Author writes compelling tales of a community's challenges and triumphs in a narrative where change and hope are constant, Yang Yang reports.

Liang Hong, a professor of contemporary Chinese literature at Renmin University of China, has completed five books based on life in Liangzhuang, a village in Wuzhen town, Rangxian county, Henan province. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

In 1973, Liang Hong was born in Liangzhuang, a village in Wuzhen town, Rangxian county, Henan province. Twenty years passed before she left.

Since 2010, Liang, currently a professor of contemporary Chinese literature at Renmin University of China, has published three nonfiction books about the village, as well as a short story collection and a novel based on her life there.

It is a fundamental task for literature to find marginal people’s discourse and to see the possibilities included in the marginal discourse and something hidden in it

Liang Hong, professor of contemporary Chinese literature, Renmin University of China

Liang is the youngest child of a five-children family. Before going to Nanyang Normal University in 1994, Liang taught in a primary school in the countryside. The salary was not only low but was often unpaid due to the local government's fiscal difficulties.

Despite the bleak reality, Liang aspired to live a "profound" life, often buying bundles of secondhand Chinese literature magazines and reading them thoroughly.

In 1994, she succeeded in entering Nanyang Normal University for a bachelor's degree, and in 1997, she went to Zhengzhou University for a master's degree, and three years later, she enrolled in Beijing Normal University for a PhD in contemporary Chinese literature.

However, as her life turned "profound", she felt increasingly lost and doubtful about her work as a teacher in a university in Beijing.

By 2008, she had even felt that her life in the city was fictional, having nothing to do with the reality, the land and soul. The connection between her and life was seemingly severed, she says.

"I even felt ashamed at my teaching style and writing frivolous articles day and night. So meaningless," Liang writes in the preface of her first nonfiction book, China in Liangzhuang Village.

On the other hand, having studied literary works about the countryside, Liang says she felt there were a lot of problems in rural areas that she had been thinking about for a long time.

"In order to look for the answers, I went back home," she says.

In July 2008, Liang took her 3-year-old son back to Liangzhuang. At first, she planned to write some essays. However, as she talked more and more with villagers, essays grew to be a book. She spent a total of five months in 2008 and 2009 interviewing villagers.

Published in 2010, China in Liangzhuang Village won the year's People's Literature Award and in 2011 a top national book award－Wenjin Book Award. It has been translated into Japanese and French, and an English translation will come out soon in the United States.

A mixture of the writer's description and reflection and villagers' first-person narration, Liang tried to faithfully record in the book people's lives and their plight more than a decade ago.

With problems such as the "left-behind children", environmental destruction, and shortage of education opportunities and healthcare facilities, Liangzhuang village seems like a miniature of China in transition.

However, this book focused only on the life of those who stayed. There were many villagers who had left for job opportunities in cities.

In 2011, with the help of her father, Liang started visiting villagers who worked in more than 10 cities as migrant workers.

After returning to Beijing, Liang rented an apartment to deal with the information and, in 20 months, completed the second book.

In 2013, her second nonfiction work Out of Liangzhuang Village was published, telling stories of 51 villagers' struggles in cities over the last three decades, their frustration and loneliness.

Liang's trilogy is based on her home village: China in Liangzhuang Village, Out of Liangzhuang Village, and Liangzhuang Village in the Last Decade. (PHOTO PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY)

As the last book of the nonfiction trilogy, Liangzhuang Village in the Last Decade, published in January, records the change of the village in the past 10 years and depicts its current situation as well as the present life of the figures that appeared in the first two books.

Compared with the previous two books, the latest one is light and more about the daily life of individual villagers.

The trilogy, by telling the stories of one typical Chinese village, vividly and faithfully records the great changes in the countryside of China since the reform and opening-up started in the late 1970s.

Around the country, as more residents have left their hometowns to work in cities, villages have been emptied, except for the elderly and children left behind, giving rise to many problems.

In recent years, society has been paying increasing attention to the revitalization of villages. Writers, scholars and artists are casting their eyes back to the roots of Chinese civilization.

"While I was writing the first book, I could feel that my hometown was a place in my heart that especially made me feel sore. Because I often went back, I knew a lot of stories about it which gradually accumulated in my heart. That's why I wrote the first book," she says.

In a dialogue with Liang in Beijing, livestreamed in February, Chinese film director Jia Zhangke says: "We often say that villages are silent. Without writers like Liang Hong, villages will remain silent."

Liang's five books form an epic narration with a timeline and rich depictions based on longtime observation of the village, Jia says.

"The five books construct a firm structure, not only about an individual or a group of people, but from a panoramic perspective of a village. And any figure or any story from the books can make a touching film," Jia says.

"I wrote about Liangzhuang village and the villagers because they are common people and we are all common people. And in common people's lives, we can see they were trying to break the defined limits of their dark life, which is what particularly touches me," Liang says.

Liang recalls that when going to different cities to visit her fellow villagers for Out of Liangzhuang Village, the migrant workers told her how they fought in Xi'an using bricks and iron chains.

"It's horrible just like those Hong Kong action movies. But in their stories is also the hope of their life. It is a fundamental task for literature to find marginal people's discourse and to see the possibilities included in the marginal discourse and something hidden in it," Liang says.

Nonfiction writing demands a writer's capability to deal with information about the reality, Jia says. Through scattered irrelevant information, writers insightfully make discoveries that with their creation will allow readers to understand the world better, he says.

Liang says she wanted to represent the complexity in the development of both villages and cities. Instead of simple optimism or pessimism, by reading her books, people can understand the problems better.

Liangzhuang continuously gives Liang, who now lives in Beijing, great spiritual support. For her, villages exist as a basic experience for a fast-changing China that shapes people's thinking or behavioral modes.

"Villages are important cultural genes for China," she says, "which cannot be simply decided as advanced or backward."

As China is now attaching more importance to the rejuvenation of the countryside, Liang says one of the important things is to build public spaces to meet people's mental needs.

"I want to renovate our old house to open a library. Besides, we can also show movies using a projector," she says.

Physical life has been greatly improved in the countryside, but it still needs time for advanced concepts to be promoted, understood and accepted, Liang says.

"It needs artists, scholars and writers to go to the countryside to help to build cultural space," Liang says.

Contact the writer at yangyangs@chinadaily.com.cn