The readers' meeting of the novel Baoshui Village by Qiao Ye, awarded the 11th Mao Dun Literature Prize, was held at "The Temple of Earth and Me" Book Fair. Han Jingqun, editor-in-chief of Beijing October Literary Publishing House, and Qiao Ye, author of Baoshui Village, led readers into the world of the novel.
Qiao Ye is a professional writer at the Beijing Lao She Academy of Literature, vice-chairman of the Beijing Writers' Association, and a member of the national commission of the Chinese Writers' Association. She is the author of many works, including Baoshui Village, The Slowest is Living, Guilty Plea, and Absent-minded, and has been awarded the Mao Dun Literature Prize, the Lu Xun Literature Prize, the Zhuang Zhongwen Literary Award, the Chinese Literature Media Award, the People's Literary Award, the Beijing Literary Award, and the Xiaoshuo Xuankan Annual Award. Baoshui Village, winner of the 11th Mao Dun Literature Prize, is regarded as a masterpiece of "soil novel" during the modernization of China, vividly presenting the great changes that are taking place in rural China. The four chapters, Winter-Spring, Spring-Summer, Summer-Autumn, and Autumn-Winter, are like a long scroll, telling the current rural life in the sequence of the four seasons.
"For me, feminine writing is a return to my original state." Qiao Ye admitted, "I used to sometimes narrate from a male or a neutral perspective, but now it's almost exclusively a female angle. Perhaps for many female writers, feminine writing is a natural choice; but for me, it is a destined return journey. There are many women in Baohui Village: the first-person narrator Qingping, her grandmother Wang Yulan, Grandma Nine in Baoshui village, the local Party Secretary Daying, Xiumei, Xiangmei, and Xuemei....... I deeply love each of them. Meanwhile, I think villages like Boshui and Futianzhuang are also female. Mother lands, mother villages, don't we all call them as such? I love a remark from Grandma Nine in the novel: 'A person is to the crowd as a drop of water is to the river.' In the great era, women, who are like water, will shine greater, never just on themselves."
Zhai Yejun, a judge of the Mao Dun Literature Prize, commented, "Baoshui Village recreates a complex countryside that can't be summarized in a single sentence." The novel told a story about Baoshui village in the Taihang Mountains, which was simple, vigorous, affectionate, and almost inaccessible. Some readers said, "Understand Baoshui Village, then you will understand your own hometown." Han Jingqun said, "We can see it as a novel about the relationship between everyone and their hometown. People can only truly embrace their hometowns if they have left them."
Baoshui Village focuses on the relationship between people and their homeland, their previous experiences, and themselves in the past, which is rather important. In the refreshing and steady environment of Baoshui Village, the heroine Di Qingping is healed, gradually relieves herself of her father's accident, and no longer holds a grudge against the countryside and her hometown. About "hometown", Qiao Ye wrote in Baoshui Village: "What is hometown? It is a place where the old, alive or dead, waiting for us to go back, and a place that is too old to go further. Therefore, the land, the village, the house, the relatives, they have no choice but to wait for us to come back, and that is the so-called hometown."
Speaking of the creative process, Qiao Ye recounted her experiences in the villages, admitting, "So far, this is the novel I've ever written most patiently. I came to these villages again and again in apprehension, and the more I went there, the more I realized that only when I went inside the countryside to scrutinize it could I find out what kind of rich and plentiful novel it actually contained. The countryside is undergoing great changes that must be attached to details that are composed of trifles of common folks. It’s just like a trickle of water that eventually becomes a river, in which every drop counts."
Translator: LI Xiaochun
