Writer A Yi: If You've Worked Out What You Want From Life, Move a Little Faster | Interviews ②

He has no time for WeChat's “100,000+” articles either: “Almost all of it is slop — a 100,000+ read count is just a measure of how much slop it is.”

The writer A Yi has published a volume of selected short stories, Five Million Chinese Characters (《五百万汉字》). It gathers 12 stories, picked by his friend the book critic Xu Zhaozheng, whom A Yi asked to choose from his four earlier collections.

Five Million Chinese Characters has no preface, only an editor's afterword by Xu Zhaozheng.

Xu Zhaozheng considers these the best 12 short stories and novellas A Yi has published. The book set out to show what A Yi had achieved in short fiction over the past decade; what it ends up showing is an A Yi both familiar and strange. In Xu's words, he is “a novelist whose image grows ever more resolute — caught in the rift between small-town and urban experience, between fantastical invention, the reconstruction of experience and the visualization of ideas, between the presence of technique and the fading of voice.”

This is A Yi's first selected volume. Wen Zhen, the book's editor and a friend of his, asked him at the time whether he had anything ready to publish. A Yi thought he might as well put out a selection — call it a 40th-birthday present to himself.

A Yi used not to want a selected volume, because those stories had been published once already and were no longer “original.” But now that the door is open, one thing leads to another. It's like losing his virginity, A Yi says — before long he'll have to bring out another selection with a different publisher.

A Yi hasn't written a new work of fiction in more than a year. In all that time he has written almost nothing at all. Ask him what he's been doing and he says he's been sleeping — and then regretting it, regretting all the time he slept away.

He also calls this year and more of rest “thoroughly satisfying,” because before it began he had finished a novel.

A Yi was born Ai Guozhu. He was once chief literary editor at Tiehulu Books, and in 2013 he left the company. People who know him know that writing “without restraint,” with “no regular routine,” gave him lung disease. By 2013 his body was already showing signs that something was wrong.

He decided to write a novel — something of an all-or-nothing gamble, written with death as his last card. “A novel needs sweep. You pour yourself outward, you push forward. But my temperament is cautious, careful. It's like a factory worker making something who won't allow himself a single mistake — every word, every line, I've weighed more than ten times over. Writing that way is exhausting. It's a bit like rock climbing.”

A Yi says he has always written the wrong way, a way that wears the body down: smoking, staying up all night, skipping meals, no routine, no discipline — discipline in the sense Haruki Murakami means when he writes.

He suspected that if he hadn't written the novel then, he would never have had the capacity again. But finishing it cost his health another round. A Yi puts it this way: his own wishes are very few and very extreme. “Just one novel — the novel I have in my head is enough. Written the way I myself approve of, not just going through the motions.”

A friend once told A Yi that he had the temperament of an outlaw on the run. A Yi later took the remark seriously and agreed with it, and the way he describes himself sounds almost exaggerated: “The reason I'm still alive and in one piece is that the people around me have indulged me, or forgiven me.” And: “My father had that outlaw temperament too. That he lived into his seventies is nothing short of a miracle.”

GQ China once ran a profile of A Yi called “Writer, Patient, His Father's Funeral,” which covers his writing and the experiences behind it in fine detail.

A Yi doesn't mind telling these things, the same way he'll talk on the spot about a novel he means to write even when the idea reaches back into his own life. Things other people might find impossible to face, things they would never tell anyone, come out of him offhandedly. He doesn't care. What really lasts, he thinks, is the published work.

By the end of 2014 the novel was done. A Yi says that if an earthquake hit right now and killed him, he would have no regrets.

Sample chapters of the novel Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning (《早上九点叫醒我》) went out for foreign rights when the book was only half-written, and several overseas deals were signed. But the Chinese edition stayed unsettled for a long time. A Yi says: “After I finished it I got precious about it, held it back out of spite, refused to publish the Chinese edition. I thought I'd only put it out when I was close to dying. I wanted to keep it.”

But his medical bills drained his money, and the standoff couldn't continue. In October 2017 the Chinese edition of Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning will finally appear. Something curious happened with this book: the Italian edition, the first one signed, uses the original text, 180,000 characters in all, while the domestic edition is the version he revised quickly early this year, cut to 150,000. The English translation was finished before the Chinese edition had even come out.

At the end of 2016, in an interview with Youth Daily, A Yi described the contents of Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning in detail. The protagonist is called Hongyang. In the story he gets drunk and tells his concubine to wake him the next morning. The next morning, when she goes to wake him, she finds he is dead. There is a twist: after Hongyang is buried, the coffin is opened again, and people see that the flesh on his fingers has been worn away to bare bone — proof that he had gone on living for a while underground.

In that same interview, A Yi said: “Hongyang is just a small, ordinary man. What I really wanted in writing this novel was to tell my experience of the countryside over again, to finish writing about it once and for all. I wanted to write two things: first, that the countryside I remember is gone; second, that the people of real character who lived in the countryside are gone. So I wanted to write the countryside's last local strongman, a figure as grand as a festival, a celebration. While he was alive his word was law. But once the tree fell and the monkeys scattered, his authority collapsed in an instant, and his own coffin could be pried open on a whim.”

A Yi is fond of the cover of Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning. He describes it: across the top, a burial, a grave being dug — several figures, ghostlike, prying open a coffin. The bottom of the cover is filled entirely by a single face, one that looks a little like Dostoevsky. The color is black shot through with grey, something hellish, and it suits the novel exactly.

He never used to look at his books' covers; this one he cares about. It is the work he has put the most into, and he has been waiting for it to come out.

Q: QDaily

A Yi: author of Grey Stories (《灰故事》), The Birds Saw Me (《鸟看见我了》) and Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning

Q: What have you been thinking about lately?

A Yi: I'm anxious about one thing. I'm about to start writing about a problem. Plato has a work, the Symposium — I don't understand philosophy, but I want to write a novel in that form: several police officers discussing a case, with no emotion in it at all, purely technical.

The people solving the case work entirely from law and forensic deduction, pure technique. The killer, too, is pure technique, with no feeling in it.

That is the secret at the center of the novel. I won't say what it is, but readers may find it. I'm not a pervert; I just like digging into this kind of thing.

These past couple of days I've still been studying the case. I rested for more than a year, and now that I've touched writing again I'm anxious all over again. Look at Stefan Zweig's Chess Story (《象棋的故事》): cut off from the thing he loves, a man can stay fairly calm; the moment he touches it again he goes mad, tormented by it.

Q: Why do you want to write this kind of story? Do you think it's special? Showing off technique? Something else?

A Yi: It isn't showing off. It's simply worth writing — it's a certain state of the human condition, and you can't help caring about it.

Q: In your writing, what's the biggest change of the past few years? And in how you understand the world?

A Yi: In writing, the biggest change of recent years is that I used to write sparely and now I write densely. I pay more attention to the small branches and twigs, the minute things; I'll write a single matter out in great detail. Faulkner and Proust are both dense, minute and agile. Spareness is only a road that doesn't go far.

My understanding of the world has in fact been degrading badly. Part of it has to do with a spiritual laziness in me. The other part has to do with medication. It's been four or five years — from 2013 until now I've been on hormones the whole time, plus an antidepressant. I shouldn't call it an antidepressant; it's an anti-anxiety drug. These drugs have dulled my reactions, and at the same time my memory has dropped badly and my ability to feel things has weakened.

Q: Do you pay attention to social issues?

A Yi: Have you had this experience — you see someone holding forth, or you're the one holding forth. When it's over and everyone has left and you're alone, you feel a little embarrassed, wondering why you talked so much, why you were so garrulous.

Some people are commentary machines, opinion machines. You watch a person discuss one thing after another, and once each thing has passed it's forgotten and nobody discusses it anymore.

With some things, I can't tell whether they pass through you or you pass through them. My sense is that about 20 percent of it is worth discussing, and 80 percent is there to fill up other people's loneliness.

I like watching small, specific commotions, not enormous ones. On an issue the whole society is watching, I look to the friends I trust and see how they're following it, how they think about it rationally. GMOs, for instance — I go and see what the friends I trust say about it. I'm not foolish enough to research the question thoroughly myself.

Q: Are you someone who gets angry easily?

A Yi: I used to be — though it depended on the setting. A person gets angry more easily in a place full of strangers, because the outside world is an environment where nobody follows the rules. Some cars park right in the middle of the road and wipe out the bike lane. It happens at hospitals, on the subway, everywhere. When I run into it I get very angry and want to do something — go to the market, buy an egg and throw it at the car, because the driver has such contempt for the rules. (He takes out paper and draws the scene.)

A friend was right when he said I had the temperament of an outlaw on the run. He told me to watch myself, and thinking it over, he had a point: the reason I'm still alive and in one piece is that the people around me have indulged me, or forgiven me.

Once I saw that, whenever I go out to get something done I tell myself: I'm here to do business, not to make trouble. It works. You have to remember what you came to do, and not let the unfair, rule-breaking things distract you.

A few days ago I came across a line from the Stoics, an ancient Greek school. When you go to the bathhouse, you have to accept that your things may well be stolen, and you mustn't get into a fight over it. Factoring that in ahead of time is what makes you whole; it gives you a mental preparation. If you don't factor it in, you're forever caught off guard.

So the problem is that when I go out, I haven't been factoring it in.

Q: When was the last time you felt afraid?

A Yi: A few years back. I went to a psychiatrist then, and the medication he prescribed worked. He's seen a great many cases, and he told me that among his patients mine was a mild one.

I'm afraid of dying every day. I have a lot of physical illnesses, and I'm afraid I'll suddenly lose control of my limbs and be reduced to depending on someone else's care. My self-respect is very strong, and I'm afraid of becoming useless. If it really came to that, I think I'd want to kill myself.

I often think of a wild boar covered in wounds, arrows all over its body, unable to stand up, convulsing in the mud. It's very easy for me to picture myself like that, and that's when I get very anxious.

Q: Do you ever feel you resemble some figure from mythology?

A Yi: A long time ago I had a blog called Marshal Tianpeng. Back in my Tianya days, I felt I was in the worst place fate could put me. In my early twenties I was full of self-pity with no real cause.

Just like Marshal Tianpeng: kicked out of the heavenly court, he landed among the pigs and became a creature everyone despised. My love life was like that then, and so was my work. Stuck in a county town, looking out like a frog at the bottom of a well, full of self-pity.

Q: Is that about your circumstances, your personality, or something essential in you that resembles this mythological figure?

A Yi: Even now I haven't worked out what kind of person I am. Even now I'm someone who often stares into space, often at a loss for what to do. Outside of writing I'm frequently at a loss for what to do with myself — I have far more empty, bored time than most people.

Q: Do you like this kind of boredom?

A Yi: Not very much. People seem to be lazy; it comes naturally, I suppose.

Q: If you could change it, would you want to change this boredom?

A Yi: I don't know. It's something deep. Spiritually I'm quite degenerate, spiritually bored, and I'm often in a state of boredom. That's my most usual state. (He takes out a photo from a couple of days ago, of himself staring into space on the sofa.)

Q: What was the last thing you did with real passion?

A Yi: Lately it's all been medicine and doctors. There's no passion in that, and what passion I do have disappears fast. I think of something, turn it over, and then probably won't write it. Not like before, when I'd just go and write it out.

For a while recently I've been riding a bike for exercise, going in circles on the road for no particular reason. I rode six or seven kilometers and passed a flower shop, where four or five clean-looking people were trimming flowers.

It struck me that it had been a long time — a year or two at least — since I'd bought my wife flowers, so I walked over and bought one stem. I stuck it on the bike, took it home, put it in water and gave it to my wife. A pink-and-white rose. (Just the one?) Yes — 8 yuan a stem, that's good enough.

Q: Is there anything recently that's especially worth sharing?

A Yi: There's a magazine I've always wanted to share with people, called Today (《今天》), which has been published in Hong Kong for a long time now. Its taste in literature rarely has anything murky or greasy in it; the literary state it presents is fresh and bright. You can go to the website and look (link). It's been going since the late 1970s, an independent journal founded by Bei Dao.

Q: Does that novel of yours, with its hellish cover, conflict with “fresh and bright”?

A Yi: No conflict. A lot of my early work was published there. By fresh and bright I mean pure literature. Take the many self-media accounts: they're murky, they're terrible. The way they love to hang a headline on the word “shockingly,” for instance — it's a prostitute soliciting customers, a very bad way of doing things.

Look at the official account called Borges: its headlines aren't murky. The Paper's aren't murky either. Yours aren't murky either — I've read a bit of your stuff, and the pages don't look like something with too much soy sauce and MSG poured over them.

Not like those outlets valued at hundreds of millions, billions of yuan at the drop of a hat. That's the trashiest, most degenerate thing there is, scraped and aggregated. They treat everyone as pigs and feed them slop. Really, almost all of the “100,000+” pieces are slop — a 100,000+ read count is just a measure of how much slop it is.

With slop, the readers don't much matter; there are paid click farms doing the reading anyway. Some videos claim 40 billion views. Count every rat on earth and you wouldn't get there. Add up every sperm cell inside every Chinese person and you still wouldn't reach 40 billion.

It's absurd. They treat the whole society as idiots, and themselves as idiots too. Maybe that view count is a TV series, added up across episodes — but I still don't think it's possible.

Q: From Hongyi to Ruichang, to Zhengzhou, then to the coast, then to the capital … A lot of people, talking about you, keep emphasizing how you achieved this step by step, as if to say: it wasn't easy, it's remarkable. How do you see this experience of yours? Is there anything different, anything more, you'd like to say about it?

A Yi: The trajectory looks a bit like Julien Sorel's, a bit like the 19th-century Napoleonic dream. In fact it was also somewhat arbitrary — moving from one city to another was partly just tiring of the old and chasing the new. But once I got to Beijing I no longer wanted to move on, because Beijing is big enough. It offers the most of everything — bookstores, for instance.

Q: Do you have any advice for society today, or anything you're especially worried about?

A Yi: Whatever state you're in — Europe or China, ancient times or now — one truth never changes: you have to race the clock and get done the things you want to accomplish, because there is no next life.

A lot of people waver. Say a man really wants to be a saint of literature, but he also wants to travel, or he has to feed his family, or whatever. For my part, I largely agree with The Moon and Sixpence.

Which is: if you've worked out what you want from your one life, get moving a little faster. Don't wait until you're fifty or sixty, watching the big blocks of your time already gone, your life nothing but a dried-up riverbed, no ambition left and no strength left, full of regret. So my view is this: if there's something you want badly to do, you have to start on it right now.

Q: When you started writing, or started that novel, had you already wasted a lot of time?

A Yi: I didn't waste it, because I started with short stories and worked my way gradually up to the novel. You can't do it from the start — that's how I see it. You train on the short, and keep training until you reach the long. My sense of anxiety is fairly strong, so I've actually moved pretty fast.

Look: the moment I didn't want to stay in the county town, I got out fast. I went out to work, worked at a newspaper. The moment I didn't want to be a sports editor anymore, I moved over to the literary side, and that was fast too. Everything got done fast. I'm not going to complain to you, or air some grievance about having a literary dream I still can't realize. No — I'll just tell you I've realized it.

Q: Your answer to this is different from a lot of people's, because the question was about what advice or worries you have for society.

A Yi: My advice is: hurry up and finish what you want to do, then retire. Anything that isn't your own ideal is futile and pointless in the end. I can't put it in absolute terms, but that's basically how it is.

Cover image from StockSnap and a painting by Gauguin