With The Bookworm Literary Festival in town, Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore and Nian Dong meet four Chinese literary heavyweights yet to be fully translated into English to find out just what the rest of the world is missing.
- Han Song
- Zhang Yueran
- Feng Tang
- A Yi
- Click here to read an exclusive English-translated extract by Han Song
Beijing-based Han Song is one of China’s most well-known and prolific science-fiction writers. Born in Chongqing in 1965, Han – who works as a Xinhua news journalist – has won China’s Galaxy Award for fiction six times. His novels include 2066: Red Star Over America, My Homeland Does Not Dream and – most recently – Subway, published last year.
‘Every morning, I wake up at 4am to write. Then I go to my job at Xinhua. Writing for a news agency actually gives me more freedom because I can write about a variety of topics, whereas novels are easily banned. I believe in justice. There are many people who, like me, try to push the boundaries at Xinhua.
‘I am inspired by authors such as Sir Arthur C Clarke and George Orwell; also, the Chinese sci-fi writer Zheng Wenguang. In the 1950s, Zheng wrote a book about establishing communism on Mars. It was a very positive, very realistic, portrayal of communism. He described a utopian society that finally came to an end. It failed. It is very sad.
‘Science-fiction has a very small audience in China, as it is futuristic. Chinese people think that the past, such as Confucianism, is more important. Young people who read science-fiction need temporary escapism. The goods and daily life cannot satisfy their psychological needs, so they run away from the real world. For me, it is both escapism and social commentary.
‘In Subway, I write about people who live their lives in a narrow space – the subway – and are struggling for a better life. The subway is a very strong and well-managed system. All the passengers want to run but fail. The novel mainly describes the relationship between China and the West. One way of looking at it is that the subway is a Western invention, so the Chinese felt that they needed to invent their own subways and aeroplanes to boost national pride. But that is ironic.
‘I hope that my work can be translated into English. But it is difficult because the world of science-fiction is dominated by Westerners; Chinese writers are marginalised. In China, most of my books cannot be published. They are just buried in my computer. But I do not write to publish. I just write for myself.’
- Click here to read an exclusive English-translated extract by Zhang Yueran
Zhang Yueran, 28, is one of China’s most popular literary stars and editor-in-chief of fashionable cultural magazine Li. Known as one of the ‘post-’80s generation’ writers, her works include Red Shoes, Ten Tales Of Love and Oath Bird, and often express the heartache of youth.
‘I started writing when I was a 14-year-old high school student. I wrote about generational gaps in a family. In China, the structure of a big family has been broken down due to the one-child policy. So what connections do we still have? Now, I will dig deeper. I will explore social patterns. For example, our generation is very self-centered. Everything is about “me”.
‘I oppose the labels or identities ascribed to me, for example “the post-’80s writer” invented ten years ago by the media. It seems that people of my generation are always talking and rebelling against something. This label is misleading because it simplifies us. We are on an assembly line. We are like media dolls subjected to their portrayals.
‘An author has to be interested in social problems, politics and philosophy. But the purpose of writing a novel is not entirely to reflect these issues. I don’t think my generation is interested in current affairs. We rarely thought about it when growing up.
‘The current environment of Chinese literature is not what I envisaged before. By comparison with previous generations, my generation is tightly connected to the market economy and commercialism. Authors need to “expose” more of themselves to their readers. Now, they communicate with their readers on the front stage rather than simply communicating through their books. But I have my own principles. I won’t just write popular topics for the sake of entertaining my readers. I was once an author contracted to the Beijing Writers’ Association, but I am not now. Although I didn’t think it restricted my writing, I believe that I should still have more freedom.’
- Click here to read an exclusive English-translated extract by Feng Tang
Feng Tang, 40, is an author, essayist, poet and GQ columnist. The Beijing-born writer – who also has degrees in medicine and business – has lived for seven years in Hong Kong, where he works for a leading Fortune 500 conglomerate. With his novel Everything Grows hailed as the Chinese equivalent of The Catcher In The Rye, Feng writes about the agony, alienation and ache of youth.
‘I wrote my first book, Happiness, when I was just 18. It is extremely pure – things have changed since then. During my high-school days, there wasn’t even a copy machine – so, after I finished one draft, I needed to copy it, page by page – over 200 pages – by hand. My newest book, Oneness, is set in the Tang Dynasty. It’s not going to be published in simplified Chinese as, by the current Chinese definition, it is pure pornography. One character, a nun, plays a professional lady’s role to reach the end stage of Buddhism through interaction with men.
‘My first three novels are semi-autobiographical. The trilogy is all about growth, youth, and puberty. In Everything Grows, I write about my Peking University days studying medicine. It is set in the 1990s when there was something like 17 per cent GDP growth every year: you can see the newly built roads, the mobile phones, all those people eager for money. My protagonist has three relationships in the novel; one is pure imagination; his high-school love who he thinks is a goddess.
‘Medicine was like doing the sketching for my novels. I understand human beings: their biology, psychology. I try not to be extremely political in my books. I focus on the small stuff, the details of everyday life.
‘I do not self-censor, which is a bad habit. So I just write to my heart and leave the cutting to my Chinese editors because they have a better sense of censorship. But you should accept the reality of censorship. It is like living in Beijing: you enjoy the sunshine but you need to tolerate the dirtiness and the pollution. It’s a package. But it is not a good time for Chinese literature right now. The current brightest are not writing – they are making money and earning fortunes.
‘I write in Chinese because its beauty is close to being perfect. The Tang Dynasty poems use just 20 words to lay out a picture; even if you use thousands of words in another language, there is not the same efficiency, the same effectiveness.’
- A Yi spent five years working in the police force of his home province, Jiangxi, before turning to crime writing. The Beijing-based author, 34, has published two collections of short stories and is the executive editor of literary magazine Tian Nan. His novel Cat And Mouse will be published in August.
‘My mother is illiterate and my father graduated in middle school. My parents think that it is a waste that I gave up the police force to choose a vagrant’s lifestyle. My novels are set in a small town, like the one where I used to live. I write a lot about the townsfolk. It is a place for exiles, far away, where life is more stagnant.
‘Before I was a 27-year-old, I only read Chinese books, but I felt undernourished. They often preach. Then I started reading foreign works and I was moved by Albert Camus’ L’étranger. Camus, Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera have influenced me most.
My writing is very pessimistic. The greatest pessimism comes when man realises that no one can escape death. My next book, Cat And Mouse, is inspired by both the American cartoon, Tom And Jerry, and a real-life crime case from 2006. A young person feels that living in this world is boring. He is unconstructive, with no sense of belonging, tormented by time and idling at home. At last, unable to actively plan his life, he decides to kill his female classmate. As he is being pursued by the police, he feels a sense of purpose: he sees himself as the mouse with a cat hot on his heels. In just half a year, I have written more than 50,000 words. I tremble as I write because I am able to see the cold possibilities in store for my protagonist.
‘My books are philosophical. The crime genre for me is a way to explain the actions of others. There is more interest in crime writing now, probably because CCTV has lots of crime serials. But they are used to preach “morally right” behaviour. That is rubbish.
‘While the police force provided me with a mine of resources, it is not the only one. Corruption exists, but I do not only reflect it in my books. I was a policeman once and I made mistakes too. I feel no pressure when writing and I don’t have a conscience. My only principle is truth. I write in Mandarin only because I know Mandarin. I feel that I am writing for man.’