"All the movies I watch are pirated."
In the later days of the Cultural Revolution, the library in town reopened, with maybe thirty or forty volumes of what they called revolutionary literature, the sanctioned kind, and I read all of that in one summer. But there were a small number of novels that got passed around my middle school in secret, until they lost their front or back covers. There’d be ten pages missing from the beginning and another ten missing from the end. By the time they reached me, I’d have no idea even what their titles or who their authors were. In my experience, you can live with not knowing how a story begins, but not knowing how it ends? Now that’s torture. I found it so unbearable that I started making them up myself, inventing one ending after another. My classmates would crowd around asking to hear my stories. When I think back to it now, I realize that’s where my writing career began.
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The writer with whom I was most infatuated, though, was Kawabata. I read a story of his called “The Dancing Girl of Izu,” and I was enamored with him for four years, reading everything I could get my hands on—Thousand Cranes, The Old Capital, Snow Country, which I still think is just the best … Kawabata taught me that it’s detail, not plot, that makes something worth reading—that great works of literature aren’t sequences of events but assemblages of unforgettable details. That’s what readers find moving—the storyline is merely interesting. At twenty-one, I was completely sunk by one of his stories. A woman whose fiancé is at war worries he’s died in battle, visits a house that’s under construction in his neighborhood, and speculates about who will live there when it’s complete. This is classic Kawabata, and it became my ideal—a story without a protagonist, just supporting characters. He showed me that you didn’t have to write in this constricted narrative progression of life unto death, that you could reverse it.
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INTERVIEWER
How was it sharing a room with Mo Yan? Did you show each other your work?
YU
While I was writing Cries in the Drizzle, he was writing The Republic of Wine. We rarely exchanged our works in progress, but we worked side by side, at two desks that faced the same wall. At first, there was just one cabinet in the room to divide our separate spaces, and later we went and stole another, which he had discovered somewhere. When we opened their doors, they divided the room almost completely. But the thing is, when you’re writing longhand, you want to lean back, to look to the right or the left as you’re thinking, and there was a small gap between the two cabinets. Often I’d look over and see he’d be looking at me. It felt wrong. I’d say, “You’re affecting my work.” He’d say, “You’re affecting my work.” In the end he went to some garbage pile and found an old calendar with photos of popular actors. He hung it on a nail—the gap was sealed.
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INTERVIEWER
Does it bother you that your books have been pirated?
YU
I have no objections. All the movies I watch are pirated—to all the filmmakers out there, my apologies, but the kinds I like don’t screen in our theaters, so it’s the only way I can watch them! Our pirating technologies are incredible, by the way. Cannes Film Festival ends in May, and by August or September we can watch the movies, with translated subtitles.
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INTERVIEWER
Have you ever considered emigrating?
YU
No. I’m too used to life in China, and you can’t find the bustle of Beijing anywhere else. Not to mention that I don’t speak any foreign languages. I remember, back in the nineties, Wang Shuo went to the U.S. for a year. We all thought, Wow, his English must be getting so good, but it turned out he still couldn’t speak it. Zhang Yuan told me he’d been to LA to visit him—they’d gotten coffee on Wang Shuo’s street and managed to sit there all day without hearing a word of English. Everyone was Chinese. If I moved to the U.S., my life would probably be like Wang Shuo’s was that year. If that’s the case, I might as well stay in Beijing.
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Literature is not the only thing in my life. I encourage my students to think this way, too. Recently, I told one of them, “Let’s meet this afternoon to talk about the story you wrote,” and he said, “Professor, I’m going clubbing tonight.” I said, “All right, have fun.”
(From The Paris Review Interview: The Art of Fiction No. 261)
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