Shanghai-born writer Chan Koonchung meets CLOSER at a discrete coffee shop in Hong Kong. He’s here to promote the English version of his new novel, "The Unbearable Dreamworld of Champa the Driver" ("Doubleday").
The 61-year-old, spends most of his time in Beijing, but that doesn’t prevent him from writing about what he wants to. The Fat Years, published in 2009, is a dystopian novel that never made it to the Chinese publishing market, because of its content. With his new book, set in Tibet and telling the story of a young Tibetan man who gets involved with a Han lady, Chan wants to share his personal views on ethnic relationships, and also to demystify one of the most romanticised regions in Mainland China.
Macau CLOSER: After writing The Fat Years, such a polemic book, how did you decide on writing about Tibet in this new novel?
Chan Koonchung – In The Fat Years I wrote about a lot of topics but I deliberately left out one topic: ethnic relations, because I wanted to write another story about that. The Fat Years is a dystopian novel and has the capacity to join a lot of topics. After that book, I started to work on a new novel about the Tibetan people. Before I had another approach but I dropped it, and I came to this one. It’s about a young Tibetan guy growing up in Lhasa. Lhasa is not the typical Tibetan place now; it’s very cosmopolitan, more than half of its population is not Tibetan. So this young guy speaks fluent Mandarin, listens to the same pop music and has the same kind of designer jeans as young people from other parts of China. His aspiration is to go to Beijing. Like many Tibetan families, his parents work for the Government. The largest employer in Lhasa is the Government. This may not be the typical image we have in mind when we think about Tibet outside of China. We always picture this romantic exotic Tibet, but Lhasa is a city. So, this young guy has a relationship with a wealthy Han businesswoman. He enjoys it a lot until eventually something is not right, he’s not happy and wants to get out of the relationship. It happens that the daughter of this wealthy woman visits Lhasa and he kind of has a crush on her. He tries to follow her to Beijing and he drives all the way from Lhasa to Beijing. But it turns out that it’s not easy for an ethnic Tibetan living in Beijing to find a job or even to find a place to live.
Not easy, even being very cosmopolitan like he is? So you wanted to explore that topic of a young Tibetan living in a major Chinese city?
Yes. It gets kind of difficult to carry on your daily life because you probably can’t find a place to live, the landlord won’t rent a place to an ethnic person, who has to apply for a permit from the security department. Things like that…
How do you look at relations between the Central Government and Tibet?
I just wanted to talk about this in a very personal way, as I see it, from people I know or stories I had heard. It’s all very personal; it’s not about two ethnic groups or the State. It’s not about that, but about personal relationships. And, again, it’s very complicated. There are two relationships in the novel: the Tibetan guy with the middle aged businesswoman, and the very ambivalent daughter, who has doubts about her own sexuality. I did it deliberately, so people cannot simplify it. It’s a metaphor for Han and Tibetan relationships. There’s jealousy, compassion, everything.
The book also has some sex scenes. Was your intention to explore the theme of sexuality in China?
Yes, because the novel comes from the mouth of this young Tibetan guy. Everything is quite direct; he’s a young man with a huge sexual urge. He’s not very literate, but he’s not dumb. He’s a smart guy but not very well-educated, and everything comes from his mouth, so that’s why the sex scenes can be quite explicit, because it’s what’s on his mind. One thing I really wanted with this novel was for it to be anti-romantic. All the stereotypes about Tibet are very romantic. Either it is Shangri-La, or full of simple peaceful folks, or a place that the Chinese Government invaded. There is truth in all these, but it’s not that simple. I really wanted it to be anti-romantic. That’s also why the sex is very explicit.
After such a controversial novel like The Fat Years, was choosing this topic for your new novel also to try to be deliberately controversial?
Maybe it is controversial in the sense that nobody is writing about topics like these. It can be controversial because it won’t please everybody, it will probably upset somebody. People have preconceptions of what Tibet is and they have an attitude towards what they call the ‘Tibet issue’, both inside and outside China. This book probably doesn’t satisfy any of them, so it could be controversial in this sense.
Your previous book wasn’t published in Mainland China and this one probably won’t be either..
No, it won’t be published in China. When The Fat Years was published in 2009, many publishers from Mainland China came to me, but afterwards they didn’t come back. When they came back, they did it to publish an earlier novel of mine about Hong Kong, but not for The Fat Years. For this one it will be the same or even more so, because of the explicit sex scenes.
Does it concern you what Chinese authorities think of your writing, or you don’t think about this?
You never know what they will think, because the red line changes all the time, so you can never predict it. Because this is not published in China, maybe they are not that worried. But we don’t know what upsets them. If you want to write something more truthful, you shouldn’t pre-censor yourself to fit the market or fit the Mainland censor’s point of view. So I decided to forget about the Chinese market, even if it is potentially huge.
The Fat Years had a large international impact and was also circulating in underground circles in China. Were you surprised by the impact that the book had at the time?
Yes, I was. After it was published in Taiwan and Hong Kong, in traditional Chinese, someone prepared at least two versions of it in simplified Chinese and posted it on the Internet. That was how it kind of became viral. This one is less lucky, because the Internet police are getting better. The Fat Years was on the Web for at least six months. Now they delete anything sensitive very quickly.
After writing about a kind of collective amnesia in your previous novel, is there something you really want to say with this new book?
I really want to show a more realistic picture of what’s happening on the ground, the very complicated relations between Han people and Tibetan. There’s no easy solution, I don’t know of any. Luckily I’m a novelist, I don’t have to provide real solutions to things. If there’s a goal, it’s to provide a text that shows what’s happening. I haven’t seen this kind of writing from other sources. There are very few novels about Tibet from someone inside China. I can’t imagine it’s typical for Tibetans outside of China to do it, because they will be kind of out of touch with what’s happening. I wanted to do something, because I’ve been following the Tibetan issues for many years.
And you started to do research on Tibet in a very curious way, when you were working for Francis Ford Coppolla’s American Zoetrope studios, right?
That’s how it started, yes. We were working on a film about the 13th Dalai Lama and his relationship with Charles Bell, a kind of a Lawrence of Arabia of Tibet. I’ve been visiting Lhasa and other parts of Tibet since the early 90’s. I have Tibetan friends in Beijing and Lhasa, so I know some of the urbanized, educated Tibetans.
Not many writers might have written about minorities in China, but there are some books, like The Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian, a novel about the nomads on the border between Russia and China. Do you think contemporary writers in China are starting to get interested in these topics?
In China there are many professional writers. Some are State employees too. There must be many books about ethnic issues. Maybe I overstated saying there are not that many. Only a novel about this relationship between Han Chinese and Tibetans is more rare, because of its sensitivity. There are a lot of books about Tibet’s historical past. The book you mentioned is about a very small ethnic group, an ethnic group that is dying-out, which is quite publishable.
And how would you portray contemporary Chinese literature being published these days?
There are many good writers, both inside and outside the so-called system or establishment. But if you want to be published inside China, you have to be very clever and know where the red line is. Some of them manage to get very close to the grey area, almost reaching the red line, without getting into trouble. You avoid writing certain things, avoiding some words for instance.
That must be a difficult exercise for a writer.
Some are very good at it, actually. I’m sure they train themselves to do that. There are writers who have written very critical novels and most of them are published inside China. So, it’s still possible to do something authentic, but other authors prefer to write about historical issues.
Coming back to where we are, do you find literary potential in Hong Kong and also in Macau? Did you ever consider writing about Macau?
Outside of Hong Kong, people seem not to be too interested in Hong Kong topics. They are somehow more interested in Mainland China. Macau is fascinating; I used to go there all the time when I was a child. But if you write about Macau, you either write about it in a postcolonial way, with a lot of history; or you write about the present in Macau.
Would it be interesting for you to write about this new gaming city?
Sure, the gaming thing can have some universal elements in it, if you do it the right way. Probably you just start in Las Vegas and come to Macau. Of course it would be very interesting and it probably wouldn’t be published in Mainland China either.
You mentioned the universal feel that some stories have. Was the fact that your previous book was translated into many languages probably not only because it was about China, but also because of those universal elements?
I just realized that later. Initially I was trying to write for my friends in Beijing, because they had a different view about China at that time, in 2008. They were either for or against China. I believe China is at a new stage that started around that time. Being a rich country, more influential, the mentality of the people changed, their perception of themselves also. There is a new confidence. That was the thing I wanted to write about in The Fat Years.