Zhang Dachun Launches *Seeing the Word as It Came* (《见字如来》): Half Character Study, Half Life Story

"I always thought I was fearless, that my ways were wild, that nothing could touch me."

On the afternoon of January 13, Seeing the Word as It Came (《见字如来》) had its launch event in Beijing, where the author, Zhang Dachun, and the writer Mo Yan talked about the new book for an hour.

"Tells a good story, knows how to perform one, skilled with a brush, fond of writing verse" — that is the line most often used to introduce Zhang Dachun. Zhang is a Taiwanese writer, born in 1957 in a military dependents' village in Taipei, with family roots in Jinan, Shandong. His work refuses to sit in one category, or even one form: he has written fiction, screenplays, and essays.

His best-known novels include Apartment Tour Guide (《公寓导游》), Sixi Worries About the Nation (《四喜忧国》), and The City-State Gang (《城邦暴力团》). His early work is regarded as a landmark of Taiwan's avant-garde literature; he later taught at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan and shaped a younger generation of Taiwanese writers, Luo Yijun among them. He has also worked as a radio storyteller, performing Water Margin, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, and The Seven Heroes and Five Gallants. He is a calligrapher besides, with many exhibitions across the mainland, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, and it was through calligraphy and literature that he came to know writers such as A Cheng and Mo Yan.

Mo Yan is a major figure in contemporary Chinese literature, with family roots in Gaomi, Shandong. His best-known novels include Red Sorghum, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, and Sandalwood Death. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012.

After the Nobel, Mo Yan went quiet for five years; when he published again in 2017, he had turned to short stories, poetry, and scripts. His recent opera libretto Sorghum Wine (《高粱酒》) ran in the fifth issue of People's Literature in 2018. In an afterword on adapting the piece, he wrote: "To get the lyrics right, over Chinese New Year I studied regulated verse with the Taiwanese writer Zhang Dachun, forgot to eat or sleep for a week, and came away with a little insight."

Seeing the Word as It Came collects the stories behind 46 Chinese characters, as Zhang Dachun tells them.

In 2011, an editor at the international Chinese edition of Reader's Digest asked Zhang for a column. Wanting to "do some small bit for the teaching of Chinese characters," he took over "Telling Words Apart," the column the writer Liang Shiqiu had once run in the same magazine.

Each installment of "Telling Words Apart," Zhang explained, ran ten questions, and readers picked the right answer out of four. Three right or fewer was rated "poor"; five or six was "passable"; seven or eight, "good" or "fine"; nine or more, "excellent."

But for as long as he could remember, Zhang said, he had only ever come out "passable" or "poor" on those questions — never "fine." Years later, when Reader's Digest came to him, he wanted to bring Liang Shiqiu's column back, but not as questions and answers alone. He asked the editor for two extra pages so he could also explain where each character came from. He wanted readers to "know not only that it is so, but why it is so."

When it came time to make a book of it, Zhang's wife told him: "If you're serious about publishing this, you have to put in the stories from your own life." So he added to the Reader's Digest columns, "turning each piece into two halves — one half is me, the other half is the character." The "as it came" in the title, then, points to Zhang's own past. How you feel about a character, he believes, shifts with what you have lived through.

It was only while writing the book, Zhang said, that he realized he is in fact a man of very little courage — someone easily frightened, easily startled.

"I always thought I was fearless, that my ways were wild, that nothing could touch me. But once this book was out and I looked back at it, having to face those fragments of my life whether I meant to or not, I found I wasn't the person I imagined, or the person I usually show. He's inside the characters."

During the conversation, Mo Yan pulled out characters Zhang had already explained in the book — yang (sheep), jiu (wine), zai (disaster) — and put questions to him on the spot, with much of the air of two scholars sparring over their craft. Afterward, in a group interview with reporters, Mo Yan was still marveling: "Only today did I learn how the character gui is properly pronounced."

Excerpts From the Audience Questions and the Press Interview

Q: Could each of you describe the other in a single character, and say why?

Mo Yan: Cool.

Q: Any reason?

Mo Yan: Don't you think he's cool? (Laughs)

Zhang Dachun: Geng — as in gengyun, to till the soil. Because ever since I've known him, he has called himself a farmer. Politically his status was that of a soldier, but he has always been in a state of cultivating something. In the Gaomi dialect of Shandong it's pronounced jing, first tone. The more we've seen of each other these past few years, the more I've come to feel he is a professional writer — though "professional" doesn't quite cover it either.

Can you picture a life bound that closely to the land? Everything that passes between him and the land, every thing and every relation, is an exchange. It's the same between him and the written word. I'll leave it there.

Mo Yan: "Cool" was a joke. Let's say bo — as in boxue, erudite. You could feel it just now while you were listening, couldn't you? I came today meaning to trip him up, and I couldn't catch him out.

Q: Mr. Zhang, which readers do you most hope will find this book? And what are your writing habits, both of you?

Zhang Dachun: I hope the people who read this book have an interest in Chinese characters that comes from themselves — not people studying for an exam. I'd also like it to reach readers who enjoy brain-teasers, the sort who want to test themselves and are curious about the limits of what they know.

I usually get up at 6:30 and write until two in the afternoon — these days, until one. But for the past six months or so my writing has taken a different form. I've started using a brush, writing in small running script and small regular script, composing in classical Chinese. Even the text messages I send him — Mo Yan — I write out by hand first, then photograph and send. When I was working on the fourth volume of Li Bai of the Great Tang (《大唐李白》), for instance, I'd write it in classical Chinese first, then find time later to turn it into vernacular Chinese and add to it, and that's the part you end up reading. For me this is a daily routine.

Mo Yan: I keep no strict hours. I write when I feel like it and don't when I don't. Any time will do — I wrote last night but not yesterday afternoon, wrote all yesterday morning, and haven't written today.

Q: A friend of mine thinks some of the character explanations in your book aren't rigorous — that they're a novelist's flourishes. He thinks explaining characters is one thing and writing fiction is another, and that you may have run the two together without meaning to.

Zhang Dachun: I did mean to, actually. It's true that when I write fiction I let my imagination stretch a little. When I write essays I can't help measuring them against fiction either. But on the matter of the characters themselves, I can't invent where a character came from. It's a good thing your friend couldn't stomach it, because he must hold some firm, stubborn belief about how characters should be explained, and I respect that. Still, unless he can produce counter-evidence and show that what I wrote is invented —

Unfortunately this book is not a work of scholarship; it isn't packed with footnotes saying where each line comes from. So all I can say is sorry: if he's expecting a paper in philology, that isn't going to happen. But if he takes me for a novelist, a man in the habit of lying, then he probably doesn't understand why I would write about characters at all.

Q: Is your state of mind any different when you write about characters and when you write fiction?

Zhang Dachun: They're alike, if anything. Writing fiction, we often need something to go on. When I wrote Li Bai of the Great Tang, for example — the dialogue especially, and especially the words used in that dialogue — I had to check every single phrase: did it exist in Li Bai's time, roughly the years 701 to 762? If a word hadn't appeared yet, I wouldn't use it.

Take what Mo Yan said just now, that I had flattered him: the word taiju. Between the Kaiyuan and Tianbao eras, nobody would have taken those two characters for a compliment, or for speaking well of someone. It meant this: I borrow money from you, and when I pay you back I give you a little extra. Today we call that interest; in the Tang it was called taiju. So if I'm handling a scene about borrowing money in the novel, I can't have anyone talk about interest — it has to be taiju. Is that kind of verification pure invention? It isn't. Even though a novel is plainly a made-up thing, you still owe it whatever checking you're able to do. That's roughly the likeness I mean.

Q: I have two questions. I once heard Mr. Zhang say on a program that when he was learning calligraphy, a member of his family — a very well-known calligrapher — didn't have him copy whole texts, but picked out certain characters, on the idea that getting those right would do twice the work for half the effort. I'd like to ask about that secret.

Second: Yang Jiang wrote about the "ghost wall" — walking in circles as though an invisible wall were in the way — in one of her books, and your Writing at Ease (《文章自在》) tells a similar story. Mr. Mo also had a strange encounter as a boy. Could you each share more stories like this?

Mo Yan: I have written a ghost-wall story, but I've never run into one myself (laughs). Let me tell you about my aunt instead. She was a village doctor, often out treating people late at night. One year she went to deliver a baby in a village more than ten li from ours, and on the way back, the moment she left that village, everything in front of her went black — she couldn't see her own hand. The darkness around her felt like a wall, impossible to push through and yet springy. She pushed her bicycle forward and felt the dark ahead bounce her and the bicycle back. So she sat down and prayed under her breath: Heaven, Earth, my family has practiced medicine for generations, we have always been decent people, we have never done a wicked thing — must you punish me like this? After a few muttered words she opened her eyes and saw a single star flickering overhead. She walked on slowly, and heard my great-uncle standing on the river dike, calling her name. This really happened to her, and I believe she wasn't lying. Of course you can also explain it scientifically: your sight or your nerves fail for a moment, everything around you goes dark, you rest a while, your body recovers, and you can see again. It has never happened to me. Let's just take it as a story.

Zhang Dachun: My own story is in the book. It came out of a ghost wall, though perhaps not the same kind. When I was about three or four, my father and some friends would play one long stretch of mahjong every New Year — two days sometimes, or one day, and shorter as they got older. One year I remember it running especially long, maybe from the second day of the new year straight through to the fifth. These uncles smoked and dozed beside the table, asleep in rattan chairs. I gathered the empty cigarette boxes into a fruit basket as if they were presents for me, and carried them along with an older girl from the kindergarten nearby, two years older than me, who liked to frighten me. We were walking home at dusk on a stretch of road less than 50 meters long, and she told me that ghosts hide inside bricks. There were brick walls on both sides, so you can imagine — I screamed. I said before that I'm not brave, and I'd better stop, because I'll scare myself again. Anyway, I ran and screamed the whole way, and the whole way I kept hearing that girl say, "Ghosts come out of the bricks." She probably never said it twice; I heard it anyway. It was terrifying.

On the matter of copying model texts: from elementary school through university I always had calligraphy classes. At university especially — I had started out on Liu Gongquan's style, with no real choice about it, since that was simply what the teacher taught, and I never liked plump, fleshy characters, so I studied Liu from a young age. Then, unexpectedly, my university calligraphy teacher, Chen Weide, looked at my hard-tip handwriting and told me I was suited to Chu Suiliang. So I began on Chu, copying his model text who knows how many times. From my thirties on I wrote calligraphy only now and then, whenever the mood took me with a brush in hand — not the way I later did it, seriously, every day, up to 15 hours at a stretch. But in that period my uncle by marriage, Ouyang Zhongshi, gave me guidance, and it wasn't the ordinary kind of copying, because I had already gone through the stage of writing every character from the first to the last, without skipping one. Later he asked whether I'd ever copied the Ouyang style. Never, I said; I'd only done Liu. After that I started learning running script, writing one thing today and another tomorrow, even taking up Wang Duo, Zhao Mengfu, and Mi Fu with next to no grounding — writing however I pleased, really. Then my uncle told me to work on the Ouyang style, but not from start to finish: he'd paste up two characters from one page for me, two more from another. For about a year, those few characters were all I wrote.

Bit by bit I came to see what he was doing. He was training me to be fluent in the turns between one stroke and the next. Looking back, it wasn't about whether the strokes looked good or resembled the model, but about the rhythm of how a stroke turns. I can't say much more, because past a certain point it starts to sound mystical. Even now I still take out that model text from time to time — Ouyang Xun's Stele for Huangfu Dan (《皇甫诞碑》). It isn't a famous one, but anyone who writes in the Ouyang style knows it. There are a few characters in it I wrote over and over, which was frankly dull work, and to this day I still can't turn what I took from it into a paper or an essay that says it plainly. But I know it has to do with the tangled, linked relations between one stroke and the next, and with how we turn the brush in our hand. Thank you.

Q: I told a friend in Taiwan I was coming to meet you, and he said, "Oh, you're going to see Big-Head Chun?" So people in Taiwan call you that. You must be great fun. My question: what do you take delight to be, and what sort of delight has carried you this far, in life and in learning?

Zhang Dachun: "Big-Head Chun" was the title of one of my books and also its invented author — I wrote a whole set under that name. The first was The Weekly Diary of Young Big-Head Chun (《少年大头春的生活周记》), the second My Sister (《我妹妹》), the third Wild Child (《野孩子》). They weren't purely fun things. The Weekly Diary of Young Big-Head Chun was me imitating a child writing a weekly diary — schools had a fixed form for handing those in, and I copied the form. I never expected it to become the one bestseller of my life, one I'm sure can never be repeated: it sold more than 200,000 copies in Taiwan at the time, which, for a market that size, was quite something. My editor wanted a second, and then even a third, so by the third I had no choice but to execute my male lead. Even so, those three characters, "Big-Head Chun," still make people smile.

As for what's called delight: China's scholar-official class — men who'd read a bit, perhaps held some post, had a few things to feel strongly about, and could write — often couldn't resist spending the second half of their lives writing about wind, flowers, snow, and the moon, without really expecting their words to outlast them. Most of that writing prized some refined pleasure taken in living, and it mostly came out of the writing itself. Sometimes it meant appreciating poetry, sometimes writing a joking essay — but the essay would still seem to carry the larger moods and feelings of a life, and even ideas about the world. In short, this character qu kept swelling within that class, and beyond a man's private aspirations it came to carry what the class prized most: the singularity of the writing. Qu, delight, often stood for that singularity.

I'm not so grand. I've never held office, and I have no claim at all to that so-called scholar-official class. But for me, finding in each day something even slightly unlike the day before, or unlike many days before — that, I think, is roughly what delight means. Isn't there a saying: "Each day learn what you did not know; each month do not forget what you can do"? I often think that if "each day learn what you did not know" could become "each day live through what you did not know," that would be, at least at this stage of my life, the rarest and happiest delight I know. Thank you.

The cover image and the photographs in this article are from the launch event for Seeing the Word as It Came, provided by Imaginist.