Writer Chu T'ien-hsin: I'd Rather Stay Outside the Mainstream — Never Absorbed, Never Co-opted | Interviews④

"I've seen a lot of weak people. Everyone assumes the weak are at least harmless. But because there is so much a weak person cannot do, he attacks pre-emptively, he lies, all sorts of things… he can be very dark."

At 17, the Taiwanese writer Chu T'ien-hsin wrote 《击壤歌》 (Ballad of Striking the Earth). She said the book contained "not a single fabricated word": it was her autobiography of her days at Taipei First Girls' High School. In its first year it was reprinted more than a dozen times in Taiwan. Within five years it had sold 300,000 copies there. Famous young, and with royalties behind her, Chu T'ien-hsin was able to write full-time from the day she left university.

Ballad of Striking the Earth was championed by Hu Lancheng, who was looked after by the Chu family for several years in Taiwan and was both Chu T'ien-hsin's teacher and an elder to her. A few years after the book came out, Hu Lancheng challenged her with a question, likening the young Chu T'ien-hsin and her book to the first 80 chapters of Dream of the Red Chamber.

Hu Lancheng said: "Before, everyone was young, everyone existed together with heaven and together with the gods, so you and those girls and boys were as one." "Without knowing it, what you wrote was the manifestation of the divine, the language of the gods. But now, what language are you using, what phenomena are you writing about?"

"Take today's Japanese writers. They write historical novels, autobiographical novels, novels about the scenery in front of them, reportage novels about the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and on this very point they have all failed. Even the last forty chapters of Dream of the Red Chamber were troubled by it; if not a failure, then at least a disappointment. So how, from here on, will Chu T'ien-hsin get past this barrier?"

Hu Lancheng said that in 1981. Thirty-three years after the question, Chu T'ien-hsin wrote 《三十三年梦》 (Thirty-Three Years of Dreams), a record of the dozens of trips she took to Kyoto with family and friends between 1979 and 2015.

One reason was that for ten years she had wanted to write a novel about "the fifty years of Taiwan I have lived through," but the memories were too tangled and the writing would not come, so she thought of using Thirty-Three Years of Dreams — using Kyoto, the place she had returned to for so many years, to sort her memories out. The other reason was that, without quite meaning to, she wanted to answer Hu Lancheng.

In the questions and answers appended to Thirty-Three Years of Dreams, Chu T'ien-hsin wrote: "Now, with this book, I am answering my own 'last forty chapters.' I take the shortcut of Perseus's shield and steal a look at Medusa, using Kyoto as a stage on which to refract these thirty-three years of mine. Writing that city, that time (and the time that no longer exists), writing my friends (and the friends I no longer see)……"

As with many Taiwanese writers, Ballad of Striking the Earth was not published on the mainland until 2010. This August, Thirty-Three Years of Dreams came out on the mainland, two years after its Taiwan edition. Two books written nearly forty years apart reached mainland readers seven years apart.

That has had another effect. There is an age gap between Chu T'ien-hsin's readers in Taiwan and her readers on the mainland: the mainland ones are younger. And because the publication dates were scrambled, mainland readers may not feel the forty-year distance between Ballad of Striking the Earth and Thirty-Three Years of Dreams as directly.

Chu T'ien-hsin often uses a mirror to describe what a writer should demand of herself. In her twenties and thirties, she thought a writer was a mirror polished bright: whatever the facts were, that was what should be reflected. Later she came to think this was impossible, because whatever a writer sets down carries her own understanding of it.

So admit it, she says. She changed her description to a funhouse mirror. The writer reflects things through her own perception; and she has to feed and sustain the quality of that funhouse mirror, so that things come out with a quality to them.

This is not a demand that fits every writer. Chu T'ien-hsin will raise the writer's responsibility to society before anyone asks her about it. A writer, she believes, must not echo political correctness — which is why she has spent most of her career doing the politically incorrect thing.

In 1977, after Hu Lancheng's books were banned in Taiwan, Chu T'ien-hsin, her sister Chu T'ien-wen and other friends started the journal 《三三集刊》 (San San Collectanea), which published work Hu Lancheng wrote under the pen name "Li Qing." Chu T'ien-hsin then held to the belief that "China's future will be saved if it has just three thousand true scholars," and saw San San Collectanea as a way of finding and nurturing them.

In the 1980s and after, while Taiwan was stressing localization, Chu T'ien-hsin spoke up for the island's incoming communities, pressing for the rights of vulnerable groups such as Southeast Asian and mainland Chinese laborers.

In 2003, she and Hou Hsiao-hsien and others founded the Alliance for Ethnic Equality. (In Thirty-Three Years of Dreams, Chu T'ien-hsin avoids nothing and says plainly that Lin Hwai-min and Bo Yang had agreed to join, then asked to withdraw their signatures once it appeared in the press.)

In 2004, in the preface she wrote for the writer Lan Bozhou's book 《战风车》 (Tilting at Windmills), she recorded the alliance's manifesto: all residents of the islands within our borders shall enjoy equal treatment and freedom from fear, and shall have the right to decide their own way of remembering, their own way of living, their own way of thinking, and their own way of pursuing happiness.

Ask her these days what keeps her busy and she says: writing, and animal welfare. Strays, in her eyes, are also among the most marginal and most vulnerable. Taiwan is already far ahead of many places on animal welfare, but she carries something like the vow "I will not become a Buddha until hell is empty," so she gives a great deal of time to it.

Afraid that packs of dogs would attack the street cats and often bite them to death, Chu T'ien-hsin's husband Tang Nuo spent half a year keeping watch outside their front door between 1 and 3 a.m., under the porch light, with a copy of the Zuo Zhuan, a baseball bat and a cup of coffee at his feet, to protect them.

Chu T'ien-hsin borrows Edward Said's words from Representations of the Intellectual: "The intellectual's duty is to stay alert at all times, never to let half-truths or received ideas carry you along," "to remain outside the mainstream rather than be absorbed and co-opted," "the intellectual is always a traveler, a passer-through, never a parasite, a conqueror or a plunderer."

For Chu T'ien-hsin, faced with a king who is wearing no clothes, the novelist is the one who should say, "Shame on the king, he's wearing nothing at all." So when she is asked what she values most in a friend, she says she likes people who are very honest, and people who are brave.

The writer A Cheng is a friend of the Chu family. On the writing of Chu T'ien-hsin and her husband Tang Nuo, A Cheng said: "Chu T'ien-hsin and Caijun (Tang Nuo's real name is Xie Caijun) are both writers I deeply respect. What I respect first is their character, and second the literary character that this character supports and shapes." "People don't talk much about character now, or about literary character. What are these two things, to me? Not going around. When you hit a problem you don't go around it." "However long or short the piece, when you run into a problem, what do you do? You go straight through it. In their writing you can hear that creaking sound of going straight through."

There is something interesting about Chu T'ien-hsin. Across all her interviews, and in her books too, the same views keep coming back. Her thoughts and worries about literature, her thoughts and worries about society — she restates them again and again, occasion after occasion.

Look closely and you find that these views and these experiences answer one another, and fit together without a seam.

If you notice the protective charm at her neck, a gift from a journalist friend, you can find elsewhere the story of how she met that friend. When she mentions her asthma, you can trace in her memoirs the year she got it and what caused it. When she says that at a book fair a few months ago she envied a man walking against the crowd, you can find her saying in an interview two or three years earlier that a novelist should walk against the crowd.

At the mainland launch for Thirty-Three Years of Dreams, Leung Man-tao said he would say something "bold and not very polite": the Chu family is sometimes thought of as a family out of step with the times.

"What does that mean? It means: in this day and age, what do you actually think literature is? What is creation? What is your relationship to it? I have rarely seen a family like theirs — like Tang Nuo, like Tien-hsin — treat their own writing so seriously, so earnestly, so strictly."

Q: QDaily

Chu T'ien-hsin: author of Ballad of Striking the Earth, In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound and Thirty-Three Years of Dreams

Q: What made you think of writing a book like Thirty-Three Years of Dreams?

Chu T'ien-hsin: The big reason is that I spent ten years on a novel, a novel about the fifty years of Taiwan I was present for. From my childhood, to watching people and events, to having opinions, to having to speak.

I set to it twice, and both attempts were published. I don't know what readers made of them, but to me they were a total failure. I made the mistake only a beginner makes: someone with a bellyful of things to say brings a character on stage and stuffs everything into that character's mouth, never mind who he is or what he has been through, working the people on the page like puppets.

So I felt I had to pack away my memories and my opinions first. Like tidying a room, like packing a suitcase, so that afterwards I could travel light.

I found a keyword: Kyoto, because I had been there more than thirty times. It is like a stage — each visit at a different age, with different people along. The things that happened offstage, back in Taiwan, I wrote those down too. That's roughly the motivation.

There is a smaller reason as well. In 2013, when I began the book, I went to visit a shoot. My child, Xie Haimeng, was in Japan filming with Director Hou at the time. By then the two of us hadn't spoken for three years.

That trip was full of memories of the two of us… from when he was tiny and I pushed the stroller, to when I held his hand, to when he was as tall as me. Could those memories call back the good part of our past? But he still ignored me and kept up the cold war. Which made me feel it all the more: if you don't want this memory, fine — I want it, at least.

I came back from that trip and started the book. Later, not because of the book, about two or three months on, he was hit by a car. Luckily it wasn't serious. I went to the emergency room, and we simply started talking again.

Q: What are you busy with lately, and what has changed?

Chu T'ien-hsin: Still hoping to write a book. Before you write, of course, there are a lot of days spent staring into space. It isn't that I reach the café today, sit down and can start writing at once. I'm not a machine. You may have to sit there three or four months before you can begin. To other people that may look leisurely — sitting at a café table, a book in hand, even. But to me it's very busy indeed. It's getting into a working state.

I also do stray-animal welfare in Taiwan, and that eats a lot of my time. Those aren't numbers, they're lives, one at a time, and none of them will wait.

As for what has changed: it takes up a lot of my time, and it leaves me grieving and glad at once, the stray-animal work especially. You watch many lives end, and some of them, because you got involved, change course — they're rescued, they find good homes.

It's a bit like a roller coaster, with big rises and falls. Not like writing, which is purely a personal matter, where the difficulties you face challenge only yourself and involve no one else.

Q: Is there anything lately worth sharing?

Chu T'ien-hsin: Animal welfare, still. Taiwan is already ahead of many countries in this area. But it's like what the Bodhisattva Ksitigarbha said: "I will not become a Buddha until hell is empty." When you feel there is one suffering life left on the street, you feel your work isn't finished.

Q: In a 2013 interview you said literature is no longer a basic fact of life. At the 2017 Hong Kong Book Fair you spoke on the same theme. Talking with you there, Leung Man-tao asked whether that isn't simply the normal state of things. Has your view changed?

Chu T'ien-hsin: No, it hasn't. Take Taiwan. Writers used to play the revolutionary, the legislator, the spiritual guide, even the class entertainment monitor in charge of fun — all sorts of roles. Now people from other professions have taken those functions away. So the role now is purely a literary one.

Maybe that's no bad thing. The people who stay in this line are purer about it, less divided in their attention. For literature that isn't bad.

Q: Who do you think does most to push this era forward?

Chu T'ien-hsin: Every single person, really. It depends where you put the meaning of progress — in national strength, or in the strength of society, of citizens, or in certain progressive values. So I find it hard to sum up "progress" in a phrase; it depends where it lands.

In politics, it should rest with each individual. In Taiwan, democratization was not driven by one or two people, or by a party, or by a group of revolutionaries, but by every person in every corner of society over many years, each holding to their own profession and not letting politics override it. That alone, I think, is very good for democracy. It's what keeps it sound.

On civil rights and progressive values, you do need people with a bit of foolish passion, people with a warm heart, willing to make a different sound and brave enough to say it out loud.

Never mind whether other people look down on them for it, or think, this is a fine enough way to live, why bring up so many things that are hard to do, things that often cut against human nature, since a person is supposed to calculate for himself — why bother thinking about someone else's basic survival.

Q: Why does it take both a warm heart and a bit of foolish passion?

Chu T'ien-hsin: That's what makes a person willing to risk everyone's anger. Most good writers, I think, have that character and stand in that position. Everyone pursues the same goal, the same method, the same ideal: by a certain age you should have a good job, a good family, a car, a house, and be able to travel abroad a few times.

But a few people put a question mark over it: how could this be what happiness in life means?

So being willing to risk going against the grain to say something different, to want something different — that takes a fairly warm-hearted person with a bit of foolishness in him, someone who doesn't calculate too carefully. Because once you've worked out the gains and losses, you probably wouldn't do it.

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

Chu T'ien-hsin: Broadly, at a macro level, I worry about where the internet age is going. Our learning used to have a vertical axis — history, tradition — and a horizontal one, our peers. Internet society, I think, has amplified the back-and-forth among peers and weakened vertical learning a great deal.

Human beings, after all, aren't animals with only the present moment. What makes us human is the chance, through writing or otherwise, to know what happened a hundred or a thousand years before us; that's how you avoid being trapped by your own body. A life lasts 60, 70, 80 years, but the moment you're willing to learn from tradition you can be a 1,060-year-old person.

The internet has strengthened the influence among peers — a very powerful form of constraint — more than it has strengthened vertical learning.

I see a lot of young people spending hours on Facebook looking at what their friends ate over the weekend. But they won't spend the same hours looking at what, a hundred years ago on the other side of the planet, the family in García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude had for lunch — rice, or fried bananas.

Q: What have you been thinking about lately?

Chu T'ien-hsin: The state of the wider environment, still. This somewhat self-destructive turn in Taiwan, where, in the name of de-Sinicization, the related reading and education are being cut off. It's the most important thing happening in the place you live, and it touches your own learning too, because we were educated that way and we benefited from it.

But now, because of political forces, anything to do with China is to be erased. That's what I've been thinking about.

Q: Anything you want to say about the circles you move in?

Chu T'ien-hsin: It's all in Thirty-Three Years of Dreams. I still think other people's lives may not demand honesty to such a degree, but honesty matters enormously to someone who creates.

So when I was writing Thirty-Three Years of Dreams I was aware of that, more or less. I see a lot of people who are one thing in public and another in private: behind your back they'll criticize you to the bone, to your face it's all how-are-you. I can never get past this. At the very least I can be different. I don't have to be like them.

That's probably why the book was so unwelcome in Taiwan. People feel I broke some unwritten rules, and that makes life hard.

Right — the book has been out in Taiwan for two years, and it spent two years under review on the mainland.

Q: What do people commonly misunderstand about the writing profession?

Chu T'ien-hsin: The attitude to the work that I like — the writers I like all keep their backs to the reader and concentrate on their own job. They don't keep turning round to ask, "Do you like what I'm writing?"

I'm the same when I write. I shut the reader, the publisher, the market, the critics and the literary prizes outside the door, and concentrate on doing this thing myself. But readers usually feel: how arrogant of you, you don't even ask what we like, don't ask how we feel, don't ask whether we can follow it.

There's another kind of trade in words as well — popular literature, always asking what you like, always thinking about which subjects are in fashion.

Ordinary readers find the two hard to tell apart. Pure literature is precisely about avoiding this, avoiding knowing what readers like, so that your own writing stays pure. But the usual result is that readers ignore you.

Which is what you asked for, I think. Your life is so short — how many books can you write? And you're still looking over your shoulder… At that point, I think, you should change professions.

Readers often think a writer can turn it on and off at will, that a writer is like the service trade: you order off the menu and out it comes.

Q: What is the function of literature?

Chu T'ien-hsin: I don't want to answer that head-on, honestly — it's a matter of pride. I'm in this line of work, and here I am having to explain the benefits and importance of literature.

Usually I come at it from the other side: without literature we'd be a bit more stupid, a bit more conservative, believing the world in front of us is the only world there is.

With literature you know the world is enormous. The world in front of you may be an immovable, obstinate fact, but there are other periods, other places, where people lived otherwise and thought otherwise. It gives a person, here and now and in this body, something else to want.

You see — I said I wouldn't answer head-on, and I've gone and done it anyway.

Q: And what is the writer's responsibility?

Chu T'ien-hsin: In an age when literature is doing badly, a writer who hasn't jumped ship, hasn't switched trades — well, since you're already in this line, then settle down and write properly whatever it is you want to write.

I'm also not used to calling it a social responsibility. I'd rather say: that a writer sees with her own eyes, out of tune with the people of the day, and can say what she has seen — that alone is already a good deed.

It isn't that a writer must care about every issue, everything in society; if that's the aim, becoming a rights activist would be quicker. It's enough, I think, for a writer to write out fully and properly what she set out to write.

I feel this society, this era, asks a great deal of writers and understands them very little. I don't mean that because you ask so much of a writer you owe him support in return.

No — I mean don't load the other big frameworks, the big responsibilities, onto writers. Just being able to make a dissenting sound is hard enough, I think.

Q: Much of what you've said you have said in earlier interviews, and on many things your views have stayed the same for years. I keep wondering why. You've thought about a question the same way for years, and that question seems to have stayed especially important to you the whole time.

Chu T'ien-hsin: Yes. If you hadn't said it, I doubt I'd have noticed. Because it's already part of the natural make-up of your character.

Certain values, beliefs and traits — I feel I've very deliberately kept hold of them and gone on honing them, because I think they matter enormously to my writing.

It's almost like being someone under a spiritual discipline; some of it has become part of what I'm made of inside. Even if it's impossible to live up to a hundred per cent, I do as much of it as I can.

Q: You've said the especially precious thing your family gave you was freedom. It sounds as though this freedom wasn't simply "your parents not interfering with you." Is there a more complicated meaning to it?

Chu T'ien-hsin: Writers are always talking about freedom to write, freedom of thought. What I care about more is the freedom not to write. I take that freedom very seriously: being honest with yourself about your own difficulty.

Freedom doesn't run one way only. We mostly describe freedom on its positive side, and we're not watchful enough about the other side.

My parents left every book open to us, which I think is rare. Other parents pick books for their children; for us, anything could be read.

So Tien-wen and I grew up in the same house — we even live together now — yet what we write is so different, and that has to do with what we each read.

Put simply: Chu T'ien-wen had finished Dream of the Red Chamber in her teens. After thirty-odd years I still can't get through it. I read Journey to the West over and over, and I read Eileen Chang and Pai Hsien-yung, the writers I love. Those are our respective genetic maps. What you read at what age makes an enormous difference to what your life is made of.

The freedom our parents gave us was like this: when I married Tang Nuo, he had no job. I once heard a friend of my mother's ask her, "Tien-hsin's getting married — what's the man like?"

I heard my mother answer cheerfully: "Him? Give him a chessboard and a book and he could live up a tree and never come down." Most mothers, I think, would have been worried sick: how exactly is this man going to keep my daughter?

They were broad-minded, very open-minded, and set no limits at all. The idea that at a certain point in life you should do this or that, should play the part society expects of you — they wouldn't so much as hint at it, let alone push. Yes, the freedom they gave us ran through everything.

Q: What quality do you value most in a friend?

Chu T'ien-hsin: I like people who are very honest, and people who are very brave. In writing above all, since most of my friends are connected to literature.

Can other people not see what a writer sees? Plenty of them can. But they feel that seeing it is dangerous, or does nothing for your life, or that seeing it will disturb your mind. Don't look once, don't look twice, and the thing seems to stop existing.

But a writer is required to stare at it without blinking, and to have the courage to set it down.

Plenty of writers see it too, and then as they take up the pen they wonder: is this all right? Will people get it? Will people accept it? Give it time — I'll put it in the next book, or write it ten years from now. Give way once, give way twice, and it's gone.

So over these years, honesty and bravery are what I've cared about most in a friend.

Because I've seen a lot of weak people. Everyone assumes the weak are at least harmless. But because there is so much a weak person cannot do, he attacks pre-emptively, he lies, all sorts of things… he can be very dark.

Q: What does perfect happiness look like to you?

Chu T'ien-hsin: It would have to be something very real, not the sensory kind that comes from eating, drinking and having fun.

Before coming here to Beijing, I went to a cat's funeral. I first met that cat in 2007 — a wonderful cat. Then I stopped seeing it. In early 2017 a neighborhood was running a stray-cat management program, and I looked at a photo of one of the cats and — my god, it was that cat.

I went to the neighborhood and talked to them about the animal-protection law, but they still treated it cruelly. They said, if you want it, take it home and keep it yourself.

In the end a family was found to take it in. The cat had many illnesses, and the family spent 200,000 to 300,000 Taiwan dollars treating it. The earliest photo has it on their windowsill, then beside the computer desk, then on the desk — you can see this street cat change, step by step.

But ten days ago it went anyway. They buried it under the cherry tree by the front door. The sun was so good that day. I went up the mountain too, and saw that they had already cremated it and were laying it down.

People from three families came, men and women, old and young, all of them, laughing happily, glad that "Big Brother" was free at last. I cried and cried.

Looking at the faces of those three families, I felt something… so real. In the end happiness isn't sensory, it comes through a… it has to pass through the heart, I suppose. It's hard to say.

Q: What is the most recent thing that frightened you?

Chu T'ien-hsin: My fears are all very shallow, honestly; talking about them too much would be embarrassing.

At the Hong Kong Book Fair, the journalist Jiang Yan gave me this the first time we met — blessed by an adept at Yonghe Temple, it can drive off demons. She knew that when I stay in hotels away from home I'm afraid of this and that, and often can't sleep for days and nights on end. After I put it on I really did have a peaceful week.

I'm just very afraid of ghosts and spirits, very afraid of unknowable forces. It's embarrassing to say, like a three-year-old. With things you can understand, you only like them or dislike them. But that vague, unknowable sort of thing — because there's no resolving it, it frightens you.

Q: Who is the most recent person you saw and envied?

Chu T'ien-hsin: The Hong Kong Book Fair again. A million people came through the venue in seven days, a dragon of people all the way from the subway. We had events there, and sometimes when we slipped off to eat I'd see someone walking against the crowd, hands in his pockets, and I could almost swear he was whistling.

That's what a writer is like in the world he lives in: his mind elsewhere. The things everyone else is chasing so keenly he finds dull, or simply doesn't agree with, and his thoughts wander off. I find that image tremendously appealing.

Q: Which trip is your favorite?

Chu T'ien-hsin: So long as it's me, Tang Nuo and Haimeng going to Kyoto, I love pretty much every trip. We walk at the same pace, know the city equally well, like the same food, know the same things; the three of us go every time, and some days we walk ten-odd hours straight.

Sometimes we bring a friend, who walks a stretch and says, Tien-hsin, I can't do it. I'll wait for you at the café. Come and get me on your way back. And I say, we're not coming back this way, we're walking a big loop. The three of us are an ironman team.

I love traveling like that. At night, back at the inn — we always stay at small inns — Tang Nuo lies there reading, Haimeng is off writing his own things, the television is on, and I sit there peeling fruit for them to eat.

Images courtesy of the publisher