Favorite: A graceful and charming novel

Favorite: A graceful and charming novel Preface - "Exiled from the End of the World"...

Preface - "Exiling Guests from the End of the World" In November 1998, Nei Zi Wanbing published her first collection of essays and micro-novels, "Returning to the Years", and it has been more than ten years since then. Her "Disturbing the Red Dust", released in February 2006, was the first collection of Chinese haiku poems in the Australian Chinese poetry circle. Six years later, in the Year of the Dragon, his new micro-novel collection "Exiled from the End of the World" is about to be published. I am honored to be the first reader of the original manuscript of this book. He also asked me to write the preface, but he hesitated for fear of making the Fang family laugh. Because it is hard to disobey a girlfriend's orders, fortunately there is a saying that "do not avoid relatives when you are in love", so I can only bite the bullet and do it reluctantly. I will try to give a brief summary of my experience after reading it, and hope that literary critics will not hesitate to correct me. In 1993, Wan Bing began to submit manuscripts on a whim, and published her first micro-novel the following year. Over the past eighteen years, she has written less than 100 "micro-novel" works, averaging four to five per year. During the rest of the time, she wrote mostly prose, Chinese haiku, and poetry. She is not a prolific writer. As she used to like singing and acting in Cantonese opera, she considers herself an amateur rather than a professional. Occasionally, I would sing loudly when I got excited, and I could sing and entertain myself without any pressure. When inspiration strikes, he writes at his desk, writing articles and novels without any utilitarian thoughts. It's all about randomness, so it's no wonder that there are so few works. Her beautiful singing voice comes from natural talent, and her beautiful singing voice is self-taught without a teacher. Her poetry, writing and novels are also self-taught like me. He has a good heart and wisdom, and he studied ancient Chinese under the contemporary scholar Zhao Darui when he was in high school and after school (Teacher Zhao lives in the suburbs of Sydney and is over 90 years old), laying a good foundation in Chinese. Therefore, his choice of words in poems, articles and novels is extremely elegant, and his skills in Chinese studies are naturally revealed. "Micro-novel" is divided into many categories. Generally speaking, the chapters included in this collection belong to the category of combined prose style. The beautiful prose style can be seen in the writing or description, and it is by no means an ordinary work like those popular popular romance works nowadays. An anthology published by the Chinese Writers Association of Victoria uses her article "On the Maple Forest Road" as the title of the book. This article has sentences such as: "The maple trees hurriedly stretched out their green palms and asked for kisses in the clear sky, and actually taught the spring wind to play with it." "Their melancholy eyes wrote helplessness and sadness, causing the flowers and plants to be infected and look at each other with tears." With the rich imagination of personification, how can flowers and plants "look at each other with tears"? In "Good Citizen": "The twinkling stars in the sky are secretly watching, citing the hypocrisy of human nature; the bright moon is also working hard to shoot through the lies it told during the day." The stars and the bright moon are regarded as spiritual people. "Good news": "The thin and soft black woolen dress is so chic and elegant as it spins lightly. The elegant fabric with elegant flowers and skin-colored underwear is full of infinite temptation." The description of clothing reveals a woman's alluring appearance. Without subtle observation, it is difficult to describe it like this. "Rare Visitor": "Suddenly, a foreign girl with shawl hair, slender curves and a snowy complexion appeared in the mirror, with a sinister smile on her lips. The image drifted vaguely around her..." She mistook the ghost figure for a beautiful foreign woman walking on the street. "On a cold winter night, the cold wind howls, and the shadows of the trees are helplessly scattered, as if they are about to move. It makes the Melbourne night sky even colder, making the stars and moon gradually lose their brightness." The first paragraph of this article "Winter Cold Shatters Children's Hearts" is like a beautiful prose. "Only the sound of Uncle Wang's slow rubber shoes is tapping helplessly on the lonely floor, and the utensils are hurriedly responding with irregular sounds." The portrayal of the elegies of the elderly in Western society reflects the reality of the "teardrops" in their dying years. It is still described with personification, and the "loneliness on the floor" reflects Uncle Wang's loneliness? The vessel can actually "response"? There are many ingenious ideas like this in the collected chapters. "Who Knows the Heart of a Grass" takes current social events as its subject matter, and at the end of the twist, the identity of the rich girl is revealed, which surprises the readers. The ending of the micro-novel uses a "reversal" without being formulaic, which can make readers feel deeply surprised and consistent with the facts. It is difficult to solve without ingenuity. How to convince readers that the "reversal" is reasonable and unpredictable until the last paragraph is a test of the micro-novel writer's ability and skills. Wan Bing used the "reversal" method in many articles in this collection. The surprising endings often surprise readers, completely reaching the charming realm of micro-novel. The title of the book, "Exiled from the End of the World," is about Wan Bing's nightmare of her family escaping at sea in 1978 and being stranded on a desert island in Indonesia for seventeen days. It was turned into a novel that has nothing to do with her own suffering. It describes that Qian'er, who went to the sea of ​​​​wrath after all kinds of hardships, was raped and murdered in the end. Her father, Old Cheng, went crazy and said to himself: "It's the ghost you once murdered who is looking for you to pay for your life!" Qian'er, a female Viet Cong agent who "worked for the tiger" during the Vietnam War, finally died in Xinxiang, unable to escape the law of retribution for good and evil. Since Wan Bing has a foundation in Chinese studies, she also likes to sing elegant Cantonese opera. She also likes to read "A Dream of Red Mansions" and Tang poetry and Song lyrics. The titles of her micro-novels already contain elegant meanings. For example: "Only the moon in the spring garden is sentimental", "The mist is cast again to confuse the heart and soul", "The old years are dying with candles and tears", "The old dreams are cold in the wind" and so on. Reading Wan Bing's micro-novel collection "Exiled from the End of the World", although not every chapter is a masterpiece, its charm is that at the same time, you can feel her graceful writing style, deft conception and clear and elegant prose. Let the readers read it slowly and carefully. It is time to stop writing at this point; otherwise, it will be regarded as a "old man selling melons"!

December 20, 2011 at Wuxiangzhai in Melbourne.