Jin Shijie: "A Person Is an Actor. The Acting Job That Earns Money and Puts Food on the Table, I Just Do on the Side" | Interviews

My motivation to learn has always come from knowing that I am a person in this universe with no ground under my feet. Not knowing life, not knowing death — it can't help but push you to dig into more things, to observe more.

On October 23, The Actors' Lab 《演员实验教室》, directed by Jin Shijie, played the Wuzhen Theatre Festival. The play was first staged in Taiwan 34 years ago, with the actors of the Lanling Theatre Workshop telling their own life stories on stage. This production is a revival for the workshop's 40th anniversary, again with the original cast, the stories updated.

The actors were barefoot and in everyday clothes as they told their most private memories and feelings. After the run, The Actors' Lab drew 14 reviews on Douban, most of them full of exclamation marks: "What have I done to deserve such luck!" "The best thing at the Wuzhen Theatre Festival!" "So good, so good!" Every one of them gave five stars.

In early October, not long before that, Yang Yuelou 《杨月楼》, a "drama-opera musical" with Jin Shijie in the cast, had its premiere. Written and directed by the Peking opera actor Li Baochun, it tells a strange love story set in the late Qing, mixing Peking opera, spoken drama and musical theater — and even rap.

Yang Yuelou played three nights in Beijing and was badly received. As one audience member put it: "The fusion of all these art forms is pretty stiff, the script drags, and what finally arrives on stage has the full flavor of a TV gala. The opera arias and stage movement, and Jinbao's performance, are probably the only two things to love."

Jinbao is what some friends and audience members call Jin Shijie. It comes from Gimpel the Fool, by the American Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose Chinese title turns Gimpel into Jinbao. The hero is a man who, out of a belief in other people's goodwill, willingly goes along with whatever he is told. Jin Shijie likes his attitude to life.

As with these two shows, Jin Shijie has played just about every kind of part from the 1980s to now. On stage: Secret Love in Peach Blossom Land, Look Who's Cross-Talking Tonight 《这一夜，谁来说相声》, Me and Me and Him and Him 《我和我和他和他》, Red Sky 《红色的天空》, The Last Fourteen Tuesday Lessons 《最后十四堂星期二的课》... In film: The Terrorizers, A Brighter Summer Day, The Grandmaster, Brotherhood of Blades, Detective Chinatown, The Final Master, See You Tomorrow, The Last Women Standing... On television: Princess Agents, Surgeons, Midnight Diner, In Time With You... He has also done voice work for documentaries and animation — The Rocking Sky, a documentary about the air force of the Republic of China during the War of Resistance, in which his own father served; and the Kung Fu Master in Kung Fu Panda, Lord Ji'an in Dahufa 《大护法》, and the Spirit Granny in Big Fish & Begonia.

Some of these films, series and plays are outright classics; plenty of others are junk. In most of them Jin Shijie turns in work worth watching — and in the bad ones his acting can stick out precisely because it is so concrete, so worth watching. He has never won a major acting prize, but audiences broadly recognize what he can do.

Asked about the bad films he has appeared in, Jin Shijie answers: "On a boat it's hard to sail somewhere good, somewhere everybody benefits. You may do your own part well, but the boat still doesn't get anywhere better." And: "Someone who comes out of the theater is used to everyone working together. If they're bad, we're all bad together. So that partly answers your question — I don't think about whether I'm good, I think about how hard this boat is to steer."

He puts the weight on whether his own performance was done well.

Jin Shijie was born in 1951 in Pingtung, Taiwan, and grew up in a military dependents' village. After high school he skipped the joint college entrance exam and went to an agricultural junior college to study veterinary science. "Take the exam, get into university, take a well-paid job in a big city" — that was not what he wanted; it was the social pattern he wanted to rebel against. Society asks people to do certain things, he says, and under those demands people are not always willing to comply. He disliked putting last things first, and he had his own settled sense of which was root and which was branch. He wanted to study "freely and happily."

After finishing the veterinary program at Pingtung Agricultural College, he raised pigs for a year and a half, then decided to go to Taipei and do something to do with making up stories. In Taipei he worked as a mover and a warehouse keeper, and loved it: he could feed himself and still had long stretches of free time to read and write. He also liked the picture of it — money earned by hard labor and sweat.

In 1980 Jin Shijie helped found the Lanling Theatre Workshop, considered Taiwan's first experimental theater. Its members included Li Liqun, Gu Baoming, Liu Ruoyu, Li Guoxiu, Wu Jingji and Li Tianzhu, all of whom would matter in Taiwanese theater later on.

Jin Shijie wrote and directed Hezhu's New Match 《荷珠新配》. Hezhu, a bar hostess, hears from a rich merchant's chauffeur — who lets the secret slip out of vanity — that she could pass herself off as the merchant's long-lost daughter. She schemes down to the last detail; then, once the merchant finally acknowledges her, he goes bankrupt and it all comes to nothing. The dialogue is full of clever turns, but the staging was bare-bones. When the rich merchant Qi Zixiao makes his entrance with his wife, the Mercedes they are riding in is indicated by a flag with the Mercedes emblem painted on it, carried at a trot across the stage. Jin Shijie says the audience laughed hard enough to lift the roof off.

For many years afterward, answering other questions, he would still say that he wanted "a plain stage: I have nothing, I just come out and act, and I can hold you; you go home and just thinking about the play makes you happy enough to die."

Hezhu's New Match was staged in 1980 and entered Taiwan's first experimental theater festival. Its popularity made it a sensation, and it was said to have "set a wildfire loose in Taiwan's barren theater," while the Lanling Theatre Workshop came to be seen as the awakening of modern Taiwanese theater.

Lanling went on running for about 10 years. In Taiwan it produced, directly or indirectly, a long line of theater companies: the Ping-Fong Acting Troupe, U-Theatre, the Performance Workshop, the Paper Windmill Theatre, the If Kids Theatre and more. Jin Shijie appeared in many of the plays of the Performance Workshop, founded by Stan Lai in 1984.

The Last Fourteen Tuesday Lessons, a play Jin Shijie is still performing, is adapted from the autobiographical novel by the American writer Mitch Albom; he has been in it since 2011. The book is a bestseller made entirely of chicken soup for the soul. Jin Shijie plays a professor with ALS who keeps meeting and talking with his student; as it goes on, the illness worsens until he is close to death.

He has talked about why he took the part. At first he didn't want it. He changed his mind after reading the adaptation, because what he read there "was two people. People had appeared. A teacher, a student. Across the whole play the two of them seem to be on a journey, each going through his own stretch of it, and where they collide, sparks come off. Page after page, their outlines get clearer. I think between the two of them something close to a wrestling match takes shape."

Hezhu's New Match did mock the mood of the time, when everyone wanted to strike it rich overnight, but it reads more like Jin Shijie writing from feeling than deliberately satirizing reality. What interests him more are the relationships around a person.

Because of the scarcity he grew up with in the military village, Jin Shijie likes being poor. Old clothes, secondhand things, leftovers, a small apartment. The Taiwanese TV host Chang Hsiao-yen saw his plays back in the Lanling years. When she first knew him, she says, he carried a schoolbag and rode a bicycle that creaked, and made one steamed bun last a day.

Friends also like to tell the story of him eating leftovers at the writer Li Ang's house. Having worked out that her household had leftovers after every meal, he made a point of going over to eat them. First he would phone: was this a good time? Were there leftovers? Once there, nobody was allowed to sit and eat with him, and no extra dish could be cooked on his account. So each time he came, Li Ang kept her distance and did not dare speak, or the rules would be broken.

On the variety show Kangxi Coming 《康熙来了》 he told another one. In those days he liked to pack up the boxed lunches other people hadn't finished. Once he got home and found one missing; he went back, found it at the side of the road, and nearly lost it to a dog. He chased the dog off and carried the box home.

For a time Jin Shijie held to a rule of no marriage, no children, no car, no telephone. The director Chen Kuo-fu once spotted him riding his bicycle down the street and told him: "I think that speed of yours is too proud." Chang Hsiao-yen, who had acted with him, worried he was too alone, and used to urge friends to leave more messages on his answering machine.

Tomorrow We'll Meet Again in the Air 《明天我们空中再见》, written by Jin Shijie and staged in Taiwan in 1988, tells the love story of a woman radio announcer; the film director Edward Yang loved it. The play is a record of "his speed."

Chung Mingder, a professor in the theater department of Taipei National University of the Arts, described it this way: "Tomorrow We'll Meet Again in the Air is one shade of the mood of Taiwan in the 1980s... Taiwan really was lively then: street protests, illegal racing, postmodernism, neo-Marxism, the Dajiale lottery craze, the property boom, 'Taiwan's money is up to your ankles' (rather like Shanghai today?), and so on — and in the middle of that brash Taiwanese miracle of economy and democracy, Tomorrow We'll Meet Again in the Air looked lonely, young, taut, fragile, yet innocent and earnest right down to the bone."

Then came 2009. Only after he married did Jin Shijie buy a bigger apartment for his wife and children, get a driver's license and start using a phone — a basic one, not a smartphone.

Tracing his own change, he puts one turning point at close to 40. He was on a roller coaster in the United States, and on the steep drop you couldn't hear anyone scream; it felt to him as though the sound had been left behind. He was shocked to see the gap between the world's speed and his own. Living all this way at his own speed, he wondered — had he been a fool?

In 2015 Jin Shijie took part in the documentary Where Are You From 《客从何处来》, in which he went looking for where his family came from.

Asked how the filming felt, he said: it's as if I got into a time machine and time ran backward, and I was standing beside my young parents again. Watching every movement they made, every figure they cut, the sweat they shed, the air they breathed, the wind that blew on them, the sun they stood in. It struck him, he said, very deep.

The trailer for Where Are You From released a photograph: Jin Shijie standing next to a few trees in a white shirt and dark blue trousers, a bag slung across his body.

At the Yang Yuelou press conference he wore a dark, sporty, very dated outfit — and a cloth bag slung across his body.

The two outfits are not the same, but they feel very much alike.

Both of those moments already fall in the period when he had begun to change the old speed of his life and was taking film and TV work to support a family. But set those pictures beside photographs of him from the Lanling years and he still looks much the same.

As Chang Hsiao-yen exclaimed on seeing him on a program once: "Jin Shijie hasn't changed at all from Lanling until now — except that somewhere in there he quietly got married."

In interviews, Jin Shijie will set aside the risk of being interrupted in order to finish a thought whole. This was the last interview of the day and it kept running over; the schedule was tight and he was anxious to get to rehearsal, and had begun to fidget slightly — but he stayed in his seat and answered what he was asked, looking like a man very willing to hold to himself and very willing to oblige other people.

Q: QDaily Jin Shijie: theater director, playwright, actor

Q: Why did you want to take a show like this (Yang Yuelou)? You call it a strange boat yourself. I see you acting in all sorts of TV series, films and plays, working with all sorts of people. I'm curious how that range of collaboration becomes possible for you.

Jin Shijie: I started in the theater. How do you make something new? How do you overturn the system? How do you fight tradition? Those were what we went after when we were young. But theaters come in all types — commercial theater, popular theater — and we did a lot of homework and rehearsed a lot of pieces. So I think my range of contact was wide from the start, and later on every type felt fairly OK, fairly familiar. That's how it's always been with me. Very vulgar, very refined, very highbrow, very popular — all OK.

Q: When you went to Taipei back then (at 23), what you meant to do was tell stories. Acting and directing feel different. How do you look at that first intention now?

Jin Shijie: That intention shows I wasn't very conscious of having to do any one thing. I never told myself I had to be an actor, a playwright or a director — I wasn't even sure about theater.

I could write novels, I could write songs, I could sell beef noodles — all possible. I wanted to be a storyteller of some kind: run a teahouse, bang a gong, beat a drum, clap the bamboo clappers, tell tales, whatever. It could just be idle talk. Maybe I open a bar, or a coffee shop, or a children's playground.

I never thought about the form. So the man in front of you now is a well-known actor, a well-known director. When I take that on, I feel hollow. It's only a label — director or not director, actor or not actor.

I've really been standing at the starting point the whole time, and that point is storyteller. The stories I lived through as a child, or heard from my older brothers and sisters, or Zhu Ziqing's essays — that's the thing. Which form it takes doesn't matter.

Q: Is it a worldview?

Jin Shijie: It's the most basic kind of self-awareness. I serve that, always. So suddenly serving the entertainment business isn't a change of career. That's just practical life getting disrupted. As for the job, I'm only trying to get at that thing — dreammaker, storyteller, either will do.

Q: If I asked where your motivation to learn comes from now, would it overlap with that?

Jin Shijie: My motivation to learn has always come from knowing that I am a person in this universe with no ground under my feet. Not knowing life, not knowing death — it can't help but push you to dig into more things, to observe more.

I'll admit there's one more help in my life now: my children. Sometimes I look at the world through their eyes, and they give me the motivation to live the next second. So some of the pleasure of wanting to know comes out of their pleasure.

Because they take up such an important place in my life, the smallest nothing on the TV news makes me tense. Someone shouting in the street, and I think at once: what if my children saw that? There are so many things in the world — fun ones, frightening ones, subjects, incidents — and they all touch a nerve somewhere.

Q: A friend of mine wants to know how your acting system was built. It's an interesting question — even with very good actors, "acting system" isn't always the right question, but with you it feels all right to ask.

Jin Shijie: Why do you think the subject suits me?

Q: Your acting feels like a very concrete thing; I don't know how to put it. If there is such a thing as an "acting system," are you aware of yours? How was it built?

Jin Shijie: Well, my answer is that I don't make comparisons. Coming all this way, I feel acting is... not what it is for some people. Some people, for instance, feel Stanislavsky... Stanislavsky's presence and his structure have shaped people in a great many places. And it goes further than that; those things spread like ripples, and once they open out, the questions and the chances they hand you connect to other questions.

So a lot of drama school teachers fly the old man's flag while teaching some other branch of the tree — all of that is possible. In many countries on this earth people are after different things in acting, and they've all been shaped by the old man to some degree. Each of them builds his own, blended with the local culture, or dreams up a different system out of nowhere. None of it is entirely unconnected to Stanislavsky, but each has its own way.

What is my own way? Before I ever became an actor professionally, I was already sure that my work was to be an actor — and the actor I mean isn't the actor you know now. Human behavior, human speech, everything outward about a person, everything you can see: that is what I call performance.

Everybody is a copyist; almost nothing is original, in anything. Including your face and your expressions. Some of it is refracted from genes, some of it soaked up from the surroundings, some of it imitated, caught from other people without noticing, this and that and the other. Very early on I found that this business of being an actor whetted my appetite, that it was something I loved to think about.

I'm always testing whether people's behavior is real or false. Behavior, manners — I often feel that a person is an actor, rather than that an actor is an actor. Of those two propositions, I belong to the first. The acting job that earns money, that puts food on the table, I just do on the side. My larger ambition is this: without that job, when I go home and face the sky and the earth, in my heart I feel I am an actor.

If we're talking about a system, that's how I'd answer. And out of all that comes a pursuit of my own, an attitude of my own.

There's one more thing I can add to your question. Before Lanling we brought in an actor, Wu Jingji, who became the workshop's teacher.

He had just come back to Taiwan from a visit to La MaMa in New York. He was himself a PhD teaching psychology, and he fused psychology with the La MaMa style of performance in the exercises he put us through. For a year and a half we didn't come out of that room. We just trained, and never performed.

We were very young then, and the theme of all the training was relax. Relaxation. The first step of the relaxation course was called Massage, and we did Massage for a very long time. I'm being a bit playful saying it that way, but truly — the physical relations between people, how to roll, how to compose a picture, how to run, all of it fused with psychology.

He was after relaxation all the way through, and relaxation is a course that to this day has never ended for me. Often, after such a class, I felt the whole thing was just playing games. Did it have anything to do with acting? No.

For a very long time we wondered what on earth that course was for. We weren't patients in a psychiatric ward. (Q: What you're saying—) So those directions in the training had a large effect on me, and I liked that pursuit very much myself. That is: letting a person open up the body, drop all the martial law, all the armor. Not being your own master, shyness, the sense of freedom — let go, let go, let go — and what comes in is something like a playful child with two big curious eyes wide open.

That's what I'm after more than anything. Every time I read a script or watch a performance, I feel those curious eyes are on me: what are they doing? How can it be like that?

Like a child's first trip to the circus — ooooh — huh?! — ah?! Toward theater, toward acting, toward those astonishing, interesting performances, that's often how I feel. Facing a part I want to play — oooh. Some mischief comes up, some second-guessing, some being entirely faithful to what the period demands, and some voice on the other side speaking up.

I haven't said it clearly enough, but I've said it as clearly as I can.

Q: You've said acting is like play for you — you ought to be the one paying, but instead people pay you. Has that satisfaction ever gone missing along the way?

Jin Shijie: When you run into a lousy script, a lousy company, a lousy show, you turn a blind eye and get through it. When the acting is in a more interesting state, I'd use that line to explain it.

Q: You like the attitude to life of the fool in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Gimpel the Fool: dealing with suffering your whole life, even playing at self-torment as a kind of pride. A lot of interviews mention that you take this as your own attitude. Why?

Jin Shijie: Why?

Q: I don't quite understand what that line means in your case.

Jin Shijie: Gimpel the Fool, put simply: a cuckold. His wife lies to him constantly, sleeps with other men constantly, lies to him constantly, and he believes her. Oh, oh, oh — he thinks nothing of it. Then he dies and goes to hell, and there is his wife, still sleeping with other men. And he believes her again. Oh, oh, oh.

Reading it, I wondered what kind of person writes a story like that, what kind of people writes a story like that. The answer was the Jews. Of course — only an old people would write such a story. Too deep. That sense of suffering is too strong. That depth, and the relation to suffering, and the joking a person finds under suffering and repression, the capacity to laugh at oneself — that's what I like, what I admire.

Because why is he still laughing at that point? Tell him a lie and he believes it: you saw wrong just now, the thing that jumped out of the window wasn't a man, it was a dog. Any excuse will do. It's a bit dull, not a very funny joke. He writes it so cheaply. There's something in it that leaves you between laughing and crying, and something behind that draws me. What kind of person writes a story like that.

Q: You say something behind it draws you. You also often mention pessimism. Where does your pessimism come from?

And you're nostalgic too. Isn't nostalgia a matter of feeling safe about the past, or of having once reached some very happy state? I don't quite see how your pessimism comes out of that.

Jin Shijie: Where the pessimism comes from, I can't work out. I've been pessimistic since I was small. Maybe I'm timid, weak, easily frightened. Saving for a rainy day, being full of sentiment, all that... my body was never quite able to take the sunlight. A coward, a weak character. Afraid, easily afraid. I'd guess it has to do with that.

And then, going with my parents, with my mother, to the Christian church as a child and reading those stories — life and death, heaven and hell — that may set you brooding. A child can't quite get his head round it anyway, and thinking and thinking, he starts to worry. Oh — really?! Heaven, hell, death... ahem, ahem.

Q: On what you said about nostalgia and safety — do you accept that?

Jin Shijie: Yes, I lean toward the nostalgic. But the sticking point isn't oldness, it's time.

I liked it when my father put me in old clothes at New Year. From very young I didn't like new clothes; I liked old ones. Old clothes have the smell of a person in them; new clothes don't. There's a "long live the poor" feeling in it. Probably the influence of my mother's thrift. Everything must be used to the full, nothing wasted, the tap turned off tight, the lights switched off when you leave. (laughs)

Q: A lot of your film and TV work has left a deep impression on people; they even clip out passages of your acting to pass around.

As a viewer, I sometimes find that watching those clips makes me feel let down.

Because the other characters, or the whole set of relationships in that film or series, is not something I can believe in — and then a very real performance of yours comes out, and I end up feeling you're telling the audience a lie. Do you get that sense of imbalance as an actor?

Jin Shijie: You mean it's acted too false, right?

Q: No — you act too real, but everything around you is false. To put it bluntly, the film isn't very good.

Jin Shijie: That I can't answer. I can only be responsible for my part of the acting; I can't be responsible for the whole. This... this... I'm not really in a position to answer it.

Q: But does it leave you feeling let down?

Jin Shijie: On a boat it's hard to sail somewhere good, somewhere everybody benefits. You may do your own part well, but the boat still doesn't get anywhere better. The captain doesn't have it in him...

On a set I'm often a tiny, tiny bit more mouthy than other people. I keep finding I have to be careful not to overstep, not to go too far, not to be disrespectful. But often the moment I show it — huh? Why can't I keep it in?

Someone who comes out of the theater is used to everyone working together. If they're bad, we're all bad together. So that partly answers your question — I don't think about whether I'm good, I think about how hard this boat is to steer.

Q: Is there anything you've been thinking about lately? Or something you've thought about for a long time?

Jin Shijie: What I've been thinking about lately is how to talk with a child who is ten years older than mine is now. My child is 7, and I'm a fairly old father, so of course I worry about how finite life is. I think: I'll be older still by then, so how will we talk? We'll talk about past and present, China and elsewhere, about love, about careers, about whatever — and what meaning can I produce?

Q: Some people who make stories want to lay out society's problems and solve them. That's where their drive comes from. Are you one of those?

Jin Shijie: Not really. There's always been something detached in how I relate to reality. When I wrote stories in my youth, I loved to avoid saying that we were on Chaoyang Avenue, that I was in Beijing, that I was on such-and-such a street in Taipei. Anything tied to the real world — political questions, economic questions, current affairs, politics — I tend to blur. That's my habit.

That's different from Stan Lai's crosstalk material. Crosstalk carries satire in it by nature, so he is bound to touch on the present: what's happening with Taiwan's elections, Taiwan's historical baggage, what Taipei was like in a given decade. He writes toward that. In my subjects I usually steer around it. Yes — my answer is that I keep my distance.

Q: And in real life, in your own thinking, is there anything you worry about?

Jin Shijie: What worries me isn't anything absolute. It's more to do with relationships — between people, your relationship with yourself, with your family, with society, or the story of some warped character. Those are the things I find more interesting.

The cover image is a production still from The Actors' Lab, from the official Wuzhen Theatre Festival site.