Luo Yijun, the Novelist Who Is Fun: Is a Novelist a Psychiatrist, or a Patient? | Interviews

On writing about wastrels, the novel, The Scholars, and a novelist's illness

In 2014, the column Luo Yijun had written for Taiwan's Next Magazine for ten years was suddenly killed. It had been his main source of income, and losing it changed his life overnight, making the next four years "extremely rootless and difficult."

Luo Yijun has two sons, both still in school. To support the family he "went around taking on a huge number of lectures, events, and judging panels," but speaking fees in Taiwan are "very low" — about 800 yuan a talk. Adding up all the odd bits of income, he still made only half of what he used to.

"Doing all that, one thing after another, I wrecked my body," Luo Yijun said.

In the winter of 2016 he came down with a strange illness. A hole opened above his scrotum, oozing pus and stinking, "awful, agonizing," bad enough to wreck his sleep and his routine. He went from hospital to hospital, through dermatology and urology, and the hole simply "would not heal." He was sick for a full three months. And, he said, "running back and forth inside this Kafkaesque hospital system, I felt deeply ashamed."

In March the following year he fell seriously ill again. He had a heart attack in Taipei's Daan Forest Park and collapsed. He survived, but his health never came back — he was "sick for a whole year" — and he now carries heart medication whenever he leaves the house.

He has also lived for years with depression, insomnia, and other conditions, and takes medication daily. "Depression, a minor stroke, colon surgery, stomach ulcers, insomnia, sleepwalking and binge-eating at night as a side effect of the sleeping pills — I've put on even more weight than before. My lumbar spine and my shoulders are like the frame of a used car, worn out and coming apart; I've been going to rehab for years for traction and electrotherapy on my back. I can't quit smoking — three packs a day. I don't think I'll live long, but I hope I can hold on until my children can stand on their own, or write two more decent novels before that. That would be more than enough," Luo Yijun wrote in 2016, in an essay titled "Turned to Spring Mud to Better Shelter the Flowers."

Born in Taipei in 1967, Luo Yijun is one of the best-known novelists in the Chinese-speaking world. He has won the top prize of the Dream of the Red Chamber Award (the Award for the Best Novel in the World Written in Chinese), the United Daily News Literary Award, and other major prizes. His books include The Xixia Hotel 《西夏旅馆》, Daughter 《女儿》, Moon Surname 《月球姓氏》, Dispelling Grief 《遣悲怀》, and The Book of Faces 《脸之书》. His work is strongly experimental and original; Harvard professor David Der-wei Wang calls its traits his "registered trademark" — "pseudo-autobiographical private stories, relay-style fragmented narratives, bizarre and decadent imagery, and a worldview of human dregs."

Both Wang and the cultural commentator Liang Wendao have called him "the most remarkable, most creative writer Taiwan has produced in more than a decade, and even one of the weightiest writers in the entire Chinese-speaking world." The novelist Zhang Yueran sees him as a "born novelist," superb at telling a story and at "making things complicated."

In a sense, Luo Yijun thinks his illness has something to do with being a novelist. Writing fiction, for him, is "being smashed to pieces," an "extreme sport" that comes with "occupational injuries." He was shaped by Western modernist fiction, and once wrote to his contemporary, the Hong Kong novelist Dung Kai-cheung: "Because modern fiction is a thing that violates the classical sense of the 'person,' of 'nature,' of the feel of 'time and space' — like repairing the wiring of a spaceship tens of thousands of miles out in space, or entering the inhuman zone after a nuclear blast in heavy protective gear, or a diver in the deep sea, or a prospector descending into the molten core of the earth… This work is high-radiation, high-explosive, high-speed, high-intensity, a long-term, perverse practice of tearing and dissociation, of 'exercises in split personality.' Psychologically it is inevitable, self-inflicted, an occupational injury none of us in the trade escapes — except that what extreme athletes tear is a knee, an ankle, an elbow, a wrist, a shoulder, and what we injure is the nightmare of a tiny individual trying to swallow the whole world, the scorched circuitry left in the brain after that last flash and shock?"

Luo Yijun decided early that he wanted to be a creator. He has recalled that during the year he spent in a cram school repeating the college entrance exam, he stood in the stationery section on the third floor of a department store next door and read "literary books" — first over lunch breaks, spread across many days, and later by skipping class outright. Two of them hit him hard: Eileen Chang's Half a Lifelong Romance and Yu Kwang-chung's translation of Lust for Life, Irving Stone's life of Van Gogh (published on the mainland as Longing for Life: A Biography of Van Gogh). "It really set my head spinning — standing there beside the department store's counter clerks and customers, it was as if the normal light and air had been sucked away, and another world came through a crack of light somewhere behind my forehead: 'I want to be a creator,'" he recalled.

In college he read novels obsessively, and copied the ones he loved out by hand, over and over. That laid the foundation for his love of the Western modernist novel, and for his study and inheritance of it. Kafka, Kundera, Calvino, Proust, Borges, García Márquez, Bolaño, Yasunari Kawabata, Kenzaburō Ōe, Dostoevsky — a whole crowd of novelists he knows intimately and keeps on his lips, the "big names."

Compared with many novelists of earlier generations, Luo Yijun's generation is generally seen as "experience-poor": they never lived through so-called grand history, or lives of dramatic reversals. So most of their writing starts from within, working through solitary individuals and crises of identity, using wide reading to make up for what they have not lived; their language, accordingly, leans hard toward rhetoric, long sentences, and the formality of the page.

Compared with many mainland Chinese novelists, Luo Yijun carries almost nothing of the nineteenth-century realist habit; what he has inherited whole is the twentieth-century modernist tradition. The greatest invention of the twentieth century, he says, was the novel. By "invention" he means that only in the twentieth century did people take this attitude toward it: using the novel to keep taking risks through every way of seeing, every form of knowledge, every philosophical dialectic — using it as a medium to sense and present the human condition, to look for other ways of looking.

By that measure, Luo Yijun thinks, the Chinese-speaking world has grown far too few varieties of good fiction. "This civilization is nearly into the second decade of the twenty-first century, and the novels you'd imagine it growing should still have all kinds of possibilities to experiment with — but people don't seem to be experimenting like that," he said.

He still writes by hand, on paper, and has someone type the manuscript up afterwards. Before he got sick he liked to write in Taipei cafés, drinking three or four lattes over an afternoon. After he got sick, because "smoking at a café means going outside, and in summer and winter you really can't take it," he moved to small hotels.

"Put crudely, those small hotels are love motels — a lot of the men who go there are basically buying sex, and the soundproofing isn't good either. I sit there like an old monk, through countless afternoons, and through the wall comes a girl's voice, sounding sorrowful and at the same time like she's having a heavenly time, and none of it moves me at all. Think about it: a man goes to a hotel every day, a love motel at that, takes a four-hour room, sits there in silence like a priest, and when he leaves there's a whole ashtray of cigarette butts on the table — that's pretty damn perverse too. But I really am writing hard in there, writing away in a small hotel with a kind of athletic momentum," Luo Yijun said at an event in Beijing in August 2018.

Seven years ago he got online to keep an eye on what his son was doing on Facebook, and ended up more hooked than his son on the Facebook game "Happy Farm." Then he started writing "nonsense" on Facebook and discovered he had "a gift for stand-up." Because he types slowly, what he writes there "basically has no punctuation" — all line breaks, like poetry. He now has more than 110,000 followers. Netizens' "shooting the breeze and leaving comments," he says, has a "healing" effect on a homebody like him.

To ease the money problem, in April 2018 Luo Yijun signed a contract with Taiwan's Mirror Media. "They're doing something like IP acquisition, and they came to me with a plan: they'd give me roughly 10,000 yuan a month, and I'd hand in a 200,000-character novel every year. I said yes. The good part for me is that I'd stop getting sick right away. I need that money to live on. It might also be a transition for me. If I live into my sixties — this contract runs at least three years, they'd keep me for three years, so at minimum I'd have to hand in three of these transitional works, as practice," he said.

In August 2018 Luo Yijun published Fat and Thin, Written Together 《肥瘦对写》 on the mainland, co-written with Dung Kai-cheung. It is a book of literary correspondence, 26 letters on topics the two set for each other in turn. They are old friends, and they wrote sincerely, each in his own voice. Some letters are about their own lives — "Remembering My Wedding," "Remembering the Day My Child Was Born," "On the Way to Take My Child to School" — and some about writing and ideas: "The Age of Sport," "The Necessity of Human Dregs," "A Book I've Always Wanted to Write But Am Destined Never to Finish."

Under the last topic, "My Own Last Book," Luo Yijun quoted a passage of Dung Kai-cheung's that said what he himself felt — heavy, sorrowful, and also stirring.

"As novelists, our work is to use fiction to fight deprivation, to refuse forgetting, to build a world that lasts and means something. Among literary forms, the novel comes closest to being a model of the world. Only through the form of the novel can we resist or delay the world's spoiling and decomposition, stop the wearing away and counterfeiting of value, confirm that real things still exist in the world, or that things still possess real existence, or that the world still possesses the reality that lets things exist. Even knowing that the novel has already become an untimely literary form, we, as novelists, must fight the fate the age has laid on us — even knowing that in the end we are bound to lose."

On August 24, 2018, we met the 51-year-old Luo Yijun in Beijing. He came in an oversized T-shirt printed with cartoon characters, laughed out loud often, and his eyes lit up when he talked about novels he loves. He seemed full of energy.

He told QDaily otherwise: "I might look like I have plenty of energy, but my fighting strength now is about a quarter of what it was before this illness. I've recovered some — that near-death feeling is gone. But I know the wall of my heart's ventricle is still fibrotic. The damage was done at the time of the heart attack. In the second half of the year I'll be a writer-in-residence in Hong Kong, at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, to rest, and I hope I'll feel much better next year. Otherwise I still feel my strength tires easily, and I can't get back to what I had."

Q = QDaily

Luo = Luo Yijun

Is a Novelist a Psychiatrist, or a Patient?

Q: You call yourself a "wastrel" novelist, and in the book you also wrote: "A wastrel is in fact an individual whose supporting spiritual structure — the one that stood behind him in his time and could have held him up — has been bent and snapped by some violence far larger than the individual, leaving him speechless before heaven." That's a bit abstract. Can you say more about how you see the "wastrel"?

Luo: Hahahahaha, I've forgotten!

I love Bohumil Hrabal's Pearls of the Deep. As for so-called city writing, a lot of the time now, the big mainland writers — Wang Anyi writing The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Ye Zhaoyan writing Nanjing — are working with a very large history, a vast city on the scale of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

But the university I went to in Taiwan was a particularly bad one, and the buddies I hung around with really were wastrels (laughs). Back then we watched a lot of Hong Kong films — Curry and Pepper 《咖喱辣椒》, The Fool and the Wild Girl 《傻瓜与野丫头》 — really funny stuff, with people like Ng Man-tat and "Big Fool" Shing Fui-On in them, who were just like us. We felt close to them.

My college dorm was up on Yangmingshan, and the whole place stank. It was a bad school, so people shacked up together, and there'd be a pile of men's and women's shoes outside the door. It was all smelly guys inside, but sometimes a roommate's girlfriend's underwear would end up on the floor. Then the sound of mahjong; a crowd drinking; someone crying over a breakup; someone gambling on video arcade machines until he'd lost it all and came to borrow money from me… I studied hard in college, but the buddies who kept coming to bother me were all this type — wastrels.

A complete mess. And I spent all day soothing them. I didn't have a girlfriend then. But I was like a spiritual guide all day, buying braised snacks, buying the cheapest sorghum liquor at 7-Eleven… we were broke students.

Actually, fooling around and laughing with them, sometimes I'd think, I've had enough, I have to get away. So I'd go hide out alone in my mother's house in the countryside and work in seclusion. My biggest goal back then was still to write fiction; these people around me were more like my happy companions, the little animals of my forest.

But what I wanted, deep down, was to sit at the round table with García Márquez, Calvino, Kundera, Kafka. I thought: the pilgrim road runs here. I also spent quite a while writing. By my thirties, once I'd met some of the older figures in the literary world, I suddenly missed those wastrels from high school and college terribly. I felt no language of modernity had ever described them. He isn't a man who describes himself. He isn't like a lot of novelists — Eileen Chang could describe what kind of person she was, tell her own story. She had the language.

The wastrels and dregs I knew couldn't tell a story; they'd stammer and mumble and never get it out. But they were so good to you. They really did turn into something like Hrabal's pearls of the deep. And later it wasn't only those dregs. In the city, I became a man who never had a job, who hung around cafés and small hotels and wrote. A man like that, never working, turns up in all sorts of places at all sorts of hours, unlike a normal person going to an office — so I don't have much experience of office relationships. I'm terrified of big institutions.

I especially love these so-called pearls of the deep. You're in a pub and the bums are running their mouths; you're in a café, eavesdropping on the next table. I often hang around a little café in Taipei called Yabu. The wastrels there are twenty-some years younger than me, but they're exactly what we were. They work there part-time. "Brother Luo, Brother Luo, you're here again," they say, and come over to smoke, and it's all a mouthful of nonsense — and I love it.

Q: Dung Kai-cheung wrote a passage describing his understanding of your "wastrel writing": "Toward the mainstream and the establishment — omnipresent and yet already riddled with holes — the wastrel, or in the broader sense the useless person, the failure, the superfluous person, may in fact be the chosen one, the lucky one, who sees through or even penetrates the so-called spirit of the age. Follow that line of thought, and 'wastrel (human dregs) literature' becomes a necessity." What do you make of that?

Luo: I've forgotten that too (laughs), but he's right. We now feel that the Japanese postwar school — Osamu Dazai and the rest — is very typical of it. In the literature that came after the twentieth century's two world wars — take Ha Jin's War Trash — the structure of the human heart had already changed. How small the individual is. The country you belong to has been built on an enormous scale, and we already live inside this "modernity" that has destroyed us.

That destruction may have started earlier in China, perhaps in the middle or late Qing. When it began, the empire couldn't react in time. By the time it started reacting, the destruction kept accelerating. After destruction comes disintegration. And disintegration isn't only the national humiliations in the history textbooks — the First Sino-Japanese War, the Treaty of Shimonoseki. It wasn't only those humiliations; it was the whole community of scholar-officials, men like Eileen Chang's father, whose once whole and self-sufficient inner universe began at that point to come apart, and then ran headlong into violent war on top of it. For a hundred-odd years, down to us, it's been one long disintegration.

Think of the German novelist Günter Grass writing The Tin Drum, the Hungarian novelist Ágota Kristóf writing The Notebook, Salman Rushdie writing The Satanic Verses or The Moor's Last Sigh, Mo Yan writing Frog or Sandalwood Death… If you want to write across a long stretch of time, looking back over ten years or a hundred — we've come through Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan, Lin Zexu, Sun Yat-sen, and yet why, more than a hundred years later, do we still seem to live in some other state, sealed up like amber, feeling like monsters? We can't join ourselves into a whole; many parts are broken, or say one thing and mean another. Because if we didn't make those jumps, put up those screens, we couldn't go on living.

In this world order, the freedom and the love of beauty of a whole individual are, in fact, almost entirely coming apart. And in fiction, that circles back to what Dung Kai-cheung said. It isn't the only necessary road, but it is one choice. There's the type you find in Kafka or Beckett: a man deliberately written as broken, but not a piece of trash. And there's another type, like the European picaresque. That man is saying outright: I am Ng Man-tat (laughs).

I'm writing inside a terrifying world, as in The Tin Drum or The Notebook. I no longer have the ability to face it head-on and write, in realist mode, about how cruel, how hellish, how depraved the adult world is right now. I focus on idiots, dwarves, wrecks, vagrants, drunks — the point is that I write him. And once you write him, he has already become a miniature of the harm this world does, a refraction of it.

Q: Dung Kai-cheung goes on to say that what you're really asking is: can the wastrel, utterly in revolt against "meaning" (or revolted against by it), really enter literature at all? And can a writer, who by definition is never a wastrel — whatever his private morals, once he stands in the position of "writing" he cannot be called "waste" — really take on the wastrel's eye and write the wastrel's heart, if there is such a thing? How do you feel about that?

Luo: Yes, he's right, it can't be done. But push it to the extreme and it becomes: is the novelist the psychiatrist, or the patient? Is he the ore vein, or the man mining it? Is he the top Michelin chef, or the wild duck being slaughtered? It turns into Achilles and the tortoise — it can never actually be settled by dialectics.

Because at the core it's the whole world, or the whole century, or different centuries, operating on certain cultural or artistic products. Van Gogh's work, for instance, is really an operation of the entire Western art market, which has nothing to do with the creator at all.

Coming back to us: thirty years ago our eyes shone, and we were sure we had to become great novelists like García Márquez, Borges, Kawabata. But I said to a friend once that in a few years they might give the Nobel Prize in Literature to J.K. Rowling.

Dung Kai-cheung and I were extraordinarily lucky to have lived in the twentieth century. People of the twentieth century thought Calvino, Kundera, Naipaul were remarkable men, great exemplars of the age. When something big happened in the world, you needed to hear people like that explain it.

But over the past thirty years the figures society looks to for enlightenment have become animation directors, or rock musicians, and now influencers. Relatively speaking, the novelist's position over these thirty years, his role in society, has come to look like the poet's (laughs). If he seriously means to write fiction, the print run can't be large. What we call fiction with a really large readership is usually a different thing from the big twentieth-century names we know. It's still called a novel, but the volume of information it handles inside can't be that serious; it can't touch the layered, innermost nightmare of the world, what's happening in that last room.

It's happened around me — people who wrote fiction and later killed themselves: Qiu Miaojin, Yuan Zhesheng, Huang Guojun. So it comes to this: if you truly set fiction in motion to investigate and interrogate the innermost enigma of arrival, then by Dung Kai-cheung's logic you'd have to die to know that all those novels you set going were in the end only ninjutsu, only illusion — Impure World Reincarnation, the Rinnegan.

But the ones who truly reach that secret are, in the end, the ones who kill themselves, the dead. Eileen Chang stopped writing. But did she really stop? Kafka didn't write. But he did write. And in the end, strangely, both of them handed the work to a friend. And the friend always betrays the will, always refuses to obey, never burns the manuscripts — prints them instead. The gesture the dead man leaves behind is: this is the thing I absolutely want destroyed. I think the whole business is a hard threshold. And at that threshold it's easy for someone to start playing the mystic.

Fiction has a madness of its own; read my novels and you'll certainly find it. Or don't read mine — read Bolaño, read Kenzaburō Ōe; both are extremely good at writing the madmen of the asylum. But say these novelists are mad. Were they mad? Possibly. Bolaño died fairly young. Ōe has long been troubled by mental illness. So have I.

I know older writers who from some point on presented themselves permanently as madmen or drunks — in Taiwan, Wu He, Qi Dengsheng. Japan has writers like that too. They never entered the normal world, never had families. Being like that, I'd say, belongs more to the previous generation. But their later work sometimes wanders off into another secret realm entirely, completely unreadable, even the character encoding scrambled, no punctuation.

My role is more like this: we ought to be nothing more than human beings who know how small we are, who put on whatever protection humanity has managed to develop, and then dive. But you're setting out to do something arrogant and blasphemous, to be sent down into the very deep sea. Go deeper than anyone has ever gone, and you may bleed from every orifice and die. As a novelist I work right at that edge, trawling for the things you can't see at the bottom of the deep sea of human nature — the darkness, the terrors, the despair, the longing.

The Novel Is Almost Like Today's Internet — It's Really an Imperial Concept

Q: You just said the novel is a very important crystallization of human civilization. What do you think makes the novel special? Why does it matter so much?

Luo: Apart from a very few strange exceptions — Dream of the Red Chamber 《红楼梦》, say — what we now call the novel is by and large defined in the Western way: from the end of the nineteenth century on, mainly the twentieth, the various European novels — Kafka, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Proust…

The novel of that era was almost like today's internet. It was an imperial concept, a giant. A Dostoevsky would put the whole panorama of his age in front of us. Every relation of life and death, of men and women, every economic relation — all of it. Books like Dream of the Red Chamber, The Plum in the Golden Vase 《金瓶梅》, and The Scholars 《儒林外史》 do the same, at a different scale.

When you read these novels, what you see is a panoramic performance in a hall of mirrors. You might see all of Vienna or Prague, the center of Europe then, a crowd of genuinely civilized people, artists, people who held political power, trading with one another the highest displays of civilization. God had already collapsed, the classical was gone, and there were arguments of every kind, revelations of every kind on show.

So I think the greatest invention of the twentieth century really was the novel — not the car, not the computer or the film. It's also the part AI is least likely to lay a hand on or get inside. Go has already been wiped out, but the novel's secret realm is somewhere AI can't enter. The information inside these giant novels — its volume, its layers, its many meanings and how they convert into one another — is far too complex. That's why, at that level, human beings hold the novel to such a high standard and think it extraordinary.

But something like the heap of "IP" novels we have now — J.K. Rowling's kind is also a novel, and a very good, very enjoyable one — is really a return to the folk tales medieval storytellers told, only in the form of a novel. That's another kind of mass flow, one-directional information transmission, the same as the internet.

Still, I think the novel is basically an imperial scale of thing. Look at Britain, France, Germany. Latin America pooled its brothers — Mexico's Carlos Fuentes, Argentina's Borges, Colombia's García Márquez — and they were all brought into France together, becoming the Latin American Boom, which set off an explosion across Europe. India's Naipaul and Rushdie could be taken up by the West because they were educated by their colonial ruler, Britain. The Booker Prize takes in Indian and African novelists, but the whole thing is still played by imperial rules.

You can see it through the novel. Tsubouchi Shōyō wrote The Essence of the Novel in 1895; Japan understood this clearly by then. When China had Liang Qichao and his contemporaries, Japan already had Natsume Sōseki and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. By Lu Xun's time, Japan was in roughly the same period as Kawabata and the rest.

So I don't think China's whole arc of literary reformism, its dream of rebuilding civilization, carried through into the fiction of the People's Republic, adds up to an absolutely complete landscape of literary history.

Think about it. On the mainland there's Mo Yan, Wang Anyi, Jia Pingwa, Yan Lianke, Yu Hua, Su Tong, Li Rui. In Taiwan there was Zhang Dachun before, and the Chu sisters, but after they turned forty none of them really seemed to be writing fiction in that sense anymore. And then me. Down to the younger generation in Taiwan now, Tong Weige is a terrific novelist, along with Gan Yaoming and Chen Xue. And there are the Malaysian Chinese writers Li Yongping, Zhang Guixing, Ng Kim Chew, and in Hong Kong, Dung Kai-cheung and Wong Bik-wan.

In a hundred-odd years China has learned to launch spacecraft and satellites. But if you want to see what this nation's civilization and culture actually produce at their core, I don't think you look at box office; you look at the novels it has written over the years. The experimenting and practice of fiction in the Chinese-speaking world is only about a hundred years old. Honestly, we've handed in plenty of good novels, but far too few varieties of good fiction have taken shape — the species is far too singular. This civilization is nearly into the second decade of the twenty-first century, and the novels you'd imagine it growing should still have all kinds of possibilities to experiment with, but people don't seem to be experimenting like that.

So at this point, novelists like Dung Kai-cheung and me, or Tong Weige and Ng Kim Chew — if we really have been pushed to the margins of society within the mainstream literary language, then that kind of language was always meant to be marginal (laughs). If that kind of language became the mainstream language, everyone would be out of their minds.

The question is whether you know your civilization has grown these margins. Take Raymond Carver, or Alice Munro: those novelists never entered the principal melody either. Their work is cold, marginal. But their society was healthy enough that these marginal creators didn't feel a desperate urge to move toward the center, to become mainstream, to get big money and fame. That society had a professional system of evaluation independent enough to know the work was good.

Ask different people to vote for the greatest novelist of the twentieth century and some pick Joyce, some Kafka, some Borges. But at least that civilization knows that certain things were never easy to come by. It really shouldn't be the way it is on the mainland now, where a lot of famous writers get very rich. Look at Bolaño — people now think he may be the last true heavyweight master of the late twentieth century after García Márquez and Borges, and he died poor and depressed.

Q: This gets at your view of what the novel fundamentally is. You think the greatest invention of the twentieth century was the novel, and that only the twentieth century treated the novel as a way of taking risks. Seen that way, Western modern fiction isn't really telling a story; it's a way of seeing, a way of sensing and presenting the human condition through the medium of the novel. Is that how you understand the essence of the novel too?

Luo: It's what I learned slowly, by studying fiction, reading fiction, feeling my way through different novels.

This is a modern eye.

Before you've read Kundera you don't know a novel can be written as a fugue, instruments in different keys playing the same theme together — The Unbearable Lightness of Being, say, or Life Is Elsewhere.

Before you've read Kafka you don't know how flexible fiction can be with a person. Think of the land surveyor K. in Kafka against the exquisite, crystalline precision of Eileen Chang — a completely different sense of control and refraction. But you have to read Kafka, and Chang, to know it.

You may need to have read Patrick Süskind's Perfume — where he writes out every stench of fourteenth-century Paris, all the excrement, all the dead infants, all the cat and dog carcasses, everything filthiest in the city, and only then writes how perfume is extracted.

You may have to have read someone like Alice Munro to see how, inside a very static country house in a Canadian or American small town, with none of the grand adventure we'd imagine from Cervantes, in what are simply ordinary human relations, she catches something very fine: an inward sensibility of continual longing and regret, remorse over some misjudgment, and endless wallowing in that regret. Out of it she made her own strange short stories.

All these different methods are what make these novels into things that otherwise could never have been known.

Take Calvino writing The Castle of Crossed Destinies, arranged with tarot cards. The world of "the castle of crossed destinies" is the language of the medieval tale, and its characters might be an emperor, an empress, a knight. But after the Renaissance far more complicated occupations appear — sailors, harbor prostitutes, pawnshops, casino and tavern keepers, small traders of every sort — so the second part of his book becomes "the tavern of crossed destinies." He once said that if he had lived to write into the twentieth century he would have written "the motel of crossed destinies." And of course, in our time you'd get "the internet of crossed destinies," "the peer-to-peer network of crossed destinies" (laughs). You have the marker of your own era. Calvino never got the chance to do it.

So all of this took a long time. At least in my era — I was born in 1967, and I started running into Western fiction around the late 1980s — as I kept reading these great twentieth-century Western novels, you'd find that every way of seeing pushed one step further into what it is optically possible to observe. Actually it isn't optics; it's that once the methodology behind the brain's projection of visual imagination changes, a new work grows out of it. That's exactly how it goes, always advancing. A great many great works are built on that kind of viewing strategy. Calvino himself is a fine example: what If on a Winter's Night a Traveler demonstrates is a lesson in a different way of seeing chapter by chapter.

I Wanted to Write a Taipei Scholars

Q: Many Chinese-language novelists today have been deeply shaped by Western modern fiction. How do you see the value of the classical Chinese novel — would you bring it into your own work?

Luo: I've felt that strongly these past couple of years too. Take Jin Yucheng's Blossoms 《繁花》: in its language I think he found the tone of the old storyteller's vernacular novel, so against the vernacular realism in use since the 1930s, or the language of the People's Republic, it forms something strange — it looks like a retreat, but it turns into a flash of narrative light, a shimmer of light and shadow, and all the solid angles of the characters suddenly seem to bristle into view. I've also read some of Mo Yan's short stories, A Collection of Cat Tales 《猫事荟萃》 and Sacred Whoring 《神嫖》. For a while they all went back and wrote about the Qing too.

But in Taiwan's literary air we never used to feel any of that had much to do with us. It was mostly these past couple of years, while I was ill, that I went back and reread Dream of the Red Chamber, The Plum in the Golden Vase, The Scholars, and found them all remarkable. Rereading them, I understood them anew: their way of seeing at the time really was special. Of course they wouldn't have called it a way of seeing. But the way they choreograph space and scene, switching from one stage to the next, is extraordinarily skillful shape-shifting. There was no Western literary theory then; he did it entirely with the narrative ability of his day and an intuitive sense of beauty, opening up so many panoramic scenes, writing so many young women…

A lot of that has been lost to us; we can't do it. None of the novelists of my generation is much good at a scene with more than eight people in it at once. You can't write that anymore. That's what I think is remarkable about Jin Yucheng. In our generation, being able to write one person, two people, three people is already an accomplishment. The space we've lived in was never the extended family. Look at Eileen Chang: she could handle five or six people with ease. But look at Dream of the Red Chamber — a scene can hold twenty or thirty. He writes it without hurrying, without a single seam showing. He's constantly switching, handling local relations inside a scene — the fighting, the playing dumb, the flirting, the saying one thing and meaning another — all of it extraordinarily skillful.

Q: That makes me think of the new novel you published in Taiwan this year, Kuang Chaoren 《匡超人》, which borrows an allusion from The Scholars. Most mainland readers haven't had a chance to see it — can you say what kind of story it is, and why you wrote it?

Luo: After Daughter, I wanted to write about some things I'd been seeing on the mainland in recent years. I wrote a few pieces about it in a column, then got sick and stopped. At the same time I was writing a column called "The Monkey King" for Taiwan's China Times.

The two were connected from the start. A few years back there was a "Taiwan craze" on the mainland. I watched a lot of Taiwanese cultural figures come over, and nearly every one who came became a hit. That, of course, is where The Scholars comes in. The Monkey King has his 72 transformations: whatever you imagine the mainland market wants, you turn yourself into that. Later the "Taiwan craze" passed very quickly.

At first, naturally, I was moved and warmed; I felt our mainland buddies loved us. Don't only look at writers like us, these so-called mainlander writers — read Tong Weige, Chen Xue, Zhong Wenyin, Egoyan Zheng, Gan Yaoming. But later I realized, no: they let a few of us in for a while, then shut the door.

Around 2010 my experience publishing books on the mainland was very good. Civilization ought to be exchanged this way — not handled by politicians or by international models, but by reading each other's novels (laughs), understanding each other, because only then can you actually have a dialogue and avoid what Kundera called "words of misunderstanding."

In 2016 I got a very strange illness: basically a hole opened up on a man's you-know-what. Very odd, wouldn't heal, awful, painful. It hurt terribly. I was sick for three months, running through every kind of dermatology and urology department, and it simply wouldn't heal. Running back and forth inside this Kafkaesque hospital system, I felt deeply ashamed. Later I joked with a friend that I should write a comedy called Broken-Dick Superman 《破鸡鸡超人》 — that would probably sell like crazy (laughs).

Then suddenly I tied the two together.

Journey to the West 《西游记》 carries very complicated meanings. From the end of the nineteenth century, this nation's own journey to the west was set in motion. By the time it reached us, my generation in Taiwan, it had already soaked into daily life. Including when we first started sneaking cigarettes: those very cheap lighters, ten Taiwan dollars each, with a sticker on the side, a Western girl in a bikini. That was our earliest sexual fantasy, before the internet. Including the pop songs we listened to and the Hollywood films we watched. Your picture of the Second World War would never be that it happened on Chinese soil — Japanese planes bombing Shanghai, the Nanjing Massacre. You'd think the Second World War had nothing to do with you, that it was the American army fighting the German army, the Normandy landings, always the same things. When you're a bit older you realize that it had all gone west long ago — including the flavors you eat, the way you drive, the way you dress.

And that came to exactly 500 years. The world has in fact been making our whole journey to the west, toward the Western Paradise. And in the course of that journey we all turned, in the end, into a kind of monster. Later I suddenly realized: isn't the Buddha just America? The Buddha tells Sun Wukong, whom he had pinned under the Five-Finger Mountain, to go protect the monk and fetch the scriptures. And the scripture he fetches is my own scripture (laughs). He fights monsters the whole way, gets knocked half to death, and it turns out he can't beat the truly powerful ones. The real tough ones he never beats. And the characters who can't beat him just go and ask for help. The boss comes out, and it turns out they were all pets kept under the seat of the Buddha or Guanyin, who ran off and made havoc in the human world. How do you stage all that? In the end the scripture you have to fetch is your own scripture, and the demon you have to pay a price to fight is the one you yourself let out from under you. The whole trip is one long Journey to the West.

But there's a doubleness in it. Relative to Taiwan, the mainland is the west. So that's also why I'd write this Journey to the West. I wanted to write a Taipei Scholars. It turns into something a lot like Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift: Chicago in the 1930s, roughly, where a crowd of literary types erupted all at once. Having erupted, they got into every kind of swindle, every kind of gaudy dissipation. I badly wanted to write that feeling, and in the end I couldn't. Because I've never actually seen that gaudy dissipation. I'm a homebody from a relatively poor class; I never get to see the real upper world. So what I wrote was still Taipei's cafés and the shabby antique shops in Taipei's back lanes, everyone running scams.

And in the end Sun Wukong is released into the internet world that exists across the mainland, and everywhere else.

I actually spent a long time watching mainland internet content: A Northeastern Family 《东北一家人》, The Jin Xing Show 《金星秀》, Treasures of the World 《天下收藏》, all sorts of Taobao shows. And you find that this nation puts enormous creativity and an entire industrial scale into faking things. Journey to the West happens to have a real and a fake Sun Wukong too.

I was also reading The Scholars then, and it really is a remarkable novel. In every chapter the characters speak that whole set of Confucian cultural language. That language had already gone bankrupt. But these Ming literati-officials — the ones climbing toward an official post, or the ones putting on airs and playing at brushwork in the provinces, whatever relations develop among them — speak nothing but ornate, embroidered prose. And a reader sees at once that they're all like robots, saying only false things, saying one thing and meaning another, saying hollow things. Yet this hollow, hypocritical speech runs like a clock or a music box, in a complete, meticulous, minutely ordered mechanism.

I'd treat Sun Wukong as this nation's 400-odd years of continuous journeying west. Almost all of the mainland's countless films are about Sun Wukong in some way. In the online world Sun Wukong is like a Trojan horse. He's trying to get close to the core of civilization, running his 72 transformations, but the more he transforms the less he can escape that terrifying, dark monster, that terrifying violence.

The book was supposed to be called Broken-Dick Superman 《破鸡鸡超人》. I think Broken-Dick Superman is a wonderful character. A hole opens below his genitals, he thinks the hole is too strange, he goes to every big hospital, and no treatment will make it heal. The hole just stays there, open and empty, so he ends up dragging it around the city, listening to people talk about how to pull off a swindle, how to go make a killing on the mainland — a farcical, chaotic scene like Humboldt's Gift.

He suspects the hole below his genitals is there because aliens planning to attack Earth opened a wormhole and a spaceship was supposed to come out of it, but the wormhole opened in the wrong place, right under his penis. For me, that hole becomes the Water Curtain Cave I built inside the novel. It can keep being cast out, from these 500 years into another 500. What we call "the Chinese" is in fact disintegration, collapse, and then the journey west. And this journey west is more terrifying still: it never reaches the Western Paradise. It just keeps changing shape, all 72 changes. The design of the novel is to give Broken-Dick Superman a hole where he can settle.

So why did it end up called Kuang Chaoren? Because one night I was having dinner with my wife and children. The book was already written. I was explaining more or less how my Broken-Dick Superman went. My eldest son, a Cancer, was furious — he said if the novel was called that he'd be bullied at school. He said, if you call it Broken-Dick Superman, I'll kill myself. He meant it, so I had to change the name. I thought: The Scholars happens to have a character called Kuang Chaoren, that works. Because kuang is the simplified character for "state," guo, with a piece broken off its frame. His genitals broke open, his testicles fell out — so the state was broken too. Honestly, for a Taiwanese mainlander like me, my father's state was broken long ago. More than a hundred years ago the cultural body and soul of Chinese people broke too. For men like Wang Guowei, Wu Changshuo, Qi Baishi, the cultural body and soul of their era had already had its genitals broken open.

The Greatest Novels in My Mind Right Now Are Dream of the Red Chamber and 2666

Q: The greatest novels in your mind right now are Dream of the Red Chamber and 2666, but you think Dream of the Red Chamber is even more remarkable than 2666. Why?

Luo: Put that way it doesn't sound quite right either (laughs).

Q: Is it from the angle of the way of seeing, of the panorama?

Luo: Right. And structurally. 2666 is of course extremely strong, but it still rests on five novellas, or five buildings, photographed from the front, from the side, through a window, entered from underground — different ways into the building — and in the end, amazingly, the dreams of those five novellas link up with each other. So the whole thing is extremely impressive. But it still has to be split into five parts to work that way.

Dream of the Red Chamber is far stranger. It's like those 108-layer ivory carvings in the Forbidden City, the concentric latticework spheres. You'd think it impossible. An ivory carving cut into 108 concentric shells, and they can all rotate against one another like an armillary sphere. Cao Xueqin poured his mind into that structure, unlike us professional writers now. Take me: I spent five years on The Xixia Hotel, and I felt that if I didn't publish soon it would damage my professional standing, I wouldn't be recognized as a professional, so out it went after five years. Six years after that I had to publish Daughter. If I hadn't produced it I wouldn't be a top professional writer. I've worked hard at it, constantly. There's a publishing rhythm pressing on you. If you're a top professional athlete, every four years you have to peak for the Olympics. Dream of the Red Chamber may have taken a very long, unhurried ten years, with no publication, no professional writer. He just sat inside his spherical latticework pagoda.

And it's built layer on layer. If 2666 connects the sewers among five novels' worth of dreams with different kinds of resources, then in Dream of the Red Chamber he first builds the mythic structure of the Goddess of Disenchantment, then the source of power of the Rong and Ning branches of the Jia family — all hazy, all shadowy. And Imperial Consort Yuan, of course; they were the imperial silk commissioners at Jiangning, and there's a complicated structure to how that came about. Unfolding further, it's because Imperial Consort Yuan comes home to visit; in fact she is a sexual sacrifice, given to the emperor as a sexual gift, and that is what builds the whole magnificent display. And then, just before that, out of nowhere, Qin Keqing dies in disgrace in the Hall of Heavenly Fragrance.

It's that complicated: the family relations, the genealogy of sisters-in-law, the generations fixed by the radicals in their names — the jade radical or the grass radical marking which generation they belong to — and then the servants' relations too, maids of every rank. It's layer on layer, and each layer rotates. It isn't static; it isn't that he finishes one layer and then looks at the next. Each layer feels cut into sections, into chapters. There's a chapter early on that breaks your heart, where Daiyu buries the fallen flowers…

I'm only talking about what comes before and after that one chapter. You find it's simply too complicated. When you read it young, your eyes filter and select: you only see the Baoyu-Daiyu romance, only Qingwen's death, only how formidable Wang Xifeng is. Because you can't even keep the relationships straight. That's why you find that these formidable old readers think Dream of the Red Chamber more extraordinary the older they get. As I said, if you're a real practitioner, if you've spent a lifetime practicing the writing of fiction, you find that this man was rotating a multi-layered ivory sphere like that, and you wonder how he kept hold of it all, and his hand never even shook. He left many threads unfinished — either he didn't finish them, or they were burned, nobody knows. What comes later sounds as if it will be more terrifying still, and the rhythm is so beautiful, but the terror is on its way. The jade is already hidden in the prophecies early on. And the further you read — chapter 60, chapter 70 — the more that dread deepens. On the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival the two of them cap each other's verses: "the cold pond ferries the crane's shadow; the cold moon buries the flower's soul." It gets more and more terrifying, an ominous air. By the end it's terrifying beyond bearing.

I think Dream of the Red Chamber really pushes to the limit everything a person can bear: the beauty, or the lying a person is capable of, the sense of being a puppet, the power struggles across the horizontal layer of sisters-in-law, the false courtesies among the servants, sex as the flow and exchange of unequal power, a tragic life story hidden just where you can glimpse it, the ostentation of a gaudy upper class, the tableau of aristocratic ladies' lives out of In Search of Lost Time… it's just too strong! If I could write like that, I'd call you Dad (laughs).

Q: What will your next novel be?

Luo: I'm writing it now, I've made a start. It's science fiction (laughs), called Ming Dynasty 《明朝》.

I want to use the logic of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem 《三体》. The Three-Body Problem ends with the whole solar system destroyed by a higher civilization from outer space, flattened into two dimensions, so humanity makes a great escape. But I want to write a parallel escape plan for civilization happening at the same time. My part of it is AI. For humanity to escape you'd have to build an enormous spaceship and fly for a very long time. A hundred years is already too long for you; you can't cross that distance. Can't AI solve the problem? A floating robot costs little; you only need to compress its brain into a file, and you can build a very vast world out of it. After 100,000 years it drifts to a planet, lands, suddenly switches on, and becomes the primitive first ancestor. Then it starts replicating according to the city's presets, and replicating, and replicating again…

There's an underground laboratory developing this robot. How do they pour their own imagination into its brain? Humanity will be extinct by then, but we want a civilizational form to recur eternally on some planet, forever. At the time there were different project bids around the world: one team might be doing the Renaissance, another Greece and Rome, another maybe Weimar Germany. And on the China side, the team competing with the Ming dynasty might be the Song.

The story goes roughly like this: I'm the scientist on the team in this laboratory. I'm with my robot every day. What am I going to feed it today? What I finally pour into its brain is a hugely complicated, condensed, metaphorical archive about the Ming dynasty. Every Ming emperor, for instance, was mentally ill — a grand exhibition of human mental illness that also has to be input into its system. And yet in such a mentally ill, such a dark dynasty, there still grew extremely captivating paintings, and the late-Ming familiar essay, a wonderfully strange civilization.

Q: Do you worry about this society?

Luo: My worry has reached a point past what I'm able to worry about (laughs). I've already entered a new world.

At my father's age he couldn't use an ATM, couldn't take the subway, didn't use a computer. Now I come to the mainland and find everyone paying for everything with Alipay. To me that's unbelievable. I keep asking people about publishing on the mainland, and they say the population base is so big that publishing still works, that at least it won't collapse. But in Taiwan it's obvious. Every publisher I meet — and especially this year, Taiwan's literary publishing has collapsed particularly badly.

The people in their twenties now have been online since primary school, so most of their knowledge and their understanding of the world comes from the internet, and both the range and the volume of what they take in far exceed mine. Especially in the first half of this year, I've felt the world changing so violently that I can't keep up. Including the current China-U.S. situation. There's a lot I don't think it's convenient to say — I think you understand it more deeply than I do, and none of us has any idea what's coming.

We used to think humanity would probably be better off in five years, better in ten. Lu Xun said, save the children. But then you find that the children Lu Xun said to save grew up and did all kinds of terrible things (laughs), and have now blanketed the world so completely that civilization has no other possibility left, no other flight or exercise to try.

Q: I've felt that strongly these past couple of years too — that the world is getting darker and darker.

Luo: Human history has certainly had darker times. Think of the late-Ming literati: their inner darkness and suffering were far greater. Across the whole 200-odd years of the Qing, very little literature was produced; it really was terrifying rule by an alien people. We're all quite lucky. My generation, and my parents' — we've been extremely lucky, for a short stretch: humanity hasn't had war for a long time.

When I was deep into Shoushan stone seals, I read that Wu Changshuo's family had lived in a small town in Zhejiang that was destroyed by the Taiping Rebellion; they nearly starved, and fled and fled. Qi Baishi began as a carpenter and fled to Shanghai, which is how he ended up specializing, studying painting and calligraphy, climbing slowly out of the commoner class to become a painter. That's why there's an enormous compassion in their paintings.

We've all been constructed by this world; we still sit fairly safely in our rooms, looking at the internet. But everything has already been Kafka-fied. A sense of humiliation, of suffocation, comes through layer on layer of built corridors, rooms, office floors, suffocating you one layer at a time.

You'll never feel what Wu Changshuo and his contemporaries felt — the terror of starving, or the immediate terror of the Cultural Revolution, where the violence was pressed right against you; or the inner humiliation and terror of the late-Ming literati. And yet even then someone painted such beautiful paintings, someone wrote Dream of the Red Chamber, there were still such brilliant works. Like Dream Memories of Tao'an 《陶庵梦忆》 — there are some very beautiful things in it.

Once you reach a certain age and look at their paintings, you can see that spiritual refusal to submit, to give up, to let yourself rot. A lot of literary people today strike me as pitiful. They've given up even the most basic sense of beauty — an ugliness beyond words. Just to hold a good position, they'll say something that shameless? And they can revel in that? Then the sense of beauty is simply gone.

Cover image: a still from the film The Tin Drum, source: Douban