Zhu Tianwen Won This Year's "Chinese-Language Literary Figure" Award. She Talked About Literature's Own Rules, and Inheritance

Taiwanese writer Zhu Tianwen was named this year's "Chinese-Language Literary Figure" by 21 students at Renmin University. Here is what she said in her acceptance speech and the interviews that followed.

On December 5, Taiwanese writer Zhu Tianwen attended the "21 University Students' World Chinese-Language Literature Gala" at Renmin University of China, where five writers and scholars — including Yan Lianke and Liang Hong — together with 21 graduate students from Renmin University's writing program, named her the 2018 "Chinese-Language Literary Figure."

Zhu Tianwen was born in 1956 into a literary family in Taiwan. She published her first novel, Feigned Sorrow (《强说心愁》), at 16, and has worked in literature ever since; her best-known books include Notes of a Desolate Man, Witch Words (《巫言》) and Fin-de-Siècle Splendor. She also writes screenplays — Dust in the Wind, A City of Sadness, Three Times and The Assassin were all made with director Hou Hsiao-hsien, for whom she wrote the scripts.

Zhu Tianwen delivered her acceptance speech under the title "A Writer's Position and Time." In it she spoke of what reputation, as "a system of recognition," means to a writer. The people most deserving of reputation, she argued, may be exactly those who do not care for it and take no pleasure in it — "a wariness toward reputation's fragility, its uncertainty and its habitual falseness; a revulsion at the way reputation always serves wealth and power so charmingly."

Yan Lianke spoke first, on why the "Chinese-Language Literature Gala" exists at all. One reason is that Chinese really is a great language, and has produced a powerful Chinese-language literature and culture. The other is that, great as Chinese is, one has to admit that contemporary literature has contributed less to the language than modern or classical literature did, and that mainland literature has preserved less of the language than Taiwanese literature has. Since Chinese still has to be developed and created, there has to be a world literary prize for those who have made an enormous contribution to the language itself.

"We chose Ms. Zhu Tianwen because her novels and her films keep our Chinese, our Chinese writing, our square characters circulating around the world without pause. We are not saying that among the world's writers Zhu Tianwen must be number one — she may be number nine, or number ten. But on one point there is no question: for her contribution to Chinese-language literature she is certainly in the top three."

In her citation, Liang Hong analyzed the range, the language and the structure of Zhu Tianwen's writing as rooted in Taiwanese and urban experience, and wrote: "On the whole, Ms. Zhu Tianwen's reverent devotion to the Chinese language has awakened the language's inner vitality, and her dense, subtly imagistic writing refracts the predicament of human existence in a postmodern context."

Excerpts from the speech and the Q&A

Zhu Tianwen, "A Writer's Position and Time"

Thank you to the "21 University Students' World Chinese-Language Literature Gala" for this award.

Beforehand I read carefully through the stack of material Professor Yan Lianke sent me, and noticed that the final jury is made up of 21 graduate students from Renmin University's creative writing program. That is highly unusual. I would go further: of all the literary prizes I have come across, at home or abroad, this is the only one of its kind.

First, university students. To all of you here at the gala today — how would you define the term? What image do you hold of it?

In the era when I grew up, set against the complicated tangle of entering society after graduation, against a daily life that grew wearier and more fossilized by the year, being a university student meant purity and idealism. Even if you were sharp-edged, even extreme, that was the fastidiousness and the impetuousness one was supposed to admire in the young — a young person who is never a little wild wastes his youth. But I am past sixty now, and I want to use different words. To go on describing purity and idealism in that fairy-tale way feels irresponsible, and feeble.

A university student — this is how I would put it now — stands in a clean, uncluttered position: the position Hannah Arendt called "disinterested, without stake, uninvolved." So you will ask: disinterested in what, with no stake in what, uninvolved in what? My answer is: in reputation, in wealth, in power.

It is from that position that 21 students discussed, judged and finally decided to give this award — and that a gala like this exists at all strikes me as remarkably fresh and rare. So what sort of thing is a "prize"? Since we are gathered here today, let us take a moment to think about it.

Let me start with the 21 students. You are not only university students but writing students in a creative writing program, and that makes this more of an honor for me. I published my first collection of stories at about your age; today I have been writing for nearly fifty years. I am very glad to receive this gift from your hands — this honor, or you could call it this immediately visible "system of recognition." If you struggle and work hard, and if you are lucky — yes, I say lucky, because it really is very, very hard — then by the time you have written your way to the age I am now, you may, like me, understand the following story very well.

It is a strange legend about time, from Thoreau's Walden. Allow me to retell it.

There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who longed for perfection. One day he decided to make a staff. Considering that time is one of the ingredients of an imperfect work, while a perfect work contains no element of time, he said to himself: this staff shall be perfect in every part; for it I may do nothing else the rest of my life.

He went at once into the forest for wood, determined that it should not be made of unsuitable material.

As he searched and searched, discarding piece after piece, his friends gradually left him, for they grew old and died while he bent over his work, and he himself did not age a single moment. His single-mindedness, his resolve, his rising devotion, granted him without his knowing it an eternal youth.

Because he would not compromise with time, time stepped aside and could only sigh from a distance, for it could not overcome him.

Before he had found a stick suitable in every respect, the city of Kouroo had crumbled into ancient ruins, and he sat on a heap of stones peeling the bark. Before he had given the stick its proper shape the Candahar dynasty had come to an end; with the tip of the stick he wrote the name of the dynasty's last ruler in the sand, then went on with his work. By the time he had polished the stick smooth, it was no longer the pole star. Before he had fitted the gold band and set the jewel at its head, the dream had woken and fallen asleep again many times over.

You see what kind of craftsmanship this is — even time can do nothing but step aside.

More than twenty years ago I wrote Notes of a Desolate Man, and at the very end I wrote: "Time is irreversible, life is irreversible; and yet in the act of writing, everything irreversible becomes reversible. And so the writing continues." If the book has a theme at all, it is perhaps resistance to time, resistance to forgetting.

Ten years ago, when Witch Words came out, I went out to meet readers, and over the course of several interviews I found myself returning again and again to Borges's story "The Garden of Forking Paths." While writing, of course, you proceed without knowing, doing what has to be done; only afterward, with hindsight, do you dissect your own work. My analysis is this: the writing of Witch Words is zero-narrative.

So, first: what is narrative?

Narrative, I think, is the advance of time.

In the endless labyrinth of time and causality, the writer tries to work out — or design — a thread, and pulls himself forward along it, out of the maze. That is perhaps the simplest narrative structure. But zero-narrative, used to write a long novel — does that mean following no thread, that time has stopped? Does it mean not looking for a way out, and letting everything stay chaos and bewilderment?

The words "chaos and bewilderment" come from the important Taiwanese novelist Wu He, who has a novel by exactly that name, Chaos and Bewilderment (《乱迷》), a piece of passionate, radical writing that is entirely conscious of what it is doing. Must writing like this be doomed to be nothing more than a failed experiment born of ambition? I believe sincerely that rather than applaud the success of practiced repetition, we ought to have the courage to identify failures rich in meaning, and reward them.

So what were Chaos and Bewilderment, or the far gentler Witch Words, trying to test? They were testing whether it is possible to turn time into space — a kind of "garden of forking paths."

"Forking" here means forking away from narrative time.

Fork after fork, and every place a fork leads to is a garden in various, abundant bloom. In other words, time's forward motion is turned into an incomparable space, and lingering there, unable to see or savor it all, we forget to leave.

This particular sorcery of writing I learned earlier still, from Calvino. In Six Memos for the Next Millennium he raises the idea of digression. As a writing strategy, digression exists to multiply the time inside a work, to defer the ending — a flight that never stops. And what is it fleeing? Death, of course.

Flowing endlessly away, time is death. Calvino says: if the straight line is fated, if the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, then deviation can lengthen that distance. If these deviations become more winding and tangled, more complex and indistinguishable, until they hide the linear track altogether, then perhaps time itself will lose its way, and we can go on hiding inside our ever-changing deviations where death cannot find us.

Digression becomes the subject. Narrative shows as zero, as an eternal present, as the reappearance of anthropological detail. I once used this angle to describe my father Zhu Xining's The Hua Taiping Family Saga (《华太平家传》). He revised it eight times, and in the last ten years of his life began it a ninth time, writing 550,000 words and leaving it unfinished. He was using material from this "actual" world of ours to build the shimmering dreamland of the "should-be" world he carried in his mind. In his later years he said, "I am writing for God to see" — and my sister Zhu Tianxin, indignant on our father's behalf, shot back, "You give God far too much credit!" But it was exactly then that I suddenly understood: before a writer so intent on building a dreamland, time, too, can only sigh and stand aside.

This is my model: a writer's singular time, and his one-of-a-kind position. He is thinking of one work, and of a whole world at the same time.

So let me call on my beloved anthropologist Lévi-Strauss to gloss it for me. His books and Calvino's — whenever and wherever I pick them up they still flash with light, and start up my desire to write all over again. Lévi-Strauss said: "I have a particular fondness for craftsmanship, one of the greatest and most irreplaceable things humanity has created over thousands of years, founded on a person's sense of their own place in the universe." The position a person finds for themselves in the world, its sense of wholeness, its dense solidity, its steadiness without fear or doubt — in that, every recompense has already been received. "I am writing for God to see" — so that is what my father was pointing to.

Follow this line of thought and it might seem that prizes have nothing to do with me. What is the emperor's power to me? What is an award or an honor to me? But no, that isn't right either.

Go back to where I started, the position of the university student — disinterested in reputation, wealth and power, with no stake in them, uninvolved. Let your imagination run for a moment and you will see that this position is exactly the position from which God watches. Brought down to earth, it becomes the position of the court historian, the position a historian ought to stand in. "In Qi, the Grand Historian's bamboo slips; in Jin, Dong Hu's brush" — historians formed a lineage of their own, even independent families or schools handed down generation after generation, kept apart from power and wealth, exchanging nothing with them, working only by their professional standard. The historian took what had been a factual record-keeping job and added to it a reckoning of right and wrong, good and evil, correcting what had actually happened and turning it into "a system of recognition." This is the brush of the Spring and Autumn Annals — the one that made treacherous ministers and usurpers afraid, that even emperors feared.

God is more radical still. To keep justice from being the same thing as force, to let goodness stand on clean ground, you have to put God, a higher and fairer assessor, in the place of human judges. Render unto God what is God's, unto Caesar what is Caesar's — the reflections of the Sermon on the Mount come only after Jesus has drawn a clean line between himself and worldly power and wealth.

Well, I hadn't expected to end up talking about religion and history. These two great systems of recognition — in the flat, globalized world of the 21st century, do they still work? In fact everything I have cited above, the words and the content, comes from a book just published, My Simple Reflections on Reputation, Wealth and Power (《我有关声誉、财富和权势的简单思索》). Its author? Tang Nuo.

What the book truly cares about is reputation and nothing else, and yet it spends two-thirds of its length fighting its way through the dense, crisscrossing forest of wealth and power — which is precisely the evidence of reputation's real condition today. But why write a whole book combing so doggedly through the question of reputation? The book tells an old joke: reputation is just a rope.

"How did you end up arrested by the authorities?"

"I took a rope that belonged to someone."

"They reported you to the officials over one rope?"

"The other end of the rope was tied to their ox."

Reputation is that rope. In itself it may be worthless, and a little affected — but it is tied to, and holds fast, a great many people and things of real value.

Reputation often presents this paradox: the people most deserving of reputation may be exactly those who do not care for it and take no pleasure in it. A wariness toward reputation's fragility, its uncertainty and its habitual falseness; a revulsion at the way reputation always serves wealth and power so charmingly. And yet the book insists on defending reputation, because reputation on its own reaches toward the should-be world, and connects to — and to a considerable degree determines — how much we must think about that should-be world, and its possible quantity, breadth, scope and content. In short: the ox.

We cannot have only an actual world, only a thin present-tense existence. Besides, isn't the present exactly what was once, for people in the past, the future — and isn't a large part of it exactly what those people insisted on, fought for and realized of their should-be world? Often, without knowing it, aren't we all disciples of some thinker, some sage, from long ago?

So we have to let reputation stand on its own, and protect it as a system of recognition.

Let the intent to do good, the rare energy of goodness, have the chance to form some minimal, self-renewing cycle. Someone sees it, someone smiles, someone can talk about it. In the actual world ruled by wealth and power, we struggle to leave behind a few things that belong to the should-be world.

On this basis of thinking through reputation, a prize, as a system of recognition, is meaningful, and carries responsibility too. I am glad to accept it. Thank you for your gift.

Zhu Tianwen's other interviews

Q = questions from the audience and the reporters present

Q: Hello. I'd like to ask you to say more about your novel In the Twilight of the Republic (《在民国的黄昏里》) — before Witch Words came out, this novel was being serialized chapter by chapter.

Zhu Tianwen: For the past ten years I have mostly been working on The Assassin, a martial-arts film set in the Tang dynasty world — and what came out of it was, in a sense, anti-martial-arts and anti-gravity. Director Hou Hsiao-hsien is a minimalist, and his economy and his way of expressing things meant that by the time the film was finished a great deal had been cut, so much that the screenwriter looks as though she did nothing at all. We actually spent many years on it, but that was the director's call to make.

The other thing is that I have recently been writing two books. One is an essay collection called A Rebel City, Population One (《只有一个人的叛市》), about the remarkable people around me in all sorts of trades — I sort them out first, and write an essay collection. It's like Zhu Tianxin writing Thirty-Three Years of Dreams (《三十三年梦》): she was too impatient to pack everything of her own into her novel. She has that problem, so she deliberately sorts things out before writing her next novel. She said, "I want too badly to speak, I want too badly to have a system of recognition in the real world — I want fairness and justice to exist immediately. I want my book to praise things right away, to praise the good passionately and condemn the bad just as passionately." So to stay faithful to literature's own language, she has to do a sorting-out before writing a novel — settle the fairness and justice she believes in inside Thirty-Three Years of Dreams, so she won't be in such a hurry. Then, when she writes her next novel, she can follow literature's own natural laws. I'm the same. So while I'm writing A Rebel City, Population One, at least the people I write about there stand for my values. I may be gentler than Zhu Tianxin, but I too have to sort things out first before I write.

Then I'll write In the Twilight of the Republic — about my parents' generation, the generation of 1949, which is also the present I was there for, never absent from; that is my reality. Writing this book, I am saying that this world is about to be turned over — that after 1949 comes the twilight of the Republic. In the Communist Party's version of history this is something to be turned past quickly; and in the atmosphere in Taiwan, where Taiwanese consciousness and native consciousness have become politically correct, they too can't wait to turn the page as fast as possible.

I said the same thing in the writing workshop today: don't expect to turn the page that fast. We are still here. We still see it. We still remember it. We have to write it down. This is going very slowly. Every year I hope to concentrate and push it forward a little. But The Assassin interrupted me and pulled me into the Tang world — perhaps that Tang world is also a soil, an invisible nourishment.

Q: You mentioned exchanging ideas with students in Renmin University's writing program, and the Zhu family has also supported and mentored many young writers in Taiwan. In your exchanges with young mainland writers, have you felt any difference from young Taiwanese writers? What is your immediate impression? Are the things that confuse them different?

And a second question: you said you are currently writing In the Twilight of the Republic and A Rebel City, Population One. What are your writing plans after that?

Zhu Tianwen: I don't know how far my writing plans run. The immediate thing is to finish a documentary that has to be delivered at the end of next year. Then I hope to spend at least two hours a day concentrating and making progress on In the Twilight of the Republic. What I'm actually writing at the moment is A Rebel City, Population One, and there's been some progress. So for now the documentary comes first; only the year after next will I be able to go back and finish A Rebel City, Population One.

As for young writers, I'm badly behind, because at my age energy and time are both limited. With reading I tend to rely on someone filtering young writers' work for me first. I'm in no rush to read it myself — plenty of people have already told me I have a time-management problem. What I do a lot of instead is reread. The books I keep going back to I call "pacifier books."

Speaking of rereading, I think mainland editors are better than Taiwanese ones — the standard of book editing on the mainland is very strong. There's a book called Reread (《重读》), published by Imaginist, by Tang Nuo. In Taiwan it came out as Meeting Fourteen Writers in a Café (《在咖啡馆遇见十四位作家》), but when the simplified-character edition was published on the mainland, the editors boldly changed the title to Reread. Reading again — the idea is that many books, classics included, need to be read again and again. You read one in your teens, then in your twenties, your thirties; and at sixty, with limited time, you reread the classics and it is completely different. Because your experience and your reading history are different by then, and when you look at it again — a so-called classic is something that has survived, accumulating through time, still standing. There is something in it; it can withstand the sifting of great spans of time.

So, given my time-management problem, what I do now is reread the things relevant to me. For what young people are writing today I take recommendations from friends — Tang Nuo, Tianxin — and let them do the filtering first. Tianxin and the others all serve as prize judges; I'm far too slow at that, so I keep away from judging entirely. When Tianxin judges and says something is really good, if she says it's good I'll read it. So in these circumstances I'm badly behind on young people's work, and haven't read enough of it, which is why I still can't answer your question.

Q: You mentioned "pacifier books" — which ones are yours?

Zhu Tianwen: Any book by Calvino. My favorites are things like Why Read the Classics? or Six Memos for the Next Millennium — you can open it at any moment, at any passage, and it is wonderful. Every book by Lévi-Strauss is a pleasure to open too; my favorite is Tristes Tropiques.

Q: You've said that in In the Twilight of the Republic you want to write about the half-world of Taiwan you witnessed. Your father's The Hua Taiping Family Saga also tells the story from your great-grandfather's generation onward. Is your book an inheritance of his? Or is the relationship something else?

Zhu Tianwen: I can't inherit it. He wrote 550,000 words — would inheriting it mean writing a sequel to Dream of the Red Chamber? That simply cannot be written. So I'm writing my own thing; In the Twilight of the Republic can only write what I myself saw. What my father wrote about — going back to our great-grandfather's generation and earlier — amounts to the beginning of China's modernization: Western civilization arriving with the missionaries, the great rupture across 5,000 years, with every person of conscience, in whatever field and by whatever means, trying everything to answer and respond to China's modernization.

My father was in effect answering that as a novelist, and he took it to his limit. I have no way of writing what he wrote — much of it he had heard from his own great-grandfather, from his grandmother. What I heard from my father about his past can only be a soil, a nourishment, for me; whatever it turns into without my noticing, whatever I see — I can only write what I see. What I inherit, in that sense, is his spirit.

Q: You tend to pursue an objective, precise kind of writing, a more meticulous kind, but you've also said writing can't keep up with the "present." Do you feel a gap when you look at your own words? How do you handle that feeling, and what do you think good writing looks like?

Zhu Tianwen: There is no such thing as better writing, because every piece of writing, every use of language, comes out of the content it is expressing.

Writing, I think — whatever the school, whatever the postmodern label, whatever style you want to name, since a style becomes a school or an -ism of some kind — comes down to this: the writer feels that what he used before no longer reaches the vein, as when you are digging a vein out of a mine, or that there is some new state of things, and he tries everything to answer that new state, to dig out what can't be dug out, or what is getting harder and harder to dig. When you first start telling stories there is plenty of material, and you can handle all of it with very simple language; but the deeper in you go, the harder it gets. What people say a lot lately is that the low-hanging fruit has all been picked. That was the easy part, everyone has picked it clean, and if you still want to pick you have to climb and jump to reach the hard stuff.

So you have to find a way to dig out a new vein, because the material lying exposed on the surface has more or less all been dug up. To find every possible way to dig that vein, you have to find every possible way to find the right thing. Language and writing, I think, arise in answer to this, not by forcing something on from outside, because that way you won't dig anything out either. So there is no best writing and no best language — it depends on what you want to express, and on finding the most fitting vessel for it, and very often you fail. But you keep going, and it turns out everything before was practice, until the time comes when you reach the best vessel, when the language and the form you find fit exactly, exactly right for what you want to express. That doesn't happen out of nowhere; it may come only after you have written many failures. Because you are not willing to keep repeating what everyone already knows, the things that would earn you plenty of money and reputation. You always want to push forward a little, and pushing forward carries the risk of failure — and still you keep stubbornly doing it, and that is exactly where the greatest reward lies. When you reach the moment where it is exactly right, where the inside and the outside are that consistent, you are very happy.

Q: Besides writing, you've also done a lot of screenwriting. After screenwriting, when you go back to fiction, is there some cinematic sense or cinematic way of thinking guiding you? In the process of writing, how do you live alongside film as an art form and still write?

Zhu Tianwen: On living alongside it — someone in the writing workshop today asked me the same thing. He said many of his screenwriter friends had originally written fiction or something else, and then went into screenwriting, which is another world, one where the money is often far bigger, very different from honestly writing away over here. So after doing screenwriting for a long time, when they want to come back and write a novel, they find that feel for language is gone — the sense of touch, as we call it. It's gone.

In one sense, once you go into screenwriting, and do a lot of it, your pen gets ruined. So when you come back to fiction you find that fiction no longer recognizes you, and you need to be fully aware of that. What I mean is that once you go into screenwriting — for film or for anything else — you may even secretly hope: I want to write something with a huge fan base, a subject with mass appeal. So from the moment you start writing, your intentions are already elsewhere; you're hoping this thing can immediately be made into a film or a web series or something, and in some ways that is already another matter entirely. If you work with that in mind, I think the feel for language, the sense of touch, is simply gone. This is something to be fully aware of.

As for whether film has affected my writing — as Professor Liang Hong mentioned just now, whether there is montage-style cross-cutting, or a particularly strong sense of being on the scene, a strong visual sense — I think all of that is very technical, and I don't think that is where it lies. Film's influence is more the kind of thing you might not spot in a novel right away. I also said in the writing workshop today: a person's life can really only realize one kind of life. As in the story I mentioned earlier, about wanting only to build one perfect staff — that's a metaphor — every trade has its own expertise, something it takes a whole lifetime to carry to its peak.

By the time you reach that peak your life is more or less over, but your satisfaction is in there too. So a person's life really can realize only one kind of life. What is more thoroughgoing than a career is your calling — that is the one that can be realized, because it is what you love, what you are passionate about. Someone who can realize even one such life has already done something extraordinary.

As for making films — I have been in it myself, and all 17 of the films were directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien. I don't write for anyone else, because I don't even have enough time for my own work. So I chose to write only for Director Hou. But the way we work together is too particular to become a model script; if it became a model, that would be a disaster. Since it can't be a paradigm or a template, the film work you take part in is with a top-tier film author, not with a director working inside a film industry. A film industry has professional actors, professional costume and art design — everyone is a professional, and everyone works together under a professional division of labor. That is industrial. In fact Taiwan can rarely reach Hollywood's professional standard collectively; it is often semi-artisanal. Or, if you take the other path, as Director Hou and his team do, it is more artisanal still — the work of a craftsman building by hand. In this kind of collaboration you are both an author and a craftsman. My own part in it isn't sitting there writing a script; my biggest contribution is in the long discussions over the script — how to draw out your counterpart from a different field, because it is only through that discussion that something really good can come out. What emerges at the end is just a blueprint for execution. And all of that is entirely because it is Hou Hsiao-hsien.

So what I have gained from taking part is not, I think, technical; it is fundamental, foundational: a person's life can realize only one kind of life. I feel as though I've managed to realize two. That is the fundamental gain, and it is the greatest thing I have gained and been influenced by.

The cover image and the images in this article are from the "21 University Students' World Chinese-Language Literature Gala," provided by the event organizers.