Old Things in the South of the City is an autobiographical novel. The author described all kinds of people and events in southern Beijing in the 1920s and 1930s in a simple and pure style. Through the memory of childhood, the author expressed his nostalgia for childhood and the south of Beijing.

The camel team in winter, the crazy woman in Hui 'an Pavilion, the "thief" with thick lips hiding in the grass, and Aunt Lan with crooked mouth sitting on the donkey's back, all the childhood scenes are clearly discernible. However, childhood is gone forever, and it's embarrassing to read!

Extended data

Artistic feature

The homesickness expressed in the old stories in the south of the city has the following characteristics:

First, the homesickness nourished by the daughter complex. Rolling on a Donkey recalls the story that Ma Song went to town as a wet nurse because of family embarrassment. She endured the pain of separation of flesh and blood, and her children were lost in loveless poverty. Lin's novel creation has its own consistent theme, that is, concern and thinking about the fate of women in China.

Second, homesickness with tragic meaning. The result of every story is that the protagonist left me until the last story, when my father's flowers fell, my dear father left and my childhood ended.

Third, the writing style of homesickness. Lin's novels are purely nostalgic novels. She played down the construction of the myth of home country and the grand narrative of the times, and wrote the life growth of women in the local world as a woman through her own hometown experience.

And with a large number of trivial and real daily life themes in the field of women's life, it deconstructs the hometown narrative tradition represented by men's feelings about home and country. This situation determines the starting point of nostalgia in her homesickness novels.