CHINESE people typically are nostalgic about their hometowns. They may leave the places of their birth to pursue lives elsewhere, but pangs of homesickness are easily rekindled by hearing a familiar accent or tasting a particular food from the past. Shanghai Daily recently talked with two Minhang natives who, in their 60s, are trying to preserve the legacies of their hometowns for future generations. Lu Feiran reports.

Li Deshun and ‘The Historical Records of Jiuxing Village’

Li Deshun recently finished the biggest project of his life, compiling “The Historical Records of Jiuxing Village,” a book of 1.2 million words and hundreds of pictures. He spent six years as chief writer and editor of the book.

 “I think I have done something worthy of my hometown,” he said.

Jiuxing Village is located in the west of Minhang.

Li, a retired accountant, was asked by the Party leader of his village to compile a historical record of the place. Li agreed but had no idea where or how to start.

So he gathered together three farmers from the village and then invited Wang Xiaojian, a consultant with experience in historical records, to point them in the right direction.

“We asked Wang to tell us how to write this book,” said Li. “After listening to him and reading historical records of other places, we realized what a mammoth task we faced.”

Young village

Jiuxing is relatively young as villages go. Its history dates back only about a century. Up until the early 1990s, most of the villagers lived in poverty.

Due to urban creep, they lost two-thirds of their farmland to development and had to seek other ways to survive. So they turned to business. Today, the village owns one of the biggest home-decorating materials markets in China and is one of the wealthiest villages in the Shanghai area.

“We wanted to tell the history in our own words,” said Li. “The concept sounds easy, but it’s harder than you might think.”

Li and his team had to scavenge to find historical information. He recalls how they once found a pile of financial reports in a garage.

“That place was a virtual rat’s nest,” Li recalled. “The papers had been sealed and stored there for more than a decade. The smell … well, it was truly awful.”

The present Jiuxing Village was created by the merger of the original Jiuxing with Dongfeng Village. The records of Dongfeng were almost completely lost in fires in the 1970s and 1990s.

So the team was forced to search out people who had been born and raised in Dongfeng to piece together the history.

They were lucky to come across two notebooks from a village official who had recorded agricultural production and villagers’ salaries in the 1960s and 1970s.

“It was like finding a treasure, and we were really overjoyed,” said Li.

Li and his team also listened to villagers’ stories. They invited teachers, workers, local doctors, accountants and priests to meetings to tell what they knew about the villages.

“Many stories were hardly known and quite riveting,” Li said. “They told of local gangs and of people making fortunes overnight. They were juicy and made me love my hometown all the more.”

Job of collating

Once it finished collecting material, the team turned its hand to the difficult job of collating and writing it all up. Some of those involved at that stage of the project didn’t know how to use computers and had to write accounts by hand. Manuscripts piled up in Li’s office until the stack bulged to more than 100 kilograms.

“I was so engrossed in the project that the village stories began appearing in my dreams,” he said. “In 2011, the first draft of the book was finally completed.”

After three more years of editing, proofing and revising, the book was finally published.

At a recent national traditional culture festival held in central China’s Shanxi Province, Li’s masterpiece was selected one of the “10 Best Chinese Village Historical Records.”

“Many Chinese villages don’t keep records, especially economic records, and that causes headaches for historical researchers,” said Shen Weibin, a professor at Fudan University. “But this book is an excellent example of detailed data and gives us a true insight into the development of a village in modern China.”

Chu Bannong and ‘The Xinzhuang Dialect’

Chu Bannong was born in Xinzhuang in the Minhang District. He spent half his life studying the local dialects of Shanghai. Recently, he published what he considers his greatest work, “The Xinzhuang Dialect.”

The book, which includes more than 10,000 words, phrases, slang expressions and two-part allegorical idioms, was a seven-year labor of love for Chu. “The Xinzhuang dialect, which is different from Shanghai urban dialect, is beautiful in many aspects,” Chu said. “I was afraid many words would be lost if I didn’t record them.”

Chu grew up in the countryside and began jotting down his observations about the village and its language when he was 15.

Observation since childhood

“My first diary entry was in 1959, and my diaries became the backbone of this book,” he said. To complement the diaries, Chu read more than 300 books written during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, when literature used many words and phrases common to the Xinzhuang dialect.

Chu said the dialect’s origins can be traced back 1,600 years. For example, the word sheng xiao, which means “Chinese zodiac,” is pronounced as sheng shao in the Xinzhuang dialect and it is typical of the ancient pronunciation.

The Xinzhuang dialect is rich in verbs, giving it more expressive range than standard Mandarin. “In Mandarin, phrases such as ‘call a cab’ or ‘fetch water’ use the same verb, but Xinzhuang people have separate verbs for each,” he said.

Of course, the Xinzhuang dialect is not completely isolated from other district dialects in Shanghai. As a part of the Songjiang dialect system, it absorbed language from surrounding areas.

Chu said he plans to improve the book in future editions. He wants to add an international phonetic system to the words and notes to explain the origin of slang expressions.

“Studying dialects is my lifelong hobby. It doesn’t have an end,” he said.