From Northeast China to Shanghai, From Life to Writing: Writer Jin Yucheng on His Past | Interviews

"A writer's world is actually very narrow."

Jin Yucheng's signature work came late. He finished his first novel, Blossoms (《繁花》), at 60. Critics were lavish with praise, arguing that it went past the psychological description and omniscient viewpoint that contemporary fiction relies on, and instead "wrote people and events as scenery" — simply listening to what they said, watching what they did, everything in plain view, stripped of any "second layer of meaning." The approach has roots in classical fiction, yet also feels thoroughly of the moment.

The language of Blossoms is less a dialect than a remaking of dialect and written Chinese. Translators find it a headache; Jin Yucheng finds that satisfying: "It shows the book was written only for Chinese-reading readers — to me, that's high praise."

This runs against the view of some other Chinese writers, who long for recognition from the English-speaking world, work hard to find quintessentially Chinese stories, and hand the expressive burden of language over to translation. They are also drawn to gazing at the countryside. Villages and small towns are rich in a sense of the real, and can turn strikingly magical too — perennial favorites with literary prizes.

Acclaimed writing about cities is rarer. The last classic novel about Shanghai dates back to 1996, Wang Anyi's The Song of Everlasting Sorrow. Blossoms follows three ordinary men — Husheng, Abao, and Xiaomao — through a rocky adolescence in 1960s Shanghai; in the novel's other strand, Jin Yucheng lays out, in exhaustive detail, what happens to them in 1990s Shanghai.

The first draft of Blossoms ran as a serial on an online forum popular with Shanghai natives, an anecdote that adds a note of humor to the writer's late-blooming fame. Jin Yucheng fully embraced serialized online writing, and never felt it threatened a writer's independence. He points out that before the internet age, early novels were often serialized too. Serialization was "an extravagant pleasure" — it not only kept him motivated to write, but also gave him a taste of readers' hidden depths. Taking their feedback into account, Jin Yucheng revised the fate of the "old Shaoxing woman" when the book was finalized, letting her live a few years longer.

In 2012, the draft — whose characters' names kept shifting — was reworked into a novel of more than 300,000 characters and published in the full-length-fiction special (the autumn-winter volume) of the old-school literary magazine Harvest (《收获》). After several more rounds of revision in 2013, it became a book.

Blossoms has won no fewer than ten literary prizes, fiction prizes, and book-of-the-year awards. A Cheng, known as an "encyclopedic writer," felt he had discovered a cartographer of a writer, and hoped Jin Yucheng would keep writing until all of Shanghai unfolded, the way Balzac's The Human Comedy maps Paris. The director Wong Kar-wai felt he was reading Shanghai's own Along the River During the Qingming Festival, and bought the film rights in 2014. Blossoms has since been adapted into pingtan storytelling and stage drama too, though these adaptations have largely lost the rare naturalism of the novel — which A Cheng described as "seeming to carry no values at all, yet so powerful."

Jin Yucheng first assumed only people born around 1950 would care for these stories — steeped as they are in a distant atmosphere, full of the murky, unresolved "ambiguity" of that era. At his first book signing at the Shanghai Book Fair in 2013, seeing so many young people in line, he finally relaxed. "He has a lot of fans," said a staff member keeping the queue in order at this August's Shanghai Book Fair, where Jin Yucheng was signing three new books — The Bowl (《碗》), Square Island (《方岛》), and Light Chill (《轻寒》) — in the main hall. On the title page, he addresses his young readers as "little friends."

Jin Yucheng hand-lettered the titles of all three new books and drew the covers, a self-portrait, and the illustrations himself. Some illustrations are printed straight onto the page, others pasted in by hand, most in a woodcut style. It is a practice that goes back to the standalone edition of Blossoms: the interior illustrations and the hand-lettered title are both distinctly Jin Yucheng's own. "In the computer age, these handmade elements are rare, I think. In the novels of our time, hand-drawn covers and woodcut illustrations were tightly bound to the text."

Jin Yucheng never trained as a painter, but the past two years he has become quite obsessed with it. His enthusiasm owes something to his current fame too — this year alone, he has been invited to hold three exhibitions of his paintings.

Jin Yucheng's writing began in the 1980s. Like most literary youths of the time, he believes he was shaped by Western literature. He took part in the Shanghai Writers Association's first youth fiction workshop and wrote a story about young people and death. In it, a young man building coffins doesn't understand that the idle coffin in front of him — cracking, warping, rotting more each day — is where every old person ends up. At the opening ceremony of a literary prize this past March, Jin Yucheng was invited to talk about his earliest writing and brought up this story again; it is also included in the newly published Square Island, under the title Bird in the Wind (《风中鸟》).

Unlike Blossoms, Bird in the Wind and most of the short and medium-length fiction collected in Square Island concern a chapter of the past in Northeast China, and carry the distinctive voice of that region.

In 1969, Jin Yucheng left Shanghai to settle in Nenjiang, in the Northeast, and stayed until 1977. He missed Shanghai badly, but that stretch in the Northeast still matters to him. The short story The Legend of the Phoenix (《不死鸟传说》) has a young Shanghai woman muttering the Shanghainese word for "pedicab" all day long. In Parable (《譬喻》), a young man is overjoyed that a botched medical treatment has left his foot lame — because it means he can be sent back to Shanghai on medical grounds. Even then, Jin Yucheng already showed an unusual attentiveness to detail and gossip.

In 1992, Jin Yucheng published Night of Confusion (《迷夜》), which included some of the fiction that would later appear in Square Island, The Bowl, and Light Chill. It made no impression at the time. Starting in 1988, Jin Yucheng went to work at Shanghai Literature (《上海文学》), the journal run by the Shanghai Writers Association, editing manuscripts in the old building known as "Cupid's Garden" (Aishen Huayuan), designed in the 1930s by the Hungarian architect László Hudec. The staircase spiraled, the corridors ran long and narrow; on the third floor, in two large rooms, he sat at a succession of desks, the mantelpiece lined with cloth-bound, gold-stamped bound volumes of the magazine going back to 1952, the year he was born.

In hindsight, those long years as an editor shaped his recent writing deeply: he came to understand the "fundamentals" of writing, and built a distinctive narrative method more effectively for it. The other fact is that he spent most of his time reading other people's fiction, wrote less himself, and what he did write often went unpublished, or, when published, drew no response.

If not for the enormous fame Blossoms brought him — and the chance it created to reissue his earlier work — few people would have noticed that this behind-the-scenes editor had kept writing on and off all along, revising back and forth, even while he had yet to find the form that suited him best.

The Age of Reshuffling (《洗牌年代》), first published in 2006, was reissued in 2015; it contains quite a few of the prototypes for Blossoms. Looking Back (《回望》), published in 2017, was written across different periods: it holds stories of his father and mother that he wrote in the 1990s; a few years ago he added new chapters drawn from his father's letters and reading notes; and a large portion comes from his mother's detailed oral account, finally recorded after she refused several times. The material carries traces of "local inconsistency," but Jin Yucheng isn't bothered by that.

"People and events don't need to be complete. They can be fragmentary, contradictory. You don't have to keep writing to serve some structure. Question your own fixed memories. What doesn't need to be said can be left unsaid." Jin Yucheng writes this in the afterword titled Family Letters (《家书》), appended to both The Age of Reshuffling and Looking Back. This can probably be taken as part of what he understands as "good writing."

The other part is what V.S. Naipaul once said: "When I write about a life I don't understand, I'm not really writing a novel — I'm writing a fairy tale." A good writer can't write about everything. A writer's world is actually very narrow.

Our interview with Jin Yucheng took place in a hotel café near the Shanghai Book Fair. He showed up in a black shirt and black sunglasses, smiling only rarely. Still, "cool" would be a hard word to pin on him. Beneath his vague, hedging way of speaking lies real shrewdness. The corners of his mouth and his eyebrows tend to tilt upward, and he carries himself with great composure — like an old cat.

Q = QDaily

J = Jin Yucheng

Back then, both writers and editors wanted to change the ecology of fiction

Q: Reading Square Island, the details feel concrete and ambiguous at the same time. On one hand, it's hard to form a specific picture of life on the farm; on the other, I deeply relate to the characters' sense of being lost. It's a lot like The Sound and the Fury, or Dubliners. I wonder whether your writing in the 1980s and '90s was genuinely influenced by books like these, or whether you were deliberately trying to obscure the concrete?

J: Writers in the 1980s were all keen on exploring the aesthetics of narrative form — that really was a huge push. This generation had been deeply influenced by Soviet and Russian literature before that, and in the years leading up to the 1990s we were hit by the wave of avant-garde fiction; everyone became extremely self-conscious about text and language, pushing aesthetic experiment as far as it would go. It was surely the fashion of the moment. So rereading these stories now, I honestly can't say what specific influences were at work, or whether it was some kind of echo running from particular reading straight into writing.

But I did come to realize that people matter most. Human relationships, human states of being — none of that fits the old narrative mode anymore, and that became completely clear. Even when writing landscape, it carries personal traits, filtered through the individual.

Q: Writers in the '80s and '90s wanted more experimental writing, and everyone probably drew on different reference texts or preferred different styles. What were your own leanings at the time?

J: It's too far back to say clearly. I definitely read a lot — the most important ones were Foreign Literature and Art, Beijing's World Literature, and Yilin, the fastest templates for writing available. Then there was another batch, things like Selected Contemporary Experimental Fiction, Selected Modern Fiction, The French New Novel, and so on. Publishers like Lijiang Publishing House and Shanghai Translation Publishing House back then… this whole generation was shaped by these books.

Some traces are especially clear — Márquez, for instance, set off a wide-scale fever for writing; Faulkner too, and American fiction generally. Emotionally, I personally feel European fiction had the bigger influence on me. Take Michel Butor's novel A Change of Heart (《变》), one of the earliest books to enter the reading range of serious literature in China. It's written entirely in the second person, describing objects and things in painstaking detail; it's really the story of a man shuttling between Paris and Rome, with a woman in Paris and another in Rome, the whole novel built around the experience of travel. The second person is sustained from beginning to end, very distinctive, describing every concrete scene and detail on the train in exhaustive detail. And of course I also love things like The Garden of Forking Paths (Borges).

You can't say that reading a book means you'll write it right — in practice it combines with whatever foundation you already have, and countless variations happen inside; how it comes out on the page is hard to say. Reading is a catalyst. It stirs up the writer's own experience, drawing out whatever parts of your past life in the north happen to resonate — in perspective, in color, in mood.

Q: I remember in one story, a scene of a character walking along a wheat field or cornfield recurs several times. It looks like you were especially eager to experiment with structure.

J: At the time I especially wanted a certain lyricism, and used a lyrical method to bring out a narrative rhythm with personality — not the old-style realist approach, but one that moves toward inner feeling.

Q: Back then, did the story itself matter to you?

J: The story… actually always mattered, but I wouldn't let it show itself in full. Because often, the less clearly you tell something, the richer it can be — I knew this early on. Mostly, I've never much liked fiction that covers every angle, and I still don't. Every reader in fact creates their own space, not to mention how much smarter readers' comprehension has become these days.

Back then the whole scene, across the board, was very energetic. When I sent manuscripts to Harvest — a story like Light Chill, say — I never worried that the editors wouldn't understand it. I remember my editor, Xiao Yuanmin, raised several specific suggestions for revision. The moment I saw those revisions, I knew she had fully understood — though I've forgotten by now exactly what they were about. What I mean is, editors and writers back then were completely in sync, very energetic; in a sense, both writers and editors shared a kind of vibrant hope, a hope of changing the ecology of fiction, its narrative methods. The two sides were deeply in tune. That enthusiasm seems to have completely faded now — a lot of those editors have already retired.

Q: Was that because there was a very clear goal at the time? Is it that the narrative style of the previous decade or more was simply no longer wanted?

J: The decade or so around 1970 was utterly barren — there was nothing to read. It's the same logic as the late Cultural Revolution: everyone had been wearing plain Mao suits, and suddenly all these brightly colored clothes appeared. We had simply been that cut off, and that's how we discovered literature had boundless range. So why did that energy fall away again once the 1990s arrived? The state that had kept you sealed off for over a decade was long gone; over time, the passion just went slack. Or you could say that energetic period was itself a kind of abnormality — like someone who's been starving a long time: anything tastes good. But once they can eat whatever they want every day, they eventually return to normal. It's hard to put into words.

Q: What was the writing workshop like at the time? I read in Zhu Wei's Rereading the 1980s (《重读八十年代》) that Chen Cun and Yu Hua both attended, and you took part in a writing workshop too.

J: The Shanghai Writers Association held its first Young Writers' Creative Workshop in March 1986. There were twenty-seven or twenty-eight of us, recommended by each magazine, which nominated whichever submitting writers it thought showed promise. It ran three months, with organized visits and all kinds of lectures — we toured Tilanqiao Prison and a psychiatric hospital, watched "passing films," and so on. At the end, everyone had to hand in a story. For the last two weeks, they sent us to a guesthouse in the mountains of Ninghai, Ningbo.

Sun Ganlu had already written Visiting a Dream (《访问梦境》) before joining the workshop. Some of my classmates simply couldn't write anything at that point and went off hiking and drinking instead. I felt some pressure and wanted to write, and in the end I really did write Bird in the Wind — it turned out to be one of the workshop's three results, meaning three stories from that class ran in the September issue of Shanghai Literature: mine, Sun Ganlu's, and one by Yin Huifen, who lived in Jiading. Mine and Yin's were short stories; Sun's was a novella. That was autumn 1986.

There were three sessions in all — the second was also for fiction, the third for poetry. Just those three. It was one of the concrete things the Writers Association did in the 1980s.

Literature can absolutely be repeated

Q: Why did you write Bird in the Wind at the time?

J: I spent eight years living out there — a lot happened, and I had to structure it into individual stories… The opening is always the most agonizing part: vague at first, working off some feeling as a trigger, trying to work out how to piece together which parts of the real material — and then a light finally switches on and, ah, so that's how it goes. Short stories especially need an opportunity; you have to wait for inspiration.

What I mean by inspiration was this: an ugly old coffin is, for someone about to die, the single most important destination. Young people never take the theme of death to heart, yet even they can feel, concretely, the ugliness of death. At the end, both old people cling stubbornly to life, refusing to die — meaning they refuse that ugliness — and that was the story's inspiration. First you need this condition handed to you: the process by which the coffin grows steadily uglier, battered by wind and rain, cracking, filthy — yet still, whatever happens, bound to fulfill its purpose in the end. That's where the dramatic effect comes from.

Writing Bird in the Wind, I shut myself away somewhere with nowhere to go and have fun — outside the guesthouse window there was nothing but mountains, which forced me to get the thing written. In a different setting, I probably would have run off to play instead. There was pressure — every day at the canteen, word would go around that so-and-so had written something really good, and the pressure built up. I might just be the kind of person who only finishes something when forced to. I wrote one night straight through until dawn, and by lunchtime the next day word was already spreading: "Incredible" — "a dark horse has come out of the youth workshop."

Q: After this story, did you suddenly feel your writing had changed? You've cited this same example before, when invited to talk about your youthful writing — what does it mean to you?

J: What it means is that writers are usually in pain — even after writing something good, it doesn't mean the problems are over from then on. In a certain sense, literature may be an especially demanding discipline: it can't be repeated. It wasn't until twenty years later that I realized literature actually can be repeated, but for a long time I believed it couldn't. Take painting: if you paint one peony really well, you can just keep painting more of them. But with literature, once you finish the novel, it's over — you have to start again from zero. Even after winning a prize for a novel, you're privately thinking: what do I write next? How do I keep up the standard? Unless you're a writer with an exceptional gift for this. In reality it's all anxiety and pain, sustained purely by interest.

Q: You later said literature can absolutely be repeated. I'd guess what you mean is: write what you know best. Don't always chase something new — you can keep writing what you're already familiar with.

J: Yes. Because over the years I've met a lot of writers who, after writing a few pieces set in some particular background, decide they've exhausted it and need to write something else. But once they move on to other material, they often go downhill — perhaps because that's exactly when the writer has left the part he knows best, and drifts forward without really feeling anything, going in a big circle, and ending up with very little to show for it.

If you compare it to the bear cub picking corn — you should really sit down and gorge yourself within one patch of the cornfield. Right? But usually people just get confused: I've already written about the cornfield, surely I can't write about it again; or, I wrote about it five years ago, so five years on I ought to write something else. But as you walk forward step by step, you're actually drifting farther and farther from the territory you know best, until finally you're lost.

So what did I mean by saying "writing can be repeated after all"? Say a writer has written a few dozen stories — it's simple. I mean it's simple for other people to judge. Looking back at these stories, which ones drew readers' attention, got anthologized, won prizes; and which ones nobody ever mentions, written as if they'd never been written at all? That verdict draws the boundary of your territory. Say three of them got real praise from readers and critics — that, in effect, marks out the range you're best at. The rest, published or not, might as well not exist. So that other material and territory — you shouldn't touch it again afterward, right? You need to come back to the range of those three praised stories. That patch of ground is yours. Why? First, because if people say you wrote it so well, and you yourself say, I've already written that, time to move on — how can that be right? Try it and see. Take me: if I went and wrote another story about a coffin a few years from now, it would surely turn out differently. Of course, I haven't tried it, but I believe that.

Q: You've said more than once that you're a writer who takes reader feedback very seriously. But is it really workable to judge what you're good at based on feedback? Take the three newly published books — several of the pieces in them were published before and, for various reasons, got no response. But I believe the response will be bigger this time.

J: You believe that… (pause) On what grounds?

Q: At least more people will be interested in reading them — you have your reputation now. Don't you think?

J: There's some truth to that. Also, years have passed, and new readers have come along who haven't read them. When I put together this old material myself, I made a selection — using today's eyes — and I feel some of it was actually written quite well back then.

As I said just now, I eventually left that northern region behind, and in terms of interest and feeling, I'm actually quite averse to it. I've said as much to Chi Zijian myself: how does she write the Northeast so beautifully? My place there was at most a few hundred kilometers from hers, and in my memory it was always cold and bleak, always gray. Once I left, I never wanted to go back.

Of course, Chi Zijian is more than ten years younger than me. She said she had no idea Nenjiang could be like that. She grew up in the mountains around Mohe, much more unspoiled — up at the tip of the rooster's comb on the map of China — while Nenjiang sits around the rooster's eye, its eyebrow. A native village and a giant, Soviet-designed farm are entirely different soil and water.

Regret is complicated — it leaves you at a loss

Q: The Northeast comes up several times in your fiction. In Blossoms, for instance, Shuhua goes to the Northeast and ends up a genuinely tragic character. In the new book Square Island, there's a story called Desire (《欲望》) about a young man who wants to go back to Shanghai and is thrilled even to have gone lame. In The Legend of the Phoenix, one offhand line of Shanghainese was enough to make you "homesick for Shanghai." At the time, in the Northeast, what was the thing you found most unbearable — and, conversely, what made you miss Shanghai the most?

J: The simple reason is the huge gap between city and countryside, the huge gap in ways of life. People are best off moving upward — what does it feel like moving downward? If I'd already been living badly to begin with, I might have taken to the farm right away.

Life there dropped several rungs, and with no end in sight — I didn't know if I'd ever get to go back. Every little detail of daily life was completely different from Shanghai. Instead of a flush toilet, there was a pit; in winter, squatting over it, you could see the yellow ice block below. Clearing it out meant hacking away with a pickaxe, sending up a yellow mist like a small explosion — it didn't just vanish at the push of a flush button.

It was a semi-militarized collective — with Sino-Soviet relations tense at the time, we were often roused in the middle of the night for forced marches. I really disliked that tense, collective atmosphere. Used to being loose and undisciplined, I found the near-military rhythm psychologically very hard to bear. It wasn't about whether your thinking was correct — it was just hard to adapt to. During the day you had to fold your quilt into a perfect square with not a single wrinkle; you'd be exhausted from building walls or firing kilns, and still couldn't lie down and rest — I genuinely couldn't take it. But plenty of people actually liked this way of living, and there's nothing wrong with that — it just shows how different people can be. Farming plus military drills plus morning exercises was some friends' favorite thing. It's a matter of personality; I found it very hard to accept. That's exactly why the West has mercenary systems — it understands something about human nature. Mercenaries are recruited at high pay precisely because there really are men in this world who genuinely enjoy this kind of high-intensity life, training before dawn every single day.

It wasn't like being sent down to a village, where you got along with the local farmers, a few of you could make your own calls, take a rest if you wanted, or skip farming for a day if you didn't feel like it. During the busy season here, you couldn't even come back until dark — "the trees stand guard, the chimney keeps watch," not one person let off. These were exactly the details I hated. So I wrote in The Bowl about people more sensitive than me who, the very day they arrived at the farm from Shanghai, ran off that same night; people would go after them at once, and even in the ice and snow, they'd be caught and dragged back. People are simply different this way. Today our individual personalities have grown far more differentiated, but back then, life was extremely crude and rigidly uniform. Plenty of the people I was there with had a fine time of it, rising from squad leader to platoon leader to company commander — but what they liked can't stand in for me.

There was only one benefit. Being suddenly dropped into a place like that and looking back on city life in Shanghai was rather like having a beautiful girlfriend in the city, then some upheaval takes you thousands of kilometers away from her — you find her more and more beautiful, think of her often in the middle of the night, even though she herself feels nothing at all. And bit by bit, you find her growing clearer and clearer in your mind. It leaves you feeling something increasingly like a very complicated sweetness.

So it's fair to say: if I hadn't gone to the Northeast, I wouldn't have written Blossoms. During the era Blossoms depicts, I was only back in Shanghai on a few short home visits — I wasn't actually there at all. The upside was that, because it was such a large farm, I got to know young people from all over, from every district. On my brief trips back to Shanghai, I could go places I'd never have gone otherwise, drop in on people all over the city, and discover that Zhabei actually had such a dense tangle of streets, that old train station, the unforgettable sprawling tenement compounds around Shiliupu in Nanshi, the old lanes around Dazizhong, the character of Yangpu or Nanshi… It was precisely because I'd gone off to the Northeast that I came to know the details of Shanghai even better.

In the end, this whole group basically made it back to Shanghai. A small number of people my age managed to dodge being "sent down to the countryside" — I spent eight years in the north while they spent those same eight years still in Shanghai. Looking back at them now, I sense a certain narrowness in how they see things, because they never went through so many complicated changes. Whether it was better to have left, or better to have refused to leave — honestly, that's a hard call for me to make.

A reporter once asked whether I had any regrets about those eight years away. In The Bowl I answered: regretting it bitterly does no good. My regret is that back then I could have refused the mobilization — refused even if it killed me — and maybe I'd have stayed. There really were people, one or two percent, who faked illness and stayed, even with the neighborhood committee banging gongs and drums at their door every day, refusing to budge. Why was I so foolish, agreeing right away, transferring my household registration and heading north? But then, coming back eight years later, looking at those few I knew who never got sent down, who'd spent those eight years working in some quiet, forgotten neighborhood factory alongside the intellectually disabled and so on — watching this whole crowd of us return in a great noisy homecoming — would they feel regret? It's very complicated, like Hamlet's to be or not to be… how to put it…

Q: After you came back to Shanghai, was that Shanghai very different from the Shanghai you'd missed so much while in the Northeast?

J: Imagination is always richer. I came back in 1978, on medical grounds. By the time I got back, more or less the whole wave of sent-down youth was returning to the cities almost at once. Everyone at the time was doing everything they could to get back; people with connections had gone back long before. In my case, coming back turned out fine — it varied from person to person. Some people came back to find there was no room left at home, say because a brother or sister had gotten married; a few actually didn't want to come back at all, since housing in Shanghai was extremely tight at the time.

Q: You made a short film with Joan Chen before, talking about Shanghai in the '70s and '80s. Joan Chen is fairly typical of the nostalgic feeling people have now when they talk about the 1980s, but the state you present is quite detached — you feel it actually wasn't that good back then, that the sky was gray.

J: I once looked at a big black-and-white photo collection of Shanghai shot by Guo Bo (Guo Moruo's son). I stared at it a long time, kept feeling — why do the streets look so strange? Only later did I realize: back then, no building in the whole city had an outdoor air-conditioning unit. Looking at the past through today's eyes, it always feels simple, even a bit desolate, like an old dream that never quite wakes. On the level of detail, the roads — a lot of the small lanes were cobbled, not the carefully laid round-stone paving of Petersburg. I remembered Shanghai's old gravel roads, which stayed bumpy and uneven no matter how many feet wore them down — in Shanghai dialect, they were called "tan-ge roads."

There were also the chamber pots that used to sit by the roadside everywhere, almost never seen now. A few years ago I saw a resident of Changle Road and Xiangyang Road ask, in effect: when can they finally tear down this old house of ours? Just let me enjoy a flush toilet once in my life — I've emptied chamber pots my whole life… So I'm somewhat suspicious of blind nostalgia, of people now painting the old lane-house life as so wonderful. How could it possibly have been that wonderful? In reality it was quite, quite crude and shabby.

Look back at old photos of Shanghai's lane houses in the '70s and '80s — seventy-two tenants under one roof, all those clothes and trousers hanging out to dry together, people crowding the front and back doorways downstairs. Have you seen Shanghai Fever (《股疯》), the film with Pan Hong? It's a good film, the best one depicting Shanghai residents of that era — a neighbor, an old woman, accuses Pan Hong's character of stealing her tap water. That whole crowded, cramped way of living really wasn't a normal Shanghai life. I find it hard to feel nostalgic for that "seventy-two tenants" condition. As people who still live in the old lane houses today put it: you left the old lane houses, and now you want to preserve buildings like this? Then let's swap — you come over and try it, and we'll trade places.

The lane houses should be preserved — the crowding wasn't their true character to begin with. It came about because after the "August 13th" incident, huge numbers of refugees flooded into the foreign concessions, which were safe; ordinary people and wealthy people alike, from all across the surrounding Jiangsu and Zhejiang region and everywhere else under Chinese jurisdiction, poured into the concessions. A shikumen house was originally designed with one address, upstairs and downstairs, for a single household — and ended up crammed with seventy-two tenants. People even slept on the staircases; old comic sketches have routines about it — a whole family living even under the stairs. That abnormal condition has persisted right up to today.

When I came back from the north, Shanghai felt smaller, more crowded than before. The north is flat as far as the eye can see, and even the air is different. It's very hard to put the feeling between the two places into words. As far as scenery alone goes, the Nenjiang area is almost like Russia — birch trees, wide grassy meadows, marshland — but that's about all it has.

Pay attention to your elders and relatives — to their relationships, and to their stories

Q: Given you don't even want to go back to the north, why gather all this material into a book again?

J: Those are two different things. Going back there is about paying respects; the content is already contained in this writing of mine. Even The Bowl, which I wrote after Blossoms, isn't really about whether to go back or not — it started from a piece of gossip. By pure chance, I heard a rumor: back in those years there was a Shanghai girl named Xiaoying who fell into a well and died — everyone remembers that. But this time, the story went, Xiaoying had actually gone back to Shanghai in secret, given birth to a daughter, and only died after returning to the farm — that was the startling piece of news. Everyone remembered a young woman who'd died at twenty, and now there was this sequel. And then, while this piece of gossip was making the rounds at a reunion dinner, the very girl who'd been born back then suddenly walked into the private room — that was the second, quite extraordinary thing. She said to everyone directly: back then, my mother gave birth to me and died a month or two later. This time, having heard that you were all planning to go back together, I wanted to go with you — I want to visit my mother's grave. That convinced me it was a rare kind of story, so I contacted a TV documentary channel and they went back with everyone to film it.

I myself didn't go back with them, because it was this story that made me look afresh at the scenes from back then — how, faced with this newly emerged twist, different people reacted, what contradictions surfaced, how the story began and how it ended. That's the origin of the nonfiction piece The Bowl. The book's second part includes a short story on the same subject, A Desolate Anniversary (《苍凉纪念日》), which ran in Harvest in the 1990s. This earlier story creates a contrast with the nonfiction piece and opens up a new angle — a story I'd written long ago that, unexpectedly, gained new content decades later. If readers look closely, the two pieces are completely different in content and form, but they share one common facet, one real background.

Q: The structure of the whole book reads wonderfully. Having heard you talk about so much of your experience, I'd like to ask: your generation has had so much experience, while our generation's experience could be described as plenty, or as nothing at all, because it's so uniform. If we're supposed to write from territory we know well, what is there for us to write?

J: Compared to the '50s generation, the post-'80s and post-'90s generations are more focused on themselves. There's nothing wrong with that — it's a habit their parents raised them into. From childhood, parents kept telling them: just stay home and do your homework, don't worry about anything else, so this generation doesn't pay much attention to what happened to the generation before them. My generation, born in the '50s — our parents simply couldn't manage us at all. During the Cultural Revolution I was thirteen or fourteen, and my own parents could barely look after themselves, let alone stop you from going off to Beijing or Guangzhou to "link up" with other students — the trains were free. Tomorrow you'd sling a bag over your shoulder, walk along the railway tracks, and go off to Jiangxi with some other kids — nobody would stop you. So this generation paid especially close attention to their surroundings, to what might happen, including what might happen at home, what might happen to their parents. If a parent said one sentence, I'd be listening, wondering: could this pose some threat to my family? It was chaotic times, the future was so uncertain, nobody had any idea what tomorrow would bring — including when I went to the Northeast, everyone there was the same, but deep down, we all knew our parents' situation, knew it very well.

I know people born in the '80s would say they too have their own particular kind of space, but there's no need to compare these two generations — the gap is too vast. The post-'80s generation wouldn't, straight out of university, be forced down into some very low rural existence overnight. Your circumstances are relatively far more autonomous, and the conditions of survival simply aren't comparable. Back then, pulling one thread moved the whole body; this generation, by comparison, has narrowed down to the scale of the individual.

But when it comes to writing, the question shouldn't stay this static. Literature's old, tired question — where do I come from, where am I going — really means paying genuine attention to your elders, listening to them, getting them to talk about their own elders, about relatives and friends, paying attention to their stories and their relationships. Zhou Jianing is also a post-'80s writer, and we've discussed this — she says she's a bit too embarrassed to bring things up with her father, but she has that wish. Literature's concern with people is like a stage play: if it has the depth of several generations in its background, even just a faint figure somewhere, the view from the audience becomes far more three-dimensional. If you only pay attention to the front row — my upper bunkmate and lower bunkmate in college, the friend in the room next door, who later went abroad — that's flat, just a single plane. Beyond keeping in touch with your own college and high-school classmates, who else is there to know? Once you track down your elementary-school classmates, the world suddenly opens wide.

By comparison, young writers who grew up in the countryside have had a different way of life from urban writers since childhood — their existence is still bound up with the whole family, with the entire clan's network of connections, involving far more complicated dealings among relatives. For everyday life, none of that matters much, but for writing, it definitely calls for a real exploration of these complicated relationships, especially whatever moved you in the environment of your adolescence. That's why Western writers say the source lies in everyone's own adolescence — take that as the trunk, and build outward from there.

Q: If someone's adolescence is basically a blank, does that mean giving up on writing as a path?

J: It's simply a question of whether or not you recover the memory. Or the content may have been dulled by time, and then, through some particular occasion, it all suddenly lights up at once. Whatever the case, writing is a narrative about people, concerned with human relationships — it requires curiosity, requires wanting to understand. If you're genuinely blank, you can turn to nonfiction that reflects the present instead. Even Proust, lying in bed, wasn't blank at all — Proust spent all day recording gossip; if two people at a table whispered something to each other, a few stray fragments drifting over, he'd write it all down. That's the flavor of people and of a city.

One thing I noticed about how the post-'80s generation socializes: some young people once told me they'd never eat in a private dining room at a restaurant — they're used to sharing tables with strangers. For this generation, socializing means table-sharing: three men sitting here, two women over there, none of them knowing each other, not even speaking to one another, yet each group talking about the same kinds of topics — their bosses, office trivia, more or less the same content. But once the men notice there are two women nearby, they'll suddenly talk much more animatedly. The two women will also talk a lot, as if performing for the men to hear, but without either side actually wanting to get to know the other. When the meal's over, everyone just leaves. Isn't that a rather fascinating scene?

When it comes to writing, what you need is exactly this kind of material that plays no real role in life, material other people consider useless. A writer's purpose is precisely to take note of these particular, distinctive things in life. If you don't have that sensitivity and curiosity, go do something else. Fiction exists specifically to gather up the material that everyone else thinks is worthless.

Cover image from David Hockney (cropped).