Chinese Literature Today

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Can Xue Interview

Jonathan Griffith

To cite this article: Jonathan Griffith (2010) Can Xue Interview, Chinese Literature Today, 1:1,
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To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2010.11833917

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 Can Xue Interview
Jonathan Griffith

I
first met Can Xue in April 2009 at the reading for the New Hunan Daily News before 1957. My mother
her newly published novel Five Spice Street at the worked at the newspaper too. We were a big family—
92nd Street Y in New York City. Can Xue, whose eight children and a grandmother lived together in
pseudonym means “the dirty snow that refuses to that house.
melt,” and I had already been in correspondence after I wrote In China, all the newspapers belonged to the Party,
a letter to her via the publisher of her wonderful story col- so my father was a very honest Party member and a
lection Blue Light in the Sky. A few weeks after I sent
the letter, an e-mail from Can Xue appeared in my in-box,
which was so typical of my experience with this important
Chinese writer. She not only answered my rather awkward
questions with humility and clarity, but she also pushed my
thinking to another level and offered to continue the dialogue.
Can Xue’s diamond clarity is something that distinguishes
all her work. Wrestling with it brings the reader/participant
to his or her own sense of clarity. It’s dialogue as a dance that
requires, as she says in this interview, initiative and effort on
the part of the reader, and it can at turns be both very serious
and hilariously funny.
This interview began over a wonderful weekend of con-
versation at Can Xue’s apartment in Beijing in September
2009 and continued through numerous e-mails, more discus-
sion, and more clarification. The apartment where Can Xue
and her husband live is part of a larger group of apartments
set off from the busy Beijing traffic. The place is quiet—not
what I’m used to from my previous visits to Shanghai and
Beijing—modest, comfortable, and wonderfully full of light
since the apartment spans the width of the building, giving
views on both sides to the courtyards below. The walls are
white and unadorned, a bit of a surprise since Can Xue has a
passion for art, but there is something right about this as well
for a writer who strives for what she calls “breaking through.”
Several bookcases hold her book collection, which includes
volumes of her work, those by her favorite writers, and books
of art. She had prepared for the weekend by writing notes on
one sheet of paper both in Chinese characters and in English.
Can Xue is intense but extremely patient, and she laughs very serious man. And he studied Western philosophy
chinese literature today summer 2010

very easily, putting people at ease.—Jonathan Griffith
Jonathan Griffith: You were born in 1953 in a par-
ticular time and place in history. What were the cir-
cumstances of your childhood? What were you like
as a child?
Can Xue: I was born in a “revolutionary” family. My
82 father was the director and also editorial director of
(mainly Marxism-Leninism) very hard. From my
impressions, my family was a very orthodox family,
as most Chinese families were at that time—very
possibly the most orthodox among the orthodox
families. That means every member in this family was
very honest with each other and never told a lie. We
shared delicious foods, candies, and fruits very fairly,
and our parents were supposed to divide them for us
impartially. The most important thing for us kids was
studying, and we seldom talked about material things.
But that also meant our father’s and mother’s words
were forever correct. We children should listen to
them at any time and any place. And we should not
have a different opinion. Actually, that was the social
atmosphere in the 1950s and ’60s, an atmosphere
that was modest, sincere, and idealistic. But at the
same time, it was very depressing and full of a
dictatorial spirit. It made a child like me always very
nervous (afraid of breaking the rules) and extremely
introverted.
In 1957, my father was identified as an “Ultra-
Rightist” by the Party during the Anti-Rightists
movement. Our big family moved to a very small
apartment (just two small rooms) in the suburb of
Changsha City. Behind our apartment was Yue Lu
Mountain, a beautiful mountain with a lot of trees,
some streams, and many old beautiful graves. So
although that was during the Great Leap Forward
when people could not get enough food to eat and
families like ours were extremely poor and miserable,
for us kids, going to the mountain was paradise. If
it was not raining hard or in cold winter, we were
on the mountain almost every day—looking for
edible wild herbs, wild fruits, mushrooms; collecting
firewood; planting vegetables; or just playing. So we
were very hungry every day, but our spiritual life was
so rich, so colorful.
These were my young days in the ’50s and ’60s. I
think there were four special things that helped mold
my character: the idealism of the ’50s and ’60s; living
among nature in those years of crucial importance
in my childhood, which let me know what beauty
was; the fact that our family fell to the bottom of the
society, which made me experience life as a common
person and not as anyone special; and the family
atmosphere, with its peremptoriness yet at the same
time extreme attention to our spiritual life—these
two caused me to be both painfully introverted and
to bestir myself.
JG: I love the foreword of Dialogues in Paradise, “A
Summer Day in the Beautiful South.” It’s incredibly
evocative of exactly what you are talking about,
the feeling of paradise on the mountain during
this time of your youth, yet, reader beware, what’s
being described is incredibly painful—the ever-
present threat of starvation, the ways your family
tricked yourselves to survive in a time of incredible
deprivation. The essay is very funny yet heartrending.
After all, your grandmother essentially starved herself
so that her grandchildren would survive. How did
you survive with your spirit intact?
CX: This question would have to have a very long
answer. I would just like to give some main points here.
How did I survive? Or, how did my spiritual world
come into being?
As you know, I grew up in a family that was full
of idealism and peremptoriness. So from a very young
age (two or three), what could mesmerize me most
were spiritual things. I invented all sorts of stories—
warm, beautiful, adventurous stories for myself since
I was two or three years old. Usually it would be like
this: as I sat still, with my grandmother in an adults’
meeting, or with my dad, or sometimes just by myself,
the interesting stories would come to my mind. I loved
those stories intensely, so I thought about them all the
time and was reluctant to give them up. I still remember
some plots of the stories from when I was three.
When I was a little bit older (four to eight years
old), I detected spiritual materials (usually at home)
like a hunting dog—things like a colorful rag, a chalk,
a beautiful new button or an ugly old button, a glass
ball, a peach pit, a knitting needle, a crude painting, and
so on. All of them could become my materials. I told
myself (or sometimes my younger brother or a certain
friend) those stories again and again. But most of the
time, I just kept a silence and told them in my heart
over and over. I was secretly excited for a long time. At
that time, a family like ours couldn’t seek any material
things. So my spiritual seeking was exceptionally
persevering.
As soon as I learned to read, I fell in love with
it. When I read primary literature stories, I began
an undertaking—playing the parts of my stories in
my mind. Those parts—sometimes they were from
my reading materials, sometimes they were just my
inventions—but if I loved a certain character in a book
very much, I acted that character many times, and was
moved deeply by the acting.
Language is a magical thing. When a child who
is very sensitive to spiritual things enters that world,
his or her imagination will proliferate wildly, and
performances will become his or her real life. So
although I didn’t begin writing formally until I was
thirty, I gave performances all the time. And only these
sorts of performances could satisfy my needs. All the
chinese literature today summer 2010
other things were at most second-best compared with
this.
Back to your question: How did I survive? I
survived through my spiritual performances. And I will
do so in the future. I think that spiritual things have to
be realized through one’s acting. One has to practice it
every day. You practice, you survive. And your stories
continue to proliferate. If someday you totally give up,
you will die soon. 83
 JG: Deprivation in your case in some ways may have
allowed independent thinking. I know that your
formal schooling was stopped at a young age, yet you
became highly educated in an idiosyncratic way that
seems critical for your formation as a writer. Was this
the influence of your father? Do you think it made
you more independent?
CX: Yes, I agree that I got my knowledge in an
idiosyncratic way and that it was critical for my
writing. And it was indeed mainly because of the
influence of my father. After I finished my primary
schooling (five-and-a-half years), if I wanted to go to
a middle school, it was very possible. But I thought
that if I went, maybe there would be scorn, insults,
and all sorts of difficult things waiting for me at the
school. I was such a thoughtful kid, always burning
with anxieties. That’s a heavy burden on my heart. So I
complained of it (not without some exaggerations) to
my father, whom I loved most in our family. My father
sighed and agreed with me. He said that I could stay
at home. I remember how relieved I felt on that day!
And although I did get a lot of advantages from not
going to school, I don’t think this [not going to school]
was critical for my formation as a writer. I think even if
I had been in school, I would still have been a writer.
For a person like me who is very sensitive to spiritual
things, whether you press her hard or give her some
freedom, she will continue her pursuing. Calvino
went to schools, and he turned his knowledge into the
fodder and methods of his literature so wonderfully.
What really matters is whether you have the strongest
desire for idealistic things. If you have, then even in
the lowest conditions, you will automatically change
your environment to serve your ideals. And you will
practice your skills for pursuing it every day. As time
goes by, your ideals will take shape.
My father protected my desires. He always
encouraged me to read. He even taught me some
Western philosophy and history for a time. I think
his example is always in my heart. My view is this:
Recognize your desire; protect it and let it exert
rationally. Then you will have independent thinking.
But people usually don’t know what they want at a
chinese literature today summer 2010
young age; how can they choose? In my experience,
reading some literature and philosophy will help you
recognize your desire.
JG: This reminds me of another comment you made
at the 92nd Street Y about the internal spring that
coils tighter and tighter, then springs back, in essence
powering your art. The point you were making was
84 that the suffering of those early years was transformed
by this spiritual action. The stronger the internal
pressure, the more powerful the springing back. This
is the way of the artist. But you seem to have been
practicing this from a very young age—in the stories
you told yourself, in your recognition of spiritual
material that others might think of as common or
sordid, in your performances. Did you recognize your
experience as being unusual?
CX: My character when I was a child was inclined
toward an extremity. But I don’t think that my early
experience is unusual. Possibilities are often unlimited
for a child when she is very young. If you give her an
elegant factory-made doll, she will be mesmerized by
that doll. If you don’t give her anything, maybe she
will find something by herself—a flake of wood, an
old shoe, a peach pit, or something like these. I think
maybe the imagination for the latter is nearer the
essence—the core—of aesthetic activities. Because the
material is prosaic and modest, it opens an unlimited
space for a child’s imagination. In my view, the best
literature always uses material that has the most
universality. Some advanced literature uses material
that borders on coming from a vacuum—maybe we
could call it “pure imagination.” So I think I was just
very lucky at that very early time because I had the
chance to come very close to the essence of beauty
and was always engaging in an aesthetic activity.
That’s also why material is not a problem for Can
Xue’s writing. Actually, I can develop stories from
any material. This way of writing is totally different
from the way of realistic writing. I think of modern
people, think of why a lot of them are so lazy. Maybe
mass-manufactured products kill their capability for
imagination from when they are infants. They are lazy
now. And it seems they will be lazier and lazier in their
minds in the future.
A comment about “dirty” and “ugly”—what
is “dirty,” what is “ugly”? We children get these
conceptions from adults, from society. In a very
young child’s mind, usually she is not that concerned
about whether an object is “dirty” or “ugly.” What
she is concerned about most is whether the object is
interesting. And this standard is usually not according
to adults’ standard; it’s according to the child’s own
sense. So I think a very young child’s sense is often
the nearest to the intuition of arts or literature. But
of course it’s not equal to the real art intuition—that’s
another story.
She didn’t have beautiful toys; she only had those
“ugly” materials, which was what she was able to find
by herself. In a certain sense, she found beauty at the
same time.
JG: You say in the foreword to Dialogues in Paradise
that you began writing when you were thirty. What
triggered this sudden self-expression? What was the
writing about?
CX: The ’80s were a time when Deng Xiaoping wanted
to liberate the thinking of the Chinese. So the possibility
came to me. Before that time, it was impossible for a
person like me to get my works published. I saw the
chance and got very excited. I had written some diaries
and some paragraphs for some stories. I was a housewife
and a mother, and my family was very poor. If I wanted
to put my time in on my writing, I had to double my
efforts first. That’s why my husband and I learned to
make clothes by ourselves and started a workshop to
teach others. I practiced writing whenever I had time.
Actually, it was not a sudden self-expression. For a long
time, something had formed inside me. I felt that I had
a lot of words to say; I longed to communicate. I was
sure that this sort of communication belonged to the
world of language and that I was a part of that world
almost every day.
What was the writing about? Very soon, I found
my style. I still write in that style today. I think what I
wanted to express is the essence of the human being.
Or to say it another way: expressing the possibilities
of the human being as human being. The writing was
about this at that time. And it is today. In a sense, all
the characters and backgrounds in my works have to
serve that purpose. They are not social people, and
the backgrounds are not political either. I endow
them with deeper meaning. The processed materials
are something that I metamorphose in my “vacuum-
processing workshop.” But this way of creating is not
unusual anymore today. A lot of modern artists have
practiced it time and again. I was very surprised when I
was in the United States in April 2009, when I told some
of my readers that my novel [the English translation of
Five Spice Street, which had been published in spring
2009 by Yale University Press] was not a political thing,
they didn’t agree with me. Of course, you could see it
from that perspective if you like. But if you are a person
who has great interest in spiritual things, and you are
not satisfied with superficial plots in works, then you
have to train yourself (I mean come into contact with
modernist art and literature again and again), and turn
your perspective toward another direction, put yourself
into the works, ask yourself, ”What am I like?” when
you appreciate the works.
My writing is like something Calvino and Bruno
Schulz described: using air to weave transparent cloth—
or using “nothing” to make transparent clothes. We
artists get our material from the worldly world. But
we turn these materials into transparent things, almost
as if from a vacuum, and use them to build up our
transparent palaces. That’s a magical process.
JG: You speak of Calvino and Schulz, and you frequently
cite Kafka, Borges, and Dante as being strong influences
in your development. In fact, you have published
commentaries in China on these writers.What is it that
these writers share that you feel such affinity for?
CX: I think these writers belong to the first rank
of writers, including Goethe, Shakespeare, Beckett,
Hölderlin, and Rilke, among others. What their works
share is that all of them have the same subject—the
deep nature of human beings. You can discern the
structure of spirit in each work if you read them again
and again carefully. This structure is also in our first-
rank artworks. I call the structure “a projection of
humanity.” It appears in aesthetic objects. And it works
during all your aesthetic activities.
I have studied the above spiritual phenomenon
for a long time and have written six books analyzing
it through these classical writers’ works. I have become
more and more sure that it’s the structure that decides
the cutting degree of depth of our literature. My
standard about first-rank work is whether the work
has this structure in it. If it has, the aesthetic activities
will become very exciting. The reading will become an
adventure, a rebuilding of oneself. But if the structure
does not exist in the work, the reading for me will
become very boring and I can’t continue on for
another page. Of course, often the structure is very
obscure in a writer’s work. And it can be concealed by
layer upon layer of plot. Sometimes it can even take me
several months to find it! But I always think that kind
of labor is a worthy one. Once you do it, you will see
the light of God. That’s really a wonderful moment.
For the appreciation of readers, these works have
the same characteristic—readers can’t get anything
from superficial plots. All the descriptions serve a great
subject. So what can we do when we face such a
work? In my experience, meditating is the best way to
approach this sort of work.You read and reread it; then
you close your eyes. Suddenly the structure floats on
chinese literature today summer 2010
the sentences! But most of the time, you will fail. If you
fail, don’t give up. You should assemble your spiritual
force for a second attempt! If you fail every time, you
should put aside the book and read other modernist
literature. But you shouldn’t forget it entirely in order
to try again in the future.
These works make one feel full of pain. But after
your painful course, you may get the most enjoyable
things in the world! If you are a person who would 85
 like to seek a high quality of spiritual life, you will take
part in these sorts of aesthetic activities again and again
voluntarily and never feel bored.
JG: When did you start publishing, and what was the
response? You were clearly writing a different kind of
literature from anyone else in China.
CX: I published my first story in a small magazine in
Changsha City in 1985 through my friends in literary
circles. At that time, the movement of liberating the
thinking of China was a rising high tide. People
around China were still denouncing the Great Cultural
Revolution. So naturally, some critics in China
read my stories as a memory of the Great Cultural
Revolution. Especially because of my unusual aesthetic
way, they were inclined to treat my “ugly” characters
as the oppressors in the Great Cultural Revolution,
and treated the backgrounds in my fiction as the
backgrounds in the Cultural Revolution. Their articles
always used words like “denounce,” “allude to,” “satire,”
and so on. Some old leaders in the literary circles didn’t
like Can Xue’s works very much. And they criticized
the works, said that they were too “cold-blooded,” too
“malformed.” But there were also some really good
readers then. They were very excited about my works
and read carefully every one of them that appeared
in the magazines. It’s they who gave me a great
consolation. And they are my readers still today.
At that time, publishing was a big problem for me
in China.The publishing house did not want to publish
my collection of stories, although I was able to publish
stories from the collection in a few magazines. My first
collection was published in Taiwan. It was my good
friend Jon Solomon who took the manuscript there.
 CX: I’m very happy to answer the question. I always
JG: Of your books, we have available in English
Dialogues in Paradise, the two novellas Yellow Mud Street
and Old Floating Cloud, The Embroidered Shoes, Blue
Light in the Sky, and the latest, a novel from the ’80s,
Five Spice Street. I understand that Yale is coming out
with another novel and with your commentary on
chinese literature today summer 2010
Kafka at a later date. Yet in China you have published
much more than that. Is the work that’s being translated
from a specific period of your career? What are we
English-speaking readers missing about your full body
of work because of what’s available to us?
CX: I think these works that you mentioned above can
provide a good outline of my fiction. The five books
86 are about one-fifth of all my fiction. Some of them are
early ones, some are later ones. The latest is Blue Light
in the Sky. Several stories from it are from as recent as
2001. Five Spice Street is my early novel that was written
in 1988. But I think it’s one of Can Xue’s representative
works. Three of my books were published by my best
friend Jonathan Brent, who is the editorial director at
Yale University Press. Another two will come out from
him shortly, including the commentary about Kafka.
I think Jonathan has the deepest insight about pure
literature, and he is a very good writer himself, too.
Writing commentary is a big and important part
of my work. I hope when my commentary on Kafka
comes out, things will be much better for me in the
United States. I have found that some of my American
readers have difficulty understanding my works. They
are not familiar with my style. I gave some clues to
readers in a few interviews last spring when I visited
Yale and New York City. But that’s not enough. I’m
going to do some more works about this. So when you
recommended building a website at MIT, how happy
I was! I agree with you that the website should be for
the readers. And I’m going to give information about
my creative life continuously to it.
JG: I was interested in your comment about the study
of philosophy being as much a mirror as literature is.
I know that your older brother, Deng Xiaomang, is a
famous philosopher in China, and you’ve said that your
father read philosophy very diligently every day and
taught you philosophy as a child. It seems there is a very
strong bent toward philosophy in your family. Does the
study of philosophy engage you in a different way than,
say, reading literary writers of the first rank? Do you
and your brother see the world in the same way, or are
you very different?
think that the current world literature is more and
more philosophical. The two are flowing together.
This tendency is especially obvious in the works of
the first-rank writers like Kafka, Borges, Calvino,
Beckett, Schulz, Goethe, and so on. All of them are
very familiar with philosophy. And their works are full
of philosophical sense. On the other hand, philosophy
today is nearer and nearer to poetry. I think literature
and philosophy are the two legs of human beings. They
are two ways and two world outlooks. One belongs
to rational cognition; another belongs to perceptual
cognition. The current position is a result of a naturally
developing course because in ancient times the two
were in a family.
Yes, our family has a very strong bent toward
Western philosophy. My father was a person who
had a high degree of rational consciousness. This
was very unusual among Chinese at the time. My
brother Deng Xiaomang has inherited and developed
my father’s spiritual quality. He has studied Western
philosophy for forty or more years and has been
building his own system of philosophy in recent years.
He calls his philosophy “life philosophy.” In China, he
has published a lot of works and has attracted many
readers among young people. As for me, I haven’t
read philosophy since I became a grown-up because
I love literature much more. I am always reading
literary works—I never stop. I think I have gained my
philosophical knowledge mainly from these first-rank
literature writers. And the knowledge enters into my
works imperceptibly. I also think maybe the knowledge
I received when I was very young can be found in my
works. But since last year, I have tried to study the
aesthetic activities in literary works. And I have read a
book of aesthetics by my brother and some articles by
the Western philosophers. We discussed these things.
Suddenly we found that we two had pursued the same
thing for so many years! And although our opinions
are not always the same in one thing or another, our
world outlook is definitely the same. So I also would
like to call my literature “life literature.” This kind of
literature is different from Western literature. And I
believe that it is not pure Eastern literature at all.
JG: I know when I visit China, I hear a lot about
young people’s pursuit of money. Of course I know
it’s a generalization, and the main cities I have visited
in China are Shanghai and, to a lesser extent, Beijing,
where I see young people in business schools. Yet you
seem to be seeing another side to Chinese youth in
their attraction to your brother’s “life philosophy”
and to your “life literature.” You’ve mentioned in
interviews before that young people are your primary
readers. What do you think young Chinese readers are
seeing in your work?
CX: Since China converted to a market economy, I
have sold many copies of my works. And I also have a
celebrity blog on the Internet. So from the information
I gathered, I know that most of my readers are young
people between 20 and 45. I’m very happy about the
phenomenon because that means there is reason to
hope for its continuance.
Maybe the reasons they choose my works are
these: Although the time is full of material things and
most of the young people are pursuing money hard,
not everybody is like that. China is a country that
has a long-standing history of cultural self-cultivation
through literature, history, philosophy, and so on.
Nowadays, mainstream literature can’t satisfy these
young people’s needs anymore. They want to develop
their personalities freely. That means they want to
pursue spiritual things. Some of them said that they
sought and sought, and at last they met Can Xue. Of
course I have done a great deal of writing to introduce
Can Xue to them, too.
Can Xue’s works are very difficult and full of
force that repels readers. But in the past ten years, I
have found some excellent commentaries about Can
Xue on the Internet here. Sometimes a certain young
reader even tries to write commentaries that address all
of my works. They read them very carefully and take
the reading as an undertaking.
JG: When you say that there is a force in Can Xue’s
work that “repels” readers, I understand it on one level.
Can Xue doesn’t allow readers to have their world
confirmed for them, but instead forces the reader
into these untenable situations. For some readers, this
will seem like a repelling force. For others, they come
to Can Xue for exactly this because they know that
their work as a reader to break through the untenable
situation will lead to greater understanding. But you
may be saying something else?
CX: Yes, you are right! As you said, on one level, my
works have a force that repels the readers who are
halted by their “conventional reading.”To these readers,
my works don’t provide grounds for continuing their
reading. So they are repelled outside my world. On the
second level, the repelling force is a very welcome one
for readers who want to find strength for their life and
are used to interrogating themselves often, to analyzing
themselves in a clear-minded, uncompromising way.
Because when you are reading, you have to find the
grounds by yourself. You read and reread, back and
forth; at last, you build up your own image, or your
own self through the works. Superficial plots repel you;
you resist the repelling, and enter into a deeper level.
This kind of reading is always like that. 
An extended version of this interview can be found on our
website: www.ou.edu/CLT
chinese literature today summer 2010
87