Writer Zhu Tianxin and Friends on Their Literary Memories of the 1980s

Excerpts from the conversation follow.

On August 30, the Taiwanese writer Zhu Tianxin's Thirty-Three Years of Dreams was launched in Beijing under the theme "The 1980s: Our Literary Memories."

"The literary era of the 1980s" is a subject mainland China keeps coming back to. For marketing reasons, perhaps, the publisher gave the launch a theme that doesn't quite match the book.

Thirty-Three Years of Dreams is something like Zhu Tianxin's memoir. It records the dozens of trips she made to Kyoto with friends and family between 1979 and 2015.

The Zhu family she was born into is one of Taiwan's best-known literary families, and many of her relatives and friends are writers too. Almost any memory of literature can find a thread leading back to her.

So Zhu Tianxin opened her remarks by saying: "I don't quite know how a book like this gets us to the 1980s." In the end, every guest at the launch except Ah Cheng — Leung Man-tao, Tang Nuo, Li Rui, Jiang Yun and Zhu Tianxin herself — talked about their literary memories of that decade.

Zhu Tianxin

In the 1980s I was just past 30, and for me that was the best of times. The best of times was nothing more than this: I was full of what Hokkien calls "hàn-tánn" — foolhardy nerve, a kind of dumb courage. Because I understood too little of the world, I was fearless instead, reckless and unafraid.

I was just past 30, set against the most turbulent decade Taiwan had ever gone through. I wrote a great deal about Taiwan in the 1980s — about "democratization," about the localization movement, about the New Cinema movement.

In the 1980s Taiwan, with localization roaring along, someone with my background — my parents were mainlanders (waishengren) who followed the Nationalist government to Taiwan in 1949 — we who are called second-generation mainlanders often served as a target, or a scapegoat, during those years.

You probably can't imagine this, but even now, when Taiwanese media interview me, they still ask me one question: if the two sides of the strait went to war, which side would you support? I am still asked about my political loyalty, even though Taiwan already thinks of itself as a thoroughly democratized place.

Writing in any era runs into political correctness. What that correctness consists of may change, but its force is the same, and as a writer you have to work out how to resist it. All through the 1980s, including the boom in what we call nativist literature in Taiwan, you had to face it.

New Cinema too. Back then Taiwan was awash in Hong Kong films — box office, reviews, popularity, all Hong Kong. Taiwan followed the trend, and everything else was a Chiung Yao picture.

New Cinema meant Hou Hsiao-hsien, or Edward Yang, or one or two other directors, filming the land they knew, the society they knew, the people they knew. At the time it was fairly niche, and many people blamed them for dragging down the film market. Which is a strange charge — if their films didn't sell and made no money, how could they have dragged anything down?

Our literature was in the same position. I can't dispose of the 1980s in one breath. I was lucky to be that age during a golden age of Taiwanese literature. A golden age doesn't mean what people describe later — that you win a prize, publish a book, and from then on you're certified a writer, with fame and money to follow. I don't understand it that way. This is really Tang Nuo's phrase: back then literature was still a basic fact of being alive, of survival.

Tang Nuo

Today's framing of the 1980s gives me some trouble, because I've just kept writing and writing, and I never turned around to look at it.

I resist collective descriptions of literature. Writing is something each individual finishes alone. I once said that a golden age of literature doesn't stand for everyone. It isn't that old line about Liu Yong — that wherever there was a well, people sang his lyrics. I need that sort of era less than you might imagine.

Take a place the size of Taiwan: if three or five first-rate pens are writing, the golden age has already arrived. Those three or five pens may not need strong social conditions to hold them up, because in the end the individual transcends the collective and can choose to put himself on the page.

That is why, even in today's fairly miserable literary environment, there is still reason to keep a degree of optimism.

Because someone may, for no reason anyone can name, live that kind of life and produce a novel out of it. It's hard to believe anyone lives like that: alone by choice, simple food, a simple life, not even reading the paper or watching the news, just walking past to feed the cats, glancing at the newspaper seller, and thinking, well, the Third World War hasn't broken out, the world hasn't ended — and going back to write his novel.

So sometimes writing is pushed to a certain extreme. I hope this doesn't sound like an excuse for rulers or the people in charge, but sometimes literature gets written precisely under those conditions. For me, that is a golden age of literature.

As for what Tianxin described about the 1980s, of course I know it's true. Asked to think back a little today, I'd say it was a rather good period for writing, rather good for Taiwan — a lot of pens were at their peak then and wrote extremely well. And I won't shy from naming people close to me: Zhu Tianxin, Chang Ta-chun.

The 1980s are twenty or thirty years behind us now. Looking back, every way of writing that submitted to political correctness ended up hurting itself, because when you write in too comfortable a position you never push your writing to its own dead end. You take the easy road that wins quick applause, and once time has passed, those works, in Kundera's words, "deserve nothing but to be forgotten."

It's hard to say, but perhaps it is exactly because you are politically incorrect, on constant alert and anxious, forced to push your own thinking, that literature can be pushed to its extreme.

Jews are not numerous next to the rest of the world, yet look at how individuals among them perform. It probably has something to do with a people that has always lived uneasily, never sure of tomorrow. That forces you to stay alert, to seize every possibility.

Or take Ireland, such a small country — you know how many remarkable writers Ireland has produced. We know this nation was long trapped in a condition that required its thinking to stay sharp and serious.

So literature is sometimes a wretched business. As someone who believes in literature, I can't talk about this without some sadness. It's like Hegel's line about the best of times turning over in a single night. Maybe literature should be a little worse off so that everyone else can live a little better. I don't know whether that's true.

I can't talk about the 1980s that broadly, because it would take a very long time. This is roughly all I can say. Sorry — I'll stop here. Thank you.

Li Rui

For us, the 1980s weren't only about literature. Every field had an explosive burst of growth. Everyone knows about the Latin American literary boom. Mainland China was having a literary explosion of its own: in the eleven or twelve years from the late 1970s to the late 1980s, a huge crop of writers and works suddenly burst out — a sky of stars, you could say, or a flood rolling through.

In the 1980s the Cultural Revolution had just ended. Right after that catastrophe, the whole society, the whole population, went through a spiritual liberation. So there was an enormous force of release. What that release produced reached very far, and what it achieved was very large.

We used to have a fixed idea of ourselves. We were called the flowers of the motherland — I don't know what you were called, but when we were small we were all flowers of the motherland. Only later did we learn the flower wasn't so precious after all: it could be sent anywhere, moved anywhere. An ideal we had believed in without limit, even worshipped without limit, held certain without limit, fell apart.

In the middle of that disillusionment we wanted to pull ourselves together: how do we go forward, what do you think is better, more correct? Answering that question became the starting point for our literary and artistic work in the 1980s.

Put that way it may sound too political, but politics isn't something you can simply set aside. It is part of history and follows you like a shadow, and sometimes a fairly important part.

In the 1980s the theorists called it "literature of the new era." Literature of the new era is interesting: first it was "scar literature," then "reflection literature." And at that point there was a very important literary phenomenon, acknowledged by the critics and by many others, called "root-seeking literature."

The background to root-seeking literature, I think, is that this was the first time literature of the new era threw off its political shackles, found an independent literary personality, and found a wider world for literature. Only by turning from political constraint into a freer act, a freer pursuit, did we get that literary explosion, that eruption where so many people seemed to break out at the same moment, and a social response that strong.

They say that after The Class Teacher ran in People's Literature, people passed the magazine around on the bus. One short story, once written, set off a response that big. I doubt Trump taking office now would cause that much of a stir.

This particular phenomenon, this particular historical period, decided which way literature went at the time. Of course China has changed a great deal since, but we shouldn't make too much of those changes, because ideology is the sort of thing that always changes. The mighty Qin, the mighty Han, the flourishing Tang, the mighty Han — all of it is smoke before the eyes now, yet the line "a lone plume of smoke stands straight above the vast desert, the long river's setting sun is round" stayed with us forever. That is the charm of literature.

Be neither a tool of politics nor a tool of the renminbi. Only then can a literary writer establish a position of his own.

The 1980s established exactly that position, and that is why the decade came to shape contemporary Chinese history so deeply.

Jiang Yun

I can't say what the 1980s as a whole were like; I wouldn't dare pass that kind of judgment. I have to speak about my own 1980s. I represent no one but myself.

From my own life — I was born in the mid-1950s — the 1980s was the only decade in which I felt no fear. Before it and after it, I never had that experience of being unafraid.

That matters enormously to me.

For me it was an era of enlightenment. All of us who came out of it felt as though we had suddenly pushed a door open and stepped onto an enormous open plain.

I was on campus then. I was a student in the Class of '77, the first class to sit the college entrance exam after it was restored following the Cultural Revolution. Before that, the only formal education I'd had ended in the fifth grade of primary school. My formal education stopped at fifth grade.

Ten years later I went and sat the exam anyway. I hadn't really studied anything — my maths score was basically zero — but luckily I'd read some books, so I got in, even if the school I got into was about the worst university going, called Taiyuan Teachers College, now Taiyuan Normal University. To me it was nothing less than a rebirth, the pure joy of starting life again.

Run-down as that university was, I'll always miss its atmosphere. Literature was something I truly worshipped, close to a religion — not the way people treat it now, so utilitarian or whatever. Back then there really was a kind of poetry spilling through the era.

Our campus had many literary societies. We would ride our bicycles more than 100 li, about 50 kilometres, in a single day to visit members of a literary society at another, even smaller school.

I doubt people coming out of universities today can understand this feeling of mine, because that place is where I was born again, and I can't forget where I came from. Wherever I go I say I'm a student of Taiyuan Teachers College, and I think it's an honor. It gave me so much. That era gave me so much.

Leung Man-tao

Everyone else up here is my elder. In the 1980s I was a reader. I've only ever been a reader. I caught the last bus at the end of the decade, when I started writing criticism.

What strikes me as especially interesting is that when the mainland and Taiwan both talk about the 1980s, a certain vocabulary, a certain set of ideas, runs through both sides — not identical, but continuous.

Nativist literature had actually begun earlier, but in the 1980s it took on new turns and new effects. On the mainland the 1980s had root-seeking literature. Both produced an imagery of land, of the native homeland, and in the literary worlds on both sides this was an important image and theme.

Which makes me think of Hong Kong. Hong Kong never had any native soil to speak of, and no nativist literature to write. You might write leftist literature close to Taiwan's nativist literature, but there really was no native soil.

So in the 1980s Hong Kong had a few small arguments about this, but they were a minor affair — even Hong Kong friends may not remember them.

What looks interesting to me now is this. Chen Yingzhen went to Hong Kong hoping to stand at the Lo Wu border, between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and gaze north at the mainland. He couldn't return to the mainland then, and the press covered him because he was an important writer who had only recently come out of prison, standing on the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border looking across.

The Shenzhen of that time is not the Shenzhen of today. In everyone's mind today Shenzhen is a flat expanse, while right next to Hong Kong there are green hills, one after another. The answer is simple: Shenzhen was blasted flat, the whole city blasted into existence. It should have looked like the New Territories. Back then, looking north, Shenzhen still had plenty of hills.

Chen Yingzhen had his back to the crowd, and the moment he turned around, he was weeping. The literary young of Hong Kong who saw this were moved, moved by the feeling of gazing north at the motherland. Once they had finished being moved, many of them went on to ask: why can't anyone in Hong Kong write good literature? Hong Kong people pay no attention to the question of native soil. Chen Yingzhen criticized Hong Kong too, finding it too thin, a merely floating city.

Which brings us back to one of the most classic oppositions in modern literature: city against countryside. As though only a place with countryside gives your whole social space its living creatures, and a place without countryside is only prosperous, hollow, running with human appetite, a consumer sign made of neon.

I remember this argument, because many writers in Hong Kong offered their own answers to the question, including some very famous ones, like Xi Xi and Leung Ping-kwan. Their answers weren't the same, but they pointed the same way. What was that direction? That Hong Kong never needed native soil in the first place; this city is our native home.

That was the first time Hong Kong literature produced a collective self-awareness on any scale: we don't need a native home, this city is our native home; we don't need soil, we don't need fields, we don't need to envy the fields in the distance. Poetry isn't always far away, out in the fields. Poetry is right here in the city.

Look back again and modern literature is one book after another, and modernism is one city's story after another — the story of Paris, of Dublin, of Prague, not of the Czech countryside, not of the French countryside. Hong Kong has to see this face clearly: you don't need to go looking for a native home. Generations born and raised right here, the language spoken here, the urban scene of this place — that is the backdrop your literature unfolds against and the subject your literature writes about, and nothing else. If people think you're shallow, let it be shallow. That is my strongest impression.

Images courtesy of the publisher.