The "Formidable Creator" Li Jing Says Today's Chinese Have a Busy, Feverish Madness | Interviews ①

"I wish everyone, at this critical moment in history, would do their best not to go mad and not to turn stupid. Above all, don't fish in troubled waters by playing mad or playing the fool."

In the last years of the Warring States period, in Xianyang, capital of the state of Qin, there was a comedy known to every household. It told the "story" of a "clown" king and a dish person. The character of the "dish person" comes from the novel Hongfu's Night Flight (《红拂夜奔》). In the play, a "dish person" is someone who becomes a dish on the king's table.

This was a profession. Once hired, a dish person could provide for his whole family: the best house to live in, the best kindergarten for the children. The play was a sensation, tickets impossible to get, and it drew the attention of a favorite of the King of Qin — the guest minister Han Fei. He had the company brought into the Qin palace to perform for King Ying Zheng and his minister Li Si.

Han Fei said: this play is malicious in intent and known to every household; if the troupe is not severely punished, there will be no way to warn the realm and make an example of them. That was why he urged Ying Zheng to watch it.

Partway through the performance, it was stopped. As the stage lights slowly came up, Ying Zheng rose from his seat in the audience and said to Zhao Gao, off in a corner: Young Zhao, whatever this play performed, don't record it. If you happen to have written it down already, scrape the bamboo slips clean at once with your correction knife.

Then they began to discuss it. Han Fei proposed: every barbed tongue must be pulled out by the root. Li Si thought otherwise: pull out such a fine tongue by the root and the common people will be unhappy — better to try plucking out just the poison barb first. So the play was ordered revised, and the king would watch the new version twenty days later. And around this play a chain of stories unfolded — between the troupe master and his disciples, and King Ying Zheng of Qin and his powerful ministers...

That is roughly the plot of The Qin Comedy (《秦国喜剧》), the new play written by Li Jing. From July 6 to July 8, 2017, it ran for three performances at the Zhongjian Theater, all private showings with no tickets sold to the public. Perhaps only this way could the play be staged at all.

The Qin Comedy is Li Jing's second play. Its subject and its form are very different from her first, The Great Master (《大先生》), but at bottom the two are the same.

After watching it, the writer Yang Kui commented on social media: "It's plainly a tragedy. Precisely because it's comic, it's sadder still." And in the preface Dao Erdeng wrote for The Great Master, his last line explains why he agreed to write it: "In this flourishing age of cynicism, I was fortunate to read a work of such formidable creation."

After finishing The Qin Comedy, Li Jing gave a public talk, and she titled it plainly: "From Hongfu's Night Flight to The Qin Comedy."

In 1996, Li Jing finished graduate school and became an editor at a literary magazine. At the start, it happened to be a time when discussion of pure literature was thinning out and argument over ideas and doctrines was heating up. Before long, the literary society she worked for received an order: "Only pure literary works and pure literary criticism may be published; all commentary on ideas and on society is to be suspended."

The "pure literature" the ban meant to encourage did not include Wang Xiaobo. Li Jing said this was because his novels were too much fun and too "wicked." Around that time, Wang Xiaobo had submitted his novel Hongfu's Night Flight to her. Because of the restrictions, she twice asked him to cut it down, and even after the cuts it still could not be published.

This became a source of guilt for Li Jing — "for having wasted so much of a gifted writer's time and energy, making him dismember a work he loved with his own hands." Later, when she began writing herself, she went through, to varying degrees, what Wang Xiaobo had gone through. In her mind it slowly turned into a parable: a parable about the peculiar fate of creativity and humor in our history.

In the epigraph to the script of The Qin Comedy, Li Jing wrote about where the "dish person" came from, and she added this line: "Thanks to him (Wang Xiaobo) — for what a lifetime of his writing has revealed to me."

Li Jing even believes that the person who has done the most to push China forward in this era is Wang Xiaobo. "Because his free thinking, indifferent to utility, and the unrestrained imagination that thinking drove, and his humorous, restrained way of expressing it, have become the typical way the clear-minded and rational people of this era speak. He never compromised with obscurantist ideology, and his protests were full of wit and humorous laughter."

Beyond the humor, Li Jing said, what mattered even more was Wang Xiaobo's warm heart. "He cared about every person's right to live, and their right to wisdom. He didn't pursue only his own interests; he cared that everyone else be well. He was a writer of great courage and responsibility."

Li Jing decided to become a writer in 2000. That year she published her first collection of essays, and the encouragement it brought convinced her that she really could write. She felt she could lose anything, but she must not lose the ability to write.

"If I can write, I can hold on to myself. In writing I can live alongside myself, and my relationship with the world becomes calmer, easier to get along with. The parts of my nature that find it hard to speak can be put somewhere in writing, and can even become a particular kind of imagination. Through that, I come to recognize a certain spiritual value."

This may come from a feeling of having nowhere to settle herself, a feeling that goes back to Li Jing's childhood.

Recommending Li Jing's The Great Master, Chen Danqing said, "We usually say that Lu Xun's inner world was very dark, and it turns out Li Jing's inner world is dark too. Her 'Lu Xun' has been steeped in her very deeply, like a long, minutely detailed nightmare, and she burrows carefully back into her mind to recall the dream. Her dark imagination astonishes me, and the supply of it seems endless."

Li Jing explained why she is willing to "narrate" this darkness: it comes from both an imagination for darkness and a fear of it. An early, unpublished novel of hers contains a passage about her childhood, which appears in the book as the protagonist speaking to another character (Anji):

"When will this world root out hierarchy — even the hierarchy of fear? In the middle of that mortal fear, when did I lose that part of myself, the serenity I was born with? How did I lose it? Must I spend the rest of my life in a panic? I don't know. I say nothing. Just as in my childhood, I said nothing."

"It would be better if there were no me — this child who's good for nothing but eating. If only I were good at singing and dancing, that would be fine, or good at making faces, or good at chattering and roughhousing; any of that would do. But I couldn't do any of it, and the other children all could. All I could do was sit neatly on my little stool, doing exactly as my grandmother told me. If I didn't, she would hit me on the back of the head and on the backside."

"Ah, I lost the self I was, Anji! That self at ease with itself, that didn't know what 'guilt' meant. That self, oblivious to others, happy in its own world. That self, relaxed and cheerful, that could want something and get it. That self, free to go wherever it pleased. Your kind of self. I lost it in childhood!"

In both of her plays, Li Jing brings up the same thing: a mirror.

In The Great Master, Lu Xun has an important line: "I will stand before the empty mirror and take a good, close look at myself."

At the very opening of The Qin Comedy, she writes: "As Du Heng speaks, she puts on her costume and her makeup, as if she were facing a mirror."

These are all metaphors, and Li Jing's own unhappy childhood is a metaphor for this era too.

Q: QDaily

Li Jing: Li Jing, playwright of The Qin Comedy and The Great Master

Q: Who do you think has done the most to move this era forward?

Li Jing: Wang Xiaobo. Because his free thinking, indifferent to utility, and the unrestrained imagination that thinking drove, and his humorous, restrained way of expressing it, have become the typical way the clear-minded and rational people of this era speak. He never compromised with obscurantist ideology, and his protests were full of wit and humorous laughter.

A sense of humor is one of his most important legacies. It is what a mind with room to spare produces, and it is something this era badly lacks and badly needs. These days, even in a WeChat group full of cultural elites, people end up trading insults and quarreling. Everyone is too tightly wound.

There is also a trend in China of hypocritical moralizing coming back. Fake propriety and fake virtue have returned. Look at The First Half of My Life: the better Wu Yue played the mistress, the more she herself was attacked and cursed at online. Is this childish business a regression in people's capacity to think, or a growing appetite for performing morality? Wang Xiaobo's humor is exactly what fights this fake morality. Only a mind with room to spare and a free heart can produce that kind of humor.

What matters even more, in fact, is his warm heart. He paid attention to marginalized groups such as gay people, warned intellectuals not to become accomplices of power, and warned society as a whole not to restage the absurdist dramas of the "Great Leap Forward" and the "Cultural Revolution." His novels, full of grotesque imagination, and his essays, shaped by the storytelling of fiction, were all settling accounts with the damage done over thousands of years by anti-intellectual ideology and cultural logic. He cared about every person's right to live, and their right to wisdom. He didn't pursue only what he himself wanted. He was a writer of great courage and responsibility.

Q: What you're describing is a need. But if you look at results, is he still the person who has done the most to move the era forward?

Li Jing: Yes. Look at the elites who speak out publicly today — they are all like Wang Xiaobo's students.

Q: What about Wang Shuo? Does he have that kind of driving force too?

Li Jing: I don't think the two can be mentioned in the same breath. Wang Shuo has a power to take things apart, aimed at a stale ideology. But he never built a more powerful spiritual value in its place, whereas Wang Xiaobo built a healthier, fresher, freer spiritual world.

Q: Which era do you miss the most, and why?

Li Jing: No era is really worth missing. Ten years ago was better, but it fell well short too. The flaws were much the same. There is no golden age that is gone for good and can never come back. I'm pessimistic about the present, but I still expect something from it. I hope there will be an era when we are more grown up, with more consensus and more sense of responsibility, with better intellect and reason.

Q: Is there anything lately especially worth sharing?

Li Jing: I just watched Inmates (《囚》), by the independent documentary director Ma Li. It was shattering. Ma Li lived in Changchun for a year and a half, spending her days and nights with the patients and doctors of a psychiatric hospital, and shot the film there.

It gives you a group portrait of "mental patients": their state of being, their suffering, their blurred histories, their obscure causes of illness. You'll find the film reveals a startling fact. The so-called "Chinese mental patient" turns out to have more of a spiritual life, and to think more about spiritual questions, than the "normal Chinese people" outside the hospital walls. Many of them have a more sensitive conscience, and it is that sensitivity that leaves them unable to bear the pressure to "betray their conscience" in real life; they can't let it go, and they break down.

The power of this film is that it makes us look back at the "normal" world we ourselves live in, and at the sick rules that discipline every one of us at every turn. There's a cruel kind of "interest" in that.

Q: What have you been thinking about lately?

Li Jing: I've always been interested in the mental state of contemporary Chinese people, and I can always sense a busy, feverish madness in it. I badly want to know where this "madness" comes from. Where will it lead people? This isn't something a book like Foucault's Madness and Civilization can explain.

Q: Do you have any advice for society as it is now, or anything you particularly worry about?

Li Jing: This society is losing the most basic rationality, common sense and moral floor. I wish everyone, at this critical moment in history, would do their best not to go mad and not to turn stupid — above all, don't fish in troubled waters by playing mad or playing the fool. Man acts, Heaven watches.

Q: Is there anything you'd like to say about your own industry?

Li Jing: Theater is in a hard place, wedged between art and the market. I only want to say this to fellow creators: even so, we still have to make theater an art that matters — bold in spirit, warm in heart, high in craft — and make work that can stand the test of the human heart and of time. As for the state companies and the private theater investors, I hope you can offer a little sincerity that isn't about immediate returns, and be brave enough to make work that is difficult and good, even if it carries risk. Because what we face is not only the present but the future.

Q: What do people commonly misunderstand about this industry (theater)?

Li Jing: China's theater audience hasn't reached any real scale, there is no mature theater-going culture, and "theater" seems to have nothing to do with ordinary people's cultural lives. If we're talking about a "misunderstanding," that's a big one. Theater is not unrelated to you; theater is a way of looking back at your own life and giving it expression. Never mind the difference between adults who go to the theater and adults who don't — just look at children. Children who have watched and acted in plays since they were small have a different spirit, self-awareness and way of speaking and behaving from children with no theater experience. They are far more perceptive.

Q: What do you think is the biggest change in you over the past few years?

Li Jing: Moving from literary criticism to writing for the theater changed my whole state of being and my way of thinking. I've become more sensory, more relaxed, I think. The hard shell between the self and the world has been slowly melting.

Q: Have you become more optimistic, or the opposite? Why?

Li Jing: About myself, quite optimistic, because I can carry myself.

About the world, in the short term very pessimistic — humanity seems to be probing the limits of its own darkness. In the long term very optimistic — look across history and humanity has always had the strength to find life by courting death. If the world in the end cannot be saved, it will be because good people weren't good enough, and didn't try hard enough.

Q: What has expanded what you know lately? What important new knowledge or perspective have you gained?

Li Jing: We're in the age of artificial intelligence now. However much new knowledge you take in, you'll never be better read than an intelligent robot built to store every kind of new knowledge, will you? So knowledge isn't the most important thing. What matters is how you face a world where knowledge is exploding and a real person could be replaced by artificial intelligence at any moment. Where does your value stand, where are the meaning and the mission of your life? You have to think that question through. And that is exactly the question an intelligent robot won't think about, even though it takes only 25 seconds to write up a news story. That's what sets you apart from it, isn't it?

The Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl wrote a thin little book called Man's Search for Meaning, about logotherapy. It opened up the border between psychotherapy and the philosophy of life, and even theology. It reminds people that out of their own will toward the future they can confirm the meaning of the self and the goal of a life; the more a person forgets himself and turns toward the outer world and the love of others, the more human he becomes and the more he can realize himself.

This era has too much knowledge and too little human warmth. I would rather steep myself in the plain, forceful "human warmth" that Frankl offers, and face the world from there.

Q: What have you been busy with lately?

Li Jing: Reading, and interviewing some people, while preparing a script about a psychiatrist.

Q: Among people still living, whom do you admire most?

Li Jing: Peter Handke. The work of his that Chinese readers know best is Offending the Audience. His singular personality and his writing are one thing. He is a recluse, unconventional, living with his wife in the French countryside, writing with pencil and paper. He thinks in reverse; he always goes against everyone else. All his work is essentially poetry — poetry that goes wherever it likes.

Q: It seems you often want to go against the grain yourself.

Li Jing: It isn't deliberate. Probably it's instinct. In my own experience, going along with the mainstream is uncomfortable, and I don't want to pretend it's comfortable. Among a crowd, I often feel ill at ease. I'm someone who is forever outside the collective.

Q: Why?

Li Jing: Probably it has to do with an unhappy childhood. Einstein and I share a birthday. I noticed something he once said: that his childhood and adolescence were unbearably painful to live through, and that the further he went past middle age, the sweeter life became. Ah, that says exactly what I feel — the older I get, the happier I am.

Q: What's the most recent misunderstanding of the world you've discovered in yourself?

Li Jing: Zhou Zuoren once said something that, when I read it years ago, I took for a writer's bleak, world-weary flourish, not to be taken seriously. Now that more than half my life is behind me, I know it isn't. Every word of it is true. What he said was: "Good ideas are written in books and have never once been carried out; bad deeds have all been done in this human world, and only a small part of them are written down in books."

Stills from The Qin Comedy and The Great Master, and photographs of Li Jing, provided by the interviewee. Note: Li Jing's portrait was taken by Liang Chen.