SILF: Hot Authors, Hot Topics: Interview with Wang Gang
Wang Gang's novel, English, is a coming-of-age story of a Han teenage boy set in Xinjiang during the Cultural Revolution, a background shared by the author. It came out in 2004 to become a major bestseller in China, winning Best Novel of the Year. Fittingly translated into English this year, the book will launch at the SILF session on Sunday, March 21 at 1pm, with translators Jane Weihua Pan and Martin Merz on hand to discuss the translation process and the novel.
How much of Love Liu's experience mirror your own experience growing up in Xinjiang?
I used to be exactly like that. In that sense, Love and I are the same person. During my youth, I really did lack and hunger for education. If you tell a kid in today’s China that you were yearning for education, they would laugh at you. I loved English very much at that time. Not only is it a [foreign] language, but also a different representation, a far cry from the dictatorship and savageness I witnessed in my real life. English stood for a desired civilization, though we didn’t have a complete understanding of what that meant. However, the memories of our last generation influenced us and inserted this civilization subtly into our thoughts. By fantasizing about them, we perfected the ideal. We didn’t go to school during Cultural Revolution. All we could do was to acquaint oneself with the outside word through one or another English word. So I’m really glad the novel is translated into English.
There is a long, protracted, varied history between the Han Chinese and Uyghurs. Why do you think the Han Chinese have long been so fascinated by Xinjiang?
I was born and grew up in Xinjiang. My father died and was buried under this land. It’s my homeland. If someone persists in asking me why Han people came to this land, I think I’ll tell him human beings share similar wishes and do similar things. Why did Europeans go to America? The answer would be the same.
**What do you think of the literature coming out of Xinjiang these days?
Not so good. Those authors living in Xinjiang have [relatively] narrow horizon. I spend most of my time in Beijing. I don’t even know if I’m counted as a Xinjiang author.
Do you have a daily writing routine? What do you do when you get writer's block?
I don’t write everyday. I write by paragraphs. When I get writer’s block, I usually listen to music and drink. Sometimes I get drunk.
What does it mean to be a writer?
I use words to express true emotions instead of academic knowledge like a scholar. Of course, the basic requirement for authors is to criticize themselves and to question their own sins before they criticize and question others’. This is the biggest difference between me and other Chinese writers.
What's your favorite English word?
Mercy and lots of other words: compassion, kind, soul, and most of all, love. They all intensely capture what my novel is about, and what’s important to me. During the Cultural Revolution, cruelty happened everyday. That’s why Love always yearned and thought in desire. These words are opposite to reality. Their meanings give us a hint of what Chinese people and Chinese authors lack. We need what these words express. If humanity truly wants less bloodshed and less killings, then not only China, but any country in the world, should experience and understand more these words used in “English.” Including America.
How did you choose your translators? What part of the translation process worried you the most? What do you think of the finished product?
I haven’t either seen the translated version in full-length yet. Nor have I read it. I’ve met my translator Martin and Miss Pan. I like them and I believe they can do a good job. Penguin Group selected my translators from five biddings. I think they won’t be bad.
Why did you choose to not really mention the Muslim faith?**
Because I don’t need to mention it. I’m not a Muslim and the lifestyle referred to in the book didn’t have much to do with Muslim. I’ll touch the multi-ethical issue in my future book “Lambskin.” I’ll talk about the history and modern times.
Why did you choose to only mention one Uyghur, and a female at that?
阿吉泰 is not a pure Muslim. As I mention in my book, she’s a mix. I didn’t make her up. She really existed. Me and other boys were deeply fascinated by her beauty. It’s nothing to do with ethnicity. We couldn’t take our eyes off her and followed her around. I was really impressed by her as a boy. It’s only natural that I wrote about her.
What's your favorite spot in Urumqi?
There’s a place called Hunan Grave Garden, burying the souls of those Hunanese who followed General Zuo Zongtang to Xinjiang in the late Qing Dynasty. That place was my playground when I was little. There were quite a few elm trees and small animals there. My home is still around there now, even though those Hunan souls have been moved away. Small animals are gone too. What’s left is a 20-or-so-story building.
What book changed your life? Who are your favorite authors?
The memoir “Testimony” of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Russian composer of the Soviet period. Then “Anna Karenina” by Lev Tolstoy. If you want me to say one more, that’ll be “Doctor Zhivago” from Boris Pasternak. I still like them, even today.
Who would you consider your literary influences?
The composer Mozart and his flute concerto and clarinet concerto. I learned to play flute when I was young, so I had access to Mozart’s works at a young age. It makes me blue and weak. I’m against cruelties and violence no matter how noble the violence is boasted to be.
Andrea Wong
Details
When: March 21, 1pm
Where: The Glamour Bar
Cost: RMB65
filed under Shanghai International Literary Fest (SILF)
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Nearly 40 years have passed since the Cultural Revolution. Different from Wang Gang's setting, today's Chinese young people, whether living in Xinjiang or not, are celebrating a time of information explosion and comtemplating the loss of faith. Love Liu's yearning for education indeed seems incomprehensible today. What also can't be undersood is the dictatorship and savageness in the 1960s and 1970s. To Chinese new generation, not only is the Cultural Revolution an unimaginable distant past, but a mysterious time, for nearly most record of that history was either concealed or destroyed. Then the time Wang's been dipicting naturally became the most intriguing part of the novel. Interesting is that as a novel set in Xinjiang, there is an absence of Muslim religion in the book. Probably the reason lies in the minds of Chinese today. Faith has nearly disappeared in the modern China, nearly every Chinese is an atheist. Deep down most Chinese's minds there are factors suspicion and uneasiness. Maybe Wang himself would laugh at the deep love of English as a longing for civilization. To modern Chinese, to put a pragmatic language at such high status is already ridiculous, let alone the spiritual religions. The distance and difference between today's China and the China in Wang's novel are huge and probably the most important factor that lures people to read it. The lack of purity and deep faith at the time may be the one modern Chinese unconciously miss the most.
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Part of the Nanluoguxiang crowd! But seriously, I'm looking forward to this talk too, for two reasons.
First, it's always interesting to me when Han writers write about minorities. From Xinjiang to Tibet to (Inner) Mongolia to Yunnan, China is a case study for clashes, violent or otherwise, of cultures, and the narratives surrounding them are always complicated by the Han mythology of 5000 years and so on.
You can see from his answers in the interview above that he would love to make a gigantic round-a-bout of the subject: he's not a Xinjiang author, and yet he writes a book set in Xinjiang; he includes a female character named 阿吉泰, but makes her "not a pure Muslim". And yet I think that by skirting the issue, he's making a statement about the borderlands that will be fit into the historical context, whether he wants it to or not. I wonder what he would say about that.
Second, I'm very curious about the translators for this book. When Howard Goldblatt translated Jiang Rong's "Wolf Totem" (and coincidentally was a speaker at last year's SILF), the book received a lot of criticism — again, the Han-minority thing — and there were questions about his choice to translate it. Furthermore, at one of the translation courses/workshops put together by Penguin, participants had the chance to watch Goldblatt and Jiang/Lu Jianmin "discuss" the translation together, which ended with Goldblatt asserting that "when Chinese authors complain about their translation it’s usually because they’ve heard something from friends who almost speak English about how the translator has ruined their book – the evidence being a handful of words which deviate from their dictionary definitions." I can't find anything on Google about Jane Weihua Pan or Martin Merz, so I'd be very interested to hear about their background, how closely they worked with Wang, and how they dealt with issues of ethnic identity in translating the book into English published by Viking for a European/American audience.
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The distance and difference between today's China and the China in Wang's novel are huge and probably the most important factor that lures people to read it.
I think that people who think this way need to look through the veil of their memories and see that era for what it really was. If they dont, they're deluding themselves and need to wake up to the reality that innocence is ignorance, and that reality has always been the same mix of cold and warm, of good and bad intentions.
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if wang gang's as entertaining as a lecturer as he was at 2 am in a bar on nanluoguxiang, then well worth going. i'm looking forward to it.