Scholar Xu Zidong: Research Only Has Value If You Find Yourself in It (Part 2)

This is the second part of our interview with Professor Xu Zidong, mainly about his life, his intellectual formation, and his scholarship.

On October 28, 2017, East China Normal University held a memorial service and academic symposium for the scholar Qian Gurong.

"We had planned to celebrate his hundredth birthday early, in the fall. His birthday is September 28, but the event was set for October. Why October? Because East China Normal University was holding a conference around then, and they decided to use the occasion to mark his hundredth birthday at the same time. As if by some strange fate — the old man never liked that sort of bureaucratic arrangement. He died on the very day of his birthday, September 28. I didn't go back that day, because I thought I'd be going back in October. Ah..." Xu Zidong told QDaily.

Xu Zidong was Qian Gurong's student and was deeply influenced by him. He came from Hong Kong for the memorial and spoke as a representative of Qian's students. As he spoke, Xu was, in his own words, "terribly sad," his voice "choked with emotion."

"How do you reconcile the dignity of being a teacher with living an unhurried, unaffected life? Mr. Qian's candor and fidelity to himself were the best demonstration of that. 'A teacher for a day is a father for life' — it was from Mr. Qian that I truly came to understand what that means. After my parents died, I got into the habit of going to his home every Lunar New Year's Day; now I don't know where I'll go. To have been Mr. Qian's student in this life — I was truly lucky," Xu Zidong said at the service.

Qian Gurong, Xu says, taught him a weapon he would use for the rest of his life: "To study anything, you must find yourself in it — only then can it have value."

So his later scholarship is closely tied to his own life, and carries traces of him throughout. One of his most important pieces of work, for instance, is his research on Cultural Revolution novels. Through 50 of them, he set out to show how these "Cultural Revolution stories," for all their different schools and leanings, run on a shared narrative pattern and a shared set of narrative rules, and how they took part in — and embodied — the writing that built up a "collective memory" of the Cultural Revolution.

Xu Zidong lived through the Cultural Revolution himself. It changed the whole course of his life.

As for his own story: in 2011 Xu Zidong wrote a memoir of more than 100 pages, How the Scrap Iron Was Tempered (《废铁是怎样炼成的》), collected in Crossing Boundaries: Xu Zidong's Lectures, Vol. 3 (《越界言论：许子东讲稿（卷三）》), which tells it in detail.

He grew up in the Cultural Revolution. In 1966 Red Guards raided the family home three times; his father was later placed under isolation and investigation, and the family's circumstances were upended. He belonged to the "Class of '69" — the first generation of young people who never attended middle school at all, and the last generation sent down to the countryside as an entire cohort. As a sent-down youth in Jiangxi he served as deputy head of a production team, cutting firewood and carrying water; transplanting rice seedlings hurt his back (doing it well meant squatting and stepping backward, one row at a time). He returned to the city in 1976 and worked as a steel roller, which gave him asthma (a red-hot steel bar in front of him, a huge blower behind). He was then recommended for the "July 21 University," a worker-peasant-soldier college run by the Shanghai Metallurgical Bureau.

In 1977 the national college entrance exam, the gaokao, resumed. Xu Zidong signed up, and his scores should have got him in. But by then his "July 21 University" had been renamed and upgraded to Shanghai Metallurgical College, a junior college — and as a junior-college student, Xu lost his eligibility to sit the gaokao. Only when graduate admissions resumed did he get into East China Normal University, into the Chinese department he loved, to study under Qian Gurong.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Xu Zidong went to the United States to study and do research. At the University of Chicago he took part in discussion groups with Leo Ou-fan Lee, Liu Zaifu, Li Tuo, Huang Ziping, Gan Yang, Liu Xiaofeng, Tu Weiming, David Der-wei Wang, Lin Yusheng and Zha Jianying, trading notes on theory and method. It was in Chicago that he began his project on Cultural Revolution novels. In 1993 he left the United States for Hong Kong, where he has taught at Lingnan University ever since. He is now a professor in Lingnan's Chinese department.

The watershed of his life, Xu Zidong believes, was April 1976. He was 22, just back in Shanghai from Guangchang, Jiangxi, where he had been sent down. "Everything I ran into later, learned later, thought about later — family, revolution, the lower classes, sexual desire, history, labor, corruption, public squares and the rest — had, roughly speaking, already shown up by April 5, 1976, the day I left Guangchang. Since then my life has basically been a matter of testing, practicing and holding on to what I had already seen and thought before that. Apart from the four years in the U.S. from 1990, which did bring something new (which is why I call it my 'rustication abroad'), I — who by now have done several thousand episodes of Behind the Headlines with Wentao (《锵锵三人行》) on Phoenix TV — am not much different from that 22-year-old jobless returnee with an elementary-school education," Xu Zidong wrote in How the Scrap Iron Was Tempered.

In 2011 Xu Zidong published Rereading the "Cultural Revolution": Xu Zidong's Lectures, Vol. 1 (《重读“文革”：许子东讲稿（卷一）》), which gathers nearly all his papers on the subject. In the preface he wrote: "More than thirty years have passed since 1976 — as long as the whole 'New Democratic Revolution' period, from New Youth (《新青年》) to the peaceful liberation of Beiping. That shows how enormous a historical event the 'Cultural Revolution' is: so enormous that people still lack the psychological, cultural and political distance to face it squarely and reread it."

Seven years on, we met Xu Zidong — dark suit, light trousers — in a hotel café in Beijing's Chaoyang District, and raised the subject again. Now 64, Xu says he wants to keep going, and plans to expand his corpus of Cultural Revolution novels to 100, "and do it far better than I did before." "And honestly, I find that rereading the 'Cultural Revolution' is more and more necessary — really, more and more necessary. We used to say we were afraid it would be forgotten. It already has been," he told QDaily.

Over nearly an hour and a half we talked about the May Fourth Movement, Lu Xun, the Enlightenment and other subjects, and, starting from Xu Zidong's own life, worked through his scholarship and his intellectual formation. Because the interview ran long, we are publishing it in two parts. This is the second, mainly about his life, his intellectual formation, and his scholarship.

Q = QDaily

Xu = Xu Zidong

Behind a Ranking of Writers Is an Ideological Operation, Showing What a Century of Chinese Cultural Policy Did to Literature

Q: The writers discussed in your new book, Xu Zidong's Course on Modern Chinese Literature (《许子东现代文学课》), are still fairly canonical — the "Lu-Guo-Mao-Ba-Lao-Cao" set (Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, Ba Jin, Lao She, Cao Yu), plus Shen Congwen and Eileen Chang. A lot of people feel "Lu-Guo-Mao-Ba-Lao-Cao" is a political ranking specific to mainland China. But going purely by your own taste and reading preference, could you try ranking those eight, from favorite to least favorite?

Xu: Writers shouldn't be ranked like that. Personally I have writers I like and writers I don't, but I won't rank them. It isn't fair, and what you admire in a writer runs in several directions at once. Ranking forces something plural onto a single scale. It's like saying you like fruit — strawberries, bananas, oranges, watermelon — and then insisting on putting them in order. There's no logic to it.

But behind that kind of ranking is an ideological operation. It shows, in reverse, what a century of Chinese cultural policy did to literature. So what matters isn't the writers; it's the force doing the ranking. And "Lu-Guo-Mao-Ba-Lao-Cao" — you think that's pure politics? It's also a compromise, not entirely the official line. I'll talk about this specifically at the book event later.

(Note: Xu Zidong holds that "Lu-Guo-Mao-Ba-Lao-Cao" was floated quietly by Zhou Yang at a writers' symposium in 1956, and that Zhou framed it in terms of "the linguistic character of New Literature." The list took hold in literary history starting with the Tang Tao edition. It followed Zhou Yang in judging by linguistic style — because by strictly political criteria, by revolutionary credentials, by contribution to the revolution, the turn would never have come to Ba Jin, or Lao She, or Cao Yu; there was a whole crowd of League of Left-Wing Writers authors ahead of them.)

Q: So there's no such thing as a favorite writer for you either?

Xu: There is, but no ranking among them. Lu Xun, Eileen Chang, Xiao Hong, Yu Dafu — I'm fond of all of them. That doesn't mean they stand highest; partly it's that I've spent time researching them and have read more of their work.

Q: The book leaves out Xiao Hong, though it covers the other three. Can you say why you like her?

Xu: The modern literature course runs two semesters, and this book is the first semester, so it never gets to the League of Left-Wing Writers or Yan'an — it's only the early part. Eileen Chang wasn't in the course at first either, but once they decided to livestream it I wanted the students to see something closer to a whole literary history, so I added a session on her. I should have added Qian Zhongshu too, but there wasn't time. So it's unfinished — nothing after the 1930s.

As for why I like Xiao Hong: look at The Field of Life and Death. It's remarkable, it understands Chinese social reality, it's realism. That knack for writing reality straight, which I mentioned earlier — she beats a lot of writers at it. Once you've read The Field of Life and Death, go back to Spring Silkworms and the rest of the writing about rural China and it all tastes thin.

Q: In the preface to Eileen Chang, Yu Dafu and Hong Kong Literature: Xu Zidong's Lectures, Vol. 2 (《张爱玲·郁达夫·香港文学：许子东讲稿（卷二）》), you said the "writer study" laid your foundation, and that you've never regretted it. Can you say why you lean toward the writer-study method? What are its strengths and weaknesses?

Xu: First, because it's how I've always worked, and people always justify, always defend, what they do themselves (laughs). If I'm an old revolutionary, of course I'll say revolution matters. If I do scholarship, of course I'll say scholarship matters. Live long enough and you have to affirm what you've done — that's certainly part of it.

Second, I really don't regret it. I've come to feel strongly that the theory-first approach that later became fashionable — start from a theory, then go hunting for examples to display it — makes the essay itself look good but offers nothing new to literary study. So when I go after "postmodernism" and the like, that's mainly what I'm arguing with.

Q: Why do you think that method can't produce new insight?

Xu: Because its purpose is to prove the theory. Say I take some theory of Foucault's and read something through it — to prove the theory I go find material, and in the end the material fits the theory, wonderful. But finish the essay and you notice that the examples he cites — say he discusses Lu Xun, Xiao Hong, Eileen Chang — yield not one new insight into Lu Xun, Xiao Hong or Eileen Chang. This is what's called "letting theory lead history." It's a holdover from the Cultural Revolution: you write from a viewpoint you already hold, rather like "theme first" in creative writing. In academic writing, "theme first" means I have a viewpoint, and having it, I go find examples for it.

In creative writing I prefer theme last. What does that mean? I see an interesting person or event and I write it down. What it means once written — that comes slowly. And in a paper, what do I like? I analyze a phenomenon everyone has noticed — but what does the phenomenon mean? I don't know. So I use the paper to show what it might mean. That's the basic method and outlook behind my research. Maybe it's an old method, but I don't think it's out of date.

Q: Does the writer study have drawbacks?

Xu: Its drawback is that it isn't fashionable — it doesn't look current, and it isn't easy to publish. With major writers especially, if you write about them today by the writer-study method, an editor may well pass. Take the same paper: your title is "Rereading Wild Grass" or "On Wild Grass" — or, alternatively, "A Lacanian Reading of Wild Grass." The editor is certainly going to be more interested in the second. So with a writer study you have to write it solidly, with real substance.

Q: Have you ever turned the writer-study method on yourself? Does How the Scrap Iron Was Tempered count?

Xu: Yes, that's more or less a study of myself.

Rereading the "Cultural Revolution" Is More and More Necessary

Q: How the Scrap Iron Was Tempered raises a lot of questions you had no answer to at the time. I'm curious whether you've settled any of them. Two stayed with me: one, that you couldn't grasp the human and social meaning of the scene where Mr. Yang, your elementary-school teacher, was denounced; the other, that when the Red Guards raided your home you didn't know why you felt no hatred.

Xu: (Xu Zidong shakes his head.) The raid especially — those people were denouncing my father, and at that moment I felt no hatred toward the Red Guards at all. That question has really troubled me. Later a professor overseas asked me: did you have a bad relationship with your father? I said no. He didn't press. I think he was thinking, this cold-hearted kid, not a good person. That's the natural human reading, and I understand it. But it wasn't that. I respected my father enormously and learned a great deal from him.

Thinking about it since, here's roughly the explanation. Say you're a Christian, at church every week, the whole family devout. One day in church your father admits he did something wrong — a sin. The priest denounces your father, and everyone joins in. At that moment the child may well denounce his father too, rather than pity him. He may feel bad inside, watching everyone look down on his father, but it won't make him doubt God. I think that's the only way to explain what I felt then.

Q: In the 2011 preface to Rereading the "Cultural Revolution": Xu Zidong's Lectures, Vol. 1, you said you had hoped to use the publication to widen the study to fifty, sixty, even seventy Cultural Revolution novels (mostly work from the previous decade), but illness left the rewrite unfinished for the time being, and you hoped to continue it in a later edition. Where does that plan stand?

Xu: I don't have the time now. I still want to do it, but it'll probably have to be the next book. And honestly, I find that rereading the "Cultural Revolution" is more and more necessary, really more and more necessary. We used to say we were afraid it would be forgotten; it already has been. So I think those of us in the generation that lived through it really ought to get down what happened.

First, I plan to expand my memoir, How the Scrap Iron Was Tempered, into a book of its own.

Q: That one really is a good, rich read.

Xu: And it was easy to write. Why easy? No invention, no fiction — real people, real events. But the thing is, put enough time and distance between yourself and these very ordinary events and they start to mean something. That's the one I plan to do.

The other project: I plan to take the Cultural Revolution novels up to 100, done over, far better than before. Really — if the whole thing is 100 percent, that earlier book did 10 percent. The other 90 percent I still haven't said.

Q: Do you have new ideas already?

Xu: I find that the various things that happened in the Cultural Revolution — the human things — repeat themselves more and more. The more repetition, the more meaning. Something that happens once, you can't say much about; something that happens again and again in different contexts is a different matter. So I'm particularly interested in which things keep coming back in China — the ones we can't get around. They're very much worth watching.

Q: I'm a little puzzled — you've read thousands of Cultural Revolution novels, and that reading experience must be complicated. On one hand, as a scholar you have to analyze their patterns coolly; on the other, you lived through it, so you might well be indignant. Is that how it goes?

Xu: Not indignant — dissatisfied while reading. That's exactly why I wanted to study Cultural Revolution novels. I lived through it, so I read others' accounts closely, the sent-down years especially. And most of the time, reading them, I just think they're talking nonsense — and the more prize-winning and acclaimed, the more nonsense. At that point you can't hold back; you want to speak, to write something.

That's my strongest feeling: it plainly wasn't like that, so how did it turn into that? And then everyone says it was like that. You start doubting yourself, and pretty soon you're in "Diary of a Madman," wondering if you've gone mad. Plenty of things in real life work the same way. Something absurd happens; A says it's fine, B says it's healthy, and after a few people have spoken you begin to wonder whether you're the crazy one.

As for these older stories, once there's some distance — people writing about the home raids, about being sent down. I remember the Shanghai writer Chen Cun talking to me about Ye Xin's novels on rustication: "nonsense, nonsense," he said, and then said Shi Tiesheng wrote it well. I thought very highly of Shi Tiesheng's The Story of Rustication (《插队的故事》). Why is it good? Simple — it matched my own experience. I felt he had written my experience out. What I can't stand is someone writing about something I lived through and getting it completely wrong. That anger is one of the engines of my research (laughs).

At a Certain Point You Go Back to the Old Books — the Classics Are Classics, Truly Worth Rereading

Q: Reading How the Scrap Iron Was Tempered, I picked out three turning points in your life: the year you spent reading at the Shanghai Library while ill; the three years of graduate study; and your time in the United States. Do you agree with that?

Xu: More or less. The fourth turning point hasn't come yet (laughs).

Q: That piece ends with this line: "Whether measured against what the revolutionary era demanded or against my own earlier hopes, the first half of my life has so far been mostly frustration, helplessness and failure." That was 2011. Some time has passed — do you still think so?

Xu: More frustrated. More frustrated, at the very least.

Q: Why?

Xu: Everyone understands why (laughs).

Q: On those three turning points — your memoir describes what you read at the first (Anna Karenina, Les Misérables, A Concise General History of China (《中国通史简编》), The Analects, Hegel's The Lesser Logic (《小逻辑》), and so on). The second was graduate school. I read that your mornings then went to theory or classical texts, afternoons to reading literary works, evenings to writing. Can you say what left the deepest mark?

Xu: The theory I built my thesis on was a few histories of literary criticism — Zhu Guangqian's History of Western Aesthetics (《西方美学史》) above all. Reading his history, you notice what he stresses, and you chase it down. He says Aristotle matters, so I go read the Poetics and the Politics. He discusses Conversations with Goethe (《歌德谈话录》), so I go find Conversations with Goethe. He mentions Lessing, so I go find Lessing. Beyond that, two books were very useful then: Guo Shaoyu's A History of Chinese Literary Criticism (《中国文学批评史》), and another History of Chinese Literary Criticism co-edited by several scholars at Fudan University.

A history of Western aesthetics and a history of classical Chinese literary criticism — those two were very useful. Put simply, I wanted to know how the important foreign figures and the important classical Chinese figures each talked about literature.

For all these books I made note cards. I dug them out recently — stacks of them, all made by hand. Wow, I'm honestly impressed by how many cards I made. I wrote them in notebooks, about a dozen of them, and sorted them by category. My method was this: for realism, say, if I came across a well-written passage — something Balzac said — I'd copy it under "realism." Sometimes a passage could go in several places — realism, psychoanalysis, whatever — so I'd make an index entry there, a cross-reference to where else to look. It was fun. That was the mornings.

Afternoons were for reading literary works. I remember that by four or five o'clock I'd usually go leaf through magazines — Harvest (《收获》), Zhongshan (《钟山》) — skimming the newest work, moving fast.

Q: How tall a stack do those dozen-odd notebooks make?

Xu: I found them all again while moving recently. About this high — (he gestures, roughly the thickness of a dozen or so books of 200 to 300 pages).

Q: And your four years in the U.S. — any books that had a big effect on you then?

Xu: In the U.S. — when I first arrived I was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, a Luce Fellow. There was a group of scholars there then — Liu Zaifu, Li Tuo, Huang Ziping, Gan Yang, Zha Jianying — and we invited plenty of people, Tu Weiming among them, plus some foreign scholars. In today's terms it was a mind-opening era, so what we discussed most was Habermas, Derrida, Lacan, Bakhtin — theory, basically.

My biggest gain, I think, was Foucault's "knowledge is power," and the question of discourse. That theory was the most useful of all for my work on the "Cultural Revolution." It was right around... afterward, everyone was thinking about China's problems. That was the biggest influence.

What shaped my own writing most was structuralism — Vladimir Propp's method.

Q: Right. Your book says it was while reading beside the Alster in Hamburg that you first thought of using Propp's method on Cultural Revolution novels.

Xu: That's right. I hadn't read all his books then — I'd read someone else's account of his work. I saw the review and thought the method was good, that I could put it to use.

Q: Why did the method appeal to you then? Were you looking for a shared pattern or rule among Cultural Revolution novels?

Xu: Yes. As I said, I'd read so many Cultural Revolution novels and I was dissatisfied. Why dissatisfied? I had two options. One was to write one myself — I had the material and the ability to write one unlike theirs. The other was to criticize what was wrong with them. But how do you do that? I found the best way was first to sum up the flaws they shared. And to sum up their shared flaws I first had to sum up how they were written — what they had in common. Only then could I say what shortcomings they shared.

That's how I arrived at Propp's model. Because I found the same elements coming up again and again — someone falls into misfortune, and whoever falls into misfortune always meets a woman who saves him, patterns like that.

Q: After you came back from the U.S. to teach, especially in recent years, have any books had a big effect on your thinking?

Xu: The books of recent years that have affected me most are, of all things, some of the old classics. Rereading The Analects and Records of the Grand Historian has been very rewarding. These days I have less time for that. There's a real contradiction here: on one hand you feel short of time, that you have to get things done; on the other, reading now is nothing like reading before, and the returns are much greater. I haven't had time lately to reread Dream of the Red Chamber, for instance. If I did, I imagine I'd get a great deal out of it, because I'd see all sorts of things I couldn't see before.

A couple of years ago, for Behind the Headlines with Wentao, I was rereading The Plum in the Golden Vase, and I saw a lot I'd never seen before — before, I hadn't even known what I was looking at. Now I notice: ah, when they're having sex there's a cat beside them, and what color the cat is, and so on.

I've been reading Records of the Grand Historian lately, looking at the proclamation Qin Shi Huang issued to the people after taking power. I find it fascinating — it's all about controlling people's genitals. A man may not sleep with a married woman; if he does, here's how he is to be dealt with, and here's how she is. It's wonderful. So it's rare now for a book to shock me. But the better the book, the more I read it, the more I get out of it.

Really, once you reach a certain point in life you go back to those old books, and the classics are classics — truly worth rereading.

Q: Could you say more about what you get out of them? Is it mainly for your scholarship, or more about life?

Xu: All kinds. Reading usually goes like this: you come to a passage and find it has said the thing you never said. And "the thing you never said" means you had certainly thought it, just not clearly enough — and there it is, said. What's more remarkable, it was said a thousand years ago. It makes you feel very small.

To Study Anything, You Must Find Yourself in It — Only Then Can It Have Value

Q: Could you talk about what your three teachers — Qian Gurong, Professor Chen Bingliang and Professor Leo Ou-fan Lee — meant to you?

Xu: Mr. Qian's influence on me was enormous — the greatest of any teacher, I'd say.

First: before I met him, nobody had ever told me I was good, that I was outstanding, that I had ability. Nobody. In this world, apart from my parents, no one. Think about it — before that I'd been sent down to the countryside, worked as a laborer, just someone getting by, until I passed the graduate exam. Getting into graduate school was a proud thing back then — and not only did I get in, but Mr. Qian considered me the best of his students at the time.

On my first reading report he corrected six typos and then said he'd send it to the university journal for publication. Think about it — that changed my life. That was the first thing. Apart from my parents, Mr. Qian was the first person to affirm me. Privately, of course, he also criticized me a great deal.

The second and biggest help was that he gave me a research method — a theoretical anchor — I've used all my life. I remember spending a month in the library reading everything Yu Dafu wrote. I came across On Yu Dafu (《郁达夫论》) by Zeng Huapeng and Fan Boqun, more than 50,000 words, written in the mid-1950s. Zeng Huapeng was Wang Hui's teacher; Fan Boqun later worked on the Mandarin Duck and Butterfly School at Soochow University. When I finished it I just collapsed, sitting in a corner of the library. I still remember it: I must have sat there doing nothing for half an hour. That afternoon I went to Mr. Qian and told him I didn't know what to do. Put simply: what I'd been thinking, someone had already written twenty years earlier, so what was left for me to write? Mr. Qian said one thing to me: that's because you, Xu Zidong, haven't seen yourself in the work.

Powerful. I understood it later. When my book came out he wrote the preface. I was young and cocky then, and titled it A New Study of Yu Dafu (《郁达夫新论》) — very presumptuous. Mr. Qian didn't scold me for it; he smoothed it over. What did he write in the preface? He wrote: there is nothing new under the sun. But the essays in this book are indeed Xu Zidong's own insight, his own expression, and so they have their own value. That backed me up, explained me, let me off the hook, and set up a theoretical anchor. The idea came to him from Goethe: don't demand the deepest, the highest, the greatest — don't even think about such things. Or rather, if you want those things, there's only one road: know yourself. So to study anything, you must find yourself in it — only then can it have value. That gave me a huge foundation of confidence.

So Mr. Qian's greatest help came down to those two things. First, very concretely, he was the first person to appreciate me. Second, he gave me a weapon I'd use for the rest of my life.

Q: So it seems all your later scholarship carries traces of you.

Xu: Objectively that's true of everyone; it's just that some people believe it and some don't. Some think about it from an entirely different angle.

Chen Bingliang urged me to go abroad and gave me a lot of practical help — a genuinely good man. Leo Ou-fan Lee too, though he was more of a friend. I went to the U.S. as a visiting scholar, but after a year as a visiting scholar the money ran out. Around that time... afterward, people said we could get green cards there. He said, why don't you hold off on going back? I said fine, I'll stick it out. And he started helping me.

But you know, that bred a habit in me. What bad habit? Because from Mr. Qian to Chen Bingliang to Leo Ou-fan Lee, you notice a pattern: my teachers were good to me, which made everything feel smooth, and that produced an illusion — that I had talent, that I deserved these things. You come to feel they were good to you because you're clever, because you have talent.

Only later did I discover it doesn't work that way. Once you run into people who aren't good to you, or whose kindness has conditions, comes as a trade, you discover that people competing with you and treating you badly is the normal state of society. Having someone appreciate you, having someone be good to you — that's luck. When you meet someone in life who works against you, that's normal (laughs). The old Chinese saying goes, "a gentleman gives himself to the one who knows him" — and those who truly know you are few.

So it was only later that I understood, and looking back I'm grateful. That's why, when Mr. Qian died, I went back and spoke as a representative of his students, and was terribly sad. To meet people in your life who appreciate you, who happen to give you a hand — that really is luck. You have to see everything this way.

Q: When did you realize this?

Xu: In the last ten years or so. Because the academic environment in Hong Kong keeps getting worse — the situation I described earlier: old colonial traces still lingering, resistance to mainland China, and narrow institutional management on top. So of course I may have run into some difficult people, but what I'm drawing from isn't any individual, particular cause. What I'm reasoning about is the normal condition of human life. To be clear about this one thing: you struggle, and people don't back you — that's normal. The world doesn't owe you universal support. Don't assume that because you're gifted everyone is out scouting talent, waiting to push you forward. If you meet a talent scout, treasure it. If you don't, don't cry about it.

Scholarship's Effect on Society Should Be Encouraged and Protected by the System

Q: Apart from what you've described, are there other questions that have troubled you for a long time?

Xu: Nothing to be done about that — in life the questions you can't work out always outnumber the ones you can.

If there's anything new in the past few years, it's that the media work I do in Hong Kong has in fact met constant obstruction and criticism. Their objections rest on two grounds. One is that they think this sort of thing isn't scholarship — that I should be writing pure papers, papers that meet Western standards especially. The other is that they think it's mainland China's business. It's interesting: people at my own university say, why are you meddling in mainland affairs?

I've kept turning those two questions over, and I sometimes write back to them. I've thought it through carefully and checked myself: is doing this work straying from what I'm supposed to do? Having thought about it, I still don't regret it.

First, I think all of it has to do with scholarship, Behind the Headlines with Wentao, Letters Alive (《见字如面》) and The Roundtable (《圆桌派》) included. Scholarship is a broad thing, far bigger than writing papers, and it feeds back into my papers as well. So I don't think taking part in this so-called public-intellectual activity has hurt my work on Lu Xun in the slightest — this book is the proof. It's aimed at a general audience, but in my view it holds to professional standards. If you saw the poster, David Der-wei Wang and others rated the book highly; that was encouraging. So on the first count, I don't think this work has damaged my scholarship at all. On the contrary, I think it has helped it — it may even be my scholarship.

Second, the connection between Hong Kong's social and academic development and mainland China is obvious. If you do something good for mainland China's development — if we carry on Lu Xun's tradition and do something useful — that's naturally good for Hong Kong too. It's such a simple point that failing to see it would be a shame.

Recently Hong Kong's University Grants Committee, the university funding system, changed its policy too. In academic assessment, 70 percent goes on your research output, but another 15 percent looks at your research "environment" — put simply, what money you've won. And there's a newly added item that never existed before, worth another 15 percent. What's it called? "Impact." They define it specifically as impact outside the academic world, not inside it. In mainland terms, roughly "social benefit" or "social effect." I think that shift is the right one.

So this book of mine will be filed under "impact." I used to feel that when people said many readers of my books were literary-minded young people outside the field, there was a slight put-down in it. Now I see there's no put-down at all. If this book, besides being read by university students and specialists, can also reach ordinary literary-minded readers, that's an honor for me. And if the specialists see the value in it too, better still. At the very least you can't go for noise alone; you also need your peers not to attack you.

Banner and lead image: stills from the film The Golden Era (《黄金时代》), via Douban.