Chapter 23 Appendix Li Ximin: Through the Forest of Death

I still remember the impression he made on me when I first met Li Ximin.This writer, who came out of the mysterious mountains of western Fujian, is short and strong like a boxer, with a loud voice, exuding the rough aura common to rural men in western Fujian.Once or twice with him, you will know that he is a man of temperament, who hates evil like a vengeful, has a chivalrous mind that is as daring as a friend, and may burst out amazing power at any time; moreover, behind his rough appearance, he is still a tender heart A man like water, he also has compassion and conscience-stricken pain for the weak in life.

In recent years, he has successively published many novels such as "Good Girl", "The Girl of Gu", "Blood Money" and so on with amazing speed and passion.What is even more convincing is that he wrote these novels in two ways: one is the way of horror novels, and the other is the way of serious realism literature.His horror novels have won him the reputation of "the king of Chinese horror novels", and his achievements in serious literature are equally impressive. Where does Li Ximin's imagination and creativity come from as a unique novelist? As far as I know, he was born and raised in West Fujian.His creations so far have never been separated from his hometown. The villages and towns where the Hakka people live in western Fujian almost constitute the background of each of his novels.Therefore, I think that the mountainous area of ​​western Fujian must be a fertile land rich in strange and terrifying legends, otherwise how could he have inexhaustible very localized, mysterious and strange images and stories?He must have admired heroes and heroes since he was a child, and admired the straight-forward and straightforward style of acting of lonely heroes-"die happily or live happily", that's why he has 21 years of experience in the army; Only when friends talk to each other will they use that kind of concise, straightforward, unpretentious, skinny language.In addition, he must have been a very sensitive child when he was a child. There is a word "Min" in his real name. Even now that he has become a famous writer, he will occasionally show some restrained shyness that belongs to a teenager.When he first wrote novels, he strongly felt the need to express, almost all of which were the joys and sorrows or the beautiful and beautiful stories and legends that happened in his hometown in his childhood.In my opinion, his sensitivity must be innate and inherited from the ancient ethnic group to which he belongs—the largest ethnic group in Chinese history who migrated from the north to the south due to wars—the Hakka people.The bumpy road to survival in a foreign land has cultivated generations of Hakka people to be extremely sensitive to the environment and reality, and this spiritual temperament has been deeply rooted in the blood and character of many descendants of this ethnic group.This sensitive group has cultivated two outstanding writers for contemporary Chinese literature. One is Beicun, a famous writer who once created avant-garde literature and later turned to faith literature. Home writer Li Ximin.Li Ximin once said that there is a mysterious passage between him and his hometown of Minxi.I think the mysterious channel he mentioned should be his memory of his hometown of Fujian and the sensitive personality inherited from the Hakka family.

One of the insurmountable literary themes for writers is death.But the most impressive thing about Li Ximin's works is his penchant for describing death.This is definitely not an exaggeration.Whether it is his early works describing "My Hometown of Wild Boar Col", or his horror novels in recent years, or this novel, death runs through it vigorously like a protagonist who never leaves the scene.For Li Ximin, death seems to be a lingering complex that cannot be fully expressed.This stubborn complex is closely related to his own growth experience.According to his own statement, during his growing up, he heard and witnessed too many deaths, which made his fragile and sensitive heart unbearable, and haunted him like a nightmare. To soothe those ghosts who are struggling and wandering in the dark depths.

After the Spring Festival this year, Li Ximin and a friend who lived in Shanghai went back to his hometown in western Fujian together.When the long-distance bus they took was driving on the road in the mountainous area of ​​western Fujian, they encountered a car accident. A middle-aged woman was killed by the car, and a large amount of blood flowed from the dead body along the road.At that time, Li Ximin's seat was close to the car window, on the side where the deceased could be seen.The tragedy of the deceased was deeply engraved in his mind, and for several nights in a row, he would involuntarily fall into a terrifying nightmare.In the nightmares that woke him up again and again, the woman who died tragically always appeared in the image of a dying suffering person, as if calling: "Why don't you save me? Why don't you save me?" Li Ximin recounted this terrible During the experience, I could clearly hear the shock of the death I witnessed from his unexaggerated tone.The sensitivity in his blood seems to have endowed him with some kind of supernatural sensitivity, even the death of someone who has nothing to do with him will bring him an extraordinary shock.This kind of shock will be deposited in his heart for a long time, until one day it condenses and becomes the inspiration for one of his novels, allowing him to express it in words.

Therefore, in my opinion, the reason why he insists on describing death in novels is not so much out of the needs of literature itself, but more because of the fact that the death events in real life endowed him with too many extraordinary characters. Writing has become the best channel for him to relieve this inner experience. Li Ximin started writing horror novels in 2000. Although the time is not very long, it has shown a strong and unstoppable momentum. "Daughter of Gu" and "Blood Money" are almost a new work every year.A major feature of horror novels is the inseparable description and rendering of death.Death is the most basic fear of human beings. All horror novels create a terrifying atmosphere around the unknown, imminent death, strangeness of death, and tragic appearance of death.Therefore, once he broke into the field of horror novels, Li Ximin became like a fish in water, as if he had found a training ground where he could display all kinds of death scenes leisurely: the green grasshopper, which is a metaphor for a young girl who died young, emerged from the water of memory (); Nightmare The sewer with broken corpses floating in it has become the daily consciousness of demented teenagers, and the screaming rats symbolizing death are scurrying around every night ("Blood Money"); Reappearance, bringing a series of strange deaths ("Daughter of Gu"), and so on.But in his novels, the strange and terrifying images of death are never transcendent and fictional, but are deeply rooted in his experience of his hometown in western Fujian.From a literary point of view, this is a full excavation of localized horror elements; but from Li Ximin's personal psychological point of view, it is a kind of catharsis full of pleasure from memory.

If Li Ximin only writes all kinds of strange death experiences from the perspective of horror, Li Ximin may keep his writing confined to horror novels forever, unable to surpass himself.Fortunately, his literary pursuits are diverse, and his perspective on death is not limited to horror.In his spirit, it is better than "the ant that penetrates into the brain", "the red-haired mouse in the dark night", "the king of poisonous insects - Gu", "the green light in the eyes of the dead that flashed past the morgue" What is even more terrifying than the horrors that symbolize death is the cruelty of the naked social reality.All of this is closely related to the rural life he was born in the 1960s and experienced hardships; this also causes his literary writing to often transcend the perspective of horror, put aside all exaggerations and pretense, and turn to a more straightforward seriousness about real life write.

In recent years, some writers and directors born in the 1960s and 1970s have described the Chinese social life in the 1970s they experienced in their works, such as the novels "North by Northwest", "Taking Root" and "Brothers". , the movie "My Brothers and Sisters", "Peacock" and so on.The lives of ordinary people in that period were full of hardships, friendship, joy, absurdity, bitterness, and even suffering.Li Ximin's novel is a very typical work that reflects the rural life experienced by his generation in the 1970s.What is different is that the angle he chose to enter that period of life is not ordinary or suffering, or absurd, or warm memories, but the actual death.In this book, he wrote more than 20 death incidents in one breath. Death is like a rugged mountain road, connecting the typical events that happened in the countryside during that period into a complete picture.Cultural critic Zhu Dake said: "It is the death pedigree of the Hakka people, or a chronology of the life of the Hakka people...not only maintains our concern for life, but also becomes the hardest part of the spiritual history." But in my opinion, this novel is by no means a rural literature in the general sense. What it shows is not only the death pedigree and life chronology of the Hakka people, but also in a broader sense the life of Chinese rural people in a period. The holographic picture of life and death, those ordinary and dense death events like the continuous rain in the plum rain season, outlines a realistic image of the Chinese countryside in a period, and the living conditions of ordinary people who are struggling in the misery and absurd reality are all here. which is presented.

Death is the protagonist of Li Ximin's novel, and it is Heizi, a young man who lost his father prematurely, who shows us the various performances of death.After losing his father (a symbol of the loss of asylum), Heizi followed his mother to the foreign village of Quliu (a symbol of all Chinese villages, no doubt).Thus, through Heizi's childish eyes, scenes of death that really belonged to the countryside and the corresponding lives, weird, humble, exaggerated, tragic, and absurd, surfaced in the waters of history: those who died of tetanus The rogue boy and the fourth child; Li Laifu, a cowardly husband who exhausted himself to death because he couldn't bear the evil woman; Wang Shichang, who was stabbed to death by the rebels like a pig; Li Yuanxin's father died after eating a chicken a day; Li Wenkui, who flew under the wheel in order not to let his son marry the girl he liked; Zhu Bitao, a rightist intellectual who came to Quliu Village in spring and was crushed to death by a collapsed mud house in autumn; the passing away of the red-haired mother-in-law who represented justice and benevolence in the world and symbolized the mother earth... The young Heizi was accompanied by these extraordinary and constant shocks grew up with the death of his sensitive mind.Heizi seems to be the incarnation of everyone who has experienced rural life. The deaths he experienced will make you feel familiar, and reading this novel will make you unable to help revisiting past experiences and touching every detail in the process of growing up. precious memory.Therefore, the life and death that Heizi participated in, observed, and recorded, which are as common as weeds in the countryside, are actually a history of heavy spiritual growth.

Li Ximin's ambition in writing this book is obvious.As he said, "While we record some noble deaths, we should also record those humble deaths. The deaths of too many humble people constitute the spiritual history of our nation." However, he seldom expresses directly in his novels own thoughts, but only state the facts.This is why this novel adopts a more story-telling style of narrative.This kind of narration is quick and direct, making the whole novel like a document, a document that records history.