Kevin Tsai: If My Tombstone Gets One Line, Don't Make It "the Man Who Talked About EQ" | Interviews

"It makes me sound too kindly, and I'm not that kindly. I'd rather it said: this is someone who created a fantasy world."

In 2010, Kevin Tsai published his first how-to book, 《蔡康永的说话之道》 (Kevin Tsai's Way With Words), an attempt to teach people how to talk. Four years later came the sequel, Way With Words 2. Together the two sold close to 4 million copies, and a man past fifty turned into exactly what he had despised as a boy: a bestselling author of how-to books.

He sees it differently now. Writing a book, he says, is a way of "probing yourself." If the finished book also lets its readers probe themselves, it was worth writing. So how-to books have their reason to exist — at the very least they can solve a small problem for someone. The same, he says, goes for making television.

Way With Words was also where he stopped wanting to display the "I" and began trying to write from other people's positions. He had published eight books before it, among them 《痛快日记》 (Diary of Delight), 《LA流浪记》 (Drifting in LA), and 《那些男孩教我的事》 (What Those Boys Taught Me). Most carried a strong personal stamp — his childhood, his schooling, his social life, his ideas.

Readers who like Tsai's writing mostly find it consoling, useful for working through some of life's problems; those who don't find it shallow, chicken soup for the soul that solves nothing. He has answered the charge himself: "I don't think my Weibo is 'chicken soup for the soul.' What I write isn't all optimistic either — there's sadness and confusion in it. I never write things like 'don't hate other people' or 'effort always pays off' that I don't believe. I write what I believe."

More than as a writer, though, the public knows Tsai as a host. He has won Best Variety Show Host at the Golden Bell Awards (Taiwan's top television prize) and hosted the Golden Horse Awards (Taiwan's top film prize) ceremony seven times. His best-known programs are the Taiwanese variety show 《康熙来了》 (Kangxi Lai Le) and the mainland online debate show 《奇葩说》 (Qipa Shuo). Kangxi Lai Le above all, which he co-hosted with Little S (Dee Hsu) for 12 years, reached far across the Chinese-speaking world and drew an enormous following.

Before he started hosting Kangxi Lai Le in 2004, though, Tsai was a culture-programming host: the celebrity interview show 《真情指数》 (The Sincerity Index), the books program 《今天不读书》 (No Reading Today), and others.

His friend, the journalist Sisy Chen, once said: "I think Kang-yung has a certain ability. First, he considers other people. Second, his ego is very small. Third, although you studied English literature and film, when you need to, you understand — and are willing to — crouch down and do Kangxi Lai Le."

He rejected the idea that he had crouched down to do Kangxi Lai Le, and answered her: "In the Analects, Confucius goes and talks with farmers and gardeners, and says that when it comes to growing crops, I am not the equal of an old farmer; when it comes to growing flowers, I am not the equal of an old gardener. Confucius also said: do not raise a man up because of his words, and do not throw a man out because of his words. Don't admire someone's character just because he said one good line, and don't disbelieve what someone says just because he's a scoundrel. I'm someone who very much likes talking to people from outside the academy. I don't think you have to learn something from them. Just getting to see what's there is fun enough."

On his hosting style, some people find him courteous, clever, quick; others find him out of place and half-interested. Both are true, and both have a lot to do with how he grew up.

Tsai was born into an old family with money. His grandfather ran the Shanghai Waterworks; his father, Cai Tianduo, was a well-known lawyer and, before 1949, the owner of China's largest shipping company, the Shanghai Zhonglian Steamship Company. The luxury liner Taiping, which sank in 1949, belonged to that company.

Interviewed by Sisy Chen, Tsai recalled how much his family shaped him: "An old-style Shanghai family that had come to Taiwan — the air I grew up in made me feel I was living a secondhand life, and left me unable to work up interest in much of anything. When I was small, whenever my father had guests at home, if a yellow croaker came to the table, he would take one bite and say it was about three times worse than the yellow croaker he used to eat in Shanghai. If we went to the Peking opera and the White Snake somersaulted down off two stacked tables perfectly, and we clapped and cheered, my father would sigh and say that in Shanghai the White Snake could come down off three tables. Once he took me out for ice cream and we ran into a hunchbacked old woman. My father said hello, and after she left he told me she had been the greatest beauty in Qingdao. I said, she's bent over like a dried shrimp now, and she was once the greatest beauty in Qingdao. I found that unbearable."

According to Southern Weekly, Cai Tianduo, a Shanghai man, loved having guests, and trained his son in how to look after them from an early age. At family dinners, Tsai's father watched constantly for any guest being left out. Later, hosting television, Tsai treated everyone who came on "Kangxi" as a guest too: "On TV I look like I'm having a great time at my own party, and a lot of that is because I care so much whether the guests are enjoying themselves."

Like many rich men's sons, though, Tsai was rebellious from childhood, and wanted out of the ready-made world his family had handed him. In 2012, interviewed by the mainland edition of GQ, he named "rebellion" as his "most obvious personal style, or personal mark." "Rebellion is an important source of energy for me. The thought of being a docile person bores me. I like anything new; sameness bores me," he told GQ.

In high school, for instance, a classmate handed him the works of Yin Haiguang and Friedrich Hayek. That was when he learned about the February 28 Incident, and when he discovered that Taiwan had poor people and laborers too — a shock, a thrill, and a shame. He went on to run pieces in the school magazine about what really happened on February 28 and about The Communist Manifesto, joined a few radical activities, and was disciplined repeatedly. Perhaps out of deference to his father, the school never simply expelled him.

So it isn't hard to see why, after taking a master's degree in 1990 from the film and television graduate program at the University of California, Los Angeles, he went on to do so many different jobs — university teacher, columnist, screenwriter and director, film-festival juror, creative director at a radio station, founding editor-in-chief of the Taiwan edition of GQ, designer of clothes and women's shoes, collector, host, maker of performance and installation art. And he often says he has no sense of mission or duty, doesn't like preaching at people or influencing them, and is happiest doing as little work as possible. Sisy Chen once wanted to reach some conclusion about his life but never said it out loud; his guess is that it would have been "take things as they come."

When Kangxi Lai Le formally went off the air in 2016, many read it as the marker of Taiwanese variety television's decline. But the mainland entertainment industry had been rising, and the Hong Kong and Taiwan industries falling, well before the show ended. The reasons are tangled: the mainland's advantages in capital, market size, and talent; the creative exhaustion of Hong Kong and Taiwan; different limits on advertising; shifts in the media itself. One factor people love to cite is the gulf in production budgets — shows like I Am a Singer and The Voice of China ran on about 10 million yuan an episode, while Kangxi Lai Le had roughly 100,000 yuan an episode (not counting Tsai's and Little S's fees), and that was already the richest talk-show budget in Taiwan.

So from 2014 on, Tsai moved his work mainly to the mainland, looking for something new: online variety shows including Qipa Shuo, 《真相吧！花花万物》 (The Truth! Flowers and Everything) and 《男子甜点俱乐部》 (Men's Dessert Club), plus his first film, 《“吃吃”的爱》 (Didi's Dreams).

Apart from Qipa Shuo, none of it did well. The Truth! Flowers and Everything (2018), Men's Dessert Club (2017) and Didi's Dreams (2017) scored 4.2, 5.6 and 5.3 on Douban. Didi's Dreams cost 250 million New Taiwan dollars (about 56 million yuan) and took only 185 million New Taiwan dollars (about 41 million yuan) at the box office — a failure with both audiences and critics.

Many longtime viewers say they met a different Kevin Tsai on Qipa Shuo. On Kangxi Lai Le he played the interviewer: ask questions, listen, reveal little. On Qipa Shuo he has to state a position, persuade people, use his influence. In the 2015 season he talked on air, rarely for him, about coming out, and broke down crying — which moved a great many viewers, who found him gentle and strong at once.

"Whenever someone in the business is thinking of coming out, they come and ask me first. Rationally, I usually talk them out of it. They haven't been through what I've been through, so I can't be sure they'd hold up the way I did when the hard part came. But from where I stand, alone, I badly want company. The more people come out, the harder it is for that 'closet' to exist at all. The one thing I can do is prove to mothers and fathers that we're not monsters, that we can live perfectly well in this world," he said.

For all his talk of having no mission and no duty, Tsai — the entertainment industry's designated reader — still passes his values along in his shows and books when the moment allows, and recommends the books he loves. Reading and writing have always been the two things he likes. He also keeps his distance from entertainment and thinks about it warily, hoping people will watch better films, read better books, and learn how to be alone.

In November 2018 he published his third how-to book, 《蔡康永的情商课》 (Kevin Tsai's EQ Class). "Searching out your EQ is the same as searching out yourself. The ability to be alone is the key ability that makes us unlike anyone else. Why do we praise a good book or a good film as something that 'opens the mind'? Because when our own minds are bare and can't generate energy, the rich mind hidden inside the book or the film keeps working on us, until we can imagine a life," he writes.

Of everything he does, Tsai says what he actually wants to do is write, and to write a good long novel. One of his plans is a long fantasy novel — a fantasy world tied closely to the real one. He has been at it for 12 years, has begun it five times, and still hasn't finished it.

"If there's one line on my tombstone, I don't need to be introduced as: this is a man who talked about EQ. I'd rather it said: this is a person who created a fantasy world. You're right that it's weakness — how do I put all this aside and go write that novel? Or do I write both? I don't think anyone can really do both. So maybe the next time you interview me, I'll be starting my fantasy novel for the eighth time," Tsai, 56, told QDaily.

Q = QDaily

Tsai = Kevin Tsai

Q: The EQ Class is your third how-to book. How do you see it in relation to the first two — what connects them, what separates them? Has your thinking changed? Because in a 2012 interview you said that even though Way With Words sold well, you were telling yourself not to write Way With Words 2 or 3 — that you wanted to know more and do other things.

Tsai: Right. With this EQ book, they told me it had been eight years since Way With Words, and I really was startled. I hadn't realized it had been that long. When I was young I badly did not want to become a writer of how-to books. Walking into a bookstore and seeing the bestseller list on the wall would make me angry — I thought these how-to books had taken the best spots in the store and pushed the serious literary writers I admired into the corners. Later I tried reading some serious literature myself, and when I found them confirming, over and over, things I already knew, I started to think: I don't actually need to keep being reminded of what I already know.

I've seen a lot of the films that win at Cannes or Venice, and they keep filming the ugliness of human nature and the emptiness of life. At seventeen or eighteen I was grateful for those films. Back then I thought: why has nobody told me these truths about life? Everyone was papering over the cracks, pretending life was interesting and full of joy. So watching those painful works was exciting — someone had opened my eyes, someone was on my side, someone was going to expose this hypocritical world.

Watching them now I think: all right, I know all this, so could you stop bothering me? Those works still suit people of seventeen or eighteen who are just starting to wrestle with life. But now I find myself thinking that if what you write can solve a small problem for someone, that's worth more than telling them "life has problems."

I don't think everyone who writes how-to books gets readers behind them. Plenty of people write things readers don't like. When I was writing Way With Words, I didn't know whether I was any good at it. When Way With Words was accepted, I was astonished. I wrote it in a very playful frame of mind — a lot of it is written in the tone of someone joking around. So when it was accepted, I thought: so there really are this many people troubled by talking. I honestly had no idea.

Four years after Way With Words came out, I wrote Way With Words 2. I thought: I could keep writing this forever. But I didn't want to. Talking is about building a relationship with other people, and what I care about more is building a relationship with myself. I've met a lot of clever people who are very good at relationships with others and not at all good at a relationship with themselves. So I thought: if I dare to write this book, it will test me far more than Way With Words did. When I wrote Way With Words I knew exactly what I was doing; I'd been doing it a long time. But facing yourself — even I am nervous. Could I write a good enough book at all?

I had to solve my own problems first, so that I could face myself with some confidence. Only then would I have the face to show anyone the book. So having finished it, I was relieved: it turns out there's a way through. Because as a child, along with not believing in how-to books, I didn't believe in this thing called EQ. How could it be that easy? I'd read all those literary works about the darkness of human nature and the cruelty of the world, and then you want to tell me one turn of your own mind can settle it? As a kid I would have been furious — I wanted to blow up the world, let the human race die out and stop bothering the animals, let them live in peace; I thought that would feel wonderful. But now you know we're not going to become the demon king and blow up the world. There's only one target you have to deal with, and it's yourself. So let's have a go at it. And then I found that this is what EQ is about — not what we mistakenly took it for, being smooth with people and wiping out your emotions. It's not that, and that made me happy. That's the EQ worth introducing.

Q: From what I've read, the thing you really want to do is write, and to write good long novels, one plan being a long fantasy novel. I'm curious how far that fantasy novel has got. Roughly what story is it? And why do you want to write it?

Tsai: It's always in progress. Each time I get 10,000 or 20,000 characters in, I think of a better opening and throw out what I have. That's happened five times now. I'm on the fifth. I really do like this opening, and I hope I can keep going from it.

What I want from a fantasy story is that it creates a world. Going into that world, we find more to look forward to, more surprises. The fantasy world has to be closely tied to our real world, not cut off from it, so that readers can happily feel it isn't far away. That's the direction now.

**Q:**When did you first start writing it?

Tsai: About 12 years ago. Along the way books like Way With Words and The EQ Class keep coming up, and I think, people need this one more urgently, so I write it first. Those books take time too, and so the other one gets held up.

Q: Are you willing to say yet what the story is?

Tsai: I'd have to be sure myself first (laughs). The opening keeps getting thrown out — I don't have the face to talk about it.

Q: Which suggests there might be a sixth try.

Tsai: Please don't say that. The fifth is very good (laughs).

Q: You recently mentioned the science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451 on Qipa Shuo. In it, the author imagines a future where books are not permitted — if books are found in your house, they're burned. At the end, everyone who refuses the book-burning policy takes one book into their own head, keeping its contents alive for humanity. I'm curious: if you had to memorize one book, which would you preserve?

Tsai: Probably this one of mine, The EQ Class.

Q: Really?

Tsai: Mm. I couldn't bear for that book to disappear. If you asked me for a favorite instead — Miyuki Miyabe, say — it would be hard to pick which of her novels. And I'm quite sure that if I were the living person carrying that book inside me, anyone listening would fall asleep after 20 minutes. Her books can't be carried by speech. So Miyuki Miyabe, or García Márquez — their books don't transmit well out loud.

Fahrenheit 451 mentions a man who is carrying Laozi's Tao Te Ching. I don't believe anyone could recite the Tao Te Ching and have people sit through it. A copy of the Three Hundred Tang Poems walking around the streets would be nice, but I don't want to be the one carrying the Tang poems. I think in a bleak end-time, EQ would matter enormously. Nobody could earn money from a prosperous world then, and there'd be no entertainment to watch, so in the end all you have to face is yourself.

Q: You've said writing is a process of "probing yourself," and that if a book you write happens to let its readers probe themselves in turn, then it was worth writing. Can I take that as the reason and the meaning of your writing?

Tsai: I think that way about making television as well. What a show gives off isn't its actual content; it's your attitude. If your show gives off an attitude that lets viewers feel that life can be lived like this — that you don't have to carry so many heavy labels around, that not everything has to follow the rules, has to be a "should" and a "therefore" — then the show gives people energy. It isn't what gets said in the show; it's what the air the show gives off makes you believe. A show without that quality is, to me, just a job. Only when there's that air do I feel it's my work.

So when Kangxi Lai Le or Qipa Shuo give off that air, I feel more strongly that they're my work. And I solidly believe they plant seeds in people, so that when trouble comes those seeds can put out a flower and carry them through. Growing up, we all leaned on some film or some book to do that for us, so I believe it happens.

Then there are the books I wrote self-indulgently — I used to show off a lot of verbal technique. One of my books is called 《再错也要谈恋爱》 (Fall in Love Even If It's Wrong). It takes every stage of a love affair and argues both sides, me debating myself. Anyone who's read it knows I came out of debating; I'll argue both sides of a thing with myself. Relatively speaking, it wouldn't matter at all if that book disappeared. Between Way With Words and this EQ Class, I'd rather The EQ Class were the one that stayed.

So, yes. In the end there's always one book where you really do care whether it left a seed in someone.

Q: You mentioned film, and we know film has shaped you a great deal. You once said about it: "What makes us happy is that entertainment has been handed down; what's a pity is that film is no longer great. Most films now are use-once-and-throw-away products — a circus." Can you say more about why you think film is no longer great? And what role should film play in society now?

Tsai: Think about it: the generation that grew up on Douyin — how could they feel there's anything precious about the moving image? It's there for the taking. You simply can't accept someone watching a film like The Godfather on a phone; it feels like an insult to The Godfather. How can The Godfather, or Chaplin's films, be watched on a phone? Lawrence of Arabia, a film you should watch on a screen the size of a house — how can that be watched on a phone? And then he tells you he's already seen it.

For the past two weeks I've been doing something quite interesting. Every day I watch three of the canonical films I've missed ever since my student days. Indian, Greek, Italian — watch, watch, watch. And after two of them each day, I have to watch a Hollywood film; only by the third do I come back to life (laughs). The first two wear me out. Sometimes I've already talked myself into keeping a book beside me, so that when it gets unbearably slow, I read. Then I look up — ah, it's still on the same scene — and go back to my book, determined to see it through. That's how I got through most of the Italian and Swedish ones.

I once argued a motion on Qipa Shuo: do you have to travel rough while you're young and broke? Can't you save the money and travel later? I said one thing then: going somewhere at 18 and going at 80 do not mean the same thing. Seeing the pyramids at 18 and seeing them at 80 are completely different. So seeing the great Italian films or Japanese films at 18 is a completely different thing from seeing them at 80. When I watch these films now, I know they were once great, but later generations have imitated them into the ground. I suspect that if I told my students to watch The Godfather now, they wouldn't find it all that remarkable either. They've seen a hundred other gangster films that copied The Godfather into the ground, without ever seeing The Godfather.

So film losing its greatness isn't film ceasing to be great; it's that people have seen so much more. The first time I saw Douyin, I still thought it was great fun. But when someone sets a scene from The Godfather to Douyin music and puts out 30 seconds of it, you understand: film has been forced to stop being great. And I've never minded that.

Q: So you don't take a sad or regretful view of it?

Tsai: No. Whenever someone laments to me that this is an age of fragmented reading, I think: reading a few fragments beats reading nothing. They say, you only read articles on your phone. I say, otherwise these people would go their whole lives without reading an article. Now they read on their phones — you should be glad for them, they're at least reading something. A lot of people talk nonsense, imagining that in the old days everyone was upright and human feeling was pure. Rubbish. In the old days huge numbers of people couldn't get a book, couldn't read a character, couldn't lay hands on a single printed page, had no chance at school. How can you call this the fragmented age? Was there ever a whole-reading age before it? I have never seen a society of ours that loved reading. I've never seen it.

Q: Will you make another film?

Tsai: People keep asking. The other day I said the most painful part of my last film was the promotion after it was finished. I really don't want that. Talking about EQ with you now is a pleasure because I'm still exploring. After I finished the book my mind opened right up — I'd opened a world, and I want to know more of it. But after I finished the film, the promotion afterwards horrified me. I'd never been through anything like it. I never had to finish Kangxi Lai Le and then go promote it; Kangxi Lai Le simply aired. I finished Qipa Shuo and there was no promotion either. How is it that I make something and then have to keep talking about it to people?

So I told a friend: if I shoot again, I want to make a film that needs no promotion.

Q: But in this industry that's basically impossible.

Tsai: The budget would have to be small enough that no promotion is needed, and then you can watch it or not, as you like. To do that you'd have to make a very rough film — rough enough that the budget is tiny, the cinema chains ignore you, and you still survive. I'd rather make that kind of film. I don't want to go the proper big-picture route again.

Q: On entertainment — the talk you gave this year at Zaojiu was very interesting. In your view, in the entertainment business of the future, stars will become "parts" in our lives, and entertainment will deliver a more self-absorbed, more sealed-off satisfaction and a virtual happiness. I'm curious what attitude you take toward the future of entertainment. To me it just hands people the technical means to feed and sink into their own narcissism — but people also have a public life, and a future where everyone is delighted on their own doesn't sound like a good thing.

Tsai: I said all that with a certain glee, honestly. By the time that era arrives I'll be gone, so I won't end up bought by a porn game with some star's face printed on it, letting you sleep with that star every night as you please, consuming him without end. I think that day is coming. Take a Hollywood star: why would he care whether people in Asia are fantasizing about him in bed? He's been paid his royalty; how you fantasize is your business. Even if a few Hollywood stars refuse, I think a few others will agree.

So that's the first thing: your idol will certainly become virtual. He has a physical self, but you may decide that your idol only needs to be 28. He himself goes on aging past 28, and I don't want to face that, so please, Hollywood, keep making his films with him at 28. In every film we watch, the actors we love — Tom Cruise, say — stay young forever, going on performing in their fullest years. Fine. Then it will inevitably evolve: he becomes the butler in your phone, the object of your pornographic fantasies, providing every kind of service.

On one hand I won't get to enjoy that; on the other, I won't have to endure the choice. Because if I had to, I might well say yes — sure, whatever (laughs) — so it's lucky I won't be tested. Anything I'm not around for, I don't care about, and I have no attitude toward it. It's simply something for the people who come after to deal with.

Q: I think it may well happen soon.

Tsai: It will happen in your lifetime, without question. So you'd better work out how many idols you're going to buy and keep in one phone (laughs).

Q: You're one of the few performers who has done variety television successfully in both the mainland and Taiwan. In your view, are there big differences between making variety shows in Taiwan and in the mainland? How does it feel?

Tsai: You know the TED platform. The three letters come from Technology, Entertainment, Design. Think how many years TED is ahead of us: at its founding it had already established that technology, entertainment and design belong together. The most concrete example is the phone in your pocket. It's design, it's technology, and it's entertainment.

So in that atmosphere, I think talking about "variety shows" narrows our field of vision too much. Douyin is a good example. It's entertainment produced by technology and design. Before it existed you had no way to describe it. You had no way to describe why we'd be captivated by 30 seconds of different people doing ridiculous things to the same piece of music, and then sink into it and be unable to climb out.

In Steven Spielberg's recent film Ready Player One, we watch a lot of people who are disappointed in their real lives take shelter in a virtual world. If that virtual world also pays out rewards you can use in the real one — as in the film, where money you earn inside it helps cover your expenses outside — then you stop caring what you achieve in the real world. Achievement in the virtual world is worth just as much. Your social standing there, the respect, the fame, are all real.

That's my view of variety shows, really. As long as experiments of sufficient scale keep happening in our lives, forms of entertainment we can't imagine will appear. And they are unprecedented — I don't think they even have regional borders. Douyin is popular in the West now too. Do you know where social platforms like Instagram will end up? They'll keep recombining video length with sound, with how you watch, with whether to bolt on a dating function.

My old books program failed precisely because I treated it as reading. I introduced reading inside the show instead of turning the act of reading into the show. That was my biggest mistake. Looking back, I don't think that books program had any reason to exist; all I did was introduce books on television. Someone making a serious reading program ought to turn the program itself into the experience of reading.

So on your question: I think the category of variety shows will simply vanish. You won't know whether you're playing a game or watching a show. You won't know whether you're watching drama or variety. That's the form of entertainment I believe is coming, and soon.

Q: On one hand you care about being present, about making things the public reacts to. On the other you feel time running short, and you want to clear space for what you truly want to do. You swing between the two, and you've said the reason is that you aren't brave enough, that you're a bit weak. Do you agree with that? Why?

Tsai: Completely correct. And I think everyone is like this. It's a good observation. For instance, if The EQ Class is well received again this time, there will have to be an EQ Class 2 or an EQ Class 3. But the reason is that I don't feel finished talking about it. When I like The EQ Class myself, I feel there's so much more worth saying. I don't want to stop either, because it took me so long to work this out and I can't bear to break off here. But it holds up my novel.

I don't actually want a tombstone — I'm only using it as an abstract example — but if there's one line on it, I don't need to be introduced as: this is a man who talked about EQ (laughs). It makes me sound too kindly, and I'm not that kindly. I'd rather it said: this is a person who created a fantasy world. So for me there's still a choice to be made. And yet, plainly, since The EQ Class came out, plenty of people have told me that at least one chapter, one idea in it helped them think something through.

You're right that it's weakness. How do I put all this aside and go write that novel? Or do I write both? I don't think anyone can really do both. So maybe the next time you interview me, I'll be starting my fantasy novel for the eighth time (laughs).

Cover image: a still from the film Ready Player One; the extended cover image comes from Kevin Tsai's Weibo.