legend and use traditional realistic techniques to express it?And I'm afraid that the deliberately created characters will be far from reality, and become some illusions and shadows in the concept.Especially people like Dai Wangguan who are good at fighting skills. Hearing their stories from legends, I feel that all of them are true and credible. , especially on Jianghu Road, it is indeed common.In addition to the name, it is not surprising to be given a nickname. When I was young, I saw an old soldier nicknamed "Crossing the Street Tiger" who could leap several feet and walk across the roof.Today, perhaps influenced by the general grotesque martial arts novels in the market, such characters who are proficient in fighting skills are excluded from literary works. The general consciousness always thinks that whoever writes such characters is writing "new martial arts" "!"But I have to show that this is unreasonable. I have to pass through the "narrow door" of this false consciousness, and express the pure and pure feelings I have obtained from these legends on the basis of "human beings" with artistic sincerity. move.Of course, it was actually a great adventure for me to do this. Up to now, I haven’t found any modern literary works in our literary world that depict such characters (except for historical novels.) I thought about this before I started writing "The Wind and Sand", and my conclusion is: Alexandre Dumas can write Da Tai'an, why can't I write about Guandong Mountain?Success or failure is another matter. The quality of literature in the works will not be affected by the current general misconceptions. Then there is the issue of moderate exaggeration: the vividness of folklore comes from moderate exaggeration, especially for characters; heroes such as Wu Song and Li Kui can leave a deep impression on readers because of caused by many exaggerated plots.When I write about Guan Dongshan and others, I am unwilling to use unrealistic exaggeration to destroy the nature and simplicity of the work. The problem is that some childhood impressions themselves contain primitive exaggeration.When I was writing the book "Wasteland", I had such an experience; for example, the red grass wasteland on the east bank of Hongze Lake, if you look at it with the eyes of today's adults, it may be just a piece of wasteland with a width and a length of several miles. However, in my childhood eyes, it was a vast and endless ocean.What about wolves?There are a small number of wolves, but in the young heart that has heard many horror legends about wolves and is frightened, it seems that there are wolves that devour people under every wave of grass; I wrote this based on a veteran I saw in my childhood. Today, he may only be taller and stronger than ordinary people, but in the eyes of the time, he was another Zhang Yingwu.In "The Wasteland", although I faithfully recalled my childhood memories, in fact, it still cannot avoid the original exaggeration. The book "The Wind and Sand" is written based on legends, and the exaggeration of the legends is far greater than the gap between the real impressions of childhood and adults. How can I properly grasp the characters so that the characters in the book are not far from reality? These three worries always troubled me, until I started writing, I was still not sure to overcome them, let them form a suffocating weight on my heart, but I finally started writing. This gigantic work of nearly one million words has been serialized by Crown Magazine for many years, all while writing and uploading; A way of doing nothing.Although during the writing period, my residence and life changed, I still managed to finish writing it according to the scheduled plan. For me, it was finally a kind of comfort——finally the burden on my heart was relieved. I have no need to explain the completed works. I just use this to explain the process of the birth and gestation of this book, and briefly answer the inquiries of the readers who care about "The Wind and Sand".I know that any work must face the fire of criticism naked! —although I've never had much faith in some critics who rant without reading the whole book.Maybe they just hold some keen intuition, pinching the pages and barking like this: "Brick! Brick! Another brick!" In any case, I will always be frank.