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Cover Character | Xiao Zhan : The Crack

"There have been two Xiao Zhans for a long time, and one of them is here, and that is me."

Xiao Zhan said while eating in the middle of filming in the Mountain Scenic Area in Chongqing at the beginning of February. "There is another Xiao Zhan, Xiao Zhan in quotation marks, but he may not be me anymore. We all work for him, including myself."

Xiao Zhan put down his chopsticks, opened his hands, palms facing each other, as if he was gesturing for an invisible small box.

Same as before - like most people - nothing special - just want to do this job well - don't think much of it - don't know what else to do - just be alone - In the narration about Xiao Zhan, no matter Xiao Zhan himself or the staff around him, from time to time, they can only end with these sentences when faced with questions floating in the air.

For a star, the mentality of most people may be contradictory. On the one hand, people are used to the world of labels, and they want to summarize a stranger with a few words, and they don’t want to work hard; on the other hand, the impulse to explore the truth often attracts us to question labels and look for more familiar emotions and human nature. . For Xiao Zhan, this contradiction is particularly prominent: he has very few labels, and no one can find out the most accurate ones; at the same time, the closer people are to him, the more they find that his life is the one we are most familiar with - because we are so familiar, we suspect that it is not true. This contradiction is like a crack. Xiao Zhan is doing everything he should do in this crack.

When I was young, usually before Chinese New Year, Xiao Zhan would climb a mountain in order to worship his ancestors. At that time, he felt that Chongqing is really too big, the mountains are so far away, and it takes such a long way to climb the mountains. In the morning, I just woke up, followed the adults, started from home, took the bus to the junction station, changed trains, went from the southern district of Chongqing to Jiangbei, crossed the river, and came to the entrance of the mountain. It was the 1990s, and the mountain road was still a dirt road at that time, and people in the village walked out on their feet I don’t know how many years ago. There are weeds on the side of the road, and the road is narrow, less than one meter wide, and cars cannot drive on it. Xiao Zhan remembers that the mountain road under his feet sometimes appears and disappears, clear for a while, blurred for a while, when it catches up with the rainy day, the road is very slippery, and the children run in front. Children always rush to the front, and adults always follow behind shouting, wrong, wrong, not over there, but over here.

Without coordinates and navigation, Xiao Zhan and his family could only rely on their memory to find the ancestral house on the side of the mountain road. It was a brown-black wooden house. The house may be a hundred years old, and grandma Xiao Zhan's parents or grandma's grandparents once lived there. Of course, no one lives there now. Xiao Zhan walked in the old house. He remembered that there were two bedrooms on the first floor and a small bedroom on the second floor. There was a wooden ladder leading to the second floor. An old stove, burning firewood. The whole house is made of wood. There is a small yard outside the house, and there seems to be a pomegranate tree inside.

This is an essential itinerary for a large family. On the mountain, there were many activities. Xiao Zhan and his brother and sister picked wild onions, pulled radishes, dug wild vegetables, and tried to make a fire to cook together. Tired of playing, sometimes he also tries to stay by himself for a while. He saw there were hills behind the big mountains, so he left his family and climbed up those hills, starting a child's adventure. When he got to the back of the hill, there was no one around, and he stayed there quietly, looking at the blue-black distant mountains. Families often stay on the mountain all day and don't go down until evening.

"Children are not afraid," he now recalled himself at the time, "only grown-ups will." Looking at the hazy distant mountains, he really wanted to walk over—the most important thing a child lacks is courage—— At that time, he felt that no matter how difficult the road was, he could climb up it with both hands and feet. But later, when he got older, went to middle school, went to university, and came to this mountain again, he didn't dare to climb as boldly and casually as he did when he was a child.

The last time I went to this mountain was a few years ago. Now the road has been newly built, and the expressway can directly lead to the foot of the mountain. Xiao Zhan and his family drove to the foot of the mountain, but the mountain still needs to be climbed with both legs. They are walking down the road that they have traveled over and over again for many years. When he was a child, Xiao Zhan felt that adults had long legs and walked so fast, but now, he stayed in Chongqing less and less, and found that his parents were getting old and couldn't walk anymore. He and his brothers and sisters carried their luggage, step by step, and the long and exhausting journey in memory - passing through so many places, such as a bamboo forest and a graveyard, marking a mileage after another - seemed to be shortened this time Without knowing it, I arrived at the gate of the old house without taking two steps. Looking back along the way, the large bamboo forest when I was a child is now just a small pile. There seemed to be only three or two of the horrific clusters of graves. There are also those small hills. When I was a child, it took so long to climb up. Now, it seems that I only need to lift my feet lightly, and I can climb up with one step. As for those steep ridges in memory, it seems that the slope has also dropped now. The dirt road is gone, and the black asphalt winding mountain road is shining in the sun. There are also resorts, farmhouses, and many viewing platforms built on the mountain.

The mountain used to be so far away and so high, Xiao Zhan thinks now, but as time goes by, the mountain is no longer far away, nor is it so high. At that time, he was just an ordinary Chongqing kid, but now, many people know Xiao Zhan. However, what has not changed is that the mountain still has no name.

Now, Xiao Zhan still dreams of the place where he lived when he was a child, the factory area that meant the whole world at that time. The factory area seems to belong to a certain auto parts production company—the first district, the second district, the third district, the fourth district, and the fifth district—he even forgot which district he lived in—the houses in the factory area are very similar, seven or eight The buildings are high and the buildings are dusty in my memory. There are many playmates of the same age in the factory area. When homework is done—as in the rest of the country—the children run downstairs, their cries echoing in the air. "So-and-so come down quickly! So-and-so has already come down!" Playing at eight or nine o'clock, the mothers would stick their heads out of the window again, calling down from a distance in the night: "So-and-so, come home! So, sleep!"

Playing football, playing hide-and-seek, hiding in haystacks or corners, some dark corners. The scariest place in the factory area is an abandoned sewer, with a huge hole and the height of a person, and it’s so dark inside that you can’t see anything. Occasionally a bat flies out. Brave children, light a match and go inside. Xiao Zhan had never been inside the cave, it was too dark, and he watched them from afar.

Falls are commonplace, children will fall to the ground while running, and so is Xiao Zhan, who left a lot of scars on his knees. Now, looking at those childhood scars, he felt that that might be a more real life. Now it's more false, unreal. At that time, there were no mobile phones or the Internet. The life at that time seemed to be still here every moment, like a photo was taken, stopped in the memory, and stayed in the heart. Xiao Zhan still remembers that sometimes his parents would not let him go downstairs, worrying that he would play too wildly. He was alone in the room, leaning over the window and looking down. He can still recall what he saw at that time—the balcony of the neighbor's house, the flowerpots on the balcony, the clothes to dry, the garden downstairs, and the paths in the garden. He remembers everything clearly. When he was in the third or fourth grade of elementary school, he folded the plane and threw the paper plane down from the fifth floor. A plane flew so far that it reached the balcony of the next building. He also often dreamed of running around the factory grounds, where he had run as a child. In these dreams, Xiao Zhan doesn't seem to have left here and came back again. He remembered the mood in the dream - he still lived here, but now he was just tired from playing, climbed the stairs, went home, and wanted to go to the bedroom to sleep.

At that time, Xiao Zhan's home was on the fifth floor. When going up the stairs, the corridors are aging, and many lights are no longer on. Every time he walked to the third floor, out of fear of the dark, he would take a deep breath and rush up to the fourth floor with a "bang bang bang", and there would be lights on the fourth floor. Now, every once in a while, he still dreams about the dark third-floor hallway. The dream was pitch black, I couldn't see anything, I didn't know what was in the corner. Another time, he was very impressed. In his dream, he had passed through the darkness on the third floor and came to the fifth floor, but there was still no light. Facing the familiar door, the self in the dream stretched out his hand, struggling to unscrew the door, but he couldn't open it, so he clenched his fist and knocked on the door, but there was no one in the room. He couldn't open that door no matter what, so he stood in vain in the corridor in his dream.

Like everyone else, Xiao Zhan sometimes dreams about exams. Every time he wakes up with a start. Once was a math teacher, a little fierce. In fact, he liked that teacher very much, but in the dream, the teacher looked at him and said, what's the matter with you, why can't you solve a single problem? He looked at the functions in the book and was dumbfounded, "How can I still remember the functions? I can't do a single question, it's over."

The factory area is the whole world, it is almost vast and boundless. If you want to go to the factory area, you have to report to your parents in advance, just like going abroad. At that time, he was reading encyclopedias, a set of four, one of which was about the earth and the universe. There was a picture in the book, which was a cross-section of the earth, and there were many layers under the surface. He thought the earth was like this, so he remembered that there was a particularly large stone in the garden downstairs. He later called his friends to come to the rock together, and suggested that we move it away, and the magma is underneath, which is the real appearance of the earth.

Thinking back now, such thoughts at that time were naive and ridiculous, but he savored it carefully, and still didn’t know why he was so obsessed with that stone and the true appearance of the earth at that time—it was just an ordinary stone, a child, but he wanted to learn from it. See the whole universe behind you.

Chongqing in Xiao Zhan's memory is very old and very new. In the movie theater, he remembers that in the 1990s, his parents took him to watch "The Yellow River", "The Lotus Lantern" and "The Disaster of the Python". When going to Jiefangbei, you have to squeeze the bus. It's really hard to squeeze in. Presumably everyone wanted a seat. He couldn't remember exactly which bus it was - maybe it started with 3 - and after getting on the bus, people would quarrel and sometimes fight over the seats. There was so much traffic on that road, there was always something like that going on. Standing in the car, Xiao Zhan looked out of the window. The bus passed through a long section of quiet and peaceful road in the lower city, and the two sides of the window showed the appearance of a somewhat old old city. However, after crossing the Yangtze River Bridge, he immediately entered a cheerful, modern modern city. It was already Shangcheng District. At that time, Chongqing had already started to build high-rise buildings. As for the lower urban area, the old houses used to be the most adjacent to the river, and most of them have been demolished long ago. Such a cityscape is very charming, Xiao Zhan thinks now, as if he is in the history, in the calm past that can't go away, when he looks up, he can see the dazzling glass curtain walls on the high-rise buildings, like those mysterious Things that go to the future have to take themselves away.

There is also Datianwan Stadium in Yuzhong District. A era. Chongqing's home court was popular all over the country at that time. His father took him to watch football, Chongqing Lifan, in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 - the best years of the Chongqing team - the stadium was often filled with tens of thousands of people, and everyone shouted "Chongqing, Xiongqi!" Xiao Zhan was young at the time, so he couldn't understand, looking at the dense crowd of people's heads, he just felt lively.

That was the age of reading newspapers. When he was young, Xiao Zhan’s family had always subscribed to the Chongqing Commercial Daily. He liked to read newspapers, and he would almost finish reading the newspapers with so many pages. Later, a few years later, when he grew up, there was a free "Chongqing Morning News" on the subway light rail, and he also took a copy habitually. Usually, he reads social news first, and reads it from beginning to end. Sometimes, when the newspaper is finished and the subway has not arrived, he turns to the front page and reads it from beginning to end.

It was also the era of pen pals. In school, the teacher encouraged the students to make pen pals—perhaps to improve their ability to write essays—he also made one, and communicated with each other, chatting about the weather, sunshine, and rain in Chongqing. However, there are only two correspondences. However, he still remembered the state of waiting for his letter. After writing the letter, only a week later, he came to the school's reception room to check the class mailbox. Cracking his hand upwards, he opened the iron box, and looked for the letter with the word "Xiao Zhan" written on it from the thick stack of envelopes.

Time moves forward in a certain flowing order. junior high school. high school. University. He took the college entrance examination and filled in the art volunteers. His score exceeded the Chongqing score line, and he could also take the school examinations of other schools across the country. The teacher asked Xiao Zhan, are you sure you want to choose Chongqing? Do you want to go out and try it, for example, go to Beijing or Zhejiang, and go to Gome to see it.

He said no. Xiao Zhan is very clear that Chongqing is very good. He likes Chongqing so much. If he hadn't been an actor and didn't have to go to so many places, he might have stayed here forever. However, he also thinks now that everything is unknown, if there is a parallel world, he might not be in Chongqing long ago. It's not that he deliberately wants to leave, nor does he deliberately want to stay, it's just that he doesn't have a clear destination, and he doesn't have to go somewhere.

Now he has forgotten the name of the road to work. Introduced by a friend, he submitted his resume and passed the interview. The design company was in an industrial park in Chongqing, and he couldn't remember whether it was on the second or third floor. Walking in, there are rows of workstations. The company is not big, with about ten people. Go to work at nine o'clock in the morning and leave work at six o'clock in the evening, clock in twice. He went out from home, took a bus, and crossed a bridge. Sit when available, stand when not available. Sometimes it blocks, sometimes it doesn't. In a meeting at work, he sits sideways—like most people—he wants to sit furthest away from his boss. The work is mainly to make pictures and draw pictures. They wear headphones, listen to songs and draw pictures. The whole atmosphere of the office is relatively dark, with a dark industrial style, and the air conditioner makes a muffled sound in the room. On a rainy day, the room gets even darker. He doesn't smoke, and he doesn't care if the air is a bit smoky when he is close to his colleagues who smoke at his work station. Sometimes, if customers want something urgent, they have to stay up all night and work overtime. When he came out in the morning, his head was a little heavy, Xiao Zhan went to a nearby convenience store to buy some snacks.

If it's raining when you get off work, it's a bit annoying. Xiao Zhan had to walk uphill to take the bus. The rainwater flowed down the road. He walked up against it, which was equivalent to going up against the current. After a few steps, his shoes were completely wet. Tired already, his whole body was sticky from the water, and now water got into his shoes, and he stood there anxiously waiting for the bus. There are many people leaving get off work, and the first bus may not be able to get on, so continue to stand and wait for the next one.

After the salary was paid, he gave part of it to his parents and kept some for himself. He doesn't smoke or drink, and he goes to KTV with his friends at most, and rarely goes shopping. He was really short of clothes when the seasons changed, so he thought about buying two. This habit has been maintained-what is missing, what to buy, and to buy directly, never go to the mall first.

Now, after waking up, Xiao Zhan stood in front of the mirror. In the mirror, his hair is messy, and sometimes his face is a little swollen. He thought, what would they think if they were seen like this? He is responsible for his own image. As an artist, you have to care about appearance. He loves to eat bread, but carbohydrates make people swollen, and filming will cause single eyelids to become swollen. Then restrain the desire. There is a play where skewers are to be eaten, so he will be hungry for a while in advance. For a while, he stopped drinking water after six o'clock every night. For a while, he was so thin that he lost 20 catties than his usual weight. But he felt that there was nothing to say about these, just for work needs.

His face looks small. Many people saw him and asked how old he was. He likes to pretend to be vicissitudes and say that he is over thirty. But people always think that this person is in his early twenties. He said thank you. But being small isn't always good. When you want to play some roles that relatively need to control the age span, looking younger is an obstacle to the shaping of the characters. Once, he met several older actors in the play, and he observed their expressions and facial movements. He noticed that the corners of a person's mouth will go down a little with age, and he also deliberately learned to face down. There is also eyes to learn - it turns out that he always looks at things with focus and concentration, which are the eyes of young people - when he observes those older actors, he finds that they are squinting when they see people. Focus, don't care, don't bother - he learned it, and looked at himself in the mirror, it seemed that he finally looked alike. Of course, he is not just pursuing a sense of age, but because of the needs of the plot, he wants to shape the character more completely and prevent the audience from jumping.

He started exercising and consciously training his muscles in the second half of 2020. In the past, he only ran regularly. Later, because he wanted to play a strong man in a play, he started to exercise. This habit has been retained until now. Now, even in the dressing room, he finds time to do some high-efficiency workouts, or go for a run. But always, there are always some voices who worry that he will destroy the image he once had. He also didn't want to grow his hair longer, and he didn't want to keep bangs when he made up. The team will always tell him, you listen to everyone's voice, you look better that way. Sometimes, he made himself rough on purpose, and people would indeed be angry—and many people would be angry—sometimes, there would be voices from outside telling him, you don’t want to exercise—this face is his, but Countless people looked at it, and countless people asked for it—this face, the face in the mirror, Xiao Zhan looked at it, sometimes thinking that it belonged to him, and it seemed to belong to other people.

Being considered good-looking, will this become a stumbling block in his acting career? More than once, someone asked him that. It may be the same dilemma for good-looking stars. He would think so too. But he can't do anything on purpose. Everything depends on the script, the plot, and the needs of the characters. If you're playing a young man in an urban drama, he thought, it's not right to be ugly on purpose. If the plot is worthwhile and requires him to change this face, then he also has enough enthusiasm and willingness to change for the role. This face can help him, but he also knows that sometimes he has to pay more.

Now, he thought, perhaps it was more important to find balance. Some of the people who like him will stay forever, and some will leave. He just walked forward step by step, just like climbing a mountain when he was a child, with this ever-changing Xiao Zhan's face.

When reading the script, Xiao Zhan always thinks a little carefully—if he is an audience at the moment, and he looks at it from the perspective of a third party, can this story, this script move him, and can he empathize with this character? ——He was very afraid of just becoming a wandering spirit on the scene, just standing and reciting lines. There's no point in saying lines in vain, he knows. In an emotionally charged costume drama, those days, he was always figuring out how to speak in order to make the audience worry about him. The best class, of course, is playing with those better actors. He is not afraid of the audience saying that he is not as good as those senior actors. What he cares more about is whether he has made progress in the play and whether he has learned new things

When he first started acting, Xiao Zhan did what the director said. But in fact, until now, he still doesn't know which expression or which action of himself in the camera is "good"-he really doesn't know where the standard is, and no one has discussed such issues with him-what is it like? face is right? The so-called actor face, movie face, model face, idol face, these mysterious words, what is the difference between them? His criterion for judging is very simple, that is, to only look at the picture itself, and see if the face in the picture can move him.

Now, Xiao Zhan will have dreams every time he arrives at a new crew. He often dreamed that the director came to him and asked him how to perform a scene. "But I can't even remember the lines" - he thought in a panic in the dream - and then woke up suddenly. He couldn't fall asleep, got out of bed, came to the table, took a pen to mark on the script, looked for those unreasonable places, and continued to recite the lines.

One way to relieve stress is to run. Now running is not as convenient as before, and now there are always people following. In 2016, he just debuted and lived in Moon River. In order to be photogenic, he always runs along the small river next to him. Later, there was a drama, and he went to Xiangshan, Zhejiang. Every night, as long as there was no night drama, he would go for a run. The summer was very hot. At that time, Xiangshan was empty and far away, and there were some vast and endless farmlands—unlike when he went to Xiangshan a few years later, it completely turned into a bustling scene—there were wheat fields and rice fields in the countryside, which were very beautiful. After dark, he ran along the concrete road at the edge of the field. There are often big cars coming on the road. For safety, he will turn on the flash of his mobile phone so that passing vehicles can see the lights and notice people. Sometimes he runs alone, sometimes with other actors. After running for a while, the body will be soaked, but it is very comfortable, hot and cool. Sometimes while running, it will rain in the sky—Xiao Zhan is Xiao Zhan at this time, he feels—at this time, he completely belongs to himself.

From his debut, from his first play to now, every role of Xiao Zhan is not repeated. Every time, when receiving a new script, whether he or the team, always ask, do you really want to take this role? Are you really going to make this movie? They repeatedly screened and considered, hoping that each character will have new progress, and each character is also different from Xiao Zhan.

What does he think of himself? There doesn't seem to be an easy answer. Filming, filming commercials, and some public events, other than that, Xiao Zhan stays alone most of the time. On the set, like a bat burrowing back into a cave, he burrows into a hotel room, and won’t come out until he can; usually, he stays at home, of course, except for the driver who picks him up at work, few people know where he lives— ——It's like a habit, more like an instinct—he estimated that if he switched to another job, he wouldn't like sitting in a cafe or bar. He didn't go to crowded places before, but his current job is surprisingly suitable for him—he can stay alone after work—watching dramas, playing games, doing push-ups, and thinking about things by himself.

There are many problems that you want to understand when you are alone - of course there are those that you can't understand - Xiao Zhan's method is to not think about it for the time being. Problems had to be solved by himself, and he hardly ever opened his mouth to others. Confidence is a word that is far away from him. A friend told him that if you are under pressure, you should tell others, talk to others, and vent. He disagrees. You can figure out the problems that can be solved by yourself, and talking about the problems that cannot be solved will only increase your troubles. He would rather do something new. It's an experience. People are constantly encountering problems. When new things encounter new problems, the old problems are forgotten. At this time, the answer is obvious: this shows that the previous problem is not so important. Even if those important issues are forgotten, they will resurface in the dead of night—like a big wave coming, a lone lost ship, at this time, Xiao Zhan feels that there is still no way.

It's not a question of telling, he thought. Even after talking to a hundred people, the problem is still there, unresolved, and it floats back in the middle of the night.

He has been like this since he was in college, because he does not confide and is unwilling to express, but he becomes a safe object, and he will be caught by his friends and confide in him. His character is a living tree hole. However, on the one hand, in order to help his friends, he always listens, and then forgets after listening; If it’s irrelevant, don’t talk about it, I really don’t want to hear it.” He felt that it was difficult to keep others’ secrets, so he tried his best not to listen to other people’s privacy—listening is risky, and if secrets are revealed, he would be one of the suspects—he He didn't want to be a suspect, let alone prove his integrity to his friends: "That's not what I said, I didn't betray you." That would be ridiculous, he thought.

Now, he spends very little time alone. When it is extravagant, there can be three days in a row. During these times, he and the staff try not to communicate with each other as much as possible, and keep busy with each other, leaving room for him to return to his own small universe. This was a habit at first, then became a tacit understanding, and is now a fact. Occasionally encountering a little trouble at work, Xiao Zhan seems to be able to draw some energy from his body at any time to firmly control the matter. An event, a rare accident, it was time to go on stage, they were still on the way to the stage, got out of the car, Xiao Zhan rushed to the stage, the host was improvising, filling the time sentence by sentence. Walking to the stage, Xiao Zhan remembered that his heart was still beating wildly, he suppressed it first, and then sent the words out of his mouth. But no one saw any flaws—he was too well controlled, too steady—and like so many times before, the staff was sure that he really had a small universe with him.

"I'm going to run"—sometimes, he may be a little tired, or suddenly want to relieve pressure, he joked like this—it's just a joke, but his expression is serious. What did you run away for? Maybe open a florist shop, or a gallery, he said. I can run anywhere—in short, stay alone—to the factory area of my childhood, the stands in Datian Bay, or the bus in Jiefangbei. You can also run back to the fifth floor where the door cannot be opened, or to the design station. If you continue to run, you will reach the mountain in your childhood. The mountain used to be so far away and so high, but as time goes by, the mountain is no longer so far away, nor is it so high. Many people know that his name is Xiao Zhan, but the mountain still has no name.

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