Interview with the hailed, yet sometimes banned writer Yan Lianke

In China, people reaching 50 are expected to know their fate and heaven-sent duties, or "Zhi Tian Ming," as the Confucian saying describes. And this is exactly where the 55-year-old Chinese writer Yan Lianke stands now. As one of China's best yet most controversial authors today, he knows what he wants to write and what he is capable of, after experiencing a publishing crisis in his previous years.

Publishing not required

With the first draft of his new book, Zha Lie Zi (explosive factor), already finished, Yan expects it to be published within the year - that is, if everything goes well. The book is an ambitious work that recalls 30 years of China's opening up and the role of common people in that process.

"I have no confidence at all now that my books will be published," said Yan, reminding people of his three banned books. To Serve the People, finished in 2004, involved too much nudity and sex among army personnel. Dream of Ding Village, from 2005, told stories about AIDS patients in central Henan Province where selling blood was once common and resulted in the epidemic. The other banned one, The Four Books, written in 2011, was about the Great Leap Forward in China during the late 1950s. After these twists and turns, Yan has become more easygoing and less concerned about the publishing of his books.

"Actually, since I began to write The Four Books, publishing doesn't bother me anymore," he said. "Now this book has been published in South Korea, France, Vietnam. I can express myself more completely in the writing now, and I believe the society is progressing. Today they can't be published, but maybe tomorrow they will be," Yan told the Global Times in an interview.

At this period in his life and career, Yan focuses more on the breakthrough of his writing as well as the special understanding and bond he shares with readers. While some people don't understand him and his persistent, antisocial writing, "those who do understand me will become even closer," he said. "The support and driving force for my writing now comes from those readers."

"I was attending a literature festival [in France, 2010] and signing my books, a 70-year-old lady came to me with two each of all five of my books. She couldn't speak Chinese and had never been to China, but she told me through the translator that she was doing this for her late husband," said Yan.

It turned out that her husband had passed away half a year earlier, and he loved to read Yan's books most. She wanted Yan to sign the books and she planned to put them in her husband's cemetery. "She kept a copy of those five books for herself and said to me that she wanted to share my novels with her husband. It was much more warming when you encountered such a sincere old lady than people just acclaiming you with fancy words," he said.

"What foreign readers get from a book is much different from us in the country. They focus more on how and why it is written in this way, but we care more about what has been written in the book."

A clumsy writer

As his writing examines various subjects like people's dignity and rights, or the acceleration of changes in society, some of Yan's critics have said he is "a writer with a firm standpoint." Actually his persistence in writing subjects like these (despite successive banned books) has led readers to believe that these are the things that motivate him to write in the first place.

"A writer is usually unconscious of his writing before and during, it was after his many works that readers or himself realizes that he was caring more about certain subjects," Yan explained. "His paying attention to reality, criticism of those in power, or even recognition about love, are totally unconscious."

However, writers caring about reality and society in China today are not a few. Mo Yan's works including The Garlic Ballads, The Republic of Wine, and Big Breasts and Wide Hips are all laced with a certain degree of vitriol toward bad elements of society.

"I think Mo Yan is much more clever than I. He is better at dealing with realistic subjects given the current publishing environment," said Yan. "I belong to the dumber and more clumsy kind; you can't require a clumsy man to become smart, neither can you make a clever man become dumb."

Claiming himself to be clumsy, Yan has actually settled on a more difficult way to present his ideas and values. "For the same story, different writers will definitely adopt different ways to tell them. I'm not short on stories, just the perfect way to unfold them," he said.

"I hope the language and structure of my new novels can feature many differences from my previous works. Right now, I have several stories in my head that I would like to write, but I will not start until I find the perfect ways to tell them," Yan insisted.

Major tributary

Yan cannot be described as a mainstream writer, but neither can he be justifiably excluded. Yes, he has had three books banned and refuses to constrain his content, but he continued to grow as an army writer, and now he is still a member of the Chinese Writers' Association.

With that mainstream title and such contrasting work, Yan confuses a lot of people when it comes to defining him as a writer. But in his view, there has never been a hard and fast definition of what is and is not mainstream.

"I really don't know how to define a work of literature as mainstream. Literature needs a variety of writers," he said. And as to some people's point that Mo Yan's winning of the 2012 Nobel Literature Prize is a recognition of China's mainstream literature, Yan finds it ridiculous.

"It is absurd to define Mo Yan's writing as mainstream or non-mainstream," he said, "saying it's mainstream we are understating its versatility, and classifying it as non-mainstream we are undervaluing his work."

Despite the banned books and controversy around his writing, Yan has earned a reputation both at home and abroad. Sales for his best-selling novel The Joy of Living amounted to over 150,000 copies. He has won several leading domestic literature prizes, such as the first and second Lu Xun Literature Prize in 1998 and 2001 for his works Gold Hole and Days, Months and Years respectively. And in 2006, he won the 3rd Lao She literature Prize for the novel The Joy of Living.

His name has frequently appeared on the short-lists of different international literature prizes, including the recent announcement for the candidates of the 5th Man Booker International Prize, with the final winner to be announced on May 22nd this year.

Though being short-listed now and then, Yan said winning prizes is not important any more. At his age, he just wants to write what as he likes, leaving no regrets when he becomes too old to write.