CANR
WORK TITLE: Mother River
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE:
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COUNTRY: China
NATIONALITY: Chinese
LAST VOLUME: CANR 214
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born May 30, 1953, in Changsha, Hunan Province, People’s Republic of China; daughter of Jun Hong Deng (a newspaper editor) and Ying Li; married Yong Lu (a tailor), 1978; children: Lang Yuang Lu (a son).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Also works with husband as tailor.
MEMBER:Chinese Writers Association, Hunan Writers Association.
AWARDS:First Literary Award, Beijing University; Special Award, Zhong Shang Literature, 1988; Best Translated Book Award, 2015, for The Last Lover; nominated for 2019 Nobel Prize.
WRITINGS
Also author of a novel, Breakthrough, 1988, as well as novellas and stories.
SIDELIGHTS
Can Xue has been called “China’s leading proponent of experimental fiction,” by a contributor to Time Out Hong Kong. “Cerebral Can Xue commands a disjointed striking prose, with jostling images engendering different realities,” the contributor added. The author of numerous volumes of short stories, novellas, and novels in Chinese, Can Xue has had several published in English translation, including the 2009 novel, Five Spice Street.
Born Xiao Hua Deng in 1953, the author writes under the name Can Xue, which means “dirty snow,” a “combination of purity and messiness,” as she told the Time Out Hong Kong contributor. Her father was an editor of a large paper in Hunan province until he was denounced as a rightist and lost his position. Can Xue left school at thirteen when the Chinese public schools closed during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a Maoist mass movement designed to overthrow an older generation of communist leaders, which resulted in ten years of social and political turmoil, from 1966 to 1976. However, her father encouraged her to continue studying on her own, reading philosophy and working together to interpret it. She was also encouraged in her writing endeavors by her father. Meanwhile, for ten years she had to work in an iron works, and she later taught herself to be a seamstress. She and her husband worked together as self-employed tailors for many years.
Can Xue explained in her interview with Time Out Hong Kong what experimental fiction means to her: “Taking yourself as the experiment. It’s not starting with an outline, it’s an entire system of writing. It eschews surface-level material and realism for paying attention to the inside life, the performance of the soul.”
The earliest English publication for Can Xue was Dialogues in Paradise, a collection of thirteen short stories that “radically departs from the realism … of her compatriots,” according to Publishers Weekly contributor Penny Kaganoff. The gathered tales, according to Kaganoff, “reflect an interior vision in which conflict is represented impressionistically, symbolically.” Her next translated work was Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas, comprising, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “two stubbornly obscure novellas about contemporary China that veil political and social commentary in symbolic, psychotic grotesquerie.” In one of the tales, “Yellow Mud Street,” the miserable lives of the inhabitants of that neighborhood are told in symbolic and metaphorical terms, in part to avoid political condemnation and in part out of a desire to go against the current of Chinese realism.
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, John Domini felt the two novellas “offer nightmare images of life under a punishing regime.” Domini concluded of Old Floating Cloud: “Art that emerges from harsh circumstances is sometimes called a ‘miracle.’ In Can Xue’s case, the word is appropriate as much for the work itself as for how it’s happened into print.” Similarly, Daniel J. Bauer, writing in Asian Folklore Studies, praised the work for “its mingling of the folklore elements valued by ancient Chinese storytellers and its hard-driven parabolic references.”
In her short story collection The Embroidered Shoes: Stories, the author presents “one of the most remarkable collections of short fiction published in 1997,” according to Matthew Badura in the Review of Contemporary Fiction. In the eleven tales, Can Xue tells of “characters whose identities and realities have become as indeterminate as language itself,” Badura noted.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that “the artificial meets the supernatural in this elusive collection” and felt that Xue’s insistency on pointing out the inherent unreliability of narrative tends “to drain the life from her fables.” Higher praise, though, came from Artforum International contributor Kate Bernheimer, who noted of the collection: “Can Xue fuses the absurd with the depressed, the political with the asocial, the beautiful with the disgusting, the magical with the willed.” Bernheimer called Can Xue’s characters “brilliantly crazed. They seduce and elude, defying resolution.” Writing in the New York Times, Lisa Michaels thought that in this collection, Can Xue “offers fanciful language and plenty of action, much of it bizarre.” Michaels further observed: “The best of these tales have the compression of dark fables.”
In Blue Light in the Sky & Other Stories, Can Xue offers more dreamscape stories of reality and surreality in Communist China. Writing for the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Danielle Dutton felt that beginning one of Can Xue’s stories, readers “enter a landscape that, like a dream, is both familiar and otherworldly, the peculiar and the banal combining in such a way as to push everything a little off-balance.” For a Publishers Weekly contributor, Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories is an “enigmatic collection.”
Five Spice Street is Can Xue’s first novel to be published in English. It tells of a mysterious Madam X who seems to rule the street named in the title. Her background and age are a mystery to the other inhabitants of the street, but one thing that is not contested is the effortless way she controls people and events. It is known that there is a romance between her and Mr. Q, but beyond that Madam X remains a cipher until the equally mysterious “Widow” appears on the scene and begins asking about the two, reading their letters, searching their rooms, and making generalizations, mostly unfounded, about Madam X and Mr. Q.
Writing for Booklist, Allison Block called Five Spice Street “prickly and provocative,” and she said the novel “poses penetrating questions about the search for identity and the definition of self.” Similar praise came from a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who termed the novel a “lovely surrealist romp.” For Library Journal contributor Shirley N. Quan, Five Spice Street is an “erudite work,” and one “requiring great patience, study, and discussion.” Reviewing the work for the Web site Words without Borders, Brendan Hughes called it a “novel that is by turns confounding, comic, and sharp in its portrayal of communal life on a small street in an unnamed country (but which bears an unmistakable resemblance to China).”
Can Xue once told CA:
“I can write wherever and whenever I find a sheet of paper, a pen, and a little time. The most important thing to my writing is criticism from others. In fact, my own literary works are full of self-reflexive critiques. This may be unique, at least in China. I hope that future critics will get at the roots of this characteristic.”
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Xue’s Frontier, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping and first published in China in 2008, follows up her award-winning novel The Last Lover. Frontier blends magical realism with portraits of daily life. Thirty-year-old Liujin grew up in the surreal Pebble Town, at the base of Snow Mountain, on the frontier of civilization. When her parents leave, she’s alone and has to care for herself for the first time in her life. She earns money selling fabric. Pebble Town is populated by people who are drawn to it as a place where they can fit in, like her uncle, a bachelor janitor, and orphans, and by a bevy of animals, such as snow leopards, wolves, cats, and geckos, that have dreamlike qualities. Liujin hears voices and has hallucinatory visions.
“Xue’s lack of connective sentences and transitions makes it difficult to predict where the narrative will progress from one paragraph to the next. The daily experiences of the people described in Pebble Town read like a series of flash fictions or vignettes,” according to World Literature Today reviewer Melissa Beck. “This story is so layered with metaphor and mystery that one imagines it to be informed less by real-life circumstances,” according a writer in Kirkus Reviews. Frontier “is an extraordinary and deftly crafted novel that is unreservedly recommended,” declared Helen Dumont in MBR Bookwatch.
In an interview with Porochista Khakpour in Words without Borders, Xue described the meaning of Frontier: “I view the book as the most successful pursuit of freedom. The border town in the story is not the type that people see or think about in daily life, but a more real small cosmos that is described as an ideal of nature and humanity. I build up the kingdom of freedom, and everything in it…presents an immortal painting.”
Xue next published Love in the New Millennium, translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, which has themes of love’s many iterations. In episodic chapters, the story follows several women in a nameless Chinese city as they explore sex, romance, and happiness. A Si escaped the drudgery of the cotton mill to become a prostitute, but finds freedom with the money she makes and the clients she falls in love with. Long Sixiang (“homesickness”) is haunted by the death of her son and works in a brothel; and Xiao Yuan can control radios with her thoughts and flees to the Gobi Desert.
In Xue’s superb experimental novel, her “fully developed main characters…struggle to survive in an industry that normalizes fraud and exploitation,” according to Emily Park in Booklist. Xue’s prose “eschews the stylised clichés of Postmodern experimental fiction, creating a terse and lucid aesthetic that is both symbolic and incisive, oblique and witty,” reported Jay Gao in The White Review.
Barefoot Doctor, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, follows village healers as they gain knowledge and find purpose. Mrs. Yi is an herbalist in Yun Village who gathers plants at the base of Niulan Mountain for her healing draughts. She has two contenders to take after her: her young, wayward assistant Gray, who is often distracted and can’t find his path in life; and Mia from nearby Deserted Village, who wants to learn the healing arts to have meaning in her life. Xue created a mystical realm of love that flows between mankind, nature, and the land.
“In such a world each moment is freighted with possible revelation. Nothing exists passively,” said Spectator contributor Frank Lawton. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that despite the disjointed narrative, Xue “still offers profound insights about what it means to pursue and live a fulfilling life.” Xue is powerful in “transporting readers to new worlds where reality and magic are intertwined,” according to Emily Park in Booklist.
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Artforum International, November 1, 1997, Kate Bernheimer, review of The Embroidered Shoes: Stories, p. 22.
Asian Folklore Studies, April 1, 1993, Daniel J. Bauer, review of Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas, p. 221.
Booklist, March 1, 2009, Allison Block, review of Five Spice Street, p. 24; November 1, 2018, Emily Park, review of Love in the New Millennium, p. 17; August 1, 2022, Emily Park, review of Barefoot Doctor, p. 17.
Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 2017, review of Frontier.
Library Journal, September 1, 1997, Rebecca A. Stuhr, review of The Embroidered Shoes, p. 222; March 1, 2009, Shirley N. Quan, review of Five Spice Street, p. 63.
MBR Bookwatch, March 2017, Helen Dumont, review of Frontier.
New York Times, October 19, 1997, Lisa Michaels, review of The Embroidered Shoes.
New York Times Book Review, December 29, 1991, John Domini, “A Nightmare Circling Overhead,” review of Old Floating Cloud.
Publishers Weekly, June 16, 1989, Penny Kaganoff, review of Dialogues in Paradise, p. 65; September 20, 1991, review of Old Floating Cloud, p. 130; July 7, 1997, review of The Embroidered Shoes, p. 48; April 24, 2006, review of Blue Light in the Sky & Other Stories, p. 38; January 19, 2009, review of Five Spice Street, p. 39; July 18, 2022, review of Barefoot Doctor, p. 156.
Review of Contemporary Fiction, summer, 1998, Matthew Badura, review of The Embroidered Shoes, p. 239; spring, 2007, Danielle Dutton, review of Blue Light in the Sky & Other Stories, p. 170.
Spectator, Frank Lawton, November 26, 2022, Frank Lawton, review of Barefood Doctor, p. 38.
ONLINE
Quarterly Conversation, http://quarterlyconversation.com/ (May 3, 2010), John Madera, review of Five Spice Street.
Time Out Hong Kong, http://www.timeout.com.hk/ (October 26, 2009), “Can Xue Interview.”
Web del Sol, http:// webdelsol.com/ (May 3, 2010), “Can Xue.”
White Review, https://www.thewhitereview.org/ (May 2019), Jay Gao, review of Love in the New Millennium.
Words without Borders, http://wordswithoutborders.org/ (May 3, 2010), Brendan Hughes, review of Five Spice Street; (March 13, 2017), Porochista Khakpour, “The Performance of Fiction: An Interview with Can Xue.”
World Literature Today, https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/ (May 2017), Melissa Beck, review of Frontier.
Can Xue
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Can Xue
邓小华
Can Xue at childhood
Can Xue at childhood
Born Dèng Xiǎohuá
May 30, 1953 (age 71)
Changsha, Hunan, China
Occupation
Novelistshort-story writeressayistliterary critic
Language Chinese
Period Contemporary
Literary movement
avant-gardeexperimentalstream of consciousness
Notable works
The Last Lover (2005)
Frontier (2008)
Vertical Motion (2011)
Love in the New Millennium (2018)
Notable awards
Best Translated Book Award (2015)
Huaji World Chinese Literature Award (2022)
America Award in Literature (2024)
In this Chinese name, the family name is Deng.
Deng Xiaohua (Chinese: 邓小华; pinyin: Dèng Xiǎohuá, [tə̂ŋ ɕjàʊxwǎ]; born May 30, 1953), better known by her pen name Can Xue (Chinese: 残雪; pinyin: Cán Xuě, [tsʰǎn ɕuɤ̀]; lit: 'lingering snow'), is a Chinese avant-garde fiction writer and literary critic. Her family was severely persecuted following her father being labeled a rightist in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957.[1] Her writing, which consists mostly of short fiction, breaks with the realism of earlier modern Chinese writers. She has also written novels, novellas, and literary criticism of Dante, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka. Can Xue has been described as "China’s most prominent author of experimental fiction,"[2] and most of her fiction has been translated and published in English.
Life
Deng Xiaohua was born in 1953, in Changsha, Hunan, China. Her early life was marked by a series of tragic hardships which influenced the direction of her work. She was one of six children born to a man who was once the editor-in-chief of the New Hunan Daily (Chinese: 新湖南日报; pinyin: Xīn Húnán Rìbào). Her parents, like many intellectuals at the time, were denounced as rightists in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, despite being Communist Party members themselves. Her father was sent to the countryside for two years in retribution for allegedly leading an anti-Communist Party group at the paper. Two years later, the entire family was evicted from the company housing at the newspaper and moved to a tiny hut below the Yuelu Mountain, on the rural outskirts of Changsha. In the years that followed, the family suffered greatly under further persecution. Her father was jailed, and her mother was sent along with her two brothers to the countryside for re-education through labor. Deng was allowed to remain in the city because of her poor health. After being forced to leave the small hut, she lived alone in a small, dark room under a staircase. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, Deng was thirteen years old. Her formal education was permanently disrupted after completing primary school.[1][3]
Can Xue describes the horrors of her youth in detail in her memoirs titled "A Summer Day in the Beautiful South" which is included as the foreword to her short story collection Dialogues in Paradise. Throughout this period, her entire family "struggled along on the verge of death". Her grandmother, who raised her while her parents were gone, soon succumbed to hunger and fatigue, dying with severe edema, a grotesque swelling condition. While the family was forced to scavenge food, eventually eating all of the wool clothes in the house, Can Xue contracted a severe case of tuberculosis.[4] Later, she was able to find work as a metalworker. Ten years later, in 1980, after giving birth to her first son, she quit work at the factory. She and her husband then started a small tailoring business at home after teaching themselves to sew.
She began writing in 1983, and published her first short story "Soap Bubbles in Dirty Water" (污水上的肥皂泡) in January 1985. Two other short stories followed that year, "The Bull" (公牛) and "The Hut on the Hill",[1][5] at which point she chose the pen name Can Xue. This name can be interpreted either as the stubborn, dirty snow left at the end of winter or the remaining snow at the peak of a mountain after the rest has melted. Publishing under a pen name allowed Can Xue to write without revealing her gender. According to Tonglin Lu, a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Montreal, once critics found out she was a woman, her "subversive voice within the supposedly subversive order [of avant-garde fiction]"[6] made them uncomfortable. Tonglin Lu called this "double subversion".[6]) Not only was she writing avant-garde fiction, but she was also a woman; male writers and critics attempted to analyze her works by psychoanalysis of the author, and some even suggested she was certifiably insane.[6] In 2002, she said, "Lots of [the critics] hate me, or at least they just keep silent, hoping I'll disappear. No one discusses my works, either because they disagree or don't understand.”[7]
More recently, however, many critics have paid tribute to her work,[6] drawn to the careful precision she uses to create such a strange, unsettling effect on the reader.
Work
Can Xue's abstract style and unconventional narrative form attracted a lot of attention from critics in the 1990s. A variety of interpretations of her work have been published, but political allegory has been the most popular way of understanding her early short stories. Many of the images in her stories have been linked to the Cultural Revolution, the Anti-Rightist Movement and other turbulent political movements of the early People's Republic of China. However, direct references to these events are uncommon.[8] The author herself explicitly denies most forms of political commentary others claim to have found in her work, stating once in an interview, "There is no political cause in my work."[9]
On the contrary, Can Xue says she treats each story as a kind of life experiment in which she is the subject.[10] “In very deep layers,” she says, “all of my works are autobiographical.”[7] As for those who struggle to find meaning in her stories, Can Xue says, "If a reader feels that this book is unreadable, then it's quite clear that he's not one of my readers."[11]
Can Xue has also written part of the libretto for at least one opera. In 2010, Can Xue and Lin Wang (web) co-wrote the libretto for a contemporary chamber opera Die Quelle (The Source) commissioned to Lin Wang by Münchener Biennale. The opera is based on Can Xue's published short story "The Double Life". In this opera, a young artist named Jian Yi is deconstructed into different aspects played by different roles. They crosstalk to each other on stage; drying and bubbling-up of the spring symbolize loss and regain of one's own identity. Lin Wang composed the music for Die Quelle (85 minutes in length). Chinese instruments such as the sheng, guzheng and sanxian were used. An unusual feature of the opera is its combination of English pronunciation and Chinese intonation. Die Quelle was premiered on May 9, 2010, in Munich Biennale and broadcast live.[12]
Reception
Amanda DeMarco stated that the extent to which Can Xue's work is radical is overstated. DeMarco also claims the animals in her novel Frontier "appear in such wild profusion that it would be impossible to assign them a symbology. Can Xue’s writing is not metaphorical in this sense. There is no organized system of correspondence or meaning within it that would allow individual elements to be explained back into the realm of the logical. Often her works are compared to performances, to dance, or to visual art." However, the reviewer still described the experience of reading the author's books as rewarding, explaining that the tools of literature used in experimental writing to chart the human being extend beyond the capacities of language as logic. DeMarco said that at "the sentence level, [Frontier] is a wonderful, carefully hewn thing, lucid and pure".[2]
American novelist and editor Bradford Morrow has described her as one of the most "innovative and important" authors in contemporary world literature.[13]
Can Xue won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for her novel The Last Lover.[14]
Selected bibliography
Can Xue has published a large number of novels, novellas, short stories, and book-length commentaries, many of which have been translated into English.[15]
Novels
Year Original title English title Publisher
1990 突围表演 Breakout Performance Hong Kong Youth Library
2002 五香街 Five Spice Street Straits Literature and Art Publishing House
2004 单身女人琐事记实 Trivial Records of Single Women Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House
2005 最后的情人 The Last Lover Huacheng Publishing House
2008 邊疆 Frontier Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
2011 呂芳詩小姐 Miss Lu Fangshi Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
2013 新世纪爱情故事 Love in the New Millennium Writers Publishing House
2015 黑暗地母的礼物（上） The Gift of the Dark Earth Mother (Part 1) Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House
2017 黑暗地母的礼物（下） The Gift of the Dark Earth Mother (Part 2) Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House
2019 赤腳醫生 Barefoot Doctor Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House
2021 水乡 Water Village Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House
2022 激情世界 Passionate World People's Literature Publishing House
Novellas
Year Original title English title Publisher
1987 黄泥街 Huangni Street Taiwan Yuanshen Publishing House
1988 天堂里的对话 Conversations in Heaven/Dialogues in Paradise Writers Publishing House
1990 种在走廊上的苹果树 Apple Tree Planted on the Corridor Taiwan Vision Publishing House
1994 思想汇报 Ideological Report Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House
1995 辉煌的日子 Glory Days Hebei Education Press
2000 奇异的木板房 Strange Wooden Board House Yunnan People's Publishing House
美丽南方之夏日 Summer in the Beautiful South Yunnan People's Publishing House
2001 蚊子与山歌 Mosquitoes and Folk Songs China Literary and Art Circles Publishing Company
长发的遭遇 The Encounter of Long Hair Chinese Publishing House
2002 松明老师 Teacher Songming Straits Literature and Art Publishing House
2004 爱情魔方 Love Cube Ethnic Publishing House
从未描述过的梦境 Dreams Never Described Writers Press
2005 双重的生活 Double Life Taiwan Trojan Culture
2006 传说中的宝藏 The Legendary Treasure Chunfeng Literature and Art Publishing House
暗夜 Dark Night Chinese Publishing House
末世爱情 Love in the End of the World Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
2021 少年鼓手 Young Drummer People's Literature Publishing House
2022 西双版纳的女神 The Goddess of Xishuangbanna People's Literature Publishing House
Essays and Non-fiction
Year Original title English title Publisher
1999 灵魂的城堡：理解卡夫卡 The Castle of the Soul: Understanding Kafka Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
2000 解读博尔赫斯 Interpreting Borges People's Literature Publishing House
残雪散文 Can Xue's Prose Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House
2003 地狱的独行者 The Lonely Walker in Hell Beijing Sanlian Bookstore
艺术复仇 Art Revenge Guangxi Normal University Press
残雪访谈录 Interviews with Can Xue Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House
2004 置身绝境的操练 Exercise in Desperate Situations October Literature and Art Publishing House
2005 温柔的编织工：残雪读卡尔维诺与波赫士 The Gentle Weaver: Can Xue's Reading of Calvino and Borges Taiwan Border Town Press
2007 残雪文学观 Can Xue's Literary Views Guangxi Normal University Press
2008 趋光运动：回溯童年的精神图景 Phototaxis Movement: Looking Back at the Spiritual Picture of Childhood Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House
2009 黑暗灵魂的舞蹈：残雪美文自选集 Dance of Dark Souls: A Selected Collection of Beautiful Essays by Can Xue Wenhui Publishing House
2017 残雪文学回忆录 Can Xue's Literary Memoirs Guangdong People's Publishing House
2023 新叶 New Leaves Hunan Children's Publishing House
Works translated into English
Novels
《突围表演》 (1988); later published as 五香街 (2002). Five Spice Street, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Yale, 2009).
《最后的情人》 (2005). The Last Lover, trans. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (Yale, 2014).
《边疆》 (2008). Frontier, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Open Letter, 2017).
《新世纪爱情故事》 (2013). Love in the New Millennium, trans. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (Yale, 2018).
《赤腳醫生》 (2019). Barefoot Doctor, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Yale, 2022).
Novellas
《苍老的浮云》 (1986). Old Floating Cloud.
《黄泥街》 (1987). Yellow Mud Street.
《种在走廊上的苹果树》 (1987). Apple Tree in the Corridor.
《神秘列车之旅》 (published in 2016 in the collection of the same name). Mystery Train, trans. Natascha Bruce (Sublunary Editions, 2022).
Short story collections
《天堂里的对话》 (1988). Dialogues in Paradise, trans. Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang (Northwestern, 1989).
Compilations in English
Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas, trans. Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang (Northwestern, 1991). Compiles Yellow Mud Street and Old Floating Cloud.
The Embroidered Shoes, trans. Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang (Henry Holt, 1997).
Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (New Directions, 2006).
Vertical Motion, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Open Letter, 2011).
I Live in the Slums, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Yale, 2020).
Purple Perilla, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (ISOLARII, 2021).
Mother River, trans. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (Open Letter, 2025).
Awards and honors
2015 Best Translated Book Award, winner, The Last Lover, translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen[16]
2019: International Booker Prize, longlisted, Love in the New Millennium (新世纪爱情故事), translated from the Chinese by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen (Yale University Press)[17]
2021: International Booker Prize, longlisted, I Live in the Slums, translated from Chinese by Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping (Yale University Press)[18]
2022: Huaji World Chinese Literature Award
2024: America Award in Literature, for a lifetime contribution to international writing[19]
Can Xue
China (b.1953)
Formerly a tailor by trade, Can Xue (whose real name is Deng Xiao-hua) only began writing fiction seriously in 1983. Can Xue (translated as "the dirty snow that refuses to melt") prolifically writes avant-garde short stories, novellas, novels, and critical commentaries on writers who have influenced her Gothic magic, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, and Dante.
Her first Chinese work was published in 1985 while the English translation of Dialogues in Paradise, Can Xue's first collection of lyrical stories, appeared in 1989, followed by two novellas, Old Floating Cloud in 1991 and The Embroidered Shoes Collection of stories in 1997.
Genres: Literary Fiction
New and upcoming books
January 2025
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Mother River
Novels
Five Spice Street (2009)
The Last Lover (2014)
Frontier (2017)
Love in the New Millennium (2018)
Barefoot Doctor (2022)
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Collections
Dialogues in Paradise (1989)
Old Floating Cloud (1991)
The Embroidered Shoes (1997)
Blue Light in the Sky (2006)
Vertical Motion (2011)
I Live in the Slums (2020)
Mother River (2025)
Novellas and Short Stories
Mystery Train (2022)
A Special Kind of Performance: Can Xue On The Course Of A Chinese Writer
Sep 15, 2015
The Writing Life
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We’ve asked some of our favorite international authors to write about literary communities and cultures around the globe. We’re bringing you their essays in a new ten-part series: The Writing Life Around the World. The fifth installment is by Chinese author Can Xue.
Beijing, China
translated by Jonathan Griffith
I have been fascinated by performances since I was three years old. But in my younger days my performances were very special — I performed in my mind. So no one around me knew my secret dramas.
Sometimes alone in my room, I would begin my drama. There was a fire and a lot of smoke in my home, and my grandma was too sick to move, so I supported her by her arm and ran out of the room with her. How happy both of us were!
Or sometimes at midnight, a tiger was chasing after me. I ran and ran, exhausted. Then I closed my eyes and said to myself: “Jump!” And I did jump, down from a steep cliff. I knew I would still be alive. When I woke (I always woke at the crucial moment), I found that I was.
The time came that I went to a primary school. My teacher was a poor young man; his face was not good-looking. It seemed that no young woman would be happy to get married to him. In the classroom, I listened to him, but my thoughts went in another direction. I would help him, to make him happy. One day I wrote a beautiful composition; it was so beautiful that it made a sensation in the school. “Whose student is she?” people asked. “Teacher Wen! Teacher Wen!”
Teacher Wen and I were very happy, and we went to the playground to take a walk. We talked and talked and talked…Of course the whole thing never happened in real life. My performances became longer and more complicated the older I grew.
Then came my thirteenth or fourteenth year. I began reading fiction and science fiction, and some of them were great books. Reading this fiction made me long to love someone. But who? My family was very poor. The authorities had put my father in a program of “reeducation through labor” (cleaning the library). In daily life, most people gave me supercilious looks when I went out in public. Additionally, I had lost my chance of receiving an education at a school.
All this meant that I could only come into contact with a few girls around me. So I stayed at home alone most of the time. I went to a small eating establishment nearby for my simple lunch and supper twice a day. One day (that was a shining day) when I returned from the eating establishment, I saw a healthy boy playing basketball on the playground. He was a little older than I was. I thought he was beautiful. I became so excited that my face blushed with shyness. Of course, he didn’t pay attention to me at all — boys were always like that. That night at home, I was so happy with the chance meeting. When I lay in the dark, the scenes of us appeared in my mind again and again. I worked out all kinds of new scenes in which the boy and I came face-to-face. My life of paradise lasted for the whole summer. Every day when I walked near the playground, I listened attentively to the sound made by the bouncing basketball. As I walked across the playground, I dared not turn my face; I had to pretend that I wasn’t paying any attention to him. How vigorous and nimble he was! What a beautiful body! Last night I had been in the park with him. We sat in the meadow, watching doves in the sky. But like all teenagers in those times, we didn’t touch each other. I only touched him with my eyes in my mind.
Time flew. One day the boy disappeared from the playground. He never reappeared, but my drama lasted for a whole other year.
* * *
Why did I learn to make clothes?…I badly needed time for my performances.
I didn’t begin writing until I was almost thirty years old. During that time I had been a “barefoot doctor,” a worker at a small workshop in a lane, and a temporary teacher. My last job before I became a writer was as a self-employed tailor. Why did I learn to make clothes? One reason was because my husband and I wanted to earn money to feed our child and ourselves. But the main reason was that I badly needed time for my performances. That was my ideal since my early childhood, and I had never forgotten it, even for a minute. And my husband helped me to realize the ideal. Time is money.
Both of us learned to make clothes according to a magazine called Dress-cutting and Sewing. We worked hard from morning to midnight every day. After half a year, we became two tailors — worthy of the name. The apartment changed into a workshop, and we even hired three helpers. We began earning some money. That was 1983, and at that time only a few people in cities owned their own business. But we made it. It was not much money, and our work was very hard.
* * *
…our customers always interrupted my writing. So my time was fragmentary — ten minutes, fifteen minutes…
In the same year, I began writing at a sewing machine. A strange thing happened: I found that when I was writing fiction, I didn’t need to work out plots or a structure or anything beforehand. No matter, a short piece or a long piece, it was the same. I just sat down and wrote without thinking. That’s all. Back then during the daytime, our customers always interrupted my writing. So my time was fragmentary — ten minutes, fifteen minutes, a half hour at most. In the evening, my four-year-old son (he was naughty) occupied almost all of my time.
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So during these ten minutes, fifteen minutes, or half hour, I even managed to write a small novel — my maiden work. And the plot went smoothly in the novel! It was a perfect whole.
I was so amazed, What I achieved was something that I hadn’t expected — when I wanted to perform, I performed; when I decided to stop, I stopped. But I could always come back to it. How strange! I thought maybe I was a little bit like those ancient poets, who could write their poetry in an open county while they drank wine, or talked with their friends, or just stayed alone in a beautiful scenery. It seemed they could write any time they wanted. But not quite. It seemed that there was a logic that pushed my pen forward, as if it was impossible for me to write down wrong words and sentences. All of the plots and dialogues that I wrote down were so right, so beautiful, just like my childhood performances. The only difference was that I did it more sober-mindedly and with greater determination now. I found that I enjoyed these activities so much that I wrote every day, even when our business was so busy. It was not long after that I understood that my writing was a special kind of performance — a performance of one’s soul.
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* * *
Writing fiction freely was dangerous in those dark days in China.
For all of my life, my soul has longed to go out. But the opportunity didn’t present itself until I was thirty years old. How miserable but at the same time how lucky it was! Writing fiction freely was dangerous in those dark days in China. But I was given the chance at long last. The long waiting made one so vigorous and original, it was impossible to do wrong.
Like the dancer Isadora Duncan, I didn’t need to work out things in advance because for me writing was the most natural thing to do. When I no longer needed to worry so much about money — that was after writing for five years — I just made a rule for myself: write for an hour every day, usually in the morning when I finished my running. Every day — one hour, no more, no less. No matter what I wrote — a story, or a novel — I wrote it smoothly, then left it as it was. The next day, I wrote from where I had left off the day before. I would hold a pen in my hand, think for a minute or two, at most five minutes; then the first sentence would appear in my mind. I wrote it down. Then the second sentence appeared, the third … How happy I was!
I felt that I lived a dual life. It was my worldly life that fed my performances, and at the same time, it was performance that gave the meaning to my worldly life.
The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write. My kingdom of fiction grew larger and larger, its boundary extending in every direction. Gradually I understood: since I was a dancer of the soul, this sort of performance just couldn’t stop. It was impossible. Another thing that occurred was that my personality began to change so much after I became a dancer — it became brighter and brighter. I had always loved worldly life, and now I loved it more! Now to me, every day became so beautiful. Cooking a meal in the kitchen, cleaning the apartment, washing clothes, helping my son with his homework, going to the market to buy meat and vegetables, running in the rain four kilometers with an umbrella. My everyday life was arranged in perfect order, so I was full of vigor. I felt that I lived a dual life. It was my worldly life that fed my performances, and at the same time, it was performance that gave the meaning to my worldly life. I loved both. Actually I thought the two were one. I still think so today.
Sometimes as I recall my childhood performances, I ask myself, why did they happen? Why was it that the performances made me happiest? As I grow older, I know the answer: it is because I wanted to live a full life. I wanted my body and my soul to dance at the same time. I am a daughter of Greater Nature, a nimble daughter, so nimble that I heard Mother’s calling even at three years old. The calling was from that deep, dark place, and very few people have the ability to hear it, but I had. But this ability brought with it a great responsibility upon me when I grew up.
* * *
In my writing life, I have observed that there are other people besides myself who have heard the calling of Great Nature when they were very young. But they didn’t concentrate on it, so they lost it very easily and never heard it again. For example, in the 80’s in China, some writers wrote beautiful experimental fiction, but after three or four years, all of them returned to traditional writing. I know that for a writer it is very difficult to concentrate on your performance all the time. There are too many temptations in the world, and nowadays it is easy for a famous writer to get more money if he or she wants to by dropping experimental writing and choosing realistic stories or film and TV plays. Almost all of my colleagues turned toward that road.
Year in and year out, I found that I was the only writer from my generation who still wrote experimental fiction in China.
But for me, it was another story. From the beginning, I wrote just for my ideal. But what is a life devoted to this ideal? I think it should be this: giving a performance every day, reading beautiful books, enjoying beautiful things — sex, food, comfortable clothes, and so on — in short, making my life always happy and keeping myself always curious about the things around the world. That means I must keep my body in a healthy condition. That’s it. Money is important because it can buy time or prolong my life (I have a serious rheumatism). But I always know that I want to live a life that is worthy for me to live. Year in and year out, I found that I was the only writer from my generation who still wrote experimental fiction in China. I was so sad, but at the same time, I was so proud!
I am proud because this kind of performance needs a great talent and courage, and very few people can achieve this. Inspiration is not the only thing that the writer has to have; at the same time you must have a strong rational faculty, because you will be demanding of yourself to do a sort of very special thinking, and this sort of thinking is not reasoning. I now call it “material reasoning.” Maybe it is a little mysterious, but looking at my day’s performance and the performances of my childhood, you may get some clues.
“Material reasoning” is not just thinking — it’s doing. That is why I call it a performance. In that atmosphere when you move your body, your action is following a strict logic. You perceive the logical structure directly through your senses. The more you do it, the more the structure appears in various forms. But from my experience, one must do it often if one longs to see the structure. Slacking off for a year or two, it’s very possible that the structure disappears totally. This happened to two of my friends. Both of them were highly talented in experimental writing when they were very young. I think Great Nature is fair to every human being. She always gives you a gift that you are worthy of. But some people lose it even if they don’t perceive it.
* * *
Now I’m full of gratitude to our Great Nature. In 2015, I’m 62 years old and still brimming with inspiration. Except for taking part in literature activities abroad once or twice a year, I write almost every day. Writing gives me strong confidence, keeping my body healthy. I feel that my life has become some kind of music. Every morning as I open my eyes, I see the sun rising differently. To me, every day is a brand new day!
Usually I study Western philosophy and literature in the daytime. At eight o’clock in the evening (I changed my morning performance to evening ten years ago), I give a performance. That takes almost an hour. But some times forty-five minutes will be enough. I look at the words and the sentences in the notebook (from the beginning, I have always written in a notebook). Ah, they are so neat! The strange thing is that my handwriting is usually ugly when I write into a contract or on an envelope. But with fiction, my handwriting is neat and tidy. The notebooks are so beautiful as a whole. In the beginning I didn’t know I could write like that. Now I know that it’s Great Nature who gives me the ability and lets me write beautifully. Actually as I grow older every year, my hand often shakes when I’m writing. But as soon as I begin to perform, the words and sentences, as if hearing the calling, become full of life!
— Can Xue
A few questions for Can Xue about the writing life in China…
Electric Literature: In your essay, you describe working as a “barefoot doctor,” a teacher, a tailor. Your first stories were ‘written’ while you were working at a sewing machine. At what point were you able to put other jobs aside and to begin dedicating yourself to writing? What happened to allow that?
Can Xue: As I mentioned in the essay, in my fifth or sixth year of writing, I published some work overseas (in the United States, Japan, and Taiwan). So I got some money. And at that time it was a big amount (about $10,000 USD). My husband and I were so happy that I immediately decided not to make clothes anymore. (My husband kept making clothes, though not so many, and I was in charge of the housework.) My publishing abroad is an amazing story. Both my American translator and my Japanese translator found Can Xue’s stories from magazines published in China. Then they wrote to the publishing house in Changsha, and got in touch with me. Meanwhile, one of my good literary friends helped me to contact the government in Changsha, so that I could get a small stipend every month. After a year, the government approved my application as “a professional writer.” That means you can get a monthly salary from the Writers Association of Hunan Province (about $60 USD).
EL: How was your first work published? Have the means by which publishers in China discover new writers changed over the last few decades?
They thought the books were not “real,” ”formal” and standard literature. They also thought the books were not very ”healthy.”
CX: Although my first Chinese book was published in Taiwan in 1987, and the other two were published in the United States and Japan in 1989, the leaders of the literary circle and the publishing houses at that time weren’t that interested in Can Xue’s work. They thought the books were not “real,” “formal” and standard literature. They also thought the books were not very “healthy.” I think in the past two decades the publishers have changed a lot. Since 2000, I have published many works. As for the new writers, most of the publishers choose their works according to whether they are welcome to readers. Also, the leaders of the Writers Association like certain writers, and those writers get many opportunities. So some young experimental writers are in a very difficult situation. As to me, since I’m more and more famous in China, and some young readers love my work, it’s now easy for me to get my work published.
EL: Your stories are often set in abstract or fantastical spaces that are charged with powerful forces. Are there places in Beijing — streets, neighborhoods, landscapes — that have a special impact on you or whose energy, perhaps, has been instilled into your stories?
CX: Basically no. Because experimental writing is not that sort. But in deep structure, there may be some influence. I just don’t know at the moment. Maybe someday, when somebody researches my work, they will find some changes in my writing that are linked to my move from the South to Beijing. That would be interesting. To tell you the truth, I mostly stay in my apartment, which is in the suburbs, all year round. I go downtown once a year at most. (It’s been three years since I last went.) My husband does all shopping for our family. When you ask about the streets, the neighborhoods and so on, I really don’t know much.
EL: Which Chinese authors do you consider the most meaningful for the current-day avant-garde?
CX: For the current-day, only Can Xue’s works are the real experimental writing that sells in China, I’m afraid. Another one I can think of is Liang Xiaobin (1954- ), who writes very beautiful essays. But he is very poor and has a serious disease.
EL: You are a longtime student of Western literature and philosophy, and a good deal of your work has been published to acclaim in the U.S. and Europe. Have those connections to the West had any affect (negative or positive) on your success in China?
CX: The influence you mention comes in two ways: 1. Since I have published some books abroad (mainly in the U.S. and in Japan) and received some acclaim, publishers in China are more welcoming of my work than before. I know most of my readers are young people who love “pure” literature very much. So since 2000, the situation for Can Xue has changed a lot. Before 2000, I only published 4–5 books (from 1985–1999), and the sales were very very poor (maybe because they had almost no publicity). 2. The literary circles in China are very traditional, As I know, experimental literature is in a very difficult situation. The traditional circles in China don’t consider Can Xue’s works to be “good” literature, and they don’t advocate for them. So it’s hard for me to promote my works. Meanwhile if a young writer wants to write experiment works, it will be very difficult, almost impossible for him to get any financial support from literary organizations that are founded by the government.
EL: You are in the relatively rare position of being able to make an informed comparison of the contemporary literary scenes in China and in the U.S. Do they share many similarities?
The biggest problem for both country’s literature is a lack of will to innovate.
CX: Yes, I think so. The biggest problem for both country’s literature is a lack of will to innovate. I think most works in recent years are sentimental and superficial, even the worldly-wise ones. I can’t see any innovative spirit in those works. For the Chinese writers, it’s because their individual characters are weak; they think that our tradition is more relaxed and comfortable, and they would like to lie in the tradition and have sweet dreams. Actually the tradition that they think of is not a real tradition anymore, because it has been past, disappeared. How can one still call it a tradition? In my view, if you want a real literary tradition, your only way is to recreate it. I think maybe in the United States, the situation is the same?
EL: You’ve shown a rare willingness to critique the works of contemporary writers, often quite bluntly. Has that made things difficult for you professionally? Are you surprised that more writers don’t engage in that manner of critique? You seem to take your duties to the literature and the culture very seriously.
…when I get a chance, I will criticize them. I think that’s my work (I am a critic too) and the meaning of my existence.
CX: Yes, you are right, I always tell the truth. But people don’t like to hear it. So I often put myself in a difficult situation in the literary circles in my homeland. But I’m not the least surprised by the attitude of my colleagues. They are traditional people, and that sort always deals with things like this. Their works are much more welcome than mine. Basically they are not “angry” people. But still, when I get a chance, I will criticize them. I think that’s my work (I am a critic too) and the meaning of my existence.
EL: You’ve managed to connect with Western readers in a number of ways, in addition to your fiction — engaging in interviews, writing critical essays. How do you connect with your Chinese readers? What are the outlets and the means of reaching those readers, besides publishing fiction?
CX: Besides publishing fiction, I often give short articles to newspapers, discussing my views of literature, criticizing my colleagues. I know that not a few young people like my essays. I will continue my criticizing whenever I get a chance.
About the Author
Can Xue, pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua, is the author of numerous short-story collections and four novels. Six of her works have been published in English, including Dialogues in Paradise (Northwestern University Press, 1989), Old Floating Cloud: Two Novelllas (Northwestern University Press, 1991), The Embroidered Shoes (Henry Holt, 1997), Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories (New Directions, 2006), Five Spice Street (Yale University Press, 2009), and Vertical Motion (Open Letter, 2011).
Chinese author Can Xue is favourite to win 2024 Nobel prize in literature
This article is more than 3 months old
With odds of 10/1, the author of Love in the New Millennium, who was also the favourite last year, leads a pack that includes Haruki Murakami and Margaret Atwood
Ella Creamer
Tue 8 Oct 2024 05.41 EDT
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Can Xue, Haruki Murakami, Margaret Atwood, César Aira, Gerald Murnane and Thomas Pynchon are among the authors most likely to win this year’s Nobel prize in literature, according to bookies.
Chinese avant-garde author Can Xue, 71, is Ladbrokes’ favourite to win, with odds of 10/1. She was also the favourite to win last year’s prize, which was ultimately awarded to Norwegian writer Jon Fosse.
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The recipient of the 2024 prize will be announced on Thursday at noon BST, and will receive 11m Swedish kronor (£811,780).
“This year’s Nobel prize race is still wide open, and while we’ve seen strong interest in Gerald Murnane and César Aira, it’s Can Xue who remains the most popular pick with punters, and continues to head the betting as a result,” said Alex Apati of Ladbrokes.
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Can Xue, whose real name is Deng Xiaohua, has twice been longlisted for the international Booker prize with her novel Love in the New Millennium – translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen – and for her short story collection I Live in the Slums, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping.
She was born in 1953 in Changsha, Hunan province. During the Cultural Revolution, her parents were forced into manual labour in the countryside. Her formal education finished with elementary school. If she is named Nobel laureate, she will be the 18th woman to win the prize, the third Chinese winner and only the second still resident in China after Mo Yan, who received it in 2012.
Following Can Xue with 14/1 odds is Japanese writer Murakami, who has written more than a dozen novels – including Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore and 1Q84 – as well as short story collections and nonfiction.
Atwood and Pynchon are both assigned 16/1 odds. Atwood – the Canadian author of The Handmaid’s Tale and Booker-winning novels The Testaments and The Blind Assassin along with many other novels, poetry collections and works of non-fiction – has long been considered a contender for the prize. In 2017, Kazuo Ishiguro, who won that year, apologised to Atwood: “I genuinely thought she would win it very soon.”
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Also with 16/1 odds are Aira, Murnane and Ersi Sotiropoulos. Other authors listed by Ladbrokes include Anne Carson (20/1), Don DeLillo (25/1), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (25/1), Salman Rushdie (25/1), Karl Ove Knausgård (28/1) and Han Kang (33/1).
The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded 116 times since 1901. Alongside Fosse, recent laureates include Annie Ernaux, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Louise Glück, Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk.
The Universal Whole: A Conversation With Can Xue and Annelise Finegan Wasmoen
April 9, 2024| Humanities, Interviews, Literature, Margellos World Republic of Letters Series, Philosophy
In Love in the New Millennium, celebrated experimental writer Can Xue tells the story of a group of women who inhabit a world of constant surveillance, where informants lurk in the flower beds and conspiracies abound.
In the wake of the paperback publication, Can Xue and translator Annelise Finegan Wasmoen talk about the marriage of Eastern and Western countries, the challenges of translating the grammatical particularities of Chinese, and the legacy of the book in raising fundamental questions of human nature.
Can Xue, you describe your surreal fictional environments as highly rational conjurings, while readers call them surreal. When you write, how do you approach the balance between reason and psychological drift?
CX: First of all I should explain my definition of this philosophical term reason. At the moment, I am writing a book on philosophy that takes as its core my unique definition and usage of this word. Far different than the philosophical distinctions of Kant, Hegel, Husserl and so on, I differentiate reason into theoretical reason and practical reason, and further posit the highest setting of epistemology as contradictory epistemology. The rationalists of Western philosophy have not truly differentiated this singular dimension of practical reason. They are monists of theoretical reason. Their cosmology is also unlike my theory in not putting forward a theory of contradiction. How, then, do I define practical reason? I think this is a function of the human body as well as what I formulate as the highest function—the function of Nature’s (the universe’s) material being, precisely and symmetrically corresponding to the theoretical reason put forward by Western rationalists.
Therefore my philosophy is also a practical philosophy, namely, in operating creatively through physical functions (for example, the expression of emotional material in literature) to construct an ideal and material Nature. I have discovered through the practice of literature a native self-awareness possessed by myself and possessed—or that should be possessed in the future—by the Chinese people. Chinese people have a spontaneous tendency to see Nature as the self. We excel in practice (making things), but are deficient in theoretical summation and self-awareness, so we have not produced a high degree of self-awareness about our physical functioning even over several thousands of years. In this respect I seem to be a pioneer. When I wrote my first literary work at the age of thirty, I discovered that I have a kind of aptitude that is different than other authors: I just need to sit down and write to live immediately inside of my own Nature. I am one member within Nature; I am also the entirety of Nature. Next, I only need to squeeze my emotion and concentrate my discernment in order to break out into an obscure direction. That “breaking out” is full of challenges and joys as well as the full release of bodily desire. I have never considered a work’s structure and do not plan it out overall, but instead write down whatever I am thinking, writing where it goes and that is all. If my writing is interrupted, when I return to writing afterward I can continue again with what is next, joined together seamlessly.
The works that I write down all have the tight logic of emotional structure, but are also without the vestiges of intentionality, because I am “making things.” This kind of work has no blueprint. It takes shape through the operation of the limbs and the sensory organs on emotional material. The major force behind this practice is constructive impulse. A single literary work is the entirety of perfect rationality; all of my works together form a garland. This is my usage of practical reason. I have adored Western culture from when I was young, earnestly studying its literature and philosophy to lay a good foundation. I wield Western culture as a tool to awaken the sleeping native self-awareness within me, opening the path of my creativity. I call my creativity the expression of practical reason (and also practical intellect and perception). My practical reason is synonymous with the structure of my psyche. The characteristics of the two are creativity and constructiveness, and also humanity’s ancient instincts revived in the process of both Chinese and Western culture fusing inseparably and becoming each other’s mutual essence. The force behind the psychological structure of my creativity comes from practical perceptual intuition, intellectual intuition, and rational intuition. The unique approach of my creativity functions through intuition and the construction of intuitive graphics. In parallel to theoretical reason, this kind of active reason also functions as a parable. It is the mother of all of the inventions of natural science and the humanities. What it creates are the things that our Nature does not yet have, but should.
From remote, ancient times humanity began to make tools, plant crops, domesticate animals, and use primitive language to express feelings. These ancient functions of the trunk and its limbs (in short, the body) and people’s thinking and speculative functions together constitute the essential function of our being human. In my opinion, human nature is a contradiction, and all things within Nature are contradictions; I believe that I have a unique approach to deal with these contradictions. The Chinese are the most practical people, yet their extended time historically without communication with the world brought about a lack of self-awareness when it comes to this function, which has hindered the development of our own practical function. My works are breaking through that block, being the effort to establish a more comprehensive view of the universe and of philosophy.
In the Acknowledgements of Love in the New Millennium, you write “I think of this book as the fruit born of the love between Eastern and Western cultures, its images pushing forward a wholly new type of human self and mechanism of freedom.” Can Xue, can you elaborate on the characteristics of this new human self and freedom? Annelise, was there a particular translation in the book that exemplified the love between Eastern and Western cultures?
CX: I have believed for a long time that an ideal human self would possess the strengths of East and West. For myself individually, I am mainly taking the Chinese ethnicity to be Eastern, although of course there are other distinctions. Those parts of Western culture that I am passionate about are what my ethnicity lacks. For example, with respect to encouraging spiritual matters; for example, the capacity to reason; for example, the impulse to task risks or to create; and so on. This novel is the achievement of my study of Western culture. However, in reaching the new millennium, I have felt deeply that Western spiritual culture alone can no longer adapt to the demands of the world’s developments. I also discovered that Western culture had encountered a bottleneck in its own development.
The new millennium requires a blended culture, one that is stronger, richer, and has more knowingness and vitality. The pursuit of this blending has been abundantly revealed in my novel. I think that Chinese culture (or the Chinese culture of the future) can in this way supplement what Western culture lacks. The keyword to Love in the New Millennium is communication. This communication in the novel is the communication of love between men and women, but it is actually also the communication of all of humankind. I feel that, in the new millennium, humanity’s communication has become a major issue of life or death importance. Even though many Western novels also broach this subject, I think that the contradictory dialectic of communication is unique with a Chinese person like Can Xue. This is the contribution of an author after being enlightened to the world, along with my model of pursuing freedom that is different than the crowd. Westerners emphasize spiritual pursuits, and in expressing the relationship between people they emphasize communication that is conceptual; Chinese people emphasize materiality (or embodied functions), and what is expressed through human relationships is physical communication. These two kinds of communication combined together structure a contradictory human nature, both sides equally important, without the existence of a question of which is higher or lower. We Chinese people have an adage, “use the heart to compare hearts,” which says to consider the other as yourself. In this way there is communication between bodies and not solely communication of the spirit. Even if the other is an “enemy,” one should still imagine them as oneself and have physical exchange with them in practice.
Further, this practical communication extends to the natural world, that “Great Self,” such that animals, plants, the land, the sky, and so on become the objects of our communication. The communication of high art often fails, but even so, artists should not change their original intentions and instead carry on this kind of communication to the end, like the woman singer in Love in the New Millennium. Within my philosophical distinctions, freedom can only be produced by two kinds of communication, of the body and of the spirit, besides which there is no other way. That is to say that the exchange between bodies (the interaction of practical operations and emotional material) cannot be lacking. If you seek the sublimation and freedom of the human self, you must invest yourself in the practice of communication between the human and the things of nature, seeing other people (including enemies) and also things within nature as yourself, and maintaining these relationships. Regarding this kind of relationship, the depictions in my novel become more revealing through utopian idealism. Each achievement of communication is a model of freedom. For people who have never had physical communication with other people, their freedom is blocked in a deep sense. Human character and models of freedom in the new millennium are constructive. It is every artist’s duty to take definite action in striving to invest oneself in the work of communication.
The reality of the situation is that many Chinese people lack theoretical reason in communication with other people and only speak of superficial levels of communication in the physical sense (worldly-wise, unprincipled and overflowing with emotions, feudal and backward). Without a fundamental standard, or without the wisdom of ongoing contact, they cannot establish dynamic, progressive, healthy relationships between people. Many Westerners on the other hand are indifferent to emotion with regard to human relationships, never knowing the situation of the other party, or knowing what they are thinking, and insisting on abstract, rigid principles. When they encounter contradictions, if it isn’t investing themselves completely into seeking the way to resolve it, then it’s being slipshod, using one’s own views (theoretical principles) as the standard to cut through the knot and ruin the relationship. If these two great ancient cultures can absorb each other’s benefits and mutually take each other as their essence, the extent of humanity’s freedom will surely be greatly expanded.
AFW: When I think back on translating Can Xue’s brilliant Love in the New Millennium, some of the global currents recur to me, such as what the character Dr. Liu thinks of in Chapter 6 as “the world’s great interconnectedness […] this kind of interconnectedness [that] took place every minute and every second, similar to the working of the wind […] ‘No matter how the world develops, interconnection is always necessary’.” Meanwhile, cultural signifiers from both Eastern and Western culture pattern themselves throughout the novel: La Traviata, pachinko parlors, Chinese medicinal herbs.
For one thing, the novel doesn’t depict so much the concept of the male and female sexes in Chinese reality as a merging of the concepts in Chinese and Western cultures. The most typical example is Long Sixiang, along with Dr. Liu and Xiao Yuan, who all yearn for ‘true love,’ but also have a rational side. For another, Dr. Liu uses the methods of Western medicine to apply Chinese herbal medicine (scientifically), while taking a Chinese approach to treating pain—often regarding illness as a contradiction that should not be resolved, and using pain relief methods to treat illness—which develops the logical contradiction.
I think that these two points illustrate the author’s ideal worldview.
The novel and, by extension, the translation, is also very much about forms of communication which allow the response to be unexpected, in the way authors and translators communicate with readers, rather than preempted. Characters in Love in the New Millennium do not act or respond affectively in ways that are foreseeable, whether narratively or psychologically: they may have confidence “out of all proportion,” they discover themselves as other selves in each other’s eyes, they are constantly on the move and “circle again, for a different perspective.” Sometimes characters laugh in response to comprehension: “They glanced at each other and both laughed out loud until tears flowed from their eyes, and the two, both strangely embarrassed, turned their faces away to look in different directions.” This type of communication models various forms and aspects of cross-cultural engagement, especially textual forms. As language animals we use assumptions about meaning to organize our understanding, and in most fiction context helps to disambiguate lexical meaning. In Can Xue’s fiction, there may be little internal evidence as to whether a significant word or a suggestive passage points in one direction or another, so the translation needs to leave these choices open, these unknowns, unpredictable. In my favorite line from the novel, one of the women points out: “Your not understanding is understanding!”
Can Xue, you have often stated that your fundamental subject matter is universal human nature, while readers have interpreted reality in Love in the New Millennium as inherently female. How do you explore the relationship between gender, reality, and human nature across your work?
CX: If the novel Love in the New Millennium were interpreted as the author setting out to write a “fundamental” novel from an “inherently” female point of view, this would doubtless minimize the significance of this kind of novel greatly. I am an author with an extremely strong sense of universal wholes, and my Nature as a whole can be endlessly divided. This means that communication is everywhere in my writing, communication that takes place in every aspect of human nature. I explore in my fiction the most rational model of the development of human nature. Therefore, when I depict the psychology of female characters, I am actually also writing about the male sex, and the converse is true. For example, some readers in my country have felt that in the new novel that will soon be published in your country, The Enchanting Lives of Others, the male characters are particularly vivid and have depth. As is widely known, the main character of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is a woman, yet in my reading of this work I can sense from beginning to end that this role is Tolstoy’s own ideal form of self-expression. It is good for female perspectives to be put forward in today’s society, but only with the awakening of all women, and their obtaining liberation, can this be truly brought about.
In addition, to do this, male perspectives must develop synchronously. We need to bring up large numbers of new men who have new thoughts and can defeat traditional points of view. Seen from the situation of countries around the globe, this has not been done enough, which is also a reason that feminism is worth advocating. My recent novels depict quite a few of the ideal form of male characters, and I believe that they also are myself. Several of the male characters in Love in the New Millennium—for example, Wei Bo, Doctor Liu, the antique dealer, etc.—all have a tendency toward becoming ideal. Doctor Liu especially has an appealing maleness, as a kind of allegorical character who belongs to the world of a future utopia. Meanwhile Xiao Yuan and the female singer are the personification of enchantment. Perhaps this kind of writing is what Western intellectuals often describe as “androgyny.” There is naturally a large distance between reality and fiction, which is also the reason why we need fiction. When we learn what is best through the communication of works of literature, we will consciously seek out the perfection of the human self in ordinary life.
Given the grammatical and linguistic particularities of the Chinese language, were there challenges in conveying the literary subtleties of Love in the New Millennium in such a direct language as English?
AFW: This is a difficult question, because I think of English as being so multivalent rather than direct, making it a matter of exchanging one kind of ambiguity for another. One of the key particularities in translating from Chinese into English is that Chinese branches mostly left and English mostly right, so a translator needs to dismantle and reconstruct the sentence order. For Love in the New Millennium, though, as readers have pointed out, I sometimes leave elements of the Chinese syntax in place to provide the reader with the same sequence of elements as they appear in Can Xue’s text, when it seems impactful to do so. In this way, in a larger sense, my hope is that English will eventually be influenced by Chinese on a linguistic level as well as a literary one. This of course goes back to your question about love between Eastern and Western cultures.
It is often said that translation is the closest form of reading. That is especially true of emotional trajectory, because the arcs traversed are inevitable, already written and unavoidable. As Can Xue just noted, a work like Love in the New Millennium has the “tight logic of emotional structure,” and I have been privileged to go on emotional journeys with these characters and with the author, since Can Xue sees these characters—Cuilan and Weibo and A Si and Long Sixiang and all the rest—as extensions of a capacious self. Importantly, translation is a joyful, or at least consistently intriguing process. There is something joyous in the transference of words, phrases, sentences, works across languages, and with Love in the New Millennium there is the added dimension of the author’s drawing from across cultures to create a world of intrigue, secret histories, and hidden passageways.
Love in the New Millennium was originally published in English in 2018. How do you think the work’s significance has changed or stayed the same over time, and what is its legacy?
CX: I think that the influence of this novel will continue to grow along with its successive translations into different countries around the globe. This is because in the novel I raise the most fundamental questions about human nature and about our Nature (the universe). Most importantly, I put forward these questions from a Chinese author’s particular perspective, which is something that hadn’t yet happened in previous world literature. What model should we as humanity use to live within Nature? Why are our hungry and thirsty bodies always isolated from our spirits? What secret passageway is there between the two of them? What form should communication between people take to better release the body’s desires and attain the realm of freedom? Is purely conceptual freedom possible? Among all manner of worldly people, what kind of love can be called beautiful love? Do we as modern people still have other ways to make ourselves transcend the self, aside from religious feeling? These questions are all raised from the author’s life experience.
I believe that their answers must resort to action and cannot only be accessed through contemplation. We are dissatisfied with the world we live in, we want to transform this world, so, we should first transform our own approach to life. In this novel I offer some “Chinese prescriptions” to supply readers with alternatives. These are prescriptions found by a long-suffering patient during the long process of an illness. These prescriptions are in fact the product of Eastern culture and Western culture combining inseparably into one. My hope is that for readers this novel can inspire the spirit and the flesh and excite the creativity to invest themselves body and mind in constructing a world that belongs to us.
Can Xue is the pseudonym of celebrated experimental writer Deng Xiaohua, born in 1953 in the city of Changsha. She is the author of Love in the New Millennium, I Live in the Slums, and Five Spice Street, among other books. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen is academic director and clinical associate professor of translation at NYU School of Professional Studies.
An interview with Can Xue
Dylan Suher and Joan Hua
Photograph by Lu Yong
The Chinese avant-garde writer Can Xue aptly describes her fiction as a performance. Reading her fiction is like watching modern dance: like an unfolding gesture out of Merce Cunningham or Butoh (her favorite), her sentences evolve towards unpredictable, pointed conclusions. Her stories often suggest a hidden, underlying narrative—a logic of movement that dictates the actions of the players on the stage. Her characters, with their constantly shifting motives, are expressly not rounded. They are personae, masks made to articulate whatever philosophical proposition or aspect of the psyche the performance currently demands: the little boy who secretly breeds a brood of snakes in his stomach in "The Child Who Raised Poisonous Snakes" or the wormlike humanoid who lives underground and burrows up, towards the unknown surface, in "Vertical Motion." Chief among all the personae is Can Xue, her nom de plume. Can Xue (whose real name is Deng Xiaohua) frequently refers to herself in the third person (as she does in the interview below) and even writes reviews of her own novels, as if her protean, dreamlike visions originated outside of her.
Can Xue carries on with her individual performance indifferent to those critics and readers who seek to classify and explain her. Her family was labeled "Rightist" and persecuted intensely by the Communist government; her social background barred her from any formal education. She nonetheless emerged during the literary flowering of the 1980s known as the "High Culture Fever" as a member of a pack of fiction writers (including Su Tong, Mo Yan, Yu Hua, to name only a few) whose works challenged the orthodoxies of social realism through formalist experimentation and vivid imagery of the body. But unlike her contemporaries, who sought out an untainted primitive past or aimed to record the traumas of the Cultural Revolution, Can Xue has no interest in Chinese folklore or politics. The bold innovations of her oeuvre—executed in a colloquial yet writerly style that emphasizes the rapid shifts in space and narrative logic—surpass the experimentation of her Chinese contemporaries. In fact, her creations are sometimes even more adventurous than those of the Western modernist writers she so admires: a long list of stated influences that includes Kafka, Borges, and Calvino. The literary journal Conjunctions has frequently featured her work, and she has won the admiration of many Western writers—Robert Coover called her "a world master" and Susan Sontag declared her the one Chinese writer worthy of the Nobel Prize. She continues to stand apart from her fellow Chinese writers. As others identified with the Chinese avant-garde have since shifted towards more accessible forms of realism, Can Xue has stubbornly, movingly continued her individual performance: composing challenging experimental work.
In this sense, Can Xue's writing is nothing less than an existential struggle. The high stakes of her gambits can be found on display in her short story, "Snake Island," in which a man returns to his rural hometown after thirty years, to find that he recognizes nothing and nobody and that his family is nowhere to be found. Near the end, a villager summons him into battle. Snake Island, he explains, is divided in two, between the living and the dead, and the living must fight with the dead for territory. This is Can Xue's neverending struggle as well: to write against the death of the soul, and to fight for an authentic life. The struggle never ends; the performance continues.
The following interview with Can Xue was conducted in Chinese via email and then translated into English.
—Dylan Suher
You've switched English translators over the course of your career: the first three collections of yours translated into English were done by Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang, while the most recent three have been translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. What is your relationship with your translators like: is there a collaborative process? What skills and qualities are necessary, in your estimation, for someone to be able to translate a Can Xue story?
I'm friends with all my English translators. Altogether, I have five English translators: Ron Janssen and Jian Zhang (who translate collaboratively), Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (who translate collaboratively), and Annelise [Finegan]. Starting in the 1990s, I put my all into studying English and managed to achieve a certain level of skill with the language. Ever since Karen and Chen Zeping took over translating my work, I've insisted on reading their translations (and later, Annelise's translations) and offering the translators my opinions. Can Xue's works are truly exceptional; I feel that the most important skill my translators can have is to read the original intensively, thereby having a thorough grasp of the deep underlying humor and general feel of the language in my works. How precisely they express something in their translations is closely connected with their power to feel and their ability to grasp logic, because these kinds of fictions have already surpassed the profundity of philosophy. It is most difficult to properly convert one language into another. Within Chinese, meaning is buried deep, and the language emphasizes subtleties of feeling. English is more direct and emphasizes clear distinctions. It's really difficult to grasp that "degree" of translation.
You're a remarkably prolific writer, having written over a hundred short stories and dozens of novellas and critical essays. Yet only a fraction of those works have been translated into English. Are there any works of yours that have not been translated that you would like to see translated?
At present, two of my full-length novels have already been translated. And it was recently announced that the latest [translation] of my novella The Last Lover, which is currently still being edited, will be published by Yale University Press in the spring of 2014. Dozens of medium-length and shorter works have been translated into English. I estimate that some 13 million Chinese characters of my works have been translated—is that really a small amount? My output is very consistent, and that's very difficult for a writer to do. My wildest dream is to get all of my works published in the United States.
With regard to your writing process, you've said in interviews that your writing comes from your subconscious, and that a good writer should not know what he or she is writing. What do you think of when you begin a story?
The subconscious by itself is actually not the deciding factor; every individual has a subconscious. The key lies in whether you can unleash it to create. Here there is a complicated mechanism, and I can only explain it from the vantage point of philosophy and art. In five or six years, I plan to write a book, Philosophy of Art. In that book, I'll elaborate my thoughts on these issues based on my experience practicing art and the fruits of my intensive research into Western philosophy. I've already been writing for over thirty years, and the writing method I use is precisely the creative method of modern art: Reason monitors from afar. Emotions are completely unleashed. I turn towards the dark abyss of consciousness and plunge in, and in the tension between those two forces, I build the fantastic, idealist plots of my stories. I think that people who are able to write in the way I write must possess an immense primitive energy and a strongly logical spirit. Only in this way can they maintain total creativity amid a divided consciousness. In China, I have not seen a writer who is capable of sustaining that kind of creativity for many years.
The structure in your work can be so difficult to discern—both in terms of narrative structure and in the way the images connect to one another—that it's hard to imagine just how you shape your stories. How do you edit a Can Xue story?
I never edit my stories. I just grab a pen and write, and every day I write a paragraph. For more than thirty years, it's always been like this. I believe that I am surrounded by a powerful "aura," and that's the secret of my success. Successful artists are all able to manipulate the "balance of forces"—they're that kind of extraordinarily talented people.
When you say above that "every day I write a paragraph," do you mean you write your stories sequentially, from beginning to end? Or that you write the paragraphs and later arrange them together?
All my stories—my novels, my novellas, and my short stories—are written sequentially, from beginning to end. I never arrange them together or put them in a different sequence. My manuscripts are extremely clean—I very, very rarely correct even a single word.
A few questions about images and themes that recur throughout your work. The concept of space is always contested in your writing: your stories depict impossible spaces (the apartment in "A Village in the Big City"), spaces that shift dimension and physical realities over the course of the story (the environs of the hut in "Homecoming"), and nebulous spaces (the darkness in "In the Wilderness" or the underground in "Vertical Motion"). What interests you about the manipulation of space in fiction?
Only a writer that possesses a high degree of rationality can break through conventional space and enter into a primitive and purely fantastic landscape. Dante, for example, is that kind of writer. The landscape of hell is suffused with longing and power. Those mighty awakened souls win their own space through the struggles of life and death. As soon as the struggle ceases, that space immediately disappears. This is the creative mechanism that I spoke of in my response above. A writer exhibits her vitality through unfamiliar space.
Your writing often depicts grotesqueries, bodily disfigurement, and outright violence. This is a quality it seems to share with works by other writers identified with China's avant-garde school of the 1980s. Specifically, the imagery in some ways resembles the early works of Yu Hua, which you have called "the first Chinese works that can truly be said to belong to modernism and to have substance." How does your approach to writing about violence compare with the approach taken by the other avant-garde writers and how do you yourself feel about depicting violence in your work?
Writing violence for the sake of violence is vulgar and tasteless. I am not like some Chinese writers, who get a thrill from the simple depiction of violence. That's called acting out a perversion; there's no substance to it. In a select few of Yu Hua's early works, he writes violence in a very remarkable manner, for example, the works in his collection Mistakes by the Riverside. I even wrote a review of that collection. But he has several stories where he writes violence and there is no substance to it. His self-awareness when creating is not strong. A few of Mo Yan's depictions of violence are really warped, of low character. What does it mean to say something has substance? It is to say: your depictions of violence must have form, must have a sense of metaphysics to them. Just like the images in Dante's hell, they must depict the true struggles deep within the soul. Readers read the terrifying images in Dante, but those images push those readers to yearn for their purest ideals. Your question lumps my writing together with other writers of the eighties, which shows that you haven't entered deeply into Can Xue's works—you need to put more effort into reading!
You expect a real partnership with your readers. You have said that they need to be well-read enough in modernism to understand your writing technique, and willing to make the effort to understand the deep structure of your work. Considering that you expect such a high level of engagement and response on the part of your readers, what is your personal relationship with your readers like? Do you notice a difference between the response of your Chinese readers to your work and the response of foreign readers to your work?
I often interact with my readers in China, and quite a few interviews with me have been published. And I'm also on the Web, communicating with netizens. I also frequently critique my colleagues—I've offended almost all my fellow writers and critics. However, I still must persist in speaking reason and I must maintain my critical position. China has more than a few Can Xue fans, but overall, Can Xue's era still hasn't arrived, because her works are too ahead of the curve, and don't conform to commonplace, habitual aesthetics. So I must continue to do the steady work of bringing my writings into existence. Chinese readers and foreign readers should have about the same reaction to my writing. Because my subject matter is universal human nature—the original face of nature.
What do you mean when you say "subject matter is universal human nature—the original face of nature"? We see nature frequently appearing in your stories as an adversarial force that drives self-discovery (the sea in "The Lure of the Sea") or as the truth of life, hidden just below the surface (the spring in "The Spring"). In your interpretation, what is the connection between the images of nature in your stories and your feelings about nature?
According to my worldview, the relationship between man and nature is that of having the same structures and sharing the same flesh. Nature is the highest form of existence. At some periods, She inevitably gives birth to things that occupy the same rank as mankind, so that through them, She may display her own essence. But I am not a pantheist: I feel that this state of affairs is the result of nature's structural function itself. Mankind shoulders the mission that Mother Nature has endowed to it (that is to say, nature demands that mankind realize and manifest her goals through creativity), and thus, we can conclude that mankind presumably shares the same kind of structural function as nature. They can only exist as the children of nature, with the same body as their mother. Because I believe in nature (as a Chinese person, this is very natural), in my writings, existence and nonexistence, the spiritual and the material, speculative and material thought, this shore and the opposite shore—all are unified together as they repulse each other. The opposing forces are locked in a life and death struggle, yet in the midst of that struggle, they achieve a balance and a harmony. In this aspect, my ideological system is very much opposed to Western culture. Although, of course, my worldview was gradually formed through my own exhaustive study of Western culture.
Next year, Yale University Press is putting out a translation of a critical piece you wrote on Kafka, a writer about whom you've often written, and with whom you have long been fascinated. Your view of Kafka strikes us as unusual; you've said that Kafka's works "signify an incomparable tragedy, but are also suffused with a pleasant freedom. This is like the whole of the experiences of K, the protagonist of his novel The Trial. There is mystery, terror, alienation, and yet his every action originates from a primitive instinct and a sublime will." What experiences or influences have shaped your views of Kafka?
My interpretation of Kafka is indeed unusual. The main reason why my critical work on Kafka is a breath of fresh air to readers, I think, is that I have incorporated Eastern elements into my understanding of Kafka's work. The religiosity of Westerners caused Kafka unending misery and drove him to an untimely death. I must say, to a certain degree, these living conditions diminished his creativity. On the other hand, my worldview, which combines the cultures of the East and West, enables me to regard the mundane world with an open mind and to endure this profound black comedy. Therefore, when I interpret The Castle and Amerika and other such acclaimed works, I emphasize the vitality in them, the primitive, rebellious revelry, and, above all, the vigorous meaning of life contained within. I believe I have in this respect surpassed existentialism and am proposing an artistic philosophy with a Chinese color to it. I can write this kind of criticism because I investigate the artistic philosophy shared by Kafka, Dante, Calvino, and artists like them. I have only achieved my current breakthroughs by applying my thirty-some years of creative experience to writing critical essays. I have not only written books of critical work on Kafka, but I have also analyzed Dante, Borges, Calvino, Goethe, Shakespeare, and other such masters—altogether producing six books of criticism.
Could you speak a bit more about what you term "the religiosity of Westerners"? What do you mean by "religiosity," and how did this religiosity "diminish [Kafka's] creativity"?
Here I am referring mainly to a sense of "original sin." A sense of original sin was in the background of both Kafka's personal life and his literary creativity, so some people believe that one can use existentialism to explain his writings. My critique seeks to pry him apart from existentialism; rather, I analyze and write about Kafka's exuberant creativity, his passion for the mundane world, and about his pagan rebellion against the religiosity that suppressed him. I write about his strong individuality, which led him to bring his primitive creativity (squeezed out by reason) to the fore. But Kafka's performance in real life was far weaker than what he demonstrated in his creations. He was always on the edge of being swallowed up by original sin, and he feared quotidian life, which he always wanted to escape. On this point, actually, he is in line with existentialism. The incessant guilt that came from his religious consciousness finally conquered his primitive life force; the friction within his own soul dissipated all of his vitality. His letters and diaries always show that he was a "germophobe"; a man who could not bear the vulgarities of life; a man who strived every day to be a "good person."
To shift to your influences: You have declared yourself as thoroughly opposed to postmodernism, and prefer to describe yourself as a modernist writer. What does the idea of modernism mean to you?
Postmodernism smashes structure, but establishes nothing. It therefore belongs to a transitional phase of literature and philosophy. Now that phase has already passed, and the things that were being advocated then are no longer relevant to the present. The ultimate mission of mankind only consists of being constructive and creative. As the children of nature, each one of us must exercise our own creativity, so as not to fail to meet the expectations nature holds for mankind. In this respect, modernist literature does a better job than postmodernism, and is therefore more closely aligned with my worldview. Without exception, modernism pursues the ideal, regards creation and invention as the most noble values, and truly loves quotidian, mundane life. These are all essential elements for constructing the future spiritual kingdom.
Are there contemporary artists working in other media whose work you find inspiring or admire? What contemporary artworks most closely parallel your own approach?
All modernist art (including literature) is performance art. These artworks are all demonstrations of artists standing up to survive. I like many forms of art—classical music, modernist painting, and modernist dance can all deeply move me. Pieces of classical music—by Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Bach, and others—are all true demonstrations of modernist performance. The Bible and the Divine Comedy are also brimming with modernist elements, and they are far more powerful than so-called postmodernist literature. With respect to modernist painters and sculptors, my favorites are Van Gogh, Dali, Munch, Miro, Bosch, and Giacometti. My favorite dance is Japan's Butoh (the Ankoku-Butoh movement).
You have famously described your work as a "foreign plant growing in the soil of five thousand years of history." You often talk about the "foreign plant" but only very seldom discuss the "soil of five thousand years of history." What are your Chinese influences? "Tales of the strange?" Perhaps the poetry of Li He or Li Shangyin? How does the "soil of five thousand years of history" nourish your work?
We must first clarify this idea—what is Chinese culture? The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the way we interact with each other, romantic relationships, sense of languages, ways of speaking—do these belong to culture? Are we immersed in 5000 years of culture? As a purely modernist artist, would I have more profound, more deeply felt feelings toward Chinese culture than the ordinary person? I have read some of the pieces of Chinese literature that you mentioned; nevertheless, with the exception of Dream of the Red Chamber and some Tang poetry, the others cannot touch my soul. The essence of Chinese culture that I contemplate is the potential force of ideas like "the unity of heaven and man." In the past 5000 years, our people have not been conscious of this power, because we have been isolated and closed to the world, and we lack a spirit of independence. Yet we are supposed to have this power—an ethnic group that has existed for thousands of years must possess some eternal elements. If you don't develop these elements, however, then they will forever remain in darkness and never see the light of day, which also means they will never be able to truly exist. My method is to use Western culture as a hoe to unearth our ancient culture, so we can realize its proper value. Western culture has been "divided" for thousands of years. I want to now join the two shores—earth and sky, the material and the immaterial—and combine them into one. And for that task, I have some advantages: namely, the nourishment and enlightenment I receive from 5000 years of history.
In the preface to your work Mind Report, you speak of "liberating the soul" of your readers. You've also written that the artist should "give the reader the possibility of unlocking the gates of their personal hell and freeing their long-imprisoned spirits." Many of those ideas remind us of the discussions around literary revolution and literary reform held by the writers and thinkers associated with the New Culture Movement; your "gates of hell" seem closely related to Lu Xun's "iron house." In what ways is the mission of your work aligned with theirs, and in what ways does it depart?
I still take Mr. Lu Xun's attitude toward foreign culture as my model. That sort of mentality—open to the world, but free from self-abasement—is exactly what we Mainland literary figures lack. I have already spoken enough on this issue. I only want to add this: Mainland China's literary climate today is far bleaker than it was in the 1930s and '40s. My mission is precisely to fight against today's literary circles, to carry forward the Lu Xun spirit, and to leave young writers a glimmer of hope. China's present-day literary circle consists of a few self-interested cabals. Young writers who show the slightest hint of gutsiness lose any chance of advancement and are left to fend for themselves.
You grew up in a China that, influenced by Marxism and other radical Western ideas, isolated itself from the outside world. During those decades (the 1960s and '70s), you read a fair amount of foreign literature, Marxist philosophy, and Western history, encouraged by your ostracized "Rightist" parents, who had deep roots in the Chinese Communist movement. How have you negotiated the ironies and discordances of your influences in your writing?
I never base my writing on concepts; I base my writing on feelings. Obviously I have concepts, and I am even willing to call my pattern of cognition "rational intuition." This is because my sensibility eventually congeals into reason. As I said above, what I portray are the contradictions and struggles in the depths of the soul and the landscape of life of an artistically refined human. My starting point is the impulse of life; the impulse for freedom in the depths of the mind. It is just such a mechanism: you have an impulse, then, in the midst of tension, the landscape takes shape. When you stop, then the landscape disappears. I have sufficiently absorbed Western ideology during my many years of reading, yet my creative mechanism is fundamentally a Chinese type of subversive mechanism. Of course this is closely related to my life trajectory. I am a Chinese person in love with Western culture.
At this point, you've had a very long writing career—you've been writing for more than thirty years, a period in which China has changed dramatically, and the market for writing in China has almost completely transformed. And yet, your writing style seems to remain remarkably consistent. How do you yourself feel your writing (or your writing process) has changed over the past thirty years?
The small changes within Chinese literary circles in the past few decades can hold no significance within the several thousand years of literary history; these changes have had absolutely no influence on my writing. My writing shifts gradually. What it obeys are the laws inherent in my creative process—an evolution, a gradual, continuous revealing of new life. I whole-heartedly detest writing to follow the crowd; I have always been incompatible with the Chinese literary world.
You believe that your works can only be properly understood by each reader as he or she struggles to find meaning in the process of reading, and you often encourage readers to look harder and find their own answers to the questions they have about your work. But judging from the volume of interviews you've done alone, you're astoundingly generous with your time, accessible to readers, and willing to receive questions. If interpretation of your work is such an individual process, a process that requires an investment of energy by a patient reader, where do you think the utility of doing interviews lies?
My work belongs to an especially advanced kind of literature, far more ahead of its time than Kafka was to his readers in his day. Furthermore, I myself believe that I am a writer whose sense of reason and originality are equally, extraordinarily strong—I have published many volumes of criticism. After I have finished my novels, following an idle period, I come to grasp their essential structure. Other writers are seldom equipped with this ability. Therefore I not only critique other classic writers, but I also critique my own finished novels. To think that writers cannot critique their own novels is an outdated belief. In the development of contemporary literature, cutting-edge products are drawn into experimentation. They tend to merge with philosophy, and can even achieve an effect that philosophy cannot. As an experimental novelist with a strongly philosophical temperament (my method being "experimenting on myself"), I have the capacity to analyze my own work. I suppose there's no need for controversy there? Everybody can present their own interpretation!
I believe that, in the coming era, all pioneering artists will become interpreters of their own work, and in the wake of that wave, interpretation will become a common practice. Won't that be good news for the wider audience? If the eyes of the readers are open, and their curiosity is piqued, they may become eager to add their own interpretation to the work they are reading, or even to the fiction that they themselves write. In this way, every piece of writing would turn into a site for experimentation, and—through the process of interpretation—people would endeavor to create anew. I call this sort of interpretation the extension of writing. The realist approach to reading—the passive admiration, standing at the outside and uttering a few exclamations at the mystery of literature—is inadequate for dealing with experimental works like Can Xue novels. Every reader must stand up and perform in order to enter the realm of experimental literature.
Can Xue: The Chinese author who returned to writing at 30
5 October 2023
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Yvette Tan
BBC News, Singapore
Getty Images Chinese writer Can XueGetty Images
One of eight children, Can Xue was born a few years before China was plunged into its Cultural Revolution
She's a Chinese author that few in China are familiar with - and had been hotly tipped to walk away with this year's Nobel Prize in Literature.
In the end the avant-garde fiction writer didn't win - Norway's Jon Fosse did - but Can Xue's name is now much better known.
Her early life was shaped during one of the most turbulent periods of the 20th Century.
One of eight children, Can Xue was a teenager at the start of the Cultural Revolution, which plunged China into nearly a decade of chaos and bloodshed.
When the Communist purge occurred, her father - an editorial director at a newspaper - was sentenced to the countryside and forced into manual labour. Her mother, who worked for the same publication, was forced to do the same.
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When her parents were taken away, she, her siblings and their grandmother were left to fend for themselves. They survived on pumpkin flowers and weeds picked from the mountains. At one point, they resorted to eating Can Xue's father's old clothes, including a fur coat. Her grandmother, who fell ill from overwork and starvation, later died of an oedema.
Can Xue was unable to continue her education, graduating only from elementary school. It was not until she was almost 30 that she began to write again.
A confluence of East and West
Can Xue, the pen name of Deng Xiaohua, was born in 1953 in Hunan province.
Growing up, she was surrounded by philosophy books owned by her father, who used to study Marxism.
But that all changed when the Cultural Revolution happened - a campaign launched by then-leader Mao Zedong to remove capitalist, traditional and cultural elements that were seen as anti-communist from society.
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Her parents were among millions persecuted in a wide range of abuses carried out across the country, including public humiliation, arbitrary imprisonment, torture and seizure of property.
The man who documented China's cultural revolution
The Cultural Revolution: A memory avoided
This meant any opportunity of formal education was taken away from her. But she retained her love of reading and writing. She taught herself English and began reading Western literature extensively as she worked various jobs. She was a teacher, a self-employer tailor and even a "barefoot doctor" - an unlicensed village doctor in China.
It wasn't until the 1980s that she began writing and developing her avant-garde style that has set her apart from other Chinese authors - and largely kept her away from fame.
"[Her] style [puts off] many readers, but also makes Can Xue unique," said Chen Xiaozhen, an editor at her publisher Hunan Wenyi, in a report in the South China Morning Post.
Today, she has hundreds of novels, novellas and short stories published, with several having been translated into English.
In 2015, her novel The Last Lover won the Best Translated Book Award for fiction. She was also previously longlisted for the International Booker prize for her novel Love in the New Millennium.
She names prominent Western writers like Kafka, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Dante as major influences in her work.
"My ideas grow up in the West but I dig them up to replant in China's deep soil, a rich history of 5,000 years," she said, according to an article by state-run website, the China Internet Information Centre.
"My works aren't like those from the West or from China, but rather my own creation. Chinese culture is from my heart. I was born here. I live here. I don't need to learn what is from my heart."
If she'd won, Can Xue would have been only the second Chinese person to walk away with a Nobel Prize in Literature, after novelist Mo Yan won the prize in 2012.
Her competitors included heavyweights far better known in the West - among them Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami and Salman Rushdie - but Can Xue had been one of the bookies' favourites this year.
The awards committee said the prize is awarded to "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction", and the winner receives 11m Swedish kronor ($999,399; £822,000).
China's literary atmosphere
When asked what she thinks of China's literary scene - Can Xue has had less than positive things to say.
"I've said it before, I have no hope," she told Chinese news outlet Sixth Tone in a 2016 interview. "[In China] everyone is only conserving the old. If you're not going back to tradition with them, then you're the outlier, which means you're marginalised and ignored."
But Can Xue, who lives in Beijing, said she would continue writing for the country's young people.
"There are very few progressive Chinese people right now, so I pin my hopes on the young. They are in their 20s now," she said.
"In another 20 years, when they encounter problems spiritually, or when materialism cannot meet their needs, they might pick up one of my books."
The Performance of Fiction: An Interview with Can Xue
By Porochista Khakpour
March 13, 2017
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Can Xue’s novel Frontier, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, and with an introduction by Porochista Khakpour, comes out March 14 from Open Letter Books.
Can Xue is the greatest living writer on earth, I’ve often said. And I am the luckiest living writer on earth for being not just a fan but the friend of the greatest living writer on earth. Can Xue often emails me with talk of literature and politics, checks up on my social media outlets to see how I am doing, offers all sorts of health advice (we are both chronically ill), and sometimes just drops a simple hello from Beijing. I had read her for years before meeting her—at first, thanks to stumbling on a story of hers in a Daniel Halpern international literature anthology, The Art of the Story. Soon I realized that Bradford Morrow had published her in Conjunctions for ages and I went back through the issues. (Years later, I got a job as writer-in-residence at Bard College and he became my colleague.) Everything I read I fell in love with, even as it was always over my head on some level; I’d never enjoyed feeling so inadequate more than when reading Can Xue! But I’d also feel her work deep in my body and soul, in a way I’d never quite experienced with experimental writing, art that often only fed the top layer of my brain. The experience of reading Can Xue cannot be compared to any other reading experience.
Then when I served on the Neustadt Prize jury in 2015, I finally had direct contact with her, as the Neustadt Prize—what some call “the American Nobel”—requires that we notify who we nominate (of course, she was my nominee). Can Xue was most excited about the part of the prize that involved coming to the United States, where she feels her best readers are. In the end, she was a close finalist but didn’t win—and so we decided to figure out a way to arrange for her to visit the States anyway. I helped organize a tour for her, which would include her ever-adoring tailor husband, Lu Yong (it would be his first visit to the States). The tour this past fall was an enormous success: a whirlwind of excellent talks in Chinese and English, huge crowds and long lines of scholars and students, endless Q&As, never a boring meal all over the country, and conversation-packed walks through several cities. (Walking with Can Xue through Central Park and then spending a day with her at the Metropolitan Museum of Art might be one of the highlights of my life!) At Bard and MIT and the Asian American Writers Workshop—the events I worked on most closely—students are still talking about her visit. When I ask them what touched them the most during her talks, their thoughts mirror mine: how she never tried to write creatively until she was thirty, how she endured the horrors of life in the labor camps during the Cultural Revolution that interrupted her education at age thirteen, how she refuses to revise her work and believes in the performance of the first draft, how she holds on to optimism and a belief in the future while also revering the riches of past (modernist writers, canonical philosophers, iconic artists of ages ago)—and how she is so transcendently alive. Truly, her laughter can fill a room with light just as her intellect can set pages on fire.
With six novels, fifty novellas, 120 short stories, and six works of literary criticism and commentary—only a fraction of which have been translated in English—as well as a 2015 BTBA Award in 2015, Can Xue should be more well-known, greatest living writer that she is. But while she might not be a household name, she is no secret in the literary world either. She counts among her fans the late Susan Sontag and Robert Coover, as well as John Darnielle and Eileen Myles—and I discover many more every time I speak of her publicly. I wrote to my friend Eileen about her recently again and she had a few words to say: “Can Xue walks an urgent and excited line between reality and fantasy, legend and presence, politics and surrealism. The moment I picked up her work I felt like I had found a friend and an inspiration. Her feminism is in the gut of the work and in the uniquely radiantly mad mind. It feels like work that had to be written. Like we have to take our suffering and our precious time and infuse it with magic. I’ve learned so much from her.” Indeed, we are all her students. The following interview was conducted over email over the course of months and is a fairly typical interaction between this master and this apprentice, creator and reader, icon and fan, two writers and two friends.
Porochista Khakpour (KP): I’ve had the great honor to write the introduction of your new book Frontier (pictured left). I wonder if you could tell us where you first got the idea for Frontier. The origin story of this tale, the genesis of this project, very much interests me as I consider this the most mysterious of Can Xue’s work!
Can Xue (CX): I think this is a very good question. Let me explain how I create and build up a novel. It’s a long journey, a special kind of journey that is realized through my continuing performances. It’s impossible for me to “have an idea” for a novel before the novel is being created, step by step, through my daily improvisational performances until it is finished at last. Because when I am writing, what I depend on is mainly the performance of my body, not just my thinking. In my view, the performance of one’s body is much more difficult than the thinking that occurs in one’s brain. You can’t know the meaning of your words and sentences before they are actually written down; you can’t know even after that. I usually know the “meaning” several months after I finish a novel. In the process of the writing, all you need is a strong passion and firm resolution—a resolution of performance. Of course, this sort of creation also needs a powerful original force to sustain it from start to end.
I always think that my writing is somewhat similar to Isadora Duncan’s dance. It’s not something external that gives you an idea about your tale; it’s a body’s passion and resolution that produces an essential movement. So when I am writing, I don’t need inspiration in the usual sense. Because at that moment, I am the inspiration, and I am Great Nature, which, as a Chinese writer, means the ultimate setting in my philosophical and artistic view; a warmer setting than God in the West. My body also becomes the body of Great Nature. As soon as I start the performance, the beautiful pattern of Great Nature gradually unfolds. What I need to do is just concentrate on my acting, indulging in the wildest fantasy. By the end, everything I write down forms that pattern naturally. I know this explanation is still mysterious for readers, but it is a matter of practicing, not just “thinking.” You have to do it very often; then you may understand it step by step. That means that reading works by Can Xue is also a sort of performance.
Before I start a novel, I sometimes say to myself: “I’m going to write a big thing this time. Because recently there are so many things surging and tingling in my dark heart.” Usually whatever I write down first is perfect—I call that “material thinking.”
I always think that my writing is somewhat similar to Isadora Duncan’s dance. It’s not something external that gives you an idea about your tale; it’s a body’s passion and resolution that produces an essential movement.
PK: How do you see this work as fitting into your canon? I often wonder what order you would have readers read you or which books you now favor or how you see them all next to each other.
CX: Actually I view all of my works as a whole that is indivisible. I think my writing can be seen as a tree that is growing continuously all the time. It has its specific pattern in each growing period. Maybe some readers like works that are from an early period, while others like the later ones better, according to their personalities. As for me, when I consider my fiction—a lot of stories and six novels—as a whole, I like to list them according to the time that they were written. Strangely, I feel that each of my six novels is my favorite. Maybe by the time I wrote them, my artistic self was fully mature. From Five Spice Street and The Last Lover to Frontier and Love in the New Millennium, and two others, I think every one of them ranks first in the literary circles of the world. They are so beautiful, and each one reached a higher level of body and spirit. When you list them according to the time they were written, you can see this clearly. So I can’t decide which is best, because each one displays a unique kingdom of beauty.
My performance have never failed me in these long, sustained projects. And Frontier is a mature novel, one of my best. Every time I reread, it gives me new ideas. I view the book as the most successful pursuit of freedom. The border town in the story is not the type that people see or think about in daily life, but a more real small cosmos that is described as an ideal of nature and humanity. I build up the kingdom of freedom, and everything in it (people, plants, animals, and so on) presents an immortal painting. These people force themselves to lead a brave life—a free life that is like always getting ready to fly across an abyss. One thing I would like to share is that the English translation is beautiful and poetic.
PK: What were your influences on Frontier outside of the performance of Can Xue? I think about the animals in particular, and the actual town we have here. If you had to be your own psychodetective, could you say where this imagery came from?
CX: Usually when I work on a big new project, I try hard to exercise more seriously every day (jogging twice a day), and to keep myself in a state of high tension. When I wrote Frontier, I jogged in our community (in 2006, Beijing was not as dirty as nowadays). The sky was so blue; I felt that those trees were spring up freely, and I was melting into the sky, the trees, the grass . . . I call this exercise “drawing information from Great Nature.” After that, the grotesque images will surge out even when I am not writing. Sometimes I write down one or two words as a note, but my writing is an improvisation—the strange animals will come, the plants that belong to a paradise will come too, when I am acting. Because as soon as you launch the mechanism of the paradox of your body, every image evoked is aimed toward freedom automatically. But in my view, to an artist, psychological levels are relatively superficial. The best reader for this sort of fiction should not only look for clues from the field of psychology. They should be more profound and broad. I think all of the clues are in an artistic self. The best reader should draw wisdom and nourishment from literature itself, from philosophy and history, and then build up his modern view of the world or the arts gradually.
My writing is an improvisation—the strange animals will come, the plants that belong to a paradise will come too, when I am acting.
PK: How long did it take to write and what were your habits when writing Frontier?
CX: I took about a year (or less?) to finish Frontier. That was in 2006 (it was published in 2008). I remember how happy I was during that time. The setting of the story seems to be the Xin Jiang province in the northwest of China, although I have never been there. But during that time, my wonderful Xin Jiang remained in the depths of my mind all day long—even I myself didn’t realize it. That was really a fantastic experience.
In terms of my writing habits, I always write for an hour every day, usually in the morning. Just one thousand words (a page), not more, not less. Because I want to keep my images fresh. I sit down, a pen in my hand, and after one or two minutes, I begin to write sentence by sentence. This acting continues for about an hour; then the page is finished, I stand up, and do other things and forget my writing for the time being. Strangely, there’s no need for me to change anything I have written down. It’s there, neat and beautiful, just like my handwriting. . . This is my habit when I write fiction, and for Frontier, of course, the habit remained the same. Actually, I have not changed my writing habit for thirty-three years!
PK: You often write of surreal realities. “Other worlds,” one might even say, or “dream realities” or the realities of subconscious. But what do you think when the surface is also so surreal? For example, America right now is in chaotic, almost psychedelic, upheaval. What happens when the truth is stranger than fiction? What do you think of Trump and the chaos in America at the moment? I know things have not been easy in China either, but how do you handle it? Do you think much about politics anymore? Do you feel it matters for art? How can readers and writers alike approach this—should we immerse or ignore?
CX: As the saying goes, “onlookers see more than the player.” As an eastern artist and a foreigner who has closely watched the changes in the United States, I don’t think the current situation in the country is that strange. Although American people have a long excellent tradition of democracy, and the system of the country is relatively good, at the same time, the country also has a long conservative tradition. This tradition usually functions as nationalism. For many years the political elite who led the country followed the principle of “political correctness.” They neither really knew their own people, nor understood people in other countries. The only thing they usually did was to hold high the banner of justice for their policymaking. So I think that the phenomenon of Trump is a great explosion of contradictions. It shows that the leaders of the country are more and more out of touch with the American people. They don’t know what people think about, and how they feel about their lives nowadays. And also, the theory the leaders depend on to rule the country, to deal with their foreign affairs, is a very old one that is not suitable for the situations of the world that is changing rapidly.
Because of great disappointment in their leaders, the people turned to Trump—a nationalist, and a conservative strongman—hoping that he would bring a better life for them. “The people get the government they deserve”—this is what happened in the United States recently, I think. Although Trump represents only half of the people. It is a very serious problem, and how to enlighten the masses is still a long tough task before the intellectuals. But first, the intellectuals have to find the right theory, change their outdated worldview, and explore humanistic ways to administer their country and to deal with their foreign policy. In these aspects I think President Barack Obama has done a better job than other leaders. But the time was too short, so he couldn’t change the past during his term.
Yes, I always pay attention to politics. And I feel it matters for art. But as a modern artist, I take a historical perspective to exam events that burst out suddenly. The history of human beings is long; we can’t measure it in a decade or even decades. Historical events are the power source for my creation; I have always been angry or excited for the events. But I think the main duty of an artist is to change the souls and bodies of common people. We must do more work, and enlighten people with our work. Our work is very important to politics in the world—as the events of Trump and Brexit show. Of course an artist is also a common person. If someday people here take to the streets, it’s possible that I would join them.
As a modern artist, I take a historical perspective to exam events that burst out suddenly. The history of human beings is long; we can’t measure it in a decade or even decades.
PK: When you came on your US university tour this autumn, no matter where we were—Bard College, MIT, the Asian American Writers Workshop—I was taken with how much young people loved you. I’ve never seen more young people ask questions and want to simply be around an author. I know you also love your young readers. I wonder if you could talk about who your ideal reader is, as well as why young people matter so much to you.
CX: In my heart, an ideal reader is someone who believes two things—love and creation. Those two things are also the core of my work. Can Xue loves people and the world. Communication is the most important thing for her. And at the same time she pursues a life of creation that is always new, that changes every day; she welcome challenges, and never stays in one place.
Why do young people matter so much for Can Xue? Because they are Can Xue’s hope. The works by Can Xue are the fables of beauty—they may not be realized right away—but young readers will realize them someday, I think.
Read Kate Prengel’s review of Frontier
Read Can Xue’s essay “‘The Fair-haired Princess’ and Serious Literature
Read Can Xue’s story “The Old Cicada”
Can Xue, meaning “dirty snow, leftover snow, but also pure snow on the top of a mountain,” is the pseudonym of Deng Xiaohua. She was born in 1953 in Changsha City, Hunan Province; her parents were sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and she only graduated from elementary school. Can Xue learned English on her own and wrote books on Borges, Shakespeare, and Dante. Her publications in English include Frontier, The Embroidered Shoes, Five Spice Street, Vertical Motion, and The Last Lover, which won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.
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Interview with Can Xue from the Reykjavik International Literary Festival
Last week I had the opportunity to interview Can Xue as part of the Reykjavik International Literary Festival. We ended up writing out our interview ahead of time, so I thought I would share it here. Enjoy!
Born in China, where her parents were persecuted as being “ultra-rightists” by the Anti-rightest Movement of 1957. As a result, her father was jailed, her mother and two brothers were sent to the countryside for “re-education.” Can Xue was raised by her grandmother, suffered from tuberculosis, and faced a series of hardships.
In 1983, she began writing, and here first short story was published in 1985. After that, there’s been no looking back, and, according to Wikipedia, as of 2009 she’s written three novels, fifty novellas, 120 short stories, and six book-length commentaries. Of these, six books have appeared in English translation—Dialogues in Paradise, Old Floating Cloud, The Enbroidered Shoes, Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories, Five Spice Street, and Vertical Motion—with Yale University Press publishing another novel next year, and a critical piece on Kafka.
Can Xue’s prose has attracted a lot of attention from writers and critics, including such great American writers as Robert Coover and Bradford Morrow, the editor of Conjunctions magazine, which has published a number of Can Xue’s stories—the first two people to mention Can Xue’s work to me. Her reputation has continued to grow, recently attracting high praise from The Mountain Goats frontman, John Darnielle, and being the featured author in the forthcoming issue of Music and Literature.
Frequently characterized as “avant-garde,” Can Xue’s writing operates under its own logic, a unique overlapping of images that explode “conventional” storytelling approaches, instead creating a sort of shifting landscape that forces the reader to engage closely with the text.
For example, here’s a bit from “Vertical Motion,” the title story of the collection that we published:
We are little critters who live in the black earth beneath the desert. The people on Mother Earth can’t imagine such a large expanse of fertile humus lying dozens of meters beneath the boundless desert. Our race has lived here for generations. We have neither eyes nor any olfactory sense. In this large nursery, such apparatus is useless. Our lives are simple, for we merely use our long beaks to dig the earth, eat the nutritious soil, and then excrete it. We live in happiness and harmony because we have abundant resources in our hometown. Thus, we can all eat our fill without a dispute arising. At any rate, I’ve never heard of one.
The mixture of Can Xue’s beautifully strange prose with such complex structures is the main reason so many writers and critics are intrigued, and frequently obsessed with, her works.
Chad W. Post: I want to talk more about Can Xue’s aesthetic beliefs in a bit, but for now I thought I’d start off with a few simple, scene-setting questions. First off, what made you decide to become a writer?
Can Xue:I decided to become a writer when I was thirty years old. But I think before that I had been preparing for this, actually, since I was three years old. I still remember those things which happened when I was three and four years old. At that time I always made stories up in my heart about people, about animals, about plants around me—simple stories, happy stories, exciting stories, even horrible stories. But all these stories had good ending. Sometimes these stories lasted several days, even longer. And in all these stories, I was a leading role. I loved to make up my own stories. But I didn’t get any chance to publish any thing until I was thirty, when my preparation was complete. After the situation in China changed, all the literary things happened to me naturally. I have been like an erupting volcano ever since.
Another factor made me decide to become a writer, I think, was because of the circumstances in China. I was born in fifties, that was an idealistic time—people in China were very poor then, almost no one could pursue material wealth. My parents were firm communists, their hearts were very pure. So, in my family, the only thing that children could pursue were spiritual things. I remember the most enjoyable thing in my life was reading. I read and read, never stopping until today.
CWP: I could make some pretty good guesses about this, but what authors to do see as influences on your work?
CX: In my younger years (from thirteen to twenty-five), I loved Chinese writer Lu Xun and Red Chamber, the ancient novel. And I also loved Russian writers—Gogol, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and so on. In the late seventies, I got ahold of some western classics, and I was so deeply engrossed by them! I think the authors I loved most are these: Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Kafka, Goethe, Borges, Calvino, Bruno Schulz, and Rilke’s poetry.
CWP: Over the past thirty years you’ve generated quite a number of pieces, ranging from critical essays to novels to novellas to short stories—how are you able to produce so much? Or, more to the point, what is your writing process like? (I read the interview in Asymptote, and the bit about not editing your work, and your amazing output, reminds me of Cesar Aira.)
CX: Maybe my writing process is unique. Everyday I write a page. I just get my pen and a notebook, sit down and write for an hour. Then I leave it as it is. I never have a structure in my mind beforehand, and I never revise my fictions—both short ones and long ones. This is how I write my fiction. For thirty years, I write almost every day, even during festivals. I had never been to a festival. That’s why I have produced so many works.
CWP: For a lot of readers your works can seem “challenging,” at least at first glance. Do you have advice for readers who are first approaching your work?
CX: Yes, I always give advice for readers when I publish my works. In my mind, my ideal readers are these: those who have read some works by the modernist writers, and who love metaphysical thinking and material thinking—both capabilities are needed for the reading of Can Xue.
CWP: Before getting more deeply into your aesthetic beliefs, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the literary scene in China. From an American perspective, it’s always been a bit difficult to get a handle on what’s going on in contemporary literature, although with Mo Yan being awarded the Nobel Prize, and websites like Paper-Republic starting up, that’s starting to change. Nevertheless, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered another Chinese writer writing anything like you do. What is the writing scene like in China these days? How has it changed over the past thirty years?
CX: A good question. I also think that the Chinese know much more about America and the West than you know about China. In China, in the early eighties, a group of young writers studied western literature quite deeply, and these western classics opened their field of vision. They produced quite a number of good works. Can Xue was one among them. The group are all born in fifties or sixties—a very idealistic group. That was a literary era full of hope. But since the nineties, almost everybody in this group has changed their mind. They felt that they had had enough the West, and now want to return to their own tradition, which is much greater than the Western tradition. So their works, except a very few writers, have become more and more traditional, more and more readable. People welcomed this great regression. But I think this returning is the death of a language and a soul. Because our own cultural tradition has not got enough strength to support a new writing, the only way to develop it is by blood transfusion. I think as a Chinese writer, I should criticize my culture severely, only having done so, I get the possibility to develop it.
As for my own writing, the readers in China think that I’m very difficult but unique among Chinese writers. I dare say, no fiction writers in China has studied the Western literature and Western philosophy so exhaustively like Can Xue.
CWP: Although there are a lot of pieces of yours that have yet to be translated into English, you are one of the most translated Chinese writers, with books published by Northwestern, New Directions, Yale University Press, and Open Letter. How did you first get translated, and what has this process been like for you?
CX: That’s a long story. In 1986 in Shanghai, a student gave two of Can Xue’s stories to Ron Jansson, my earliest translator. He read the stories and decided immediately to translate them into English. He did the work with a Chinese colleague, Zhang Jian, and got more stories and two novellas published—three books altogether.
In the mid 1990s, Ron Jansson got very ill, so my English versions weren’t published in the United States continuously. Then Karen Gernant found Can Xue and she got in touch with me. Karen, along with Chen Zeping, have done a lot of work—also three books, including Vertical Motion from Open Letter and Five Spice Street, a novel published by Yale Press. Also a libretto for an opera performed in Germany, and some essays. They are continuing their translating now. I think Karen is a talented translator, and she and I have a lot common topics in literature.
Recently, Yale Press has found a new translator for Can Xue—Annelise, a young woman. She’s translating my new novel—The Last Lover. I’m very happy to get these precious friends in the United States!
CWP: Do you work closely with your translators? I believe that your forthcoming Yale book is being translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, a young, extremely talented translator—how did she end up working with you?
CX: Yes, I work closely with Karen, Chen Zeping, and now, Annelise, I read their translations, and give my comments. Yes, I also think Annelise has a high talent for languages. Sometimes her English translation is better than my Chinese original!
CWP: OK, this a very long intro into a slightly different part of the conversation, so bear with me. I want to first read a bit from your afterword to Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories:
The particular characteristics of my stories have now been acknowledged. Nevertheless, when someone asks me directly, “What is really going on in your stories? How do you write them?,” I’m profoundly afraid of being misunderstood, so all I can say is, “I don’t know.” From any earthly perspective, in truth I do not know. When I write, I intentionally erase any knowledge from my mind.
I believe in the grandness of the original power. The only thing I can do is to devoutly, bring it into play in a manmade, blind atmosphere. Thus, I can break loose from the fetters of platitudes and conventions, and allow the mighty logos to melt into the omnipresent suggestions that inspire and urge me to keep going ahead. I don’t know what I will write tomorrow, or even in the next few minutes. Nor do I know what is most related to the “inspiration” that has produced my works in an unending stream for more than two decades. But I know one thing with certainty: no matter what hardships I face, I must preserve the spiritual quality of my life. For if I were to lose it, I would lose my entire foundation. [. . .]
Some people say that my stories aren’t useful: they can’t change anything, nor do people understand them. As time goes by, I’ve become increasingly confident about this. First, the production of twenty years’ worth of stories has changed me to the core. I’ve spoken of this above. Next, from my reading experience, this kind of story, which indeed isn’t very “useful,” that not all people can read—for those few very sensitive readers, there is a decisive impact. Perhaps this wasn’t at all the writer’s original intent. I think what this kind of story must change is the soul instead of something superficial. There will always be some readers who will respond—those readers who are especially interested in the strengthening force of art and exploring the soul. With its unusual style, this kind of story will communicate with those readers, stimulating them and calling to them, spurring them on to join in the exploration of the soul.
Since writing this, has your approach, or thinking about your aesthetic changed at all?
CX: Basically, my stance, my way, and my thinking is always the same. But I’ve developed a lot since that time. My new thinking is that my experimental fictions have the same core as Western Philosophy. And in a sense, these kind of works are a new development to Classical Philosophy. Now I’m trying hard to open up a road for Western Philosophy, which has come to a standstill for many years.
CWP: In reading the recent Asymptote magazine interview a few things struck me, namely that when you talk about your aesthetic or the reasons you write the way you write, or the way that readers can only properly “understand” your stories is by struggling to understand them, your focus seems to be mostly on the process of creating and the creative process of reading. For me, this ties in with a comment you made about your fiction being “a performance.” In what way do you see your fiction as a performance? How does this relate to your view of yourself as an “experimental” writer?
CX: Yes, I think that you are absolutely right! You understand Can Xue very well. In the nineties when I studied Western literature, I found a metaphysical structure in these writers’ works: Borges, Kafka, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Calvino, and so on, even in the Bible. According to this structure, you can read their works as the process of creating and reading. Very few writers have this talent. Meanwhile, I found that Can Xue’s works had the same structure as these writers. And I felt that it was not painstaking, it’s an natural thing like giving birth. But why do all these first-rate writers have a same structure? After a hard and long period of studying, I have understood that the structure is just the structure of Great Nature, of course, it is also the structure of humanity. I expect that for great times to come to us, we artists should give performances, waking up people’s souls, I feel it’s a very urgent thing to do. This kind of literature actually means that one stands out, acting one’s own being. That’s why I said it was a performance.
Vertical Motion Can Xue, trans. from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. Open Letter (Univ. of Nebraska, dist.), $13.95 trade paper (186p) ISBN 978-1-934824-37-5
The animals and plants that figure in Xue's latest are used not only as metaphor but also as omens and characters. "What led to this? Milk. That's right--milk," says the cat who narrates "An Affectionate Companion's Jottings." The flowers of "The Roses at the Hospital" shelter babies as though invested with a secret power. Xue's Kafkaesque world is grounded in reality but infused with an eerie omniscient feeling. In the affecting title story, an unnamed "critter" lives "in the black earth beneath the desert." As hard as it digs, it never reaches the surface. Elsewhere, cockroaches, rats, and other creatures are objects of wonder and/or narrative catalysts. Xue (Five Spice Street) is a natural storyteller; eight of her 13 stories have first-Person narrators who share a confidence or a unique observation that draws the reader in. And, like Kafka, Xue often withholds information to pique interest. The traditional stories fare less well; Xue's direct prose lacks psychological complexity and endings don't live up to foreshadowed promises. But at her best, Xue captures the wonder of the natural world and then, with great assurance, steps beyond into something entirely. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2011 PWxyz, LLC
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"Vertical Motion." Publishers Weekly, vol. 258, no. 31, 1 Aug. 2011, pp. 27+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A263440121/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=03839341. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Can Xue FRONTIER Open Letter (Adult Fiction) $16.95 3, 14 ISBN: 978-1-940953-54-0
Things are strange out there on the fringes, as the always adventurous Can Xue's latest novel illustrates.There is magical realism aplenty in the pages of Can Xue's beguiling story, but magical realism by way of Calvino, not Garcia Marquez. The opening is a scene from a waking dream, in which a young girl named Liujin strains to make out what voices caught in rustling poplar leaves are saying. By the end of the book, by which time the reader has explored every corner of the quiet frontier town and its strange portals, the wind is still blowing, warm and portentous, threatening to become nightmare as Liujin thinks, "Something must be about to happen." Indeed. Pebble Town is a place where packs of snow leopards think nothing about descending for a visit, a place where walls and floors are never as solid as they appear to be ("Liujin, there's an abyss below you!"). Just so, a focal point of the town is a guesthouse that is really just a tent alongside a coal shed beneath a dizzying snowcapped mountain--details that may play on the author's pseudonym, which means "dirty snow." But then, Liujin wonders in passing, did the city's best-known hotel, with its snow leopard caged in the lobby, even exist? There's a hallucinatory quality to the enterprise as Liujin eventually comes into contact with the other dozen or so major players in the novel, among them her uncle, a bachelor janitor whose "heart swelled with erotic dreams" and whose stories intersect in tangential ways. Can Xue has remarked that all of her fiction is at heart autobiographical. This story is so layered with metaphor and mystery that one imagines it to be informed less by real-life circumstances, though, than an effort to elude the ever present censor, who is likely to be baffled by such things as creatures that may be rats or geckos but "were probably only shadows." Odd, atmospheric, and enchanting: a story in which, disbelief duly suspended, one savors improbabilities along with haunting images and is left wanting more.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Can Xue: FRONTIER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A479234781/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6969b3f5. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Frontier
Can Xue
Open Letter Books
c/o University of Rochester
Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
www.openletterbooks.org
9781940953540, $16.95, PB, 470pp, www.amazon.com
Synopsis: "Frontier" by Can Xue opens with the story of Liujin, a young woman heading out on her own to create her own life in Pebble Town, a somewhat surreal place at the base of Snow Mountain where wolves roam the streets and certain enlightened individuals can see and enter a paradisiacal garden.
Exploring life in this city (or in the frontier) through the viewpoint of a dozen different characters, some simple, some profound, Can Xue's latest novel attempts to unify the grand opposites of life --barbarism and civilization, the spiritual and the material, the mundane and the sublime, beauty and death, Eastern and Western cultures.
Can Xue is a pseudonym meaning "dirty snow, leftover snow." She learned English on her own and has written books on Borges, Shakespeare, and Dante. Her publications in English include The Embroidered Shoes, Five Spice Street, Vertical Motion, and The Last Lover, which won the 2015 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction.
Critique: Aptly translated into English for an American readership by Karen Gernant (Professor $merita of Chinese history at Southern Oregon University) in collaboration with Chen Zeping (Professor of Chinese Linguistics at Fujian Teachers' University), "Frontier" is an extraordinary and deftly crafted novel that is unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that "Frontier" is also available in a Kindle format ($9.99).
Helen Dumont
Reviewer
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
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Dumont, Helen. "Frontier." MBR Bookwatch, Mar. 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A491086797/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0be5d806. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Love in the New Millennium.
By Can Xue. Tr. by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen.
Nov. 2018.288p. Yale, $25 (9780300224313).
In this ambitious new novel by Chinese avant-garde writer Can Xue--prolific author of stories, novellas, and novels, including the Best Translated Book Award winner, The Last Lover (2014)--Cuilan and Wei Bo begin a temperamental affair after accidentally bumping into each other at a hot spring spa that offers sex as one of its services. Wei recalls his other lovers, both present and past, but he especially can't forget A Si, a prostitute who escaped the drudges of the cotton mill. A Si finds freedom in prostitution and finds men willing to provide for her, but she cannot stop herself from falling in love with her clients. In these masterful modern love stories, Can Xues fully developed main characters and their supporting cast struggle to survive in an industry that normalizes fraud and exploitation. Some attempt to escape the city and embark on transcendent delusions, while others partake in sex and romance to find happiness. Xues superb experimental novel is sure to keep readers hooked.--Emily Park
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Park, Emily. "Love in the New Millennium." Booklist, vol. 115, no. 5, 1 Nov. 2018, pp. 17+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A562369547/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9dbdb75f. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
I Live in the Slums. By Can Xue. Tr. by Karen Gernant and Zeping Chen. May 2020. 344p. Yale, $26 (9780300247435).
Can Xue (Frontier; 2017; Love in the New Millenium, 2018) presents another exquisite collection of short stories. In his solitude, an elderly bachelor cicada is disturbed by the deaths he observes from a young boys slingshot and the web of a quiet spider. A woman's malignant cousin reminds her of a locked box that becomes the center of malicious rumors after she refuses to break it open and reveal her father's secrets. A magpie and his wife witness the landscape around their home change from a single primary school to a bustling suburban neighborhood. A boy leaves his bright and vibrant community to venture down into a seemingly abandoned tin workshop. Bored by his own circumstances, he finds great pleasure in discovering a group of uncountable people shrouded by darkness, but he quickly discovers they have curiosities of their own. Can Xue is a master at twisting philosophical ideas into realities that seem simple but are incredibly thoughtful and intricate. These 16 poetic stories have astonishing depth that will transfix readers.--Emily Park
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Park, Emily. "I Live in the Slums." Booklist, vol. 116, no. 17, 1 May 2020, p. 21. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A623790555/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a8265df8. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Can Xue
Purple Perilla
Trans. Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping. New
York. Common Era. 2020. 148 pages.
CAN XUE'S Purple Perilla includes three short stories that immerse readers in a world where reality and absurdity collide. In "An Affair," the peaceful yet bland life of a primary school teacher in her midthirties is suddenly disrupted by an anonymous love letter, and her ensuing adventure turns out to be both physical and spiritual. While the teenage boy in "Mountain Ants" is entrusted by an old beggar to retrieve and safeguard a lost world where humans and ants can live together, the kid in "Purple Perilla," the title story, encounters five wolves in hallucinations and decides to live in the hills permanently. With Can Xue's concise, energetic narrative, and the excellent translation by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping, these stories, in spite of their totally different settings and plots, constitute a relay of spiritual rebellions allowing all the protagonists to reconsider the meaning of life and the possibility of self-redemption.
For many commentators, it is almost irresistible to compare the style of Can Xue's fiction with the works of Franz Kafka and Italo Calvino. In this collection of short stories, readers can still identify some fundamental themes recurring in modernist literatures: alienation, the separation between nature and the civilized world, and the lingering confusion about the meaning of existence. A revisit to these ahistorical, universalist questions in the (post)pandemic era seems timely, for Can Xue adds a touch of idealistic optimism to her characters' seemingly irrational adventure. The sense of absurdity oozing from all the stories does not imply a total surrender to loneliness and meaninglessness. On the contrary, a quiet stream of energy to undertake "little revolutions" in everyday life, though presented in a self-restrained tone, can be clearly detected in all three protagonists' internal monologues.
Can Xue's works are well known for their obscurity, and this Isolarii collection is no exception. While the language is simple and straightforward, its multilayered narrative structure poses a challenge to prospective readers. As a work of translation, elements of Chinese tradition and mythology occasionally pop up in its settings and plots but prove to be no cultural obstacle for international readers to empathize with the characters throughout their adventures. Still, readers may benefit from rereadings of the texts, for these stories, in a sense, can be seen as a literary experiment. After witnessing the characters' "accidental" involvement in the confrontation between human and nature, readers are encouraged to ask themselves: after absorption into an endless monotonousness and loneliness, is it still possible for them to invoke the impulsion to break away, even just temporarily, from the repetition of sameness in daily life?
Siyu Cao
Shanghai International Studies University
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
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Siyu Cao. "Can Xue: Purple Perilla." World Literature Today, vol. 96, no. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2022, pp. 65+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A688658087/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=da328ba6. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Barefoot Doctor
Can Xue, trans, from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping.Yale Univ., $26 (272p) ISBN 978-0-300-25963-6
Can Xue (I Live in the Shims) offers a complex and illuminating portrait of a group of healers in China. Mrs. Yi is the longtime herbalist in Yun Village, where people "don't count the passing years." Her interest in childbirth drew her to her profession, after the death of her own son as a toddler. Her intuitive connection with both herbs and her patients inspires a younger generation of healers. She offers guidance when asked, as the aspirants struggle along their own paths. Gtay, Mrs. Yi's occasional assistant and possible successor, must navigate an on-again, offagain love affair that disrupts his studies. Mia, 28, from nearby Deserted Village, deals with her fear of abandonment while trying to grow an herb garden. And for Angelica to realize her potential as an herbalist, she must decipher the secrets of Blue Village, onetime home of Dr. Lin Baoguang, the father of Chinese herbal medicine. Niulan Mountain is an ever-present resource for the healers, providing herbs, edifying mystical adventures, and encounters with reanimated spirits of those who have died. Though the disjointed narrative can be hard to follow, the author still offers profound insights about what it means to pursue and live a fulfilling life. As with Can Xue's previous work, this is both demanding and rewarding. (Sept.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
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"Barefoot Doctor." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 30, 18 July 2022, pp. 156+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A711581333/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a2559b20. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Barefoot Doctor. By Can Xue. Tr. by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. Sept. 2022.272p. Yale, $26 (9780300259636).
Mrs. Yi and her husband live in Yun Village, where she works as a barefoot doctor: a healer who uses herbs to alleviate pain. Her days are filled with collecting herbs from Niulan Mountain, growing her own herbs, and building meaningful relationships with other villagers. A local boy, Gray, becomes her apprentice, but struggles to form his own identity and find something he is passionate about. In the neighboring village, Mia is a wife and mother looking for a greater purpose in her life who decides to seek Mrs. Yi's mentorship. As the younger villagers follow Mrs. Yi's steps, they discover the magic of nature, greater self-confidence, and the healing power that transcends their understanding of the world. Xue's (I Live in the Slums, 2020) signature experimental style captivates in this newly translated novel. A barefoot doctor herself, she has a unique and powerful way of transporting readers to new worlds where reality and magic are intertwined, and she uses her own experiences to make this novel feel more personal.--Emily Park
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
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Park, Emily. "Barefoot Doctor." Booklist, vol. 118, no. 22, 1 Aug. 2022, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A714679353/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6aaa2731. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
The Barefoot Doctor
by Can Xue, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping
Yale, [pounds sterling]18.99, pp. 272
It must be exhausting to live as a barefoot doctor in a Chinese village if Can Xue's latest novel is anything to go by. Not because of your work as curer-in-chief, but because all your patients are either nauseatingly happy or prone to near-constant weeping.
Barefoot doctors emerged in the 1930s, but really hit their stride under Mao, when they spread throughout rural China. They were folk healers with basic medical training who provided healthcare in places where urban trained medics wouldn't settle. Now one of China's most feted novelists, Xue is better known for her avant-garde dreamscapes than her acupuncture, but she was a barefoot doctor in her youth. Drawing on this experience, she here portrays a rural village in the shadow of Niulan Mountain, and the business of its master healer Mrs Yi.
This is a mystical realm, animated by a love that flows between mankind, nature and the land. Here the living and dead commune on the mountain, plants speak to planters and rocks express 'impatience or a warning'. In such a world each moment is freighted with possible revelation. Nothing exists passively.
Nothing, that is, except Xue's prose. For while some of her descriptions have a clean beauty, a feature of the book is to tell rather than show. There's virtually no character development at all. People are flat; if there is anything approaching a setback, they need just a line or so to set them right again, usually with 'tears in their eyes'. This is an emotional world drained of real emotion, as characters flit between stoicism and teary incontinence. But even these jumps are dynamic compared to the dialogue, which has characters talking to each other as if programmed by an apathetic robot:
'Are my hands ugly?' she asked. 'No, they're beautiful, I'm fascinated by them.' She cried softy. 'Let's get married.' 'Ok we'll get married.'
As with any book in translation, the root of this is obscured: is Xue's original Chinese or the rendering to blame? Readers can only judge what is sold to them in English --and for all its strangeness there is just too much dead language here, as characters 'sob emotionally' (how else would they sob?), weep 'uncontrollably' (otherwise known as weeping), or tell us what we plainly know ('ha-ha-ha, he burst out laughing').
There is occasional talk of Can Xue becoming China's next Nobel laureate for literature. On the evidence of this, there'll be a long wait.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
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Lawton, Frank. "Weeping and laughter." Spectator, vol. 350, no. 10135, 26 Nov. 2022, p. 38. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A729033178/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5c84fa62. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
CAN XUE
Goddess of Sipsong Panna
Beijing. People's Literature Publishing
House. 2022.211 pages.
GODDESS OF SIPSONG PANNA is a collection of thirteen short stories by the much-acclaimed Chinese writer Can Xue (b. 1953). Set across a variety of real or surreal locations, from the tranquil grassland to the enchanting mulberry garden, and from a bleak and desolate coal mine located on the outskirts of a quaint, snow-covered town to the subterranean dugout beneath a tunneled city, each story sheds light on a distinct facet of a particular character's inner world and personal journey.
The first of the thirteen stories, "Treasure Land," features Lu Xiaoyuan, a young man from a coal miner's family. He grew up in Snow City, a small town that was once the site of several coal mines. After his parents died in a mining accident, he had to make his own living. One night, Xiaoyuan is lured by a gentleman donning a black felt hat to venture into the long-abandoned mine. As he enters the mining area, he hears the clamor of people talking and shouting all around him, and he sees the burning flames in the stoves. The warmth of the air brings back memories of his deceased parents, particularly of the time when the mine was still in operation. Although the identity of the enigmatic gentleman is never revealed, he acts as a powerful catalyst that compels Xiaoyuan to take a journey of rediscovery. As he revisits both joyous and painful moments of the past, he finds a renewed sense of purpose to continue moving forward into the future.
The titular story, "Goddess of Sipsong Panna," is about a man who goes to Sipsong Panna in search of a simpler way of life. However, he cannot tolerate living in the bungalow where ants, snails, and caterpillars crawl over the room and the roses in the front yard bloom profusely, filling the air with a sweet and strong fragrance. He moves to a high-rise apartment, but its concrete frame structure blocks out the living sights and sounds of nature. He is so lonely that he longs to move back to the bungalow, which is now occupied by a woman living with a ferocious black bear. Her presence piques everyone's interest, spurring them to steal glances at her, but her face remains a mystery, always shrouded from their view. Enveloped in her powerful earthly aura, the young man comes to realize what it takes to live in Sipsong Panna, a land of fertility, growth, and abundance.
Can Xue's gift for plunging into her characters' souls and mining the truths about them is evident in other stories of the collection. "The Lion King" charts a path from the early stage of desire and infatuation to a love that transcends physicality and species through the eyes of a woman who decides to make her own life in the grasslands after encountering a handsome male lion. "Death Education" explores the initial encounter with death and its many nuances from the viewpoint of a young girl. In "Old Man and Cat in Fresh Produce Market," readers may also sympathize with Papa Ma, an old man who lives a solitary life and suffers mistreatment at the hands of a similarly unhappy young man.
Can Xue is known for her vivid imagination and keen sense of fantasy, with a rapid, feverish ability to proceed from one plot to the next, much like a person traversing a dream or nightmare. Her collection of stories is a mesmerizing journey into the human psyche, with each story serving as an allegory of the self. Navigating the labyrinth of her writing may be challenging, but there is no denying that Can Xue is a singular and unforgettable voice in Chinese literature.
Laura Xie
Virginia Military Institute
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
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Xie, Laura. "CAN XUE: Goddess of Sipsong Panna." World Literature Today, vol. 97, no. 3, May-June 2023, pp. 75+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A747389990/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2045464f. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
Can Xue MOTHER RIVER Open Letter (Fiction None) $17.95 1, 21 ISBN: 9781960385314
Thirteen offbeat stories from the provocative Can Xue blend the earthy and uncanny.
The fiction of Can Xue (a pseudonym) owes debts to magic realism, surrealism, and the Modernists at their most abstruse, but she's also consistently determined to make sure that familiar feelings of love and loss emerge through her work. In these stories, narrators are usually observing befuddling acts of nature: strange dark shadows emerging in the title story, stones appearing both in the soil and bodies of a community in "Stone Village," mushrooms overrunning a field in "Something To Do With Poetry," an elephant suddenly emerging in "Love in Xishuangbanna." Sometimes, these unusual events serve as contemporary takes on folklore and allegory: The multiple narrators of "Smog City" describe their pollution-struck town with a diffidence that echoes our collective disengagement from climate change--"People's windpipes and lungs were getting so used to the smog that they accepted it as ordinary air, and let it pass through their bodies quietly and unimpeded." But more often, the storytelling is unmoored from big themes and mainly cultivates a mood of strangeness and wonderment, as characters transition from everyday life into something weirder. In "The Neighborhood," a retiree's concern about the disruptive construction of a sports facility leads him to a series of shifts: the arrival of feral cats, and growing numbers of Qigong practitioners, thanks to whom "every tree and blade of grass in the garden contained their breath, revealing the traces of communicating with them." In "At the Edge of the Marsh," a young man is drawn to a town elder dismissed as "defective," but through him enters into a more dreamlike and mystical relationship with nature. Translators Gernant and Chen keep the prose simple at the sentence level while allowing the oddness of the storytelling to bleed through.
Mind-bending but warmly delivered domestic tales.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Can Xue: MOTHER RIVER." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Nov. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A813883732/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9a1d1c42. Accessed 4 Feb. 2025.
REVIEW BY:
Jay Gao
ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
May 2019
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Love in the New Millennium
by Can Xue, tr. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen
Publisher:
Yale University Press
256 pp
Can Xue’s ‘Love in the New Millennium’
Over the last thirty years Can Xue has created an astonishing body of avant-garde literature exploring the limits of the individual. The vision of her idiosyncratic writing — which she calls ‘soul literature’ — positions her as a major global champion for the experimental, though her reputation in the Anglosphere has not yet reached the heights it deserves; so far, five different translators and five publishers have worked to bring her imaginative, difficult and abstract fiction into the English language. Continuing a sequence that began with FIVE SPICE STREET and THE LAST LOVER (which won the Best Translated Book Award in 2015), her most recent novel, LOVE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM (recently longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize), is a metaphysical inquiry into the networks of flawed communities. Through the stereoscopic tales of a group of women searching for enlightenment in an uncanny world of espionage and secrets, Can Xue stretches the dimensions of the novel, conjuring an irresistible fiction that is — like the reality in which one character finds himself — ‘an enormous enigma within an enigma.’
In her foreword, the poet Eileen Myles describes the gleaming world evoked in the novel as intrinsically female and connected, one which radically centres the experiences and histories of resilient, dangerous and insatiable women. The novel plays out episodically, each chapter further untangling the crowded brocade of relationships surrounding a bordello in Western China. Nothing is as it first appears: in Can Xue’s non-conformist characters, and her disregard for traditional narrative conventions, the reader is thrown into a surreal, transitional realm:
The world is in chaos! The world is in chaos! Women are vanishing off the face of the earth! When you go outside at night all you can see are black crows!
The novel is populated by sex-positive and sex-work positive women, women who look like wolves or scream like cicadas, whose bodies ‘flickered with snow-white flashes of electricity’; women who feel so lonely that ‘they burn grass on the wilderness as a way to communicate.’ Can Xue’s case-studies are forsaken casualties of capitalism and patriarchy, now plotting to establish a position for themselves in a modern world saturated with clandestine rituals and operatic violence. The novel’s title is a red herring: her characters are just as curious about friendships and familial bonds as they are concerned with flirtations, infatuations and sex. Their absurd stories absolve the women of narrative consequence, freeing their destructive rages and passions; the characters are always in a feverish state of transfiguring their appearances or the world around them. A Si purposefully cuts her head on a machine in the cotton-mill, with the wound later mutating into a vaginal-like abyss of her trauma manifested; Long Sixiang, whose name means ‘homesickness’, is haunted by the death of her son and begins to work in the city’s brothel, only to dream that she stabs a customer who turns out to be herself; Xiao Yuan, a woman who can control radios with her thoughts, runs away to Nest County in the Gobi Desert on a quest for magical herbs.
The characters in LOVE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM experience an overriding friction between their urban lives in the cities — where they have migrated in order to secure an economic future — and the legacies left behind in the rural hometowns of their ancestors. The women move between two primary areas of industrial production— the failing cotton-mill and the flourishing brothel — as they negotiate sexual desire, their desire for property, and the fetishes of the capitalist market. The future in which they are invested feels unobtainable within the spiritual emptiness of the city, its false families and shallow communities. Eventually, characters end up disappearing without warning, or impulsively travel towards the mountains, or are forced to burrow underground. Long Sixiang, for example, discovers a mysterious village of muddy caves underneath her lover’s home and contemplates moving into them in order to escape:
Long Sixiang stayed in bed for a long, long time, listening to the sounds coming from the hot springs. There seemed to be many men and women playing in the water, their voices mixed together, often with an exaggerated scream. It was a scene of false animation.
The novel is imbued with a certain kind of exhaustive dream logic: people are always losing consciousness or memories, caught between sleeping and waking, intruded upon by the narratives of ghosts, spirits and the living dead. The clamour of voices — manifold whispers, contradictions, gossip, interruptions, conversations, riddles and conspiracies — makes it easy to miss the novel’s quieter moments of satire and poetry. But Can Xue’s dreamscapes are rich and compelling: it would be easy to compare her to Schulz, Calvino or Borges, except that her mythical worlds occupy a space that reads like it is being discovered for the first time. Science, time and geography become distorted and malleable: the novel is interested only in its own incongruous dimensions. The nameless Chinese city feels both contemporary and somehow primordial; buildings are always on the cusp of demolition, and many of the city structures literally collapse after it is revealed that they were constructed using fraudulent cement. The narrative fabric is cannibalistic: just as one character travels towards a newly fixated refuge, so will a previous sanctuary disappear and cease to exist.
Can Xue’s prose — in Annelise Finegan Wasmoen’s vivid translation — eschews the stylised clichés of Postmodern experimental fiction, creating a terse and lucid aesthetic that is both symbolic and incisive, oblique and witty. With strange repetitions, uncanny syntax and aloof pacing, her sentences build themselves up only to be torn down. The novel’s hypnotic layering of language draws comparisons to Gertrude Stein’s longer prose; like Stein, Can Xue is working through relationships of objects and people in order to draw attention to the reading experience. Western influences, via Gaskell, Flaubert and Verdi, interact with an unmistakably Chinese philosophy of the soul: these references bring the novel’s various stories together thematically, even if many of its paradoxes are left unresolved. A Si eventually returns to the abandoned cotton-mill, only to find it overrun with poisonous bats. An elderly receptionist makes it his mission to record the history of the mill and its generation of ‘lovebirds’, asking ‘Wasn’t history an event that repeated unforgettably in the mind?’ In the end, the historian’s violent fate is typical of Can Xue: a transient moment of satisfaction — ‘to reverse the verdict of history’ — is destroyed by masked bureaucrats and thugs. All that is left behind are the pages of chit-chat, random movements and potentials, bodies without organs, transient vessels emptied out.
Echoes of these former lives and parallel stories hint at repetitive patterns buried deep in the text, creating an impression that one is reading a collective dream, that the characters are all reincarnated versions of one singular unified figure and their inner emotional world. In interviews, Can Xue has argued that all her books are autobiographical. Her earlier short stories and novellas dealt more explicitly with the misty spectre of Chinese history, drawing on her family’s persecution and subsequent exile to the labour reform camps in the rural outskirts of Changsha during the 1957 Anti-Rightest Campaign. Unable to return to education, Can Xue (whose art-name means ‘spoiled snow’ in Chinese) immersed herself in classical Western literature and philosophy. In 1988 the publication of her first novel, FIVE SPICE STREET, heralded a writer whose pursuit for a different form of Chinese literature stirred controversy in literary circles; critics, threatened by her position as a writer who was both subversive and a woman, called her ‘hysterical’. Can Xue is often categorised with a short-lived generation of Chinese avant-garde writers of the 1980s, including Ge Fei, Ma Yuan, Yu Hua and Su Tong, but her writing has continued to evolve, testing the radical possibilities of fiction as she explores the individual’s separation from society; she is a writer who unwaveringly chooses to prioritise art and philosophy above all else. Her internalised writing move beyond easily defined categories of post-revolutionary writing or Chinese feminist literature: one feels Can Xue may soon abandon characters, settings and even words altogether. The writer Porochista Khakpour has described her as a ‘true iconoclast, the uncompromising original’. With every novel it is clear that Can Xue is more determined than ever to bring to the surface the experimental and cryptic secrets of the soul. Perhaps it is through her fixation in the shared self that the reader can finally understand the vicious circular meaning in her worlds:
I was tired of living, and couldn’t decide whether to change. It made me anxious to the point of madness. I rushed around everywhere, until I rushed in here. Now it looks like my rampage came to the right place, don’t you think?
May 2017
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May 2017 Book Reviews
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Frontier by Can Xue
FICTION
Author: Can Xue
Translator: Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping
The cover to Frontier by Can XueRochester, New York. Open Letter. 2017. 470 pages.
Frontier, first published in China in 2008, is Can Xue’s follow-up to her novel The Last Lover, winner of the 2015 Best Translated Book Award. She was also nominated for the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Can Xue’s writing has been described as avant-garde, experimental, and even bizarre; the fantasy and magical-realist elements make Frontier an additional cutting-edge narrative in her growing body of work.
The setting of Frontier is a surreal place called Pebble Town where snow leopards and wolves roam the streets and a strange mix of mysterious characters live. Every member of Pebble Town has a different reason for coming to the town. Many of its residents appear to have gravitated toward this town as they were looking for a place to fit in; there are several characters in the story who are orphans and, after wandering for a while, have settled in this town on the frontier.
The exact location of Pebble Town is never given; it is vaguely situated at the base of Snow Mountain, near a river, with one main street and a grove of poplars. There is a strange abundance of animals in Pebble Town that are constantly present in the narrative. Geckos, frogs, various types of birds and cats all wander in and out of Pebble Town. At times the landscape seems pastoral as one of the neighbors raises sheep in his front yard. There is a certain randomness and lack of order in Pebble Town that one would expect to find in a place that is located on a frontier.
Frontier is not meant to give depth to any particular character. The roving, almost random feel to the novel purposely resists any attempt at truly knowing the inner thoughts of the inhabitants of Pebble Town. Each of the book’s fifteen chapters, written in extremely terse sentences, are dedicated to a particular character or pair of characters. In chapter 1, for instance, we are introduced to Liujin, a woman in her mid-thirties who has grown up in Pebble Town and lives in a house in the suburbs. Her parents have just left her to go back to Smoke City, and she is on her own for the first time in her life. As she goes about her various daily activities, which include selling fabric in the market and visiting her neighbors, she sees shadows of animals and people around her. Like the atmosphere in Pebble Town, Liujin’s hallucinatory visions are magical and dreamlike.
Can Xue’s lack of connective sentences and transitions makes it difficult to predict where the narrative will progress from one paragraph to the next. The daily experiences of the people described in Pebble Town read like a series of flash fictions or vignettes instead of one connected narrative. This makes Frontier a challenging read—a peculiar, multilayered, and metaphorical text that demands a reader’s full attention in order to grasp the dramatic shifts in place and time.
Melissa Beck
Woodstock Academy, Connecticut