Dillard - Encounters with Chinese Writers

ENCOUNTERS WITH CHINESE WRITERS

ALSO BY ANNIE DILLARD

Teaching a Stone to Talk
Living by Fiction
Holy the Firm
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Tickets for a Prayer Wheel

ANNIE DILLARD

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by University Press of New England,
Hanover, NH 03755

Copyright 1984 by Annie Dillard
All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America 5 4

Some of these narratives have appeared in Harvard Magazine,
Radcliffe Quarterly, and Harpers Magazine.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Dillard, Annie.

Encounters with Chinese writers.

I. Authors, Chinese20th centuryAnecdotes, facetiae, satire, etc. I. Title.

PL2277.D54 1984 895.109005 847322

ISBN 0819551309 (alk. paper)

ISBN 0819561568 (pbk.: alk. paper)

For Phyllis

Like most writers who deal with contemporary China, Ive disguised some people. Wu Fusan is not the mans real name, nor is Song Hua, Mr. Fu, or Sam Samson. All the other major characters appear under their actual names.

Throughout, Ive used standard Pinyin spellingBeijing, Hangzhouexcept where long usage dictates older formsPeking Hotel.

For support, information, and valuable opinion, I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts, to the National Committee on United StatesChina Relations, to Irving Lo (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University), Jeannette Hopkins (Wesleyan University Press), Perry Link (Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA), Robert Rees, Donald Ellegood, my husband Gary Clevidence, Andr Schiffrin (Pantheon Books), and Phyllis Rose.

These are anecdotessketchesof encounters in China and in the United States with various Chinese people, many of them established writers.

The encounters in China took place in May and June 1982. I was travelling as a member of a six-person delegation of U.S. scholars, writers, and publishers. The other delegates were Irving Lo, Indiana University; James Liu, Stanford University; Leopold Tyrmand, the Rockford Institute; Andr Schiffrin, Pantheon Books; and Donald Ellegood, University of Washington Press. We spent ten days in Beijing meeting with writers; then we travelled to Xian, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Shanghai. The first part of this book tells some stories from that trip.

There is a toasting scene at a banquet; a scene with a bitter diplomat at a dance hall; a formal meeting with Chinese writers; a conversation with an American businessman in a hotel lobby; an evening with long-suffering intellectuals in their house; the almost obligatory encounter with a worker on the street in Shanghai; a scene of unwarranted hilarity in the Beijing Library; and a scene in the Beijing foreigners compound with an excited European journalist and his family. There is also some information about Chinese literary life, publishing, economics, and family life.

These are mostly anecdotesmomentsfrom which few generalizations may be drawn except perhaps about Chineseand humancomplexity. Their subject is not China per se; their subject is the paradoxical nature of all of our days, the curious way we bump up against the unexpected everywhere, the endless dramas of good will in bad times, the sheer comedy of human differences and cultural differences, and the courage and even whimsy with which weall of uscope.

I read some of these anecdotes as the Phi Beta Kappa Oration at Harvard/Radcliffe commencement exercises in 1983. Harvard Magazine and Radcliffe Quarterly published what I read, and many people wrote to congratulate me for telling the truth about China. Their generosity flattered me, but I cannot pretend to understand what they meant. Can a sheaf of snapshots show the truth? The truth about China I leave to the experts. I intend only to tell some small stories, and to depict precise moments precisely, in the hope that a collection of such moments might give an impression of many sharp points going in different directionsmight give a vivid sense of complexity. The narratives and analyses in this section are not value-free, of course, but they yield, I hope, contradictory impressions.

I am writing here for the general reader. I pray the Sinologist will forgive the evident navet of some of these stories, with their retelling of paradoxes and horrors long familiar to everyone in the field.

The second part of Encounters with Chinese Writers presents a small group of Chinese writers travelling in the United States.

In September 1982, four months after my visit to China, I met a delegation of Chinese writers in Los Angeles. Norman Cousins had organized a four-day U.S.-Chinese writers conference, and I was one of the U.S. delegates. The other U.S. delegates were Allen Ginsberg, Francine du Plessix Gray, John Hersey, Jerome Lawrence, Robert E. Lee, Arthur Miller, Harrison Salisbury, Gary Snyder, and Kurt Vonnegut.

The Chinese writers were, for the most part, real writers and not just functionaries. They were Feng Mu, Wu Qiang, Li Ying, Li Zhun, Jiang Zilong, Zhang Jie, and interpreter Yuan Henian. (I list them by rank, Chinese-style; similarly, in China we Americans were always listed, introduced, and seated by rank.) The conference included many other participants and special guests. Id met two of the Chinese writers before. Now here they were again, sprung exhilarated from China, and here were the same events: formal meetings about writers goals and cultural differences, and informal moments of comedy or collusion.

By day we all worked the hi-tech big stage together. We spoke to a darkened auditorium from behind a long, U-shaped conference table; before us were stationary microphones, and at our ears were headsets for simultaneous translations. By night we partied. We were entertained at various elaborate houses up and down the Southern California coast: at Norman Lears, at Norman Cousins, at Jerome Lawrences. I myself had rarely seen such conspicuous luxury anywhere; the Chinese, fresh from Beijing, took it in stride. There were only seven of them, a varied lot, and all warm and spirited; we became friends.

When the conference broke up, Allen Ginsberg and I stayed an extra day to accompany the Chinese writers to Disneyland. Then we all scattered. Over the next three weeks the Chinese writers worked their way, lecturing and sightseeing, to the East Coast. From New York they drove to Middletown, Connecticut, and had dinner with me at home. The next day I set off with them for Massachusetts.

We visited Walden Pond. They hadnt heard of Thoreau, but liked what they learned. Standing at the site of Thoreaus cabin, the very distinguished delegation leader, Feng Mu, said, I think if I came here I would stay not just one year, but ten years. He looked out at the pond, breathing expansively. He was wearing an oversized raincoat and a brimmed hat with half a dozen bright red maple and verbena leaves stuck in the hatband. He added, with a pleased look, But I would leave every winter.

It was ordinary sightseeing, such as wed done in Disneyland. I was charmed to note the Chinese writers sprinting off in every directionto pick up pretty leaves, or buy souvenirs, or make phone calls, joke with each other, cross busy streets at whim, daydreamjust as we Americans had done in China, secretly preening ourselves on this putative national characteristic. I was enlightened to hear the same exasperation in the American guides voices: Stay with the group, please; stay with the group. The next day we went on to Harvard.