Ten Months After Beijing Normal University Fired Him, Scholar Shi Jiepeng Has a New Book on Classical Poetry | Interviews

Lately I've been thinking about two things: how to make a living, how to live better. And how I can write something more meaningful, something useful to other people.

The scholar Shi Jiepeng has published a new book of lectures on classical poetry, My Longing Heart: Twenty Lectures on Classical Poetry by Liang Huiwang (《悠悠我心——梁惠王古诗词二十讲》). The title comes from The Book of Songs, and his editor chose it. The editor had first given Shi Jiepeng a few titles to pick from; the one they settled on was not among them.

Shi Jiepeng let the editor name the book. He knew that "the editor in charge thinks this one sells better."

Two weeks after going on sale, My Longing Heart had been reprinted twice and stood third on Amazon's new-releases chart. One of the editors on the book said sales beat their forecast, and that readers were hungrier for poetry than anyone had expected.

Shi Jiepeng had written classical ci lyrics for his novel The Chu Tomb (《楚墓》); friends liked them and pushed him to write more of them on their own. Later the state began promoting the study of classical literature, and poetry courses multiplied online. Another friend, who was running online courses at the time, said he wanted to turn Shi Jiepeng's poetry lectures into a full course on the web. Shi Jiepeng said yes without much thought, and the two friends went to work making it happen.

But the more important background may be this: at the time, Shi Jiepeng had lost his job and had nothing to do.

So the course took shape. Besides the poetry lectures, Shi Jiepeng also taught short online courses — eight lectures on the Records of the Grand Historian (《史记》) and one on Chinese characters. Once the courses were up, he wrote a 10,000-character script for every class. The book collects them.

Beijing Normal University dismissed him in July 2017.

The dismissal notice said Shi Jiepeng had for a long time published mistaken views online and caused a bad effect in society, and that the university was therefore letting him go. A longer passage in the notice said Shi Jiepeng had "frequently continued to post improper remarks through his personal Weibo and WeChat official account, remarks out of step with mainstream values and unbecoming of a Beijing Normal University teacher. Shi Jiepeng overstepped the red line of ideological management, breached political discipline, and did great damage to the university's reputation."

This resembles a recent news story: the Party committee of Zhongnan University of Economics and Law issued a document saying that Zhai Juhong, an associate professor there, had "broken classroom discipline in class, taught erroneous views and made improper remarks, producing a mistaken influence." According to the document, on April 25 Zhai Juhong, 49, was teaching "the structure and function of government" in the course Principles of Political Science to the 2017 first-year undergraduates in public administration, and "departed from the textbook, the syllabus and the courseware, and explained the amendment of our country's constitution incorrectly." Zhai Juhong also "described our country's state-owned enterprise property system incorrectly, spoke irresponsibly about our country's people's congress system, and gave a one-sided account of the political systems of other countries and regions, producing a negative influence among students." The Party committee expelled Zhai Juhong from the Party, issued a formal demerit, moved Zhai Juhong out of teaching and research posts, and asked the certifying authority to revoke Zhai Juhong's teaching license.

And so Shi Jiepeng was out of work. Until then he had been an associate professor at Beijing Normal University's Institute of Ancient Books and Traditional Culture, where he had worked for 20 years, ever since finishing graduate school at Peking University.

Two weeks later, Shi Jiepeng's official account recorded what losing the job had done to him.

"For the past few days I could only get to sleep on estazolam. Plenty of people told me to stop, and looked up the drug for me. One look and it really did give me a fright: liver damage, addiction, a higher risk of depression, hallucinations in your sleep... God, I can't take this. The cat still needs me, after all! A friend of mine is a very good man, but the other day he sent me a line: 'I hear you actually like Lu Xun?' I could dimly see the half-smile on the other side of the screen, that look of despairing at someone who won't shape up. I said: 'Let's agree to differ.' He agreed. It is hard for anyone who has been through the world not to like Lu Xun. The more you have been through, the more you like him. The more contemptible people you have met, the more you like him. But next time, you still walk into the wall."

Five months later, on the last day of 2017, Shi Jiepeng wrote on his official account: "For me, 2017 was a nightmare of a year, and I don't want to look back on it. If a change of year could change your luck, then I hope this last handful of ash hurries up and burns out. Good riddance; I won't see it off. I'd like to piss on it right now, put it out, and step straight into the new year. But what will the new year be? Will this world get better? I'm on the pessimistic side, so I stand here holding up my trousers, not sure which way to turn."

Early in 2018, the Institute of Oriental Culture in Japan invited Shi Jiepeng to come as a visiting scholar. He went to Tokyo with his wife and daughter.

My Longing Heart had its launch event on April 21. Shi Jiepeng landed in Beijing on the evening of April 18. When the event was over, he would go straight to the airport and fly back to Tokyo.

At the event, Shi Jiepeng said his favorite poet is in fact Li Shangyin. Neither the book nor the course has a lecture on him. Giving Li Shangyin a lecture of his own would have taken time he didn't have, and putting Li Shangyin in with other poets would, Shi Jiepeng felt, be a desecration.

Most of the time, Shi Jiepeng says whatever comes into his head. When he takes a question through from beginning to end, you can still hear the teacher in him. Not in the sound of his voice: it is that when he talks at length he lifts his pitch slightly and takes a breath at the same moment. It looks natural and fluent, and a little laborious. It is a habit built out of practice. Twenty years of teaching gave it to him, and he could not drop it if he tried.

One thing has plainly changed. He now has a phrase he uses often — politically incorrect. It usually turns up like this: "If I keep going like this it'll get politically incorrect." In private he trusts you and says a few sentences more, and on his official account he writes fairly openly too. In a public setting he stops there and leaves the rest unsaid.

Q: QDaily

Shi Jiepeng: author of My Longing Heart: Twenty Lectures on Classical Poetry by Liang Huiwang, The Village Head Xiao Wu (《亭长小武》) and The Household Register (《户口本》)

Q: The online store page for My Longing Heart introduces you like this: "Shi Jiepeng, a scholar of classical philology and a historical novelist, pen name Liang Huiwang, once taught at a prestigious university. On a rich foundation in paleography, historical phonology and classical poetry, he tries to connect past and present, restore the settings of ancient lives and probe the essence of human existence, full of compassion for people; with the heart of a child, he says what no one has said before; he does not deal in grand concepts, only in basic human nature; he does not defer to the verdicts of earlier scholars, only judges what a poem achieves; he does not preach hidden moral meanings, only appreciates the art itself." What goes through your mind reading that? What would you correct?

Shi Jiepeng: "Once taught at a prestigious university" — that I'd correct. Why would I want to hang on a famous school's name? There's no need for it. Being confident in myself is enough; I don't need a university to lend me any shine.

Then there's "a body of work as tall as the man." First, I don't have one. Second, that expression has turned into standard-issue language, and it's stale by now. There's no need for it, because it carries no information. It means nothing. And the rest — "tries to connect past and present" — no need for that either. It's a hackneyed phrase. If I were writing about myself, I wouldn't use sentences like that.

The rest is all right. "The heart of a child," "does not deal in grand concepts" — those are good.

Q: You've said you like Liu Zhenyun. His novel Someone to Talk To (《一句顶一万句》) was just adapted into a play. What do you make of the novel?

Shi Jiepeng: The first time I read it, I thought his language was very good. It's plain, a little like folk literature, but unlike Zhao Shuli he carries some humor in it. And unlike Mo Yan — there's nothing much to look at in Mo Yan's language — Liu Zhenyun's language reaches its peak in Someone to Talk To.

Others may disagree, but to me the great virtue of his fiction is that the language has character, especially in that book. His later novels resemble it, which I'd guess has something to do with his subject matter: he writes about the Republican era, which has a more farcical feel. It reads a bit like Zhao Shuli's fiction; that angle and that plain way of telling a story were his peak, and he never wrote anything that good again.

I've read a lot of his novels. Ground Covered with Chicken Feathers (《一地鸡毛》) is very good too; I read it in high school. He published it in the late 1980s. Hometown, Yellow Flowers Under Heaven (《故乡天下黄花》) is a failure — he was probably under the influence of magic realism. But he isn't a scholarly writer, or a philosophical one, and when he pushes for more weight of thought, he can't manage it. Hometown is about land reform, and it's no better than anyone else's. His two most recent novels don't stand out either, because they read too much like strings of gags — the material all comes off the internet.

Q: I notice you say exactly what you think.

Shi Jiepeng: I say what I have to say, straight out. I don't run anyone down either. What's good is good; what I think is bad, I say is bad. I don't want to please anyone or flatter anyone. The truth is there's a wire missing in my head — I'll tell you, I can't feel where the red line is. Sometimes I really don't know. So, back on that question about what's stale, I said a moment ago that if I kept going it would get politically incorrect. At most I know the line is somewhere over there. And it's possible that what I take for the red line isn't a red line anymore — it's close to a line you die on. That's possible too.

Q: But you still think it's better this way.

Shi Jiepeng: It is better. But society is a vicious place, and I didn't know that before. I'm not out looking to cross that line, of course. I just think this is how a person ought to talk. Why be so false? I never imagined it would offend so many people. So I've ended up where I am now, which feels rather unfair. It's that missing wire.

Q: There's a poem in this book whose reading people argue about, and you wrote one line: "We have brains of our own; we do our own analysis." When did you pick up that habit — using your own brain, doing your own analysis?

Shi Jiepeng: Since... it must be... I'd guess it's buried in my subconscious. I've gone against people since I was small. When my parents remember me as a child, they say, ah, that boy wouldn't do as he was told.

My wife still throws it at me, because my daughter is the same way now: she contradicts you, and whatever you tell her to do, she won't. My wife says it's my family's bad genes. I denied it. Then she asked my family — my younger sister, my mother — and they said the same thing. It really is inherited. I do think there's a genetic factor.

So that contrary streak as a child makes you disbelieve everything people tell you; you resist without thinking. Later I asked myself why I was resisting. I had to find a reason for it — I couldn't just call it an instinctive reaction, which would be pointless. So you think it through, and you find that many people say wrong things, that many people talk without using their heads.

Whatever comes up, you have to analyze it yourself. My readings differ from other people's, partly by nature, partly by thinking. Taking whatever others say, whatever others preach — that won't do.

So whatever I run into, I analyze it myself. That's tied to my nature, of course. With many poems, what I feel isn't what other people read into them, so why would I copy them?

Q: What's the earliest act of deliberate defiance you can remember?

Shi Jiepeng: Some absurd things come back to me now. For instance, as a boy I would walk past a factory that had a cinema, and it often put up posters. One day I saw them putting up posters for two films.

The afternoon tickets were cheap, and as if something had taken hold of me I went straight off and bought a ticket for the two o'clock show. I had class that afternoon. It never crossed my mind — I was completely off the social order, off the rails.

Then, ticket in hand, I asked my teacher for leave, telling him I was going to a film that afternoon. Even now I wonder whether there was something wrong with my head. How does a schoolboy buy a movie ticket and then tell his teacher about it?

The teacher was amazed. He said, whoever heard of such a thing? No, absolutely not. I ignored him and went anyway. Afterwards I was terrified — what do I do if they won't let me into class tomorrow? Of course they wouldn't.

And sure enough they didn't. They made me bring my parents in. Once my parents came, I got a beating.

So I wonder whether that rebelliousness is just being unlike other people, or being warped, or what. I can't say. That's what I was like as a boy. There seem to have been several more like it. Now that I'm grown, I think I'm a bit more normal. And I do wonder whether what I did then was wrong.

Q: I'd assumed it would be something about an absurd environment — that you sensed something was wrong in it and pushed back by instinct. I thought that would be the reason.

Shi Jiepeng: Feeling instinctively that something was wrong about that kind of environment... For instance, when I was small there were the production teams. My uncle went into the river to swim and to catch fish. Then some militiamen turned up, each with a red armband on his arm, leveling rifles at the river and ordering everyone out of the water. I found it terrifying, and I hated it on instinct.

We were raised on that patriotic education, so (we knew) you weren't allowed to catch the production team's fish. But I felt the atmosphere was terrifying, that this was wrong, that living in a society like that would be dreadful and sad. I wonder if that counts as rebellion. I think it may.

Because most people wouldn't see anything wrong with it. But I felt it was wrong, instinctively. I felt this was a frightening society. Not a good one. And the red armbands were frightening — there was a killing chill in the air.

Q: When was that?

Shi Jiepeng: Five or six. It was the late Cultural Revolution — I was born in 1971, so it would be around 1976. The film came later, because I was already in primary school, second or third grade. Second grade, so eight or nine.

Q: In this book you write: "As a child I walked in the country outside town and saw one frightening grave after another in the wild grass, and imagined that the bones inside them had also lived in this world for decades; if they could write, every one of them would be a history of literature." How old were you? It's startling that a child seeing graves would think of such things.

Shi Jiepeng: Seven or eight, I'd guess, because my father lived out on the edge of Nanchang, in the countryside. My mother and I lived in the city. Every winter holiday he made me come out to the countryside on my own, and to get there I had to take a small path. Every time I passed that spot I ran for my life. And I would think: the people in these graves lived too. I didn't use the phrase "history of literature" then, but I thought that if each of them could describe their life, their lives would turn out to be very full.

I'm a timid person, and I still am. Sometimes I don't dare watch a horror film — after watching one I don't dare sleep at night and have to leave the light on. I hardly ever stay in hotels these days, because I'm frightened. I'm afraid. Something in my head must be broken. How can a person be this timid? I truly can't understand it. It causes me a great deal of trouble.

I don't even go to academic conferences. Why? Because conferences aren't what they used to be: two people used to share a room, now everyone gets a room to himself. Hahahaha. So I usually find an excuse and stay away.

Q: I thought you weren't easily frightened, because I saw on your official account that after you went to Japan, you'd look up specialist websites to find which houses near you had had a death in them.

Shi Jiepeng: I like horror films, and I'm afraid of them. There's a kind of pleasure in it, and I really am frightened. I don't know why. It seems to be human — plenty of people like horror films and are scared of them. But probably none of them as badly as me. I'm really too scared to sleep. It's been like this since I was small, and I never thought I'd still be like it grown up.

Sometimes I wonder how people lived in ancient times: there was no electric light, so how did they get through the long nights? Strange. I get frightened. I'm very afraid of the dark. So in a hotel I sleep with the light on. Such a nuisance, isn't it. So I take a piece of clothing and cover my head with it. I can't fall asleep with the light on, so I cover my head. Then my mind starts running: what if I saw a ghost, how terrifying would that be?

That's how I think. It may be an illness, something pathological. But I don't know which illness. I suspect it is one, because it isn't quite normal.

Q: You were thinking that way at seven or eight, and the direction of that thinking has to do with literature and history. Looking at it now, would you say that connection is something you worked out afterwards, or was there something "fated" in it — that thinking that way as a child led you to the work you went on to do?

Shi Jiepeng: Because I'm probably a fairly emotional person. Whenever I see someone — beggars, say — they never expected to end up as beggars when they were born, and their parents didn't bring them into the world wanting them to suffer like that. I often put myself in their place and think about their lives; I find them pitiful. They have been through a great deal too, and their inner lives may be very rich. They just can't put it into words.

Q: What sort of child were you at seven or eight, that you'd think this way — wondering what they had all been through? Had you been through a lot yourself at that age?

Shi Jiepeng: A rather sensitive child, I should think. My memories of that time are very full, very clear. That's why The Household Register has so many details in it. Even my own family said, how do you remember all this odd stuff.

I remember my childhood very clearly; it's adulthood I can't remember clearly. It may be a matter of temperament — I like to let my mind wander. They used to say I wrote characters in the air with my hand, though I don't remember that. Anyway, not a very normal person, and a bit stubborn. My younger brother and sister aren't like this; I'm probably quite unlike them.

At seven or eight, life was hard for me, and painful. I was born in '71, when China was desperately short of everything, and you felt that poverty at its worst. Others were poor too, but they didn't think about it so much. That has to do with my temperament, of course, and with what I went through.

My mother grew vegetables and my father grew rice, and they quarreled every day. Watching it hurt. Their bitter lives had ground them down until they couldn't control their feelings. I think most married couples were like that back then. Shortage made one person after another unwell in the mind; I believe most Chinese people at that time were not quite right.

Including something a friend told me later. As a boy he suddenly heard screams next door like a pig being slaughtered: the neighbor had strung his three children up from a roof beam and was thrashing them, exactly like a scene in a film. And this friend himself once angered his own mother, and she took a hot iron and burned him with it.

None of this was normal, but back then we saw it constantly and nobody thought it abnormal. So I feel Chinese people then were all a little sick. That's just my own feeling, mind you.

Q: I've been reading what you've written lately about your life in Japan. What did you go there to do?

Shi Jiepeng: A Japanese university invited me to come as a visiting scholar. (At the Institute of Oriental Culture, working mainly in law and history.) I'd been to Japan two or three times before as a tourist. I think it is what ancient China longed for as the rule of the Three Dynasties: nobody pockets what's dropped in the road, the streets are clean and tidy, government is honest and efficient. People treat each other kindly and politely. The old are provided for, the young are raised. Men have their work, women have their homes. That, I think, is exactly what the sages of ancient China wanted.

And Japan is a country close to Chinese culture. There are differences at the bone, but when you look at Japanese you find that a great many of its words come from Chinese. I work on historical phonology, and its pronunciations are ancient Chinese pronunciations, so from the Chinese you know, you can guess roughly how a Japanese word sounds. That makes you feel close to it.

So you very much want to go and see why they were able to change. Chinese intellectuals were thinking the same thing a hundred years ago, of course. Knowing the reason doesn't help, but I still want to look into it. That's all it is. Besides, I had no job in China anymore, and one place to live is as good as another, so it made no difference to me.

Q: Is the research itself interesting to you?

Shi Jiepeng: I'm interested in it; it's great fun. For a writer, the things he knows well work on him.

I've long wanted to write a thoroughly modern historical novel, one where I could make every detail thoroughly modern. It wouldn't read like a historical novel; it would read like modern life. There isn't a single novel like that in China now. What people write is emperors and generals, scholars and beauties, legends. Nothing that shows a whole society in detail.

But the West has them. They can rebuild the villages of a period. When you write the story, you know where this man lives, who his neighbors are, what each of them does for a living. China doesn't seem to have novels like that.

Take The Name of the Rose, by the Italian writer Umberto Eco, a professor of semiotics. It's set in a medieval monastery, and at its core it is very simple: a detective story. But look at the detail he writes — how the monastery is built, where a man sleeps, how he gets into the library, what he sees in there. You could rebuild the whole thing out of blocks.

Chinese historical novels, detective novels included, haven't done this. I think it has to do with Umberto Eco being a professor himself. It gives him that way of thinking. And for a writer to produce something with real weight, I believe he needs exactly that way of thinking. If you aren't a scholar, you can't develop it.

The work I do — the study of ancient commentaries — tells me how people spoke in ancient times, and how their pronunciation differed from ours. When I read excavated documents, I know what their lives looked like: what they spent in a day, the scenes of their daily life, how their government offices were put together, the whole administrative system, all of it set down in detail. Slowly that builds something concrete in your head.

Being a scholar matters a great deal to me, and to what I'm after in my writing.

Q: When you write on your official account you often turn to "irony," usually at the end of a passage. How do you see that irony?

Shi Jiepeng: It isn't irony anymore; it's self-mockery. Because when you find you can do nothing about society as a whole, when there's nothing you can say, all you can do is laugh at yourself. In the normal run of things this wouldn't be my style. I should be talking more plainly, more truthfully. Now I'm helpless. I can do nothing for society; society can only teach me a lesson. So it can only be a kind of self-mockery. Perhaps it's a form of self-protection too.

Q: What do you think using social networks does to you? I'm not asking specifically about last year's trouble — it's a real question. From your own experience, do social networks change a person?

Shi Jiepeng: They do change you, because social networks let you make many friends, friends of like mind. In the narrow life we had before, you could never have met so many people of lively mind and become friends with them. That's the good part.

But social networks also put the worst people, the vilest people, right in front of your face, and leave you despairing of this world. You didn't know before that there were so many rotten people, so much scum. Then, through social networks, you find that there really are that many, and that they outnumber the decent ones many times over. You may have known it before, but it had never been laid out in front of you so bloodily.

Q: You wrote a year-end summary on your official account saying last year was an especially bad year. I hadn't expected the dismissal from Beijing Normal University to hit you so hard. You write books, so I assumed that without the job you'd still have plenty to do, and it wouldn't matter that much.

Shi Jiepeng: It hit very hard, and it isn't only that, because a lot of hooligans are watching you. Publish a book and they'll go and denounce you for it, and there's no one to hear your grievance. There are many of these people online, and they have a wonderful time while attacking you. Their own lives are miserable. I think the whole of society encourages them. Even the way Sina built its product encourages them. You block someone and he can still send you abusive private messages. So I won't open another Sina account.

Q: Which affected you more — these people, or the school dismissing you?

Shi Jiepeng: The two feed each other. Without this business, Beijing Normal University wouldn't have dismissed me. Though with a different Party secretary at the school, maybe they wouldn't have either.

Q: Hearing you describe this pessimism makes a person uneasy — pessimism doesn't seem like a good thing.

Shi Jiepeng: The pessimism I'm talking about isn't ultimate pessimism. I mean the powerlessness of one person. A life is finite; you may not see it, but it will certainly be seen in time. I think the course of history is settled. But you can't spend a whole lifetime waiting. Within your own lifetime you may feel you won't see it, and that's where the pessimism is. In the end, of course, I'm an optimist.

Q: What have you been thinking about lately?

Shi Jiepeng: Lately I've been thinking about two things: how to make a living, how to live better. And how I can write something more meaningful, something useful to other people.

Q: Useful to other people is what you call meaningful?

Shi Jiepeng: It means that people who read what you write use their heads more. We have brains of our own; we do our own analysis. Many people can't analyze for themselves, and you have to tell them: you have a brain, use it, do your own analysis. That goes for what I write too — argue back at me, by all means.

Nothing is as simple as it looks. Take poetry. In life I meet many people who lack confidence: they find the meaning they get from a poem isn't the meaning the expert gave, and wonder whether they're too shallow. I tell them this is not shallowness.

A famous professor isn't necessarily right. You are perfectly free to think about a poem and interpret it yourself. There's no need to treat him as an authority. Poetry isn't like scholarship: it needs no academic training, it isn't logical or scientific, it's a matter of taste and feeling, something closer to the heart. You can think about it as freely as you like.

Q: What book do you want to write next?

Shi Jiepeng: A novel, a fairly short one. I want to write something with philosophy in it, along the lines of The True Story of Ah Q. A novel that expresses an intellectual's sense of responsibility, something in that direction. Both grounded in daily life and abstract. I've been collecting material all along. But I have a living to make, so I'm still writing other pieces, and I can't get to it yet.

Q: Would you mind being more specific? You said it would express an idea like the one in The True Story of Ah Q — what idea?

Shi Jiepeng: I'll leave that for now. Any further and it gets politically incorrect.

Q: About the "modern historical novel" you just mentioned — in an earlier interview you called it an ancient version of The Household Register. (The Household Register is Shi Jiepeng's autobiographical novel about what he saw and heard growing up in rural Jiangxi.) Let me put it this way: between your Household Register and an ancient one, which matters more? Where would the point lie in writing "an ancient Household Register"?

Shi Jiepeng: Because it can show a great age through one individual — how utterly small one person is inside a great age. That way you can express your own values, and at the same time give the reader something that works on the feelings, because in the present you still can't see what everything happening now means within the age as a whole, while with things from the ancient past you can. And you can build a frame of your own. There's more freedom in it.

Q: Building a frame of your own means invention? That through it you can change the character of that age?

Shi Jiepeng: It is invention, but not changing the character of the age — rather, you can bring out the typical more strongly, and make it more readable. Yu Hua's novels To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, for instance, have been reshaped to a degree, which makes them more readable and more typical. But that's also where their weakness lies: he plays to the ordinary reader.

Q: Does the typicality you're describing include writing that age very concretely?

Shi Jiepeng: It means not writing it vaguely. I wrote the earlier Household Register rather loosely — that is, I wrote it for people who really want to read, people with fuller inner lives. If I'd wanted to be cleverer about it, I should have made it more of a story, set it inside a large narrative frame, and made the story more wretched — more wretched meaning more typical. Because things like that certainly did happen in that era.

But then — take my reading of Chronicle of a Blood Merchant: what I don't like about it is that I find it deliberately trades on misery. It loses some of its truth, turns a bit into caricature. It has its advantages and its costs. It flatters the reader more, and it makes more money and sells better.

Q: When you judge whether a novel satisfies you, is "truth" a very important standard?

Shi Jiepeng: Yes, truth is a very important standard. A novel is an invented thing, but its details still have to be true. Philosophical novels excepted. Many people like Italo Calvino's novels; I don't. Why? Because I think he wants to express an idea and builds a story specially in order to express it, and that doesn't satisfy me. I prefer the classic novels. But Calvino isn't the same as Kafka — Kafka's details, I think, are very real.

Q: A Yi, for instance, says that with a full-length novel out — his most recent one — he can die without regret. For you: first, is writing that important a thing? And second, what kind of work would leave you satisfied and content?

Shi Jiepeng: I'm not satisfied yet. The Household Register is the one more people like; it's made of fragments, and some chapters still satisfy me when I read them now. But I haven't written the one I'd be most satisfied with. What I most want to write now is, first, a novel like an ancient Household Register, and second, a novel like The True Story of Ah Q. I do treat it as a very important thing, but I know I can't hurry — I have to keep working at it.

Q: If you treated your own brain as equipment to upgrade, what would you add or take away?

Shi Jiepeng: What I want most now is memory. I'm learning Japanese and my memory isn't up to it. Nothing else needs upgrading; it's basically adequate. On the makeup of my knowledge, I'd like to add some Western philosophy, some theology, some legal theory. I've read a little. Not enough. And it's hard, because I feel my grounding in Western thought isn't good enough.

Q: Who moves this era forward? Or which kind of people?

Shi Jiepeng: I think progress now rests on the law, because law is what orders a whole society. Our government says so too: rule the country according to law.

What I mean is that we have to let the law uphold this rule of law; then the country will thrive, get better, become civilized and prosperous, and then our country will be a finer place. It's the same in the West — those politicians are nearly all trained in law, because everything takes expertise, and running a country is no different.

Q: What worries you about this society?

Shi Jiepeng: My worries can't be put down on paper. I hope our society becomes more open.

Cover image: a photograph of Shi Jiepeng, provided by Thinkingdom Media.