Date of birth: 1959/4/24
1959 was born in Shanghai. 1976 went to the countryside to jump the queue and settle down. 1982 graduated from the Chinese Department of Shanghai Normal University. He used to be a teacher of Shanghai Anting Normal School and a creator of Shanghai Jiading District Cultural Bureau. In the meantime, he signed contracts with Guangdong Writers Association and Shanghai Writers Association and became a member of Chinese Writers Association. Vice Chairman of Shanghai Jiading District Federation of Literary and Art Circles.
He is the author of the novel Love Caution, How long did it take to grow up, and a collection of short stories, Love Illusion, My Story, Breaking the precepts, Love and Fallen, etc.
How hard it is to grow up, the first prize of Shanghai Excellent Book Award; "New Room" and "Home alone" won the Shanghai Literature Excellent Works Award, and the last three chapters won the Shanghai Literature Excellent Works Award 1994-1997, and the Guangzhou Literature Excellent Works Award. What is the cruel love diary of middle-aged people in Sharla Cheung's novels (Bai Zhu)? Ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign people are willing to tell her and explain her. Everyone has the right to speak to her, there is no right or wrong, this is the motto of human beings. There is no wrong love in the world, even if it is stained with several layers of absurd colors, as long as it is love, there will always be beauty in it. There are always people trying to discuss and express love, using words to express it. It may be artificial words, vulgar cliches, or sensational frivolous nonsense, but these are not important. What is important is that love is one of the essential emotions of human beings, which is irreplaceable and discredited.
On the theme of literature, love is endless and can never be explained. There are many types of love and different angles, but for writers, showing love depends on sincerity and talent; For works, it is necessary to conquer readers with persuasion. Based on my short-sightedness, Sharla Cheung, a Shanghai-style writer, has become the most sincere and convincing writer in contemporary China with his "love". Of course, you can disagree with this judgment. After all, I am not a statistician, but a person who has read novels and likes to express his feelings.
Before reading Sharla Cheung's novels, I even came to an unreliable conclusion: China people are not suitable for writing love. At least, all kinds of signs in contemporary literature show that we are either illusory or humble, and these are not the most appropriate expressions of love. Comparatively speaking, I don't think He Yi's The Boundary of Physics, Kitamura's Looking at You and Yang Lu's Fingering can be called love novels. These novels are related to love, but they may not find the bullet that hits love. Even though I have always liked and even been willing to listen to Han Dong's You and Me (it suddenly occurred to me that the names of these people overlap with Sharla Cheung in the so-called contemporary literature map), I don't think that Han Dong wrote the so-called true meaning of love: the protagonist of You and Me expressed a kind of humility in front of love, except for the love particles displayed because of truth, the details and beauty of love were not fully displayed-you and I were not as beautiful as Han Dong used to be.
Compared with the above writers, Sharla Cheung's novels have a solid sense of experience and a real sense of scene. When reading Sharla Cheung's novels, people always feel in a trance. It seems that this narrator is neither a personal experience nor a passive fabricator, but a "prophet" who is above and has insight into the truth of the world. How can a middle-aged man write those details about love so soberly and sincerely after he has experienced a happy or worried love? Sharla Cheung's middle-aged men, without exception, are deeply in love. "Love" is very important to them, and the beauty of life depends almost 100% on their indomitable pursuit of "love". If you are too persistent in the pursuit of love, you will inevitably encounter something that can be called "cruel". If movies such as Trainspotting, Swallowtail Butterfly and Brighter Summer are called "cruel youth" movies, then Sharla Cheung's series of novels with the theme of love can be called "cruel middle-aged love" diary novels. It is these cruel scenes of middle-aged diaries that make the great literary theme of "love" absent from China's contemporary novels for a long time.
Sharla Cheung's novels always focus on a middle-aged man's humble or mediocre love path. He is willing to give the most affectionate care to this role and present the love details and opinions of middle-aged men with stories with the most personal emotional characteristics. His previous short stories, such as Love and Fallen, One Heart, Flaw and I Want to Say Love, are not attractive in plot or attractive in language, but there is always a power to catch people from a unique perspective. In my personal reading memory, a scene in which a couple of teachers and students in a normal school are ambiguous in the teachers' dormitory, a scene in which men and women communicate with music at a dance, and a scene in which a middle-aged husband looks at his wife and others in a newly renovated new house, all of which have become the unpretentious plot and language in Sharla Cheung's novels. It is these vivid and emotional details that make love, a beautiful word, aboveboard in China's contemporary novels.
When Sharla Cheung's latest novel was first published in Harvest magazine, it was called "Who's in charge of Xiting". Neither the director Deng in Xiting nor Who is in charge of ups and downs is as powerful as the name that directly hit the theme of "love" before, because the novel is covered by a murder novel, and there is suspense from beginning to end. However, I still regard this novel as a real and thorough novel with love as the only theme. It still tells the story of a middle-aged man screaming in pain after being stabbed by love. When two women leave the protagonist Deng Tao, the painful experience is a perfect interpretation of love. Love always plays that beautiful and sad role. For example, you can't live without love, and life without love is incomplete or even wrong; And life often requires you to experience a kind of pain from time to time. This painful experience is only suitable for love.
Sharla Cheung's novels have always been unremarkable, without any ornate or obscure, and even suspected of being old-fashioned. He never writes stories in surprises and rarely describes a plot in complicated ways, so you can complain that this writer pays too much attention to rhetoric and technology. However, it is this that distinguishes Sharla Cheung from the avant-garde writers in the 1990s. Such a frank and faithful writing style shows the sincerity that is rare among contemporary writers. In my opinion, the plain writing style of Back to Nature is not outstanding because of maverick, but because the writer is loyal to the essence of life and knows how to show his content in an appropriate form. Only by this, Sharla Cheung can definitely be called a rare contemporary writer in China who knows how to "measure".
I have to admit that my personal vision is always narrow, so I never feel that contemporary China writers are qualified and know how to measure, or that they have never created qualified and measured works. Jia Pingwa and Yan Lianke, these are writers who are in the first line but can't produce first-line works. For example, Jia Pingwa's "Happiness" speculates on the fate of little people, which should not be done by novelists at all, but by the collusion of screenwriters in theme and plot; Another example is Yan Lianke's Ding Zhuang Dream. Stories from short experiences will always be a propaganda tool without foundation. The so-called experience life has really lost the title of novelist. Sharla Cheung's personal "private" novels, I think, are at least sincere works related to the author himself. As for director Deng's "old-fashioned" narrative, it is in the same strain in his novels. Don't expect this writer to suddenly bring you a novel in form, and the expectation of the story is also unreliable. Sharla Cheung spent many, many years writing about the feelings and love between men and women, which are endless and perhaps redundant feelings, humble but extremely high-profile love, and no story can escape from the secular life. However, Zhang Min has a charm that allows his readers to fall into the emotional details he created again and again. The beauty of this detail constitutes the surprise of every reading and the real expectation afterwards.
Sharla Cheung was once listed as the representative of the "new state" novelist by critics, but in fact, his sense of form and the angle of story selection, even his values and the atmosphere he preached were different from those of other "new state" novelists at that time. Facts have proved that novelists can only mature and go further if they insist on their own preferences. In those days, people in the so-called "new state" either lost their state and couldn't write anything, or switched to other jobs because they didn't have lasting hobbies. Writing a novel is a lonely undertaking, and it can't be rewarded from the beginning. At this point, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign. There are too few great novelists in this world who can be recognized and rewarded in an instant. More writers can only rely on their stubbornness and persistent preferences to fill their daily writing in their lifetime. Don't think that Kafka's example is a special case everywhere. You know, awesome writers like Kafka and Bukowski have never enjoyed the bread they got from writing in their lives. It is impossible to expect everyone to be as lucky as Marquez, Coetzee or Naipaul.
I believe that writing novels is an interesting thing for Sharla Cheung, and he is willing to pay for it. Otherwise, as a novelist who has published several books and no shortage of publishing opportunities, he still can't get the recognition and understanding he deserves today. He should complain alone instead of continuing to write. Preference is a prerequisite for novelists, and it is also a token to make novelists "always on the road". I understand a person who writes a novel slowly, and a person who turns back or changes careers halfway after writing for a long time-these are probably due to insufficient hobbies.
I remember that shortly after Wang Xiaobo's death, Zhu Wen, then a writer, said, "We are really indifferent." He felt that no one knew such a good writer. In today's information explosion and massive information, indifferent things happen every day. Look at those fancy emotional stories (such as "He is going to say love"), unreliable pseudo-bestsellers and stall books (such as "A Good Woman"), semi-veiled pure literature niche forms (such as "Caution"), and then look back at Sharla Cheung's novels to see his poor popularity. I can only sigh the indifference of the times again.
With novels such as Autumn and Love, He Want to Say Love and Director Deng, he became the most respected novelist of his generation. He explored the emotional world of human beings with a love-like style and language. Index contemporary novelists with hands. The name may be loud, the work may have been waiting for you, and it may have a place in the reader's heart. But when it comes to one of the ultimate values of literature, that is, touching people's hearts, it is difficult to erect enough fingers. In my view, those poor novelists are not short of skills, or even sincerity (there is no doubt that some people express their piety in front of literature). Maybe what they lack is the soul. If you describe a story with an extremely false emotion, in any case, the story can't really hit people's hearts, not to mention an excellent novel, which just hits the softest part of your heart and produces a huge sound.
There is no doubt that China's contemporary literature is inferior and clumsy. Just like China movies and China football now, no matter how you praise and praise a movie or cheer for a domestic men's football match, you must understand one premise: this kind of praise, praise and cheer is based on humble, inferior and clumsy premise. Admit it, smart readers, writers and critics, this is the worst time, this is just the worst time. Look at the existing literary works, decadent and outdated, vulgar and impetuous, cheap and frivolous, flooding everywhere and floating in all directions. Only by admitting that this is the worst can we find some works that are not the worst, but look ok, reasonable, even excellent and honest. Of course, if you don't admit this reality, it's not a big problem. Who hasn't had an absurd experience? Just don't try to announce how advanced we are with a stubborn and ignorant expression. Funny wrinkles will burn deeply into your mouth and eyebrows.