Wang Xiaobo's Letters, *Love You Like Life*, Are Back in Print — Li Yinhe on Wang Xiaobo, Fiction and Much Else

"I asked him what was the worst thing he was capable of. He thought about it and said: killing a cow."

In September 2017, Wang Xiaobo's collected letters, Love You Like Life (《爱你就像爱生命》), was reissued by the New Classics Library.

This latest edition was checked against the original letters and corrects a number of transcription errors. It also carries a new preface: the editors picked ten questions about love for Wang Xiaobo's partner, Li Yinhe, to answer, and her answers became the preface, Ten Questions About Love.

Love You Like Life gathers Wang Xiaobo's letters to Li Yinhe, Liu Xiaoyang, Cho-yun Hsu, Zhao Jieping and others. Most of them are letters to Li Yinhe.

Li Yinhe already had a job then. Wang Xiaobo was still a student in the class of 1978 at Renmin University of China, living in a dormitory. They could see each other only once a week, so they wrote. Wang Xiaobo had come by a notebook of blank staff paper, and the letters were written on it — Wang Xiaobo on the front of each page, Li Yinhe on the back.

One of the questions in Ten Questions About Love asks: "Which moment with Wang Xiaobo made you feel his tenderness and delicacy most?" Li Yinhe answered: "What I felt from Xiaobo wasn't mainly tenderness and delicacy. It was ardor and innocence."

The book is about more than the two of them. Wang Xiaobo's letters also give away a great deal about how he saw the world at the time, and the "ardor and innocence" Li Yinhe describes shows up in his attitude to everything else too.

The screenwriter Li Jing was once an editor at a literary magazine. She commissioned work from Wang Xiaobo while he was alive, and so edited his fiction. Probably because of what his writing had to do with "sex" and "politics," she said, it was extremely hard for him to place anything in a magazine while he lived.

Getting books out was harder still. In his lifetime only The Golden Age (《黄金时代》) appeared on the mainland, from Huaxia Publishing House; The Romantic History of Wang Er (《王二风流史》) came out in Hong Kong and Taiwan; and there was one thin essay collection, The Pleasure of Thinking (《思维的乐趣》), from Beiyue Literature and Art Publishing House. The Trilogy of the Times and the essay collection My Spiritual Homeland (《我的精神家园》) were under contract but not yet published.

As far as Li Jing knew, when Huacheng Publishing House brought out the Trilogy of the Times, the house felt it was taking an enormous market risk. So little of his work had been published that Wang Xiaobo was not yet a well-known writer.

Li Jing said: "There's a line in Red Duster Flees by Night (《红拂夜奔》): 'When Duke Wei died, he turned from a person into an event.' I think it was the same for Wang Xiaobo. While he was alive his work couldn't be published properly; once he died, the man had already become an event, so the work could come out whole. He could never produce anything 'worse' again, so it could be published."

On September 12, at the launch for the new edition of Love You Like Life, the publisher put Li Yinhe on stage with Li Jing and the documentary director Andre. In the group interview with reporters afterward, Li Yinhe answered a lot of questions — some about Wang Xiaobo, some about herself; some about the past, some about now.

A clip from Andre's documentary

Q: Questions from reporters and guests

Li Yinhe: Sociologist, Wang Xiaobo's partner

Li Jing: Screenwriter, writer

Q: Which love poem or piece of sweet talk in Love You Like Life moves you most?

Li Yinhe: What stays with me is a time I was away on a long work trip in the south. He kept asking why I still wasn't back. He wrote, "Hurry home — the moment you're back I'm going to set off a firecracker loud enough to shake all of Beijing." I loved that. It felt like feeling pouring straight out, and also like something a naughty child would say.

Q: Was there anything Wang Xiaobo felt he had to settle, something that nagged at him?

Li Yinhe: If you mean what nagged at him, what he felt was unfinished, look at his last email. He wrote it to his friend Liu Xiaoyang, and the gist was: we used to belong to the silent majority, and now we're starting to speak. We have to make a clean break with everything that came before — if China is going to have a liberal camp, it starts with our generation.

I think that was his hope at the time, that a real liberal camp would take shape in China.

Q: You just said you badly want The Golden Age filmed. Why? What did you feel the first time you read it?

Li Yinhe: Xiaobo used to say, "The Golden Age is my favorite child." It was also the first time he won a big award, the United Daily News novella prize in Taiwan. That was wonderful encouragement for him. He wrote The Golden Age over and over — in the earliest version the male lead wasn't even called Wang Er, he was called Chen Hui. (laughs) He kept rewriting it, for about ten years I think, until it became what it is now. He loved it especially.

Back then we even argued about who should play the parts if it were filmed. He said Shu Qi, obviously. He liked Shu Qi — she was still quite young then — and Shu Qi was exactly the Chen Qingyang in his head. And really, they are very alike.

Oh, I do want it made, but for some reason nobody has ever come to me about it. Maybe there's a cautionary example — that the Film Bureau would never pass it. Actually I think it's just as you (Li Jing) said. He has already become the kind of person who can't make any more trouble. (But a film might make trouble.) Right.

Q: When do you find yourself missing Wang Xiaobo now?

Li Yinhe: Every April 11 I go to sweep his grave at Foshan Cemetery, and every time I run into readers there. I talk with them, and it moves me. Many people leave erguotou and cigarettes at the grave; you can tell the affection is real.

I still read his books now and then, sometimes just opening a story. This year I reread 2015, and I don't know how many times I burst out laughing. I have a problem — I used to have asthma, and it came back recently, so I can't laugh hard or it brings on an attack. Reading that, I laughed hard five or six times anyway.

I mentioned it to Feng Tang afterward, because he has a standard for judging writing: good work makes you laugh, and he said Wang Xiaobo made him laugh twice. I told him he definitely hadn't read 2015 — 2015 made me laugh more than five or six times.

Thinking back on all of it is endlessly funny.

Q: In Love You Like Life, Wang Xiaobo wrote, "Stop pressing me about my bad side." Did you ever find out what it was?

Li Yinhe: Right, early on I did ask him, quite bluntly — I asked what was the worst thing he was capable of. He thought about it and said: killing a cow. He had killed cattle on a farm in Yunnan. A lot of cows cry when they are killed, and if you're a sensitive person that torments you.

I suppose I was feeling out where his limits were. (laughs)

Q: You were silenced on Weibo for three months, and about a month has passed — how does it feel?

Li Yinhe: Two months, I think, already. It feels hopeless. Afterward I posted a piece on Moments called Thoughts on Being Silenced. Most people who get silenced have joined some campaign, aimed at some specific matter. My piece only called for freedom of speech as a principle. I didn't even raise a specific issue.

If it goes on like this permanently — well, that's a terrible state of affairs, worse than the 1980s. In the 1980s there was still a movement to free up thinking. I remember a Peking University graduate student named Hu Ping who wrote On Freedom of Speech; it went around widely among intellectuals at the time, though it was never formally published.

Back then I felt the whole society, even the censors, encouraged freeing up thinking. I remember — this was really the piece that made my name, in 1978 — an article called "Greatly Strengthen Democracy, Greatly Strengthen the Legal System." I wrote it with a colleague; I was working at the State Council Research Office then.

After it ran, every major newspaper reprinted it, including the People's Daily, which ran it with an editor's note. Later, in the "30 Years of Reform and Opening Up" retrospective, I was picked in the social-affairs category, for that article. ("Greatly Expand Democracy and Strengthen the Legal System" (《要大大发扬民主和加强法制》), by Li Yinhe and Lin Chun)

It wasn't that we had done anything remarkable. The whole society was calling for democracy and rule of law, and we amounted to its mouthpiece. The call really came from society, and the entire official ideology was turning toward openness and freer thinking — there were the theory conferences, the whole effort to set things right after the chaos. People coined a phrase then, "cultural totalitarianism," meaning that the ten years of calamity, the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, were cultural totalitarianism.

Q: How is your fiction with the "academic-paper flavor" coming along?

Li Yinhe: I've been writing fiction since I retired, and yes, it has a bit of the academic paper about it. I showed the first one to Feng Tang, and he said it was terrific, a good read. But there were two problems: too little detail, and that academic-paper flavor. When I write fiction I feel it isn't really me writing — something out there exists and I'm its tool. Every morning I open it up and it pours out.

So far I've written six books of novellas and short stories and two novels. Three of the novellas have come out in Hong Kong, as The Black Knight's Kingdom (《黑骑士的王国》). It won't work on the mainland; there is absolutely no way it gets published there. Lu Jinbo was the one who published it, and he told me it wouldn't fly on the mainland — if I didn't believe him, he said, I could go try myself.

Q: Have you been following the conversation between Ma Dong and Xu Zhiyuan? What do you make of it?

Li Yinhe: I've read a few pieces about it. I actually don't think there's anything wrong with doing pure entertainment. Some people aren't suited to it, so they don't do it. Pure entertainment has its uses. And sometimes there's no way around it — pure entertainment may be one of the few things that can still thrive in China.

I don't much agree with his attitude, demanding that everyone be refined, that nobody do pure entertainment. I think that's wrong.

What Ma Dong is after is already not vulgar. Gao Xiaosong passes on some knowledge too. I haven't watched much of it myself. But besides pure entertainment, they do a bit of the work of enlightenment. I don't think we should be so hard to please, asking everyone to be as profound as he is.

Li Jing: Let me jump in. In this whole pile-on against Xu Zhiyuan, I feel rather sorry for him. When a topic goes this one-sided, something is wrong.

This era really is the era of U Can U Bibi (《奇葩说》), of Ma Dong, not of Xu Zhiyuan.

Xu Zhiyuan's delivery is a little clumsy — sometimes you feel he's awkward, or his words can't keep up — but his position as an enlightener has never changed. That's why he keeps bringing up the May Fourth movement, asking: are you satisfied with this era?

His position is dissatisfaction, and the most important thing in an intellectual is carrying that spirit of dissatisfaction. He never goes with the current of this era; he goes against it. He is permanently alert to its flaws. You may think things are fine — U Can U Bibi raises all sorts of worthwhile questions, opens our minds, is a lot of fun. It is a lot of fun.

But Xu Zhiyuan's angle is simply different; he adds another color to the range. U Can U Bibi is smooth, vivid and airtight. Xu Zhiyuan is like a leaking pot — holes everywhere.

And yet he is singular. Thirteen Invitations (《十三邀》) and Dandu (《单读》) are both real quality. You will never get a program like Thirteen Invitations from anyone else, and you will never get a cultural product like Dandu from anyone else either.

He may not be a fully mature intellectual yet. But all that happened was that he failed to say pretty, polished things smoothly on a video show, and a few halting lines ruined him. This era is too superficial.

Q: Some people say love at first sight isn't reliable. What do you think of it?

Li Yinhe: I'll answer with someone else's line: "Think of everyone who has ever loved — which of them wasn't love at first sight?" Everyone who has ever loved fell in love at first sight. I think it's actually pretty reliable. Right?

Real passionate love is often like that — you fall in love all at once. No particular reason, no sex in it, no calculation, no car, no apartment, no material conditions or social standing. You just fall in love.

Xiaobo said something like this once too. The gist was: I saw you and I fell in love and there was nothing I could do about it. That's what love at first sight means.

Q: I think you've changed. For a long time before you wrote that piece about freedom of speech, you mainly talked about sex and BDSM, and you seemed to enjoy giving your own private interests full play. Then suddenly you had a very strong urge to speak in the public sphere, and your influence grew — it feels as if you went from someone who preferred to keep to herself into someone shouldering a moral responsibility for the public. Have you felt that change of role yourself?

Li Yinhe: Honestly it was somewhat accidental. I misjudged the situation. (laughs) I thought it was something one could say; I've always been fairly mild.

After I finished the piece and published it, Daxia asked me, hey, are you sure about this? I said it would be fine, I was stating a general principle, and in such a gentle tone. I never expected the consequences would be that serious.

(And if you had expected it?) I think if I'd expected it, I wouldn't have said it. What is this thing, really? From very early on I cared a great deal about politics, but I always kept away from it. Sometimes I struggled with it, wondering whether we ought to write things that stay far from politics — because with politics you sacrifice yourself for nothing, and change nothing in the end.

I've always... For instance, when I published a few essay collections, everything political was cut. The editors simply deleted it. And I've always put political allusions in my fiction. I have two novels, one entirely about sex and BDSM, the other called Zhuangzi's Dream of the Butterfly (《庄周梦蝶》).

In that one there's a woman who ends up in a country of "Qin-style politics," where one person decides everything and everyone else is a slave — utterly, completely so. Really, caring about politics has always been my... In that book I even wrote about how people reacted after the Spring Festival Gala, about posts being deleted, about Ren Zhiqiang firing off his cannon. It's been my constant preoccupation.

That's an impulse in me too, the impulse to care about politics, about current affairs. But the situation now is too dangerous; there's simply no way to take part. And the moment you do — even a rough, general statement about freedom of speech — it isn't allowed.

As for him, I don't think his fiction paid any attention to real-world politics. Take all those old arguments — realism, socialism, all that mess. It was propaganda, plain and simple. The Yan'an Talks on Literature and Art, that whole business of criticism and counter-criticism: he detested all of it.

The difference between him and Wang Shuo, I think, is that Wang Shuo was mocking that old propaganda, doing the opposite of it — it isn't what Wang Meng later called "evading the sublime"; Wang Shuo wanted to overturn the old system of discourse, to mock it and hit back at it.

Xiaobo wasn't like that. Xiaobo simply ignored it; he had nothing to do with it. What even are you? A clean break with the old discourse: if China is going to have a liberal camp, it starts with our generation. That was his position, I think. Writing fiction, he paid no attention at all to ideological disputes, and he stayed out of real-world politics too. He wasn't as politically passionate as I am. I still have a bit of that in me.

Images courtesy of the New Classics Library, and illustrations from Gathering Honey in the Human World.