Zhang Dachun: "Hell is inside us. What is it? It's that I've lost interest in explaining this world" | Interviews

"We can't read characters accurately not because we lack the ability, but because we lack the will to explain this world accurately. You've lost your curiosity about the world. It's that simple."

In September 2017, Zhang Dachun filmed an "experiment." He went to Zhijinshi Street Elementary School in Jinan, Shandong, and taught about 350 minutes of class to the 43 second-graders of Class 6.

In those 350 minutes he began with the shapes of oracle bone script, bronze inscriptions, seal script and regular script, to let the children see the principles by which Chinese characters were built. Then he took some of those characters and put them together into a phrase he gave the class as a gift — "distinctive yet sociable" — hoping they would care about being individuals and about belonging to a group. Li Bai was his model of the distinctive-yet-sociable man, so Zhang told them Li Bai's story and taught them to chant Li Bai's famous poem Night Lodging at a Mountain Temple (《夜宿山寺》). Finally he took the whole class out to Daming Lake and had them piece lines together into a poem, while he did nothing but check the tonal patterns and rhymes. On top of that, Zhang had them pick up a writing brush and do calligraphy for the first time in their lives.

The result proved the "experiment" worked. These seven-year-olds not only grasped the principles of character formation through ancient scripts and learned how to chant a five-character quatrain, they also wrote a seven-character quatrain together:

Wind on all four sides, from all eight directions; the boat sails west while the water flows east. Lotuses withered, the lake shallow, the drifting clouds scattered; through the gaps in the willows, the sound never ends.

Class 6, Grade 2, Zhijinshi Street Elementary School, Jinan, Shandong

"I think most of the writing and rhetoric education now sealed up inside university campuses should be pushed down to elementary and middle school. In elementary school you can push it down to second grade — can you teach oracle bone script, bronze inscriptions, seal script, calligraphy in second grade? I'm telling you, not only can you, I've done it! … So tell me, how's that for a fucking achievement?" Zhang Dachun told QDaily, describing how the "experiment" left him feeling.

For him this mattered far more than the four books on writing and education he had already written — Characters I've Come to Know (《认得几个字》), Characters for My Children (《送给孩子的字》), Writing at Ease (《文章自在》) and Seeing the Character Is Like Seeing the Buddha (《见字如来》). "If that program could carry one message across accurately — that this is something we can actually do inside the curriculum — then I wouldn't have needed to write those four books," Zhang said.

Zhang Dachun, born in 1957 in a military dependents' village in Taipei, is one of the best-known novelists in the Chinese-speaking world. He "loves a good story, can tell one out loud, is good at calligraphy, and likes writing poems." He has won the United Daily News Fiction Award, the China Times Literature Award and many other Chinese-language literary prizes, and his output is large: the novels The Apartment Tour Guide (《公寓导游》), Sixi Worries About His Country (《四喜忧国》), Violent Gangs of the City-State (《城邦暴力团》) and the Great Tang Li Bai series (《大唐李白》); the work of literary theory Trivial Types of Fiction (《小说稗类》); the essay collection Listening to My Father (《聆听父亲》); and more. He has also been a screenwriting consultant on the film The Grandmaster (《一代宗师》), written the script for the Peking opera Water Margin 108 (《水浒108》), written lyrics for Wakin Chau's album Jianghu (《江湖》), worked with Li Shouquan on Super Citizen (《超级市民》), and made a cameo in Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness (《悲情城市》).

The mainland writer Mo Yan once said: "Zhang Dachun is like Sun Wukong in Journey to the West (《西游记》) — a hugely gifted, unruly, endlessly playful writer from Taiwan." The Taiwanese writer Zhu Tianwen said: "He has every martial skill there is. Among the craftsmen of fiction in our generation, who beats him?" The Hong Kong cultural critic Leung Man-tao put it this way: "I'll say it boldly — Zhang Dachun may be the most completely equipped, most versatile master among Chinese-language novelists. Whatever you need, he has it, and he's good at all of it."

Because his technique is so accomplished, some people accuse Zhang Dachun of "showing off," and the media likes to press him on it. He has answered many times. He once said: "Most important, I don't think I'm 'showing off,' because there's nothing about technique worth showing off. A lot of things come out of me naturally, and other people take that for a technique. I'd rather say I'm demonstrating a technique, and the people criticizing me have never managed to train themselves into that technique, so all they can do is tease me by calling it showing off."

Zhang Dachun was gifted and became known early. He wrote his first story at 17, knowing only that "this was something I could do with some ease". In his second year in the Chinese department at Fu Jen Catholic University he won two of Taiwan's important prizes, the China Times Literature Award and the Youth Literary Award. In 1982, at 25, he finished his master's degree at Fu Jen and went off to do his military service. "During my service I wrote a pile of pieces for pocket money, and naturally, once I was discharged, I found there was nothing else I knew how to do. Since I couldn't do anything else, I might as well do the one thing that came easily," Zhang said. From then on he made writing his trade and gave up his earlier plan to teach.

In the 1980s, around the end of martial law in Taiwan, Zhang — then in his thirties — wrote a large body of technically brilliant fiction in the Western modernist mode. It had wide influence, and he came to be seen as a "leading figure of avant-garde fiction." But after he published the modern wuxia novel Violent Gangs of the City-State (《城邦暴力团》) in 2000, many readers noticed his work drawing closer and closer to the Chinese fiction tradition. The historical novel series Great Tang Li Bai (《大唐李白》) and the biji-style ("notebook") novel series "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter" are the clearest examples.

Zhang thinks a novel is an adventure words go on through time. You never know where a word will end up. The writer is only the person who picks the story up along the way. A novelist, as he sees it, has to find a different way of telling for every different story. And a good novelist has to write the novel nobody has written before: he can't ignore any technique anyone has used before him, and he still has to invent a new point of view and a new way of writing. The telling can sometimes decide the meaning and the worth of the thing told. Writing fiction is itself an act of making and inventing. So he hopes to find technique and material in the Chinese fiction tradition, combine them with the tradition of Western modern fiction, and write something new. But the story itself is still picked up — picked up from history and from folk tradition.

This shift has to do with Zhang's years as a radio storyteller. Since 1999 he has been telling stories on the radio and hosting radio programs. These days it is Monday to Friday, an hour of storytelling and an hour of interviews. His storytelling material includes Water Margin (《水浒》), Romance of the Three Kingdoms (《三国》), Strange Tales (《聊斋》), Investiture of the Gods (《封神》), Sanyan (《三言》) and Erpai (《二拍》), The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants (《七侠五义》), The Junior Five Gallants (《小五义》) and Chronicles of the Eastern Zhou Kingdoms (《东周列国志》). His interview guests are all sorts of people — Ma Shifang, Bi Gan, Zhuang Zuyi. The work taught him not just how to speak but how to listen. Unlike many radio hosts, the moment Zhang catches a guest not telling the truth, or talking in empty phrases, he will "find a way to deal with him." "Never talk empty talk. Talk empty talk and I'll knock you flat right there on the air," Zhang said.

As Zhang sees it, storytelling lets him practice the craft of telling and keeps sharpening his ability to hold an audience. The same goes for everyday storytelling and everyday speech. The listener is always the one who finishes the work for him. He also says he should have started storytelling ten or twenty years earlier. "The moment I get into a taxi and say where I'm going — say, 'Heping East Road' — the driver, without even turning his head, says, 'You're Zhang Dachun, aren't you?' Every taxi I've taken, no exceptions. Over nearly 20 years the audience I've built up in Taiwan all seem to think: Zhang Dachun, why didn't I get to hear you sooner?" Zhang told QDaily.

After Zhang Dachun's Detailed Account of the Three Kingdoms, in May 2018 Zhang launched a new audio storytelling program on Ximalaya FM, Zhang Dachun's Detailed Account of The Three Heroes and Five Gallants. "The Three Heroes and Five Gallants is a collection of stories about a whole generation of heroes in the Song dynasty. It records how Song officials, represented by Bao Zheng — Judge Bao — and Zhan Zhao, joined forces with martial-world heroes like Bai Yutang to punish the wicked, reward the good and uphold justice, along with a few detective stories. It's held in very high regard now: people call it a classic of the long chivalric court-case novel, the first true wuxia novel in China, the founding work of Chinese wuxia fiction, the representative work of the chivalric school. All of those claims hold up," Zhang says on the program.

We interviewed Zhang Dachun twice, in Shanghai last August and in Beijing this May. The Beijing interview was in a hotel meeting room of about ten square meters. That day he wore a suit jacket over an undershirt and turned himself into a storyteller. In his pitch and his timing, in his gestures and his face, he never stopped pulling you in to listen. Even the teacup in his hand became his storyteller's block, rapped on the table at exactly the right moments.

In that room, "fuck," bursts of laughter and the knock of the cup went off in turns. That was Zhang Dachun as ever, unrestrained, turning "banter and rage alike into good prose." When the talk turned to teaching second-graders to chant five-character quatrains, he could not help singing: "A tower so tall, a hundred feet high; hands could pluck the stars. I dare not speak too loud, for fear of startling the people in heaven," and "A thousand mountains, no bird in flight; ten thousand paths, no trace of anyone. A lone boat, an old man in a straw cape, fishing alone in the cold river snow."

Talking with Zhang Dachun tends to make you worry that you are not learned enough. He reads more than ten hours a day and carries a huge stock of obscure allusions in his head. The ideal companion is someone who can cross swords with him. Sometimes he will give an underprepared reporter a hard time.

The writer A Cheng once recalled exactly that in his essay The Temperature of Philology (《小学的体温》): "I got to know Zhang Dachun in Taipei in 1992. He would suddenly quiz the friend who had brought him along — for instance: 'In such-and-such year of the Republic, who was the director of the Nationalist Army's Political Warfare Department before so-and-so? Quick, answer!' Or: 'Wang Anshi wrote a certain poem in a certain year of the Northern Song Xiping era — what's the last line?' This friend of his, a good drinker, would flush red, let his eyes wander for a moment, then recite the last line. Dachun would give a sheepish laugh and say, 'Well, you got it!' The friend would quiz him back; if he answered right he roared with laughter, and if he couldn't answer he'd say that one didn't count, ask another, ask another. As the guest at that table, I was already scared out of my wits."

Q = QDaily

Zhang = Zhang Dachun

Compared with the moral instruction of traditional Chinese fiction, Western modern fiction spends far more time on the complexity and conflict of human nature

Q: Let's start with your new program on Ximalaya, The Three Heroes and Five Gallants (《三侠五义》). I'm curious why you chose to tell it now. From what I've read, you've said that "when you tell a story, most of the time it has to connect to current events, to the present situation." But you told The Three Heroes and Five Gallants once, years ago, and this time you're telling it differently. How, exactly? What's different from before?

Zhang: The reason I pulled it out back then was purely that as a child, around fourth or fifth grade, I first became able to read the abridged, phonetically annotated edition of The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants. So when I was doing radio storytelling I felt I should bring the story out again and taste that childhood pleasure once more. That must have been sometime after 2000, but I forget which year.

More than a decade later, wanting to tell it again, everything is completely different. Put it one way — why different? I can't really say why I want to tell a new version of The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants now, and I can't say exactly why it's different either. What I keep thinking is this: from reading The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants as a child to the first time I told it, I always felt it ran along a single thread — the logic of the novel's original author, Shi Yukun, and its adapter, Yu Yue. Yu Yue was a great classicist, and he reworked The Three Heroes and Five Gallants into The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants. Follow the logic of those two and you get this: in the jianghu there are good people and bad people. The bad ones are the rebels; the good ones keep social order. That's how classic Chinese stories work.

But once I'd finished telling it, I felt there should be something else in there. And I'd already told it — too late. What was that something else? I'd actually found it while I was telling it. In other words, the first time I told it on the radio I already knew I shouldn't be telling it that way, and it was too late to change. What was it? Even in the storyteller Shi Yukun's version something is hidden: some of the xia — the chivalrous heroes — work with the imperial court, and some don't. On the surface, The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants is about how the xia, the people of the jianghu, work with the power of the court to deal with lawbreakers.

But the ones who refused to work with the court still had to compromise their own chivalrous code with their companions in the jianghu, and that's where it gets complicated. The shifting of values in there is not a simple business. The values include loyalty, righteousness, benevolence, filial piety — which one matters more? Sometimes you might feel righteousness matters more; but when righteousness collides with loyalty, does righteousness still matter more? That's the question. So when I came to tell The Three Heroes and Five Gallants later, I handled it more carefully. I made a few small changes at the level of wording, and I played with it, looking for ways to bring those conflicts out without altering the actual text of Shi Yukun's or Yu Yue's Three Heroes or Seven Heroes.

Q: In the program's opening you said "the chivalrous heroes in The Three Heroes and Five Gallants are like today's Marvel superheroes." In your view, what's the big difference between the Chinese xia and the American superhero? I've seen you say that unlike Western superheroes, who fight alone, Chinese xia share a common set of values and an intellectual tradition — keep your word, follow through, stay single-minded. Anything you'd add?

Zhang: Keeping your word is, broadly, the most important thing among Chinese xia. But in the West — never mind Marvel, outside Marvel too — a lot has kept expanding over the years. It's not that the Chinese xia hasn't expanded either. Keeping your word is very clear in Biographies of the Assassins (《刺客列传》). But loving people, and not only yourself, your parents, your children, your brothers and sisters, your friends and relatives, but strangers too — that's there as well. My ability to love others isn't a fixed, solid block either, because the Chinese xia has also gradually developed the idea of protecting strangers, especially the weak, of upholding their basic human rights. That idea exists too.

Marvel has more complexity. You know how in Marvel they'll kill off two characters at the drop of a hat, or a hero discovers how dark he is inside. That doesn't exist among Chinese xia. If a Chinese xia has darkness inside, can he still be a xia? He can't even manage himself. A Westerner would say, isn't everyone like that? That argument doesn't work here. The Chinese xia really is different. If you're that dark inside, it's simple — are you even worthy of the name?

Q: That sounds very idealized, and consistent with the moral-judgment role classical Chinese fiction takes on.

Zhang: It might be a bit more complicated than that. Some of the conflicts a Chinese xia faces probably couldn't be solved by a Marvel hero either. I won't bring in other examples. I was just telling another reporter the story of Guo Xie, his sister and his nephew. (Note: Guo Xie's nephew, drinking with a man, used his uncle's reputation to force more drink on him; the man, enraged, killed him. Guo Xie blamed his own nephew and, despite his sister's pressure, forgave the killer.) Something like that would involve the law today. But Marvel heroes would turn it into a conflict of human nature and work it through. Has any Chinese story ever written that? Zero. That should give you the idea. We don't think that — conflict within human nature — matters much.

Q: Some people think the Chinese are especially fond of the xia. From the earliest Records of the Grand Historian (《史记》) and Book of Han (《汉书》) to the chivalric fiction of the Tang and Song, the wandering-knight plays and chivalric novels of the Ming and Qing, all the way to the wuxia novels of the 20th century and today's wuxia films — the xia has always been popular. I'm curious why you think Chinese people love stories about xia so much. I've seen one explanation: "Chinese wuxia fiction is so popular not only because people project onto the xia their hope of being saved, but also because of the xia's own temperament: independent and unrestrained." What do you think?

Zhang: First, the Chinese xia generally has superpowers, abilities beyond ordinary people. You're simply stronger than everyone else. Second, that ability mostly comes from a lucky encounter. You fall off a cliff, don't die, and run into an "auntie," a giant eagle, or Feng Qingyang. Those two things alone are enough. A lot of people say Chinese society has too much unfairness and injustice, so xia stories suit us particularly well. I don't think so. I think ordinary people collectively feel they ought to be a bit stronger than everyone else, ought to have a bit of a lucky break, a bit of quick money — very practical. What can't be satisfied in reality gets satisfied in fiction. How could it be that easy? Hold on, I want to see — and so the stories of Yang Guo and Chen Jialuo get worked out properly. So never think it's because society is too unfair. It's that people want too badly to put themselves above everyone else and go on an adventure.

Q: If that's the explanation, isn't it the same everywhere, in every era?

Zhang: Not necessarily the same East and West. Look at foreign stories — Jason going after the Golden Fleece. How much suffering he goes through on the way! You could say our wuxia novels have hardship too, but at the starting line the hero isn't already better than everyone else. Look at Jason and the Golden Fleece, or Spain's hero El Cid, or all those stories set in Spain, or not even set in Spain — the picaresque novel, the rogue novel, the scoundrel novel — how much the protagonist goes through!

Q: I remember Borges wrote A Universal History of Infamy (《恶棍列传》) too.

Zhang: I haven't read it, but think about it: he's a writer in Spanish, of course he'd play with that. Picaresque is a genre; it's about a scoundrel. Including the story of the Cid I just mentioned — that's a kind of picaresque novel too.

Q: We've talked a lot about the differences between Chinese and foreign fiction. Do you think one is higher than the other? My feeling is that expressing human nature in its complexity might be the higher achievement.

Zhang: Western modern fiction has indeed gained a considerable advantage there. Its account of human nature, or of the conflicts inside human nature, isn't the crude stuff of love, hate and passion. A lot of Chinese fiction does look as though it's built on exactly that. We can't argue the point. To be fair, Western fiction generally has more layers, more thickness. I don't want to dispute that. I agree with it and I accept it.

But on the other hand, I also think the overall social function of Chinese fiction isn't quite the same as the Western approach of taking human nature out and examining it piece by piece on a dissection table. If you take the Western view, you'll think Chinese fiction is crude and lacking here, that it doesn't even have the sincerity to put anything on the table. Flip it around, though, and Chinese fiction has, in far greater volume, bad characters punished on the spot and good characters rewarded, that pattern repeated over and over, in the service of moral instruction and guidance.

So the Chinese novelist or storyteller believes that after hearing the story, the listener will conduct himself accordingly. His goal isn't to give the listener an aesthetic experience of being moved or changed. It's to frighten you. So the feeling it sets off is different. Honestly, judged purely as social moral instruction — making ordinary people docile and good, genuinely good — I think that's the height of civilization. It doesn't go through aesthetics, or self-awareness, or a person's self-criticism, none of that. I'll scare you to death! Oh, I'll never dare again! I find that rather fun (laughs). It's a different thing altogether.

Every piece of fiction is a unique experience of lying

Q: This is related to storytelling. This year the first two volumes of your "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter" series have come out in mainland China, Master of the Spring Lantern (《春灯公子》) and Battle in the Summer Sun (《战夏阳》). From what I've read, you wrote the series hoping to wander between different literary traditions in search of interest, and to find a more captivating, more winding way of narrating biji material. You've now finished three volumes. Have your feelings about the two traditions — classical Chinese fiction and Western modern fiction — changed at all? Anything new you could share with our readers?

Zhang: The interesting part is right here. This isn't really a spoiler problem. For me, everything points at the fourth volume. How do I turn a story my ear heard, a neighbor telling me something that happened to him, into a modern novel? How do I turn a very obscure, very small Qing-dynasty biji note that my eye read into a modern novel? That's what I want to do. By the fourth volume it really is a fully modern novel. I don't know whether you've read a piece of mine called Departed Soul (《离魂》)?

Q: I have — the Dolphin Books edition. I read it too early, though; at the time I didn't understand the Chinese fiction tradition of chatting, of idle talk, so I simply assumed you were copying somebody else's material. I didn't really get it.

Zhang: When I wrote that story, the whole way of narrating it — I gave a name to a man who originally had none, gave him experiences he never had, gave him thoughts and feelings he never had. And in the end, what was I trying to build? A son knows perfectly well: you're my father, you're my mother, you're my brother, and none of you will acknowledge me. My brother won't because he's been jealous of me since we were small. My mother won't because my face is different now. This face isn't my son's, so I won't acknowledge you. The father knows perfectly well that the most he ever shared with his son were the poems the two of them composed together on the road — I can recite every one of them, isn't that proof enough that you're my son? The father knows. But because his wife and his other son object, he simply refuses to acknowledge this son, gives him two hundred taels of silver, or two thousand (the original text says a few hundred taels), and buys off the bond. So at the end of the original story the man goes back to Shandong and just carries on with his tragic life.

That's not what I did. How did I write it as a modern novel? He walks to the place where he originally fell — the yellow-mud embankment — and suddenly remembers the poem he had written, and his tears come down. When he wipes them away he touches his own face, and there's beard stubble on it. He realizes the stubble isn't his; it's the Shandong farmer's, and it has grown in.

That's a technique of the modern novel. So put modern-novel technique inside what you just called a story I copied — think about it now, and that's a very important statement: classical Chinese fiction doesn't lack energy, doesn't lack inner force. It has it. It's a question of how you dig it out.

Q: So at that point it comes down to technique?

Zhang: Technique — think about it, it's so simple! Take a story that's obviously already finished and give it one more beat, or take a story that obviously isn't finished and take a beat away. Either way, that's what forms what we call modernity.

Q: So you've said you're really a person who picks stories up.

Zhang: That's right.

Q: I think this touches a very basic literary belief of yours: that a novelist has to find a different way of telling for every different story, and that a good novelist has to write the novel nobody has written before — he can't ignore any technique anyone has used before him, and he still has to create a new point of view and a new way of writing. Is that an accurate description? Anything to add?

Zhang: Right. Yes. Nothing to add, I think that's correct. We also can't assume we're the only ones who possess a given technique, and we can't say the technique is complete. Every piece of fiction is a unique experience of lying, and that lying always has to do with how we test the reader's trust.

For me, the harshest criticism I ever got came in 1997, in New York. I was taking part in a seminar at Columbia University, all scholars, chaired by David Der-wei Wang. But frankly, David Der-wei Wang doesn't have much learning. He's got his four-character idioms, he writes decent essays, his English really is very good, but in terms of insight it's zero — no real understanding. He has plenty of rhetoric, and the rhetoric is polished.

But sitting in the room was a woman professor who studied poetry, and wrote poetry when she was young, a little older than me — Michelle Yeh. Her scholarship was excellent. She's a few years older than me, like an elder sister, delightful, and very good-looking. That day she raised her hand and said: Zhang Dachun, the way you put it, it sounds as though you're the only person fit to interpret your own work, because you're the only one who can really explain the techniques you use and the subjects you take on, and no scholar's or critic's research or criticism could ever satisfy you. Is that right? She meant it as a challenge, of course. And I said, Michelle, saying that proves you're a qualified scholar. You're completely right. The whole room burst out laughing, and so did she.

Q: How do you see it now?

Zhang: The same way. From what I've seen, the best of these scholars of modern and contemporary literature are at most good in both Chinese and English and can write a decent essay. I won't name names, all right? But on insight they're extremely poor. And I can give you one name: after C.T. Hsia, there's no one.

In the earlier generation there were a few real scholars. Let me give you a couple of names: James J. Y. Liu, Chen Shih-hsiang. I don't care whether you agree — at least write those two names down. Kao Yu-kung, strictly speaking, doesn't quite count, because he didn't produce much. But scholars like James J. Y. Liu and Chen Shih-hsiang are gone. After C.T. Hsia, insight is extremely scarce, real understanding extremely scarce. And then people who are merely good in both Chinese and English become passably qualified scholars.

Q: Since we're here, what I really want to press you on is: what makes a good novelist?

Zhang: There are too many kinds. I can't answer. All I can say is this: in the nearly 500 years since Cervantes I think there has been only one great novelist, and that's García Márquez. But my favorite writer, the one who moves me most, the one whose call I feel, isn't García Márquez. It's Chekhov. That's a completely different line from my own writing. Yet again and again, since my early twenties, whenever anyone who cared about my opinion asked me which novelist writes best, in my mind the answer was always Chekhov, Chekhov, Chekhov. Not only that: sometimes I'll ask myself whose fiction is well written, and — ah, it reminds me of Chekhov. That happens too.

Q: Why? Have you written about it?

Zhang: Of course I have.

Q: I don't remember reading it.

Zhang: Ah, I know why. Because I published two books earlier, one called Zhang Dachun's Views on Fiction (《张大春的小说意见》) and one called Zhang Dachun's Views on Literature (《张大春的文学意见》), and neither was ever published in the mainland. Those are from my earlier period, my twenties into my thirties, definitely before I turned 40 — because I started writing Trivial Types of Fiction (《小说稗类》) in 1997, when I was 40.

Q: Could you sum them up? I haven't read the Taiwan editions.

Zhang: I don't really remember what's in them. I haven't gone back through them.

Q: Then how do you see Chekhov and Márquez now?

Zhang: The same.

Q: Why?

Zhang: Chekhov grasps the shape of a life, the face of it, in all its intricacy. When nothing at all seems to be happening, he can make you go, whoa — hit you with enormous force. You can see it in his story "The Joke" (《恶作剧》, also translated as 《玩笑》), or in "The Kiss" (《吻》) — (Zhang raised a hand and mimed blowing a kiss, mwah) — kiss. Those two stories show it. It's the tiniest, seemingly least important experience in a person's life, especially in "The Joke", and it produces a force that shakes a person for a lifetime, astonishes him for a lifetime.

Go read "The Joke." From that one story alone — damn! — his place is settled. He's the Yellow Crane Tower, all right?

Losing curiosity about other people and about the world may be the most serious alien invasion the world is about to face

Q: Besides the new book in the mainland, you published a new book in Taiwan this year, Seeing the Character Is Like Seeing the Buddha (《见字如来》). This is your fourth book about writing and language, after Characters I've Come to Know (《认得几个字》), Characters for My Children (《送给孩子的字》) and Writing at Ease (《文章自在》). Do you see any connection, or any change, across them? I get the sense this might have to do with your growing worry about how young people are taught language today.

Zhang: A life shouldn't carry too much worry. Though we might say: if I don't do it and nobody else does either, then what I'm worried about is only that nobody else is doing it, not what standard young people end up being educated to. In other words, if young people are willing to appreciate or accept the discipline of writing, that's their good fortune; if they're not willing, that's their own fate. None of my business.

But what I need to do, what I ought to do, I can't leave undone. What I most want to do isn't to pass on an education — what the fuck do I know? What I know is only what I've studied. What I want to stress, and hope to get across through the media, is this: I think most of the writing and rhetoric education now sealed up inside university campuses should be pushed down to elementary and middle school. In elementary school it can go down to second grade — can oracle bone script, bronze inscriptions, seal script and calligraphy be taught in second grade? I'm telling you, not only can they, I've done it! I have a new program premiering on May 27, called The Same Class (《同一堂课》).

Q: The thing where you went to the elementary school in Shandong?

Zhang: Right. That thing matters far more to me than these four books. Why is that program more important? I said, if the program's influence could carry one message across precisely — that this is something we can actually do inside the curriculum — then I wouldn't have needed to write those four books. But if I hadn't written them, nobody would have come looking for me either. So the key point for me is that the writing and rhetoric education locked inside university campuses should be pushed down to younger groups, to be soaked in, cultivated, studied deeply. Immersion, cultivation and deep study shouldn't be a privilege reserved for people past university age. Elementary school can have them too.

In my experimental class I had the children write poetry. In 350 minutes I taught them 16 oracle bone characters, 16 bronze-inscription characters, 16 seal-script characters, and, pieced together out of some of those small characters, a four-character phrase: "distinctive yet sociable." Not all 16 characters got used, of course. Why "distinctive yet sociable"? Because what I talked about afterward was Li Bai, a man who had a fiercely individual side and a sociable side — he wrote poems to exchange with other people, traded verses with them. "Distinctive yet sociable" catches the two faces of a poet like Li Bai. And that's not all. On top of that phrase, and Li Bai, I used one of Li Bai's poems: "A tower so tall, a hundred feet high; hands could pluck the stars. I dare not speak too loud, for fear of startling the people in heaven." I taught them to chant this poem, and they all learned it. And that's still not all — after they'd chanted it, you know what else they could do? "Spring sleep, unaware of dawn; everywhere the cries of birds." They could chant that the same way.

"A tower so tall, a hundred feet high; hands could pluck the stars. I dare not speak too loud, for fear of startling the people in heaven." "A thousand mountains, no bird in flight; ten thousand paths, no trace of anyone. A lone boat, an old man in a straw cape, fishing alone in the cold river snow." (Zhang began to sing.) All the five-character quatrains. Including the one I just mentioned, "Spring sleep, unaware of dawn" (Zhang went on singing). They could sing them all. Once you know how to do one, you know how to do them all. That was part of my course too. And there's more. Of those 350 minutes, 180 were spent taking them out to Daming Lake. And in those 180 minutes it wasn't only a boat ride: the whole class, with no help from me — all I did was tell them this line works, that line doesn't, this is how the tonal pattern goes — wrote a seven-character quatrain together. On top of all that, those 350 minutes also included picking up a writing brush and doing calligraphy for the first time in their lives. So tell me, how's that for a fucking achievement?

Q: Related to that. In an earlier interview you said: "If culture is gradually withering, or getting shallower by the day, my first thought is that this is a problem of language. I even think that the immense sense of weakness in human civilization comes from people's unwillingness to use, encounter and get to know written language in quantity." Could you expand on that?

Zhang: We can't read characters accurately not because we lack the ability, but because we lack the will to explain this world accurately. You've lost your curiosity about the world. It's that simple.

No curiosity about the world? What the fuck! Take all the shut-ins, male and female, who look as though society has pushed them out. The basic reason isn't that they don't leave the house. It's that they seem to have lost every last connection to the world, as though they only draw resources out of it. Flip it around and their real problem is that they've lost the give and take with the world, the flow in both directions. They're cut off from it.

So in modern society we don't tolerate someone cut off from the world very well. But it isn't only that they're cut off — they're also taking a lot from the world. They aren't really cut off; they may be extremely well informed. That's why in Taiwan this kind of person is called an "a-zhai," a shut-in. It's interesting. Some people really dislike shut-ins. The moment they come up, people understand that person's standing through a lens of mockery. That isn't how I think about it. I think they've lost the will to explain the world. I say "explain" because what I'm talking about isn't whether you use written language, or whether you're able to. It's whether you're willing to communicate with the world.

Honestly, it isn't only Taiwanese, and it isn't only people under 40 or under 30 — for people in their twenties it may be worse. Losing curiosity about other people, about the world, may well be the most serious alien invasion the whole world is about to face. Don't think the aliens come from outer space. They come from us. Hell is inside us. What is it? It's that I've lost interest in explaining this world. I set an attitude and that's the end of it. I hate you, I like her. I don't explain. In Taiwan there's a code, "Bj4," which stands for "no explanation." To me that phrase is like a drum at dusk or a bell at dawn — crack! Young people, think about this question! Think about what question? Just: no explanation.

So even leaving aside the shut-ins I mentioned, here's a phenomenon I've observed: more and more of the younger generation and their communities have lost the explanatory connection with the world. How do you translate "explanation" here? In English I'd actually call it hermeneutics — a hermeneutic relationship. What do you mean by this? What does this mean? I have absolutely no interest. What do I mean by this? You wouldn't understand. I don't care.

Q: In Taiwan last year there was a debate over classical versus vernacular Chinese in the curriculum, and you had a lot to say about it, so we won't go over it again. But as a mainlander I have a related question: what do you make of the mainland abolishing traditional characters in favor of simplified ones, and adopting Hanyu Pinyin? What effects does that have?

Zhang: Taking the study of characters seriously is very hard to do without going back to the traditional character system. I ran into exactly that problem this year, judging something for JD.com. I call it a problem because the intention was clearly a good one: to explain the origin or the use of a Chinese character. But when they explained it in simplified characters instead of traditional ones, it came up short and got a little awkward, because the original principle of formation isn't preserved that way. If you want children today to understand a character's life story, they have to understand the whole life story. Only then will they have a deeper explanation of that character, a more complete and accurate grasp of it.

So first of all, if traditional characters aren't rejected, I think mainland China could actually have a greater capacity than Taiwan for mastering cultural symbols — it's a bigger population, after all. I'm not saying "restore" traditional characters; I can't really say restore. But if you give traditional characters more weight in basic education, then overall I think mainland China would have a chance to take the lead in the contest over culture.

Hanyu Pinyin is just one way of annotating pronunciation. What Taiwan uses is based on Chinese characters: its symbol for b is the first two strokes of the character bao, its symbol for p is the first three strokes of the character pu. So zhuyin is one thing, and Hanyu Pinyin is also a way of annotating the sound of a character. I've read mainland material for years, including the dictionaries I use most, the Hanyu Da Zidian and the Hanyu Da Cidian. They have several lookup methods, and one of the most important is Hanyu Pinyin. So it works both ways: Taiwanese learning Hanyu Pinyin, mainlanders learning to write traditional characters.

Even if the reader doesn't exist, I still have to perform as though I had superpowers

Q: Last year was an important anniversary for Taiwan — 30 years since martial law was lifted. You lived through the stretch from martial law to its lifting, this whole period of Taiwan's social development. Looking back on that history, you've said that from the 1960s to the 1980s a kind of critical thinking was hitting Taiwan, but that by the 1990s Taiwanese society's capacity for reflection had grown shallower — too easily satisfied, without a deeper intellectual environment. Why do you think that change happened?

Zhang: People are lazy in the end. And whether it's a small crowd or a big one, the more of them there are, the lazier they get. "I follow the majority," as The Analects puts it, is a matter of necessity; following the crowd is always a matter of necessity. If you look at that laziness as it shows up concretely in judgments about public affairs, you can see it even more clearly: the lazier the judgment, the more easily it wins majority support. People don't much want to think; they're easily satisfied by the crudest arguments. That's human nature. Democracy, freedom, human rights — the simpler the concept they're understood as, the more widely they spread. These basic values keep getting misused, or deliberately abused. Democracy doesn't mean you get to vote; it isn't that cheap. I get cursed at everywhere and I'm good at cursing back — does that mean we've achieved civilized progress? That's crude enough as it is.

The most tragic thing about Taiwan is that everyone believes his political judgment is the result of thinking. Wrong. Most of it is the result of prejudice. Everyone has his own arrogance and his own bias, and is entirely unaware of where he stands. If Taiwan is going to suffer some form of bitter consequence, I think it will be because certain self-inflated notions of value led Taiwanese, over many years, to make self-destructive choices.

Q: Can the problem be solved now?

Zhang: No. Everyone will bear the bitter consequence himself, and perhaps it's exactly an irrational bad outcome that will end up resolving an irrational cause. The worse politics gets, the more chance we have to question and reflect from the roots up. Two simple lines: "If the matter isn't urgent, it isn't enough to move the crowd" — nothing brings everyone out until it becomes urgent; "if the evil isn't extreme, it isn't enough to take a life" — unless something is that bad, you shouldn't destroy it.

Q: You've always loved calligraphy, and from late last year into early this year you held what was billed as "Asia's first solo calligraphy exhibition" in Taipei. But there's a phenomenon now: more and more young people may have no idea what calligraphy even is, and won't go learn it. Do you think that's a problem?

Zhang: No, I don't. Back in the Qing dynasty, Wang Shizhen said of poetry — the poetry of his day, what we now call classical poetry — that for it to flourish, or for many people to write it, you need "eminent officials and great ministers," meaning influential officials to promote it. It seems that in every era of Chinese society, whether modern or feudal, new China or old China, anxiety about culture is universal. How do you resolve that anxiety? It seems the only hope people have is that those in high positions will do something, and the only method is for those in power to influence the common people. And because of that we often feel that if someone's position isn't high enough his influence won't be great, and so the weaker cultural products get overlooked.

That isn't how I see it. I've always felt that the anxiety itself — worrying that young people don't know what calligraphy is and won't go learn it — well, if the worry didn't exist you wouldn't need to solve it; and as long as it exists, it means somebody cares. Honestly, every era has had the same worry. Our era's fear, or unease, about the withering of traditional Chinese culture is no less than the ancients', but the difficulties we face are no harder than theirs either. So in this world the number of people who can handle classical prose, classical poetry or traditional crafts has never actually declined. They'll always be there. This isn't optimism; it comes out of my own life. I know that 14-year-old boys and 13-year-old girls across the mainland who can write astonishing, genuinely good classical verse are everywhere, blossoming all over the place. That's all there is to it. What is there to worry about?

Q: In Battle in the Summer Sun (《战夏阳》) you mention a novelist named Michael who says what drives him to write fiction is curiosity about the causal relations between things, especially between things that seem to have no relation at all. I'm curious: if you examine yourself, what do you think really drives you to write fiction? What sort of thing draws you?

Zhang: In the preface to the mainland simplified edition of my short story collection Sixi Worries About His Country (《四喜忧国》) I described an experience I had as a child. I grew up in a military dependents' village, laid out in lanes like a checkerboard, a few households to a lane. If I was walking behind someone, say three steps behind you, I'd get ahead and walk very fast. I'd keep going, and when I reached the mouth of the lane ahead I'd turn right. Once around the corner I'd suddenly sprint as hard as I could, run more than ten kilometers, then pretend to go back to strolling. (Zhang got up and walked around the room, acting out his childhood movements and expressions.) At the time I'd calculate: if the man behind me turns right, he'll think, this guy must know qinggong, the art of weightless leaping — how else could he have got so far ahead all at once?

You know what I mean? First, I never once confirmed that anyone actually thought I could do qinggong. Second, there's no way any living person in this world would be the fool I imagined and believe I had qinggong. But I never tired of it. OK — that's what drives my writing. Even if the reader doesn't exist, I still have to perform as though I had superpowers. Not necessarily a xia; could be a bum. Give him a surprise, give him a shock.

Q: Besides finishing Great Tang Li Bai and the "Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter" series, do you have other writing plans?

Zhang: I do. My Violent Gangs of the City-State (《城邦暴力团》) still has a prequel to come. And there's an old debt, the third volume of The Joyful Thief (《欢喜贼》). The next installment of Trivial Types of Fiction (《小说稗类》) is coming out soon; it's called "The First Page." I go through the first page of 26 to 30 novels. I haven't finished writing it.

Q: What's the biggest change in you these past few years?

Zhang: I'm lazier. I've got lazier — old people get lazy.

Q: How so? I heard you used to read more than ten hours a day and sleep four or five.

Zhang: My reading time hasn't changed. And I don't think the amount of time I spend reading is anything to hold up as encouragement. Apart from sleeping, eating, feeding the dog, cooking… damn it, isn't all the rest of it reading?

Q: Any advice for young people today?

Zhang: You think I'd dare give you advice? Damn it, just don't give me any advice, that'll do! You scared me half to death!

The banner image is a still from the film The Grandmaster (《一代宗师》), from Douban. The long cover image is Zhang Dachun, from Zhang Dachun's Weibo, @Writer Zhang Dachun.