Yan Lianke: We Live in a World Full of Lies — a Writer Has to Understand at Least That Much

For a writer, the freest moment is the moment there are no boundaries in your head.

In May 2014, Yan Lianke won the Franz Kafka Prize, the first Chinese writer to do so. He didn't know who had nominated him, or which of his books the jury had read. Asked about it by reporters, he called his own shortlisting "baffling".

"I just happened to be a bit lucky," Yan Lianke told QDaily when the Kafka Prize came up.

"Over in the West, a controversy, or a book that didn't get published — those things get used as a hook to sell books. But most of the discussion is still about the novel itself: why it's written this way, why it's written that way. The media says things that jump out at you; readers are still looking at something else."

By the time he won the Kafka Prize, Yan Lianke had been writing for nearly forty years. He was born in 1958 in Song County, Henan, which is still a designated poor county today. In his essay collection Three Brothers, he remembers the childhood and adolescence he spent there: "What I remember most sharply about the 1970s is not the revolution, but hunger and endless labor."

Around 1975, Yan Lianke first got the idea of writing. At his eldest sister's bedside he found Zhang Kangkang's novel The Dividing Line (《分界线》). The back cover said Zhang Kangkang was a sent-down youth who had gone from Hangzhou to the Great Northern Wilderness, and that writing this novel was what got her out of the Great Northern Wilderness and kept her in Harbin. That was how Yan Lianke learned you could write your way into a city job. He told QDaily this was the only reason he started writing: "My original purpose was that simple — I just didn't want to stay in the countryside. Like Julien in The Red and the Black, I only wanted to go to Paris, wanted to get into the city, didn't want to be stuck in the outskirts. I simply wanted a job. Then I saw that Zhang Kangkang had written this thing and been transferred to the city, and that's how it began.

"And in fact writing really did change the whole course of my life. So I say that no writer in the world has helped me as much as Zhang Kangkang. She shaped my entire life," he added.

In 1995 and 1997 he published The Golden Cave (《黄金洞》) and The Years, Months, Days, the two novellas that won him the first and second Lu Xun Literary Prizes. Lenin's Kisses, published in 2004, was read by many critics as a classic of "fantastical realism." Dream of Ding Village came out in 2005 and was later adapted into the film Love for Life, starring Zhang Ziyi and Aaron Kwok. In 2012 he was shortlisted for France's Prix Femina étranger. From 2013 on, he was shortlisted three times for the Man Booker International Prize. At 20, Yan Lianke left home to become a soldier, and stayed in the army for 26 years; only after enlisting did he start publishing properly. In the preface to the new edition of Three Brothers, he mentions that in 1979 he published his first short story, since lost, for a fee of 8 yuan. In 2004 he left the military, and has since taught at the School of Liberal Arts at Renmin University of China and at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

These days Yan Lianke spends half the year in Beijing and half in Hong Kong, and sometimes goes back to the family home in Henan. "Hong Kong is a place where, if you don't want to be lonely, you can stop being lonely immediately; if you want quiet, you can have quiet at any moment," he said.

At HKUST his students come almost entirely from science and engineering. He often tells them: don't become writers, do whatever it is you're meant to do. But one thing — you have to love reading. And another — you have to stop thinking literature is so mysterious. Try writing a story. Whether it gets published doesn't matter, and whether you finish it doesn't matter either. You can read, you love to read, you've tried to write: that's enough.

On the afternoon of March 2, Yan Lianke appeared at the Sisyphe Bookstore in Shanghai with Lu Qingyi, director of the documentary Four Springs, to mark the new edition of Three Brothers. Both books are about home and family. We interviewed him before the event.

Q = QDaily

Y = Yan Lianke

I need to keep seeing new changes, new stimulation in fiction. Without it, something feels wrong.

Q: Most of your work is fiction, but Three Brothers is a collection of essays. After all those years of novels, why write a book like this?

Y: I'd written scattered essays before, but for one thing they weren't very good, and for another they weren't concentrated — one piece here, one piece there. After I finished Serve the People!, Dream of Ding Village, and then Airs, Odes and Hymns (《风雅颂》), there was a stretch when writing stopped going smoothly. I revised Airs, Odes and Hymns over and over; when it came time to publish, this part wouldn't do, that part wouldn't do, and it left me a little irritated. You feel the environment around you has turned very cold, and you want to change environments, go back into the environment of the family and write something warm. I think it had to do with that state of mind.

There's also a habit of mine: after finishing a novel, in the gap between two novels, I write something else. It's always been that way. Every time I finish a novel, I'm bound to write something else. I don't go straight back to fiction. After Airs, Odes and Hymns I wrote Three Brothers; after Three Brothers, The Four Books; after The Four Books, Discovering Fiction; after Discovering Fiction, The Explosion Chronicles; after The Explosion Chronicles, The Child of Tianhu (《田湖的孩子》). That's basically the pattern — an intermittent adjustment. Essays, or writing up and sorting out lecture notes and speeches, or doing some conversations. There's always something else in between.

Q: In Three Brothers you say Zhang Kangkang gave you a fierce desire to write. Which other writers and books shaped your writing?

Y: I think it was different at every stage. When I first started writing, I liked 19th-century novels and didn't much care for 20th-century ones. It wasn't until I was 27 or 28, when my health went bad, that I began to like 20th-century fiction — Kafka, Latin American literature. After that it changed stage by stage; at every stage there are writers you like, and it's rare for one writer to keep you reading for three or five years straight.

Some people say they reread the same book their whole life. I can't do that. I keep switching the writers I love. This year I've been reading a few writers' essays very intensively. I find that a lot of Chinese fiction, a lot of writers today, fall into what I often call "collective writing where everything is much the same." But you'll find that several writers born in the 1970s each write essays completely unlike one another's.

Q: Which writers?

Y: Li Jingze, say. Or Li Xiuwen, or Li Juan. All born in the 1970s. Zhou Xiaofeng too. The essays of these writers born in the 1970s are a very large landscape that nobody has noticed. So I bought all their essay collections and took them to Hong Kong, reading a piece from one, a piece from another, instead of finishing one book before starting the next. Reading that way feels particularly good.

The thinking in these essays is quite different from one to the next, and so is the language. You come to feel the differences between the essays are far greater than the differences between the writers. I took Li Juan's essays, Li Jingze's essays, and Li Xiuwen's — he's from Hubei — to Hong Kong and read them very carefully, without skipping a single character. I'd read one person's, put the book down, then read another's.

Q: Why these writers' essays?

Y: First, because you're getting ready to write essays yourself, so you go read some good ones. You won't copy them, but essays have their own language, and this way you can get it back.

Then, take Li Juan's essays: pure, plain, transparent to a degree that's hard to describe. They're full of small experiences of living, and full of optimism and humor. In Li Xiuwen's essays there's something very clear running from beginning to end — Li Xiuwen searching the whole world for the monk's robe, for that Buddhist spirit. It runs right through his essays, and the writing is very good too. Their writing is all unlike each other's; Li Xiuwen knows poetry well. Li Jingze's essays are full of talent and personal interest; he says himself that what he writes is "idle writing." But whether you call it idle or not, it belongs to one strand of the Chinese tradition — they're all "individual cases" within the essay form. And in literature, the real value always comes out of individual-case literature.

Q: Back to Three Brothers. You write there that your first novel was a story about "class struggle and landlords, rich peasants and poor peasants, exploitation and being exploited, resistance and being resisted, and the hero leaving home to go find the Communist Party." How do you judge that novel now? It ran to 300,000 characters, and your mother eventually burned it. How did that feel when you found out?

Y: It was garbage. At that point I had never read a single foreign novel. I believed all the world's literature was like our red classics, so what I wrote was like that too. Later I saw a film — an '80s film most of you probably haven't seen — and it wasn't all that far from the story I'd written.

It's a very good thing that novel no longer exists. Only after I got to the army did I learn that fiction is divided into novels, novellas and short stories; only then did I discover I had no idea what the world was like; only then did I see magazines like People's Literature and PLA Literature and Art, and read some foreign literature. So I have almost no regrets. Lucky it wasn't kept. If it had been, it would have become a joke.

Q: After you dropped out of high school, you'd already "stopped pinning much hope on writing to change my fate." You write in Three Brothers: "Reality makes you feel the hopelessness of survival; in writing, you can feel that a new world exists." What kind of world did you feel was in writing then?

Y: It's like what I said about doing something else after finishing a novel. Back then I was doing manual labor all the time and had nothing else to do — no television, and I wasn't seeing anyone. Having something of my own to do made me very happy. It's like a man who enjoys weaving straw mats sitting down to weave straw mats, or a man who enjoys carpentry doing carpentry in his spare time. If you love writing, then you feel there's a new world inside writing. Life then was extremely monotonous: eat, work, go 40 or 50 days without a bath. If you got time off, you either slept or stared into space. The monotony was beyond anything you could imagine. Writing something made life a little fuller.

Q: Later you left home and ran into foreign literature. You've recalled that when you first read Madame Bovary, you'd get up in the middle of winter nights and run alone on the barracks parade ground. Can you still say what it was in Madame Bovary that moved you?

Y: We had never read foreign literature, and the revolutionary literature we did read had no love stories in it. In revolutionary literature, revolution took up 70 percent, and only 10 percent was human nature and human feeling. It was all like that — revolution and heroism everywhere.

When I was reading Gone with the Wind, it was one volume a night, one volume a night, exactly like my son reading Jin Yong. Those foreign novels struck you as genuinely good. Then I'd go find Anna Karenina, then Balzac, then Madame Bovary, and so on. I don't think what grips you in these novels is the tension of the plot; it's the tension of feeling between people. You get pulled into that tension without noticing. Even the Sherlock Holmes stories don't leave you that tense. Emotional tension always beats plot tension, and it was that emotional tension that sent me out for a lap of the parade ground before I could come back and read on.

There will never be a time like that again. It really was a good time for reading. Back then I thought every book was good — except that I couldn't get into 20th-century novels, Kafka's for instance.

Q: Why couldn't you get into Kafka?

Y: Because the stories and the characters were unlike anything I knew.

Our library already had The Castle then. No teacher, no writer had ever told you which books to read to learn how to write. So you read the summary on the back cover of each book and worked out from that which ones were world classics — thank goodness those back-cover summaries didn't mislead me. I had never sat through a single literature class; I went on the blurbs and the recommendations in the library. It's like a bull market, when every stock looks good to you. Back then every book looked good.

But with Kafka, I didn't believe a man could turn into an insect. How could that be possible? So I couldn't get in. Same later with One Hundred Years of Solitude — couldn't get in either.

Then, after I'd written a lot of garbage novels, I was ill for a while. Lying in bed, in bad health. I don't know why, but all at once I was absorbed in 20th-century literature the way I'd been absorbed in 19th-century literature. And when I went back to 19th-century literature after that, it no longer held me.

Going back to Gone with the Wind, or Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, or Madame Bovary — 19th-century literature simply didn't interest me as much. I'd think: why does it ramble on at such length? You notice that Anna Karenina runs nearly 50,000 characters before Anna appears. In The Red and the Black, more than 30,000 characters go by and Julien still hasn't turned up. Old Goriot is 50 pages in and still describing the scenery of Paris. Why had I been able to sink into that back then?

So I need to keep seeing new changes, new stimulation in fiction. Without the stimulation of change, something feels wrong to me.

For a writer, the freest moment is the moment there are no boundaries in your head

Q: You write in Three Brothers that your second sister, who did very well at school, gave up her own studies so you could go to high school. Looking back, do you feel guilty?

Y: Honestly, I feel it doesn't amount to much, because I only lasted a year and then left too. Back then going to school just meant getting a diploma; it didn't mean much. That was during the Cultural Revolution. Whether my sister went to school or not, her fate would have been the same. Same for me. Go or don't go, the same fate. I don't feel guilty, but I do feel that a sister really is a sister, truly is a sister. There's that kind of gratitude.

Q: Could you talk about the influence of the women in your family, your sister and the others? Three Brothers is mainly about your father, your eldest uncle and your fourth uncle.

Y: I was saying just yesterday that I hope to write that book this year. Right after I finished Three Brothers, a friend of mine who publishes books said: I'll hand you the money now, take it home, and go write about the women in your family. At the time I kept saying I wanted my writing to be inventive, to be a challenge — so I went off and wrote The Four Books instead. I feel writing The Four Books brought back the explosive force, the invention and the imagination I used to have. After that I wrote The Explosion Chronicles, then The Day the Sun Died, then Heart Sutra and Urgently Seeking a Bedfellow (《速求共眠》).

I hope to write something about women this year — my mother, my own sister, and the few girlfriends I had along the way. Dating then was nothing like today; the interesting parts were especially interesting, so I want to write some of that in the second half of the year.

There's another reason I want to write about women this year. I've felt for a long time that I've never written women well. There's been a lot of research on this lately. I think I haven't been respectful enough toward women. Male writers have a problem; male writers writing women have a problem. I believe women writers writing men have problems too, but those problems can more or less be set aside — a male writer's problem can't be. I want to try it, and I hope to make even a little progress in understanding women.

That's just an idea; whether it can be done is another matter. I've only just finished a novel, so next comes essays. Once the essays are done, next year I'll do another novel. It also amounts to a recovery period.

Q: You write in Three Brothers: "That innate difference between city and countryside is exactly the beginning of my lifelong wish to escape the land, and the one gap in life I can never get past." Do you still think that?

Y: It's certainly still the case. My mother is over 80, and the moment she enters a city she feels inferior. Her own children may be another matter, but Shanghai is Shanghai, Hangzhou is Hangzhou, Suzhou is Suzhou. And the smaller cities below them — Huzhou is Huzhou. There's a difference. It isn't that once you reach Shanghai you're one of Shanghai's own. That outsider's feeling stays with you for life. Just as the masters of Beijing today are certainly no longer the old Beijingers, and yet the old Beijingers are sure they're still the masters.

Q: In Three Brothers you write about the sent-down youth, and about the gulf between them and the farmers. You say many sent-down-youth writers treated being sent to the countryside as being sent to prison, and that the sent-down youth — and the writers, poets and professors who had once been sent-down youth — could never truly understand the land, or the people who have lived on it for thousands of years. What do you make of sent-down-youth literature? Can the city and the countryside ever really understand each other and be reconciled?

Y: They can still understand each other. That statement comes with a premise: the fate of the sent-down youth was also wretched and painful. It was an enormous tragedy. But when we discuss the tragedy of the sent-down youth, what we overlook is that the farmers' fate was every bit as tragic — in some ways the farmers' tragedy was worse. The premise of the statement is that in attending to one group's tragedy, we've ignored another group's.

But it isn't always like that. Take Shi Tiesheng's My Faraway Qingping Bay (《我的遥远的清平湾》). Why is that story considered good? Because in it Shi Tiesheng was the first to look, through the eyes of a sent-down youth, at how hard the farmers' lives were — harder even than the sent-down youths' own. Whereas in other sent-down-youth fiction, what we see is the farmers' ignorance presented as a major cause of the sent-down youths' fate. There certainly were farmers who raped female sent-down youth, female sent-down youth abused by farmers; I imagine a great many such things happened in my hometown. But you also have to face the other side: the way male sent-down youth ruined the fates of village girls is something nobody takes much to heart. Both are tragedies, but we've seen one and ignored the other.

Q: In the preface to Three Brothers you mention a period when you were enduring physical pain on one side and rejections from publishers and magazines on the other — you even say you "sometimes thought of death." How did you get through it?

Y: My health was terrible then. I was effectively disabled. Let's leave that aside; now I wonder whether I'm being precious about it.

Thinking back: however it went, Airs, Odes and Hymns did get published after all that revising. But afterward I felt I was too old to keep writing that way, and that it was pointless as well — what I wanted to write I couldn't write. At that point I felt my imagination used to be so good, and that my fiction now had no invention in it, no imagination at all. You badly want to go back to that earlier time, the time of writing The Sunlit Years (《日光流年》), Hard Like Water, Lenin's Kisses. Those were things you could only write when there were no boundaries in your head. It took having no boundaries to write Serve the People!.

Now there are boundaries in my head, and they constrain my writing severely. But you also know that if you cross the boundary your writing runs into trouble — the way The Four Books did. The boundary now sits there in your head, perfectly distinct.

For a writer, the freest moment is the moment there are no boundaries in your head. Not just no boundaries on what you write, but none on how you write it, none on what language you use — even the grammar of Chinese shouldn't be a boundary for you. Being able to break the grammar is the best thing of all.

That language has no boundary is the one thing I don't have the power to break. Only by breaking it can you be without boundaries in every respect. And yet if there are no boundaries you feel fear, you feel dread afterward: am I going to hit some reef? You're caught in that contradiction. So that stretch was an anxious one, and Three Brothers was written during it. Very simply: your writing was constrained, your life was constrained. I really was in poor shape then.

Spiritual experience matters far more than lived experience

Q: You grew up in a Henan village, and much of your work turns on the Henan countryside. Beyond your own experience, what other material sets off your writing? Where does it come from?

Y: A writer's work always draws on two kinds of experience. The first is what we call lived experience — experience of the feet, the hands, the eyes. The other comes entirely from the spirit. Spiritual experience comes out of the writing of people like Kafka; he shows you that lived experience isn't as important as we think, that spiritual experience matters far more.

This is where our literature today has things backwards. Every day we stress lived experience and neglect the thing that matters most, spiritual experience. Every 20th-century writer, without exception, offered us a workable road through spiritual experience, and we are still standing on 19th-century lived experience. I think that once a person has spiritual experience, writing becomes inexhaustible — all the more so given how many stories our society throws up today. Spiritual experience is richer and more complicated than lived experience.

Q: How do you acquire spiritual experience? By reading?

Y: Sensitivity and thought. Sensitivity above all. But for me there's also this: if there's no new novel you like, the challenge and the stimulation in your own writing drop off badly. Reading gives you a great deal that brings sensitivity and inspiration. I think a writer, over a lifetime, has to write out of sensitivity and reading, rather than read in the middle of daily life and writing.

Q: If spiritual experience matters far more than lived experience, how much does childhood and growing up affect a writer?

Y: It affects you for a long time — half a life, a whole life. The experience left behind by a childhood and youth in the countryside keeps surfacing in your writing for years. The Four Books, for instance, is about a group of intellectuals, but you still bring it back to the countryside. However much spiritual experience you have, you at least have to make the reader feel it's "real," that it's believable. That can't be separated from lived experience. And when you join lived experience to the spiritual, you have to go back to the place you know best, back to your own countryside.

There are also novels with little to do with my youth — Heart Sutra, say, or The Day the Sun Died. I think The Day the Sun Died and The Four Books are both very strange novels, and that strangeness matters a great deal to me. They have little to do with adolescence. Heart Sutra still needs more revision; I can't say anything about it yet.

Q: After you finish a book, do you go back and revise the draft heavily?

Y: Yes. Now that I'm older I have to. My earlier writing never got revised this obsessively. Lenin's Kisses, The Sunlit Years, Hard Like Water — those had a few wrong characters and bad sentences fixed on the manuscript, at most a page cut here, half a page changed there. Lately that isn't enough; I'm older, and I revised The Day the Sun Died over and over. It's not that the main plot needs changing. You just feel your novel is too dark and you want more "love" in it. So you add a bit here, add a bit there.

The one I revised most was Heart Sutra. In that novel I may have had too much of a "boundary" around the religious material. I wanted to break through it and was afraid of breaking through it, afraid of losing the freedom to write. The ending is only three to five thousand characters long, and I wrote four endings, every one of them completely different; the four have almost nothing in common. The novel should have come to 320,000 or 330,000 characters, and only 160,000 are left. That had never happened to me before, and I hope it was a one-off.

Q: Do you show the draft to other people, for comments and revision?

Y: Yes. We have a writers' class, and every one of them is full of talent. When I feel a piece is more or less done, I bring my fiction to class and let the students discuss it. That helps me enormously. These young writers are excellent — they'll tell you which part of your novel doesn't sit right, which part feels off. On this point I probably have a virtue that's rare among writers: you can all tell me my novel is no good and I'll take it perfectly well. The title The Four Books was given to me by Zhang Yueran; the scene near the end where the writer confesses was suggested by Professor Liu Jianmei at HKUST. An important plot turn in The Explosion Chronicles came from Jiang Fangzhou. Increasing the weight of metafiction in The Four Books, The Explosion Chronicles and The Day the Sun Died was Yang Qingxiang's suggestion. The moment I finished Heart Sutra I handed it to the class to discuss. I'm lucky to have these young writer friends around me. They're my teachers, and I've learned a lot from them.

Q: Before you write a story, how much of it is already in your head? Do you work the plot out first, or let it develop as you go?

Y: Even a novel may come from one small thing, one small notion. With Lenin's Kisses, the notion was buying Lenin's embalmed body — one sentence, one idea, and it became a novel. The Four Books also came from a very small idea. I was walking toward Renmin University one day and suddenly thought: what if I had a gun in my hand, and I walked up to people and said, here, girl, take the gun and shoot me. Meeting a department head, a friend, a classmate, a lover — hand each of them the gun and say, shoot me. The thing is so impossible that you become obsessed with it. And out of that came the character of "the Child" in The Four Books, and out of that came The Four Books.

Maybe conceiving a novel takes only an instant — maybe five or ten minutes and it's done. Then, when you're writing, once the first 10,000 or 20,000, 20,000 or 30,000 characters are down, everything that follows becomes perfectly clear. Once those first 20,000 or 30,000 characters exist, you can see exactly what comes next.

The world we face today is full of lies. A writer has to understand at least that much.

Q: You've said in interviews that before picking up the pen a writer should first have a clear view of literature, and also that a writer is never writing purely for himself. Who do you write for?

Y: It should still be for yourself. That's something I say to the students in our class. They've all written a lot of fiction by now; this isn't their first or second story, and it's not enough to just tell a good story and get it published. What people need now is a view of literature and a view of the world, especially in China at this moment. You don't have to say it out loud, but inside you have to know what is right and what is wrong. That sense of right and wrong matters enormously.

You have to know that the world we face today is full of lies. A writer has to understand at least that much. It's the simplest thing there is, and you can't afford not to care. When a lot of migrant workers get driven out of Beijing, you should at the very least feel sympathy for something like that; you can't say it has nothing to do with you.

All of this matters enormously. Over a lifetime, these things all end up in your fiction. Why do we call Lu Xun and Tolstoy great? Because they cared about them. Beyond their own lives, what they cared about was other people's lives. A writer who cares only about his own life and not about other people's can write very good fiction, but will never become a great writer. In fact, every great work without exception begins with caring about other people's lives.

Q: And beyond that?

Y: Those are the basics. Once you have them, you also have to go after something inside literature itself. You have to believe that 20th-century literature matters exactly as much as 19th-century literature, and you have to believe that what we are writing today, in the 21st century, is 19th-century fiction — not 20th-century fiction, let alone 21st. Chinese literature never finished the writing of the 20th century. That's my personal view.

There's no invention at all right now. Our young writers have read so many Western novels, and they say the novels are good once they've read them, but it has had little bearing on their own writing.

Q: Why is that?

Y: China puts too much weight on 19th-century literature, too much weight on realism. And this realism isn't real realism. Readers, critics, prizes — everyone says it's good. In an environment where everyone says it's good, speaking independently makes you doubt yourself: was I wrong, or was I right?

I want young writers to write something unlike everyone else's. Right now they feel to me slightly homogenized. So I say I hope young writers will be absolutely unlike my generation. You have to suspect that my generation's writing experience is flawed, exactly as I suspect the writing experience of the generation before me.

The previous generation's writing had problems even when it wasn't revolutionary fiction. I hope today's young writers will doubt my generation of writers. At the very least, don't draw only on my generation's experience — the world is full of great writers. And beyond drawing on other people's experience, you have to create something of your own. So I keep saying: don't go and study the previous generation of writers, there's nothing there to learn. What matters is working out what you can betray. Everyone talks about Dream of the Red Chamber every day — can you write something better than Dream of the Red Chamber? What's the point of writing an identical Dream of the Red Chamber? When you draw on the tradition, can you draw on it and betray it at the same time?

Q: True — the young writers who get the highest praise still tend to write with lower-difficulty, traditional narrative techniques.

Y: Right, and that's the road Chinese critics and readers have paved for writers. Anything inventive is bound to be argued over. Anything argued over is unsafe. No argument, no danger. Those young writers tell a good story, draw a good character, write beautifully, and everyone's pleased. But betray those things and you're in trouble.

Q: At the end of 2017 you gave a public lecture called "Yan Lianke's Literature Class: Borges and 'The South'." Before that you'd resolved to see whether you could stay home entirely, and after more than two years you contacted the lecture organizers yourself and asked if there was something you could do. Why did that occur to you? What did you want to do?

Y: I really hadn't gone out and done anything for two years. Then all at once I had some new thoughts about Borges's fiction. Whenever we discuss Borges we bring up metaphysics, time, labyrinths, the universe. None of that is wrong; he did open new territory for fiction. But I think the more important thing about him is that he overturned our understanding of what fiction is. We talk endlessly about birth, aging, sickness and death, about human nature, human warmth, human darkness — and his fiction hardly writes about "people" at all, hardly writes "human life." The fictional experience of the 19th century simply doesn't exist in his work. Watching him overturn these "truths of writing" is the greater achievement. I often say he is the one who truly threw 19th-century fictional experience aside. Reread Borges and you find he discarded our most conventional experience of fiction — so all of a sudden I went out and poked at all that. I'd written twelve lectures on 19th- and 20th-century writing; the book hadn't been published on the mainland then, only in Hong Kong, so the organizers were keen for me to give a lecture on the mainland. So I gave that one lecture.

The book should come out on the mainland this year.

Q: In the lecture you also said a kind of "bitter-coffee literature" is now prevalent in China — that a lot of current work attends only to the small sorrows, small warmths, small setbacks and small certain happinesses of a tiny group of people.

Y: That statement wasn't rigorous enough. I hope we can find time to discuss that subject properly another day.

It's also possible this is simply how it ends — a whole life, and you leave with the regret. A life can't be without regret.

Q: You've said in interviews that your strongest feeling in recent years is that "writing is meaningless." Why? Or are you still trying to find meaning in writing?

Y: You won't become Jin Yong, you won't become Lu Xun, and you won't become a man with power — so why keep writing without stopping? I think about these questions constantly.

If you write because you want to make money, that's entirely reasonable. Or if you just want to win prizes, that's normal too. If you want to become an official through writing, I can understand that as well. But if you're after none of it, with no clear aim, you don't know what you're doing it for.

I don't know what I'm doing it for. I don't know where the meaning of writing lies.

Q: But you keep writing.

Y: If I didn't write, there'd be nothing else to do. Three days without writing and I'm bored stiff. Maybe writing is a companion for life.

Q: You've said literature was long ago left on the bench by the times, and that the environment for writing keeps getting worse. What worries you most?

Y: For me, leave me a pair of shoes that let me walk around and a pen that gives me a companion for life, and I'm already very content with this age. A pen and a pair of shoes; that's all I ask. What I worry about is having the pen taken out of my hand and the shoes pulled off my feet, leaving me a living dead man.

Q: What do you most want to write?

Y: I know the army well — I was a soldier for 26 years. But perhaps I never quite worked it out, and now I no longer have the strength to write it. Still, I've never forgotten that lived experience or the spiritual experience that came out of it. Twenty-six years, the best years of my life. From 20 to 46 I was in the army. Nobody has as much experience of the army as Mo Yan and I do; we both know it well, and neither of us has really written it.

But it's also possible this is simply how it ends — a whole life, and you leave with the regret. A life can't be without regret.

Cover image: Guomai Culture