Coffee Literature Coffee, Golf and Modernist Literature

Yu Yiming, a member of the Chinese Writers Association and a director of the provincial and municipal writers' association, has written nine long and short novels. He has won the people's Literature Award, the Zijinshan Literature Award and other awards. He is now teaching in Nanjing Foreign School.

(Yu Yiming / tr. by Phil Newell)

More than twenty years ago, I was teaching in the countryside, and my cousin from Shanghai was coming to be a guest. At that time, the traffic was not as convenient as it is now, and it was not easy to take a long trip. Cousin is a rare visitor and a relative from Shanghai. My parents have to buy fish and meat. Now it is not rare to have fish and meat on the dinner table, but at that time we often see them during festivals. Of course, at that time, fish was fish and meat was meat. After dinner, cousin said it would be better to have a cup of coffee. Coffee? There was a real problem at that time. Many people in the countryside had never seen it. I just read about this term in a book. According to the book, Balzac asked for coffee when he wrote. At that time, I didn't know that Balzac was also a poor man when he was alive, a man who was chased by his creditors and did not choose to escape into literature. More than 20 years ago, literature was still covered with a halo of sacred nobility. In my mind at that time, Balzac was sacred, and coffee followed the noble.

There are more than ten miles of dirt road from the school where I teach. As soon as I ride my bike to the department store, I find out that there are coffee and coffee partners who are tied up and sold together, and my husband must be taken with his wife. I gritted my teeth and paid half a month's salary to buy a box. After my cousin left, I couldn't wait to cook a cup just like him. It was so bitter and tiresome that I was suffering to drink it. I understand that behind the nobility is bitterness, and from then on I disapprove of the bourgeois way of pretending to be in Shanghai.

Later, when I went to the city, there were foreigners among my colleagues and pseudo-foreigners who had been "instant" by the Western way of life after going abroad. They all liked to drink coffee, and there was often a strange smell in the office. I stuck to my tea and sniffed at it. I'm afraid of accidentally picking up the fragrance. Six or seven years ago, I took my students to study in Europe. At that time, there was no boiled water in the hotels of the great powers. I carried on my back an electric kettle and a large bag of tea in my suitcase, carrying forward the fragrance of the green tea of the motherland all the way. But something unexpected happened. I lived in Toronto last year and walked to Chinatown to buy vegetables every day for more than two hours, so I had to look for a place to pee. Starbucks coffee shops are the most popular on the streets of Toronto, and the advantage for me is that I can go to the bathroom for free. But we Chinese are thin-skinned and embarrassed for too many times. after all, people all over the world know that we Chinese are not short of money, so we also pretend to order a cup of coffee. One day I found out that I went to Starbucks for that cup of coffee, and it was too late.

It's good to have tea, but it's good to have coffee without tea.

More than a decade ago, a rich friend invited me to play golf. As soon as I heard that a card was my salary for a year, I felt that it was not a sport but a show of wealth. Over 50 years old, the body is so high that he does not rely on wheels to go to work on two legs. One weekend, I was encouraged by a friend to play once. I shot down the 18th hole. If I didn't take a field car, the number of the pedometer was equivalent to walking more than half of Xuanwu Lake. Suddenly I felt that the green land was really green and the white sand in the bunker was so white. Understand that the theme of this movement is to burn money, but also to protect life, like it.

So when there is more time and more money in my wallet, I have no objection to being elegant.

In the eighties of last century, Western literature prevailed in the literary world, and writers like cutting leeks appeared one after another to pull the flag to make tiger skins, which made people greedy. I also want to catch up with fashion, nibble on those modernist classics, and write a few short and medium-sized novels. But after all, I was standing in the corner of the country, not tall, and I couldn't steal the limelight on tiptoe. Frustrated, as he continued to write, he cursed angrily: literature, you libertine, you have loitered enough, and one day you will return to the nest of realism. Many years later, literature finally returned to the realistic style of writing, but writing, I often found that those years of reading and writing, in fact, can not be omitted detours, they add a new style to my current realistic style.

What I want to say is that we don't understand until we are over fifty that we should not jump to conclusions about things in this world.