Long march of Chi Zijian

Long march of Chi Zijian

Long march of Chi Zijian
Thu, Jun 10, 2004,

The prolific, prize-winning Chinese writer is paid a salary to work. But it hasn't dented her imagination, writes Rosita Boland

Food is never very far away from conversation in China. It's 10 a.m. on a Sunday in Beijing's Chaoyang District, and the restaurant table in front of me is dense with bowls and plates of delicious Chinese dishes. Writer Chi Zijian, who reads at the Dublin Writers' Festival this month, has done the ordering and the first dish she presses on us is a bowl of huge beans. They are a speciality of the area of China she comes from, Heilongjiang Province.

Every time I attempt to take out my notebook, Zijian shakes her head. Through her translator, Wu Xinwei, Zijian makes it clear where priorities lie - eat first, talk later.

It's over half an hour before I am finally allowed to open my notebook and start the interview. That's a lot of hospitality - especially given the earliness of the hour, and the fact I unwisely had breakfast before leaving the hotel.

Chi Zijian looks a decade younger than her 40 years. She flicks her long glossy black hair at intervals, pours green tea for everyone, and proffers her business card the instant we all sit down - as does Xinwei. Giving and receiving a business card in China - using both hands, each time, for respect - is practically the first thing everyone does on a first meeting. After a week, I realise why: it's so you don't have to ask anyone straight out what job they do, they just look at your card and vice-versa and you both know instantly.

I try to think of any Irish writers I know who carry business cards, and can think of none. But being a writer in China can also literally mean being paid to do a job.

Chi Zijian has written "about 40" books: short stories and novels. She is a member of the Chinese Writers' Association, and so gets paid a salary from the government, as well as earning money from royalties.

Her tally of 40 books includes a novel of 700,000 words, which was published in two parts in 2000, about 1930s China, when the Japanese invaded. The 40 books means she has one for every year of her life; an impressive statistic under any circumstances.

Among her literary prizes is the Luxun Literature Award, for the novel, Stable in Moon Light. Her last novel was published in 2003, and had a print run of 50,000.

The Suspended Sentence Fellowship, which is bringing Zijian to Ireland, was first established in 1993 by the James Joyce Foundation. It now involves a three-way literary partnership, between the Irish Writers' Centre, the Chinese Writers' Association in Beijing, and the Australian James Joyce Foundation. Writers from each of the three countries go on residencies and readings to the other two participating countries. Zijian is this year's Chinese Fellow.

This year, for the first time, translation has formed part of the Suspended Sentence programme. Figments of the Supernatural, a special selection of six of Zijian's short stories, has just been translated into English by Australian Simon Patton; the first of her works to be published in English. By the time she reads at the Dublin Writers' Festival, Figments of the Supernatural will be on the shelves. However, in Beijing, in mid-May, the books are still in Australia. Hence two long stories, Fine Rain at Dusk on Grieg's Sea and Willow Patterns, end up being faxed to me in China from Zijian's agent in Australia; which makes it a kind of literary treasure hunt across three continents.

The stories are very good indeed. Fine Rain at Dusk on Grieg's Sea is set partially in Norway, partially in a small rural Chinese town called Mona. It is the story of a Chinese woman who visits the former residence of Norwegian composer, Edvard Grieg, and who is reminded in the process of the mysterious sounds and movements which occurred in the rented house in Mona, where she had lived and wrote for some months. The house is haunted by the ghost of the dead owner, who had loved music and the sounds that nature gifted to him:

"In spring when the ice thawed and the snow melted, he used to arrange empty containers around the house to catch the water that dripped from the eaves as the snow on the roof melted. These containers came in all shapes and sizes; some were made of earthenware, others of china, plastic or glass so the sounds they made as they caught the drips were all different from each other . . . variations on pitch and the graceful, random order of their occurrence made music of the sounds."

The protagonist is haunted by the ghost making musical sounds, while she attempts to write late at night, or sleep. She cannot settle into the place or her work. She arranges an exorcism, which doesn't last: the sounds return. But later, on the other side of the world, in Grieg's house, she has a powerful epiphany about music, and the people who have made it.

The strength in the writing is in its quirky eeriness, and its confident and lyrical descriptions of the rural landscape.

Zijian has a poet's eye and a feeling for places. The stories also feel both modern and old together; a blend of classical Chinese style and contemporary writing. The dialogue is contemporary, but everything else seems to belong to a different style of writing, and yet it somehow works, and surprises and moves as it does.


The feel for landscape and the observations of rural life, both in this story and Willow Patterns, come across so convincingly that I ask if she comes from rural China.

"Miss Chi comes from a small village, called Mohe, with just 1,000 people," translates Xinwei.

For China, this is unusually small: China is a huge country, full of huge cities, where a near-permanent fug of smog hangs over much of the exhausted land. Beijing alone has 80 kilometres of suburbs and a population of some 15 million.

"Could Miss Chi have written these stories if she had been brought up in urban China?" When this is translated, Zijian laughs, and her eyes open wide.

"According to her, in childhood, nature had a very strong power over her. She had a desire to talk to the nature. If she was living in Beijing when growing up, she could not be a writer. It is true; the small village has informed her work." Zijian nods her head intently, for emphasis.

Zijian now lives in a part of China infamous for its winter sub-zero temperatures; the Nangang District of Haerbin. To try to attract visitors to one of the most inhospitable parts of China, there is an annual international ice-sculpture competition, where massive pieces of ice are sculpted into human and animal form around street lights, which glow surreally within, like strange organs.

Willow Patterns has a different atmosphere altogether from the dream-like incantations of Fine Rain at Dusk on Grieg's Sea. There is a brutality in the telling of this story of subtle, but insidious, cruelties between a couple who should not be together. The nastier things get between wife Cheng Jinlan and husband Pei Shaofa, the more beautiful the images are that shine out:

"The branches of the summer river willows were no longer red but a vivid emerald green. The water by the willows flowed unhurriedly, while the blazing sunlight was so excited by the ice-cold water that it stamped its feet, light floating on the surface." In the next scene, Jinlan is firing rocks through the window of the wine-shop where her bullying, errant husband is drinking, and she is smashing all around her.

What is somewhat surprising about Zijian is the fact she speaks no English at all, although she has spent time in Australia, and has been to Ireland before; in 2000, as part of a Chinese delegation organised by the Chinese Ministry of Culture.

But the really astonishing thing is that the name of Jung Chang means nothing to her.

"Jung Chang?" Both Zijian and Xinwei look blank.

"Wild Swans," I try. "Possibly the most famous book published in the west about China in recent years." And not, by the way, banned in China: I saw several copies in a bookshop near Sanlitun, without even going out of my way to look.

Xinwei takes out her dictionary and looksfor "Wild Swans". She doesn't find it. They both seem genuinely surprised. So am I. How can it be possible that a prolific contemporary Chinese writer, who has travelled abroad and also participated in residencies abroad, has never discovered this 1990s publishing phenomenon? Or that nobody else seems to have asked her the same question? But perhaps if you are paid by the government-funded Chinese Writers' Association to write books, there are some things it is better either not to know, or to admit knowing.

Chi Zijian reads with Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and Goh Poh Seng at the Dublin Writers Festival on June 18th at 3 p.m., at the Project