The Anonymous Writing Contest That Judged “the Work, Not the Writer” Has Ended. What Does It Tell Us About Literature?

Writers, judges, readers and publishers alike may all have something to think about after this anonymous writing contest.

On the afternoon of December 15, the first “Anonymous Writers Project” revealed the real names of all its anonymous entrants in Beijing and announced the results. Zheng Zhi, a 31-year-old writer, won with his short story Spirit Sickness (《仙症》), taking a prize of 60,000 yuan.

Many people who had followed the contest were happily surprised. For one thing, next to entrants such as Yan Lianke, Luo Yijun, Lu Nei and Shuang Xuetao, the winner was barely known — it felt like finding a new star. For another, once the names came out, many readers found they had guessed wrong: writers they thought they knew well had turned in work that looked nothing like their usual style. Ponytail (《卜马尾》) and Sea Fog (《海雾》), for instance, read as though written by women; their authors turned out to be the male writers Ma Boyong and Ban Yu (who posts on Weibo as @Tankman Vegeta). Shuang Xuetao — whom Su Tong jokingly called the winner of the contest's “Best Makeup Award” — wrote The Martial Artist (《武术家》), a story very different from his earlier work.

The “Anonymous Writers Project” was organized jointly by the literary journal Li (《鲤》), which is published in book form, the WeChat official account “Tencent Dajia,” and the publisher Imaginist. It began in May 2018 and drew 35 entries. Every entrant had to stay anonymous, and so did the first-round judges: the critic Yang Qingxiang, the writers Xiaobai and Zhang Jiawei, the mainland literary editor Zouzou and the Taiwanese literary editor Wang Congwei. They picked the 11 stories on the preliminary shortlist. Three well-known writers — Ge Fei, Su Tong and Bi Feiyu — judged the final round, choosing the six stories on the final shortlist and the winner, Spirit Sickness.

Spirit Sickness is told in the first person and set in northeastern China. It follows the narrator's uncle by marriage, Wang Zhantuan, a man with a mental illness, and the rest of the extended family. The judges' citation read: “An archive of the north. In cool, unflinching prose charged with a strong sense of presence, it restores a group portrait of a deranged individual and his family. Magic and reality coexist, and the inner tension never lets up. In this wasteland of love, people search — with the will to survive against all odds — for the spark of love and the meaning of life.”

Su Tong said: “This story is especially interesting. In a lot of our fiction the protagonist is a madman, mentally ill, but you rarely see anyone write that person so that he really reads like someone with a psychiatric condition. Of all the Chinese writers I've read who write about the mentally ill, the protagonist of Spirit Sickness is — I won't say a hundred percent perfect, but I'd score him above 95. It's written really well. I suspect he must have a relative close to him who is like that. I don't think I could have written it.”

At a group interview with reporters, Zheng Zhi recalled writing the story. “The writing itself took three days and three nights without sleep, but I can't say how long the story had been turning over in my head before that. Teacher Su Tong guessed exactly right — Wang Zhantuan really is based on a relative of mine. When I was very young, I witnessed this person's death. I thought about it a lot at the time, but I wasn't clear what it was about. So writing this for the contest felt like finally understanding, today, what it was I'd been thinking about back then.”

“Part of Spirit Sickness also comes from my own life. The boy narrator, ‘I,' stutters, and because of the stutter he doesn't speak. I didn't stutter, but for a stretch of my adolescence, for reasons I didn't understand, a feeling of suppression came over me, and for three months to half a year I didn't say a single word to anyone. Looking back it seems like performance art, but at the time I truly couldn't understand why — some inexplicable emotions I shouldn't have had to carry at that age simply came looking for me. Not until the day I really came to understand reading and writing did I learn what it was that had come for me, and that there was a reason for all of it.”

Zheng Zhi was born and raised in Shenyang, Liaoning Province. He took his bachelor's degree at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Hong Kong Baptist University, then worked in Hong Kong and Taiwan before moving to Beijing two years ago. At 20 he published his first novel, Adrift (《浮》). Originally called Aren't We Boring? (《我们是不是很无聊》), it was serialized online before Writers Publishing House brought it out. Five more books followed, among them Swallowed Whole (《生吞》), I'll Wait for You at the End of Time (《我在时间尽头等你》) and Since Then, I've Learned to Hide My Sorrow (《从此学会隐藏悲伤》). He had a small following, but never drew much public attention. Today, besides working as a screenwriter, he is a regular contributor to ONE, the literary app edited and produced by the writer Han Han.

He has been away from Shenyang for more than ten years, but Zheng Zhi feels the change of place has had no effect on his writing — he has always written about his hometown. “What I write today still hasn't left Shenyang. For a lot of writers, everything is decided in childhood. I never left Shenyang once as a child, and that influence is in my bones. I'm honestly still at a raw stage of writing — I haven't learned much of the craft yet, so I'm drawing down my own life experience. That's why I really feel that if I left Shenyang behind, I probably wouldn't be able to write anymore,” he said.

After winning, Zheng Zhi seemed a little emotional on stage. “I never had the chance to step into serious-literature circles before, never published in a well-known, orthodox domestic journal — this is more or less my first time. I have to be self-critical here: I love literature and set out to be a serious literary writer, but my years in Hong Kong were just too poor. To make money, I wrote some bewildering things. From the year before last to last year I wrote four film screenplays and sold them to capitalists, and life got a little better. When Teacher Yueran invited me to enter the contest I felt honored, and I never expected it would end like this. Just as I wanted to come back to serious literature and work alongside everyone else, it gave me this huge embrace.”

One thing needs saying. “There may be elements of popular literature inside serious literature, and elements of serious literature inside popular literature. But there's one rule: serious literature never takes a commercial purpose as its purpose. That's the most basic thing. And no one puts the commercial failure of serious literature down to a failure of literature. It's completely normal for a good writer to sell badly. For popular literature, royalties are almost the only measure,” Bi Feiyu said.

Most literary prizes simply announce a winner. The “Anonymous Writers Project” wanted to “honor anonymity with transparency,” so the organizers livestreamed part of the three final judges' deliberations from the ceremony. Readers could hear what the judges thought was good and bad about each story, and see their standards and tastes directly. Because the entries were anonymous, the judges spoke very bluntly, with little held back. In the end that made the contest feel more open, more just and fairer than many literary prizes.

Viewers watched the three judges argue, for example, over How We Got Here (《我们是怎么走到这一步的》), by the writer Duyan (real name Ye Yang). The story examines the shape and the difficulties of a new-generation couple's marriage, and it made the final three, alongside Spirit Sickness and Yan Lianke's The Believer (《信徒》).

Su Tong said the language of How We Got Here was almost devoid of basic rhetoric and of thought, that it read like bureaucratic prose — the language of an official report used to write a genuinely interesting story. “However I read it, it felt like a wordy Carver, with no flavor. Such an interesting subject, and in the end it didn't quite get there. I think that's a problem of narrative.”

Bi Feiyu agreed the language had problems, but not the narrative: this was a strategy the writer had chosen on purpose. “It's the work most deeply embedded in life as it is lived now. The people in it are strikingly detached — they can do without any emotion, any values, any goal in life, even desire. Life itself isn't that coarse, and they've lived it so coarsely. Life itself could be very good prose, and they've turned it into an official document. I think her narrative strategy matches the whole movement of the story.”

Ge Fei also felt that although the prose was rough, the narrative carried the author's own thinking and depth. “Her work reminds me of Gide's Strait Is the Gate (《窄门》). Why can't the marriage last? Why is it a dead loop? Why does this woman insist the man has to leave her? Where does this tragic quality come from?”

In the end the two of them talked Su Tong round. “I really can't stand bureaucratic language — I refuse to read prose this coarse and bloated. But after your explanations this story keeps sounding more sophisticated, and I think it holds up. Especially at the end: the pity that arrives once a loveless marriage has been made, that sublimated warmth and love between people — that's very sophisticated. So now I believe the story works, and I'm entirely willing to accept it as the third pick. If the prose isn't good, so be it. There are plenty of stories with bad prose.”

The three judges also said plainly what they judged by.

One reason Spirit Sickness won, for instance, is that it added a new kind of character to Chinese literature — Wang Zhantuan, the mentally ill man. “A character like this is very rare, or has been overlooked by so many writers for so long,” Su Tong said. “We use a lot of standards when we judge, and you could call them subjective, even brutal, but one of them basically never fails: we want a story to contribute something new.”

Ge Fei said: “I put more weight on work that is challenging, that in some sense produces an effect of defamiliarization, and that pushes us to reflect on our own experience.” On those grounds he did not much like Ponytail: he found its narrative method too old-fashioned, and not challenging.

Bi Feiyu had two standards. First, when works were close in quality he would choose the younger writer without hesitating; he would rather support the young. Second, he leaned toward work that wanted to reveal, sum up and name new forms of life. So in the final vote, Ge Fei and Su Tong both voted for Spirit Sickness, and he voted for How We Got Here.

“It's not that the work has no flaws, and I knew how the vote would come out, but my vote was always going that way. It states a position: someone is applauding her. The way that man and woman relate emotionally in How We Got Here is unimaginable to my generation. She put it on the page. That gives me reason to think she has contributed something to Chinese literature, offered a new element — either a change in how it is expressed, or a change in what is expressed,” Bi Feiyu told QDaily.

Beyond the openness of the judging, the anonymous entry format itself carries a reflection on literature that is worth noting.

“I think our era loves celebrities more than any era before it — loves names everyone already knows. Even our literary magazine, which hardly anyone reads, invites famous names to write for it. If Haruki Murakami wrote a short paragraph, we would certainly run it, however bad it was. That's how this era works. From that angle, I wanted to decide with friends to run a contest like this: hide every name, so that we see only the text itself, and no name decides the value of a work,” said Zhang Yueran, a writer and the editor-in-chief of Li, explaining what the contest was for.

The writer Zhi An thinks everyone has a “snobbish eye,” and that anonymity can take it away. A friend, an acquaintance, someone you admire — anonymity can more or less rule those factors out.

Ge Fei and Su Tong, who have sat on the panels of many literary prizes, also told QDaily that anonymity is valuable: a judge can't be swayed, to any degree, by the fact that a shortlisted writer is someone he knows, and every entry gets the same treatment. It also lets judges face the work objectively and stay fair. “It's the same principle as covering the name on an exam paper. I think it's a very good design,” Ge Fei said.

But Liang Wendao and Zhang Yueran have both said the format has flaws too. It stresses one face of literature, they feel, and hides the chance to discuss other things — the author's intent, the background of the times.

Even anonymous, not every writer let go. In an interview with Li, the judge Xiaobai said he was disappointed by most of the entries. Anonymity, he felt, had not really given the work a sense of freedom. Even some pieces with practiced prose wavered inside, lacking the firmness a narrative needs.

Interestingly, Bi Feiyu and Ge Fei gave up entirely on guessing who had written what, sure they would get it wrong. Su Tong thought every game requires guessing. Sure enough, apart from one writer whose style was too obvious to miss, he guessed wrong on all the rest.

On the relationship between a writer's name and a writer's work, it isn't only writers and judges who have something to think about — publishers do, and so do ordinary readers like us. The semi-anonymous Elena Ferrante wrote the Neapolitan Novels, loved around the world. But in real life the more common story may be the one about J.K. Rowling that Zhang Yueran tells in her foreword to Li: Anonymous Writers (《鲤·匿名作家》).

“In 2011, J.K. Rowling sent her newly written detective novel The Cuckoo's Calling to two publishers under the name Robert Galbraith, and got two rejection letters back. In one of them the editor kindly suggested Rowling might first take a writing course, or at least look at books about publishing such as The Writer's Handbook and Writers' & Artists' Yearbook. The Cuckoo's Calling was published under the name Robert Galbraith in the end, selling 500 copies and ranking outside the top 5,000 on Amazon UK.”

“Rowling is said to have changed her name in the hope of getting feedback that came purely from the novel itself; behind a male name like Robert Galbraith, we might guess, she was trying to shed the constraints and prejudice that come with being a woman writer. The attempt failed. After a few lonely months, ‘Robert Galbraith' was revealed to be a new mask of Rowling's. Sales of The Cuckoo's Calling jumped 507,000%. The rejection letters, made public afterward, made the whole thing look like a game that had played a trick on ‘snobbish' publishers and ‘blind' readers,” Zhang Yueran wrote.

More From Our Conversation With Ge Fei, Su Tong and Bi Feiyu

QDaily: In a way, masked established writers and anonymous newcomers also stand for a generational gap among Chinese writers. From your limited reading of younger writers' work, what do you observe or think about how the younger generation writes, compared with your own?

Ge Fei: I've paid close attention to younger writers these past few years, mainly because I don't believe that in a country this big, no good writers can come out of the post-80s, post-90s or even post-00s generations. Many people say literature has been broken off, or that because marketization has sped up… people may hold all sorts of misunderstandings or biases about this. But going by the work I've seen, I think it already contains something very good, qualities completely different from my generation's. That matters a great deal.

I'm not saying that caring about young people means I really care for them and help them grow — I'm not that good a person, and I don't have the standing. What I mean is that I want to know what these people are doing. What does the world look like through their eyes? Does that particular way of seeing mean something to me? I'm too familiar with how the people around me, people my own age, see the world — liberal, conservative, so-called nationalist, everyone with his own background. But how do young people see it, how do they describe the world we live in? That can give a writer an especially important chance to look at himself again.

When today's young writers make their debut, the training they've had in language, in form, in style is far, far better than my generation's, and their eye is sharp.

They have flaws too. The pressure they face from social discourse is probably much greater than what we faced. In my era, social discourse was very uniform. The 1970s and 1980s were extremely uniform — you knew exactly what it was. It was relatively easy then to hold your footing, to know what you wanted to create, to root yourself in, to attend to. Today one person says this, another says that, forming layer upon layer of discourse wrapped around you, working on you every day.

So when I read young people's work, the flaws I find are these: first, they are influenced too much by social discourse; second, they lack a philosophical, cool-headed analysis of that discourse. Mo Yan's work, for instance, has a very clear relationship to the world. Whether you like it or not, he is clear. What makes him write, as a writer, is clear.

Today, in the middle of this change, so heavily influenced by this discourse, different works show different transformations. And there's something very important in that: first, we need to study the social and cultural discourse around us. If you don't study it, it influences you without your noticing, and you'll think it's your own view. In fact your view was dictated by someone else from the start. That pressure is far greater for young people than it was for us. I know it's hard, but for a writer it's very important.

Su Tong: Actually every generation resembles the others in some ways — none of them wants to repeat its predecessors, and all of them want to break through the walls or fences their predecessors built. Breaking through is instinctive. Of course they don't care whether the tradition, the fence — to put it simply — is good or bad; breaking through is just their instinct. What they try to write is usually unlike what came before, the same as what we did when we were young.

But there's a problem. However you classify our writing, the words, the Chinese language, it's still just that one pile. The directions of creation you can describe come down to realism, romanticism, postmodernism, terms like these. The stage isn't as big as young people imagine. The stage of literature has an invisible edge, and that edge is set by language, by tradition, or by the form of fiction itself. So “breaking through” is bound to be very, very hard work.

Sometimes when I look at young writers — in this Anonymous Writers Project, for instance — I see the same tendency. With a lot of young writers, even without knowing their names, one look tells me they write differently from us. That's good. But at the same time you find a shortcoming: they aren't like us, but they are very like one another. I can't say which piece is like which; overall it's the way the prose is put together, the whole feeling you have when you finish. For instance, they're very fond of what you might call implanting a crystal — putting a small, glittering thing inside the story. Science-fiction elements, future elements, code elements — a lot of people are doing this, in a lot of stories.

The first story like that I read struck me as fresh and new, but when I saw a second and a third doing the same thing, I ran into this problem: how do you tell them apart?

QDaily: Why does this resemblance happen?

Su Tong: I don't know. Maybe it's because the intellectualization, the future feel, the science-fiction elements in their fiction are what this generation is collectively concerned with. Because they share that concern, I keep finding that same glittering implanted crystal in story after story — several people happen to have the same one.

QDaily: The “Anonymous Writers Project” is also a reflection on China's literary ecosystem and its rules today. Beyond that, is there anything about them you're very unhappy with, or think is a serious problem? For instance, I've heard people say that in China a pure-literature writer who wants to become known largely has to depend on official journals and the official prize system.

Ge Fei: I don't see it that way. Looking at the state of writing in China as a whole today, and at young people's work in particular, I think it's pretty good. Whether or not they've been given that kind of important recognition — many people may feel that process isn't very fair or objective. But on the work itself, I've read these pieces, and I personally still find them instructive and inspiring.

So I don't feel the basic state of our literary creation is bad today. I think it's quite good. They have a great deal of room. One of the better things about China's social conditions today is that a very large space has formed among different ideas, concepts and discourses. The point isn't on this side or that side, but in the clash and the dialogue between them. A space has formed among all these different actors. And within it, if you compare with literary creation abroad, you'll find that space is in fact very large. I set a lot of store by that.

Su Tong: I don't know about rules, because every institution has its own. Some have unwritten rules, but there are also good rules. A good rule is always about justice and fairness. Any rule with hidden elements that work against fairness and justice is a bad one. The premise of “anonymity” is itself very good — you don't know who someone is. That's a pretty good rule.

There are so many media outlets and platforms now that the path isn't a single one anymore, where you had to publish in one particular journal. As you know, a lot of authors go straight to books. So compared with the environment when we were literary youths — how should I put it?

Let me take it apart. On one hand, back then we couldn't have imagined a young author publishing a book this easily. You had to struggle five or eight years before a book might come out. Ask Ge Fei, or Mo Yan for that matter, and both of them remember vividly how hard it was to get a first book published; now it has become that easy. Of course, the social environment and the ideology behind it are quite different now. They are two eras.

So you can't say now is better than before, and you can't say it's worse.

QDaily: Compared with the past, what state do you think literature is in, in this era and this society? And what role should it play?

Bi Feiyu: It's in decline — more and more marginal, less and less important. But in exactly this larger context, I think it's the best opportunity for people who truly love literature. What everyone else has given up, we get to play with properly, to tend properly. That's a good thing.

The key point is that the profit margin in literature is too small. It's like people who spend a whole life as bakers. Bread or cars — which has the higher margin? Cars, obviously. So why, at 70, is a baker still willing to pass the craft of breadmaking on to his son? Because he loves it.

Su Tong: There's no going back to the past. In the 1980s, literature's power to lead society, its influence on society, was enormous. Today literature has returned to the place of literature. Take so-called serious literature: readers shouldn't expect it to have a hundred million readers. Some popular fiction will always be popular; it'll have its own readers. In this era literature has already split apart. Its enormous influence over society and the public is gone. I think that's completely normal.

But literature doesn't die. I've never believed literature would die. Because the need is always there, and that need is what literature lives by, and what gives you confidence too. People will always need literature.

Extended cover image: Zheng Zhi, courtesy of Imaginist. Cover image: a still from the film Anonymous (《匿名者》), via Douban.