MCLC: Bi Feiyu interview

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Bi Feiyu interview
***********************************************************

Source: China Daily (1/12/12):
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/usa/culture/2012-01/12/content_14431522.htm

>From absurdity to reality
By Chitralekha Basu and Song Wenwei (China Daily)

Author Bi Feiyu says his storytelling has now moved from the fantastical
to the literal. Chitralekha Basu and Song Wenwei report.
My colleagues and I have been pursuing Bi Feiyu for months. Of all the
major writers in China we managed to pin down and interview, Bi proved to
be the most elusive. It wasn't as if he was playing hard-to-get. Since
winning the Man Asian Literary Prize (MALP) for Three Sisters in March
2011, Bi - whose first name, Feiyu, means "one who flies across the
universe" - has quite literally been living up to his name. He has been
attending literary dos, conferences and book signings around the world. "I
haven't slept in the same bed for three consecutive nights," he says. But
even before the big MALP win, events featuring him at literary festivals
in Beijing would sell out the fastest.

The man who has been billed by media and marketing professionals as
"China's finest male writer with the deepest understanding of the female
psyche" - much to his consternation, in fact, but we'll come to that later
- was also, by popular (read, female) consensus, one of the nation's
dishiest novelists.

The 47-year-old, whose shaven head shows off his prominent cheekbones and
brooding, vulnerable eyes to his best advantage, has the draw of a movie
star.

When we reach the residential compound in which Bi lives in Jiangsu's
provincial capital Nanjing, the staff member manning the gates tells us,
assuredly, "Oh, he only needs to win the Nobel now. The rest are already
in his kitty."

Bi won the Lu Xun Award - twice. He also took the Mao Dun Prize, the
highest national literary award, last September. He was the youngest among
fellow heavyweights, such as Zhang Wei and Mo Yan, to do so. He was also
long-listed for The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2008 for The Moon
Opera.

Bi joins us soon, leading the way through a maze of corridors, restaurant
kitchens, private enterprises' back offices, a shopping mall escalator and
across a noisy highway with heavy traffic. He kneels down, on the way, to
pet a golden retriever that clamors for his attention at a magazine kiosk.
("I have a female of the same breed, and he can smell her on me," he says,
tenderly).

Finally, after what feels like a journey across the author's personal
world, we are led into the picture-perfect precincts of a traditional
teahouse, where Bi talks to us.

The idea for Massage, which won the prestigious Mao Dun Award, came to him
in a moment of epiphany, he says.

For years, Bi had been going to a massage parlor staffed by blind masseurs
late in the evening.

One night, after packing up, as both clients and staffers were getting
ready to go home, the lights were switched off. A woman masseuse took Bi's
hand and led him through the pitch-dark corridor.

"You see, Teacher Bi," she told him, "I can see better than you do."

(Bi had been training special education teachers for the blind for a
while.)

The dichotomy between physical blindness and one's sense of vision and
perception has served literature well in the past. Celebrated examples
include Blindness by Jose Saramago and The Blind Assassin by Margaret
Atwood.

The idea that limited vision might actually be an attribute - a gift,
offering insight into things that people with normal eyesight may not be
able to perceive - had an obvious appeal to Bi, who says he has "always
respected limitations".

Extending the metaphor to the scene of China's race to fast-track
developmental success and commercial hegemony, he says, "Unlimited power,
unbridled energy, full-on development might throw things out of control. I
think a little restraint can do good for this country."

But blindness, in Massage, which can be read as a collection of
interrelated stories with a blind person at the center of each, Bi says,
is more about the actual physical state of being blind and society's
response to it, rather than a metaphor.

"I am just trying to bring the things that tend to remain outside the
realm of visibility into light," he says.

In the story about Du Hong, for example, a blind girl is urged to overcome
her limitations by learning to play the piano and is later applauded for
what is, in fact, a lousy performance that is billed as her service to
society.

Such tokenism for the physically challenged, Bi says, actually smacks of
"condescension and disrespect - the last things the blind would want from
you".

Du Hong's public performance is packaged and presented as a payment of her
"debt to society".

Nationalistic fervor runs very deep in China, where Olympic medallists are
ticked off for omitting to mention the role of society in their makings.

It's precisely the sentiment Bi says he has been trying to satirize.

He obviously does not buy the theory that every performer, athlete and
writer ought to be beholden to society and "especially not the blind.
Society has done very little for them, so to expect them to have to repay
society is total hypocrisy," he says.

Bi, who began his career by writing poems and screenplays for celebrity
director Zhang Yimou (Shanghai Triad, for instance), sees his trajectory
over the last 10 years as a movement from the absurd to the real.

The bizarre scenario in one of Bi's early stories - The Ancestor, in which
the living sleep in coffins and the very ancient great grandmother's teeth
are pulled out, one by one, to exorcize the ills plaguing the house - has
given way to simple tales, told simply.

Bi says he now prioritizes understanding over imagination.

"In one's 40s, one begins to have a better understanding of things," he
says.

"Scientists sharpen their senses of logic and analysis. Writers hone their
understanding."

This shift from clever craftsmanship to empathy and intuitive
understanding is also evident in the MALP-winning Three Sisters - the
story of three women from rural China, trying to make a life at a time of
turbulence and general confusion in 1970s and '80s.

"Often, stories set in the 'cultural revolution' (1966-76) years talk
about the damage it did to the country's economy and politics," Bi says.

"But the 'cultural revolution' was more serious than politics. I am
interested in individuals and how their lives panned out as a result of
the social upheaval."

Women - often strong, feisty, ambitious types who do not hesitate to use
their sexuality to get what they want - dominate Bi's fiction.

Expectedly, he's a little tired of the "best male writer on women" tag.

"It's a marketing ploy, which probably helps sell a few more copies," he
says.

Evidently, the label makes no difference to him, unless, of course, it
implies "a disrespect for my ability to write about human nature in
general".

But the state of women in China today remains a matter of concern.

"Women are still discriminated against in terms of getting jobs, raising
capital for investment, retirement ages, etc," he says.
"If you claim there is equality between men and women in China, you're
living in a fairytale."

In his acceptance speech upon receiving the Mao Dun Award in September, Bi
said a writer's vocation included the responsibility of leading an
exemplary life, beside the obvious task of continuing to write well.

Hectic travel since the Man Asian win in March has continued to distract
him from the quiet life of contemplation, inner monologues and focused
writing that Bi would rather lead.

Even as the flashbulbs go off and fans crowd around him with questions,
comments and autograph requests, Bi is sometimes bothered by the fact that
the novel about a doctor's life that he has been trying to write for four
years is probably not going anywhere.
"I work best only under conditions of quietness and isolation. Quietude is
my oxygen and water," Bi says.

He hopes for a positive turn in March, "when the next unlucky Man Asian
Literary Prize winner takes my place".

That's when he plans to stop in his tracks, at least for a while, and turn
his gaze inward.