We Asked “Liushen Leilei” 80 Questions. He Talked About Tang Poetry, Jin Yong, and This Parallel World

This official-account writer knows about “the red line that moves.” He says, “You need a switch.”

At the end of 2013, Wang Xiaolei, a reporter at Xinhua’s Chongqing bureau, registered the WeChat official account “Liushen Leilei Reads Jin Yong” and published his first piece, “The Least Devout Cult Leader — On The Smiling, Proud Wanderer, Part One.”

After seven more articles in the same vein, his “How Would Jin Yong, Gu Long, and Lu Xun Write Where Are We Going, Dad?” was reposted by the show’s own production team, and his traffic spiked for the first time. By 2016, “Liushen Leilei Reads Jin Yong” had more than 2 million followers and annual ad revenue above a million yuan.

Using commentary on Jin Yong’s novels as his vehicle, Wang wrote about the fates of minor characters and about love that can never be had — and also about smog, housing prices, and Kim Jong-un. Whenever a topic caught fire in public debate, followers would leave comments asking, “Leilei, what do you make of this?” In June 2015 these essays were collected into a book and put on sale.

A year later, a piece titled “Why Can’t the Xingxiu Sect Get Its PR Right?” got every function of the “Liushen Leilei Reads Jin Yong” account blocked for the first time. Earlier he had posted a photo on the account bearing the words: “Every word I write conforms to the core socialist values.”

Now Wang Xiaolei is promoting his new book, Liushen Leilei Reads Tang Poetry. In this book about Tang poetry, its poets, and its history, he no longer comments on current affairs. Instead he offers to “climb over the wall of Tang poetry for you, break off a few dew-tipped flowers, and hand them to you.” He also plans to help produce a paid content product called “A Tang Poetry Course You Can Listen to With Your Kids.”

In a 2016 interview with Phoenix Culture, Wang said: “A lot of things in China are the art of the line. I’m fairly good at knowing where the line is. You see some accounts that die right out of the gate. Maybe it’s the training I got at Xinhua — I have a red line in my eye. I know how far I can put my foot down, and that’s enough.” In this interview, he told QDaily: “You think you know where the red line is, but you quickly realize the red line moves.”

Even so, “Liushen Leilei Reads Jin Yong” keeps posting.

What follows is a transcript of our conversation with Wang Xiaolei. Because it runs long, we have split it into several sections for easier reading, not strictly in the order the interview took place. There were also questions Wang didn’t answer directly; at one point, looking a little pained, he said, “Have mercy on me, swordswoman.”

“How Did Tang Poetry Surpass Our Own Dynasty?”

Q: What made you start writing about Jin Yong in the first place?

A: It was an accident. At the time every reporter had to go through retraining before returning to the job. They locked us up in Fangshan and wouldn’t let us out, and we studied the Marxist view of journalism. We watched instructional films, three episodes at a time, and every evening people would say, “the three-episode picture is starting.” We studied all day, and I studied hard, of course, but there was still a lot of free time, so people said we could start an official account for fun. So I opened one about reading Jin Yong.

Q: Why did you start writing about Tang poetry?

A: Readers asked for it, they wanted to read it. I dashed one off, then found people liked it — well, I like it and you like it, so let’s write it for fun. Actually I’d been writing it off and on the whole time; I’ve been at Tang poetry for more than two years now. I just love poetry, and I love the Tang dynasty.

There’s another reason. Tang poetry keeps wandering into Jin Yong’s novels, and I never thought of the two as separate things. In A Deadly Secret, for instance, the hero practices a swordsmanship style actually called “Tang Poetry Swordplay.” There’s also a great treasure hidden inside a book, and that book is an anthology of Tang poems. Or take the scene where Zhang Wuji goes to Zhao Min’s residence and a scroll is hanging in the main hall — it’s Yuan Zhen’s “On Swords,” though of course Jin Yong never tells you the title, it’s just hanging there. Or when Guo Jing is teaching Yang Guo, and suddenly Du Fu wanders in: a stele for the vice director of the Ministry of Works appears in front of them, and Guo Jing uses Du Fu and the idea of “the greater kind of hero” to brainwash Yang Guo.

Q: So writing about Tang poetry feels more relaxing?

A: Writing about Tang poetry means going slower — you have to check a lot of sources, verify things. “The Formidable Du Fu: A Small Account’s Comeback,” for example, I wrote at my own dining table, twenty minutes after finishing dinner. But what I’d noted down at the time wasn’t accurate; only after publishing did I realize I’d gotten several dates backwards. So writing the book meant checking a lot of sources.

Q: At the time, why did you think people liked Nalan Xingde?

A: The poems going around online were all Nalan Xingde and Tsangyang Gyatso, weren’t they? Everyone shared them — “Seeing Me or Not,” that kind of thing — sharing a lot of fake poems.

Q: How is your Tang poetry writing different from theirs?

A: I never expected people to like Du Fu. There is a difference — in the standing of the poetry, and in the persona, for instance. I think people have a natural respect for Du Fu and poets like him, but there’s no way to get close to them, no way to take part. If someone wants to applaud Du Fu, there’s no platform for it. That’s why that picture of Du Fu got turned into memes; I think that’s people expressing their love for him. So how do we get close to Du Fu? Do we go buy a copy of Three Hundred Tang Poems, or a biography of Du Fu? I think what I did was give people that — let them take him in. Give people a chance to come into contact with Tang poetry.

Q: Is that what you set out to do?

A: I wrote about this in the preface. I climb over the wall, pick a few flowers to show people, tell them these flowers are beautiful, and if you’re interested you can go in through the front gate.

Q: But picking flowers is a process of selection. Which flowers do you pick?

A: The ones I think are beautiful.

Q: What counts as a beautiful flower?

A: Fun, beautiful, moving.

Q: Take “The Formidable Du Fu” and the piece on Bai Juyi — how did you decide to pick those two flowers? On Bai Juyi writing “Song of Everlasting Sorrow,” why write that the poem alludes to a former emperor?

A: That’s just gossip, and gossip has to be cracked down on hard. Write about a former emperor? Do I have a death wish? (Laughs.) Here’s the thing: what I really wanted that piece to do was answer a question — why Tang poetry in particular, why Tang poetry is good. Starting from that year 618, poetry reached a peak.

I’m not the only one thinking about this. People in the Song dynasty thought about it too. Hong Mai asked, “How did Tang poetry surpass our own dynasty?” One theory is that Tang poetry avoided nothing. Tang poets could write about anything, and Song-dynasty people had already worked out that this had become impossible in their own era. There’s an essay that brings up Zhang Ji’s “Ballad of a Chaste Wife.” It tells of a chaste wife, already married, who accepts an expensive gift from another man and even wears it, then, torn and reluctant, returns it after much soul-searching — “I return your pearls, tears streaming down.” Look at the sensibility of Tang people: back then that already counted as being a chaste wife. Later it stopped counting. People gradually came to see a woman like that as two-faced, and she became a target of criticism — not a chaste wife but a loose one, with people saying, “Her claim to chastity is in danger.” It’s the same story. What I wanted to say is that the Tang dynasty was open and enlightened.

Q: The book is called Reading Tang Poetry, but most of it is about the poets, their lives, and Tang history. Why?

A: In the end I didn’t have the energy left to deliberate over the title. I’d thought of calling it “None Before Me,” from Chen Zi’ang’s line “Before me, I see no ancients.” But then people added a subtitle, and it went wrong. It became “None Before Me: Liushen Leilei Reads Tang Poetry.” What I meant was that Tang poetry was a peak in the history of Chinese literature; what it turned into was Liushen Leilei having no one before him. How full of yourself can you get? You’re bound to get roasted for that, and people still roast me for it — look how full of yourself you got.

Q: Does it bother you when people attack you?

A: That title is just too arrogant, I couldn’t live with it myself. Later I thought up some more literary names, like “From ‘Watering the Horses at the Great Wall Spring’ to ‘Bodhisattva Barbarian’” — Tang poetry begins with Li Shimin’s “Watering the Horses at the Great Wall Spring” and ends with “Bodhisattva Barbarian.” But I ran out of energy and just went with “Liushen Leilei Reads Tang Poetry.” It really is more of a poetic history, though, so maybe “Three Hundred Years of Tang Poetry” would have fit better.

Q: Could you say what you really wanted to write about was the poets, not the poetry?

A: You can understand it that way, but everything I write is meant to help people understand a particular poem. When I write about Du Fu’s family life, it’s to help people understand “Qiang Village.” He left his wife and children in Fuzhou, went off alone to find the organization, and finally came back to reunite with them. After reading it, you’ll have a better and richer understanding of “Qiang Village.”

Q: Of all these poets, who’s your favorite?

A: Du Fu.

Q: What do you like about him?

A: You feel different standing in front of Du Fu. He gives you an overwhelming sense of your own smallness — you’re one meter fifty, he’s two meters twenty. For one thing, Du Fu had more learning than Li Bai; you get the sense Li Bai’s talent outran his learning, that Li Bai conquered the world with the Songs of Chu and the Records of the Grand Historian, whereas Du Fu feels like he had more behind him. So you feel this man has more learning than you, more talent than you, writes better poems than you, and is a better person besides — his character holds up too. In front of him you feel small. That sense of smallness is very strong. I used to like Qian Qi, the leading figure among the “Ten Talents of the Dali Era,” who wrote lines like “the tune ends, the player is gone, and over the river a few green peaks remain.” That’s the style he wrote in; his poems are like little watercolors. When we’re young we all love beautiful prose, and someone like Qian Qi fits that. Once you’re older, and a bit more worn down inside, Du Fu starts to feel better.

Q: Which do you enjoy more, writing about Tang poetry or writing about Jin Yong?

A: Both, they’re both interesting, each has its own flavor. Sometimes while writing I can’t tell which of the two feels more real. There was a passage where I wrote something like, “Our poems were hard to preserve, just as martial arts manuals were guarded by many skilled fighters.” At that moment I really was treating Jin Yong’s world as real, and while writing the two got mixed together.

Q: Is it a kind of parallel world? How do you slip into that state so easily?

A: You see something funny happen in real life, and after enough Jin Yong you fall into that state on your own.

Q: What kind of funny things?

A: The stuff that happens on my account. I’ve read Jin Yong many times over — not always cover to cover, but I’ll pick a book up whenever it comes to mind. So it’s left a deep mark.

Q: Which of Jin Yong’s books is your favorite?

A: The Smiling, Proud Wanderer and The Deer and the Cauldron. I used to prefer The Return of the Condor Heroes — I found the sixteen-year love story very moving, Yang Guo’s underdog comeback, all that raw feeling. But over time I’ve come to think these other two are better.

Q: Those two are relatively late works, and less orthodox?

A: They really are later works. But the main reason is that they’re weightier, more worth chewing over. Sometimes you read Jin Yong and it’s just fun, you can’t help laughing out loud. Take Wei Xiaobao: he brings in a great scholar to write something for him, and the scholar works very hard at it, and then Wei Xiaobao looks it over and says, “Wow, you’re amazing, you filled up two whole pages.” Wei Xiaobao is praising him sincerely at that moment, but the scribe must have found it excruciating. (Laughs.) But yes, that’s right — they really are like my parallel world; a lot of the time I find myself projecting into them.

“I’m Just a Sports Account”

Q: Compared with writing about Tang poetry, isn’t writing about Jin Yong closer to current-affairs commentary?

A: No. My Jin Yong account is classified as a sports account. Because martial arts is folk sports. I work the culture and sports beat, and I’ve always been keen to take part in sports-world events — but they never invite me.

Q: Why do you think that is?

(Laughs.)

Q: Because you’re not really a sports account… Would a normal sports account write about Jin Yong’s father being a landlord and what happened to him during land reform?

A: (Laughs.) The subject is reading Jin Yong, so I consider that background knowledge about Jin Yong.

Q: But the fun of these pieces, for readers, isn’t Jin Yong or the Tang dynasty — it’s the connection to the present. What do you make of that?

A: No, no, no. I’m just a sports account. My job is to interpret Jin Yong well.

Q: Other people have interpreted Jin Yong before. What makes your writing better than theirs?

A: I suppose people feel I’m upstanding. A chest full of righteousness, honest and upright, full of positive energy, teaching people to be good, promoting classical culture.

Q: So how do you define positive energy?

A: Positive energy is… teaching everyone something good, teaching people to be good, to be decent.

Q: How do you choose topics? Does your team hold meetings?

A: I write whatever I feel like writing. I’m not a team, I’m a gang. I’m the only hired gun. We don’t hold topic meetings — there’s no way to hold one.

Q: Don’t you have to chase trending topics?

A: What I tell myself is this: on current affairs, I set my own standard. I only write about things that touch the bottom line. There are two kinds — some things are evil enough to cross it, some are stupid enough to cross it.

For example, the year the singer Yao Beina died, netizens made heart signs and lit candles online. Suddenly a certain voice came out saying: General Zhang Wannian also died, so why are you mourning Yao Beina instead of Zhang Wannian? They called it a loss of the national spirit, said it made people unfit to be successors of communism. I thought that was stupid enough to cross the line, so it was worth writing about. I wrote a piece called “We Always Mourn Cheng Lingsu More Than We Mourn Wang Chongyang.” I think it’s simply how human nature works — of course netizens shed more tears for the death of a young girl like Cheng Lingsu; that’s common to everyone. I said we Jin Yong fans ought to apologize, we’ve lost our national spirit.

Q: But the whole thing was about Yao Beina. Why bring in Cheng Lingsu? What was the thinking?

A: (Laughs.) I don’t know, I’m just someone who reads Jin Yong.

Q: Does it bother you when people say you’re not really about reading Jin Yong? Is there a reason? … Because of the account getting blocked?

A: The first time the account got blocked, I was about to take a break — I was planning to give myself a week off, and I was on an island in Australia, Kangaroo Island. Then a friend told me: no need to take a break, the organization has already given you one, a whole month off. I had ads booked that month and had taken deposits, so I had to scramble to explain to the clients — force majeure from the organization, they’ve given me time off.

Q: What was that one about? Ran out of positive energy?

A: (Laughs.) I suppose I overdid the positive energy. That piece was called “Why Can’t the Xingxiu Sect Get Its PR Right?” — and that got me an instant holiday. The next time it got blocked, I honestly didn’t understand why. That piece was called “What’s Really Different Between Fatty Kim III and Castro?” I just posted two photos — one of a girl crying, surrounded by images of Fatty Kim III, and one of a girl laughing, surrounded by images of Castro. I said the difference between them is that one makes girls cry and one makes girls laugh, that’s all. What’s wrong with that?

Q: Do you know why the Xingxiu Sect piece got you in trouble?

A: With that one, a veteran colleague at our agency told me: “You’re like a street vendor selling leather shoes. A vendor can rip off a government minister, but you can’t rip off a chengguan [urban management officer]. You say their PR is no good — isn’t that ripping off the chengguan? How could they let you off?”

Q: So you can still write pieces that rip off ministers…?

A: I don’t dare rip off anyone. I’ll stick to positive energy.

Q: What do you make of the rumor that Mimeng was arrested?

A: I asked her about it, hilarious. I asked her, “Are you out of jail yet?” and she said, “It’s baffling — I’ve never had any contact with the tax authorities. Last year there was a rumor I’d died, last month a rumor I’d been picked up for prostitution, this month a rumor I evaded taxes. My own fault for showing off — sooner or later you pay for it.”

Q: Does that worry you?

A: Mimeng is a big account, I’m a small one. It’s different — who cares about a small account? Getting big would be nice, of course, but it’s not the end of the world if I don’t, this is fine too. Basically, don’t think about it too much. Update when it’s time to update, write however I write, as long as it fits positive energy and socialist values.

“You Need a Switch Inside You”

Q: Do you censor yourself?

A: If it gets blocked, it gets blocked; I just try to be careful. But here’s the problem: you quickly realize being careful doesn’t help, because the red line moves. You think you know where the red line is, and then it moves, and that’s very hard to live with. When did we realize sports had become sensitive? When did we realize the Spring Festival Gala had become sensitive? We used to think the Gala was fair game for jokes — why shouldn’t a work of art be made fun of? So you see, being careful doesn’t help.

Q: If being careful doesn’t help, what do you do?

A: Then I just go with it.

Q: But what happens when the red line moves to where you are? Plenty of accounts have already been blocked.

A: Then I stop writing. If the organization gives me a long holiday, I stop writing. Entertainment gossip and that sort of thing, I’ll say hello to friends in private.

Q: You seem very at peace with it.

A: What else can you do? Luo Yin has a poem: “If there’s wine today, get drunk today; when tomorrow’s sorrow comes, worry tomorrow.” And Du Fu has a line too: “Next year at this gathering, who knows who’ll still be here — drunk, I turn the dogwood over carefully in my hand.” This time next year, who knows who’ll still be alive. That’s what it means.

Q: Does quoting the poems of the ancients and thinking about their lives calm you down?

A: These days I often tell myself, you’re actually very fortunate. When I’m agitated, impatient, I tell myself: don’t be so precious about it, you get to make reading Jin Yong your job, which you never would have dared imagine. If back in middle school someone had told you your future job would be reading Jin Yong, you’d have died laughing. Well, the dream came true, so stop being precious. When I think that way, I settle down fast.

I also think about how I’m living a happier life than most of the poets in this book — happier than Du Fu, Li Bai, Jia Dao, Meng Jiao. My talent doesn’t deserve to be this much happier than theirs, and that calms me down too.

Q: How do you judge that kind of happiness, though? Du Fu’s life was full of upheaval and hardship, but didn’t he find something higher through his poetry?

A: Now you’re talking like an outsider — his son starved to death. It’s true that at his thatched cottage and places like it he had relatively calm stretches, and the poems he wrote there were gentler, but most of the time he was adrift and in anguish.

Q: But you can’t compare your happiness to someone living through a war on the basis of basic material security. Once your basic needs are met, shouldn’t you go after more than that?

A: I think my current state is already good. Your job is literally reading Jin Yong — what more do you want?

Q: Do you think you could reach a higher level in your writing, or elsewhere? You once wrote on your account, “Sitting in front of García Márquez, I’d feel ashamed.”

A: Doesn’t it all end if I just don’t think about it? You need a switch inside you: when a strange thought pops up, you flip it right off. Imagine you have a lot of switches on you — flip them off, problem solved, right? You can’t spend every day wrestling with what you’d do if García Márquez were sitting in front of you.

Of course, watching this so-called spring of content entrepreneurship, you’re bound to feel ashamed. Everyone says it’s the spring of content entrepreneurship, but what have you actually built? Take it out and look: a pile of posts. You see, when I’m writing about Tang poetry, I keep thinking that every era has its own literature — poetry in the Tang, fu in the Han, a heap of palace-style verse in the Northern and Southern dynasties. If later ages ask what literary form represents our era, I’ll tell you: web fiction. What a terrifying thing to admit. A lot of people won’t accept it, but sorry, many years from now, if I were writing a literary history, the representative form of today would be web fiction. It might even write me in (laughs). How embarrassing, to enter history in that posture.

Q: But you have other choices. You don’t have to enter history in that posture.

A: Let’s just switch it off. Forget it, forget it, switch it off. Once, an old leader at my agency told me very solemnly, “I think your name will be in the history of contemporary essay writing.” I was thrilled, really fired up. Then I got home that night and saw an ad request: “Bro, are we writing that ad or not?” and I said, “Sure, write it.” At that moment I thought: forget it — carrying on like this, and I still want my name in the history of the essay?

Q: So how do you handle that contradiction?

A: I try not to think about it. Switch the button off.

Q: You’ve already switched off several buttons… Once they’re all off, will your writing still have any appeal?

A: (Laughs.) I don’t think about that. There’s no point. Once I see it’s a dead end, thinking about it is wasted, so I switch it off.

Q: In real life you say you “switch it off,” you don’t think about it. But when you write, you write about “land reform,” about “secret burials.” Isn’t that a contradiction?

A: (Laughs.) “Secret burial,” right? Everyone says there’s never been such a thing as secret burial in our history, we’ve never had it, and I say that’s not right — Jin Yong’s father was buried in secret.

Q: So… how do you make sense of your own behavior here?

A: Have mercy on me, swordswoman. Let’s change the subject. All this talk about our account being blocked is giving me a real sense of crisis.

Q: One last question. When your account was blocked, you said you felt like “snow falling in June.” Was that a reference to The Injustice to Dou E?

A: Did I really say that? I don’t remember. (Laughs.) But I do think my situation is a lot like Ren Woxing’s — like Ren Woxing locked at the bottom of the cell by West Lake. Locked up for ten years, he even carved a line there: “In my life I have killed men like cutting hemp, and hated evil like an enemy — imprisoned at the bottom of this cell by West Lake, am I not getting what I deserve? A pity that the youngsters of later generations don’t even know my name — that too is a regret.” I feel it’s a bit like that. A sense of just deserts, of having brought it on myself.

“Web Fiction Is the Literature of Our Era”

Q: At what point in your writing did you feel you’d made it big?

A: I haven’t made it big. Not at all.

Q: But the book itself calls you “the talent carrying self-media writing.”

A: That’s the belly-band blurb, you know how it is. When I first opened the book and saw the first page said “Famous Names on Leilei,” I found it genuinely alarming. Isn’t that a bit too low-brow? If you’re going to hype yourself up, at least do it with some class.

Q: Over these past few years, do you feel noticeably more worn down, now that writing about Jin Yong and Du Fu is your job?

A: These days reading Jin Yong is a pastime for me. I can’t really call it work.

Q: Then what’s your main job?

A: My main job is all kinds of odds and ends. After this book, for instance, I’m launching a subscription project to teach people to read Tang poetry, called “A Tang Poetry Course You Can Listen to With Your Kids.”

Q: Are you turning into an education account?

A: (Laughs.) It will be a bit lighter than this book. I’ll do one semester first and offer it as a subscription. Once I’m through all this, I’ll write one piece on Tang poetry and Jin Yong to relax.

Q: You spent eight years as a current-affairs reporter. What’s the best story you ever did?

A: Let me think. The best were probably the internal-reference reports. Internal-reference reporting could actually change things; it felt like a real accomplishment. But… those reports can’t be discussed publicly.

Q: If it was so fulfilling, why did you quit?

A: Mostly because I couldn’t keep up with everything. Being away on trips for that many days at a stretch, the agency obviously wasn’t going to allow it. My own account and my personal affairs kept piling up, and I couldn’t stay at the agency. I made the decision fast — I figured, wherever I write, it’s still self-expression.

Q: It’s writing either way. Does writing on your own account feel more fulfilling?

A: At the time it felt freer. I could write whatever I wanted, and whenever I had free time I could write a bit about Tang poetry, a bit about Jin Yong.

Q: After quitting in 2015, what do you consider your profession to be?

A: A roaming Party member — even the organization can’t find me anymore. What am I now? I don’t know either. Someone who works in new media? A self-media person? I don’t know how to define it. “Self-media person” — as if the state let you run a media outlet, shamelessly calling yourself media. That title isn’t quite right either. I think I should be called a has-been internet writer.

Q: What pushed you to make the change? You had a lot of influence at Xinhua.

A: Freedom matters a lot. For someone who writes, being able to write whatever you want feels good. No one reviews your drafts, no one gatekeeps you. That feeling is completely different.

Q: Do you care about the things people say about you? Some say you’re just dabbling in refinement for show.

A: I wouldn’t call it dabbling in refinement, I’d call it playing to the crowd. I’m this vulgar — where’s the refinement? Call it being contrarian for attention, grandstanding. (Laughs.) But really, with a few thousand comments a day in the WeChat back end, how could you possibly keep up with caring? People say all kinds of things. Facing that back end, you realize how wildly different human beings are, how many types of people there are. You can’t keep up with caring about it.

Q: So whose opinion do you care about?

A: I used to think I’d care about Jin Yong’s. Nobody else mattered, so I kept wondering: does Jin Yong even know I exist? Later I was in Shanghai, at Fudan, and Jin Yong’s son happened to be there too. Someone asked, “Mr. Cha, does your father know who Leilei is?” Mr. Cha looked embarrassed and said he probably didn’t. Everyone found that very funny. I remember thinking: so Jin Yong doesn’t know. A strong sense of loss, like I’d been carrying on for nothing, wasted all that effort. But I accepted that fact too — if even Jin Yong doesn’t care, everyone else cares even less. There are so many readers, how could you keep up with caring about them all? From the second article on, some readers were already saying, “each piece is worse than the last” (laughs) — at least make it to the fifth one.

Q: Do you still feel the pressure of being forgotten?

A: Every era produces a batch of people who write; that’s natural. If you get forgotten, so be it. You can’t go around tapping people on the shoulder asking “do you still remember me,” you can’t keep proving you exist. All I can do now is keep updating every day.

Q: From 2014 to now, do you feel you’ve changed a lot?

A: In terms of work, not as much as you’d imagine. Right after I quit I thought my life would change drastically, that I’d be thrown straight out into the waves. But there is one change I’ve thought about seriously: life has started to feel unreal. What I mean is, everyone around you treats you well. Before, as a reporter, you ran into all kinds of people and situations. Now, doing this, everyone around you calls you “Teacher Wang,” and life starts to feel unreal. That isn’t what life is supposed to look like, is it? And it leaves whatever you write with no life in it.

So sometimes I find myself hoping for small surprises in my life — it’s hard to explain. Once I took my car in for servicing, and this couple washing cars covered themselves in soap suds and dove right into scrubbing it. I thought that was something vividly alive, real life, and I think you need to see people like that. Or take now: when I go out it’s from home to a hotel, very nice hotels, night after night, in enormous suites. Comfortable, sure, very comfortable, but live like that year after year and there will be nothing left in your pen. I’ve started to understand why some singers or writers gradually lose their inspiration and can’t write anything — it may simply be that their lives have become this monotonous. That’s something to watch out for.

Q: But what can be done about it?

A: I haven’t figured it out. I keep coming up with odd, far-fetched ideas. I have a friend who sells newspapers, and I’ve always wanted to go sell papers with him. He’s disabled, and he sells papers under a pedestrian overpass. I keep thinking that whenever I have time I’ll go sell papers with him, find out what his life is like, understand his relationship with the chengguan and with customers.

Q: But will you really get the chance to go sell papers? Maybe the idea is hard to carry out?

A: Right, there’s no way around it. So I try some fairly naive things — when I land at the airport, for instance, I’ll deliberately take the subway and change lines many times, on purpose. You feel you’ll meet all kinds of people on the subway. Or I’ll go queue at a hospital, try to make contact with people, do what I can. Imagine the environment I’m in: a lot of people call you “Teacher” the moment they meet you, which seems proper enough, and say they’re your fans, though that might be fake too. Surrounded by people like that, life feels false. Is it enjoyable? Very. But god, you have to create something, and living like that you can’t create anything; whatever you write comes out ridiculous.

Q: Is that your biggest source of anxiety?

A: I wouldn’t put it that way. There are many things I’m anxious about. But in terms of life, this really is an issue, and if I tell other people about it they’ll think I’m being precious, while to me it’s a big deal. I have to create, and life needs to be richer.

“You Have to Think More Clearly Than Others”

Q: So what are your plans? Are you just going to keep doing those “odds and ends”?

A: I’ve suddenly realized that even someone with no product sense and no business instincts, like me, can end up doing something that turns into a trend. Take Tang poetry: I’d been writing it long before, signed the book deal years ago, and never expected Tang poetry to take off by the time the book came out. Or paid content — that’s hot too, isn’t it, with so many people subscribing to things online now.

How did I come to start this course? A few years ago a senior colleague at our agency organized a class, gathered everyone’s kids together, and had me come talk to them about Tang poetry. I went and rambled at them — late Tang one minute, early Tang the next, no plan at all. It went really well; the kids were lovely and liked me. And I found their level was high: poems you’d assume they wouldn’t know, they knew; poets you’d think fairly obscure, they knew those too. After that I gave talks at a few schools here and there, and it felt great. If you can teach kids Tang poetry in a way they enjoy, I think that’s a good thing to do. The plan was to launch the course once the book was out. Then paid content unexpectedly became a trend, so I decided to put the first semester online in July. It’s text plus audio.

Q: Have you set a price?

A: Prices for paid content products on the market right now are all pulled out of thin air. Luo Zhenyu does the same, just picks a number. I’m thinking, maybe, 166 yuan? Because I’m Liushen — liu means six.

Q: Will there be a difference between people who read the book and people who listen to the product?

A: Not necessarily. I hope the listeners are kids eight and up; under eight it would probably be a stretch. But I don’t want to make it too shallow either. If adults and parents also feel they got something out of it, I’ll be satisfied. The book will definitely go deeper — it includes my views on literary history, which won’t be in the audio.

Q: Is it meant to be introductory, a first-exposure kind of thing?

A: Yes, and informative too.

Q: Do you feel a drive to enlighten people? There are often rhetorical questions in the book, which read like lecture notes.

A: That’s a habit, I haven’t thought about it carefully. What I want most is this: I come across something that moves me deeply, and I want to share it with you. That’s the strongest impulse. Take the Complete Tang Poems — you can buy the whole set in a bookstore today for a few hundred yuan. It’s edited and proofread beautifully, but some readers may not know how grueling the work of compiling it was. I know, and it moves me, and I want to pass that feeling on. As for my views on the poems themselves, I don’t think I have any brilliant insights — is there anything left to say that earlier generations haven’t said already?

Q: So you draw readers in through your own enthusiasm?

A: I don’t know. Who knows whether it’s appealing — you only find out once it sells. That question is for the readers to answer. If they don’t like it, I’ll just have to haul the books home myself.

Q: What kind of people are your readers?

A: I don’t know, I have no idea what kind of people they are. The data I get is very limited. I know it’s about half men and half women, mostly concentrated in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. My own home is Chongqing, but there are hardly any readers there. Beijing has several hundred thousand; Chongqing doesn’t even have ten thousand. Most of them are on iPhones, which badly cuts into my tips (laughs). I know very little beyond that. I can’t draw you a picture of them. I don’t even know if they’re human.

Q: But you do take advertising.

A: They can advertise or not, up to them. We just agree on a time; the business side is very free, I can take a job or turn it down. I’ve set myself a rule of taking about four a month, five at the very most, and after that I stop.

Q: Once you’re selling content products, you may draw a different kind of criticism. Someone might say you’re reselling compressed knowledge. Would that bother you?

A: You have to think it through more clearly than other people do, and if someone hasn’t thought it through, there’s no need to care what they think. Say you’re interviewing a pop star: you probably wouldn’t ask how much she earns. But interview a writer and you’ll want to ask, because the whole thing feels abnormal to you. Same logic: sell pens or sell cups and nobody says, “wait, you can charge for that?” Process some knowledge and sell it, and suddenly people ask: can you charge for knowledge? Is that reasonable? Will it have a bad effect? How do you guarantee the knowledge is high quality and harmless? Well, how do you guarantee a peach is high quality and harmless? Same thing — paying for it is nothing to be shocked at. Are compressed goods in short supply? A car comes off the assembly line in a few minutes these days — what isn’t fast-tracked now? I think people are worrying about things that don’t need worrying about. People imprison themselves; you need to loosen up your thinking. Fast food can kill you if you eat it. Knowledge surely won’t.

Cover image from: Pear Video, The Smiling, Proud Wanderer (2001 edition)