Zhang Xianliang's recent works

Author: Zhang Xianliang / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: The "Wen Hui Original Series," which has a significant influence in the publishing industry and among readers, has now launched a new work. This collection of essays, Zhang Xianliang’s Recent Works, is one of them. The book vividly describes the author’s fascinating experiences in establishing cultural industries such as the Western Film City in Ningxia, while also offering humorous and sharp critiques of the people and social phenomena in the West. This book can be considered one of the most practically valuable publications by Wen Hui Press. The insights on business management and cultural industries shared in this book will undoubtedly benefit readers, especially those working in these fields. Readers will find many of the ideas and opinions presented to be novel.
Where is Ningxia? Sitting in a Starbucks café on Wangfujing or Huaihai Road, it’s hard to imagine what Ningxia looks like. Ningxia is even less seen by outsiders than Inner Mongolia or Qinghai. If you flip through newspapers across the country, you’ll rarely find a tour itinerary for Ningxia. In 1983, when almost all overseas trips were arranged by organizations, the Chinese Writers’ Association assigned me, along with Yan Wenjing and Lu Wenfu, to visit Scandinavia. The document was actually sent to the Propaganda Department of Gansu Province. Twenty years later, in 2005, CCTV came to Ningxia to film a program about me. The crew stayed in Yinchuan for a few days, and when the program was aired, the narration mistakenly introduced me as: “Zhang Xianliang lives in Yinchuan, Inner Mongolia.” No wonder I received many letters from readers who had been transferred from Gansu, Qinghai, or Inner Mongolia. Sometimes, when meeting old friends I haven’t seen in years, they would ask, “How is it over in Gansu?” or “Are you doing well in Inner Mongolia?” It often makes me feel deeply ashamed—apparently, it’s not others’ fault, but mine. In fact, before the age of twenty, I myself didn’t even know what the term “Ningxia” meant.
In 1954, when I was eighteen and studying high school in Beijing, I was expelled from school on a fabricated charge of being from a “bourgeois family” and a descendant of those labeled as “rebellious, managed, fought, and killed” targets. By the time of my graduation, my family had completely collapsed. My father was imprisoned, and my mother earned a living by knitting sweaters for others. After becoming an unemployed youth, I went to a printing shop to work as a wax paper engraver. Engraving one sheet of wax paper earned me 0.50 yuan, with the engraving society taking 0.30 yuan as a commission, leaving me with 0.20 yuan. I could engrave five sheets of wax paper a day, earning me one yuan to support my mother, sister, and myself. Now, “engraving wax paper” is a rare skill, and only a handful of people over the age of seventy still know how to do it. I am one of them.
In 1954, Beijing began constructing “New Beijing,” with the first step being to gradually remove the unemployed, underemployed, and those with problematic family backgrounds from the city. They were labeled “relocation,” with the destination being the northwest regions of Gansu, Qinghai, and Xinjiang. Naturally, people like me, with such family backgrounds, were among those relocated. In July 1955, I, along with my elderly mother and frail sister, along with over a thousand others, first took a train to Baotou and then boarded dozens of large trucks for a three-day long journey to a rural area along the Yellow River in Helan County, then part of the Yinchuan Prefecture of Gansu Province. The county government had already built earthen houses for us these “Beijing migrants” and established an administrative division for the village, named “Jingxing Village,” as if the people there were shining stars that had fallen from Beijing or meteorites. The village was divided into four villages, each with thirty or forty rows of earthen houses, arranged like barracks. Thousands of people came to live in this village. The earthen houses only had one straw mattress, emitting a musty, damp smell. How could houses get moldy in summer? Later, when I became an old resident of Ningxia, I learned that the mud used to plaster the walls had to be mixed with current-year wheat straw or rice straw. If old, moldy straw was used, the houses would definitely smell musty. People think modern decorative coatings cause pollution, but they don’t realize that ancient decorative coatings could also cause pollution. However, no one got sick from living in such air-polluted houses, which makes me think that modern people are becoming increasingly fragile.
Mixing mud with wheat straw and rice straw to plaster walls is a skill that humans likely developed when they first moved from tree nests to building houses. Mud has always been an ancient decorative coating, used for thousands of years. Back then, when I looked around the rural areas of Ningxia, almost everything seemed to be a reproduction of ancient scenes. Farming still used the method of “two oxen carrying the plow,” and even the plows were made of wood. Farming labor like planting in spring, harvesting in autumn, threshing, and winnowing all exuded a primitive simplicity, just like the “farmer’s joy” carved on the tombs of the Han and Tang dynasties.
Although the earthen houses smelled unpleasant, the pure air in the fields seemed to rush into my nostrils, resistingly filling my lungs. The sky was so transparent that it made me feel as if I had grown taller and could fly without wings. I will never forget the first time I saw the Yellow River. It was summer, and that year was particularly rainy. The river was so vast and turbulent that the common phrases “vast and surging” perfectly described it. In the eddy of the river bend, whirlpools churned the banks, and the sound of collapsing banks echoed from time to time, making the Yellow River under the clear sky seem incredibly dynamic, majestic, and solemn. The old willow trees by the riverbank held their exposed roots tightly in the cliff-like soil, showing determination and composure, embodying the spirit of “clinging to the green mountains, never letting go.”
The relocated people were all Beijing citizens who had experienced life in the old society. Though they were not skilled in agriculture, they knew how to play and had many who enjoyed fishing. With a thin wooden stick (there were no bamboo in Ningxia), they tied a piece of cotton thread to it, and the other end of the thread was looped with a bent iron wire. Without any bait, they could fish several or even tens of pounds of carp and catfish from the shallow banks of the river bend, which amazed me greatly. We drew water from wells. Once, while drawing water, I accidentally dropped the wooden bucket into the well. The government had only provided us with productive farming tools—shovels, hoes, and sickles—so what could I use to retrieve the bucket? I had to go to a nearby village to borrow a hook-like tool.
In Ningxia, people call villages “zhuangzi.” Upon entering a zhuangzi, I found a family with their door open. Two young women, wearing traditional jackets with buttons, were sitting cross-legged on a kang (traditional bed) sewing quilts. I said, “Excuse me, I’d like to borrow your hook.” To my surprise, the two young women first looked at each other in astonishment, then burst into laughter, shouting, “Oh, my stomach hurts!” They pushed and shoved each other, saying, “You give your hook to him,” and “You’re the one who wants to borrow your hook from him.” They ignored me and continued to laugh and tear at each other on the kang. I was left baffled. Their family’s hook, made of tree branches, was clearly placed by the water bucket at the door. If they didn’t want to lend it, why was it so funny? Of course, they eventually understood what I meant. The older of the two young women blushed and hesitantly got off the kang, turning away to hand me the hook. When I returned the hook, they laughed and clapped their hands.
Later, I learned that in Ningxia dialect, the word for “hook” is pronounced as “xu,” so a hook is called a “xu zi” or “xu xu zi.” The pronunciation of “hook” is the same as that of “gou,” which in Ningxia dialect means buttocks. For example, the common phrase “to curry favor” in Mandarin is called “liu gou zi” in Ningxia. Asking a woman for her “gou” is undoubtedly serious sexual harassment. Shanghai people say “to eat tofu,” while Ningxia people call it “sao qing.”
The nature and people of Ningxia completely compensated for the sense of loss I felt from living in big cities. Moreover, in the big cities, I was just an unemployed “low-born” person. The vastness, roughness, and unrestrained spirit of Ningxia, along with its primitive naked beauty, unknowingly made me fall in love with it. And the smiling faces of those two rosy-cheeked young women left such a deep impression on me at nineteen that they determined my aesthetic standards for women. Even today, I still appreciate girls with a touch of rustic simplicity. This place, which was once so unfamiliar to me, became my home for more than half a century, and I still live here today.
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