INTERVIEWER
You talk about the lure of the city, but don’t The Explosion Chronicles and The Family Plot suggest that, as rural villages expand and become wealthier, their inhabitants tend to lose their moral compasses?
YAN LIANKE
I’ve written about all the problems wealth brings, but also about the difficulties of being poor. Humankind lives in an eternal dilemma. You’re in a terrible situation either way.
INTERVIEWER
Could we say that your real subject is power, then? People are powerless when they’re poor, and after gaining power, they use it to oppress others.
YAN
Gaining the power to control others is a terrifying business. I’m currently writing a novel that includes all the revolutionaries who emerged after the Qing dynasty—Sun Yat-Sen, Chiang Kai-Shek, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and so on, along with fictional characters from other people’s work, as well as Lu Xun, Hu Shih, and virtually every other Modernist writer. And the writers who killed themselves during the Cultural Revolution, like Lao She and Fu Lei. Obviously, the novel is unpublishable, but I’m strongly drawn to writing it. If only there were no such heroes and we could all calmly live our lives. In any case, I won’t discuss the plot in this interview. Let’s just say that I’m writing a book that I plan never to publish. I’ll leave it to my son, and maybe he’ll pass it on to his children. Maybe, far in the future, people will read it and know that their ancestors once thought and wrote in this way.
(The Paris Review: Yan Lianke, The Art of Fiction No. 269)
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