Chinese Literature Today

By Yan Lianke
Translated by Eric Abrahamsen

Ladies, gentlemen, respected jurists,

Today’s award ceremony for the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, held as it is in these unusual COVID times, in this unique fashion, will become a memory that belongs uniquely to those of us here today, stamped upon our respective literary lives. Likewise, the Newman Prize is destined to be a unique part of my literary life, no less so than the place where I was born and live. The word “Chinese” in the title of this prize denotes a language that has been separated from the land of its birth, that has been understood and assessed by another group of people, highly sensitive, who may have an even deeper understanding of this language’s subtleties. And so I believe that this literary prize from Oklahoma, for each of its recipients, serves as something of an Odyssean homecoming for Chinese-language literature.

As every tree has its roots, so every literature has its home. Languages and writers each have their homelands, places that belong to them alone. Amid
the literature of the world, we so often see “created homelands” written in languages, by writers, that have lost their own—for instance Nabokov, who lived in the United States and wrote in English; or Kundera, who even now lives in France; or Chinese writers like Gao Xingjian, Ha Jin, or Li Yiyun, living outside of China and writing in French or English. Each of them has created works of true brilliance, yet we could not fathom or describe the striving and suffering they underwent as they—for various reasons—gave up their native language, and wrote. By comparison, I have been unusually lucky. Not only does my language’s homeland still belong to me, it is a homeland of uncommon substantiality. The world is full of writers with their own languages, their own homelands, to be sure, but I believe that few of them can compare when it comes to a homeland with such a particular reality as mine.

By Zhang Hong 张鸿
Translated by Yvette Zhu

Zhang Hong: Greetings, Wenying 文颖. As someone who has fulfilled the goal of becoming famous as early as possible, your works are marked with distinct literary qualities: Suzhou, Shanghai style, women’s literature, regional culture; they are humanist, worldly; delicate, unique, distinct; decadent and nihilist, atmospheric and stylistic; complex and concise; vast circumspection in delicate casualness, tenacity and determination in tenderness and refinement. Of course, I could go on and say much more about your creative style, but I want to hear from you on how you characterize your own literary work.

Zhu Wenying: First of all, thank you for applying such precise literary and multilayered analysis to describe my creative style. Actually, I quite like the three words that appear in the title: secrets, confrontation, and alienation. As to self-evaluation, I had, in fact, some time ago, realized that trying to summarize a person’s writing is a difficult task. The linear progression of time causes the entire craft of writing, its language, its style, and even its mood to shift and have subtle and complex variations. Sometimes, they could become completely different, or worse—full of contradictions and loopholes.