Writer Liao Yimei: "I Don't Want to Repeat Myself, I Don't Want to Stay Inside My Own Framework" | Interviews ⑦

She says the truth about people and the world is the core motivation behind her writing. But she also says that the only way anyone can get along with the world is to accept that it is a flawed one.

In early September 2017, Liao Yimei's Pessimism Trilogy was reissued. Along with the scripts for Rhinoceros in Love, Amber and Soft, the new edition adds a great deal of interview material, working notes and photographs. By volume, the scripts take up half the book and the new behind-the-scenes material the other half.

At the launch event, she said: "For the friends who came today, I just want us to sit down and talk. We shouldn't let too many focal points scatter our attention across all kinds of hot topics." Liao Yimei said: "The book is the same. If you only want a few quotable lines, that's fine, thank you all. But if you have the patience, if you want to talk and understand things in detail, then I can tell you the stories — where these three books came from."

Liao Yimei hasn't appeared at a public event in a long time. Search for news about her and the most recent hits are from late 2014, when she gave a few interviews during the promotional run for Gone with the Bullets, the film she co-wrote. Around that time, the Pessimism Trilogy was staged together for the first time at the Poly Theatre, and she took part in some of the promotion for the plays as well.

It has been nearly ten years since the Pessimism Trilogy was finished. Her novel Flowers of Pessimism came out in 2008, also nearly a decade ago. Her most recent book before this one was the 2011 illustrated collection Living as Clumsily as I Do.

She hasn't published a new book in years, rarely appears in public, rarely goes out. Wang Shuo, the other screenwriter on Gone with the Bullets, is the same. Two weeks before the launch, Liao Yimei happened to see Wang Shuo. The two of them felt exactly the same way. Wang Shuo said: "We haven't gone out, and we haven't lost a thing." Liao Yimei said: "Right. Exactly right."

Liao Yimei hates empty talk. Three years ago, introducing these three plays, she said: "I'm someone who really can't stand empty talk, so I keep silent as much as I can. But each of these three plays is a pain I felt in my own flesh. If it hadn't hurt so much that I had to speak, I certainly wouldn't have cried out loud enough for everyone to hear."

By that account, those cries are now nearly ten years old. With the new edition out, everyone keeps asking Liao Yimei why she writes so little. Meng Jinghui once told her: "If I were you, with someone always waiting to stage whatever I wrote, at any cost, ready to put it on at any time, I'd write like mad and open a big production every year!"

At a Douban book event, Liao Yimei answered the question this way: "I don't want to repeat myself. I don't want to stay inside my own framework. When you're young you're confused about all of this, and then you gradually build a powerful system of your own. Whatever it can't hold, you cut without hesitation — you filter it out in the middle of a conversation — and that's how a framework takes shape."

"Some of these frameworks are big, some are small, but even a big one is a limit. I want freedom, I don't want to repeat myself. That's what I want to do now. But what will get me there isn't easy to find, so I'm in no hurry to write."

The new edition of Amber says: "What she wants to explore is not the concrete details of real life, but a situation anyone, in any era, might find themselves in." She said: "The truth about people and the world is her core motivation; it drives everything she writes and everything she does." She needs "something that goes all the way down to a very deep place," which may also be why these books leave such a strong impression.

Talking with Liao Yimei is a spare process, but not a brisk one — her answers leave you no choice but to keep following up. By the end, though, you can more or less see what she is doing: trying to break open some state of affairs that everyone else takes for granted.

Many of Liao Yimei's friends have shaped her — Liu Suola, Wang Shuo, Jiang Wen and others, among them "geniuses." For a while she was keen to be around genius. She was interested only in people who were perfect. She wanted to see the limits of what a person could be, what they could accomplish. She wanted to feel what attitude they took toward the world, what methods they used to deal with it, what they found in the end, and whether it satisfied them.

All of this pulled at her hard. When Meng Jinghui says, "If someone were always waiting to stage whatever I wrote, sparing no expense, ready to perform it any time, I'd write like mad," Liao Yimei doesn't see it that way: "I'm not like that, I don't much need those things. I want to go somewhere deeper, I don't need to write a play every day. This is a matter of each person's own rhythm. People are just that different from one another. Through these outstanding people I learned that I'm not a genius, that I don't need to climb to the top of the tower. Through them I learned to know when to stop."

With the Pessimism Trilogy back in print, Liao Yimei has one wish: "I'm afraid that the plays I write and the novels I write will mislead people — that instead of opening more windows for everyone, they close more of them. That's what worries me. I don't want to turn a bowl into a cup. I want people to see what a conflicted person I am, that I do everything the most troublesome way. I just want everyone to see that even someone as conflicted as I am can make peace with life. Take a rubber band: you twist it and twist it, and at the end you let go and it springs open all at once. What everyone is waiting for is that moment, not the whole process of twisting."

In the Pessimism Trilogy, Soft is the last of the three plays. The new edition records Liao Yimei's state of mind as she finished Soft: "She returned to her own world to continue her exploration." Kindred spirits can offer comfort, but not answers. "Even people cleverer than her, more sensitive, who had explored for longer, turned out to be in no different a state than she was. The discovery left her deeply disappointed, even in despair." Everyone is stuck in the predicament of the self, trying to break past its limits and win freedom.

After a long stretch of suffering alone with nothing she could do about it, Liao Yimei had a flash of insight: "If the 'I' disappears, does the suffering still exist?" She had found a way to make the suffering vanish: erase the self. "No matter how sensitive you are, how clever, how much of a perfectionist, the only way you can get along with the world is to accept that it is a flawed one."

That must be what Liao Yimei means by "the moment the rubber band springs open." She probably doesn't much care how people interpret "accepting that the world is flawed."

Q: QDaily

Liao Yimei: Writer, screenwriter

Q: What have you been busy with lately? Has anything changed?

Liao Yimei: That's a big subject if we really get into it. What am I busy with? I'm busy turning myself from a cup into a pot, and then into a sea. Think how big a project that is. (That's quite a change.) No, I haven't turned into it yet. I'm still working at it.

Q: Are there victories along the way, stage by stage?

Liao Yimei: How could there be? It never ends. Victories along the way? Here's one, for instance. Meng Jinghui always says I'm someone with a very fast mouth. He's forever telling me my mouth is too quick, that I react too fast. Whatever comes at me, I go "Tua~" (the sound) and knock it back with a wisecrack. I'm working hard now at becoming someone who reacts slowly. That is especially hard.

Q: Has the effort to react slowly got you anywhere yet?

Liao Yimei: I'm a bit slower now. Which is why I don't like giving interviews. It took me so long to slow down, and now you want me to hit the ball back within a minute, within a second. That's something I know how to do, but I don't want to. Whatever you throw at me, I can throw it straight back at you. But it comes out of my own system, this thing… There's no way to write this down, is there. What I mean is that wanting to become someone who reacts slowly is an extremely hard thing to do.

Q: But is there any benefit to reacting slowly?

Liao Yimei: Only once you've slowed down do you find out what the benefit is.

Q: Really? Maybe it's just that we've never been fast.

Liao Yimei: What?! As a reporter you must be reacting all the time. You have no idea how fast you are.

Let me just make up an example. Someone comes in the door, and you judge at once what class each person belongs to, whether you might have anything to say to them, what type they are. You do that on instinct. Whether you move toward someone or away from them is decided in a second. Or you see someone you're about to interview, and you decide how you want to talk to them, which question would be better to ask. How is that decided? It has to be a fast reaction, every time.

Q: Now that you put it that way, I'm even more curious what the benefit of reacting slowly is.

Liao Yimei: It's very good, not ordinarily good. But if you're not slow, you'll never know. I can't explain it to you.

Q: What if you came at it sideways?

Liao Yimei: It's like the sea. Lakes, seas, cups — those are the only comparisons I have.

Q: How did you come up with that comparison? You've mentioned the idea before, but you didn't use this image then.

Liao Yimei: Oh, it's because you all keep asking me — that's why I came up with it. I kept thinking, how do I make people understand? I'm going through this huge… Or put it this way: I want to go from being a very reliable person to an unreliable one, as unreliable as Shi Hang. That is very, very hard.

Q: But that's only a comparison — when you say you want to slow down, you don't mean becoming unreliable, right?

Liao Yimei: Well, take it however you like.

Of course it's not about becoming unreliable.

But being unreliable is also a trait. A moment ago I was saying that reacting fast is a trait, and that wanting to react slowly is hard. Now I'm saying that going from reliable to unreliable is also hard. What I'm talking about is changing a trait like this. Any trait at all is a limitation.

Look, take this business of being reliable. Being reliable is instinctive, it's entirely inside your body, it isn't something you control. Meng Jinghui told me he had a meeting the next day. Then we went to sleep. I woke up at 8 in the morning, no alarm, I hadn't even been thinking about it. I said, you have a meeting at 10, you should get up. He said, let me sleep a bit longer. By 9 I couldn't sleep anymore. I said, your meeting's at ten. He said, it can wait a while. By 9:30 I was already up, I really couldn't stand it. And then he said: I'm not going!

That's an instinctive reaction. After that, whenever he started to say "tomorrow I…" I'd say, don't tell me! What is this? It's an anxiety disorder. It's an internal anxiety, and it comes out as waking up right on time. See, you can't write this down. (This part can go in the Q&A later.) Oh — that's what I mean. Do you see what I mean?

What I'm trying to say is about changing your basic state. That's what I mean by reacting slowly and by being unreliable. You really can't control this reliability in yourself: if there's something to remember, you remember it. And there's a clock inside you — who woke me up?! The thing is really a kind of internal tension.

Q: Is the original driving force connected to this internal tension and conflict?

Liao Yimei: Of course. Everyone is much the same, really. Everyone has this internal tension and anxiety, afraid of being thought unreliable, tasteless or unsuccessful. Whatever you do, the original driving force is this; it's a form of proving yourself. Sometimes you forget it's there, but it's at work every moment. That's what I mean about reacting fast, too: it's an internal structure.

Q: Is your core pressure or motivation this tension, or that conflict — wanting to break out of the frame?

Liao Yimei: My core motivation is that I want to know the truth about people and the world. That's the ultimate motivation behind everything I write and everything I do.

Q: A moment ago Shi Hang went on at length about the director Meng Jinghui. (Shi Hang said: "If Old Meng put out a book like this, it would be a real headache — it would be like I Love XXX, endless 'fucking awesome, fucking awesome.' His vocabulary can be pretty thin. Once, at the Wuzhen Theatre Festival, a very solemn occasion, Old Meng was supposed to speak at the festival, with Stan Lai standing by to translate, and he looked out at everyone and said: 'Wuzhen Theatre Festival — fucking awesome!' And then said nothing else.") You said you disagree with him. Is it the point that "Meng Jinghui's vocabulary is limited" that you disagree with?

Liao Yimei: Of course. He just likes using certain words. And honestly, at an opening-ceremony occasion like that, whatever you say is nonsense anyway. Meng Jinghui can talk plenty when he wants to, but these days he's a bit like me — he probably just can't be bothered.

Q: For the next question I should first ask which circle you think you're in. What I want to ask is what you'd say to your circle.

Liao Yimei: I'm not in any circle at all, I never go out. (What about the industry?) The industry has even less to do with me.

Q: If you had to say something to the theater industry, would you have anything to say?

Liao Yimei: Nothing I want to say. Leave that to Meng Jinghui. We divide the labor at home. He has a stomach full of things to say about the future of theater, and he's actually doing something about it. He runs theater festivals, serves as artistic director, supports young people. He has the ability and the ideals for that. I don't.

Q: Then do you think people misunderstand the theater industry in any way?

Liao Yimei: I don't think so. I don't know what opinions people have, let alone what misunderstandings. I don't care about it in the slightest.

Q: Do you have any advice or worries about society today?

Liao Yimei: No. I'm not that arrogant, and my opinions aren't that important. Say I state it, spell it out, tell you, and you print it — what would be the point? Empty talk, pointless worry.

Whatever is coming to this world will come, and life later on certainly won't look like it does now. Development is already as fast as it could possibly be. I feel as though I've lived through several centuries of change. From primary school through university to now, the change in this world is beyond recognition. The way people live has changed, all of it has changed.

Q: When you say several centuries of change, are you comparing it with history?

Liao Yimei: That isn't mine, everyone says it. About the pace of development now — I read it in some book, I can't remember which. What people used to go through in a few hundred years, we go through in ten.

Q: Does that come from technology?

Liao Yimei: Mm, technology, maybe. And then the world really did start changing fast.

I still remember one evening back when I was in school. We lived in the dormitories of the dance academy. My mother was chatting with a colleague of hers, and I was very small at the time. My mother said, "I hear that now… (a family only needs to) send one child to the countryside." The other day I brought it up with her. I said, "Do you remember that moment? I was so small then, the sent-down-youth movement… You were worrying about the future for nothing. You were imagining that once the children grew up they'd be sent to the countryside, and whether the family could keep one at home." Because there was me and my younger brother. And you never knew the world would turn into something else entirely.

This kind of self-designed planning, this kind of worry — it's all just delusion.

Q: This ultra-fast change is happening to the whole world, not only to China, right?

Liao Yimei: It's probably more obvious in China. But on the whole, yes, it should be. Some places still keep to a much slower way of life. They're still there.

Q: Why is it especially obvious in China?

Liao Yimei: I don't know, and I don't care! No — I don't want to analyze it, I don't want to respond to that question of yours. I could certainly go and analyze it. I just think the analysis would be meaningless.

Q: When you say something is meaningless, where's your standard for judging that?

Liao Yimei: There's no ultimate meaning to it. It won't produce any change in your life.

Q: Not for you, or not for readers and everyone else either?

Liao Yimei: Not for anyone. Who cares how I judge how fast China has changed? Empty talk, empty talk for everyone. I'd rather say: go see a play, take care of yourselves. That at least seems solid.

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

Liao Yimei: I don't know, I don't make judgments like that. That's Shi Hang's job.

Q: Why do you keep pushing everything onto him?

Liao Yimei: Because he's always talking about this sort of thing, and to talk about it you have to sort it out in your head first. Line people up — 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 — and put each one in a nice position. I don't want to do that kind of thing now. I don't want to rank people and things. I think they all grow on their own, each in the place where it should be. It's not for me to rank them. I'm very unwilling to do it right now, which is why I don't want to answer this question. And whoever I named would be meaningless anyway. Don't you think?

Q: When and where do you feel happiest? Or what is perfect happiness?

Liao Yimei: There's no when or where that's the happiest. What I mean is that as long as you're confined within time, within space, within any bounded range, you can't be truly happy. It's a very fine psychological feeling, and also something people usually don't… how should I put it? (What people usually do) is mistake being recognized for being happy.

Images courtesy of Meng Jinghui Studio, Purui Culture and Douban.