By Lin Gang
Translated by Stephen Nashef
Abstract: In this interview, Lin Gang and Xue Yiwei discuss the latter’s thirty years of literature more or less chronologically, beginning with his first published novella in 1988 and concluding with the publication in 2020 of “King Lear” and Nineteen-Seventy-Nine. Xue reflects on the relationship between his life and his work, his views on literature, and the difficulties he has faced in his career as a writer.
LIN GANG: At the beginning of January in 1986, some three months before your twenty-second birthday, you returned to Beijing, the city where you had graduated from university six months previously, and completed the piece that would become your first foray into the Chinese literary world: a novella about the defiance and destruction of a young man. It was a work that ought to have received a great deal of attention but in the two and a half years that followed, as it traveled from editor to editor receiving unanimous praise wherever it went, it nonetheless failed to find a place in the pages of China’s literary publications. The obstacles your debut faced seem to have foreshadowed the difficult literary path you went on to follow. Happily, history finally provided the novella and its young author the opportunity they deserved: the story was published in August 1988 as the leading piece in Zuojia 作家, an influential literary magazine. The name Xue Yiwei had finally found a place within the contemporary Chinese literary canon. Looking back on it thirty-two years later, one cannot help but wonder at the fortuity of the event. Its significance in the history of Chinese literature is well understood, changing as it did the very landscape of literary production in the country. I, like many others, believe you to be the most distinctive writer in the Chinese language today, something I think will continue to be affirmed by scholars looking back on this age in the future. A German scholar once claimed that all contemporary Chinese literature was rubbish, something that shocked the Chinese intellectual world, but I was not so affected because I knew of an exception, a black swan who could falsify the theory. As a writer you have always lived a humble life, pondering questions quietly on your own, fiercely committed to your writing, and as such have developed a rare reverence and passion for the knowledge and linguistic understanding that literature requires. The avant-garde fiction writer Can Xue 残雪 once said that you were “a genuine writer” who “forever inhabits the mental vanguard, disdaining the secular.” The German scholar’s critique could never apply to you. Just as importantly, you have always maintained a certain idealistic purity, refusing to participate in the official Writers’ Association and maintaining your distance from China’s literary social circles. To borrow the Chinese American writer Ha Jin’s 哈金 expression, you are a maverick in contemporary Chinese literature. All those familiar with the Chinese literary landscape will know that to choose the road not taken is to embark on a struggle of Sisyphean proportions. Yet remarkably enough, you have managed to pull off a kind of being-towards death, whereby your outstanding literary achievements have been able to break through by way of their unique quality, going some way to restoring the reputation of Chinese contemporary literature. In the eight years from 2012 to 2019 you published twenty-five books in China (including reprints of older works), every year providing readers with new literary pleasures and the cultural media with new topics of discussion. Just how incredible such an achievement is will be evident to anyone who understands the Chinese literary market. In 2010, Liu Zaifu 刘再复 used the word euphoric to articulate the experience of reading your series of war stories, describing your use of literary language as the gold standard. Aside from the vivid contrast with Kubin’s rubbish theory, Liu’s gold thesis seems to have anticipated the prolific ten years that have followed. In the summer of 2018 four influential publications, among them Zuojia and Xinjing bao 新京报, ran special features celebrating thirty years of your work. Shortly after, Houlang Publishing House published Thirty Years of Literature, a complete collection of all your published works at the time, divided into two series, Fiction and Non-Fiction. This rare, concerted action on the part of publishers in China speaks to a shared recognition of your unique value as a writer of Chinese literature. I would like to base our discussion today on these thirty years of literature. My first question is about how you felt at the age of twenty-four when you first saw that your novella was to be published as the leading piece in a literary journal of such national importance. Did you think that thirty years later you would still be a relatively lonely writer in the margins of the literary field, or did you think that you would have become a famous figure in contemporary Chinese literature by now?
XUE YIWEI: I didn’t think that far ahead. However…
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