Xu Zhiyuan on Liang Qichao in Hong Kong: "This Is What I Can Do Right Now, and I'm Very Sorry"

He said it during a conversation with the novelist Lu Nei — but the best part of the event was the audience Q&A.

At this year's Hong Kong Book Fair, the writer Xu Zhiyuan and the novelist Lu Nei held a conversation titled "Personal Writing and the Spirit of the Times." What made it interesting was how different their two paths into writing have been.

Xu Zhiyuan started in journalism. From 1998 he wrote for magazines including Sanlian Life Week, worked as chief writer at The Economic Observer, and wrote columns for Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Weekly) and the Chinese-language site of Britain's Financial Times. Lu Nei, from the age of 19, moved between factories in Suzhou, Shanghai and Chongqing, switching constantly between unemployment and work, and between jobs such as fitter, maintenance electrician and warehouse keeper. He began writing his own fiction after reading novels by Su Tong, Lin Bai and others, and after "hanging around online forums."

What the conversation dwelled on most was how each of them had changed since those starting points.

Lu Nei's list of jobs recently gained a new one: director. He will be filming a novel of his that has not yet been published.

Xu Zhiyuan, meanwhile, has become "fascinated" by the history of China's transition at the turn of the twentieth century, and Liang Qichao has become his main subject of research. In an interview with QDaily, he called the shift a way of "rebelling against the spirit of the times" by other means: he wants to use "history as a whole" against fragmentation, and to "search for the spirit of a historical figure" in an age preoccupied with personal feeling.

How wide a writer's field of vision should be was a question both men raised.

Xu Zhiyuan believes that in the Chinese-language world, "writers have narrowed what writing is": "I really hope China will produce something like Edward Gibbon writing about the decline of the Roman Empire, or Thomas Carlyle writing about the French Revolution, or Emerson writing about the rise of the American spirit — the kind of work that can carry the spirit and historical weight of a whole era. It feels like that is exactly the part that has been squeezed out and eliminated in today's Chinese-language world."

On mining personal experience for fiction, Lu Nei said that "forcing it is a shameful thing": when a writer's knowledge and capacity for reflection cannot meet what the work demands, "stalling" is the better choice.

The exchange between the two of them was very short. Of the ninety-minute event, nearly two-thirds went to audience questions. We have excerpted parts of the talk and of the interview below.

Excerpts from the talk and the interview:

X: Xu Zhiyuan; L: Lu Nei; G: audience member; Q: QDaily

X: When I look at Hong Kong, I think of how, over the past century and more, this city has been a gateway to the new — Kang Youwei found his inspiration here; passing through Hong Kong for the first time in 1879, he was stunned by the experience and wanted to change ancient China. And it has also been a gateway to the past — in 1948 and 1949, Qian Mu went to Guilin Street with a few colleagues and built the first form of New Asia College, and there he constructed an entire Chinese tradition, right after that tradition had vanished inside China.

What fascinates me now is how Chinese history, step by step, got from the nineteenth century to where we are. Say "literature" today and people think of fiction. A century ago, why was fiction called xiaoshuo, "minor talk"? Because it wasn't respectable; it was thoroughly marginal. Liang Qichao wrote essays arguing that fiction mattered a great deal to "renewing the people." So the great tradition Liang Qichao stood for — that writing should carry the Way — is the very thing now disappearing.

Fate is a curious thing. I keep thinking about how our generation can make writing broad again. Sometimes it simply annoys me: so many writers have narrowed writing, shrunk it. To describe a world, discover a world, think a world through — that involves aesthetic judgment, moral judgment, values. What an enormous thing that is. And by the time it reaches us it has slowly turned into a craft. If our generation could widen the scope of writing again — personal experience matters here, of course, digging deeper into personal experience — I think that if the tension in it could be released again, the result would be far more interesting.

L: Is that a demand you're making of the novel, or of all writing?

X: I don't find dividing writing into categories very interesting. The modern novel was invented only two centuries ago, and in China more recently still. Writing — poetry, fiction, essays — should be one thing: a way of expressing the world, or of standing against it.

G: A few days ago I was talking with an older friend, slightly older than you [Xu Zhiyuan]. He feels that at his age the world has changed, China above all, and that the shock to him has been enormous. China went through enormous change in the 1990s too; many people quit their jobs to go into business, many lived through upheaval. I asked him whether today's changes feel more violent than the 1990s because back then he was still young and full of energy, and now that he's middle-aged the blow lands harder. When I finished, he went quiet for a while. What I've noticed is that right now, whether you're in your 20s or your 40s, everyone carries some degree of anxiety about society. So I want to ask: when you were in your 20s and faced confusion and anxiety about life, what did you do? And do you have any advice for the young people here?

X: For our generation these were two different kinds of shock. In our 20s, what we faced was the hunger for more possibilities in life, and the public mood was growing more open and free — an exhilarating kind of shock.

By your account, now that we are reaching middle age, the pendulum of history is swinging back, and the whole world faces this problem. The world we grew up facing was the one the neoliberal order built, a globalized world. Over the past two or three years you can see the pendulum swinging back everywhere; many of the values we had settled on, including growing openness and growing freedom, are being challenged. It is all backlash, waves of populism; the whole world has started building walls. What used to be globalism has become tribalism. So we have to adapt to this change, and for our generation, especially when we examine our values, it is a very large question.

The second problem is that all this anxiety is produced by new technology — the torment of speed, of too much information — but it has a great deal to do with the weakening of humanist values, because it is through humanism that people confirm the self, confirm identity, confirm a sense of safety. Over the past twenty years, humanism has been badly weakened, above all by the waves of technology and commerce. This is a global crisis.

But this may be an interesting moment, because it means that even in middle age we can still take part in rebuilding the humanist values we believe in. That becomes an enormous attraction. Last night I was moved watching a documentary about Qian Mu. He ran off to Guilin Street in Hong Kong, grocery shops all around, and rented the second floor of a secondary school. At the start there were four students in the class, and Mr. Yu (Yu Ying-shih) was one of them.

Many of us call ourselves liberals — but these young people, are they really one of us? Have those values never really grown inside us? If they haven't, then we are just opportunists. Can they truly grow at a moment like this? That is when courage and engagement become especially important. Facing a new situation you will feel weak, short of courage, unprepared — but perhaps a moment like this is also an opportunity, one that can help us build these things. I think the same holds for all of you. Most of the time pressure crushes most people, but sometimes, used well, it awakens the real force of will and the creative force inside you. I hope that moment comes.

G: One difference between this era and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is that we don't trust much. In the past we might have trusted Lu Xun or Hu Shi; now we may not even trust intellectuals. In an age of distrust, how should we choose our values? Through this whole passage from globalism to localization — nationalism, regionalism, and finally back to an age of selfishness, or self-interest — when a person faces so many conflicting values and is surrounded by so many voices of distrust, how does one choose independently?

L: A person who writes novels can't offer you any advice on this. A novelist writes you a story; how the story is read is left entirely to the reader.

I was reading a book by Lévi-Strauss the other day. He says humans did not start keeping sheep in order to milk them. Before people learned to milk sheep, they had kept them for roughly 800 to 1,000 years as a luxury for the aristocracy. Only after about 800 years did people discover that sheep could be milked and shorn, that they had many uses; only then did ordinary people start keeping sheep, and the aristocracy stopped. It's an interesting story. It also works in reverse: in China's Jin dynasty, when the common people were starving, the emperor asked why they didn't eat meat porridge. That's the same story turned around.

X: Every era is full of similar confusions. During the Enlightenment, for instance, every issue you just raised was troubling people. Voltaire cursed all day, Rousseau cursed all day. Back in the Chinese context, the May Fourth era was just as full of this kind of doubt and difficulty. The distrust you speak of, though, has a great deal to do with how fast intellectuals as a whole were pushed to the margins over the past century and a half. New forces replaced them, and that marginalization is bound up with the political movements of that period.

So today we lament it. Take Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao: Liang was 25 at the time, and although his campaign failed, he still had the chance to be swept into the center of state action. Not quite the innermost center, but in 1898 the two of them could still set that kind of change in motion.

By 1917, Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi were helpless before the warlords, yet they could still lead a cultural movement. They had lost power politically, but a cultural movement was still possible. By the 1930s, after Chiang Kai-shek unified China, the cultural leadership of intellectuals began to slip away. Now it is worse still: cultural leadership is set by celebrities and the entertainment business. Intellectuals have been pushed further to the margins. That is connected to this situation, and probably to the whole course of the past century.

But we console ourselves a good deal of the time. Being marginal isn't necessarily bad. The margin forces you to rethink a lot of things, and the margin and the center turn into each other faster, and in ways more complicated and more interesting, than we imagine.

Take this place, Hong Kong. In 1842 it may have been a barren island, the absolute edge of the empire; when it was ceded, our Emperor Daoguang didn't even know what it was, a place he had never heard of. But a century and more later, when China opened up in the late 1970s and the 1980s, Hong Kong had become a center. Every place wanted its own little Hong Kong; it had become a central force. Over the past few years it has begun to be pushed to the margins again.

I think all of this belongs to a larger historical fate, and we are part of that fate ourselves. Much of our anxiety may come from overestimating our own importance. On one hand we need to confirm that we matter a great deal; on the other, an individual's value is quite limited, hemmed in by all kinds of constraints. Qian Mu and his generation, and novels too, can teach us a lot. Accepting in our hearts the fate of history as a whole, including other people's fates, is a very important part of how we grow as individuals and as a society.

G: I want to ask: a lot of things can't be said now. When you run into that, do you simply stop saying them from then on? Or, when something can't be said, what else can we do? Besides silence, is there really only silence?

X: It's awkward. I'll feel a lot of guilt about it; tonight I'll do a lot of blaming myself. I have too many reservations these days. A few years ago I wasn't like this. I don't know whether it's cowardice or something more complicated, but now I only take a strong interest in something once I know I can sustain it for a long time. On one hand I admit I'm not brave; on the other, striking that kind of posture doesn't suit me. I would rather have something more drawn out — Liang Qichao, Qian Mu, whichever. You can accuse me of running away, or you could call it a new kind of self-discovery: I want to make my thinking last longer.

If I want to understand many of today's problems and conflicts, I would rather set them in a much longer historical view, a much wider view of the world. Perhaps running away and discovering are happening at the same time. Of course it leaves me uneasy — I've laughed my way past all of it — but this is what I can do right now, and I'm very sorry.

Q: Why did you choose Liang Qichao?

X: Breadth. If you want to understand the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, he is the person who connects the most people, ideas and places. I suppose I felt he and I were a little alike in our younger years: expressing ideas through periodicals, pursuing intellectual exploration — alike in that way. But he was far more capable than I am. Though I speak better Mandarin than he did.

Q: What did you make of him before you started writing?

X: I didn't know him. He was just a very important name to me, like a lot of important historical figures — an abstract name. But the closer I got to him, the clearer all the threads of history became.

I'm full of curiosity now. Once I finish the first volume, I'm going to move to Japan and study Japanese — how they understood Japan at the time, what it was like for them in an unfamiliar language, what late-Meiji Japan looked like, how it felt to a young Chinese person. So I really want to get into all of that and go and find out. What Yokohama was like then.

Q: Do you feel your values have changed in the time you've been writing about Liang Qichao?

X: Yes, I think I've become a bit more serious than before. That's temperament, of course. My basic values haven't changed much; I'm still a liberal. But I'm more willing to understand their complexity, more willing to accept patience. Writing history now goes against the current — everyone cares about the future — but I very much wanted to explore China's transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Before, I knew it only vaguely; even with something like May Fourth, you're not really clear on it. I wanted to see whether I could find that narrative thread.

Q: You're presumably not just trying to understand that period for its own sake. Are you looking for some kind of answer?

X: Partly, yes. Many of the problems Liang Qichao faced China still faces and still hasn't resolved — the difficulty of building a modern state. So how they responded back then gives me a lot of encouragement, and piecing together the thread of that history means a lot for understanding your own era.

Q: A lot of people now say they're writing nonfiction — I'm not sure whether that's a kind of dressing up — and they see their writing as reflecting a great era by recording small people.

X: That's journalism, really. The division between fiction and nonfiction is quite boring to me. How much truth is there in fiction, and how much fiction in truth? An absolute division like that isn't that important. For me there are only two kinds of writing in the world, good writing and bad writing; the rest matters little. Whether it's drama, poetry, fiction, essay, even a television program or a documentary, the differences aren't especially important, because all of them construct a narrative.

Q: How do you define good writing?

X: Writing that helps you and helps others explore new dimensions, new layers, and enriches your understanding. Whether it widens the angle from which you read, or deepens it, either is good.

Cover image from Weibo