Jia Pingwa and Root-seeking Novels

The 800-li Qinchuan is plain and mysterious with a long history and profound cultural connotations. The land full of charm also nourished a group of writers with the same charm including Jia Pingwa. Jia Pingwa grew up in a poor peasant family in Shaanxi, and began his creation career in 1972. Jia Pingwa's creations are full of regional color. His hometown Shangzhou is not only the background of his writing, but also provides abundant materials for him. His talent and rebellious spirit also make his works' styles diversified and the contents colorful.

Jia Pingwa is a versatile and productive writer. After he entered the literary circles, his short novel Full Moon aroused attention. After 1983, he successively released novels related to changes in the life of farmers in Shangzhou, Shaanxi such as The Story of'Xiaoyue, A Family in Jiwowa, The Last and First Months of a Year, Distant Mountains and Wild Passions, Sky Dog, Black Clan, The Ancient Fortress, Shangzhou and Turbulence, which are called novels of the "Shangzhou series" and are Jia Pingwa's representative works. He wanted to "experience, study, analyze and dissect Chinese rural areas' historical development, social transformation and life change in Shangzhou." Later he created novels such as Deserted City and Shaanxi Opera, manifested his unique style more obviously, and exerted great influence among readers.

Turbulence truly manifests the life scene of a relatively closed town's society in the early period of reform and opening up with the protagonist Jin Gou's tough experiences as the main clue. The novel's title "turbulence" is a symbolic summary of the feeling of the times and the mentality of the nation with abundant ideological and cultural connotations. This novel won the U.S. Mobil Pegasus Prize for Literature in 1987.

Shaanxi Opera won the 7th Mao Dun Literature Prize in 2008. The story of the novel takes place in Qingfeng Street. The generous and upright old director Xia Tianyi has led ordinary people of Qingfeng Street through decades of wind and rain, and has loved land all his life. When seeing Xia Junting's irrational commercial development of land harm villagers' life, he feels extremely painful. Xia Tianyi dies in a mud slide on the land loved by him. This also suggests how the traditional mode of agricultural production will end at last. The new branch secretary Xia Junting having received modern education can eliminate the restrictions of traditional views and has modern production consciousness and commercial consciousness. He establishes a free market of agricultural products in Qingfeng Street but ultimately fails because of lack of information and poor sales; the old headmaster of noble character and high prestige Xia Tianzhi loves Shaanxi opera and regards it as his life but can only helplessly see this ancient form of traditional Chinese opera decline and see rural simplicity gradually disappear. Xia Tianzhi is a representative of the traditional culture. Through depicting his fate, the author expressed his worries about the fate of the traditional culture. In the novel, the development of love between the "madman" Yinsheng and Bai Xue is a clue linking the stories happening in Qingfeng Street. In people's eyes, the "madman" Yinsheng is the story narrator and often flashes extraordinary wisdom while speaking wildly, adding mysterious color to the novel.

Jia Pingwa's novels focus on Chinese countryside in the reform and opening up period with Shangzhou as the main background of creation. They have strong regional color, are full of folk customs, manifest the anxiety and pain shown by Chinese people in social transformation, and have far-reaching significance. Because of the profound cultural connotations, his novels also have important folk value. With these characteristics, he formed a style of his own in the modern literary circles in the new period and occupied an important place in the history of Chinese modern literature.

In the mid-1980s, the conspicuous phenomenon of seeking cultural roots emerged in China's literary circles. The emergence of root-seeking consciousness on the one hand was the result of literature's development in the new period, and on the other hand was brought about by foreign literature's stimulation, especially the influence of Latin American hallucinatory realism. With the continuous deepening of ideological emancipation, literature gradually began to respect its aesthetic nature, and a number of works with different aesthetic tastes and artistic styles emerged in the literary circles - for example, Wang Zengqi's Becoming a Monk, Liu Shaotang's The Family under A Big Catkin Willow, Deng Youmei's The Snuff Bottle, Jia Pingwa's First Records of Shangzhou, etc. brought about a refreshing trend in the literary circles then. In 1984, the long novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Columbian writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Marquez was translated, introduced to China and evoked great repercussions. Such tapping of local culture and exploration of local culture achieved great success, complied with the strong wish of many Chinese writers of that period to examine the nation's reality with modern consciousness and tap and carry forward the nation's cultural traditions, and stimulated their awareness of participation in world literature hidden in their hearts. They attributed the success of Latin American literature to the unique color of regional culture, and began to turn their eyes to Chinese rural, folk and primitive culture not affected by modern civilization and explore the origin and essence of national culture in the regional life they were familiar with in an attempt to seek emancipation of literary views in a more fundamental sense and reshape national spirit. Han Shaogong's "random talk" series of novels, Li Yuhang's "Gechuan River" series of novels, Jia Pingwa's "Shangzhou" series of novels, Zheng Wanlong's "strange tales from strange lands" series of novels, Acheng's novel series entitled Romances of the Landscape, Zheng Yi's Remote Village and Old Well, Mo Yan's Red Sorghum, Zheng Chengzhi's River in the North, etc. all reflect this view on novels. Most of these works manifest folk customs and people's livelihood, examine them historically as cultural phenomena, reflect the nation's cultural psychology and have strong regional color.