Cctv news(Reporter Sun Xiaoyuan): 65-year-old Dai Jianye goes to bed at 3 am and gets up at 9 am every day. This routine has been going on for almost two years. He once said that loneliness is the deepest scar in adolescence, "but now I am too busy to be lonely."
In the era when short videos were the hottest, Dai Jianye was pushed to the top of the traffic because of his poor Mandarin and humorous ancient poems.
At the beginning of 2018, some of the lecture videos he recorded more than 10 years ago were intercepted and uploaded to Tik Tok, and one of them quickly exceeded 20 million hits that day. The ease and interest of the three-foot platform made the old professor popular on the Internet when he was about to retire. In his own words, he was very popular when he was teaching at school, but now it seems that the whole country knows it.
In mid-May this year, Dai Jianye officially retired from Huazhong Normal University. He declined the employment of two universities in the south and has been silent in his study ever since. Reading in the morning, writing in the afternoon, and recording videos in the evening. If he still has time, he will also call his friends and "brag".
He said that at this age, it is very lucky to know what you can and should do.
Dai Jianye
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Dai Jianye, standing in front of the public, has white hair and a wrinkled face. Since he became popular on the Internet, people he knew always greeted him with a few words, "Teacher Dai, have a joke".
He smiled bitterly. "It seems that my jokes are in my pocket and can be taken out at any time."
In the usual lectures, when Dai Jianye is emotional, he will pop out one golden sentence after another and talk about the ancient literati, which is unique. He condensed the friendship between Du Fu and Li Bai into nine words, "looking for immortals, picking fairy grass and refining elixir". He commented on the poets in the prosperous Tang Dynasty, "romantic as hell, crazy as hell", which was later used by netizens to describe him, and added, "fun as hell".
He once said in an interview, "Now people always say that I have an interesting soul, but if you just watch the short video on Tik Tok, you will misunderstand me.".
The speaker is easy to get into the role, and the listener is also easy to be infected. On the Tik Tok platform, Dai Jianye has more than 5 million fans, which is almost the same as the national population. Young people don’t study, which worries him. In the era of fragmented knowledge, he has repeatedly mentioned that the best way to learn is to go in from videos and come out from books.
Last October, an hour before bilibili’s first live speech, Dai Jianye carefully shaved his beard and looked in the mirror again before taking the stage. He joked, "This live broadcast is like a tryst with your beloved girl. You should try your best to make your appearance super clean and handsome, and try your best to speak your Mandarin super standard and beautiful."
The live broadcast began with "I am Dai Jianye" and ended with "I am Dai Jianye". At this point, he has a new identity authentication: a well-known UP owner in bilibili.
In the spotlight of traffic, he once felt that "as a teacher who has been sitting in his study for a long time, he will be loved by so many people." However, looking back, in his words, it is "enjoying the blessing of the network and suffering from it".
Under the high degree of attention, he strives for perfection, gives lectures well, and constantly innovates, which is why he enjoys it. On the other hand, various invitations and social activities followed, which disrupted the pace of work and took up a lot of reading time. Some activities had to be reluctant or even not good at it. He was troubled by it.
For a while, Dai Jianye has been looking forward to and planning his life after retirement: he found a studio by the sea, filled with his own books, made a pot of good tea, tasted some good books, recorded some useful and interesting courses, and wrote some articles worthy of him.
He also often recalls most of his life, feeling the plasticity of people and the possibility of life.
Dai Jianye University began to learn English only in the first year. After two or three years, he was able to understand English materials and was finally admitted to graduate school with high scores. His method is to read an English article every day and learn 30 words from the English-Chinese Dictionary. Recite during the day and review at night, from shallow to deep, from easy to difficult.
But almost to everyone’s surprise, his favorite in high school was math, and his best grades were math. Many years later, he realized that some of the same group of candidates were admitted to Peking University with 270 points, while his college entrance examination score was 289 points.
A small English-Chinese dictionary used by Dai Jianye in college.
In the dead of night, he was in a daze occasionally. "If the college entrance examination had not been filled in, maybe he wouldn’t have been in Huazhong Normal University. If he hadn’t been crazy and wanted to be a poet, maybe he would have chosen mathematics. So, if you can choose again, what will he look like now? What are you doing? "
Life is full of mistakes. Reading, writing and lecturing are things that Dai Jianye can’t avoid all his life. Among them, the "Putonghua" that runs through most of his life has made a more dramatic turn in his later life.
The difficulty of local accent
In 1956, Dai Jianye was born in a small mountain village in Macheng, Hubei Province. His father received a good education before liberation, but his mother didn’t know a word. In the expectation and coercion of his father’s ambitious son, he began to read and write at an early age. Although childhood is forced, it has also grown a lot. Later, he changed to live in high school. After being away from his father, he was more self-disciplined than at home.
Before the college entrance examination in 1977, Dai Jianye had published many poems and essays in local tabloids. Therefore, he is dead set on becoming a poet. A physics teacher from his alma mater told him that there was a dome building on the campus of China Normal University, which was particularly beautiful. At that time, he had just come out of the country, and he rarely saw buildings, let alone domed houses.
With the romantic dream of a teenager, Dai Jianye’s first choice was to fill in the Chinese Department of Huazhong Normal University, then the name of the school was still Huazhong Normal University. After reporting to the headquarters of China Normal University, the first thing he did was to look for the dome-shaped house. A teacher told him that there was a mound on the top of the physics department. He looked at the round mound from a distance and smiled bitterly.
At that time, he may not have realized that what is more frustrating than this "round weight" is his "Mandarin".
In a class spring outing shortly after entering school, Dai Jianye said "the most beautiful here" as "lè lì? Jimi Li ",repeated several times, no one understood. At that time, I thought it was a joke from my classmates. Later, I learned Pinyin, and he was sure that everyone did not understand.
He once said in his speech, "Before I went to college, no one spoke Mandarin to me face to face, and no one taught me to speak Mandarin, and I didn’t even learn Pinyin since I was a child. When I was in primary and secondary schools, all the teachers taught in Macheng dialect, while the math teachers taught in Cantonese Putonghua.
Dai Jianye (first from the right in the back row), graduate tutor Cao Mufan (front) and brother Liu Minghua were photographed in Taihu Lake, Wuxi in 1983.
After going to college, Dai Jianye realized that there were still people who couldn’t understand his "Mandarin".
Dialect attracts laughter and imitation, which is a great pleasure when he is in a good mood and an embarrassment when he is in a bad mood. In the first class of teaching practice, as soon as he opened his mouth, he read the word "forever" in the title of the text as "ren", and the whole class burst into laughter. Later, in the first lecture after graduation, the student asked for a new teacher. When the school leaders considered transferring him from the teaching post, he was unwilling. "My Mandarin is not good, how can you understand it?"
Mandarin is the biggest bottleneck, and he has been trying to get through it all his life.
Dai Jianye and Fan Jun, a professor at Huazhong Normal University, have known each other for more than 30 years. When the students were very tired, he was also upset. When Dai Jianye was annoyed, he ran to Fan Jun to chat. The chat lasted for hours, and he was far apart and rambled.
In order to learn Mandarin well, Dai Jianye bought a portable radio in the era when tape recorders were not popular, and listened to the radio and practiced reading every day. After a year or two, he became a self-proclaimed "neither donkey nor horse" ‘ Mapo ’ " It is rare to hear students complain that they don’t understand, and he has gradually developed the mantra of "do you understand?"
Nowadays, the nonstandard Mandarin has become a distinctive label on him, and some imitation shows about "Dai Jianye accent" on the Internet have emerged one after another, and some have even reached the point of confusing the real with the fake.
He once said at a reading conference that it is inevitable that this life will be bumpy and difficult, but he has always been grateful to benefit from this era and many mentors and friends.
Dai Jianye (fifth from the right in the last row) took a group photo with his graduating class.
Nature and frankness
As a public figure, Dai Jianye’s humor is deeply loved by netizens. He made ancient intellectuals more grounded, and also made crude poems easier to understand.
He teased the poets in the prosperous Tang Dynasty with humorous language: Li Bai was a "romantic fool", and when he got carried away, he felt that he was not a mortal, so he had "Laughing at the sky and going out, are we Artemisia people?" Meng Haoran woke up in the morning, and the first thing he did was to care about "but now I remember the night, the storm, and I wonder how many blossoms were broken."
Behind the three-foot platform is decades of profound study and accumulation and confident control of professional knowledge. After Dai Jianye’s ancient poetry class became popular, netizens ridiculed: "This bad old man is very humorous!"
Liu Minghua, president of Chongqing University of Chinese Studies, once commented on Dai Jianye in an article: truth, knowledge and truthfulness. He believes that Dai Jianye has a distinct personality and a true personality. Laughing and cursing are all articles. His lectures showed profound academic attainments, and Macheng Mandarin added a little comedy effect. Later, Dai Jianye forwarded it, and he said it was an encouragement.
The expression and tone of speech come from nature, and behind the wit, more is actually frankness.
Dai Jianye
Dai Jianye said frankly that what he looks like is what he looks like. He likes the truth, and has analyzed himself on many occasions, not only occasionally having "bad" trips, but also often having the idea of "vulgarity".
In college, Dai Jianye was obsessed with Russell’s English version of History of Western Philosophy, but he couldn’t buy it anywhere. He lied to the library borrowing teacher that he had lost it, and stubbornly insisted that he couldn’t find it. Although it was only pirated, he couldn’t put it down. After paying a fine of ten times, it has been kept to this day, and every page has been marked.
In high school, the teacher asked him to write poems and run a wall newspaper. He copied three poems in one breath and changed some words, but he didn’t expect to be praised by teachers, classmates and even the principal as soon as he posted them. When he was young, he sent these poems to a local newspaper when he was excited. He never thought that the muddled editor actually published them.
This move, which was not very "decent" in those days, aroused his dream of becoming a poet. In his words, since then, he has read all his poems with relish, from ancient times to contemporary times, from China to foreign countries. It wasn’t long before I could really write a decent poem.
Later, when I was in college, People’s Literature Publishing House published a Zhu Shenghao translation of The Complete Works of Shakespeare. He thought Shakespeare’s English must be more beautiful, and vowed to read through the original. So I saved money through my teeth and bought all Shakespeare’s English collections. But many years later, he said that he still couldn’t understand the beauty of Shakespeare’s original works, so he gave them all away in a fit of pique, leaving only one Shakespeare Sonnets.
Now, every time in the dead of night, he still takes out this book from time to time to remind himself: "Dai Jianye used to be an aspiring young man!" "
He doesn’t hide, he doesn’t escape, he faces the public with self-mockery, narcissism and introspection, and responds to snooping from all directions. He said that he was not afraid of anything, so he lived happily.
For a while, the controversy about "intellectuals earning money and literati’s character" once again pushed Dai Jianye to the public. In an interview, he admitted that the income from manuscript fees has been good for more than 20 years, which can support his wife’s treatment in the hospital. And the sentence "If my wife is gone, what’s the use of my scholar’s character?" He did not say it himself.
Dai Jianye and his wife He Xiaoping
On the Lantern Festival in 2020, Dai Jianye’s wife, He Xiaoping, died of lung cancer. After that, he often went to the grave to see her and said, "Xiaoping, I’m coming to see you." Before he finished his tears, he came out.
Later, when he gave a lecture on the Internet and talked about Su Dongpo’s "ten years of life and death", he couldn’t help crying. At that time, his wife had died for more than three months. Later, when talking about Nalan Xingde’s sentence, "It was unusual to be a Taoist at that time," he said that at this moment he really understood that Nalan Xingde did not really get out of the grief of losing his wife.
Today, 65-year-old Dai Jianye lives alone, cooking alone, reading alone, and lecturing loudly in front of the camera in an empty room. He can use WeChat, play videos, scan files with a machine, upload or download materials through a network disk, sometimes translate a little foreign languages, and spend most of the rest of his time writing.
Although he is well-known, he is still immersed in the study of "Knowledge Classification and Classics Classification in Ancient China", and some achievements of this subject "On Knowledge Classification and Classics Classification in Ancient China" were collected and published the year before last. In addition, he is still working on the lyrical research of China’s classical poems, and will also write some essays. He always seems to have endless work to do, and there are always endless things to do.
At the end of the interview, Dai Jianye told CCTV that a person’s time and energy are always limited. It is his wish as a university professor to complete academic works and give good lectures, and it is also the greatest value he can bring to this society. He doesn’t want to waste time.
As he once said in his book: If we don’t mystify ourselves, the "happy life" we pursue is nothing more than eating our favorite dishes, reading our favorite books, doing our favorite things and loving the people we like.
