Writer Zhang Yueran: The "Post-80s" Label Sticks and Won't Come Off | 100 People With Ideas

Back then the post-80s generation seized the microphone for a moment, then were overtaken and mocked by a younger generation... The whole generation has had to look at itself again — a little forlorn, a little inferior, under enormous pressure.

Han Han has turned middle-aged. Guo Jingming is still on the front line of entertainment gossip. And the last of the three writers once held up as the emblem of "post-80s writers" — Zhang Yueran — found success young and has stayed neither hot nor cold ever since.

Zhang Yueran published her first work at 14, won first prize in the New Concept Writing Competition at 19, and brought out her first book in 2003, the year she turned 21. Measured by the body of work she has produced, she gives away nothing to her two wide-ranging peers. Her pull is real too: for publishers, the first print run of one of her novels can reach 100,000 copies, still a guarantee of sales.

These days phrases like "young people today" have started to appear in Zhang's own speech. Partly this is because her readers keep getting younger — the peers who first read her now find themselves sizing up the "young people" who came after. And partly it is a reminder that the group who built careers on the idea of "youth literature," recording the confusions of their own coming-of-age, must now do what the elders of the trade once did for them: answer other people's questions.

"I think when a writer is younger," Zhang says, already speaking with a clear sense of looking back, "what they write is more absolute, more extreme. But as you get older, as death and so much else draws closer, and you begin to feel a pain that cuts to the bone... there aren't so many absolute, extreme things left."

Even so, phrases like "a pain that cuts to the bone" still slip out, which gives away something of the youth-literature writer she once was. She may know it, which is why she stresses that she tries to push back against it, that she still wants to keep a little of the "absolute" — a darker ending, say, death written all the way through, or claiming "innate evil" as her own label.

In her fiction and in her values alike, the 36-year-old Zhang Yueran has softened a great deal. Her novels no longer end in total darkness; death has grown gentler, and usually there is a chance of rebirth after it. She comments on issues in an even, measured way that suits her age — it has been 22 years since she made her debut, after all. She even reaches for words like "mercy" and "tolerance" to describe how she has changed.

Even from a 36-year-old, "mercy" is a word that makes a listener stop.

Some of this may come from her change of job. Han Han and Guo Jingming went into film and entertainment; Zhang Yueran became a lecturer at Renmin University of China in 2012, a path she calls "very orthodox, very by-the-book."

We talked with Zhang Yueran for nearly an hour and a half in a hotel near Shanghai's Jing'an District. By every measure she is a mature, self-possessed, poised writer, and still you feel the "post-80s" label sticking to her, refusing to come off.

Back then the post-80s writers seized the microphone for a moment, then were overtaken and mocked by a younger generation... The whole generation has had to look at itself again — a little forlorn, a little inferior, under enormous pressure.

"It's like one whole silent ship," she says. "A thousand people falling behind together."

Q: QDaily

Zhang: Zhang Yueran

Q: What usually sets you off on a piece of fiction?

Zhang: Sometimes I hear a story, and what interests me isn't the external event — not who betrayed whom, who killed whom — but the state of mind a character holds at a particular moment, the attitude they take. That is the thing I find strange, or distinctive. And of course it's real.

Q: You often work into the human heart through one small entry point. Has that entry point changed over the years?

Zhang: It has. In this story collection, for instance, there's an early piece called The Wedding Dress (《嫁衣》), written around 2008. That story was mostly about jealousy between people, jealousy between women, and something quite evil as well. You can go very deep with that, but in my later fiction I began looking for smaller entry points, not such a head-on way of writing about jealousy or about the tangles between people.

Say we find one emotion in a person under some particular event — an emotion that may contain jealousy, but other things at the same time. No emotion exists on its own, I think, so when I set it down I'm not there to discuss jealousy. Instead, in that situation, we see that the person may feel jealousy, but also sympathy, also pity, all kinds of rich feeling at once. Later on I put more of these complicated feelings together.

Q: Your recent fiction seems gentler, in the prose and in how the stories end.

Zhang: I think when a writer is younger, what they write is more absolute, more extreme. Look at Eileen Chang in her twenties, writing stories like Withered Blossom (《花凋》) — the heroine is written all the way to the bottom, without a shred of sympathy. Death or tragedy at that point was entirely something imagined in her head, in fact far from her own life. But as you get older, as death and so much else draws closer, and you begin to feel a pain that cuts to the bone, the world under a writer's pen turns more complicated, more uncertain. There aren't so many absolute, extreme things left.

As I've gotten older, relatives around me have died, and I've had friends who killed themselves. All of it made me think about death again. I can feel that it's no longer the death I wrote as a child. Back then death was an artistic death, with no connection to a real body; it existed purely out of an aesthetic need — there was a beauty in it, so that's how I set it down. Now I feel it has begun to involve the death of a body, and we can't look past that.

A simple example: in some Hollywood movies, cop films, fight films, plenty of people die and we don't feel sad, because when they die it doesn't hurt — it's over in an instant. But in another film one person dies, or nobody dies and someone is only hurt, and we feel it, because a real body is there and we can feel that pain. The two are not the same. Once fiction pays more attention to that real, physical pain, it becomes very hard not to carry a merciful heart.

Q: Where does that mercy show up?

Zhang: I once wrote a boy who takes a huge blow and falls into despair. What he feels at that moment is that the world in front of him has suddenly turned different from before — familiar things have gone strange. That is the kind of moment I want to give in fiction: not simply despair turning into rebirth, but a chance to look at the world again. As long as life goes on, a person who has been through the greatest pain will still recover from it. That is closer to how things actually are.

Recovery, healing — that is where you feel the complications of the human heart most, where you feel all the life in a person. Sometimes it's a bit as if I've pushed back the moment the story ends. I wait a while longer at the lowest point, to see what grows there. On a field burned flat there may still be a few seeds, and next year they come up as grass and shoots. That waiting, to see a trace of green, matters enormously. These days I treat that waiting as the place where my stories end.

Q: Social media has spread literariness around — ad copy, films, official accounts all count as literature now, and yet pure literature has grown scarcer. How do you see that conflict?

Zhang: In an era like this, pure literature takes a hit, and there's no avoiding it. We have to ask ourselves which kind of fiction we're actually reading now. Some people read only web fiction, others read literary fiction. Things have split far more finely than they had ten years ago, and I think that's a good thing.

Plenty of people write pieces on Moments now, and they have a distinct talent of their own, part of it related to literature. You can feel their inventiveness, or what's interesting in them. It may not be the talent of a novelist; it may be another kind, still literary, carrying a little literary gift. The good part is that this era gives people with all sorts of different literary gifts a shot at fame or success. That is a kind of tolerance particular to our time.

In the past there was one profession called novelist and every other profession had nothing to do with literature. These people might never have found such a distinctive place for themselves.

For literature itself, though, the ground has narrowed. Real literary readers are dwindling, because many people can now get a great deal through other channels, which meets the need a certain kind of literature used to meet. Not a good position for literature — but literature was never supposed to shoulder that much responsibility anyway. It doesn't carry the job of enlightening the public, or anything of that sort.

With pieces on Moments, some of the big official accounts, a lot of the time what people are reading them for is lessons. Any number of anxious women ask, "What should I do about this?", "What should I do about that?" They hope to take some usable wisdom out of these articles. Now they no longer go to novels for that, which is a good thing, because fiction isn't responsible for teaching people how to live. Fiction today is freer.

When I write about a social or real-world issue in fiction, I don't think I'm addressing the event head-on. Journalism and nonfiction carry that responsibility, and they do it far better than fiction can. What fiction attends to, most of the time, is the human heart. Reality may be the big backdrop, but the conflicts that arise between people inside that backdrop — the way a heart can be twisted, and can also recover in the middle of being twisted — that is what I care about in fiction, always. Even when a novel takes in large events, nothing has really changed as I see it; it is still writing the plainest truths of the heart.

Q: Do you read official accounts yourself?

Zhang: I rarely read the ones that hand out lessons, because I don't think life can be explained by reasoning.

Q: So when something confuses you, where do you go for help?

Zhang: Fiction itself is a question a writer raises because they can't think it through. I put a lot of what I want to explore into my novels, but fiction doesn't answer the question. I use fiction to look into it, to ask, "Why does this happen?", "Why is there an inner world like this?" Fiction is my way of asking.

Q: Does it solve the problem in the end?

Zhang: I don't think it can be solved. Most problems in life can't be solved. Either you wait for them to go away, or they sit there, waiting to put the question to you.

Q: But plenty of readers think you know the answers, and come to you for help.

Zhang: They do. At book club events, readers often ask me questions tied closely to their own lives — choices in love, choices in work. They feel lost, so they ask me. There's a misunderstanding that takes the writer for someone who holds more of the truth.

In this era we all want a life mentor too badly. We take writers, cultural figures, celebrities and make mentors of them, but a writer is certainly not someone who holds the truth about life. A writer is someone asking questions, facing their own confusion through writing, trying to set it down. I don't think they know more. So at moments like that I always feel awkward, unsure how to answer. Because writers are people inside the confusion too.

A writer can make a total mess of their life, can be utterly lost. It's only that we face this confusion every day — or say that we've grown used to confusion as a large part of life. People in other lines of work often find confusion unbearable; the problem has to be solved at once, the confusion driven off, so they can live clearly and definitely. That's their frame of mind. For someone who writes, it may not matter much.

Some confusion is perfectly normal, I think, especially for the many young readers who feel lost. But that age is exactly what being lost is for — what else did you want to do with it? That confusion is precious, because it's only when you still have so many possibilities that you feel lost at all.

A reporter asked me just yesterday, "The people you write are all so wicked — how is anyone supposed to go on living?" But evil is simply there, in the real world. We don't stop living because evil exists. What I find interesting is precisely that we can see how complicated people are; it isn't binary. I really do think the younger generation has been taught too much inspirational thinking, that the bad has to be stripped out entirely. There's far too much of that.

Q: Narcissus Has Ridden Off on a Carp (《水仙已乘鲤鱼去》) and Da Qiao and Xiao Qiao (《大乔小乔》) are both being developed into films, and the rights to other novels of yours have been bought. Will your focus shift?

Zhang: I rarely take part in film work myself, screenwriting for instance, because film and television and fiction are two different modes. I once thought of a comparison: the ending of a short story or a novella is a bit like the surface of a river. It doesn't necessarily stop where all the rivers meet; it stops earlier, where the river is still fairly wide, and yet we can feel which way it's running, we can imagine it joining up somewhere further on. That's what I find interesting about the short story or the novella. It doesn't end on the last page. By two-thirds of the way through, a momentum has already begun, everything is heading in one direction, and when you reach the ending it feels inevitable. Where it stops isn't our destination; the story is pausing there, leaving the thinking and the argument to the reader.

Television isn't like that. It's full of ups and downs, it wants you not to guess, because once you guess you give up watching. It presses the ending into the last episode, an abrupt ending, and you often feel that someone suddenly dies or something of the sort, and then everything turns upside down. It isn't simulating a truer world. It doesn't really follow the logic of reality.

Q: The recent calls for women's rights, including this year's Hollywood sexual-assault scandal, have woken up a lot of women's consciousness around the world. Has it affected you?

Zhang: That female consciousness does keep growing stronger. It has to do with our social setting and the ideas underneath it — look at the official accounts, still stressing that women must be independent, must be strong. The premise those articles start from is that you should accept being treated unfairly, and therefore you need to grow stronger. Everyone has already taken that state of affairs as given, which is how you get this logic of, since that's how it is, women should do this and that... A lot of the time it isn't about making people stronger; it's a contest of wits and nerve, a way of working out how to live better, or more shrewdly, inside that predicament.

This unfairness is worse now than it was ten years ago. Women are objectified more, I think. There are all sorts of methods now for making women more beautiful, and our taste has grown more uniform — the so-called internet-celebrity face. Presenting women that way is really about what men want and approve of.

Q: Are you the kind of woman who speaks out?

Zhang: No. I come from Shandong, a fairly patriarchal place, and on questions of belief I think north and south differ. Farming culture runs on physical labor, so it most easily produces dependence on men; but the Jiangsu-Zhejiang region shed farming culture very early, and women's standing there is relatively higher. Shanghai and Suzhou are especially typical. From ancient times to now they have celebrated a kind of female beauty, and it isn't the objectified beauty we talk about today. That beauty is a natural energy, a force. That is why women's standing is higher in places like these.

In places like Shandong it is still relatively a man's world. People lean on men more; the man is the head of the family. That has certainly shaped me. Even though I've worked hard to climb out of it since growing up, no one who grew up in that world could become a person who celebrated female beauty in her head from childhood on. Childhood memory can't be changed, so I often catch myself thinking in the same way those official accounts do.

Later I wrote a story about a nanny. It's about a natural female strength, a woman using that strength to redeem herself and to redeem others too. I do have the wish to speak up about women's circumstances and the difficulties they face, and to say something about them. But a person is always bound by their education and their family background, unfortunately, so I'm fairly pessimistic that I could ever become a whole, powerful feminist. So I've always paid attention to women's circumstances from a slightly detached position, or from that kind of vantage point.

Q: In your writing now, do you still try to shed a label, or to build one?

Zhang: I think about it much less now. In the early years the "post-80s writer" label was on me for about ten years, but now I feel it dissolving. Partly because we're no longer young, there's nothing novel about it, we've each become a mature individual, and people rarely argue in labels these days.

But the identity of a woman who writes is hard to get around. For a long stretch I sometimes thought it would be better to be a male writer, because a woman writer's relationship with her own text is more delicate. A woman writer has to guard, from the start, against projecting herself into the novel, has to avoid the narcissism and the self-pity people are quick to spot in women writers. Male writers don't have this problem, so there was a time I rather envied them.

Q: What's the biggest change in your prose over these years?

In my twenties I chased ornate writing, prose saturated with my own style. There was a wish that this sentence, this word, this character should belong to me alone — that every branch of a novel, down to its smallest cell, should carry my mark. That wish was of course a demand for distinctiveness, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but it was naive.

Now what I want is for readers to finish a novel and feel its force, to like one of the characters, to be left thinking hard. That's the response I'd rather get, not someone marking out a couple of golden lines with a pen and thinking, "These two sentences are so well written, I'm going to use them as my WeChat signature." That isn't what a novelist should be after.

A novel has enormous power precisely because it is a whole thing. You can't break it down to branches, to cells, to words and sentences, and look at it that way. Once I saw this, I began cutting a great deal out of my fiction. I began letting the language lose some of its recognizability — although in the end, I do think it should still be recognizable. But in this period of change I'd rather it grew simpler and plainer, and then see what might grow out of it later that is truly mine. So in this process I probably wouldn't claim any single sentence as my own.

For a long time, I think, I didn't write a single sentence that felt entirely mine, carrying a strong mark of the self. But once you turn down the pleasure of picking words and building phrases, another pleasure comes through: the pleasure narrative itself gives you. Inside that pleasure you feel your understanding of fiction turn into something completely different.

Q: Among the writers you admire, who does this well?

Zhang: Many of them — Nabokov, Faulkner. Both have beautiful passages, but what matters more is their centripetal force. It's a bit like this: what we see is the flower on the outside, but their roots go very deep, and the roots feed the flower an enormous amount. I can't start out thinking about how to make the flower prettier.

Q: What does writing mean to you now?

Zhang: Honestly, whatever the work, once we treat it as a profession it will have dull, repetitive parts.

Writing is bound to be the same. For someone who has written this many years, it's hard to feel what you felt at the start, when writing was an intensely pleasurable, happy, free way of saying things. It isn't that now. There's a great deal of thinking in writing now — more careful, slower, often more hesitant, with plenty of things in your way.

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

Zhang: It's fine for people to reach literature, or learn about these things, through all kinds of routes and methods. But there's a shortcut mentality now — courses sold everywhere, even services that read the book for you and mark out its key points, so in ten minutes you supposedly get everything in it. I'm skeptical of that.

People are keen to learn now, or all those courses wouldn't sell so well. Everyone is afraid of being left behind by the times, so everyone is studying, but everyone is studying toward an aim that I don't think is quite right. For any kind of knowledge, or any literary reading, the time a reader spends in the process matters enormously. You need that time to stay inside it — time that includes your own thinking, time for the knowledge to soak into your head. Now it's become a summary, something like fast food. You absorb it, and it has turned into a form that's all about quick returns.

Q: Have you ever gone after results like that yourself?

Zhang: I wouldn't, because that result is worth nothing — nobody is transformed by reading one book. So I'm fairly opposed to anything built for speed. Sometimes a place asks me to lead a reading group, and I find it very hard to sum a book up. With literary works especially, I always feel that if a book could be summed up, if it could be delivered that way, there wouldn't be much point to it, would there? It was written the way it was because everything good in it is spread all through it. It can't be reduced to a few sentences. We care too much about efficiency and results now, but acquiring knowledge is a process you're meant to enjoy from inside.

Q: What do you think lies behind your dislike of shortcuts?

Zhang: I teach at a university now, and my first job out of university was writing. Writing has been, in a way, a form of protection for me. It never threw me out into society to compete hard for a position, never pulled me into that cycle. That cycle probably forces people to arm themselves, forces a lot of crash-course learning. I didn't have that. My reading and writing have always been a very slow process, so I don't have that fierce sense of racing the clock to acquire things.

The classics are just sitting there, aren't they? You can go and read them any time.

Q: Why did you call your latest book I Came Following the Firelight (《我循着火光而来》)?

Zhang: Firelight is a kind of hope and at the same time a kind of desire. Firelight can be warm, and it can also be dangerous. So firelight carries a very contradictory, complicated meaning, and in this book the characters walk toward exactly that kind of firelight — dangerous and warm at once, standing for hope and for desire. They may end up burned by it, but that walking forward, that wish to come close to one another for warmth, is in itself a very positive thing, an effort to push back against one's own emptiness and meaninglessness.

Some of the stories in the book I call swamps. They sink, they're heavy, reality is inside them. Another kind is more like fireworks — a consuming instant that lifts us off the ground of reality all at once, a moment when we can fly. Swamp and fireworks have always been the two possibilities I explore in fiction. My grasp of the swamp has grown deeper and stronger than before, and precisely because of that I'm even less willing to give up stories like the fireworks. We need those moments of flight, that lift into the air. It's a fierce answer from somewhere inside us.

Cover image: vice, duonao, upsplash