Liao Weitang on Writing as a Career and How He Sees It Today | The Study

Right now, the biggest responsibility for people like us is to keep speaking up, not to stay silent. And if you can't even manage that, you should at least hold the line on one thing: refusing to lie.

Hong Kong media call Liao Weitang "Migrant No. 001."

In 1997, Hong Kong rolled out a new immigration policy allowing children born on the mainland to Hong Kong parents to move to the city. Among the approved applicants, Liao Weitang was No. 001; his younger brother and sister were No. 002 and No. 003.

Liao was already 22 by then, working at a TV station in Zhuhai. Counting from when he first applied to move to Hong Kong at seven or eight, he had been waiting in line for over a decade. During those years, Liao — who had a Hong Kong father and a mainland mother — lived in Guangdong, rarely able to see his father. So much time had passed that by the time his approval came through, he had forgotten he'd ever applied.

For Liao, 1997 was a turning point. The stable life he'd had in Zhuhai fell apart, and the practical pressures of moving to Hong Kong came flooding in. Facing financial pressure at home, Liao — who had only meant to stay briefly in Hong Kong — quit his job in Zhuhai and stayed. It was from that point on that the outside world began reading him as a "Hong Kong writer."

When he first arrived in Hong Kong, Liao managed a local bookstore, but he soon quit to try submitting pieces to Hong Kong newspapers. Starting in 1998, he began publishing book reviews and art criticism in Ming Pao and Hong Kong Economic Journal, rotating pieces across the arts and culture sections of several Hong Kong papers. Later he started publishing poetry, fiction, and essays, and took on translation and photography as well.

Liao sees his early multiple identities as something he was forced into: "If you're a freelancer, you have to do all of this just to survive."

Starting at 17, in order to become financially independent, Liao — still in Guangdong at the time — began submitting to magazines and entering literary competitions. After moving to Hong Kong, he went on to win the Hong Kong Youth Literary Award, the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature, and Taiwan's China Times Literary Award and United Daily News Literary Award. Living off fees from print publications, he never went back to an office job and became a full-time writer. He traveled widely, using words and images to record his own migrations.

The golden age of print media is over now. As print has shrunk dramatically, Liao's name has instead become a fixture on new media platforms. He writes for many mainland new-media outlets, contributing reviews and columns. He watches a film every day and reads two books a week, and the reviews that follow are often published by mainland new media.

Liao has also drawn attention in the new-media era through social media. On Weibo, his sharp opinions have repeatedly stirred controversy. He has said that being a Hong Kong writer feels almost like an original sin — the moment he weighs in on anything, someone points out he's from Hong Kong. Because of that, he writes far fewer current-affairs commentaries these days, sticking instead to the relatively safer territory of book reviews, film reviews, and music criticism.

But even now, when the term "public intellectual" has become something of a punchline in most people's eyes, he still believes becoming one is everyone's responsibility, and he keeps speaking up on Weibo. "Hong Kong and Taiwan give you comparatively more freedom to speak," Liao has said. "If you get to enjoy that freedom, you owe it even more in return — do what you can, for as long as you can."

Liao defines himself as someone without a hometown. Hong Kong isn't home to him, and nowhere really is. Before moving to Hong Kong, he had already lived in three cities: Xinxing, where he was born; Zhuhai, where he spent his teenage years; and Guangzhou, where he studied. In 2001 he moved to Beijing and stayed for five years. He travels constantly between China and the West, and keeps running into kindred spirits. "People born in the seventies were destined to be a generation of migrants," he wrote in his travel essay collection Traveling by Night in Fine Silk. "As we grew up, China loosened its restrictions on movement between city and countryside, universities kept expanding enrollment, and young people moved from city to city in the name of school or work — while for us bohemians among them, no excuse was ever needed."

Liao calls himself a "cultural drifter." He has written that in Hong Kong, a foreign land stood in for home, but in the end remained foreign. He doesn't want to be labeled a Hong Kong writer; he'd rather be seen simply as someone who writes in Chinese. Still, there's no denying that Hong Kong literature, its grassroots culture, and his participation in the city's social movements have steadily deepened his sense of identification with it.

In 2018, Liao left Hong Kong to become writer-in-residence at a university in Taiwan, and has been living there since.

On July 31, on the eve of leaving Hong Kong, he wrote the poem "Farewell I: Blindness Wandering," in which Hong Kong place names — Lan Kwai Fong, Tin Hau, Kowloon Tong, Tsuen Wan — resurface. Nearly twenty-one years had passed since he became Migrant No. 001 in 1997.

Seven years ago, Liao had a son; two years ago, a daughter. He talks about his children often, and his everyday time is now largely claimed by them. He gets up early, makes breakfast, and takes them to school. In the evening he picks them up, and once they're asleep, he works late into the night.

In his twenties, Liao carried an electric guitar to Hong Kong and later lived, in Paris, "a poorer version of the Hemingway life." Now he almost never leaves the house. The time he once spent on photography has shrunk sharply, and writing criticism has taken up more of his time instead. He has also started recording online courses at home, on Chinese and international poetry.

Below is QDaily's interview with Liao Weitang.

If you can't even manage to speak up, you should at least hold the line on refusing to lie

Q: When did you start writing? Was there anything specific that shaped your writing?

I started writing with intention around fourteen or fifteen. Around then I read Lu Xun's Wild Grass, Bo Yang's The Ugly Chinaman, and a Japanese anthology of prose poetry called Golden Fantasy. It felt like my mind had been under a blindfold the whole time. Those three books got me questioning the environment Chinese people grow up in, and the kind of long-running indoctrination we're fed.

Two things specifically shaped my writing: 1989, and 1997. In 1997 I moved to Hong Kong. Back in Zhuhai, I'd been living a fairly ivory-tower life — just reading and writing. But in Hong Kong, you can't avoid confronting a very real, very concrete city. That changed my writing a lot. Urban culture and life at the bottom rung both entered my field of vision, and my poems picked up far more realist elements.

Q: What was your life like right after you arrived in Hong Kong in 1997?

When I first got there, I actually had a chance to join a Hong Kong TV station and continue the kind of work I'd been doing in Zhuhai. But one day, browsing a bookstore, I suddenly felt there was no need to go into television. I never really loved that medium to begin with.

The bookstore happened to be hiring, so I applied. The owner was also into the arts — an amateur Peking opera performer. She asked if I liked reading, and I told her not only did I like reading, I'd already written a book. She read it and hired me on the spot as store manager.

I remember she asked what I wanted out of the job. I told her I just wanted to know what staff discount I'd get on books. She gave me a good one, and I was happy with that. Part of the reason I took that job was simply to read and buy books cheap.

Q: How did you go on to become a full-time writer?

I worked at the bookstore for a year or so before quitting. At the time I figured I could try living as a freelance writer. The pay wasn't high anyway — I could make about the same from writing fees, so why bother going into work every day?

In 1998, I started submitting to several major Hong Kong newspapers, mainly Ming Pao and Hong Kong Economic Journal — mostly book reviews and art criticism. Neither paper could run my pieces every week, so I rotated between them, plus a few other papers. Back then, Hong Kong's arts and culture sections still had plenty of space.

By 1999, I was writing a lot of fiction. Fiction paid better, and there were more places to publish it. By then I was making about 10,000 Hong Kong dollars a month just from fees — plenty for a single guy in his early twenties with no other expenses to speak of. That's roughly when I became a full-time writer.

Q: You write poetry, essays, and criticism, and you also do photography, painting, and translation. How are these different roles different for you, and how do they influence each other?

Honestly, at first these different roles were forced on me. If you're a freelancer, you have to do all of it just to survive. Later I came to see it as a good thing — it's like splitting your mind into different compartments that keep colliding with each other.

And it also means that when I write poetry, I have nothing to worry about financially. Poetry basically pays nothing. Criticism earns me a living, and beyond that, I think writing criticism matters enormously for a poet — it lets you think rationally, to organize your reading and your life experience.

Q: You've said Susan Sontag "is a landmark figure for me." What do you think is the responsibility of a public intellectual today?

These days, "public intellectual" has become something of a stigmatized term — almost a punchline. None of us dare call ourselves that anymore, or dare to say society actually needs public intellectuals. But I believe every writer — really, every one of us — should try to be one. It's a civic responsibility.

Right now, the biggest responsibility for people like us is to keep speaking up, not to stay silent. And if you can't even manage that, you should at least hold the line on one thing: not lying, not flattering, not painting over the cracks. Managing even that much is already far from easy.

Q: Your writing appears across many outlets. Now that media is shrinking so sharply, where do you find your place, and how do you identify your own readership?

Honestly, I haven't given readership much thought at all. I just keep writing the criticism I want to write, whatever moves me. If one outlet doesn't think a piece fits, I send it to another. I write one or two thousand characters most days. Every book I read, every film I watch, I write something about it, more or less, and put it out there. There's basically always somewhere for it to run, so I never really worry about this.

The key is just to write well. Put simply: if what you turn in is good, the market for it takes care of itself.

Q: How has your writing changed over the decades? What does writing mean to you now?

I've been writing poetry for nearly thirty years now. If I had to choose, out of everything I do, poetry is the one thing I'd never give up. It feels like a calling — I have a responsibility to write it well. Poetry has given me so much that I have to give something back. I've read a great deal of good poetry, and I have to write a lot of good poetry in return.

As for how my writing has changed: I started out influenced by poets like Rilke, writing in a meditative mode, and gradually shifted toward realism. Over a decade ago, I wrote a lot of poems critiquing reality directly.

Now, sitting with it more, I feel that writing poetry and I, as an individual human being, act on each other. When I write, it's not necessarily me shaping the poem — it's the poem shaping me. I write to search out my soul, to see where it can lead. Once you feel that, the finished poem stops mattering so much; what matters is the writing itself. It's like throwing yourself into lightning, or into a churning wave. It forces you to collide with something, and it tests whether you can come through it. To me, that's the deepest meaning writing has.

Q: Compared to the past, do writers today face more difficulties or distractions?

I think the biggest distraction is the phone. On my phone's home screen I've written, by hand: Don't look at me, read a book.

But that's genuinely hard to live up to. Your mind keeps drifting there, and people are now bound to each other by the network whether they like it or not. You have to keep tabs on other people. That might be a good thing for a novelist, but for a poet, it eats up an enormous amount of time and energy. If we could cut all of that in half, we'd be able to read so much more, and write so much more.

Life is so short — when your family is together, you should treasure it

Q: You've written a lot of poetry and essays about travel, and said you spent at least 20 years wandering. Which trips left the deepest impression on you? How has travel shaped your writing?

Most of my travels ended up in the essay collection Traveling by Night in Fine Silk. Looking back now, a few trips stand out most. One was my first trip to Paris, where I spent a winter — I later wrote a whole book about it, Untitled Stills from Paris. Another was the six months I lived in Italy. I also went to Tibet three times, especially the southern Tibet region — I went there to trace the imagery in Tsangyang Gyatso's poetry, which helped enormously with my new translation of his work. Those trips became a book, Searching for Tsangyang Gyatso.

I usually travel with a book in hand. I'm not an adventurer, and I'm not chasing grand scenery. What I want from travel is contact with a different civilization. Travel, for me, is really an exploration of another civilization — it happens with your feet on real ground, but also on the page, in text. I can write anywhere, but I like writing on transport best, especially trains and planes. The moment you lift off the ground, inspiration seems to follow. Of course I don't get that chance often, but I can open my laptop anywhere, anytime, and write.

Q: Could you talk about your time living in Paris?

I went to Paris in the winter of 2004 and left in the spring of 2005. At first, I rented a garret from a student who was heading back to China — he sublet it to me. Later I moved into a friend's apartment, shared by three women who were also studying in France, and lived there with them. There's really only one word for that stretch of life: bohemian. It was a bit like Hemingway's Paris a hundred years earlier — a poorer version of the Hemingway life.

In Paris, I'd head out to wander every morning, have a baguette and a bottle of milk for lunch, then go browse galleries and museums — cemeteries especially. French cemeteries carry a heavy literary atmosphere. You can find the grave of someone you admire — a writer, an artist — sit beside them, and have a kind of exchange no one else can witness. That exchange might survive as a poem, or it might not need to survive in written form at all. It's like communing across time.

Q: Of all the cities you've lived in or traveled through, which bookstores left the deepest impression? Do you have a favorite in Hong Kong?

I don't live in Hong Kong anymore — for the next two years, I expect I'll be based in Taiwan. Right now I'm writer-in-residence at an arts university there, teaching writing courses. In both Hong Kong and Taiwan, bookstores were where I spent the most time. In Hong Kong, my go-to was Kubrick; in Taiwan, it's SMC Publishing and Jiu Xiang Ju, the latter a secondhand bookstore.

Wherever I go, the first stop is always a bookstore. The one that left the deepest impression was a tiny bookstore on Santorini in Greece, run by two Englishmen. Poetry made up more than half the stock, and both owners could talk about it inside and out. It felt like arriving at the edge of the earth and finding your hometown there.

Q: You've mentioned that having children pushed you toward a more stable life.

My son was born seven years ago, my daughter two years ago. Once you have kids, life is forced to become stable — you have to live on their schedule, and you can't stay away from home for long. When I do go out to travel, or attend a friend's event, I'm rarely gone more than four or five days — usually just two or three before I'm back.

Both kids miss me when I'm gone, and I miss them just as much. While they're still young, this time with them belongs only to us. Life is so short — when your family is together, you should treasure it.

Q: How does a typical day look for you now?

Monday through Friday, I'm up at seven, making breakfast for the kids, dropping them at school by eight. Back home, I have a coffee, then start reading and writing. At four, I pick up my daughter; at six, my son. From then on, there's no time left that's mine — it all revolves around them: playing with them, reading with them, doing homework with them, handling whatever they need. Only once they're both asleep by ten do I get back to my own work. After ten, I'll read, watch a film, write, or record a course. I usually keep going until around one in the morning, sleeping five to six hours a night.

I'm still young enough — early forties — to keep this up. It's a heavy load, physically and mentally, but I sometimes think of it as finding joy in hardship, a kind of training for myself.

Q: Bands and musicians show up often in your poems — Tom Waits, Joy Division, the Velvet Underground. How has music shaped your writing?

Enormously. When I first started writing, I also played guitar and was in a band, and back then music mostly shaped the rhythm of my writing. My early poems all carry a strong musical pulse and a rock-and-roll defiance. Later, as I shifted from rock to jazz and folk, I started to feel freedom through music instead. The freedom and improvisation of jazz, the candor and ease of folk — those shaped my middle-period writing a great deal.

Jazz also taught me more complex structures for writing. Compared with rock, jazz offers a richer model for structure — like bebop, built around a few sections, a few melodic threads, endlessly varied, with different instruments functioning like different voices in a piece. That's what makes jazz more intricate than rock or folk, and it's been a real lesson in craft.

Q: What have you been listening to lately?

I like jazz while writing — as I said, it keeps my thoughts flowing. Over the past year I've kept returning to the music of Morita Doji, a Japanese folk singer. When she passed away last spring, I wrote a poem and an essay in memory of her. Her music is bleak, carrying the imprint of Japan's 1970s student movements. Her voice is deeply solitary, set apart from the world. Listening to her, I often feel both a mourning for an idealistic era and a confirmation of nothingness.

Q: Beyond musicians, plenty of writers' names show up in your poems too — Modiano, Salinger, Rilke. Which writers and works matter most to you?

Reading has shaped my writing enormously, and I read very widely. The names you mentioned are all writers I genuinely love. Modiano is my favorite European novelist. For me, his fiction has stopped being just a literary matter. Purely as literature, I don't think he's quite reached master-class status, but his novels still fascinate me endlessly. I always feel he's excavating something buried in my own memory. Salinger has that quality too — I don't just see him as a literary giant, but as a friend.

Among poets: Ezra Pound, Rilke. Among the living, Gary Snyder in the US. These are the poets and writers who matter most to me.

Q: What are you reading these days?

I just finished the three-volume epic by the French graphic novelist Frédéric Pajak, Uncertain Manifesto [on Walter Benjamin and his era]. It's wonderful — his own drawings paired with his own prose, in a form that sits somewhere between essay, biography, and criticism, very much a classic French contemporary genre. What's rarest about it is the sense of pain running through it — a modern person confronting the pain of the past century of European upheaval, of shifting world civilization, and of his own life. It's written extraordinarily well.

Q: You've written that you never know what experience will end up nourishing your work, but what you can do is stay open — always. You write about comics, about Star Wars, and you've translated comics too. That attention to pop culture has struck a chord with a lot of younger readers. How does pop culture shape your writing?

I've loved comics since I was a kid, and I've drawn several comics myself. I even taught myself Japanese just so I could read comics in the original. Over time, what I read got more varied — beyond Japanese manga, I read a lot of experimental Western comics too, including Here, which I'm translating now. That one's very avant-garde as well.

I pay attention to pop culture like comics and rock music, but what I'm always looking for inside them is whatever isn't "pop" about them. They give me a parallel universe.

Q: Any plans for this year?

This year I want to finish a long poem about Taiwan, and while I'm still here, travel around to some remote places I haven't been. I also have a translation project planned — I want to finish translating Leonard Cohen's posthumous poetry collection by the end of the year.

Photos provided by the interview subject.