Yan Lianke, Jin Yucheng, Tang Nuo, Xu Zidong and Gao Xiaosong on Literature — and on the Writing They Did Young

These remarks came at the Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize, which carries a 300,000-yuan purse and goes to a single writer under 45

On the afternoon of March 24, the launch ceremony and forum for the "Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize" was held at the CHAO Hotel in Beijing.

The prize is jointly hosted by the publishing house Imaginist and the Swiss watch brand Blancpain. The judges for its first edition span several fields: the novelist Yan Lianke; Jin Yucheng, novelist and executive editor-in-chief of Shanghai Literature; the literary critic and writer Tang Nuo; the scholar and cultural critic Xu Zidong; and the musician Gao Xiaosong.

The organizers said entries for the first prize must be fiction in simplified Chinese, formally published as a standalone volume in mainland China between January 1, 2017 and April 30, 2018. Any novel written in Chinese is eligible, as is any collection of a single author's novellas or short stories; anthologies and multi-author collections are not accepted. The panel of judges will be replaced every year. Submissions are now officially open, and the winner will be announced this September.

At the launch, Liang Wendao — who created the ideas platform Kan Lixiang and heads the prize's organizing office — explained what the award is for: "We hope to bring forward, in the Chinese literary world and in fiction in particular, writers we believe have real potential, a long-term drive and expectation of themselves as writers, and considerable achievement already — and to let more people know them and enjoy their work. That is the founding principle of the whole prize."

What most sets the Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize apart from other Chinese literary awards is that entrants must be under 45 (measured by the author's age when the book was published), which gives younger writers a better chance.

In the group interview with reporters, Xu Zidong said: "These days prizes go to big-name writers, to play it safe. That group has ruled the literary world for 30 years, from the root-seeking movement to now. They really do have a lot going for them — they lived through the Cultural Revolution, they have the sent-down-youth background, in the 1980s Western writing techniques came in, and some of them are extraordinarily hard-working. Take Wang Anyi, take Jia Pingwa — you can't keep up. You haven't finished one book and the next one is out."

"What's most missing right now is the critics. Ours is the least competent profession of this era. Why? Because there is no criticism in the critical world, and no schools of thought. All the criticism is book promotion run by publishers, and every writer has a few professor friends standing beside them. The book isn't even on sale yet and these professors have already written their essays. Look at Anonymity (《匿名》) — nobody had read it, and Chen Sihe and company had already published pieces on how wonderful Wang Anyi's writing was," Xu Zidong added.

The Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize also goes to a single winner, with a purse of 300,000 yuan. Set against most Chinese literary prizes, which pay only tens of thousands of yuan, that counts as generous. Among the official prizes, the largest purse belongs to the Mao Dun Literature Prize, at 500,000 yuan. Among non-government prizes, the JD Literature Prize, set up last year, pays the most of any literary award in the country: 1 million yuan.

Besides introducing the prize, the five judges each gave a talk on the theme "No Regrets for My Youthful Work," looking back on how their own writing began and reading aloud from their "youthful writing." They then took questions from the audience and the press. We've excerpted parts of those talks and answers below, in the hope that you find something in them.

Excerpts from the talks and the Q&A:

Yan Lianke:

I bitterly regret my whole life's writing — 80% of it is garbage

I bitterly regret my whole life's writing, and looking at what I wrote as a young man today made me want to throw up. Getting ready for this afternoon, I took my youthful work out again over lunch and couldn't finish the meal — I nearly ruined the whole family's appetite. But I'm here, so I'll talk about it. I really can't claim to have no regrets about my youthful work. I often say I've written a great many things in my life, 80% of it garbage and 20% of it fairly good — but how much life does that 20% have? While I'm alive they're alive; when I die they die. Once I'm gone no one will mention those either, so the 80% nobody talks about now really is garbage. Go back further, to what I wrote as a young man — let me tell you about it, and you'll all agree it's the garbage of garbage.

I joined the army at 20, and, like a "genius," published a short story called The Story of Tianma (《天麻的故事》) in what was then the Wuhan Military Region Combat Report. It was about a soldier who badly wants to join the Party, so of course he has to behave well, and he also has to give a small gift to the political instructor — the Party branch secretary — so he gives him a catty of tianma, a medicinal herb. The instructor is delighted, but sends the tianma back and writes a letter about how a man should conduct himself if he wants to join the Party, and that he mustn't give gifts. If that piece of juvenilia had been any good, it would have been the ancestor of "positive energy," main-melody fiction — I was writing that stuff better than they do, thirty or forty years before them. That's the side of me that has no regrets about my youthful work.

I'd only finished junior high at the time, but I brought a fake senior-high diploma with me into the army, and they decided I was the most educated man around. They ran the story across a whole page, it caused a stir through the entire army, and I was paid 8 yuan. The fiction desk even wrote me a very kind letter saying the story was very, very good, but that my descriptions of the scenery were better than the story. What they didn't know was that I had never read a foreign novel before that. The first one I read, after I turned 20, was Turgenev's "Bezhin Meadow," from A Sportsman's Sketches — the scenery in it was so good, the language so good. Saying I "plagiarized" it may be too harsh; saying I "imitated" it lets me off too easily. It was somewhere between plagiarism and imitation. There is no way I can not regret that.

Mo Yan's and Yu Hua's "youthful work" was good because they had already read foreign literature

I've kept asking myself: why did Mo Yan write The Transparent Carrot (《透明的红萝卜》), and Yu Hua write On the Road at Eighteen (《十八岁出门远行》), while Yan Lianke wrote The Story of Tianma? I turned it over and over, and recently I finally understood: before I turned 20 I had never read a single foreign novel, and it turns out they both had. Before 20, out in the countryside, what I read was Wildfire and Spring Wind Do Battle in the Ancient City (《野火春风斗古城》), Blazing Fire and Steel (《烈火金刚》), Three-Family Lane (《三家巷》), Railroad Guerrillas (《铁道游击队》) — I could recite them backward. It isn't that those novels were bad; they were so good you couldn't learn from them, and when you tried to copy them mechanically you wrote bad fiction. After I turned 20 I happened to become the keeper of a library, and I wanted to find a foreign novel to read — the very best one. Which was best? Gone with the Wind. On the cover was an especially beautiful film star, Vivien Leigh from the movie, so of course I had to read it. Three volumes; I finished them in three nights. There were stories that good in the world! China's revolutionary novels were good, but this one somehow turned out better. It, too, was about war, about love — revolution plus romance. From then on I read foreign novels, and from then on I found my own writing had gotten worse than before.

That's how I've come along — almost my entire life in a state of particular regret, so I don't believe there is any such thing as no regrets for your youthful work. I'm still writing now, and I think everything I write, I write out of regret. The only thing I don't regret is that I've been hard-working and diligent — but the disappointment each novel leaves behind is greater than we can imagine.

This is my first novella. It's about war, and although I never fought in one — I very nearly went — my feeling for war may run deeper than that of people who did. It's called The Little Village, the Little River (《小村小河》). My first short story earned me 8 yuan; this novella earned 800, enough to buy the family a television. My mother counted the pages of the manuscript and said: you can earn 800 yuan writing just this much? This is work worth doing. And I've spent my whole life doing exactly what my mother said. The novella came five years after that first story, and for various reasons it wasn't published until three years after that — a very long story. Looking back at it now, it is full of passion, and it has a lot of poems in it.

The first is especially good: Where there's a river there's a village, where there's a village there's a river. The village is the river's home, the river is the village's song.

The second: The seven households of Seven-Surname Hollow, the seven graves swept at Qingming, seven fields sown when the door opens, seven hearts tucked away when it shuts.

The third is written in the style of the "Five Stresses, Four Beauties" campaign: A mother raises a son, one day, one year of debt owed — the son buys his mother a box of face powder; a mother raises a son, one year, ten years of debt owed — the son buys his mother a headscarf; a mother raises a son, ten years, a hundred years of debt owed — the son buys his mother a burial shroud; a mother raises a son, twenty years, a debt beyond repaying — all she asks is that her son see her into her grave, and plant an evergreen cypress before it, to remember what a mother owes a son.

I was in tears writing it. I wrote so much of it — let me pick a few at random.

The iron-bucket realm, I'll go win it; the bronze-cast throne, you'll go sit it — it's only that I wasn't born with an official's fate, only that I can't read a single character, not even ones the size of beans.

East, west, south, north and center, fighting on like a gale. Fought Chiang Kai-shek, cut down Japanese soldiers. The old man's a good man, his adopted son a hero. At the country's south gate there's a second Luo Cheng.

Jin Yucheng

Seven or eight years sent down to the northeast, and for a while I thought I really was a northeasterner

My entire youth fell inside the Cultural Revolution. At just over 16 I went to Heihe, in the northeast — that was being sent down to the countryside. More and more, I feel that place was like Chekhov's Sakhalin Island: the special farms in the Heihe region, where relations with the Soviet Union had grown tense in 1969, the main army units had moved out, and many people who had just finished serving prison sentences remained. So through my whole adolescence, every piece of farm work I did was taught to me by these people of special status, born in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, from all over the country.

I had a high-school friend in Shanghai who wasn't sent down, and the two of us wrote to each other constantly. He read an enormous number of books — I remember that in 1967 he was reading Hegel's Encyclopaedia Logic (《小逻辑》) and reading Schopenhauer, and he and I got on especially well. Through that whole youth neither of us ever wrote anything; we only wrote letters. Once he wrote back and said, you're someone who could write fiction. But there really was no environment for it — the dormitory was all double bunks, seventy or eighty people sleeping in it, terribly noisy; letters were the most you could manage. I told him the same thing, that he could certainly write fiction, and neither of us wrote a thing. There were a few young people on the farm who liked to write, but supposedly, to submit a piece to the Heilongjiang Daily, you needed a political vetting and a letter of introduction from the local revolutionary committee — with my bad class background, the idea was out of the question. It wasn't until I returned to Shanghai eight years later, and my life settled down after 30, that I began to write at all. That friend went to the United States in the early 1980s. He was an exceptionally bright person and never wrote anything, which, thinking about it now, really is a waste.

Because I'd spent seven or eight years living up there, I always felt my roots were in the northeast. I wrote a few stories on that material in 1985 and 1986, and in 1988 I was transferred to Shanghai Literature, because I'd taken part in the Writers Association's "First Young Writers' Study Class" and written a prize-winning story there. Sun Ganlu was in the same class; by the time he joined he had already finished Visiting Dreamland (《访问梦境》). I handed in nothing, right up to the final stage, when I stayed up all night and wrote a story about a coffin-maker in the northeast. The custom in that place was that if someone was expected to die that night, word went out to have a coffin made. They finished this one overnight, and then early the next morning the patient revived. So the plain white-wood coffin sat outside the carpenter's shop, drying in the sun. After that nobody in the camp died for a long time, and the coffin, weathered by wind and rain, grew uglier and uglier — the boards gapping, like a mouth baring its teeth — and some people even kept chickens and ducks in it. But every old person in poor health came around in secret to look at it, because the rule was that whoever died next would have to use it. In the end two old people were on the verge of death at the same time, and both just lingered without dying. That's where the story stops.

A young person should try all kinds of things, learn the stories around them, and find a way to write

After I got to Shanghai Literature I wrote a bit more — what you'd now call "youthful writing," though I only started in my thirties. Take Square Island (《方岛》): the wheat-cutting contest of 1963, a table set up in the middle of a wheat field a kilometer away with a day's food ration on it, and whoever cut his way to the table first could eat as much as he liked. I heard that from my Cantonese master when I was learning to lay brick. He said that if he'd been from Shanghai or Beijing he'd never have survived to now; he simply couldn't keep up with the other wheat-cutters, all of them younger than he was. But he'd discovered there were plenty of newborn mice in the wheat field, and to his eyes back then they looked like Cantonese har gow, pink and tender. He collected them in a cloth sack and ate them on the sly every day, swallowing them alive.

After I became an editor I wrote very little. I'd gone to the northeast at 16, and in my writing I turned into a northeasterner — I always had that misconception, until in recent years, writing fiction, I realized that although I had labored in the northeast for seven or eight years, I never encountered the real Chinese countryside. What I got was a "special education": it was those people of special status who gave me my material, and I never really experienced "re-education by the poor and lower-middle peasants." Meanwhile I had all but lost touch with that friend in America. He became reclusive after going abroad, and I kept hoping he would write fiction, but he went into business instead and ran into trouble there, and when he came to Shanghai he basically stopped contacting me. Once I told him again and again that I had nothing to do with his business and that he could come to me for anything. Still we lost touch, until 2015, when I won an award and one afternoon saw a letter at the reception desk. It was from him — I knew his handwriting at a glance. Inside was a single line congratulating me on the prize, with no signature. He no longer wanted contact of any kind, this friend I had written to constantly through my whole youth.

So I think a young person really must try all kinds of things, learn the stories around them, and find a way to write. Looking back now, I regret it: in the northeast I knew so many men born in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, and I never recorded their stories, I just listened to them talk. Several of the Cantonese masters were later granted amnesty — in 1974, I think, when Kuomintang officers from the county and regimental level up were released, lined up together, picked up their identical travel bags and left.

I always felt my roots were in the northeast — which is probably my own forgetting, something I only woke up to long after writing all of it. The life I know best is the Shanghai I lived in before I was 16. One's teenage years matter so much to any writer, and yet I had to wait until nearly 60 to write Blossoms, about Shanghai. Let me read the ending of this piece of "youthful writing," The Legend of the Undying Phoenix (《不死鸟传说》), published in Harvest in 1993.

"By the time we reached the top of the gentle slope... at that moment we suddenly thought of Dachun, thought of Meifang and Gendi, and felt an extreme cold, felt our minds go to pieces, and looking at the small, doll-like child not far off, at that patch of bright fresh red on its body, all we could do was murmur to ourselves: what happened here? What on earth happened here?!"

Tang Nuo

Literary writing is probably not a trade for the precocious

Let me talk about my own experience as a writer. I'm really a failed example. If the writing had turned out better this could have been a decent, encouraging story, but given how it turned out I'm the negative case, and I'll tell you about that too.

I was about 14 when I stopped doubting that I wanted to live in the world of writing, the world of words, and I began writing with any real self-awareness at around 18, after finishing high school, together with a group of friends including Zhu Tianxin and Zhu Tianwen. Through a chance opportunity we started a literary magazine, so from my freshman year I was going to college and running a magazine at the same time, writing consciously for the first time.

But the first work I'd call my own came when I was 45. It's called The Story of Characters (《文字的故事》). It's badly written, but it at least counts as a complete work — with roughly 27 years in between. I kept writing during those 27 years too, and I kept none of it, so I'm not a good example. When it comes to youthful writing, my results are extremely, extremely poor.

I've thought about why. Beyond the fact that my own gift developed slowly and I was a bit dull at learning, I've also found myself an excuse, which may actually be true. I think there's a basic fact underneath this: literary writing is probably not a trade for the precocious. I tend to believe literature is a profession, and a profession takes time — a long stretch of study and training. Any profession, to amount to anything, to reach the point where you can practice on your own, needs a certain amount of time. Especially now, when literature's professionalism counts for less and less — in Taiwan at any rate — I've gradually come to insist on the more professional side of it.

That goes double this year, since the Blancpain-Imaginist Literary Prize is focused on fiction. Poetry is different: as Liang Wendao mentioned, Rimbaud, even Byron, Shelley, Pushkin, all peaked relatively early. I once wrote an essay on this. Poetry's precocity may come from how self-centered it is; even that "I" has to carry a devouring quality, a very domineering way of presenting itself, which suits the state a young person is in, physically and psychologically. So poetry peaks quite early. Fiction doesn't. The "I" of fiction isn't like that — as I see it, it's a lowercase "i," and that "I" has to be placed inside time, placed among a crowd; it has to live alongside the world, has to know and understand a great many things, has to discover them one at a time, fairly calmly. It needs to feel, to take in, to verify, to understand. So in my view fiction's peak doesn't come early. It should come after 40, after 45, and only then does a writer gradually reach the height of his writing. There are always exceptions, of course, but broadly that's the shape of it.

Literature is the loneliest trade — even Borges's youthful work was bad

Taiwan has a lot of literary prizes, and so does the mainland; I welcome them. The great value of a literary prize is that we need more than one system of reward and punishment, because if no other system is added, in the end only one is left — the market, deciding everything by numbers. So a literary prize gives us, beyond the market's numbers, a way to appeal to the professional standards of literature. I think that matters.

But here's what I want to say. A few months ago, when I sat on a fiction jury in Shanghai with Wang Anyi, I remember her saying that an occasion like this is not, after all, the basic reality of literature — it's a carnival. Literature is not this flourishing, not this lively; most of the time it is extremely lonely. By Taiwan's standards it's an extremely hard-up trade as well. I'm afraid young people will misread scenes like this one as literature's normal condition. Most of the time, literature is only you and the thing you are writing. García Márquez once said this is the loneliest of trades, and he described that loneliness not as being on a desert island but as a man who has fallen into the water, fighting the sea and the waves with only himself — nobody can save you. That is literature's normal condition.

My own youthful writing is terrible, and producing it would be bad for everyone's health, so let me tell you two simple things instead, by way of small compensation:

One concerns the Argentine writer Borges. His first book of poems was, by his own account, paid for and printed by his father. Later, once he had properly published a collection of his own, he went from house to house asking people whether they would trade that first book back to him, so he could destroy it.

The other happened in Taiwan. About twenty years ago I had a pointless idea: to put together a collection of first stories, because the people I knew — Zhu Tianwen, Zhu Tianxin, Zhang Dachun — were all early bloomers, famous across the country in their early twenties. I knew where each of their first stories had appeared and which story it was. I wanted their permission to gather those first stories into one book, and I'd even worked out the wording, something like: if you want to write fiction, go ahead and write without fear — look, even they once wrote fiction this bad, so what are you afraid of!

The book never got made, because Zhang Dachun refused to go along. I don't dare say the title of his first story here; if I did, he'd cut ties with me. He has already threatened me about it many times. That is probably the truth about people who write fiction too early. Zhu Tianxin was 17 when she wrote her first story, A Day in Liang Xiaoqi's Life (《梁小琪的一天》) — read today, it's terrible, of course. Zhu Tianwen's was Feigned Sorrow (《强说的愁》), written in her second year at Zhongshan Girls' High School.

Xu Zidong

I was the most ordinary sent-down youth there was, and even I could resist that temptation — why couldn't you?

I've published a dozen or so books, all of them in literary theory and criticism. I've also published a dozen or so short stories, and my achievement in fiction still hasn't had a fair hearing.

The picture in my mind is of walking into the Shanghai Literature building many years ago. I remember it still — a very Western building, with a staircase spiraling down. The others have just talked about the loneliness of literature; let me talk about literature's other side, which can show you what part politics can play in a person's life.

I was already a graduate student at East China Normal University. Shanghai Literature said they had received my manuscript and that it could be revised, which was an enormous honor, because our university had only three members of the Writers Association: Zhao Lihong, Wang Xiaoying and Sun Yong — and I had started writing earlier than any of them.

The first time anyone told me I could write was at 15, when I was sent down to the countryside and reading hand-copied manuscripts. One of them was mimeographed, called A Maiden's Heart (《少女之心》); the other I don't know the title of, but both had been thumbed through until the pages were falling apart, and I don't know who wrote them. What they had in common was that they described breasts and thighs — we read them in the same spirit in which people watch Sora Aoi. Afterward a friend told me the mimeographed A Maiden's Heart was so-so and the other one was better. He said: we could write things like this too. That was the first time anyone said to me, we could write too. Many years later I learned that the book thumbed to pieces was Mao Dun's early novella Disillusion (《幻灭》). We had no respect for it then; we were reading his novel with the eyes you use for pornography, so when I later did research on modern literature, I came to it with a sense of atonement — Mao Dun actually wrote something like that! My point is that we simply didn't understand it at the time.

The second time was serious. Where I was sent down there were, besides the educated youth, cadres who'd come down from Nanchang. One of them knew I had some taste for literature and urged me to write fiction. I did, and then — exactly as Jin Yucheng just described — the Jiangxi Daily actually wrote back to me. I found out later that before that letter was sent there had been a political vetting. They went to my commune to check what sort of person Xu Zidong was, and I passed. My commune's Party secretary came running over, delighted, and said, the Jiangxi Daily wrote to you, didn't it? How did you know? He said, they telephoned us, and we all told them how good you were.

You can't understand this today, but if I had published a short story in 1974, my standing in that commune would have changed completely. Newspapers then had only a few pages, and if I got in it would have filled half a page. But they sent one revision note with it. Put simply, the note wanted my story turned inside out. I had written it as a criticism of the suspension of college admissions and of how helpless sent-down youth were in the countryside, and they wanted the whole thing twisted the other way.

This was one of the larger decisions of my life. I didn't think about it much at the time, and I'm not religious. My worldview hadn't fully formed either, but I had a very plain idea, which I still hold: a person can lie in a lot of places — on a talk show, when courting someone, when doing business — but a person must not, in his own work, tell a lie he knows to be a lie.

So I lost that chance, and I've regretted it bitterly ever since. Otherwise my work would have appeared in Zhaoxia (《朝霞》). You have no idea how much Zhaoxia meant then. I later saw in it the names of many people who are now my friends in the literary world; they had started writing that early, in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, and I missed the chance, so that publishing fiction was pushed back five or six years and my literary standing suffered badly.

I haven't faced many choices like that in my life. Since making that one, I've heard famous people describe that era in similar terms, and I don't believe them. I was the most ordinary sent-down youth there was, and even I could resist that temptation — why couldn't you? Why is it that, faced with an era, people will say things like that for the sake of some benefit? I don't forgive people like that.

I later sent the story to Ba Jin, and he actually wrote back. His reply said: I have a relative who edits a magazine; I don't do criticism myself, so I'll pass this to him — thank you for trusting me, Comrade Xu Zidong. Even after the Cultural Revolution, when an editor wrote back to me, they still wanted revisions.

I haven't written much in my life, but the good thing is, none of it needs much revising

I later wrote a story that ran in Baihuazhou (《百花洲》) and paid over 120 yuan. A year of work in the countryside, on top of my food ration, earned me 76 yuan. A story took a week and brought in over 120. That completely changed my view of life — as Yan Lianke said, this is work worth doing. But there's a catch: writing fiction isn't such a private matter.

Later I wrote a story based on something real. A lot of us were fond of one of the sent-down young women. Her older brother lent us The Count of Monte Cristo and Romain Rolland — a very cultivated man, who played the piano. And yet he introduced his own sister to a commune official, to work at a guesthouse. In our eyes that was a kind of corruption. So I wrote a story called Poor Thing (《可怜的人》), in which the protagonist is furious at the brother. How could you do that to your own sister, knowing what you were putting her into?

Just after the story came out, I saw in the same issue a story by Wang Anyi called A Circuit Around the Commune (《绕公社一周》), which also featured a sent-down young man very good at working the system and pulling strings. But where my protagonist despises that kind of man — my own honest feeling — Wang Anyi's protagonist envies him. My classmate Wang Xiaoming came to me and said: Zidong, Wang Anyi's story goes deeper than yours. The character is awful, trimming his sails to the wind, giving up his principles for a small advantage — but a protagonist who despises him, Wang Xiaoming thought, was too shallow; the protagonist ought to envy him. That's how people like that cut my path in literature short, right there. It left a very deep impression on me.

My teacher, Qian Gurong, once said something I've never forgotten: "I haven't written much in my life, but the good thing is, none of it needs much revising." Consider that from the 1950s, when he published On Literature as the Study of Humanity (《论文学是人学》), through the 1960s, when "On the Characters in Thunderstorm" (《〈雷雨〉人物谈》) had the Shanghai Writers Association holding meetings for 67 days, criticizing them day after day — after all those meetings, the essay went unrevised. So the one thing I've managed to learn from my teacher is this: what you write may not be good and may not be much, but it also won't need revising later.

Gao Xiaosong

"Craft" is the door; "art" is the demon behind it

I certainly have no regrets about my youthful work. If I regretted it, that would be getting the better of a deal and still complaining, because the first song I ever released was You, My Deskmate (《同桌的你》). Everything I have today, including the nerve to stand here, started there. My aim at the time wasn't to release anything or make an album; it was to sing to girls. And I hit my target every time — every performance got me somewhere — so no, no regrets. But honestly, looking at it now, why does every single line end in "you"? As lyrics, it really does look crude.

Artistry is actually two things. One is craft, which is the professionalism Tang Nuo was talking about. The other is art — the world inside you. Do you actually have that plot of land in there? What has grown on it? Let me put the two in a picture, since I feel it clearly when I write: craft is the door, and art is the demon behind the door.

When you're young the door is open only a crack, and your craft really isn't up to much, so the demon has to squeeze out through that crack. A big demon can't get through, so what comes out are small demons, all colors of them. Later, once you've become a professional, the crack opens wider and wider, and a problem appears: there is no demon that big inside you anymore. So the creative process passes through a very painful stage: the door has finally opened, and where's the demon? Your craft is excellent, and you sit there with nothing to write, because there's no demon in you.

I tend to use poetry as my example, since that's the trade I'm in. A lot of people wonder why some musicians' first album is so good and it's downhill from the second. In fact the craft on that first album was quite crude; later, once you have all the professional equipment and are quite professional yourself, the door opens and you find nothing inside. That's painful. You still have to go looking for the demon — where is this demon of mine? So a lot of people come down after that, myself included.

Of course, if you happen to live through a particularly unlucky era, or unlucky things, that big demon may break through the ground. The day before yesterday I was opening my nonprofit library in Hangzhou, and Mai Jia came to lend his support. He said he'd noticed something: a whole cluster of great writers were born in 1899 — Borges, Hemingway — why? Because they were young right at the time of the First World War, he said, and a mind that young is naturally full of sunlight, but in that war ten million died and twenty million were maimed, and the wound to the mind was severe. That's when the demon grew. So if you can't find yours, don't worry — it will come, by way of all sorts of things.

García Márquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores, a great demon with no teeth left

I translated García Márquez's last novel myself. I translated the title as Willows Planted Long Ago (《昔年种柳》); it's also translated as Memories of My Melancholy Whores (《苦妓回忆录》). If I hadn't been in prison with nothing to do, I could never have gotten through it. There I was with time to spare, so much time that I first made myself a pen, slowly. They didn't issue pens inside — you got a refill only — so I took writing paper, smeared it with the morning porridge and rolled the refill up into a pen. There was no table or chair either, so I sat on the plank bed holding that pen, wondering how this novel had come to be written the way it was. It was only on my third or fourth reading that I slowly began to feel what it was: that for García Márquez the door no longer existed at all, everything was open, but the great demon, the demon that could still devour people, had no teeth left.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was written by García Márquez before he turned 40, and you can feel that the demon inside him then could swallow the world; reading it, you feel swallowed yourself. By the end, at 77, when he wrote Memories of My Melancholy Whores, the door stood wide open, and lying inside was a demon with breath going out and none coming in, no teeth left, no claws left — but that demon's heart was full of a grief it had never had before, and perhaps one especially cloudy old tear, still crusted at the corner of its eye. I read it many times before I understood a little, and only then did I begin to translate.

I'm 48 now. From when I started writing in my teens until today, I can still faintly feel that whole painful process. When craft and art cross at exactly the right density of energy — when the crack in the door is exactly right, when the demon's strength is exactly right, and it comes out through that crack — that happiness can't be replaced by anything, and it can't be reproduced. Every time someone asks how you wrote something, you can't reproduce the crack in the door, or the demon that was inside you then. It may have been vivid at the time, brilliantly colored, and you have no way to restore it.

What Else They Said

Q: What do you hope for from young writers?

Yan Lianke: It's very simple. Whatever talent young writers need in order to write today, they already have more of it than any of us sitting here, more even than the previous generation of writers. But there is one thing: what is real? That is what they have to learn to tell apart. As Xu Zidong said, we live in an era full of enormous lies — or you could say the lies themselves are an enormous truth. Which is the real one? That is what young writers have to see through and tell apart.

Q: Do you feel that the young people who came up after the 1990s, who haven't been through anything, can write anything worth reading? Do you feel a little sad on behalf of our generation?

Xu Zidong: Having lived through that era makes it harder to speak from the heart, and that is the most important legacy the era left us.

I was talking about this with Wang Anyi recently, about the Cultural Revolution, and I thought her answer was excellent. She said: it's not that we want to write about it, it's that there's no choice. We happened to live in that time, we grew up in it, we ate and slept in it, so of course we write about it.

Really, writing still has to face a person's life, a person's own character, the most basic facts of being human. That matters no less than your marriage or your love. So the people of every era have their own demon. Don't assume you don't have one. Every era's people do.

Q: People born in the 1990s have one enormous goal — buying a car, buying an apartment — and to get there we cut into the time and even the energy we have for eating, drinking, sleeping and reading. This is a reality we have no choice but to face. Do any of you have a solution?

Jin Yucheng: I can only offer one suggestion, or rather point out where those born in the 1990s and 1980s differ most from us. They are the center of the household, whereas in our generation, born in the 1950s and 1960s, there were a lot of children in every family and the parents paid us hardly any attention; if anything, we had to keep an eye on what our parents were doing, on what was happening to them. That's an enormous difference.

When a writer cares only about himself he can still produce good work, but as a general rule you ought to pay attention to your surroundings, to your elders. Literature is always, in a sense, a looking back. Read enough of that and you won't end up writing only about bunk beds, campus stories, stories about your closest friends. There is a backdrop behind the stage, layer upon layer. Even a grandmother, a grandfather, someone like that, a few lines here and there, and the depth of field is completely different.

Liang Wendao: The way I see it, when an entire generation wants to buy a car and an apartment, that in itself is a formidable collective experience.

Q: What do you think a writer's responsibility is in this era? Is there anything about this era that particularly worries you?

Jin Yucheng: Every writer thinks differently, but a writer's basic task is to write down the world as he sees it, the world as he feels it. It's a very simple thing. As for what worries a writer, speaking only for myself, I don't think literature is such an important thing. Borges put it this way: it's enough that literature moves you. It gives you something to be moved by, gives you diversion — the model of One Thousand and One Nights, all kinds of stories. So a writer can explain the world in very grand terms. But speaking for myself, I should write down what I know, keep my posture low; and my worries about the world are just an ordinary person's worries.

Photos of the guests courtesy of Imaginist; cover image from Unsplash.