Doubting Yourself and the World at Once
Xi Chuan reads two of his poems, with Vivek Narayanan reading their English translations (by Lucas Klein).
A transcript of Xi Chuan’s talk at the seventh edition of the Almost Island Dialogues, held in New Delhi from 19 to 22 December, 2013.
Experiences
The train rumbles over the railroad bridge
I walk beneath. I feel its structure tremble.
Because this is the countryside, and midnight,
I think, nobody but me
could be planning to pass beneath this bridge.
Written at 30
in my first decade
the moon revealed its silent craters
while under that moon, in the town I lived in
a clatter of exorcismal gongs and shouts in the street
my limping uncle swore in the courtyard
careless I met with a white rooster's kiss
and a girl pulled down her pants in front of me
I ran into a suicide's shade on the stairs
and was instructed: do not be scared
my father lifted me over his head
hail bounced in exhaustion on the road to the commune
I entered an immaculate school and studied revolution
in my second decade
with working crickets of all countries I grew up
together we scorned difficulty, together fell in love with violence and moonlight
a tiger appeared at my door
I smelled the scent of flesh
I bunny-hopped to a stranger's doorway
and saw a man and woman preparing their festive attire
I stole, and others stole too
I set fire to sparrows, and others did too
such is life, but I had an outstanding gift
for painting ideals of mountain landscapes
without too many sins requiring forgiveness
some doors shut, some doors were yet to open
my third decade was for travel and study
it made sense to torment myself
I sang for the brow and knees of love
but saw no faerie queens descend on the streets
friends came, wild and vivacious, then vanished
leaving me a shirt and glasses but no way to wear them
the spearhead of judgment called forth catastrophe
as riots of flesh that called forth rainstorms
I shouldered an umbrella and climbed up a hill
a bird searching for someone greeting thunder and lightning
making circles in the rain
how can you doubt both yourself and the world at once?
you can't stop the rain, can't get a bird to land in your hand
thought's like a knife, a flick of the blade
drenches my spirit in sweat
I drive out thirty contentious philosophers
and say to the shadow who guards me, I'm sorry
salty sweat, salty tears, what else is flesh supposed to taste like?
night is like a display of identical rooms
I walk through, pacing
back and forth as if it were all one room. Morning
to night my worries for the future prove I'm ill at ease—
the earth is in motion but I have yet to sense it—
***
I grew up during the Cultural Revolution. My father was a soldier so I went to a primary school belonging to the navy – my father was in the navy – and then I took an exam and was enrolled by a very special school at that time, which was called the Foreign Languages School attached to the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute. At that time during the Cultural Revolution, most of the Chinese schools stopped and students were sent to other places to do some revolutionary things. But only two schools in Beijing remained, so that teaching went on, and my school was one of them. Because even during the revolutionary time the Chinese government needed diplomats. Some of my classmates, they later became diplomats, for instance, the girl who introduced me to become a member of the Communist League, she later did a lot for the reunion of Hong Kong and mainland China, and after the reunion she quit her job and became a businessperson. So it was a very special school...
My classmates were from different classes or social layers. I went there from a soldier’s family and I had classmates who were from peasants’ families and also from workers’ families and also from intellectuals’– red intellectuals’– families... Chairman Mao’s grandson and granddaughter, they were also there... And so, being a kid, I saw the whole structure of the Chinese society at that time... I had a classmate who once wrote a composition about a grandpa, he called him grandpa Chou, and later we found out that was Premier Chou En Lai who visited his family, and we were so surprised... So starting from that period of time, I realised that although it was a very special time, a revolutionary time, the structure of the whole society was there.
And right after the Cultural Revolution – the Cultural Revolution ended in 1976 – I was lucky to be selected as one of the representatives of the middle school students to go to the Tiananmen Square for Mao’s big memorial. A hundred thousand people got together in Tiananmen Square in memory of Mao – Mao passed away in September of 1976 – and I was there, among others, so I can say that I witnessed the end of the Cultural Revolution.
And then I became a student of the Peking University. Peking University is the number one or number two university in China, and we had several very good professors who came from the 1930s, 40s. I remember several professors, one is Professor Winter who went to China during the Sino-Japanese war (usually we call it “Anti-Japanese War”) and he was introduced to the Chinese University by a very famous poet whose name is Wen Yiduo who played a very important role in modern Chinese literature. Actually, there is a short poem here, ‘The Hospital’, that I wrote about him. Professor Winter was from the United States. He stayed in China for many years and he didn’t get married, and so when he was sick... well, when he was dying in the hospital, my classmates were sent to the hospital just to look after him in his final days. So I wrote that: ‘I was there, right there, reading Afanti stories’ – Afanti stories are some very wise stories from the Uyghur people – ‘to a dying man’ – this is Professor Winter – ‘(he’d cough every so often / and sometimes drift to sleep); I was there, right there / trying to get a dying man to laugh’ – that’s what I did in the hospital. So that was Professor Winter, and when Winter died, I feel that an era much bigger than the Cultural Revolution had ended, because the Cultural Revolution, that’s a part of the Communist Revolution, and the Communist Revolution is a part of the 20th century Chinese radical revolution starting from 1919, that is, the May 4th Movement – so I found that I witnessed the end of both the small era of the Cultural Revolution and the bigger era of the so-called New Cultural Movement.
And there were other professors too. So I got the sense that I was living in a very special period of time. And then there was the 1980s. The 1980s in China was called ‘a decade of enlightenment’. China opened its gates to the world, and we found that, as students, we know nothing about the world. So what my classmates and I did was to read as much as possible. Almost everything we could get translated from the world, from the west especially, into Chinese... I stayed in a dormitory at the Beijing University, and we had 6 students staying in one room and each of us had 8 cards for the library, so each week we would go to the library together for 48 books – piles of books – and back... so 48 books a week... so that was a very special period of time. And then lots of new ideas were introduced to China, waves of new ideas – they could have been old ideas but for us they were new – a wave of Nietzsche, a wave of Sartre, Jean-Paul Sartre, a wave of the Frankfurt School of ideas, a wave of Freud... We read a lot and as a student I also read a lot of western poetry translated into Chinese... I had a professor from the United States whose name was Herbert Stern. Herbert Stern’s wife was a poet, and they introduced me to Robert Bly’s poetry and to poems written by Ezra Pound. And I found a special interest in Ezra Pound’s poetry because he has a kind of connection with the Chinese culture.
And then lots of political things happened. For instance, it was the first time – in 198... I can’t remember, 81 or 82 – that people voted for the representatives of the community. That’s a very low level election, but intellectuals at that time felt very excited because it was the first time. And then lots of things happened and it went to 1989. That’s a very special year for me – I grew up during the Cultural Revolution so the Cultural Revolution, to me, was something natural. At that time I didn’t have the experiences of the 30s, 40s, or foreign lives, foreign ways of lives, so I couldn’t make comparisons between the Chinese life and other lives. I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, I took the Cultural Revolution as something natural. But 1989 was a very special year because that was the end of the 80s and we’d read a lot, so I feel that I myself had learned a lot by the year 1989 and I changed a lot in my writing. Before that, I tried to write some good poems according to the poems I’d read. My standards were from the west, mostly from the west, because in order to be a modern person... well, actually, in China to be modern meant to be westernised, at that time. So during the 1980s I tried to modernise myself, which means I tried to westernise myself.
And then it was the year 1989. I lost several friends and that was also the first time I saw tanks in the city. And I felt that what I’d learned about writing was insufficient at that time. I couldn’t write about my feelings with the things I’d learned from Paul Valery, or Rilke, these giants. So I was at... I was at a loss actually. History made my self be at loss in the year 1989.
And then the market economy came to China. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping gave a speech in Shenzhen, and then the market economy started, and in about five years you could feel an air of consumerism in the society. That was 1997 or 1998. You could feel that the society had changed. Earlier, people cared about political things, and then people seemed to find it more important to make money. The whole atmosphere had changed. In the 80s, poets – Bei Dao and others – they were regarded as heroes, poet-heroes. To be a poet meant to be a hero in the 1980s. But then, later, in the mid-1990s, poets became very much marginal. So you got more freedom but, meanwhile, you were marginal, nobody cared about you... So it was quite natural for me and my friends to ask ourselves whether it was still meaningful to write poems, since you couldn’t be a hero anymore. But I, I adjusted myself of course, and I kept on writing...
That was just a very brief introduction to my life...
***
[When I was] in the United States, I went to bookstores, and if they had special bookshelves for Chinese history and culture and you could find several kinds of books about China. One kind was about the bitter experiences from the Cultural Revolution and then, well, there were other kinds of books. But if it was a book about the Cultural Revolution, then I’m sure it was a book of sad stories. But for me, since I grew up during the Cultural Revolution and my father was a soldier – he was not an intellectual, and he was not high-ranking red cadre – so he was not persecuted. But I had a neighbour who stayed in front of us, he was arrested, and I saw him being taken away by soldiers. But my father was safe during the Cultural Revolution.
And so I went to school, and I had my daily life. This March in Princeton, I met a poet from South Africa, and this poet talked about her daily life during the time of apartheid, usually when people talk about South Africa they always talk about the segregation. And she said, ‘But I did have my daily life.’ And during the Cultural Revolution, I have to say, I had my daily life. But from the perspective of nowadays, it could be absurd. For instance, just now at lunchtime Rahul asked me: Did you recite Mao’s quotations? I said, ‘Yes, every morning when you got to the classroom, you had to bow to Mao’s portrait hanging above the blackboard and you had to recite Mao’s quotations and Mao’s poems.’ Even now I can recite lots of Mao’s poems and quotations, and since I am fifty, looking back, I feel that’s absurd. But I have to say that I grew up during that period of time and I think the Cultural Revolution is a part of the twentieth century Chinese radical revolutions...
This morning when I listened to Laszlo’s [Krasznahorkai] speech, I was not sleepy – I had a silent storm in my mind. When Laszlo talked about the Hungarian communists, I tried to think about the differences between the Chinese communists and the Hungarian communists. I once read an essay by a Polish thinker whose name is [Adam] Michnik, who’s one of the big thinkers of the Polish Worker’s Movement, and he visited China, I think two or three years ago and he talked about the differences between the Chinese communists and the East European communists, and he said that East European communism was enforced by the Soviet Union in the East European countries, on the East European people, whereas the Chinese communists came from the peasants. So the Chinese communist party is a peasant’s party – it’s not a worker’s party, it’s a peasant’s party...
Then this morning I tried to ask myself, why there was such chaos because of the revolution? I got one answer, I’m not sure whether it’s correct or not – I found that other revolutions, usually they have one target, one aim – to overthrow a power... but the Chinese communist party, it seems to me, had two targets – it had two targets when it did these things. Mao once gave a definition of the nature of China, modern China: he said that China was a half-feudal and half-colonial society. It means that the Chinese communists tried to fight the first thing, the west – that is, imperialism – and also the Chinese feudalism, that is, the old dynasty, the Qing Dynasty. And if we take the Qing Dynasty as a part of tradition, it means that the Chinese communists also fought against tradition. So, if you fight the west, then you need to have a subject, to fight against the west. That means that you need something to support you from the tradition. But then meanwhile, if you have another target, to fight against tradition, it means you have nothing. So you have nothing to fight against something else. And all the problems came, I think, because of this. Because you can’t fight against anything without anything. So the west was the enemy at that time, and then you cannot have a kind of theoretical support... So there is a kind of alternative west for China, that is the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was a kind of alternative west – not the west in a sense, but alternative – and then another tradition... So the Soviet Union played a part there, and China learnt a lot from the Soviet Union.
And also for the issue of tradition... Since Chiang Kai-shek of the Chinese nationalist party called himself as a representative of tradition, then the communists tried to fight against him. And the only tradition the Chinese communists could use is the popular tradition, not the tradition from the elite. So then the communists, I think they swept all the elite tradition away, but the folk songs, the folklores remained. And folk songs and folklores, I have to say, they’re still a part of the tradition, or a kind of tradition that has been changed but is still something traditional. And then the communists got this term, an oxymoron, which is the ‘People’s Democratic Dictatorship’. Yes, this kind of dictatorship is also a part of tradition. So on the one hand they don’t like tradition, and on the other hand they have to... Well they get into this kind of dictatorship, but with another name, that is the ‘People’s Democratic Dictatorship’. And right now, after more than thirty years, the Cultural Revolution ended – that was in 1976 – and now people realised that we do need both – the tradition and the west.
And it’s very funny... The other day, we talked about the demolition of the old hutongs and siheyuan courtyards – and China was fiercely, sharply criticised by people from the outside world, that you are destroying your culture. That’s partly true. But if you go to Beijing, you will find that inside the Second Ring Road several hutongs and courtyards remain... so the old Beijing, there are some symbols there. And then once I went to a panel in Beijing, hosted by the UNESCO, and then a French guy, he criticised the Beijing-ers sharply, saying that it’s a shame that you destroyed all your old things. And then I felt a little bit absurd, that the French people when they go to Beijing, they want to visit museums, but when the Germans go to Beijing, they want to sell cars to you. So if they want to sell cars, they need to widen the hutongs... so we can’t preserve the hutongs. So the contradictions are always there...
And then some Chinese feel that now it’s a good time for us to collect all the old things. I myself have a deep love for all the old, old things, the antique things. But in ancient times, the Chinese didn’t have a sense of museums. So the Chinese – this is interesting – the Chinese realise that they need to preserve the old things according to the western sense of museums. It’s very complicated. And also, what is more complicated is that they want to move to new buildings. Most of the common people, they don’t care about whether the old houses should be preserved or not. So this morning I asked Laszlo, ‘What’s the role for those ‘boring people’?’ Actually I had some deeper meanings there, but Laszlo didn’t answer me, I have to say.
So usually when someone wants to represent the people, then he or she would like to use the term ‘the silent majority’, but when we talk about things like the issue of new buildings, we never think about the silent majorities, we think about the elite taste for culture. And this is our own contradiction. The silent majority, they don’t care about the demolition of the old houses, that’s on the one hand, but on the other hand they criticise contemporary poetry and contemporary art, saying that only traditional Chinese paintings are art, all the experimental things are from the west, they’re not our Chinese tradition. For a contemporary poet, if you do some experiments, people will say this is not poetry, because we have great poems from the Tang Dynasty. So people have their standards for poetry from the Tang Dynasty, that is more than 1300 years ago, and so we can’t simply say whether people are preserving tradition or not, whether they care for tradition or not. It’s very complicated.
Now the Chinese people are trying to develop the country. After people have some money in their pockets, they have a need to live a higher standard of life. So tradition is needed by the ordinary people. And for that we have to go to the western sense of museums. So lots of things seem old but actually they are new. They are fake things. They are fake traditions. And I think fake tradition is playing an even more important role than tradition itself, and fake tradition is a part of fashion... so it’s a very big problem. And to be a poet living in this time, facing all these contradictions, all these paradoxes, all these fake things... you have to do some experimental things, you can’t just write according to the foreigners, according to the other poets from other cultures or earlier periods of time. You need to invent something.
We talked about the invention of tradition... I feel that I have difficulties in going back to the Chinese tradition, that is, all the old books are there, but I found that I lost my way in reading these books. I was not educated like that, to recite the old books – I was trained to read as a modern person. So for instance, the book of Confucius – Analects – I’m not sure I am reading the same book read by the people from the Qing Dynasty or the Ming Dynasty because I have a modern mind. Then that raises a question in my mind – that is, whether you need to invent a way to read these old books. So to invent something old, that’s one task, that is one thing people are doing, and then there’s something else, that is, maybe you need to find a way to read the old books... The language I mean – I’m not sure whether it’s used the same way as the forebears are using. So, so I feel that maybe poets or writers, they are not trying to be someone with all kinds of literary or artistic experiments... but you have to be symmetrical to these surroundings.
And usually, being a poet, I need... well, each of us, we need to evolve. In your twenties you write according to your own talent. Then in your thirties, in your forties, in your fifties, maybe one day you will realise that you are not a genius. In our twenties we always feel that we are geniuses, but in our forties we become more comparative, more relative, that is, there were geniuses but maybe I myself am not a genius. So since you’re not a genius and you want to go on with your writing, then you find that there are some things behind you that try to promote you... And that could be... So I feel that here a person’s sense of creativity... usually we say creative writing, but I have to say most of the artists or writers, although they call their writings ‘creative’, they are not so creative. To be creative is to make something really interesting, and that’s very hard... to be different from others, that’s very difficult.
And then I think, to be creative you need to at least be symmetrical to the surroundings. You may get your language from others, from previous writers, but maybe there is another possibility – that is, you can get your language from reality itself, from society itself. And I wrote an essay some years ago in which I talked about the Chinese oxymorons, social oxymorons. So, before, when I wanted to be a new poet, I tried to be a surrealist, or a symbolist, or a futurist, and now I don’t care about all these terms, and I feel that I need to be honest to myself, and I need to be honest to my awkwardness in this society, my embarrassment in this society. And once you admit that you are embarrassed, then maybe, maybe you can go on with your writing...
***
The Mandarin pronunciation is different from the Tang Dynasty pronunciation of the words, so when I’m reciting a Chinese poem I’m not sure whether this is the way the Tang people used to read the poem. But I can do nothing. When I have classes in Beijing, for instance, when I teach about the literature from the Warring States period of time – that’s before China was united by the first emperor Qin Shi Huang, so before Qin Shi Huang there was the Warring States period of time –when I focus on that, I talk about the thinkers from that period of time. I try to make my students feel that they are in that time. It means to try to be a contemporary, for instance, to Mencius. If you are a person from nowadays, then you are far away from Mencius. I think the only way to try to understand Mencius is to try and understand Mencius and his time, and you and your time. So there is a structure there. You don’t really get Mencius, but you get that structure, and then you can understand the change up to another. Plato for instance, Plato and his time. So we try to understand Plato, not only Plato, but also his relation with Greece at that time, and we can guess something from this structure – not only from Plato but also from this structure.
I mentioned yesterday that I had a classmate who invited me to a ceremony celebrating the eighth anniversary of her yoga club. And I went there, and we did yoga. Whether that was invented by the English people or not, I did that, together with other people. And there was an Indian yoga master who stood in front of us, and we prayed to the sun and something... but then I stopped because I’m not a practitioner, and I felt very tired, very sweaty. So I stopped and I suddenly realised that the origins of Chinese knowledge are quite different from Indian origins. You have the Vedas, or Upanishads, all these books, these ideas... the ancient Indian people got these ideas from nature, from the structure of the universe... I’m not sure whether I’m right or not... but the Chinese got their first knowledge from the chaos... So Confucius was a person who belonged to the time even before the Warring States period of time, and that was the end of the Cho Dynasty. The Chinese society at that time, although it was small, was in chaos. Then Confucius proclaimed some doctrines to the people, saying that we need to insist on some good virtues... it means that there were no such virtues at that time. So whatever Confucius insisted on, focused on, it means there was a crisis there. So this is the origin for the ancient Chinese knowledge or ideas or thinking. And the reason why I’m so interested in that period of time is because I feel that all this knowledge is from a time with troubles. So ideas from a time of troubles might be helpful for me to think about my time, because I feel that we have so many troubles in contemporary China...
But Mencius, Zhuang Tzu, Lao Tzu and others, Hsun Tzu, Han Fei Tzu and others, they didn’t want to be poets or novelists, they were the people who had to face their own times, and they wrote things in order to solve problems. That means they are not really literary figures, it was not their ambition to be literary writers. It was their ambition to solve problems. So they, all of them, were amateur writers... Earlier, I tried to be a professional writer, to be a qualified writer, but then I felt that maybe it could be possible for me to retreat from that position and be a kind of amateur writer.
And so this is my attitude to the ancient Chinese books, and also the Tang Dynasty poetry. Whenever the Chinese talk about Chinese poetry – the first thing appears in people’s minds is the Tang Dynasty. And it’s the same thing in the States: when our friends there, when they talk about Chinese culture, they always talk about Li Bai and Du Fu and Cold Mountain, Wang Wei and these poets... all of them are from the Tang Dynasty. In China, we have a very famous selection of Tang Dynasty poems, which is called 300 Poems from Tang Dynasty which was edited by a person in Qing Dynasty. Now people feel that’s a classic, so if you want to know something about Tang Dynasty poetry then this is the first choice. But actually, there’s another much bigger book which is called Complete Tang Poems. Complete Tang Poems consists of about 50,000 poems, by 2300 poets. So I suggest my poet-friends or critic-friends that if you want to know something about the Tang Dynasty, you need to forget this 300 Tang Poems, you need to go back to the Complete Tang Poems, because there, in that book, you may find some poems which are not so good, some, let’s say, not really bad poems, but average poems. By reading these poems, I feel that I can get some information about writing in the Tang Dynasty... they have shortcomings there, and why they have those shortcomings... and so I always suggest my friends to go to the Complete Tang Poems. And this is one thing.
The other thing is that whenever you have something brilliant, it means that you have sacrificed something. So the Tang poets – what’s the thing they sacrificed for their poetry writing? And later, I found that compared to other dynasties, compared to the previous dynasties – the Han Dynasty, and the following Song Dynasty – in the whole Tang Dynasty there were no thinkers. So the Tang Dynasty poets, they don’t care about ideas, they care about their way of life, how to entertain themselves, how to express their feelings. They have lots of melancholy or sentimental things... then they wrote great poems. But meanwhile, they are not so great in thinking. There’s a famous Song Dynasty poet – the Song Dynasty was about a 1000 years ago – in the Song Dynasty there was a poet whose name was Su Shi. Su Shi said that the Tang poets are in want of, they didn’t know anything about, Tao or Dao. So I think this is the price the Tang poets paid –they wrote great poems and they had a neglect of Dao.
So then it’s a question to me, whether I can just use the Tang way to write poems in nowadays? But I do need this Dao – or, in general, ideas – I need to combine poetry and ideas, or something poetic and something which is not so poetic. I need to combine all these things. But when I’m doing this, of course people will say that this is not poetry. They have standards from the Tang Dynasty. I have a deep respect for tradition, but my understanding of tradition is a little bit different from other Chinese, so I’m criticised in China and told that I am not a good... traditionalist... but actually I feel that I need to know something new, to get something from history... that means you will have new standards to judge the, let’s say, Tang poets... So, Han Yu – there is a Chinese poet from the Tang Dynasty – Han Yu is not regarded as first class poet from the Tang Dynasty. He’s criticised for using his way of writing prose to write poems. And because usually people feel that you have a special way to write poems, and he wrote poems in a prose way, so he was not regarded as a great poet. But now because of my own practice, because of my own worries, I feel that I need, or the Chinese – at least professors – need to have a new understanding of Han Yu’s writing.
And I remember that Borges once said that whenever a strong poet appears, then history will adjust a little bit according to this person. So... I can’t do that, but I can understand that.
***
This morning you talked about beauty... In China, to be beautiful – that’s great. But beauty is difficult... This is what Ezra Pound said in the Cantos, and I think it is a quotation from Plato, saying that beauty is difficult. So I always remind myself that it’s really hard, it’s really difficult to write something really beautiful. Usually beautiful things are just clichés, so try to write something brilliant or beautiful, that’s a very hard job. And also I remember a saying from an American businessperson, a very good saying. It says – I read it in Chinese, but the meaning is like this: ‘Excellence is the enemy to greatness.’
And this is really interesting. Step by step, you’re trained to be an artist. For instance, in my school my students they go do sketches and they try to be good painters so that they can make good portraits... And they could be very good portrait painters but that has nothing to do with great painting... I had this experience in Italy... I went to the chapel in Vaticano, and Michelangelo’s mural paintings are there, and then, the four sides are decorated by Botticelli’s paintings... When you read about Botticelli in books, you find that Botticelli did some really beautiful things. But when you enter that chapel, you won’t go to Botticelli’s mural paintings. The only thing that exists there is Michelangelo. So in that case, it seems Michelangelo and Botticelli, they are enemies. That is, the great artist, the great art, and the excellent art – they are different.
And I think most of the Chinese readers, they are waiting for poems to comfort them, they never read poems or texts to have a fist in their face, you know? And in China, I think artists and writers are always facing a choice: whether to be successful or to have something new. And I think, most of the writers, they choose to be successful, especially in time with fashion, with media, and it’s a natural way to be famous... but I think there are some people, some artists, who want to do something little bit new... So it’s good even to have a new word or a new expression than just to go to comfort people...
***
Vivek Narayanan reads a section from Xi Chuan’s essay “The Tradition This Instant” (translated by Lucas Klein):
I’ve seen so-called Modernist poems wearing the top hat of “intertextuality,” but which lack any historical perspective for all their “erudition”; I’ve seen self-professed poets recite classical poetry backward and forward (and recite Chinese translations of Shakespeare and Byron forward and backward), while their own poetry is a confused mess; I’ve seen the blue faces of people standing beside ancient poetry fanatically condemning modern Chinese poetry, utterly unsatisfied with their ignorance of what they condemn; I’ve seen farcical actors hailing ancient Chinese culture without having more than a passing familiarity with what they praise; I’ve seen the exquisite play of tone, phrasing, feeling, narrative, and character of “late style” literature, while it sacrifices whatever spirit and thought it should be embodying in the present; I’ve seen Chinese culture’s real and imagined selling points in movies and on TV; I’ve seen Confucius and Zhuangzi turned into entertainment; I’ve seen businessmen cook up marketing stratagems to turn Confucius, Zhuangzi – and don’t forget Sunzi – into strategic bibles; I’ve seen the fluster of state-sponsored philosophy, as if the ancients could provide every last value; I’ve seen the boxlike statue of Confucius east of Tiananmen Square, grinning with over-indulgent artistic individuality at the north entrance of the National Museum of China. Here a speck appears on the sanctification of tradition, which has become both power and fashion. And yet, what is tradition?
***
I have to say, I have a deep respect for tradition. But whenever I see that Confucius statute... Usually, the artists, when they’re doing a statue of Confucius, actually they can’t bring their own style there. If you bring your own style, it means that you feel that you’re bigger than Confucius. But I can’t tolerate that smiling Confucius! That’s a Confucius for consumerism... It’s popular culture or something.
And so I feel that whenever we read something, it’s really important to go back to that period of time, to feel that you’re a contemporary, for instance, you’re a disciple of Confucius, to try to understand in that way.
There are some Chinese bosses, after they get rich they feel that they have a need to read old books. And so I went to a complex in Beijing not far away from my school. They asked me to go there because they have the builder... the capitalist... for this complex. He had a special room, an apartment for people to go to read ancient books. So I was invited there, and they said could you please give us a lecture on ancient Chinese culture. And I was at a loss... I don’t know what I should talk about to these people. And then I found a sign on the door, there’s a saying that is: ‘Try to speak in an elegant way.’ And I feel a little bit annoyed by that, and then I told the people, ‘Now I know what I’m going to talk about. Let me tell you something about ancient Chinese erotic novels, that’s also a part of tradition.’
I don’t like a fake tradition, neither a simplified tradition. A tradition is very rich...
***
I’m now writing something actually between poetry and other things. So between poetry and history perhaps... Right now, I haven’t finished that, but I’ve been writing recently about the year 2011 – not lyrical things. I’ve been writing about that, starting from my experience in Egypt. I landed in Egypt and the Egyptian revolution started. And so I’m trying to write something between poetry and history, between poetry and ideas, between poetry and other things. I am trying to write something in between. That’s not really poetry. For me, I just call that a text. A text, by writing it I can feel that I’m still growing spiritually. After my body stopped growing physically I think my spirit is still growing there. Whenever I find anything interesting, for instance this morning I felt that I grew again, that is I realised two targets for the Chinese revolution, and all the chaos came from that. I’m not sure, but anyway... So, but this kind of things, of course I can’t deal with this kind of things directly with my writing. I, then I do feel a need that I, I need to have something which could be symmetrical to this. For instance, something like a dream or a nightmare, so that I could be symmetrical to this. And, I don’t know, maybe... symmetrical to the, to the two targets. I don’t know... it’s a... I like dreams...
***
I have a series of poems telling things about the late Qing Dynasty. I haven’t collected these things, I haven’t finished that, but I have published seventeen of these poems about the late Qing Dynasty. I talked about these people who occupied the Forbidden City. They were peasants, they were from the lower level of the society. Usually, or traditionally, people feel that they are not qualified to overthrow the emperor. But they did that. And it seems that there’s no historical consequence there. So these peasants, they went to the Forbidden City. So I wrote about that, trying to show that they did that, and why they did that, and why they were successful. I have no definite answers but I’m trying to talk about that.
I also talk about ordinary people... We always talk about the sacrifices made by some heroes in history. We never talk about the sacrifices made by the ordinary people, we never notice what they have paid for the history. And
so in this series of poems – in Chinese it’s called ‘万寿’ (Wan Shou)and if it should be translated into English it means ‘Ten Thousand Lives of Longevity’
– I’m trying to do that.
***
In China, sometimes tradition is served like things from the west, because both tradition and western culture are things from afar. And also, well, the traditional way of life, in Beijing at least... the siheyuan courtyards... that’s very expensive. So people feel that the Chinese traditional culture, mainly, is an elite tradition. So in order to enjoy that elite tradition you need to be rich, to have money. But the thing is that they have lost the connections with the traditional things... It’s something like this: they go to an old house in the traditional style to enjoy a cappuccino. And then everybody is satisfied with that, the westerners, and the Chinese. The Chinese feel that now they are enjoying a cappuccino, and the westerners feel, ‘Wow, that’s a big roof,’ and everybody’s happy.
But is that the true meaning of tradition?
I think only those people who have questions in their minds about society, about history itself... questions lead people to something true, to true tradition. If people just enjoy themselves, then that’s possibly something fake. But sometimes even fake things could be interesting, I have to say.
And also people have different attitudes towards tradition. For instance, usually the foreigners, when they go to China, they prefer to go to old temples, right? To see the old statues of Buddha. But actually, believers don’t care whether that’s an old Buddha or not, they just care about having a Buddha there. So if that temple is still a living temple, usually they’re inclined to have new statues, to show that they always give money to the temple, so that they always rebuild the statues. But intellectuals and foreigners, they are tourists, when they go to temples they just want to find old temples, old statues. So you can tell who really is a believer, who really is a tourist. That’s quite different. And I was told how to judge whether this is a good temple, whether it’s an old temple. It’s not to go to the statues and the buildings. Actually, the only thing you can go to is the trees. Whether the trees in the courtyard are old – then it means that this is really an old temple. Because if it’s good temple, people always give money to the temple and they want to rebuild the temple all the time.
So that’s the difference between the believers and the tourists. And sometimes I think in China, when people talk about tradition, lots of them choose to be tourists. They choose to be tourists and get that sense for tradition. So this is what I mean when I say that sometimes fake things mean something bigger...
***
I don’t know whether I could be called an intellectual or not. I do want to be an intellectual. But I feel that in many cases it’s impossible for me to do that.
And also I have no answer to this: people are talking about freedom. Freedom is great. But I don’t know whether freedom is based on the individual... individuality... I don’t know whether that makes sense or not. So when I try to think about this individuality, then I can’t take it for granted that I am an individual. Once there was an American poet whose son went to Japan. And I met him in Greece and he talked about his son’s experience in Japan, and he mentioned that his son got a new ego in Japan. Then I said, ‘I’m not sure whether your son just got a new ego in Japan, because in Japan... you talked about your son’s living there, you never talked about your son’s neighbours. Your son’s relationship with his neighbours in Japan does mean something, but this is what you neglected.’
There’s a Japanese philosopher, I can’t remember his name, who invented a word, that is ‘inter-being’ – usually we say ‘being’, ‘be’, and then someone invented this word ‘inter-being’, that is the relations between people. In order to understand a person, you can’t just understand this person himself or herself, you need to understand his relation with others, and this is a kind of Asian way of thinking. So whenever I think about this word ‘individuality’ then there is a tail always there, that is, do I need to care something else about the relationship between you and your neighbours?
And I’m not sure... I feel embarrassed with my western friends. We talk about liberalism, and liberalism bases on market economy, and individualism, and then I feel, if I could be a liberalist in the full sense... I feel embarrassed. And also, we have so many concepts, for instance, freedom, justice, all these words, justice, love... And these concepts, most of them, are from the west. And then in China, for instance, I went to a movie directed by a Chinese director whose name is Jia Zhangke, about the Three Gorges. And a man went to find his woman – actually the woman was kidnapped by others and was sold to him as a wife. Then the woman escaped – they had a baby, so the woman escaped with the baby. So the man went to that woman’s hometown to look for this woman and the baby... And I can’t say that the relationship between this man and the woman is a kind of love, but if I say that there’s no love there, why should the man go back to look for the woman? I have no word, no concept for this... so I invented something, that is, ‘quasi- love.’ Not in the full sense.
And, and in Chinese social lives, I think there are lots of ‘quasi’ things. For instance, whether something is legal or illegal, it’s really hard to tell. And of course it’s fairly simple to say that this is bad, that is good, but that’s not life – that’s not life for the ‘boring people’, for the ‘silent majority’. It’s really hard... So it’s a big task for a poet or for a writer to write about this. There’s a risk there, that if you want to deal with these ‘quasi’ things, that means you can’t be politically correct all the time, that’s a risk... lots of embarrassments... to be a poet or a writer from China, from a country like this...
But I think, to be a true writer, you can’t just write what you are expected to. To write and make a success... that’s too simple. We need to have all the complexities there... that’s a hard job. Embarrassed... embarrassed writing.
Xi Chuan 西川 (penname of Liu Jun 刘军) was born in Jiangsu in 1963 but grew up in Beijing, where he still lives. One of contemporary China’s most celebrated poets, having won the Lu Xun Prize for Literature (2001) and the Zhuang Zhongwen Prize (2003), he is also one of its most hyphenated littérateurs—teacher-essayist-translator-editor-poet, and has been described by American writer Eliot Weinberger as a “polymath, equally at home discussing the latest American poetry or Shang Dynasty numismatics.” A graduate of the English department of Beijing University, where his thesis was on Ezra Pound’s Chinese translations, he is currently professor Creative Writing at Beijing Normal University. He was recently awarded Sweden’s Cikada Prize.
Lucas Klein is a father, writer, and translator, as well as assistant professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan (New Directions) won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize, and his scholarship and criticism has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, LARB, Jacket, CLEAR, PMLA, and other venues. Other publications include October Dedications, his translations of the poetry of Mang Ke (Zephyr and Chinese University Press, 2018), and contributions to Li Shangyin (New York Review Books, 2018), as well as the monograph The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness (Brill, 2018). His translations of the poetry of Duo Duo, forthcoming from Yale University Press, recently won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant.