With her unique and dynamic writing style, prominent writer Wang Anyi is regarded as one of the best contemporary Chinese writers representing the post-Cultural Revolution era Zhiqing (educated youth) literature and the xungen (searching for roots) movement.
Zhiqing refers to the young people who were sent from urban districts to live and work in the rural countryside as part of what was known as the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement” during the Cultural Revolution.
In Wang’s case, she was sent to a commune in Anhui province when she was 15 years old. Three years later in 1972, she was transferred to a cultural troupe in Xuzhou, and in 1976 she began publishing short stories.
She later received more training in writing from the China Writers Association, of which she is now a vice president. Her works, including the highly successful The Song of Everlasting Sorrow, have attracted nation wide attention, with many of them being translated into different langauges for publishing overseas.
On her way to visit Macau and take part in this year’s The Script Road – Macau Literary Festival, Wang Anyi shares with CLOSER her experiences and thoughts on life and writing.
Macau CLOSER: As a teenager during the Cultural Revolution you were sent to be a farm labourer in a commune in Anhui province. How was that time in your life?
Wang Anyi: There were very few books to read. I would write to family and to friends, but it was boring most of the time, very boring. Young life is dull. Our society thinks that youthfulness is so great, but being young is actually very boring. I think that being young is like a physically agitating stage. There were so many things that we wanted to strive for, but did not know if there would be any results. I don’t think that this feeling of being bored is unique to our generation. It is only that people are bored in different contexts.
Did you feel anxious when you were at the farms?
I was gloomy, not anxious. Being anxious was actually luxurious. Being anxious is when you have many choices in one day and you do not know how to choose. We basically did not have any way out and thus not many choices.
Your mother Ru Zhijuan was also a writer. How did she influence you?
She had a great influence on me. Without my mother and my family, I would have been very distant from literature and would have had an alien feeling towards it. It is the environment that I grew up in that made literature friendly for me, which is very important.
What did you read when you were a child?
I remember my mother used to bring me to the library of the Writers Association to borrow books. At that age, all the books I borrowed were children’s books. I would borrow a lot of them, bring them home and read them before returning them and getting another pile.
Do you think that you would have become a writer if you had not been assigned to work on the farms?
I think even if I had not been assigned to work on farms, I would still have been a writer. If the Cultural Revolution had not happened and I had been allowed to finish my higher education, I might have become an even better writer; or maybe I might not be as good as I am now. It is hard to tell. But there is one thing for certain, which is that one’s fate has already been set from the beginning. I think that even without the farm work, I would still be a writer. Therefore, I do not think that working on the farms was a prerequisite for me in terms of my becoming a writer. But I still have to admit that the experience on the farms meant a lot to me as well. If I had not worked on the farms, I would not have known that there was that life outside the kind of life in Shanghai.
In the 1980s, you wrote more Zhiqing (educated youth) literature, but later you spent more time writing stories about Shanghai. Was this about searching for your roots, your xungen?
As writers, we have to passively accept others’ definition of what kinds of writers we are. As a writer, you are not consciously deciding what you work on today or tommorrow. Actually, I consider myself to be the Chinese writer born in the 1950s who wrote the least on Zhiqing literature. The reason I was said to have written more about Shanghai in my later life is because Shanghai was not a hot topic back then. The fact is, I started writing about Shanghai in the early years, but nobody paid attention to Shanghai. It wasn’t until Shanghai became a subject that mattered that I was defined as a writer who wrote a lot about Shanghai. Actually, my works can be divided into two categories: one is about Chinese rural areas and townships; the other is about Shanghai. But it is undeniable that I have written more about Shanghai recently, maybe because of my life experience. After all, I left the rural areas quite some time ago. That part of my life did not give me many resources to work with.
A new program was announced last year by the Chinese State Administration of Press, Radio, Film and Television that seeks to send artists to grass-root communities to learn from the masses and to learn about living. This sounds similar to the Zhiqing movement started by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution. What is your opinion on this program?
If this is from the state leader, I am not sure in what context they said it. And I do not really approve of it either. Isn’t it that everyone of us is living? You cannot say I am not living today. Even for those literary artists, they are experiencing a life as well. Therefore, I think what the program suggested was to differentiate one life from another and only recognize one of them as the proper life. I think a gifted writer has to show their understanding of their lives. Everybody has their own experience. Therefore, I believe it is most important for writers to understand the life they are experiencing.
You were selected to take part in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa the United States in 1983. What kind of impact did that experience have on you?
You know that China had isolated itself before the 1980s. After years of isolation, even airplanes were very rare, let alone travelling overseas on them. Being able to travel there without worrying about the expenses, allowed me to observe a place that was totally different from my country in a relaxed manner. It did not teach me much, but served to broaden my horizons. It made me realize that I and my experiences were just so little.
What do you think about foreigners reading modern Chinese literature?
I think that the Chinese literature they can access is very limited. First, the translators have to pick the literature, which is itself limiting. During the translation process, I doubt if the meaning can truly be conveyed.
Have you had any interaction with Portuguese language writers?
The Shanghai Writers Association has a writing program that accepts applications from all over the world every year and allows participants to travel to China for around two months. In 2013, there was a young writer from Portugal. Sometimes I would chat with him and found that the life in Portugal that he described was very interesting.
Have you travelled to Macau before? What do you think about the casinos here?
I have been to Macau three times. The last time was during Chinese New Year in 2013. For me, I do not have a great interest in visiting the casinos, nor am I interested in gambling. However, I like to observe there. A casino is not like the real world. Casinos are pretty strange places. You can come up with many stories from the face of every person there, something like in 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman.
