The Road Not Taken: An Interview with Xue Yiwei

Abstract

In this interview, Lin Gang and Xue Yiwei discuss the latter’s thirty years of literature more or less chronologically, beginning with his first published novella in 1988 and concluding with the publication in 2020 of “King Lear” and Nineteen-Seventy-Nine. Xue reflects on the relationship between his life and his work, his views on literature, and the difficulties he has faced in his career as a writer.

Notes

1 Translator’s note: The German scholar alluded to here is sinologist Wolfgang Kubin. Although his critique was actually only levelled at specific writers, the misattributed sentiment gained purchase among Chinese readers and has been called “contemporary Chinese literature is rubbish theory.”

2 Translator’s note: These novels with chapters were the first literary works that resemble the modern novel to appear in China. They include Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Dream of the Red Chamber.

3 Translator’s note: This was a phrase used by Mao Zedong in his famous Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art in 1943 to criticize bourgeois literature.

4 Translator’s note: The first of these quotes comes from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the second from Li Bai’s poem, Bring in the Wine.

5 Translator’s note: That is, Mao Zedong.

6 Translator’s note: The Long March is the term used to describe the long, treacherous journey that Communist forces took on foot from Jiangxi Province to the Northwest in 1934.

7 Sun Yat-sen is reported to have said this during a speech.

8 Translator’s note: Cadre schools were official training centers that were established in the Maoist period in China where people received training in administrative and cultural affairs as well as Marxism-Leninism. During the Cultural Revolution they also became the centers for collective reform-through-labor programs designed for intellectuals who were sent to the countryside to learn from the peasants.

9 E. M. Forster, "What I Believe," in Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1972), 66.

10 Translator’s note: The model operas were a series of theatrical pieces loosely based on traditional Chinese opera that were written during the Cultural Revolution. Bourgeois themes were replaced with tales of revolutionary struggle.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gang Lin

Lin Gang is a professor at Guangzhou’s Sun Yat-sen University and was a visiting scholar at Harvard University from 1990 to 1991. Together with the author Liu Zaifu 刘再复 he has published The Tradition and Chinese People (Chuantong yu Zhongguoren 传统与中国人) and Crime and Literature (Zui yu Wenxue 罪与文学), and his individually published works include Symbol Psyche Literature (Fuhao Xinli Wenxue 符号 心理 文学), Conversations of Three Drunks (San Zuiren Tanhualu 三醉人谈话录), Utterances and Paperwork (Koushu yu Antou 口述与案头), Research on Annotations of Ming and Qing Fiction (Mingqingzhiji Xiaoshuo Pingdianxue zhi Yanjiu 明清之际小说评点学之研究), On Emperor Qin’s Campaign Against South Yue Kingdom (Qinzhengnanyue Lungao 秦征南越论稿), and Four Theses on Poetic Will (Shizhi Silun 诗志四论).

Stephen Nashef

Stephen Nashef was born in Glasgow and lives in Beijing, where he is currently studying for a PhD in Chinese Islamic philosophy. His translations of Xue Yiwe’s novel, Celia, Misoka, I, and a collection of the poetry of Ma Yan, I Name Him Me, are forthcoming.