4 April/5 April 2020 ★ FT Weekend 3
Life
A
rranging to meet Yan
Lianke a few weeks ago was
like walking into one of his
allegorical novels, where
magical accidents portend
nation-changing shifts. While trying to
organise our encounter, Covid-19 swept
across China. Restaurants closed. Only
some emails to Yan arrived, while oth-
ers couldn’t be sent at all. Was this gov-
ernment censorship of a well-known
and politically sensitive writer, or elec-
tric pulses straying on the frenzied
internet? Neither of us could tell. Even-
tually we agreed to meet in his local park
to discuss just how we might do our
Lunch with the FT.
His home is close to Renmin Univer-
sity in Beijing, where he sometimes
teaches a creative writing class. He has
lived there for eight years; but in the
park, every few turns the 61-year-old
exclaims, “Oh. We’re here,” as if the
paths were shifting under our feet.
The park is so full of people wearing
masks that we can’t find a quiet corner. I
ask Yan whether he is more concerned
about social distancing or being over-
heard by state snitches. Yan is one of
China’s best-known writers. Some of his
most famous novels are banned, but oth-
ers can be bought online, reflecting how
his rudely satirical writing is warily tol-
erated, even under the authoritarian
leadership of Xi Jinping. His essays, often
fiercely political, get deleted from the
web and then pop up on other blogs later,
as China’s literati evade the whack-a-
mole of the censors. Yet Yan tells me he
has never faced serious government har-
assment, and he has not been forced into
exile like some of his contemporaries.
It’s the snitches, not social distancing,
that are on his mind. But, he adds
quickly, he is only a “little writer”, so
why should the Communist party be
concerned by his views? “Foreign media
tend to think all my books are about pol-
itics. I’m not concerned with politics;
I’m concerned with the life struggles of
people — Chinese people,” he says. But,
he adds, “Chinese people’s life struggles
are often related to power, and so quite a
few books have been banned.”
When we finally find a place in the
park to sit, a sandstorm whips up, and
chunks of tree branches fly at us from
the sky, one hitting me on the head. Bei-
jing’s air-pollution reading is off the
charts. We talk about everything from
the randomness of censorship to the
vastness of Chinese society. I wash the
earth from my face when I get home.
The next day we have the first ever
videocall Lunch with the FT.I
am 10 minutes late for our virtual
rendezvous. The delivery worker
who has taken my order on one of
China’s ubiquitous takeaway apps
has gone to the south gate of our
office block. But our guards have closed
the gate in order to limit the pathogen
carriers, also known as humans, enter-
ing and leaving the compound. They
will not let him drop off my $6 rice-and-
pickles lunch deal. I call the confused
courier a few times and eventually
arrange another drop-off point.
Lateness is no problem for Yan: he is
immensely laid-back, in contrast to the
calls to arms in his essays. When I had
asked him on the phone what recent
pieces I should pay special attention to,
he replied, “Don’t bother with any of
that. Let’s just relax and talk.”
When I start up the videocall, Yan’s
light-grey hair and forehead appear at
the bottom of the phone screen, the
camera angled at his gold-edged ceiling.
I study his wine collection until he tilts
the phone back down towards him. I am
struck by seeing him smile for the first
time: we had conversed in the park
entirely behind face masks.
Yan is at a table filled with dishes
cooked by his wife: cucumber salad, a
whole fish braised in soy sauce, stir-
fried bamboo shoots, bean sprouts and a
large bowl of tomato-and-egg soup.
He did not always have it so good. He
was the youngest child of a subsistence
farmer in the impoverished Henan
province. “I write about illness because
it surrounded me since I was a child,” he
says. His family never received the med-
ical care they needed for his sister, who
was bed-bound in her teens. Yan’s father
died of a lung condition when Yan was in
his thirties. At that time, he himself was
suffering from a spinal disorder that
meant he could only write while lying
belly-down on his bed. He persisted.
Yan first took to writing to make
money, he tells me. He joined the army
aged 20 to escape rural life, and became
a propaganda writer. His writing won lit-
erary fame and national prizes. But theform of propaganda — lying?
Yan has not pulled his punches in crit-
icising China’s political currents,
although he believes he and his fellow
writers know where to tread lightly and
where to apply most force. The dance is
an uncertain one, since only the censors
know what they want.
What would he tell his own children, if
they had become writers? “I don’t have
any ideals now. In this environment, I
just want my kids to have a healthy and
good life, that’s most important. Then, I
want them to be clear-minded and
know right from wrong, and they don’t
need to say anything out loud.”L
ast year a student issued the
first formal complaint that
Yan has suffered in his teach-
ing career. The complainant
was an overseas Chinese stu-
dent in South Korea, where Yan was giv-
ing a lecture that mentioned Hong
Kong’s student protests. There has been
a wave of “red” students reporting their
professors for political speech, with one
leading to the dismissal of a 71-year-old
economics professor. But Renmin Uni-
versity supported Yan.
“I will be extremely patient with stu-
dents who have complaints. I hope they
can have a coffee with me, say ‘Teacher,
what you said is wrong.’ I try to show
them benevolent disagreement,” says
Yan. I ask him, overall, how he thinks
his students in Hong Kong and Beijing
differ. “Students in Hong Kong are very
naive: they believe in the rules and fol-
low them to a fault... Chinese students
are also naive, but in a different way:
about their country,” says Yan.
When I first corresponded with Yan,
he told me he was relieved I could speak
Chinese. Despite being one of China’s
most internationally celebrated mod-
ern novelists and the majority of his
readers being abroad, he speaks not a
word of English — or, as he calls it, “for-
eign speak”. The phrase is a nod back to
the 1970s of his youth, when the world’s
scripts were divided into Chinese, Rus-
sian and “foreign”.
He claims he’s too old to care about
the reception of his books, or money
(which he has enough of). But he loves
speaking at bookshops abroad, which
he does with a translator. He doesn’t use
a VPN, a form of anti-surveillance soft-
ware, to bypass China’s internet con-
trols; so he only hears of foreign media
coverage of him through his friends.
Yan decries the fact that the coronavi-
rus epidemic means he can’t stop look-
ing at his phone for alerts every half-
hour. But his form of receiving feedback
is through the opposite of mass social
media: despite China’s censors, he has
managed to create his own filter bubble
of literary criticism in Beijing, by mak-
ing sure to get 200 copies or so of every
run of his books — including the ones
that cannot be printed on the mainland
— to give to his inner circle.
Yan’s family don’t read his books, and
he’s glad: he flips suddenly into the role
of a naughty child when talking about
this. Nor, he supposes, do his army vet-
eran friends, many of whom are now
high up in the state media and publish-
ing industry. When they meet for din-
ner, they talk about their children and
their houses, the “firewood, rice, oil andsalt” of life, as the Chinese proverb goes.
Yan has said several times before that
realism cannot capture the many layers
of modern China — only magical real-
ism, or what he terms “mythorealism”,
can. “There are things that happen in
this country that you couldn’t dream
up,” Yan says, citing a criminal case that
went to trial in 2016. One person pays an
assassin Rmb2m to kill off a rival.
Instead of doing it, the assassin hires a
cheaper assassin, giving him a cut of his
fee; the second assassin then finds a
third... all until the fee dwindles to a
meagre sum, and the final assassin who
agrees to the mission instead warns the
target, staging photos of his death so the
assassin could still cash in.
Despite all his work to improve the
country’s literature and to teach stu-
dents, Yan is convinced that “the golden
era is over for Chinese literature” — and
indeed world literature. He came to this
conclusion on drawing up a 19th- and
20th-century Chinese literature course
for his students at HKUST. “Literature
cannot be separated from its era. A free
inner heart is the minimum standard
for good literature,” Yan says. “Today’s
children are all very obedient children,”
he adds — especially the ones born, like
me, after the Tiananmen Square massa-
cre of pro-democracy students and
workers in 1989. “It would be very diffi-
cult for such a thing to happen today.”
I ask Yan whether obedient children
make bad writers. “Literature needs arebellious spirit. I don’t mean a rebel-
lion against one’s family or society, but
towards literature itself,” he replies.
I have barely touched my rice by the
time the lunch is over, two hours later.
As with a traditional Chinese dinner, I
was waiting for Yan, the most high-
ranking guest at our virtual table, to eat
first. For a long time, it looks as if he
won’t. So I wait, my takeaway lunch
cooling on my table. Finally, he picks up
his bowl and chopsticks and takes a few
mouthfuls of his wife’s cooking. At the
end of the call, he calls to her and I try to
wave, but she’s not quite in frame.
I close by asking about Chinese writ-
ers abroad. Yan praises Yiyun Li and
several other Chinese diaspora novel-
ists, but adds that if they want to write
about China, they are too far removed
from it. Is Yan, living in central Beijing,
as divorced from the farmland as Li is
from China, I ask?
“It’s different,” he replies. I tell him
that many of my friends in China face
the same dilemma: stay in China and be
restricted in what you can publish, or
leave and forget the society you want to
portray. “That’s why I say, you can’t
blame anyone for what they do to sur-
vive,” Yan concludes.Yuan Yang is the FT’s China tech
correspondent in Beijing‘Foreign media tend to
think all my books are
about politics. I’m notconcerned with politics;
I’m concerned with the lifestruggles of Chinese people’
For years he has satirised
Chinese society. Over fishand bamboo shoots in
Beijing — in the FT’s firstvideo Lunch — the writer
talks toYuan Yangaboutcensorship, memory —
and why writing matters
YA N L I A N K E ’ S
H O U S ECucumber salad
Braised fish in soy sauce
Stir-fried bamboo shoots
Bean sprouts
Tomato and egg soupT H E F T B E I J I N G
B U R E A UYunnanese ‘black three
mince’ (minced pork, finely
chopped red and green chilli
peppers, finely chopped
pickled cabbage) and
white rice Rmb38
Total(inc packaging)
Rmb40 (£4.50)publication of his novelLenin’s Kissesin
2 004 led to his expulsion from the
army. His previous novels had garnered
complaints over their mentions of sex
and politics; the army believed he was
becoming too much of a risk, Yan says.
He then took a job at the Beijing Writ-
ers’ Association, and later at Renmin
University, to which he is still attached
today and which provides a partial
shield from political winds. A French
publisher published his first foreign-
language book in 2006; English transla-
tions followed. He has won the Franz
Kafka Prize and been shortlisted for the
International Booker Prize.
In the countryside where he grew up
and where writing is a luxury, memory
is especially important. Yan doesn’t
know when precisely he was born; as
with many rural families, his mother
marked his birth by her memory of that
year’s harvest, and he settled on 1958
when he had to fill in his application
form for the army.
His books express an affection for
rural traditions, but in many parts of
rapidly urbanising China, these are kept
alive only in memory. “For those of us
who live in the cities, we sigh, ‘The farm-
land is no longer the farmland,’” Yan
says. Moving to Beijing, he felt that other
city dwellers saw him as a farmer; in his
home village, others see him as an urban
sophisticate. When asked to pick a side,
he is unequivocal: he belongs to the
farmland. “I’ve always said I have noth-
ing to do with Beijing, I’m still a peasant.”H
enan, his birthplace, was
also the centre of a major
medical scandal that, like
coronavirus, was first
hushed up by local offi-
cials. Yan’s 2006 novelDream of Ding Vil-
lageis based on the Aids crisis in Henan,
which erupted after Yan had left for the
army. The disease spread through gov-
ernment-run blood stations, to which
villagers sold their blood. The outbreak
was exacerbated by a political cover-up.
In the novel, a character switches from
trading blood for profit to selling coffins
as villagers start to die.
“After this epidemic, let us become
people with the ability to remember” is
the title of Yan’s recent essay on the poli-
tics of coronavirus in China, originallygiven as a lecture to his literature stu-
dents at Hong Kong University of Sci-
ence and Technology. Yan exhorts them
to remember Li Wenliang, the doctor
punished by police for warning about
the novel virus that had cropped up in
his Wuhan hospital, and who later died
from it, causing an outcry across China.
“If we can’t be whistleblowers like Li
Wenliang, then let us become those who
will hear the whistle,” writes Yan. He
tells me the coronavirus has made him
more focused on the need for tolerance
of “benevolent disagreement” in public
discourse. At the start of his writing
career, in the 1990s, the state newspaper
the People’s Daily would publicly debate
the pros and cons of capitalism and
socialism. Such a diversity of ideas is
unthinkable today, Yan says.
The night before I met him in the
park, I had stayed up writing about Bei-
jing’s unprecedented expulsion of at
least 13 American journalists, and
texted him saying this was on my mind.
“I feel the nation’s gates are closing,”
Yan responded. He is a mixture of dia-
tribes and shrugs: in a second he goes
from ardently decrying the small-mind-
edness of some Chinese patriots to
calmly stating that the lessons of
Wuhan, too, will pass, “and be forgotten
just like Sars was”.
Yan still believes that writing can
change the world — another recent
essay speculates about whether Ausch-
witz might have been closed earlier if
the poems of those interned had
reached the outside world. I press him
repeatedly, but he refuses to say how
writing could save the world now, as if
being too explicit about one’s dreams
would cause them to disappear, follow-
ing the logic of his magical novels.
“Propaganda is a nuclear bomb,” Yan
says, making me think of misinforma-
tion multiplying and spreading from
person to person, like nuclear fission, or
a virus. Yet he is careful not to criticise
the writers who work for state media:
“When it comes to survival, who can
blame anyone?” he says.
Many of his literature students will
go on to work for state media or the
government, as he once did. “I simply
tell my students, ‘At least don’t write
lies,’” he says. But is the selective pres-
entation of facts — the most skilledLunch with the FTYan Lianke
‘Literature needs
a rebellious spirit’
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