Han Dong the Rebel: Some Poets Get Famous Off Drama, But It's Perfectly Normal for Poetry to Be Marginal | The Study

How to work, how to be a writer, how to spend a career, how not to cheat, how to be serious, how not to be spiteful, how to hold on to basic professional integrity and a moral sense. That's what needs talking about. It's very basic stuff, and nobody thinks it's worth discussing anymore.

About the Big Wild Goose Pagoda what more can we know? Many people rush here from far away in order to climb up and be a hero once Some come a second time or more Those who never made good those who have grown fat all of them climb up to be a hero once then come down walk into the street below and are gone in a blink Some, with the guts for it, jump and open a red flower on the steps now that is truly a hero — a hero of our time About the Big Wild Goose Pagoda what more can we know? We climb up look at the view all around then come back down

"About the Big Wild Goose Pagoda," Han Dong, 1983

In 1983, Han Dong wrote "About the Big Wild Goose Pagoda," a poem critics called "the opening of a new era in poetry." Han Dong was then teaching at the Shaanxi Institute of Finance and Economics, right beside the pagoda. The first version ran forty lines; later Han Dong cut the symbol-laden second section and left twenty-three. The trimmed poem reads calmer, cooler: the pagoda is no longer an image, has nothing to do with heroism, carries no value anyone has attached to it. The pagoda is only the pagoda.

In the development of Chinese poetry, the standing of "About the Big Wild Goose Pagoda" speaks for itself. In 1980 the Misty poet Yang Lian wrote "The Big Wild Goose Pagoda," and to this day, whenever people discuss Han Dong, the two pagoda poems get compared. In Yang Lian's 219 lines the pagoda is somber and magnificent; in Han Dong's twenty-three lines that grandeur dissolves. From then on, dismantling the sublime, refusing metaphor, discovering everyday life, and writing in colloquial, narrative language became the marks of Han Dong and of "Third Generation poetry."

Han Dong is the central figure of Third Generation poetry. Where the Misty poets piled on images and metaphors, the Third Generation avoided them, and refused to make poetry carry political symbolism. That shifted the values of contemporary Chinese poetry and struck at the grand-narrative tradition of Misty poetry. In Han Dong's poems, simple things carry no special meaning; they show up as what they are. His language is spare and cool, with a beauty built out of restraint.

Han Dong later explained this work as an act of "killing the father," the father being Bei Dao. But that is his own account. Misty poetry, as represented by Bei Dao and the journal Today, hit Han Dong hard, was imitated by him, and then quickly became the thing he rebelled against. "Rebellion" is more accurate than "killing" — the predecessors' textual style was taken apart by Han Dong, and rebuilt by Han Dong.

You can see the rebel in Han Dong all the way through. In 1978 he got into Shandong University, the youngest student in his class; while there he was investigated by the school for passing around Today. In 1993 he quit his job to write full time. In 1998 he and Zhu Wen sent a questionnaire called "Rupture" to 73 writers, an episode later described as "an accident in Chinese literary circles at the end of the 20th century." Explaining what "Rupture" meant, Han Dong said: if what you write is writing, then what I write is not; if what I write is writing, then what you write is not.

His views have not changed much since. He still holds that writing is not one single concept, even among people of the same generation. He has no wish to use writing to become a celebrity inside the system, and he still uses the word "corrupt" for Chinese literature. Han Dong says he longs to be a recluse, and to a degree his life already looks like one. He turns down most invitations. "Write something good, and that's enough."

He has never stopped writing poetry. Lately he has been sorting through his own remarks about poetry, posting them online along with new poems, and plans to publish them once the sorting is done. He has been writing for close to forty years. Of his contemporaries, some have stopped writing poems, some are still writing but have "turned vulgar." In the 1980s everyone was a literary person and poetry was a national phenomenon; set against the 1980s, poetry and literature today both sit at the margin of the age.

We interviewed Han Dong at his studio, on the bank of the Yangtze in Nanjing. Inside there are many books; out the window there is nothing but trees. In conversation he is brisk and direct, with no pose about him. On the "Rupture" questionnaire, he said he should not have swept other people into it. He said he is no longer as sharp-tongued as he was. As Han Dong sees it, the media hypes poetry through news events, giving it attention only through dramatic material like a suicide or a wife-killing. He hopes the public will hold "a basic respect" for poetry. Saying all this, he was calm and mild.

Han Dong currently runs the column "Han Dong Reads Poetry" at Youth magazine, and edits columns for Today and Dayi Literature. He usually writes at his Nanjing studio. Next door is the studio of the painter Mao Yan; after the interview we met him there. In 2019 Han Dong and Mao Yan held the dual exhibition "Mao Yan · Han Dong" at the Sifang Art Museum in Nanjing.

What follows is QDaily's interview with Han Dong.

Q = QDaily

Han = Han Dong

I have no idea of a homeland. If I have one at all, it's the place I was sent down to at eight

Q: At eight you were sent down to Hongze County with your parents. Can you talk about that?

Han: I was sent down at eight. From '69 all the way to '78. In '78 I sat the exams at Hongze County Middle School and got into university.

Our family lived at all three levels — the production team, the commune seat, and the county town. Back then the bottom level was the production team, and that's where we were dropped at first. A few years later my parents moved up to the commune, my father went to work at the cultural center, and the family moved to the commune seat. Later they got jobs in Hongze county town, so I did middle school in Hongze.

I was in second grade when we were sent down. Second, third and fourth grade, all at the brigade primary school. In fifth grade I went to the commune primary school, and a year or two after that we moved to the county town. From middle school on I was at Hongze County Middle School.

Q: Why were you sent down?

Han: A lot of people were being sent down then — I've written about it in my fiction. There were several categories.

One was the educated youth sent to the countryside, which everyone knows about. That whole generation of sent-down youth holds power now. They were middle-school and high-school graduates, some from junior high, some from senior high, who couldn't get into a factory and couldn't go to university. University admissions had been cancelled, so everyone went down to the countryside, answering Chairman Mao's call. That was one group.

The second was sent-down cadres, like my parents. It worked differently in different parts of the country, but here in Jiangsu a sent-down cadre went down together with his whole family.

There was a third group, the worst off of all, that nobody mentions anymore: the sent-down households. These were workers, or people pushed out of the cities for one reason or another. This whole mass of households just went down all at once. They weren't cadres.

Where's the difference? The educated youth went down, but their families, their parents, were still in the city supporting them materially, and they went back to the city from time to time. Once a cadre was sent down, family members like me became rural household registrants. But the cadre himself kept drawing a salary — he went down with his pay — so their position was much better. The sent-down households had it worst: the whole family went down with no salary at all, only a small resettlement allowance. They built a house, farmed like the local peasants, earned work points, fed themselves. So they were the most miserable of the lot.

Q: What was it like once you got there?

Han: I have no idea of a homeland. If I have one at all, it's the place I was sent down to at eight.

We went right down to the bottom. Materially our family was fine. The place was poor, but my parents and my mother's father all drew salaries, so we could buy food and put wages toward building a house. That was never a problem — our house was easily the best around.

But our whole life had moved to a very remote place. Some of what I saw there was genuinely astonishing. Years later, after I graduated and was assigned to Xi'an, I went to the museum, to the Banpo Neolithic site. It's a reconstruction of a house from a hundred thousand years ago, and I looked at it and thought, how is this the same as our village? That's how primitive our place was. Our houses had mud walls and thatched roofs; the Banpo people's houses had mud walls and thatched roofs. You hardly ever saw a tiled roof — only the commune seat had those.

There was no electricity either, only kerosene lamps. Our family had one with a glass shade, made for burning kerosene, and that was already something to show off. The local lamp was an ink bottle with a small wick in it. The houses were all mud-walled, with no windows; a window was a hole in the wall with no glass over it. In the daytime a peasant's house was dark inside, and at night, of course, darker.

I never felt hunger myself, but the poverty there was severe. Some villages, however remote and backward, still have some cultural content — festivals, weddings, funerals. We had none of that. That kind of destitution wasn't only material, it was spiritual. I don't mean our own family, I mean the brigades and production teams around Hongze County. It's different now, of course; the place is probably enormously rich today. But back then there really was nothing.

Take Lu Xun's fiction, the countryside of that era. Poor as it was, there were still rules, traditions, ancestral halls. We had none of it. It was a new place; people had moved there not long before, and it was completely barren. There was no tradition to speak of. That may also have been the times. Feudal superstition was banned then, none of that was allowed — it was all the Four Olds, all superstition.

The bigger reason was probably the place itself. The trees were all saplings; big trees like the ones in this park (pointing at the park outside his studio) were rare. You felt it was a new place, a place cleared out of wasteland.

Everyone's life depended on work points. Our team was decent — a full day, ten points, was worth 0.37 yuan. Some places it was 0.08 yuan, some 0.05.

Q: How much work was a full ten points?

Han: Back then you worked in the production team, a collective. Later Deng Xiaoping brought in the household responsibility system, but at that time the whole collective worked and farmed together. Everyone's day was counted in points, and ten was the top. The strongest laborer, a full day, earned ten. A man in his twenties, really strong, could earn ten. Where we were, ten points was worth 0.37 yuan. A young woman earned about six or seven, an older person four or five.

Q: What left the deepest impression on you about the countryside then? You've said it was a countryside in transition — traditional society had collapsed and a lot of political forces were pushing in.

Han: We went through some things. My father, for instance, was expelled from the Party. At first he saw the place wasn't working, so he spent a year as acting production-team leader, trying to raise output. He worked alongside everyone, pushed to buy a walking tractor, and the team's grain output went up. And then he was expelled from the Party. You've been sent down and you're still not behaving. So they pushed him aside.

Q: Not behaving?

Han: You've been sent down, you're supposed to learn from the poor and lower-middle peasants — how can you be the one leading the poor and lower-middle peasants to work? Isn't that turning things upside down? That's what got him expelled. Around the same time they were also going after a fabricated counterrevolutionary group called the 516. It was tied to the Cultural Revolution. My mother was put under isolation and investigation; they said she was in the 516 group.

These things were the after-effects of city life. Locally the countryside was calm, nothing much happened, and our family had a bit of money, so life was fine. The trouble came from Nanjing — the people above were still watching us. We'd been sent down and they still weren't easy about it, still looking for any sign of misbehavior, any rustle in the grass. So there was my father's expulsion, and my mother's 516 investigation.

During the Cultural Revolution everyone was fighting everyone. Whichever faction came out on top would conjure up some counterrevolutionary group, the 516. Not just Jiangsu — the whole country dug up plenty of so-called 516 members, out of thin air. Some people jumped off buildings, some families were destroyed; there were many cases. My mother was under isolation and investigation. She was released in the end, but even my elder brother felt some of it — getting into middle school took pulling strings.

Chinese society then didn't have much of a wealth gap. It was completely unlike today. The biggest gap was between city and countryside: whether you were a city person or a rural person. But the biggest gap of all was spiritual. People were sorted into ranks. Ordinary citizens, ordinary people, were one kind. Then there were a lot of people with a bad family background, the so-called "landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements and rightists," who were discriminated against in society. Any so-called political problem in your family and you'd be discriminated against. So in our case, we had no material problems, but politically we did.

Q: Were there other people there who stayed with you?

Han: Next to us was a rich peasant, a rich peasant who had fled. During land reform he ran to the city, but he was escorted back to the village. The three of them had been living in the city, and then they came back too. Looking back it was pretty grim. He had twenty-some mu of land and a few mud houses, and that made him a rich peasant. Not only did he have no safety net, like the sent-down households, he was politically an inferior class. His daughter counted as a city person, but in the end, to put down roots somewhere, she married a local young man. The rich peasant eventually died of esophageal cancer. There were many cases like that.

That's exactly what people mean when they say they dread a return to the Cultural Revolution. Today the great split is between rich and poor, but back then rich and poor were about the same. A university professor, next to a factory worker, might well have earned less. Incomes were about level. Class then was political class, entirely man-made, with no material basis. If your family background was bad, you were restricted in everything — studying, doing anything at all. In a society like that it was like racial discrimination. A discrimination you were born into.

It came down to all sorts of things, joining the Party for one. My mother's biggest regret in life was never being able to join. Because her father had been a Kuomintang member, she could never pass political vetting. To her that mattered enormously.

Q: How did all this shape you?

Han: I was in that place from the age of eight, at the very bottom, for years. From eight to sixteen — a crucial stretch — I was there. I know nothing at all about the Chinese countryside now; it must be a world away. So a lot of my work, a lot of my stories, come out of my childhood there. That was the first experience, the founding one.

And I'm different from the locals. The locals may have followed the whole process of change; we had a distance from it. In the place my family was sent to, the local political structure and the ordinary villagers did us no harm — there was no bullying, no injury. Nobody hurt you for being an outsider, or for your family having a bit of money, or for being a sent-down cadre's family. What mattered most was the collapse of our family's political standing, and the persecution that came out of the urban system — my father's literary-arts system, my mother's work unit. That kind of persecution can track you into the last dead corner.

Q: Your father worked at the Federation of Literary and Art Circles.

Han: Right, he was among the first generation of writers after Liberation. While at middle school in Nanjing he was already an underground Party member. Then came the revolution. Afterward the state wanted to send them to university, to place its own people inside the academy. There was another track too, land reform. My father didn't want to go to university; he joined a land-reform work team instead.

Q: Why not university?

Han: He felt life itself was red-hot — why go and read books at a moment like that? And going to university came with another assignment: keeping watch on other people. So he'd rather do land reform. That's the period when he started writing fiction. Later he didn't want an administrative post; after publishing a few pieces he was set on writing. He became a professional writer, at the Nanjing Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Very few people in the country belonged to the Writers Association then. He was of the same generation as Wang Meng, Liu Binyan, Liu Shaotang and Lu Wenfu, a generation the Party had cultivated entirely by itself.

Q: Did your family shape your writing?

Han: Youth magazine was founded in '79, the year my father died. Reform and opening had begun and my father had been "liberated" too. Once he was back, he threw himself into founding Youth. He worked behind the scenes. The magazine was really his doing, because he was the one lining up manuscripts — Liu Shaotang's among them. He made the contacts, he planned the whole thing. But it had only just launched when he died.

He did put effort into raising my brother to be a writer. What was he thinking? He was cultivating my brother. You can't stay in the countryside your whole life, or you'll marry a local and end up a farmer. The city-countryside gap was severe then, so a lot of children back then were practising some skill — some drew, some did calligraphy, some tinkered with radios. A skill of one's own, as people put it.

He had my brother write, even helped him get published, cultivated him deliberately. But for my writing he had zero expectations. He died in '79; I only published after he died. In his lifetime he had no idea I'd write anything, no idea I'd become a writer.

Q: How much older is your brother Li Chao?

Han: Five years.

Q: But your father set out to cultivate your brother, not you.

Han: Right, he never tried to cultivate me. As a boy he had me learn painting, which was what interested me anyway. He didn't expect much. My brother was the better essay-writer at school. He figured it would be enough if I got into a factory as a worker and stayed out of the countryside. So later, when I got into Shandong University on the first try, he was overjoyed. In '78, getting into university meant becoming a state cadre. Graduates had their jobs assigned by the state, so that problem was solved. He didn't care what you did, as long as you weren't a peasant, weren't out fixing the earth. He expected nothing of me at all. That I write — my father never knew it, and couldn't have imagined it.

Literature was nothing like it is now — back then literature was the leading discipline

Q: You got into Shandong University at seventeen. Why philosophy?

Han: It's not that I chose philosophy. Our two intakes didn't sit a foreign-language exam; if we had, I wouldn't have got in. For the classes of '77 and '78 the English score apparently didn't count. My politics score was fairly high, so I put down Shandong University. Nobody asked what you wanted to do or where your interests lay — completely unlike now. Back then, once you got into university you had an iron rice bowl, you were a state employee, you'd joined that social class. It was like passing the imperial exam and getting a post. You'd broken out of another class altogether.

My first choice had been history at Nanjing University, but their cutoff was a bit higher. So I ended up doing philosophy at Shandong University. All my classmates were the same; nobody was there because they liked philosophy. And what philosophy was there then? It was terrifying. There was a course called Critique of Western Philosophy — every school of Western philosophy was in it, and every one of them had to be criticized. What we actually studied was Marxism-Leninism. And there were only a couple of routes after graduation: become an official, or teach.

I lived in a dorm of sixteen, and also in one of eight. I was the youngest. Between our two classes, eighty people, only I and one other person of my age had come straight from school; everyone else came out of society. There'd been no entrance exams for years and society had backed up with people. Who was in our class? Army battalion commanders, deputy Party secretaries of production brigades, heads of commune farm-machinery stations, workers with years in a factory. All that sort. People who'd knocked about in society and then come to university. Plenty of men in my dorm were married, and that was the crowd I lived with. Our two intakes were nothing like the ones after us — scarcity made us valuable. In the whole of Hongze County Middle School, I was the only humanities student in that year's graduating class to get into a top-tier university.

Getting into university then really did feel like coming first in the imperial exam. That's the feeling exactly. You've got into university — my god, imagine the future. Sky's the limit. Everyone pinned on his shabby little school badge and walked around, terrified people wouldn't notice.

Q: You started in '78 and graduated in '82. What was the mood among young people?

Han: The '80s had just opened up with reform and opening. The atmosphere was wonderful. A bit like Vietnam now. Poor, yes, but with a sense of liberation. Liberated on the ruins, everything waiting to be built. The country, and the intellectual world above all, was in an extraordinary state of mind. Compare that to now — now you feel a dark cloud pressing down and staying put. Back then the individual had unlimited possibility and the country had unlimited possibility. And we happened to be young at exactly that moment. That was the mood, and everyone was in it.

Q: How would you define the values of the '80s?

Han: After '49 China stayed off the rails right up to '78. That's thirty years. On the whole it was closed off, muddling about on its own, cut off from the rest of the world.

After reform and opening, in the '80s, we really did read. Literature was nothing like it is now — back then literature was the leading discipline. Which meant everyone was a literary youth; if you didn't read novels, didn't read the journals, you couldn't get on socially. Every factory, every middle school, never mind every university, had a literary society, a poetry society. It was everywhere, and we simply loved it. There wasn't much else, either — no other toys, no internet, no other spiritual life. Filmmaking had too high a barrier; the music people listened to came in from Hong Kong and Taiwan. The lowest barrier of all was literature: knowing a few characters was enough to write. Everyone was a literary person.

It was an age of literature for everyone. Youth magazine then had a circulation over 700,000; that's how it built its office block. Over 700,000 — what would that even mean now? I doubt it reaches 7,000 today, and subscriptions are probably a few hundred. Literature really was the leading discipline back then.

Q: Was that when you came across Today?

Han: Today was a bit earlier. It had been brewing slightly earlier, in the late '70s and early '80s. I came across it at university too. Seeing it was a revelation, a jolt to the mind. I'd never seen writing like that; the aesthetic was entirely new.

My own start in literature was definitely with that generation, Bei Dao's generation, even though they weren't much older than us. There were plenty of poets inside the establishment then too, but we simply never discussed them; as far as we were concerned they didn't exist. We worshipped Bei Dao's generation, truly.

Q: How did Today reach you?

Han: My brother Li Chao and his friends had a literary society around the same time, a small group that included Ye Zhaoyan. They wanted to put out a journal and got in touch with people in Beijing. The link was probably Ye Zhaoyan — his grandfather was Ye Shengtao, so he often went to Beijing to see him, and that's how he came into contact with the Today crowd, or with the journal. That's the thread it came down. When I went home to Nanjing on holiday I saw Today, and carried it back to Shandong University.

Q: Today was an underground publication. What was the publishing climate like?

Han: As I see it, that's when it started: we stopped taking your word for it and made our own journals. I once ran into Bei Dao in Hong Kong and we talked about it. He said they were prepared to go to prison. Bei Dao, Mang Ke and a few others pasted copies of Today on the Democracy Wall at Xidan, and as they pasted, someone would be tearing them down. Their situation then was genuinely dangerous.

Ours was dangerous too. Four of us classmates seized control of a literary society in the Chinese Department at Shandong University. Our four-man core group took over the leadership outright, and within a day or two more than seventy people had signed up. We didn't run much of anything; around the Double Tenth holiday we put out one wall poster, all poems, brushed in calligraphy and pasted up.

That got the school's attention. The Propaganda Department came to photograph it. The mood was bad anyway — there was a campaign to clear out spiritual pollution, and they wanted to trace where Today had come from. The four of us made a pact of mutual protection. The journal had in fact come through me. One of the four had to be sacrificed. They decided I should carry it, on the grounds that I had urban household registration and had been writing publicly outside school, so I'd be better at writing my way out of it. So I was the youngest of the four, and I took the whole thing on. They each went home for the winter break; I stayed at the school alone.

The school wouldn't let me leave. They set up a special investigation team and had me report to the department every day for questioning, like interrogating a criminal, day after day after day, until my mother finally phoned the department, and only then did they let me go home. So I've been through my political trial by fire.

Our department chair had been in an armed work team, no longer a young man, one meter ninety tall, and every day he'd come in and slam the table, exactly like in the films. Two people from the class of '77 who'd just graduated and stayed on to teach sat there taking notes. They even had a classmate move in next door to me, someone who wasn't going home for the break either. I asked him why he wasn't leaving. He told me the department had assigned him to watch me, in case I killed myself.

Someone even said at the time, "The department's beaten Han Dong like a dead dog — now's our chance to earn merit." All that kind of thing. They'd meant to expel me; it got complicated. In the end I was more or less banished. I did go to Xi'an to teach, but because our class was generally assigned well — a lot of people went to Beijing, or back to their home province's capital — someone like me, neither in Beijing nor at home, counted as banishment. I spent two years in Xi'an.

Bei Dao was the trailblazer. Our line of poetry, our spiritual lineage, comes from him

Q: You've said your start in literature came from Bei Dao's generation. When did you first meet him?

Han: It must have been '82 or '83. My sense of Bei Dao is that he's had it genuinely hard. He's the only sent-down-youth writer of that kind. He hasn't changed; even now he still seems like the same old sent-down youth. Very few people are like that. Some people write for years, take a certain amount of energy out of society, and it shows sooner or later in how they carry themselves, some flicker of self-satisfaction. Bei Dao's character is extraordinary. I've never met anyone else like him. We've met all kinds of people; that unchangingness of his, that seriousness and simplicity, is rare.

Q: How did he shape your poetry?

Han: He was the trailblazer. Our line of poetry, our spiritual lineage, comes from him. This generation, the so-called Third Generation, came from him. Whatever official poetry there was then, we didn't care. We started from Bei Dao, from Today.

Later people called their poetry Misty poetry, but that's a mistake passed along, or just a convenient label. We only knew that crowd, only knew Today, and Bei Dao was the leader. He really did bring something to China that was entirely different. Bei Dao's poems, Mang Ke's poems, Gu Cheng too, and Jiang He — that group. Shi Tiesheng also came out of Today.

That group shaped us deeply. Our later journals, our later refusal to cooperate, all of it came from them: how to go about doing a thing, how to understand it. Xi Chuan once said something to the effect that writers who come out of the little-journal tradition are different from those who don't. We ran our own underground journals then, formed groups, argued about literature. That was different. It isn't purely an aesthetic inheritance — the most important part was how to understand the act of writing. That whole sense of independence began with Bei Dao's line.

Now the world is bigger, there are more openings, all kinds of fame and money about. Beyond a literary coordinate system, how you place yourself in that environment and how you look at it is still a big question.

Q: So mainly you were shaped by Bei Dao alone.

Han: Mainly him. There are probably only two writers of the sent-down-youth generation who hold up: Wang Xiaobo and Bei Dao. That's it. Wang Xiaobo died young; he was excellent too, genuinely good. Bei Dao is an enlightener and a trailblazer, and to this day he hasn't gone soft or corrupt, which is extremely hard.

Q: Can you talk about Wang Xiaobo?

Han: Wang Xiaobo was basically outside the circle. Bei Dao set up his own stove outside the system but still belonged, broadly, to the literary world. Wang Xiaobo was an outsider; he simply liked writing, on his own. He had no connection to that circle, to the literary establishment, to the literary world at all. That range of vision, that critical spirit, and his relatively calm manner — I think all of it was good. As for the work, his best was the essays. The essay was tailor-made for him; for Wang Xiaobo that was the form that fitted. Through the essays you can see the man. His fiction was written seriously too, The Bronze Age and The Silver Age included.

He had no influence on me. I admired him, thought he was good. Our paths never crossed.

Q: Why do you say the only real sent-down-youth writers are Bei Dao and Wang Xiaobo?

Han: There aren't others. Truly, there aren't. Look at the work — whose work can you say counts in an absolute sense? Ma Yuan's fiction is decent, maybe.

Q: A lot of people have written about the sent-down-youth experience.

Han: No, really. I'll tell you: for a start, you don't even need to look at the work, you just need to listen to how these people talk. That's how it is. It's not that I haven't read the work. I'm a poet, I have demands on language, and very little of it holds me. A lot of it, purely at the level of language, is people who never learned Chinese properly. Put harshly, that's what it is. Some of them can grind out the work, I'll grant that, and it's worth acknowledging, they really did put in the effort. Fine. But beyond that, what have they got? No brains. The way some of them talk — my god.

Someone with no brains, still trying to think, still dressing up as though he had some — that's the most frightening thing there is.

We read their poems, started writing poetry, and then started rebelling

Q: When you started writing poems, did you have models you imitated?

Han: There was imitation at first, still under Bei Dao's influence. My earliest published poems are basically unreadable — things like "raising an unbowed head." Embarrassing now. It was a short period. Reading their poems, then imitating them: two or three years of that.

Then they became the thing we rebelled against. It was patricide. I've always said an elder brother stands in for a father. My strongest feeling about Bei Dao is exactly that, an elder brother standing in for a father. We wanted then to write something unlike theirs, and the process was completely natural. It was a particular moment, and our literary tradition amounted to only that much. So we read their poems, started writing poetry, and then started rebelling. The rebellion began on aesthetics. And it happened fast.

Bei Dao is a full zodiac cycle older than me. He was born in the Year of the Ox, and so was I. That's how it was — really, it went quickly. The so-called Third Generation was simply setting aside the whole Misty way of writing. Misty poetry belonged to the late '70s and early '80s; we were the mid-'80s. Five years apart, maybe, and this wave of learning and rebelling at once had already gone national.

Q: What exactly did you want to rebel against?

Han: At the time I felt Bei Dao's writing had run out — you're old now. That was it. But looking back, we hardly took anyone else into account. That was our only impulse, the young man's impulse to kill the father, and Bei Dao occupied the father's position.

After all these years the impulse is gone. You can see very clearly now the thread of your own development, your relationship to that man. So I have no regrets at all.

I hold a certain conviction about that relationship: my recognition of a line of descent in writing. Call it patricide, call it an elder brother standing in for a father, it's a recognition of succession in literature. We recognized him very early — but perhaps we recognized him by way of negating him.

Q: How did you rebel? Through colloquial writing?

Han: "Colloquial writing" is a label later people applied; we never used it. Aesthetically, a lot can be summed up. Bei Dao's generation's poems and what we wrote afterward are very different. We were much more of the common people, for one — nothing especially lofty, all everyday life. As you said just now, the manner may have become more colloquial. Those were some of the shifts.

For us narrative outweighs image. Those shifts show up in the aesthetics. Bei Dao's generation was still fundamentally image-based, which is why a lot of people couldn't follow it and called it Misty poetry. The beauty of the obscure.

Our poems probably look fairly direct to most people, plain speech. That wasn't one person's private awakening. Yu Jian and others were writing this kind of poetry at the same time. You can see that everyone, consciously or not, had started writing this way. First, the aesthetic shock of Bei Dao's poetry, at the head of it, shook this whole crowd; Bei Dao's group had drawn a clean line against the traditional, official strand. Then this crowd, consciously and unconsciously, went looking for its own way, and arrived at something roughly shared.

Q: Besides imagery, what else did you rebel against?

Han: We rebelled against that style of writing: the heavily image-laden kind, the kind heavy with social responsibility. You can smell it, and we didn't write that way.

Take Bei Dao's line, "From the bullet holes of the stars flows a blood-red dawn." First, at the level of rhetoric, we felt it was too metaphorical, aesthetically too image-laden. What it points at is a resistance to a totalitarian society. We felt that wasn't us, that we wouldn't point at things that way. That sense of the sublime, that sense of social responsibility — we didn't have it.

It wasn't within our range. We wouldn't write that way, and we didn't want to.

Q: Out of this rebellion you founded Them in '85. How did that come about?

Han: When I put Them together, I didn't know most of the contributors. I'd never met Yu Jian, and hadn't met a lot of the others. It was all correspondence by letter. You'd see each other's work published somewhere and that alone made you kindred.

Then, when it came to starting a journal, everything clicked. I was its chief editor. Them wasn't a regional journal, it was national. Contributors included Ding Dang, who was in Xi'an. Yu Jian was in Kunming. We were watching our own generation, looking for who wrote well.

I imagine your generation might feel the same. Would you? Maybe it's different now, maybe now people look at who has a bit of a name. But that wasn't us. Nobody had a name then. There's a fellow called Yu Jian in Yunnan, not bad. Someone somewhere else writes well. That's how it went.

Q: Where did you see their poems?

Han: Magazines like Feitian, which had a column for student poetry, and Zuojia up in the northeast. Scattered around like that.

You'd spot people who wrote well. People whose aesthetics answered each other, people you'd discover through each other.

Poetry is this: you're allowed feeling, but it isn't the release of feeling, it's the restraint of it

Q: Are there poetic styles you don't admire? You've mentioned you're not a great admirer of Hai Zi.

Han: First of all, I think the way he's hyped now is amateurish. Hai Zi's poems are fine, no problem there. But how did he get to be that good? He became a news effect. He killed himself lying on the railway tracks, and then the whole country paid attention — and I dislike that sort of thing to begin with, mass attention, social news. He was romantic, chaotic. Hai Zi was a genius, but he died in his adolescence. He can't count as a mature poet, he was that scattered. His head wanted to express everything. Some of his poems are good, but taken as a whole they're really not that good.

But nobody says so now; now his hometown even has a Hai Zi Festival. His poetry is too romantic.

Q: You don't like romanticism?

Han: I don't like the pretty, and I don't like romanticism. None of it. It's pointless, it's stale. Is that what poetry is? That's not what poetry is. Poetry is this: you're allowed feeling, but it isn't the release of feeling, it's the restraint of it. Restraint.

Never mind poetry — across aesthetics generally, what I like is restraint. Restrained, contained, rational. That kind of gushing, that display of talent, I'd put second.

Q: You've said literature needs a "dark consciousness." Can you say more?

Han: I touched on this while sorting through my old remarks. If you write the perfect thing, the purely good thing, there's nowhere to go with it. Our writing and our reading have to bring our own experience in. Reality and literature are opposites.

In literature, the perfect and the purely good strike you as dull. It's the same in film and in fiction. But evil is different. Evil is frightening in reality, but in literature a flawed person, an evil person, a bad person is what makes the writing vivid. That's tied to our own experience. In life we don't do evil, but at a certain level our dark experience is shared. We don't kill, but we can imagine killing; we don't do terrible things, but we can imagine terrible things. On this point everyone connects.

By ordinary social standards you're a healthy person in body and mind, but in your subconscious your dark consciousness is boundless. Moving even a hair's breadth toward truth is that hard. Your experience can't reach a perfect person; you can't do it, and you can't imagine it either.

Q: Back to your own life. You transferred back to Nanjing in '84 and quit your job in '93. Why did you quit?

Han: Irritation, I suppose. The work unit was maddening. We didn't have many classes; you'd teach a couple of periods and leave, but it was still a headache. If you went out to an event, for instance, they wouldn't let you go: attend to your proper duties. Once I had a fairly important meeting and asked for leave, and they decided I wasn't attending to my proper work and refused. Fine. I went to the infectious-disease hospital, found a friend there, had him draw a vial of a patient's blood, and got myself a sick-leave certificate for hepatitis. Certificate in hand, I went to the school to find the leadership. They were in a meeting; I walked straight in and gave them a dressing-down, made them lose serious face. That sort of thing did not happen at that school.

I was young then, very sharp-tongued. I left them nowhere to stand, and they thought, fine, we still won't let you go, curse all you like. What they didn't expect was that I'd then mail them the sick note. They investigated me afterward, went to the infectious-disease hospital to check whether I was really ill, and people from my department came looking for me over and over. In the end I simply walked away for good.

Q: How did you get by after that?

Han: Writing. After I quit in '93 I published fiction in Today. Today paid in US dollars then; I changed all of it and came out with 9,000 yuan, and bought a computer. A black-and-white one, at that. The first year I published a dialogue with Zhu Wen in Zuojia: 180 yuan, split in half, so 90 yuan. That was my entire income that year, 90 yuan. But it was different from now — in '93 food and lodging were all at home, I didn't need money, and I already had a computer. That's how I got through it.

From 1994 to '96 the Guangdong Provincial Academy of Literature recruited writers nationwide, calling it a well-paid one-year residency. There were eight places, I think, three from within the province and five for outside applicants. I was picked, and so was Yu Hua. The so-called high pay was 800 yuan a month.

When that ended, a friend of mine had a company and put me on the payroll, funding me outright at a thousand yuan a month, and I scraped along like that for another two years or so. Then the new century arrived. Xiao Yuan at Furong got in touch, wanting me to edit for him; each issue meant commissioning about 100,000 characters. I'd decided in advance to hold out for a high rate. In the end he could manage two or three thousand a month.

Then that ended too — two or three years and it was over — and I had to fend for myself again. A friend of mine was editor-in-chief of Jing Bao in Shenzhen, so I started a column there: four essays a month at 500 or 400 yuan each, around 2,000 yuan altogether. I wrote essays for him for several years. After that I went to work at Youth.

You write your own work, you have three or five close friends, you don't lack for conversation. That's enough

Q: You quit in the '90s, and it was also from the '90s that you wrote a lot of fiction. Why the turn from poetry to fiction?

Han: I don't think there was a turn. My first published piece was actually back in '82 or '83. I'd been reading fiction all along, I just hadn't put concentrated effort into writing it.

By the '90s I was mostly writing novellas and short stories, and then in this century I spent more than a decade on novels, six of them. Then I went off to make a film, which cost me another two years, and now I may be coming back to fiction. Poetry I've written all along.

Q: You won prizes for the fiction, but you seem to have kept a certain distance from the mainstream literary world.

Han: I've won one prize, the Chinese Literature Media Award, for my first novel. Apart from that I haven't won anything, and nothing for poetry either. The few I have won, friends couldn't bear to watch and submitted the work themselves.

Q: Not a deliberate distance?

Han: Truly not deliberate. Part of it is temperament. I dislike the social occasion; in that kind of setting I'm uncomfortable. And part of it is time. At my age time matters a great deal — you have to work every day, and that really matters.

I know that's a whole part of the process. Once a book is finished you're supposed to go out, promote it, work it. I did some of that early on, but look at my later novels: not a sound. When the publisher wants to promote — a symposium, a launch — I don't take part.

Q: You really dislike these events?

Han: I do, very much. I don't see the point. It's not that I never take part in anything; I do. I just went to the Philippines, mainly because I'd never been, and it seemed fine to go and look around.

In the West some artists and writers live almost like hermits; maybe that's a tradition there. China, at least at the moment, doesn't have that tradition, but I long for it.

Q: You'd like to be a recluse?

Han: Yes. You write your own work, you have three or five close friends, you don't lack for conversation. That's enough. Launches and symposiums all the time, running all over the world — I'm not really suited to it. And events in China now are frightening; if I wanted, there'd be one every day. I'm not that fond of it, and not suited to it.

Write something good, and that's enough. Take people of my generation. We've seen two kinds of case. One kind stops writing and goes off to do something else. The other kind keeps grinding away, but you can tell it really isn't working anymore — they've turned vulgar. I've watched generation after generation grow old like this. I find it frightening. When people are young you truly can't tell; they have inspiration, something limitless in them. But at a certain age they turn vulgar. I don't know why.

It's a real phenomenon, because I've lived through it. I used to be the youngest one around; now I'm the oldest. Some people married, life got comfortable, they made money, and that was the end of them. It's strange.

Q: In 1998 you and Zhu Wen circulated the "Rupture" questionnaire. Looking back, has your view changed? Would the questionnaire be different?

Han: I did that very young. My position hasn't changed, my basic view hasn't changed. The most provocative line was: if what you write is writing, then what I write is not. What I write is writing, what you write is not.

What that meant is: we're all writing, and all we usually recognize is a division by time — this generation arrives, that generation goes, there are elders above and juniors below. But my "rupture" was a division in space. Don't assume everyone who writes is doing the same thing, that you're writing and I'm writing so we're one generation of writers. What we're writing isn't the same concept at all, truly not. That's what "rupture" meant, and the meaning is no different today.

I have no wish to work my way into being a public name inside their system, or to be respected by it. I don't hold that concept. I don't write for that; if I did, I'd have stopped already. I write because it has to do with me. Simply put, you have to write well. Doing a thing and doing it well may be the most basic thing there is, the thing that governs all of it, the core of it. Absolutely not for anything else.

But I could never use that method again. Its greatest flaw was that it swept other people along. Its success or failure, its character, was bound up with whoever started it. Zhu Wen and I could only speak for ourselves, but in fact we swept a lot of people in, consciously or not. Some came out of friendship, out of obligation; some came thinking there might be something good in it for them, and regretted it bitterly later. All kinds of situations. We imposed our will on other people, or used a seductive, sweeping-along method. I wouldn't do it again.

Q: Only the method would differ, but the view stays.

Han: Right, it's each person's own business. Don't exert any influence at all. Any influence, good or bad, I think, is not a good thing. Don't try to influence others.

Then there's my view of Chinese literary circles. All this attacking one thing and then another, up there — I think it's too petty and too complicated. In a word, our little pile of Chinese literature, like every other field in China, isn't at any high level. Two words: corruption. Personal connections, shamelessness, muddling through, cheating, blowing your own trumpet. That's what it comes to; nothing more elevated than that.

What most needs talking about is the most basic stuff. How to work, how to be a writer, how to spend a career, how not to cheat, how to be serious, how not to be spiteful, how to hold on to basic professional integrity and a moral sense. That's what needs talking about. It's very basic stuff, and nobody thinks it's worth discussing anymore.

I'm not demanding this of anyone else, because in Chinese society you have to survive, you need your work to produce some material result.

In an age of chaos, poetry may end up playing a role. It stops being poetry itself and becomes the loudspeaker and bugle of its era

Q: How would you assess the poetry environment now?

Han: China's poetry-writing population isn't small, but everyone only knows Hai Zi — whoever's hot is who they know. Once the '80s were over, poetry becoming a hot topic isn't really possible. If it does become one, it's because something strange happened. Someone lay down on the railway tracks, someone killed his wife — that can spark it. There have been a few bursts of attention, all of them manufactured. Real attention coming from the work itself isn't really possible.

Poetry isn't a hot topic, but the barrier is genuinely low, so more people write it than you'd imagine. China's poetry-writing population may be in the hundreds of thousands, even the millions. It's just that ordinary people don't care, don't really know about it.

This is a perfectly normal state of affairs, because there's no money in poetry. It's the same in the West, where many poets' collections sell only a few hundred copies. Becoming a classic, becoming a master, is rare in any case.

Poetry being left out in the cold, not very popular, or only poets of decades ago becoming classics and entering ordinary people's lives — that's normal. For a poet today to become a star overnight, with everyone rushing to read him, isn't really possible. A poet reaching the general reader certainly takes time.

Q: In the '80s poetry was a social phenomenon, but after the so-called Third Generation it's been hard to see anything on that scale again.

Han: It's like the hippie movement, when Allen Ginsberg was a star. That has to do with the social atmosphere.

Q: What kind of social atmosphere produces a poetry phenomenon like that?

Han: In an age of chaos, poetry may end up playing a role. It stops being poetry itself and becomes the loudspeaker and bugle of its era. The Tiananmen Square poems were the poems of martyrs. Poetry ends up playing a role — you see it with Ginsberg too, who in effect became a bugle for cultural liberation. But that isn't actually good for poetry. I don't think poetry needs it.

Q: How do you hope society sees poetry?

Han: First of all, I think there has to be a basic respect. Look at our films or literary works: whenever a poet turns up he's either a lunatic or a clown. That's how people imagine poets.

Western society isn't quite like that. Poets don't sell well there either, but at a reading you can tell from how people dress that they hold you in respect. They respect a thing they don't understand, and I think that's good. It's a basic kind of cultivation.

Our own people are still like this, decades on. Everyone is so confident, sure there's nothing they don't understand. So they think, what a piece of rubbish poem this is. That atmosphere isn't good; it's a general contempt for poets. At the very least, at the level of concept and imagination, whether or not ordinary people understand poetry, if they know this is a remarkable thing, I think that's already good.

Of course this also has to do with how poets themselves behave; poets are people in society too. If our media keep at it like this — either it's Yu Xiuhua, who has a physical illness, or it's a suicide, or someone killing his wife — the public will naturally conclude that poets aren't normal people. The thought comes to them on its own.

In the film I directed, On the Dock, the lead is a poet, and the actor kept asking me: Director Han, what should a poet be like? I told him: a poet is an ordinary person, a normal person. Stop thinking you're playing "a poet," and you've got it.

Q: Is there anything else you want to write?

Han: I want to write about my own generation. Their stories are all so vivid; if nobody writes them down, then all that living meant nothing at all. But there's a condition: I have to wait until they're dead. Even fictionalized, it did really happen; it's material I can't shake out of memory. That material has enormous pull.

Fiction has enormous pull too. Fiction takes things apart and puts them back together. I need real experience, but the structure can't follow the true course of your memory. My generation's stories — I want to write them. I won't sing their praises and I won't curse them. I'll just write it.

The trouble is that it's hard to write, and once they read it they won't be happy. So it has to sit for a while; I'll write this part once they're dead, or put some of it into the fiction.

Q: Is it about the generation, or about individuals?

Han: Individuals. I really do want to write this. Xiao Yuan, for instance. Xiao Yuan was chief editor at Furong and we worked together for a few years. Later he went off to Guangzhou to be director of the museum at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. A few years ago there was a big case. He'd stolen from his own institution, taking paintings from the academy and selling them, and he was caught; they said it came to several hundred million yuan. He died in prison.

That was a huge story a few years back. I worked alongside him, and his voice and his expressions are all still with me. But I won't write it plainly. A lot of the details are in my head. Same with the year before last, when a friend of mine jumped off a building and killed himself.

Q: Wai Wai?

Han: It was Wai Wai. And another person besides. So there are at least three people I could write about now.

This isn't idle talk. As you get older you want to set down the life that's going out of you. You want to write down the lives of the people you've actually known, and that impulse is very strong.

Q: At this age, is writing any different?

Han: With poetry, you finish a good poem and then you don't know how to write the next one. That's the real condition of anyone who writes. I want to pour everything in. But it's still changing, good poems can still come, so you have to hold on to it.

As for fiction, there's a great deal I want to write, but I need to calm down and concentrate. It absolutely takes time; I need a fairly long stretch to prepare. A novel takes at least two years to write properly. But who's going to give you those two years? It isn't just a matter of having the time — your state of mind can't be disturbed either. Life throws all kinds of mess at you.

At present I can probably only write short stories, because I'm being careful. At my age, so-called preparation is psychological preparation more than anything practical.

Of course I could make a decision about it. If a novel takes two years, I could cut off all contact. But I think that would be excessive. Life rises and falls, it goes through phases. This month or next I may feel my energy and my circumstances, inside and out, are all pretty good — but what if I need a year or two of that? What then?

Psychologically, physically, at home, outside, everything has to be ready. The body above all can't fall apart; at our age the body is the key thing, and so is the mind. Last year was fairly free, so what I'm working on now is the collection of remarks I put together in the first half of the year, the one you saw me sorting.

Q: I saw the remarks you've been sorting. Do you plan to publish them?

Han: Yes, I'll publish it. There's still editing to do, still time to spend. Most of it is remarks from before, very pointed, and a lot of it is cursing people out. The anger needs toning down a bit. This book isn't easy to assemble either; it needs another full pass, or reorganizing by category. I also have a poetry collection that's never been put together. That's the main business of the first half of the year. Then there's the stage play Deceiving the Masses with Heresy, which needs revising, and the film isn't finished either.

Q: On the Dock?

Han: Right. Next month I have a film festival to go to as well; there's all sorts going on. There's some paid work too, writing a few screenplays. That kind of work is what earns money, but I treat it all alike and do it seriously. Overall, though, having reckoned it up, this year is fairly free. I'm hoping to have a period of preparation this year and then get properly back into fiction. At what scale? I don't think I can find the time for a novel right now. Probably short stories and novellas.

Cover image: a still from On the Dock.