MCLC: interview with Yu Hua

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: interview with Yu Hua
***********************************************************

Source: China File (2/21/14):
http://www.chinafile.com/stranger-than-fiction

Stranger Than Fiction
By Zhang Xiaoran

In the short twenty years since Yu Hua, a fifty-three-year-old former
dentist, has been writing, China has undergone change enough for many
lifetimes. His country’s transformations and what they leave in their wake
have become the central theme of Yu’s writing.

Many readers consider him China’s greatest living author. They have loved
him since he published his early novel To Live, which chronicled the life
of a family visited by wave after wave of political turmoil in the first
decades after the revolution. Still, like any good writer, he also has
myriad critics, some of whom bemoan his failures of imagination or style
even as they clamor for his next books. The Seventh Day, published in
Chinese at the end of June 2013, saw 700,000 pre-orders—more than the
print run for most books over an entire lifetime.

Chinese people often worry Yu’s writing will be banned. Luck has played
its part in keeping his works in print. But more than luck is in play. To
Live has had six million copies printed over twenty years and was made
into an internationally acclaimed film by the director Zhang Yimou.
Critics hailed Chronicle of a Blood Merchant
<http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/reviews/king.htm> (1995) as one of the most
influential books of the 1990s.

In the fall of 2013, Yu started to contribute regular essays on
contemporary China to The New York Times. As the first among his Chinese
novelist peers to reach out to global media this way, Yu has had to strike
a balance among his many identities as a writer. At home, he must also
navigate censorship writing about issues the Chinese government deems
“sensitive.”

In January, Yu’s Boy in the Twilight: Stories of the Hidden China, was
published in English in the United States by Pantheon. His latest novel,
The Seventh Day, will be published in English in January 2015.

I conducted this interview with Yu over email over several months
beginning in July 2013.

Zhang Xiaoran: In the postscript of your novel Brothers, you wrote, “A
Westerner would need to live four centuries to experience epochs as poles
apart as the two Chinese people have lived through in just four decades.”
What did you mean? How did this rapid change affect the Chinese people?

Yu Hua: I was speaking about my own experience. I grew up during the
Cultural Revolution. Then came Reform and Opening and the economy’s
explosive takeoff in the ‘90s, and then came the fantastic wildness of the
new century and our world-view and our value system were both turned
upside down. We moved from one era to another that was absolutely
different—it seemed to happen with no transition period, which only makes
the contrasts between the two periods of time that much more stark.

I wrote [that sentence in the postscript] in 2005. Taking that
rollercoaster ride left Chinese people lost. The change came so fast it
was dizzying. People didn’t have time to react. That was when I finished
Brothers and then the criticism started–most of it was directed at the
second part of the book in which I describe contemporary Chinese society.
Some readers said it was too far-fetched, not true to real life. Some of
the critics thought so too. But now that we’ve been through the past seven
or eight years, China looks way more surreal than it did. Now no one says
Brothers was unrealistic.

Personally, I never thought of the book as absurdist, just maybe a little
hyperbolic. My new novel, The Seventh Day, is a true absurdist novel, so
it has surprised me that many Chinese readers consider it a work of
realism.

Judging from the readers’ responses, Chinese society is what’s absurd
beyond comprehension.

ZXR: It seems like you could say the same thing about China in Ten Words.
How did your perspective differ when you were writing China in Ten Words?

YH: Yes. What I just said relates to an intense personal experience about
which I feel very deeply. I treasure it because, before my generation, no
one in China had lived through anything like it, and probably no one in
the generations to come will either. After I finished Brothers, I started
to work on other novels, but I still felt I hadn’t finished what I had
started. I wanted to write non-fiction; something on the same time period
as Brothers. That was how China in Ten Words came about. When I had
finished the first chapter “The People,” I knew that, for the time being,
I wouldn’t be able to release the book in mainland China, but I still
finished it because I was convinced someday it would become possible to
publish it.

After The Seventh Day came out, I wrote a tweet on Weibo. I said, “People
ask me why in The Seventh Day I wrote about a mayor and not about a
Municipal Party Secretary.” I said, “It’s simple. By the time The Seventh
Day is a classic, readers won’t have any idea what a Municipal Party
Secretary is. This post was reposted by more than 2,400 people, many of
whom said things like “[I] hope the day The Seventh Day becomes a classic
comes soon.” One person left a comment that moved me: “I’ve started to
believe in the future.” So have I.

ZXR: Your experience during the Mao era—the Anti-Rightist Movement, the
Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution—left an indelible mark on your
life. You said that you once indulged in writing about violence to the
extent that you found yourself on the verge of a nervous breakdown. When
you realized this, you quit writing about violence all at once. But this
didn’t happen spontaneously, you had to force yourself to stop. So do you
still feel inclinations to write about violence and, if so, how do you
handle them? How do you think about this shift in your writing?

YH: I grew up during the Cultural Revolution. Childhood experiences
greatly impact the rest of a person’s life. To me, the bloody struggle at
the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and the oppressive atmosphere at
the end were both forms of violence. As the Cultural Revolution came to an
end, China commenced the era of Reform and Opening, and I began writing
novels. The violence that began in my youth hung over me like a shadow. I
wrote about violence a lot in my novels and I wrote about it very
directly. After a while, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I deliberately tried
to distance myself from violence in my writing, but it continues to appear
indirectly in what I write. That’s because Chinese society never made a
clean break with violence, it just made superficial changes. Today’s
forced demolitions and forced abortions are both forms of violence. You’re
right that violence has long existed in my subconscious. My current
writing is just a way to transfer it. But where does it go? That’s not
something I can decide. I write about real life, so when there is violence
in a certain place in society my writing follows it there.

ZXR: Do the logic and discourse of violence in the Mao era still influence
you today? How do they influence your writing?

YH: In the 1980s, the whole process of writing for me was about casting
off or revolting against Mao-era discourse and logic. I picked it up again
twenty years later, but this time I tried to get at it through humor.
Given the indelible imprint that logic and discourse left on that
particular era, if I’m going to write about that era, there’s no way for
me to avoid it. But now I freeze it with irony or burn it up with satire.

ZXR: China in Ten Words seems like a summation of your previous work in
that you connect the history of the Mao era with China as it is today. You
move back and forth through time and space. It’s a technique you use in
many of your novels, but in this book it’s more pronounced. One of the
things that’s most distinctive about your writing is the way you connect
the Cultural Revolution to the present. How did this conception of time
emerge?

YH: It’s something that emerged through the process of writing. I came up
with the idea for China in Ten Words while I was working on another novel.
The first four novels I wrote all deal with the Cultural Revolution and
all four depict Chinese society before and after. Particularly when I was
writing Brothers, I realized that even though the difference between China
during the Cultural Revolution and China today is so stark, they have
fundamental things in common. Take feverishness. During the Cultural
Revolution the fever was for politics, today it’s for money. Take
violence. Then it was the violence of revolutionary struggle, today it’s
the violence of economic development. The substance is different, but the
fever and the violence are unchanged.

ZXR: You have been writing about social issues in a very direct way for a
long time, beginning in your novels and now also in The New York Times.
You seem to have collected hot button issues and systematically put them
in your books. Aren’t you worried about getting into trouble?

YH: I may write surrealist and absurdist novels, but that’s because of the
increasingly pervasive absurdity of Chinese society. But I’m still a
realist writer. Our lives are formed from a lot of different pieces. There
are the things that happen to your family and friends, the things that
happen in the place you live, the things you hear about that happen in the
news…These things surround you. I don’t need to go out and collect them,
because they’re the kinds of things you run into constantly in the course
of everyday life. Unless you turn a blind eye, you can’t avoid them even
if you want to.

I’m not a brave person. I used to have a lot I wanted to say, but I was
scared to say it. I hoped someone else would speak up and say it for me.
But gradually I came to realize that if everyone thought that way, China
wouldn’t have such a bright future. So I told myself that I had to stand
up and speak my mind—and I did. I have a lot of hope for China’s future
because more and more people are speaking up and criticizing the
government.

Will that get me into trouble? I just don’t have time to think about that
right now.

ZXR: I personally think that in the final analysis most of Chinese
society’s problems emanate from the political system. But your novels
don’t broach that topic. Is that because of censorship or for some other
reason? How has censorship affected your writing?

YH: It takes time to evaluate a novel. Decades. At least one decade. So
people today may think they are only reading about contemporary social
issues, but future readers may perceive my criticism of the regime more
clearly. Still, one thing will never change: whether a novelist is facing
history or the present, he should approach it novelistically rather than
issuing political manifestos.

When I’m writing a novel, censorship is never a consideration. The release
of Brothers was smooth, as was that of The Seventh Day. I may see a lot to
criticize in the current system, but you’ve got to admit Chinese society
is getting more and more permissive. When The Seventh Day was released
some readers worried it would be banned in China, but even more felt
comforted that Chinese society was making progress. The same thing
happened when Brothers was released.

China in Ten Words couldn’t be published in mainland China because one of
the chapters discusses the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, which is still off
limits.

ZXR: You use a lot of Internet slang, puns, and humor—the language people
use to get around censorship. In a certain way this language is a
necessity, but it’s also a way of letting off steam and is a source of
creativity. What do you think about this kind of language? How do you
evaluate this language? Is it a real form of criticism? Is our ability to
speak critically improving or deteriorating?

YH: My friend Emily Parker was an editor of the Op-ed section of The New
York Times. In 2009 she came to Beijing and asked me to write an article,
and we became friends. She did research on the Internet in the U.S., in
Russia, and in China. She says in the U.S. The Internet was boring, in
Russia it was dull, but in China it was fascinating. Why? Because China’s
strict censorship was forcing people to be creative. They skirted around
sharp corners to launch their critiques of the government, they became
masters of disguise and subterfuge. By the time the government figured out
what they were really saying and came after them, they’d switched tactics.

I wrote an article 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/opinion/global/24iht-june24-ihtmag-hua-2
8.html?_r=0> about this for The International Herald Tribune. I said in
this kind of cat and mouse game, the “mice taunt their adversaries, they
make sure to have a bolt-hole right next to them.” Ironically, at least in
my mind, China’s censorship hasn’t suppressed people’s critiques, it has
sharpened them.

ZXR: China in Ten Words is your first collection of social commentary. Has
the shift from fiction to nonfiction been difficult? Is it permanent?

YH: It came very naturally. When I wrote China in Ten Words in 2009, I had
been writing novels for twenty-six years. I had a lot of ideas I didn’t
feel I could express in another novel. I needed nonfiction.

ZXR: Is the twentieth century Chinese writer Lu Xun the writer who has
influenced you most deeply?

Lu Xun is my spiritual guide, he’s my only spiritual guide. A lot of other
great writers have influenced the technical aspects of my writing, but he
has influenced me the most deeply. Especially in the last ten years, Lu
Xun has encouraged me to be independent and critical, and I’ve tried my
utmost to achieve that. I think he’d be happy. Ten days ago, at a
symposium on The Seventh Day at Beijing Normal University, a professor
said that I was channeling Lu Xun. This was a compliment. But I know how
far short I fall. Especially when it comes to essays, I can’t do social
satire the way he could.

ZXR: A commentator at Sanlian Life Week magazine after reading your novel
The Seventh Day said in this age of information where everything is laid
bare, people are no longer moved by literature because they’ve already
been numbed by the news. He said, “This places even higher demands on
writers, because in China how can you surpass the news? How do you tell
that to Tolstoy?” What do you think?

YH: He is half right, half wrong. When it comes to Chinese society today,
no question: the news has literature beat. Still, in the long run, people
forget the news, but they remember literature. News gets there first but
it doesn’t stick like literature. So I won’t tell Tolstoy immediately. But
when people have forgotten about the news, I will fly all the way from
Beijing to Moscow, take a two-hour bus to the Tolstoy State Museum, stand
alone beside his grass-covered grave and quietly tell him about it all.

ZXR: Among contemporary Chinese novelists of your generation, you’re the
only one who also writes nonfiction social criticism. How do you balance
these two identities? For you, where is the line between fiction and
reality?

YH: Writing novels and writing criticism are two completely different
matters. I always remind myself that I can’t bring the language of news
commentary into my novels. The language of commentary needs to hew closely
to reality, but the language of a novel must do the opposite. It’s
interesting, sometimes bringing narrative techniques into a piece of
social criticism gives it a new feel. I did that once and it seemed to
work. But never the opposite. A novel written in the mode of social
criticism would be a disaster.

For me, a single principle governs both kinds of writing: the author
should value truth above opinion. When Sewell Chan, an editor at The New
York Times, invited me to do a column, he said that he did not want a
series of political proposals or denunciations—something I agreed with.
Sewell is a great editor. We agree on everything and we work well
together. My translator, Allan Barr, is a brilliant translator, and always
has thoughtful suggestions. We have done six essays together, in which I
have tried to let the truth speak for itself.

ZXR: Should literature critique the real world? What’s the purpose of
literature?

YH: What’s the purpose of literature? Honestly, I don’t know. But one
thing is certain: literature may not exist only to critique reality, but
it critiques reality all the time.

This interview was translated by Zhang Xiaoran, Abigail Collier, and Susan
Jakes.