MCLC: miner turned writer Liu Qingbang

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: miner turned writer Liu Qingbang
***********************************************************

Source: China Daily (9/18/12):
http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/2012-09/18/content_15765043.htm

Mining literary material
By Yang Guang (China Daily)

Former miner and 'the king of short stories', Liu Qingbang artfully
describes the rural-urban divide in contemporary China, Yang Guang
believes.

If you introduce yourself as a friend of Liu Qingbang in mining areas
across China, people will treat you to a glass of white liquor. Author
Wang Anyi learned as much during a trip to a coal mine in Shanxi province.

Miner-turned-writer Liu comments this is the highest mark of respect he
has received since he started writing almost 40 years ago.

The 61-year-old is hailed as the "king of short stories" and fellow
writers view his works as "textbooks".

Most of his works adopt miners as the protagonists.

"The most frequent motifs of literature, such as the relationships between
men and nature, men and death, and men and women, are brought into full
play in the dark and grave underground," he says.

For instance, the struggle of human nature is fully demonstrated in his
Lao She Literature Prize-winning novella Sacred Wood, whose film
adaptation Blind Shaft won the Silver Bear at the 2003 Berlin Film
Festival.

Criminals and drifters Song Jinming and Tang Zhaoyang live on the
compensation money they extort from scams, such as befriending a naive man
looking for a job and telling him that they know of a job at a coal mine.

Once they go down the shaft, they murder the victim and pretend it is a
case of accidental death, and then collect payoff money from the mine
owners. But the situation gets out of control when a new victim,
16-year-old Yuan Fengming, turns up.

Liu grew up in a rural village in Shenqiu, Henan province. Life was hard
on the barren plain. He had little chance to read during his childhood and
adolescence apart from fragments of picture-story books.

During the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), he joined millions of red
guards in the "link up" movement from late 1966 to early 1967, when
students cut classes and traveled across the country to propagate former
chairman Mao Zedong's beliefs.

Having witnessed the flourishing city, Liu decided he had enough of the
countryside. His effort to join the army failed, however, since his father
had been condemned as a counter-revolutionary.

After graduating from junior high school, he had to return and labor in
the fields. When the local coal mine was recruiting in 1970, he seized the
opportunity and became a miner.

It was then that he began to write, mainly news reports about miners'
lives for the county broadcasting station. After working underground for a
year, he was selected to join the publicity department of the mining
bureau because of his talent for writing.

"Working in the coal mine gave me an opportunity to see a purgatory-like
world," he remembers.

"Facing my fellow miners, I realized my insignificance and impotence. All
the hardships I had endured became nothing."

Liu moved to Beijing in 1978, working as a reporter and editor with a
newspaper in the coal industry. In 2001, he became a professional writer
with the Beijing Writers' Association.

Some say the way to understand China is to understand Chinese farmers,
while for Liu, the way to understand Chinese farmers is to understand
Chinese miners.

He explains that most miners are farmers who choose to leave their fields
and make more money; while most mining areas are located in an urban-rural
fringe zone, where life is a hybrid of urban and rural traditions.

Liu still visits mining areas for part of the year. "The humid air
underground and the rumbling of the machines awakened my memory," he says.

Having lived in the capital for more than 30 years, Liu says the
countryside he once wanted to escape from now tugs at his heartstrings.

"I was fed with the grains, wild herbs and even bark growing on that
plain. Everything there has turned into the blood flowing in my vessels. I
will remember that land as long as I feel my blood pulse."

Since 2011, he has been working on a series of short stories about nannies
in Beijing.

Liu says he had been thinking of how to portray contemporary Chinese urban
life and picked on the nanny group because they are a large group and are
sensitive to human nature.

"The urban-rural divide still exists," he says. "The clash between rural
nannies and their urban employers reflects the common conflicts of China's
transitional period."

Liu plans to go to a coal mine in Shaanxi province later this year to
prepare for his next novel, about the lives of family members of miners
who died in a gas explosion eight years ago.

Contact the writer at yangguang at chinadaily.com.cn.