Writer Zhou Jianing on Writing and This Era: "I Really Hope I Can Live Up to My Responsibility" | Interviews

"What is it that we should be doing? What is it that we want? Even as we reject things, what exactly do we hope to build?"

Late last year, in Taiwan, Zhou Jianing made a new Taiwanese friend, who was surprised she had a Facebook account — and that she hadn't just opened it after arriving on the island.

"They probably think we're a generation that has completely lost its freedom, that doesn't understand the concept at all. But the thing is, we went from using Facebook to not being able to use it. So we know exactly what it is to go from having something to not having it. You can see very clearly what it means to lose your freedom," Zhou Jianing told QDaily.

Born in 1982, Zhou Jianing is a writer and translator. In high school she won prizes in the first and second New Concept Composition Contests and was admitted early to Fudan University. At 19 she published her first book, The Vagabond Singer's Lover 《流浪歌手的情人》. In 2007 she took a master's degree in modern and contemporary Chinese literature from Fudan's Chinese department. A year later she joined 《鲤》 (Carp), a literary mook then newly founded, and has been its editorial director ever since.

Because she came out of "New Concept," many people set Zhou Jianing alongside Han Han, who competed the same year, and Guo Jingming and Zhang Yueran, who came a year later, and file them all under the label "post-80s (New Concept) writers." But 20 years on, Han Han and Guo Jingming left literature behind long ago for the entertainment business, and only Zhou Jianing and Zhang Yueran are still writing fiction, still slowly getting better.

Zhou Jianing's last book was the novel In the Dense Forest 《密林中》, published in 2015. The novelist Jin Yucheng once wrote of it: "Reading Zhou Jianing's fiction is like witnessing a process of self-analysis — sincere, brave, never chasing novelty or pandering, rigorous and metaphysical. At a time when spiritual reflection is scarce, her fiction has the power to go straight to the heart." The novelist Yan Lianke argued: "In the Dense Forest is closely tied to Zhou Jianing's own experience. It is both a self-portrait of a young generation of writers growing up and something beyond literature, a picture of the spiritual symptoms of a generation inside history. 'The dense forest' is a metaphor — full of difficulty, full of obstacles — and yet the prose shines within it."

Yet even after more than ten books of fiction and the approval of some of her elders, Zhou Jianing still feels she "doesn't write well" and "needs to go and learn things." Asked where exactly her writing falls short, she didn't answer directly. She thinks the shape of her knowledge may be holding her back: because she lacks history, politics and economics, and is rich only in literature, it is hard for her to think about problems more deeply, and harder still to get inside China's tangled social reality.

That is also where her writing has turned in recent years. She used to be seen as a strongly autobiographical writer, one whose work carried "very heavy personal traces" and whose subject was her own life and feelings. Zhou Jianing admits that before 30 she was exploring herself, and that after 30, having reached "a somewhat blurry understanding" of herself, she began "turning her attention to the outside world." Now her writing carries a responsibility: she hopes to take some of the people willing to be taken, through her writing, into a world she has made.

"At least what I'm writing now is all trying to say something about the era. Personal value, personal predicament — both are caught in the sweep of a great age. No one can escape the flood of this era. What I want to write is the lives of the young people I think are worth something, inside this great age — to write fairly truthfully about the problems young people run into today, and my own small notions of a way out, or my own doubts. If those doubts can set people smarter than me thinking, maybe they can come up with good answers," Zhou Jianing told QDaily.

Basic Beauty 《基本美》, the short-story collection she is publishing this year, is her new attempt at exactly this. Zhou Jianing says she wants to write the predicament of her own generation. The stories center on the changes in young Chinese lives between 2000 and 2010, a decade she considers especially important for people her age. Before and after that decade, as she sees it, there are enormous differences in the room young people have to live in and to hold ideals in, and in the distance and the ties between young people on the mainland and those in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Which is why the scene at the top of this piece happened at all: young people on the two sides of the strait now hold more and more distance, misunderstanding and invention about each other. "I think we're a generation that sees very clearly what it means to lose freedom," Zhou Jianing said. "But the problem is that further down the line, young people simply won't have that habit anymore."

Besides writing, Zhou Jianing translates English-language literature. She has translated Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body, Joyce Carol Oates's The Corn Maiden, Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and more.

Translation does more for her than keep her days regular. "I feel translation has always been helping me fish certain words out of my own system, wash them clean, and use them well. Chinese really is beautiful, so when I see good Chinese used badly, something in me is uncomfortable. When you translate, your regard for words becomes very sharp — you want to treasure every word, to work out how to use each one in the place where it belongs, and you want it to be right," Zhou Jianing said.

Translating has also taught her how much of "beauty" cannot be carried from one language into another. And because she loves Japanese literature too, she has lately been learning Japanese, hoping to find out what is lost when Japanese books are turned into Chinese.

This January her newest translation, The First Bad Man, came out — the second Miranda July book she has translated. Zhou Jianing likes July enormously; she thinks July has no flaws at all. July's style, in the American writer George Saunders's phrase, is "July-esque," a school of one that no existing vocabulary can define or describe.

"She's someone with a very contemporary spirit. Her art, her fiction, her films are all bound up tightly with the changing inner life of city people around the world right now. The loneliness everybody runs into; the sense young people share that the world is sinking; how to handle the distance between one person and another... Miranda July's fiction tries to tell people: now that we all face these predicaments, how are we supposed to get out of them?" Zhou Jianing said.

Q = QDaily

Z = Zhou Jianing

In Modern Society, I Don't Know If Loneliness Still Exists

Q: One theme of The First Bad Man is loneliness. Your own fiction keeps circling the same subject. I'm curious how you see loneliness now — how you live alongside it, and what it does to your writing. In an earlier conversation about No One Belongs Here More Than You, for instance, you said: "Everyone thinks they're the loneliest."

Z: I think that's just modern people. Loneliness really isn't a remarkable thing anymore. People have talked about it for years, and been lonely for years. Any adult past their twenties has long since come to treat loneliness as something they carry around. It's already part of your life. There's nothing to make a fuss about.

And I think the definition of the word "loneliness" has shifted in some new ways in modern society. Loneliness has become something that isn't all that lonely. What used to define a person as lonely might not be loneliness now. I don't know whether loneliness still exists. Who in modern society is actually lonely? What is a lonely moment? I find I can hardly remember a moment when I felt lonely. If I work at home every day, I'm simply by myself — that may not be loneliness at all.

So on the face of it, being alone and being lonely are completely different things. People have become very good at keeping themselves company. You don't even need to meet face to face to have a love affair now; you don't have to travel all that way to someone's home. Lots of changes like that. Twenty years ago the sense of the collective was still strong, but individual consciousness has been developing for so long that everyone is lonely already. The subject has been talked out. There's nothing left to say.

Q: Which novelists do you think write loneliness especially well, and why? Richard Yates, Miranda July and Carson McCullers all seem to belong to this group.

Z: Quite a few. Miranda July is pretty good at it, actually. She already belongs to the "post-loneliness era." Richard Yates and his lot were still writing in an age when loneliness could be discussed. Now it's completely different. July discusses loneliness on the assumption that everyone has already accepted it. It's not that we're still struggling with it, wondering whether to fight it or solve it — you already know loneliness can't be solved. Once it can't be solved and you have to live with it, how do you talk about it then? That's the stage she's at, a long way from those earlier writers.

Q: Why do you think that change happened?

Z: Technology has certainly changed the structure of society, and the change in our sense of time matters a lot too. Our sense of time and our sense of distance are both different from before. You move from one place to another very fast. Moving fast means you get close to people fast and leave them fast. The texture of time has become very different. The way people communicate has certainly changed. And those changes end up changing the definitions of all sorts of feelings.

Q: For modern people, is this also something that can't be solved, only accepted?

Z: It can't be solved. It isn't something one person's strength can solve. But I think we can discuss it: if the change has already happened, shouldn't some of our definitions change too? Shouldn't the definition of loneliness shift a bit? What is the definition of feeling — shouldn't that shift too?

I think she — Miranda July — is discussing that process of change, and she has widened loneliness somewhat. In this book (The First Bad Man) she has widened the idea of love. The feelings she describes strike you as strange. As I said, it's an undefined state. It's hard to pin down with one specific adjective, because the concept hasn't fully arrived yet. We may still be using a definition of the word "love" from decades ago to talk about how modern people feel. Is that really how it is? There may be some eternal part inside it, but apart from that eternal part, something must be flowing, fading, and being rebuilt into some new form or other.

I Want to Write the Lives of Young People Who Matter, Inside a Great Age

Q: Yan Lianke gave a lecture recently in which he called the work of writers like Raymond Carver and Alice Munro "bitter-coffee literature," because "like bitter coffee, it is warm with a touch of cold in it, sweet with a thread of bitterness." In this kind of literature, Yan Lianke says, readers see only the small difficulties and small setbacks of one group of people in one set of circumstances; they don't see the predicament of existence facing a whole country, a whole people, or humanity. If a writer doesn't show readers the harshest conditions his own people and his own individuals live in, then his greatness is open to doubt. What do you make of that?

Z: I feel torn. Reading him leaves me with a strange feeling. At first glance it seems quite right, and then something seems off. I can't say exactly what. I find it a little odd that he can put it so clearly. I honestly do feel this is a complicated question, and I don't think it should be settled so flatly — the way he sorts it feels a bit too either-or. I've been thinking about it a lot lately, and I haven't arrived anywhere.

The way I see it: someone like Miranda July is talking about predicament, not misfortune. Predicament is a similar thing that everyone goes through — loneliness, say, or the distance between people I mentioned, something all of humanity faces. Misfortune falls on the individual. If we treat a country as a person, then misfortune may fall on that country as an individual with a character of its own, but that isn't a predicament. They're different things. Is one higher than the other? I think that needs more thought.

Q: So do you think your fiction expresses the predicament of existence of your own generation, people born in the 1980s? If it does, what is that predicament?

Z: Yes. At least what I'm writing now is all trying to say something about the era. Personal value, personal predicament — both are caught in the sweep of a great age. No one can escape the flood of this era. You're standing in that flood no matter what; the only question is the posture you stand in — whether you go with it, or hold a fixed position. Everyone is affected by it.

So what I want to write is the lives of the young people I think are worth something, inside this great age. Plenty of people have been swept along completely; there's nothing interesting there, no need to write them. Write them and all you get is a picture of being swept along.

Q: What do you mean by "worth something"?

Z: I can't describe it. If I could describe it, why would I bother writing those things? It's precisely because so much of it can't be summed up in a sentence or two — otherwise you'd just post it on Weibo.

Q: What do you think is the most striking trait of your generation, compared with people born in the 1990s, say?

Z: The difference is pretty big. I think we're a generation that wasted time, and wasted it quite happily. And the space we had to live in during our twenties was more forgiving than yours. Social rules weren't as settled as they are now; there was more that was uncertain. When more is uncertain, and you happen to have an uncertain character yourself, you have a lot of room to swing around in. Your odds of finding your own place were small, too, so it took more time.

My sense is that by your generation the room to swing has shrunk a bit and the rules have hardened. So you can find fixed points fairly quickly and spend your energy inside them to some effect. When you're young your energy goes further; later you get a bit tired. Your learning is very efficient, for instance. A good memory counts for a great deal.

Q: What will your next book be? Can you tell us about it? I've heard it's coming out this year — have you finished it?

Z: It's finished. It's a short-story collection called Basic Beauty, and it runs roughly from 2000 to 2010. Because for me those ten years were an important decade for our generation. Why? 2010 was the Shanghai World Expo, and 2008 was the Beijing Olympics. I think China changed a great deal around then. The room young people had to live in, the room they had for ideals — there's a huge difference on either side of 2008 and 2010.

The last novella in the book is about a friendship between a young man from the mainland and a young man from Hong Kong. Before 2010 a lot of young people from Hong Kong came to Beijing, very curious about the mainland, feeling the mainland really did give them room. Not just people from Hong Kong — I came to Beijing around then myself, and also felt it was a place where you could stretch out. In sheer physical space, and in the whole atmosphere of the time, it was forgiving toward young people; you could even be reckless. A very relaxed environment. You felt there was a lot of hope, a lot you could go and do.

After 2010 you gradually notice a lot of changes you weren't aware of then. But looking back at that decade now — at how the friends around me changed, at some of the young cultural leaders I saw, the young opinion-setters in music, film and literature — you can actually trace how certain threads in society turned into the state we're in. It isn't that the present state is so terrible; it's more: what should the ideal shape of a society be from here?

I probably have a lot of doubts, because I don't have a clear answer myself. I don't research this for a living, after all. But if you live in a society like this, and you see new young people coming up in a different shape, and you compare them with the people you knew from the '80s, '70s and '60s generations, you can see a lot of structural change that happened without anyone noticing.

So that book of mine is really about writing this decade that matters to me, and everything that changed in it. The internet began to rise in that decade; Han Han appeared in that decade. In 2008 I could still use Facebook; after 2012 I couldn't. And how did all this distance open up? So I wanted to talk about these things. It's quite interesting.

Reading Chinese and English Aloud Is Like Two Instruments Playing

Q: As a translator, what is your view of translation, or your basic principle for it?

Z: I lean toward literal translation. Even as a reader of translations, I prefer translators who translate literally. Because something is always lost passing between languages. Chinese is a pictographic language. English sometimes carries things through rhythm. Fitzgerald, whom I've been reading lately, makes that especially plain. His language is so good that as I read on I start to miss it. The beauty in his rhythm is carried by English; that beauty is something you get by saying it, riding the rise and fall that English words build. But much of the beauty of Chinese is seen. It's a pictographic script — put a lot of characters together and there's already a rise and fall for the eye. It isn't that you're often reading Chinese and suddenly start reading it aloud. That happens too, of course. But even when you do, it's an entirely different language from English. Read them aloud and it's like two different instruments playing.

So the loss in translation certainly exists. Given that, I think you should stay as close to the original meaning as you can, and not let the meaning take a further loss. If there's already been a loss in rhythm, I don't want any more loss in the author's meaning — in the sense of the words or the shape of the sentences. In those places I don't want to invent anything, or turn it into an especially Chinese sort of expression. Otherwise you lose too much on both sides.

Q: Besides translating, your main identity is really a writer. What has translation changed in your writing or your life? Can you be specific? I've read that translation work makes you live a more disciplined life.

Z: Right. Translation still does that. Freelance work makes it easy to fall out of any routine, and translation ties you to your desk. A routine is very hard to build and very easy to break. Translation helps you keep patching it. But that's help at the level of daily life, and I don't think that's the most important part.

What matters more is that translation replenishes the Chinese language — or, for me, purifies it. When you translate, you choose words very carefully. In our everyday language a lot of words have been damaged. Words that carry no praise or blame in themselves get damaged once they're overused. Translation helps you rebuild the meaning those words originally had, and helps you guard them more carefully. At least in your own writing you don't overuse them; you put them back in the place where they belong and use them well, protect them. Don't let them be polluted by all the overuse online.

Stop Always Saying You're Old

Q: This is the 20th year of the New Concept Composition Contest. You were one of the earliest prize-winners and you're a judge now. Looking back over those 20 years of "New Concept," what stands out most for you? And what effect has it had on you?

Z: Reading the entries these past couple of years has been interesting, and it's interesting because you can see how what middle- and high-school students read is changing, right in step with the times. For a while, a lot of the essays that came in were time-travel stories. Three or four years ago, maybe, everyone was writing them. It was terrifying. Why were all these students reading that?

But things change fast. I've been reading entries for another essay contest this year, also for middle- and high-schoolers, and I noticed a lot of students reading Dazai Osamu. A lot of their readings of Dazai are naive, of course. I was a bit surprised. How does a reading trend like that spread? How do students' choices of what to read take shape?

I've also been thinking that intellectuals, teachers and publishers should think about giving students better recommendations and guidance. Look back now and there are a lot of very good books, books well worth reading, that you couldn't necessarily understand in middle or high school. I've been rereading a lot of classics lately, and I feel that much of what teachers forced on me back then I read for nothing. My understanding of it was wrong.

But there are also a lot of books that suit that age. Some American writers' books, I think, suit high school, and that's exactly when you don't read them; instead you're reading a lot of Russians, and you can't necessarily make sense of them. You read them in real pain, and that makes your whole sense of literature dull. You should come in through a more interesting door — Haruki Murakami, say. High-schoolers reading Murakami is a fine thing, a good fit.

Q: Apart from three years in Beijing, you've spent your life in Shanghai. Do you think there's a relationship between the city of Shanghai and your fiction? I've read that you once said every big city is boring.

Z: At every stage of your life, your view of what's around you is shaped by the limits of that stage. When I said every big city is boring, that was a view produced by those limits.

In 2016 I spent three months at the Iowa Writing Program, and it hit me hard. In those three months I met writers from 36 different countries and regions, their native languages all completely different, some from very odd places I'd never heard of. You suddenly discover that countries are completely unlike one another. Writing in Chinese is an extremely particular thing in itself. So-called national character, and everything else too — it all arrived in front of me in the form of that impact.

At first you communicate with everyone easily. What our era is like is this: Pamuk had been on that program too, and everyone knew him, everyone had read him. Everyone knew Haruki Murakami as well, everyone had read him. At the start we had plenty of common ground — we could talk about Coetzee, everybody liked him. Carver and that crowd, everybody wanted to run down. Plenty of people ran Murakami down too. But once that first shared conversation is used up, you find that when you want to go further into your own literature, there's no way to communicate. The language barrier is that English can't convey it exactly, and your views on everything turn out to be different.

So when I used to say big cities are all the same — I later realized that really isn't true. And the so-called concept of "the world" isn't China versus abroad; it's many completely different countries, completely different cities, and completely different individuals, each carrying their own set of ideas.

Q: Looking back on this past year, do you remember any news at home that struck you, or that you followed closely? Why?

Z: Plenty. The past couple of years feel like a flood to me. I think it's been pretty bad, and I can't think of much that was good. There's no point in my repeating a lot of bad news; everyone remembers it, I'm sure. I don't think people forget that fast. And if one bad thing gets covered over by another bad thing, the first one is still a bad thing that happened.

What I think is worse is that when I try to think of one piece of news from the past year or two that lifted me, that encouraged me, nothing comes to mind. That makes me unhappy. In a world like this, I think it matters. Everyone can define "terrible" very clearly by now, but the definition of "good" has gone missing. "Terrible" is fairly easy to define, easy to describe, and you can give plenty of examples — while the definition of "good," I feel, has become very weak.

Q: So as a writer, facing what's happened these past couple of years, do you feel discouraged and powerless? Or do you feel the world is just what it is?

Z: Not powerless. I've never felt powerless. If anything it sometimes makes me feel stronger, though it may be a rather stupid kind of strength. I've never felt powerless or low, or felt the worsening of the world outside damaging my own strength — that doesn't seem to have happened to me. But there is some fear.

And I do hope that, since everyone can see so clearly what's terrible, I can at least take a few readers who are willing to trust me onto a road toward a world that isn't terrible. At least in the course of that exploration, if they're willing to trust me, then I'm willing — I want to try to do this. Whether I can bring it off is another question.

Q: What do you think has changed most in you these past few years? Is it what you said earlier, that you understand yourself clearly now and want to turn your attention to the outside world?

Z: Yes. And one more thing: I really hope I can live up to my responsibility, or at least give it a serious try. As I said, we've already said too much about what's bad. I've said plenty myself about "what I don't want" and "what I'd like to avoid." A lot of the friends around me, those young people, writers and young intellectuals both, have said a great deal about what we don't want.

But what I might want to say a little of, or try to do a little of, is: what is it that we should be doing? What is it that we want? Even as we reject things, what exactly do we hope to build? I think that's hard. And it isn't something one person can do alone. Maybe after the people around us have said so much about what we don't want, after so much rejection, we can build a few things together. Everyone is at a loss right now, but I think this period will pass. Little by little some people will step forward, and a new direction will appear. So there's no need to rush.

Q: Generally speaking, what wakes up your curiosity?

Z: Lots of things. Something I've been very curious about lately came to me while learning Japanese. I'm extremely curious what the English-language writers I love look like translated into Japanese. That's the thing I'm most impatient to be able to read. Because you're a translator yourself, you know there's loss, so you know what's lost when English goes into Chinese. Then what does English become in Japanese? Japanese and Chinese are quite close to each other, after all. So that's what I've been curious about lately.

Q: What advice do you have for young people today?

Z: Stop always saying you're old. Especially people who really are still young — I can't stand hearing them say they're old, borrowing a line greasy middle-aged men use about themselves. Plenty of young people are obviously still young and they call themselves middle-aged. It irritates me so much that I think the word "middle-aged" needs to be used properly again. It's genuinely been abused. Why ruin the word?

Cover image: a still from Me and You and Everyone We Know; Unsplash