Qian Jianan, Born in 1988, Is Searching for "a World Literature That Can Cross Borders" | Interviews

She hopes "in this era, in this place, to be neither a mediocre good person nor a mediocre evil one."

In 2016, Qian Jianan quit the job she had held for five years, teaching at Shanghai World Foreign Language Academy, and left for the University of Iowa to take a master's degree in creative writing.

Iowa City is a small town in the American Midwest. The program there, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, is the oldest and the most famous creative writing program in the United States. In 82 years it has turned out a long list of poets, editors, novelists, literary agents and nonfiction writers — and it has also rewritten the history of contemporary American literature and set new standards for it.

Take the Pulitzer Prize. Seventeen winners so far graduated from the program, among them Michael Cunningham, Paul Harding and Tracy Kidder. Twelve more taught there, including Philip Roth, Marilynne Robinson and John Cheever. Iowa's creative writing setup also includes an International Writing Program, which has hosted writers such as Orhan Pamuk, Pai Hsien-yung, Wang Zengqi and Mo Yan.

Unlike most master's degrees, this one requires a single course — the workshop — and leaves the rest of a student's time free for reading and writing. The workshop works like this: each week a student hands in a piece of work, and the teacher leads everyone in discussing and judging it.

"The teacher I had this semester is a very traditional one. He has his rules about writing, and you have to follow his rules. So what you get out of it is his pointed feedback on your text. He'll tell you, for instance, that English prizes concision and force. Language needs rhythm. Language that only delivers information is useless; language has to carry conflict. If two people can't understand each other, that should come out of the language itself. Only then does the language mean anything," Qian Jianan told QDaily.

Before Iowa, Qian Jianan wrote in Chinese and was already a young writer with a small reputation. She was born in 1988 in Shanghai, into an ordinary family of state-enterprise workers. After graduating from the Chinese department at Fudan University in 2010, she spent a year writing copy at a venture capital firm, then went to study at SOAS, University of London. She found she had no real interest in academic work. Money was tight, and in the end she had to drop out, return to Shanghai, teach in a middle school and write on the side.

Her Chinese writing stays close to her own life — Shanghai, state-enterprise workers, and the children of those workers. She has published two books of fiction, The One Who Doesn't Eat Eggs and People Only Grow Old, They Don't Die; translated the novel The Pink Hotel; won the short-story judges' award at Taiwan's China Times Literary Award; and twice reached the final round of the Lin Yutang Literary Prize.

Jin Yucheng, a writer born in the 1950s, once said of her: "The river of life in Jianan's writing is dispirited, plain, unvarnished, many-colored; behind the forceful clashes of her characters, a pity often settles and holds in the heart." A Yi, born in the 1970s, wrote that "Qian Jianan's fiction and her drawings both prove that she is a cold, everyday, unblinking god. Only so does her work get its strange color and its spell." Zhang Yueran, a writer of her own post-1980s generation, called her "without doubt one of the most courageous young writers I have met," whose "writing is restrained and remote."

This semester, Qian Jianan handed in a short story written in English about China's "educated youth" — the young city dwellers sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.

In the story, two of them meet again in Shanghai after 20 years apart and sit down to a meal. Over dinner they look back on their years in the countryside with real longing. Young people today, they agree, have no sense of duty and think only about buying an apartment and a car; in their day, everything was for the country. But their memories of village life in Yunnan do not match. They can't even agree on the name of the prettiest girl in the village. Drunk, they fight over the point and try to call their old team leader to settle it — and, being drunk, dial the wrong number. In the meantime, neither man's life since returning to the city has gone well. The Shanghai host keeps feeling for the money in his pocket and orders carefully, because his wife gave him only 100 yuan for the bill and he doesn't want his old friend to see how tight things are.

"I write only that meal. Everything that came before is explained through it. The story runs on dialogue. What I wanted to say is that there's a gap between the part they think they played in history and the part they play in real life — including how they define themselves now, that streak of heroism, which doesn't match the truth," Qian Jianan said.

The story uses a very Western technique, and still it landed on nothing with her foreign classmates, who had no way into its history. In Chinese, Qian Jianan thinks, it might have worked; in English it was a failed experiment.

That failure points to the question that has nagged at her for two years. Writing in English, she feels she has become a different person: the rhythm and the feel of her language have changed. She also reckons that "60 or 70 percent of my English writing will fail." "In my aesthetics I'm an Easterner. That aesthetic can't just be carried over to their side. How do I get them to accept it? Or do I sacrifice it and fit myself to theirs? I've come to feel I can't throw all of myself away to match their aesthetic, so the difficulty is in the compromise," she said.

The One Who Doesn't Eat Eggs came out this year, but the novel was finished back in 2015. "This novel was an accident. More than two years ago I was applying to the Iowa writing program I'm in now, I had no manuscript to submit, and suddenly I got it into my head to write this book. I had the tireless body of a young person then: I worked in the daytime, wrote the moment I got home at night until two or three in the morning, slept three hours at most, then dragged myself up for the subway. I wrote like that for more than two months, as if my whole body were on fire," she wrote at the end of 2017 in an essay, "My Love and Hate for Shanghai."

She gives two reasons for publishing it only now. First, the novel was written as a release of feeling, and some of the pain in it was too bare. She wasn't happy with that then; now the pain strikes her as more truthful. Second, she thinks the book closes out her Shanghai material. She plans to keep writing in English and to publish nothing in Chinese for a while.

Qian Jianan likes to point out that she is a Gemini, "curious about everything," fond of acting "on a whim." In writing that means finishing a piece in one go, which often leaves her sleeping two or three hours a night for days on end. When nothing comes, she copies out novels she loves by hand and thinks.

To promote the book she traveled from Iowa City to Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Beijing and other cities for a run of events. We met her in a Beijing bookstore. She talks fast, with a lot of energy. Iowa City, she says, is "really very lonely," with "long winters" and hardly any people, and it is easy to sink there — which is why the brief noise and company back home made her so happy.

So far she has published only essays in English, one of which was picked up by The New York Times morning briefing. She has published no fiction at all, and is in no hurry. Fiction, she thinks, needs long grinding, and she doesn't want to fall back on her old road — realist fiction — just to get into print. She asks a great deal of herself; she is not satisfied with her two years at Iowa; she has decided she "must first manage to read 10 hours a day"; and she hopes "in this era, in this place, to be neither a mediocre good person nor a mediocre evil one."

She also believes, without wavering, that there is a world literature that can cross borders. "That is my faith," she said.

Q = QDaily

Qian = Qian Jianan

Young people today have more money than their parents did. Why do they seem to care about it more?

Q: I've read that The One Who Doesn't Eat Eggs grew out of your thinking about your own generation. You said: "Our generation looks freer than our parents'. We live in a relatively steady era, we have more contact with the world, our horizons are wider, we have fewer things to worry about. But what exactly is blocking me? What exactly ties my hands?" The novel is finished now. Looking back coolly, do you have an answer?

Qian: Not much of one. I'm still thinking it through. What we just said is close to a paradox: on the surface we have more freedom and ought to have more choices, but you can see the whole society turning conservative. Broadly, people younger than me should be less short of money than my generation was, and yet they seem to care about money more — they may believe in the power of money more than we did. And not only in China; it's the same worldwide. Ask young people in any city what they want, and they'll tell you: first, make a lot of money; second, be famous.

But my generation, when we were young, really wasn't like that. I didn't believe money could buy everything. I believed plenty of things were more powerful than money. So I keep asking myself: why is it that young people, who have money — at least more than we had — care about money more? I have no answer. It may come from a different childhood. In mine, at least up to high school, everyone was at about the same level. There was no very rich class and no very poor one. Since everyone was much the same, your parents taught you to go after something other than money. Now, with the friends I really talk to, we still want something that goes beyond us. I certainly don't think it's wrong to want money or fame — that's fine. But I think there should also be something beyond that, that a person should have some force to them. What I want for myself is to be "someone who gives other people strength."

But now I see this — and I hope I'm only seeing part of it. A young person in Shanghai has seen the split between rich and poor from birth; the sorting starts in kindergarten. Plenty of people flaunt money, and the very rich are right there in view. So they may come to feel that social inequality, in the part of the world they live in, just means the gap between rich and poor. And if you want equality, the tool for it is money. If that's what's happening, it's a great pity that nothing beyond money counts. We keep quoting Mr. Qian Liqun's phrase, "the refined egoist." In my generation you could already see the first shoots of it. I'm afraid it may be worse in the ones after.

Q: Before writing The One Who Doesn't Eat Eggs you did more than forty interviews — with people whose backgrounds resembled yours, children of two factory workers, families that went through the layoffs, your own age — and with their parents. From those interviews, did you find anything in common among state-enterprise workers and their children? Or were they all different?

Qian: Every one was different, and the regions differed a lot. Take Shanghai. The last story in the book, Old Days on Zhapu Road, came out of that interviewing. In Shanghai, state enterprises were restructured and parents were laid off, but the government at the time had a lot of cushioning policies. The cushion meant that if both parents were laid off by the same factory, one of them would be placed in a job. Shanghai carried that policy out very well, so no child there fell into an abyss over it; nobody was stripped bare, and life could go on. But Shanghai has a strong local flavor, and it brought its own problem: the gap between rich and poor is very visible. Even when survival was never at stake, even when no one was destitute, the very rich were there, and a child felt the drop.

Many other places weren't like that. Take the Northeast. It's an old industrial belt, and everybody was laid off. What followed, for a lot of young people, was that they had to get out, leave the Northeast. You can see the leaving, and the homesickness for the Northeast. The whole atmosphere there is different. In my picture of the Northeast, a man has to keep face. If life goes downhill and cuts into his face, then a lot of things can no longer be said aloud; some part of his dignity has been marked down. That markdown works on the child too. He knows the household now has subjects that can't be raised, that certain things may set off his father's temper — and on top of that he has to leave. So other forces work on him as well.

Q: After finishing the novel and the interviews, how do you see your parents' generation now? How do you see the reform of China's state enterprises and the laying off of workers?

Qian: I understand them better. That may also have to do with my being abroad. I've used this example before. One of the people I interviewed said that as a boy he wanted a Wenquxing electronic dictionary, and his parents refused, on the grounds that he'd play games on it. In fact the games on a Wenquxing were silly and he wouldn't have played them. He was small, and he thought his parents just didn't know what a Wenquxing was, so he explained that it was for learning English. When he was older he understood that they said it because they couldn't afford one and were ashamed to tell him so, and had to find a respectable reason instead. After that interview I started thinking about the things my own parents said to me — including a lot of the friction while I was growing up. There may really have been much they had no way to say. So what's needed is a grown-up version of me, going back to make room for them, to understand what was hard for them. I didn't get it as a child. I get it better now.

Q: The Dog-Headed Bear is the piece you consider your best. Why?

Qian: I like writing about individuals. And I want an individual's story to connect to some larger world, to the times. The Dog-Headed Bear is the attempt at that connection I'm happiest with. Also, legends and myths fascinate me. They aren't necessarily true, but they hold real feeling. The Dog-Headed Bear holds what people in Zhejiang felt about the war against Japan; there's fear in it. I find that interesting. Every generation has its own way of packing this kind of emotional memory. Those things are only the source, of course, but I can keep thinking on top of them every day. Then one day an internal logic appears, a way of telling appears, and I find that marvelous. Because that's what I want to do.

Q: I'm curious — in trying to connect a personal history to the times, to history, where is the hardest part?

Qian: The hard part is that if you force it, it turns strained. The right way, I think, is to dig down into a personal history; dig far enough and you'll certainly reach the times. The difficulty is that writers, Chinese writers especially, want to write something big, want the grand narrative — and if you keep thinking about a grand narrative it's easy to write shallow and stiff. So the question becomes how to join the two. Forcing the join is stiff as well. The best way is still to go back to a personal history, a small story, and dig into it, into that person's psychology. The connection will be there. But where exactly? Will you find it quickly? Not necessarily. It may take time to look.

University creative writing rewrote postwar American literary history

Q: In 2016 you quit a job of five years to study creative writing at the University of Iowa. China has no tradition of creative writing programs, and many people still doubt that a university can produce writers. After more than a year there, do you have a reply to that? You once said: "The doubt is a good thing, and worth the vigilance of people inside the field and outside it."

Qian: I still think the doubt is a good thing — but in the United States it doesn't exist. 2016 was the 80th anniversary of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. It was the first in the world and it has produced many famous writers, so the doubt is gone there. What America now questions is not whether the program can produce good writers, but how workshop culture reshaped the look of contemporary American literature.

The London Review of Books ran a piece on exactly that not long ago. First, America has this tradition: anyone who wants to be a writer or an editor, even a literary agent, goes through workshop training. A great many young literary Americans attend a workshop, or find a way to attend one, so everyone in the literary business has been trained. Their prose, their subjects, their styles all carry the mark of that training, a very strong American style. Individual writers still differ, of course, but contemporary American literature as a whole has something that looks very alike, and that likeness is trained in.

The American workshop has a set of rules, laid down when it was founded. "Show, don't tell" — you have to show, not tell. And plenty more. In any case, write the personal and the concrete, not the abstract and the grand. None of this is native to America; the founder of the Iowa Writers' Workshop instilled it deliberately. There's a whole book about it now, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. They were thinking in Cold War terms at the time. It also rewrote literary history and adjusted where writers stood in it: the "show, don't tell" writers, Fitzgerald for instance, were moved up. Fitzgerald did not stand there at the time. In his own day he was criticized for a lack of politics, for not attending to the wider society.

Why do I say all this reflection in China is good, that China's doubt is good? Because we still argue about it; we haven't settled on a single standard. I'd rather the single standard were not set by university creative writing programs. That would be a problem. I don't think "show, don't tell" is wrong, but the moment it becomes the only rule, the only measure of quality, it goes wrong — you get sameness, you get all the things you now see in America. If China keeps arguing, or keeps other channels open for writers to come up through, that is genuinely a good thing. We'll get different kinds of literature. Otherwise we may narrow too.

Q: At an event for your new book you said, "Now that I write in English, I've become a different person." Can you say more? Different how?

Qian: Very different. In Chinese, the first thing I can be sure of is that I'm Shanghainese. The moment I write, in goes a lot of Shanghai dialect, a Shanghai intonation, a regional character. In English there is no regional character to begin with. And the English sense of beauty isn't ours. Chinese characters are square; they have their own visual beauty. Chinese can be beautiful through repetition, ambiguity, indirection. English can't do that. English is spare, forceful, clear, exact. That's where its beauty is. Writing in English, I feel even the rhythm of my language change. You have to fit their aesthetic. For two years my English has been trained by my teacher in the translation department, and what's come out is entirely the Hemingway kind — very lean language. Otherwise they cut and cut and cut. My language doesn't even feel like a woman's to me anymore; it turns neutral. The voice is different. But my English writing has no settled style yet; it's still an infant, and I don't know what it will grow into. I find that state rather interesting.

Q: And in that sense you said: "I know that 60 or 70 percent of my English writing will fail."

Qian: In my aesthetics I'm an Easterner. I've talked about it with my translation teacher. What I love most is still Tang and Song poetry, or the Eastern thing, the Kawabata thing. My teacher said something to me then: if an American tells me he loves the South, he ought to be living in the South. So, first, this aesthetic of yours can't simply be carried over to their side; they can't take to it. Second, how do you get them to accept your aesthetic? Or do you sacrifice it and fit theirs? There's a problem at every step. I've come to feel I can't throw all of myself away to fit their aesthetic. That's where my difficulty is. It would be a great pity to lose the Eastern aesthetic, and I have no idea at the moment how to make them accept it. I think it's impossible. There has to be compromise somewhere, and the difficulty is in the compromise. But this isn't the moment to give up. There will be a way. A good story should be able to cross borders — like a good song, like every art. So I'm still working at it.

Contemporary American fiction can be summed up as "the story of my grandmother getting cancer"

Q: I've read that you've never liked contemporary American literature, because its field of vision is narrow. Why? Can you say more?

Qian: Right, I really don't like it. I've argued about it a lot with my classmates. One is a Russian-American writer. He sums up contemporary American fiction as "the story of my grandmother getting cancer." Everyone knows what he means. Contemporary American literature is bound up with the workshop's rules of taste. It attends to the very personal, and that isn't quite the Chinese tradition. China has two: yanzhi, speaking what is in you, and zaidao, carrying the Way. With yanzhi, your personal material still has to bear on the times; you have to see something larger through the individual. We still care about that largeness. In America, at least since the workshop rose, there is very little attention to the large. You don't need anything big; take something very small, make it interesting, dramatic, arresting, and that's enough.

Lately America has started to reflect. A few months ago there was an interview in The New Yorker I found very interesting. He said: a great deal is happening in our era. The era is big, and the literature we see is small. We lack work on the scale of the world. He was writing from an American position. So I do think what America makes now is too small. That may not be about American taste alone; it may be about the era. Ours is a narcissistic era. Look through a very narrow thing and what you see is narcissism. American literature used to care about literature's power to build a connection between people, to make someone feel with another. That, I think, is the Western concern with literature in general. Kazuo Ishiguro has said so as well. Ishiguro writes carrying an identity.

America has so many ethnicities. If your story is a Chinese-American story, readers of other backgrounds can take the part they feel with, and through literature come to know you, walk into you, build a link. But the link rests on how much you share. Contemporary American writing now treats the shared part as nothing more than the human baseline — birth, age, sickness, death, feeling. And because the era is narcissistic, everyone attends to smaller and smaller things; if that is all you attend to, there's no attention left for the era, for the wider things, for morality and responsibility. American writers used to write about exactly that. Look at Thoreau, at Emerson — not novels, essays, of course. That generation was thinking about the moral responsibility their generation carried, about what they owed the era, even about stepping outside the self to examine it. You very rarely see that in American literature today. I think it's a problem of theirs.

Q: Yan Lianke gave a lecture a while ago in which he spoke of "bitter coffee literature", which is close to what you're describing.

Qian: There's a lot in Yan Lianke I don't agree with, but on this I do. Not that I think the Russian tradition is right and the American one wrong. The trouble is when one of them becomes the only one, the highest one — when a single tradition becomes the mainstream and no other voice pushes back against it or fills it out. If America has its own thing while everyone can also see a Russian tradition standing there, no problem at all; I think that's very good. But America now resists the Russian thing. It only believes its own is right and the other wrong. That's where the problem is.

Q: Which tradition do you lean toward?

Qian: I think both matter. I think it's fine that young people like experimental writing. What I want is for different voices all to be there. Let there be a mainstream, but I hope the mainstream leaves a gap open — that it doesn't think itself entirely right, doesn't stand as though it held the truth.

Q: Your own writing is still at an exploring stage — is that fair to say?

Qian: That's fair to say.

A world literature that crosses borders exists. That is my faith

Q: Last year you wrote a piece called "How American Literature's White-Straight-Male Tradition Reads Eastern Sensibility." You later said that on rereading it you found you had changed a great deal. What changed? A lot of what it discusses seems interesting to me.

Qian: That title was theirs, not mine. I recently wrote a new piece in English, The Moon Is Beautiful Tonight: On East Asian Narratives. It starts with what I just told you — Kawabata's The Izu Dancer, and how they can't appreciate a passage that seems to go nowhere. Then I get to small and large. Early this year a story in The New Yorker was everywhere: Cat Person. I wrote a piece for them saying Cat Person is written very much like Eileen Chang's Sealed Off. If Cat Person had appeared in China, I said, it might not have drawn anything like that attention. It's well written, but the story is very small. Sealed Off is personal too, of course, but what makes it good is that it has an era behind it. It falls exactly in Shanghai's "Orphan Island" years. You'd expect that in those years the situation would break into the daydreams of Shanghai's small townspeople and make them care a little more about the times. What Sealed Off shows is that once the tram stops, what they care about is still flirting with a stranger, and so on. There's a very cold ground underneath it. Cat Person has none of that. It is contemporary, ordinary, with nothing underneath. That's where I think contemporary American literature has a problem.

Q: In that piece you raised a question a lot of people care about and argue over: is there a world literature that can cross borders? You think there is, right?

Qian: Yes, I think there is. It's my faith. I believe art carries. I believe good music and good painting should break through borders. People appreciate them from different angles, but people in every country and every era can appreciate them. Literature is bound by language, but if a thing is good enough it can have that border-crossing power too. This is only my faith. Because I believe it, I want to keep trying. If I didn't believe it, there would be nothing to do.

Q: A distinction may be needed here, because there's a line of criticism now — I've seen it argued in The New York Review of Books — that a kind of "global fiction" is in fashion, Haruki Murakami and Han Kang and the like: simple language, easy to follow, with none of the flavor of the writer's own country, and so easy to travel. It seems to bear on how writers like Murakami are judged.

Qian: Personally I wouldn't make that choice. I think the choice has problems in it. I'm not aiming at Han Kang or Haruki Murakami, but to imitate this blindly — believing that stripping out the local, or being simple and easy, will help a book travel — is an attempt to make literature shallow and simple. It will find many readers, because you've lowered the entry price of reading; reading something loaded with cultural markers and cultural content is harder.

Second, what's popular now doesn't prove it will be popular in a few decades. Look at the playwrights who were Shakespeare's contemporaries. Some were more popular than he was, and nobody remembers their names. Time settles everything.

Third, they have another big problem: they're easy to imitate. Take Carver. Carver really did produce a lot of very bad writers. There are two Carvers, as we know. One is the Carver cut by his editor, Gordon Lish. The cut Carver's influence is enormous, and the trouble with that influence is that the cut Carver is easy to imitate. Looked at that way, a Murakami stripped of place and lowered in difficulty may be easier to imitate than most — and once something is that easy to imitate and copy, a lot of people end up as copies. No distinct voice comes out of it.

Q: When I see that kind of sorting, though, I also wonder whether it isn't itself a shallow and simplistic reading of Murakami.

Qian: I like some of Murakami's work very much. I love his early collection After the Quake. I love "A Slow Boat to China" too, and the novel South of the Border, West of the Sun. What I like is that he found another way of making you feel the large thing. After the Quake is about the Great Hanshin earthquake, but he never writes the earthquake head on; he comes at it obliquely and makes it entirely personal. The Murakami of that time was still writing something big; he wanted to use that something to connect to the earthquake. I read an interview with him once. He strongly objects to Kenzaburō Ōe's line that we should reflect some essence of Japanese literature — Ōe has criticized Murakami on precisely this point. Murakami thinks that idea is narrow, and that what he writes is a Japanese tradition moving forward and opening out. That is Japanese too. I agree with him entirely. And I agree with his method, which lets you see, inside the Great Hanshin earthquake, something deeper — how it worked on each person's feelings.

I love "A Slow Boat to China" as well, because Murakami explained it. His father fought in the war in China. He said the family kept something like a shrine, and as a boy he watched his father burn three sticks of incense on certain days and bow. His father felt guilt about that war. I think that guilt shows up in "A Slow Boat to China" as the ground color of the story. It's in the exchanges the narrator has with Chinese people, each of which ends a little sourly — as though between people of different backgrounds there were a possible connection he wants to make, and in the end obstacles he can't get through. That is very moving. There is a humane concern in Murakami. And technically he chose a very fresh way of telling, something very much his own. That's the Murakami I like.

But there's a part of him I don't like, and you can see it in the early work already. What is it? He loves a good riff. In After the Quake there's a story called "Thailand," and in it he tells a riff about polar bears: the polar bear is very lonely, meets another only once a year, can mate only that once, and then leaves. He is pointing at the loneliness between people. After that, you notice that Murakami may have realized readers like his riffs — 1Q84 and Killing Commendatore are full of them, and he finds all sorts of ways to work them in. To me that's playing to the audience. We all know there's an age group that loves reading these riffs, copying them out, posting them on social media. But at Murakami's stage he ought to be able to set his own terms. He doesn't need to lean on this. That's the part of him I don't like.

A writer's responsibility is as large as their talent

Q: In your interview with Marilynne Robinson I thought two questions were very well put, so I want to put them to you — with the country swapped. First: how do you see the chasms between people in Chinese society today? Between those with a higher education and those who never went to university, say? Between city and countryside? What would we have to do to listen to each other?

Qian: When I did that interview I wasn't really thinking about America. I was thinking that among the questions I saw Americans arguing about, China is already facing some, or soon will, which is why I put them to her. I thought about it a great deal, and I truly have no answer. I truly don't know.

First, these years in America have convinced me that people really cannot communicate one hundred percent. Second, this happens everywhere. I was born into the working class, and I've left it now and can't go back. Something between me and them has been lost along the way. Widen that out: once a college student from the countryside reaches the city, he probably won't go back either. Then what becomes of the countryside? That's the problem. I don't know how to solve it. It's a big thing.

I once translated Flannery O'Connor's essays on writing, and there's a line in them I love. She said the greater a writer's talent, the greater their responsibility. What you have to remember is that when God gives you talent, He gives you responsibility with it. I can hardly claim any talent of my own, but if I've been given a lot along the way, I hope to take what I've been given and do something meaningful with it. I hope I become that kind of person. Everyone probably needs some value beyond themselves. That matters.

Q: The second question follows from it. What do you think a writer's responsibility is at a moment like this one?

Qian: Keep writing. It's a hard question to talk about. In the Chinese environment our literary tradition is a good one and an important one; yanzhi and zaidao both matter. "Keep writing" should mean, one hopes, writing that follows the heart in both. If you can hold to that, I think it's a very good thing. For a writer, writing is the work and also the responsibility.

Q: What do you make of writers speaking out on public questions, the way Marilynne Robinson does?

Qian: Writers have this problem: sometimes they think they understand a great deal, and then they speak on public questions. On things you don't understand, I think listening is the better choice.

Q: What have you been thinking about most lately?

Qian: The omniscient point of view — a very technical question. My teacher is very fond of close third person. I wrote a story that doesn't work under Western aesthetics, and I don't think that story should have been written in close third. Which raises the question: how do I explain to them the context China is missing? I told my teacher I wanted to build an omniscient point of view. Talking it over, we defined it as a camera with a personality — which is rather fun. And once you have a voice, it can do a lot of things; it can explain the missing cultural context. Very much like Nabokov. I've been reading Nabokov lately, and his voice is spellbinding. English was his second language, but he was a genius. So lately I've been thinking about how to build that voice.

Banner image: a still from the film The Piano in a Factory, from Douban. Cover image: Qian Jianan, from the Sina Weibo account "Qian Jianan Writes Fiction."