According to the China News daily, Chen He often said that when you go far enough, you will find yourself. Chen He can be said to be the farthest overseas Chinese writer, and his life often escapes from the usual track, from wandering, to anything, to the north and south. This kind of uncertain long journey so far that every time I contact him, I first ask: Where is the nearest?
Chen Qingfei: Your long journey and creation remind me of Mr. Xiao Qian's self-condition of "traveler without a map". Do you have a travel map?
Chen He: There is no map, it is basically random. I just kept my interest in traveling and hit the road as soon as I got the chance.
I want to talk about a few trips I made when I first went abroad. In 1995, I had not been doing business in Albania for a few years, I had not yet learned a few words in English, and one day when I was passing by the Egyptian embassy, I suddenly had a desire to see the pyramids of the Nile. Later, I actually got an Egyptian visa and went to Egypt and Istanbul alone with my backpack. That time I went down the Nile to Cairo, Luxor, Aswan and came back to stay in Istanbul for a few days. It was my first truly meaningful trip, I felt that the world was so beautiful and the trip was so interesting.
Two years later, unrest broke out in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and the diaspora fled. I relied on a friend in Paris to help me get a visa and take refuge in France. There were only twenty days during this period, and I used this time to travel with travel agencies to visit more than a dozen countries and see life in Western Europe. This evacuation trip was a huge help to my later writing, and when I wrote Red, White and Black, there was a lot of French and Italian life in it, and I relied on this limited travel experience to support the story. The book was later published in Italian in Palermo, southern Italy, and received very good reviews. The president of the publishing house asked me how many years I had lived in France, and I said that I had only been in Paris for ten days and had not yet set foot in Italy. He said it was unbelievable.
Chen Qingfei: Between your travels and creations, is it the map that drives the expansion of the literary map, or the literature that drives the extension of the map route?
Chen He: I think these two situations complement each other and affect each other. On a large scale, I left the country for Albania in 1994 and began an emigrant life, which gave my writing a huge geographical space. I am not part of the category of people who write a small place and a small street all their lives, and advocate Hemingway's way of writing, and must go far away. But I'm not the kind of person who travels to find inspiration for writing, and it's said that Maugham has been traveling to the Far East and writing a lot of short stories.
More than a decade ago, I learned that during World War II, Chinese soldiers from Canada were recruited by British special forces and airdropped into the sarawak jungle to resist the Japanese army, and my heart was shocked and I had a strong desire to write. But at that time, I was still in a busy trading business and could not get out of the field trip to Sarawak, and it turned out that I had imagined a copy of "The War in Sarawak" based on the search for information. In the process of writing this book, I deeply fell in love with the Malaysian jungle and wanted to continue to write a book, this time, I had time to travel to Malaysia, to Ipoh, Red Clay Kan, Pangkor Island and other places to find feelings, and wrote "Miro Hill Camp". After a few more years, I finally had the opportunity to go to East Malaysia and stand by the sarawak river of my dreams, seven years after I wrote The Sarawak War.
Chen Qingfei: Your works are the same as the travel route, it seems to span a large range, but the spiritual core is very solid and stable, from the Malayan Chinese Resistance War in "Sarawak War" and "Milo Hill Camp" to the new work "Mirror of the Sky" to trace the world revolutionary journey of South American Chinese, beyond time and space, all point to the immigration history and survival history of overseas Chinese, and finally point to themselves - the spiritual destination of a "new immigrant" in the era of globalization, can you understand this?
Chen He: You're right. The novel "Sky Mirror" clearly reveals such a core.
More than a decade ago, I discovered at the graveyard of Ce guevara in Cuba that a Bolivian guerrilla buried next to him was Chinese, and I had always wanted to learn more about it. In 2018, I went to the mountainous areas of Bolivia where Che Guevara's guerrillas were completely destroyed to investigate the scene, and found that the Chinese team member was Pablo Zhang, a Peruvian Chinese, nicknamed Chino. And as I continued to understand, I found that more than a hundred thousand Chinese were trafficked to Peru by slave ships more than a hundred years ago, and Chino was the descendant of these Chinese slaves. As I step forward to explore the history of the Chinese people a hundred years ago, I think of the huge projects carried out in South America by the chinese big companies I saw everywhere during the trip. So I wrote this novel with a goal: I wanted to write about the relationship between Chinese and the world for hundreds of years.
Chen Qingfei: I once named your novel of writing a European adventure as "Xinhuashang Novel" in an academic paper, as an overseas businessman/writer from Wenzhou, how do you understand the relationship between the special experience of overseas Chinese and your worldwide writing? Can you talk about the creative process of "The Prisoner of Yiwu"?
Chen He: When I was still in Albania in 1995, a man named Abin came to Tirana from Italy to do business. He could only work in Italy, and he wanted to be his own boss here. Abin's business was not going well, and not long after the start, his brother was killed while helping them assemble goods in Yiwu. This story has always been in my heart.
Later, when I arrived in Canada, I frequently ran to Yiwu myself. One thing is quite strange, after I began to write again, I wrote a lot of novels in more than ten years, and none of them were related to Yiwu, completely avoiding this very important place and experience for me. But the aforementioned matter of Brother Abin is like a seed buried in my heart, which will sprout as soon as the right conditions are met. Yiwu is like a labyrinth to me, full of many vivid and strange elements.
One year my family went to Mexico, in a city called Melida near the Mayan cultural heritage area, I found a "bazaar" market full of Yiwu goods, which made me look at the name of Yiwu from a lot of space and time. I wanted to write these things out, to write a work with a metaphysical height, but there were many difficulties, and I couldn't break through the bottleneck for several years and spin around in place. I didn't give up, I put it away if I couldn't write it, I picked it up and tried it again in a few days, and one day, I finally found the exit of the maze and finished this very difficult novella.
Chen Qingfei: War, revolution, intrusion, suspense, and secrets are undoubtedly the keywords of Chen He's novels. History and reality have left too many gaps in writing, and between fiction and non-fiction, Chen He has undertaken the narrative duty of a novelist and the ethical feelings of being a Chinese writer, with a posture of free migration, with a multi-eye visit to the hidden spiritual world of overseas Chinese. How will your next work appear, and can you tell us a little bit about it?
Chen He: As I grew older, I began to consciously write more about my hometown, that is, my early memories, and the recently published "Graffiti" was written about the past of Wenzhou. In fact, I have written many of these novels, such as "Night Watch" and "The Muppets", which are my best novels.
Wenzhou is a very magical seaside town, in 1876, the British in the "Yantai Treaty" to obtain the Wenzhou treaty port rights. At that time, Wenzhou was a very remote place, but the British had a special love for it, and it is said that they gave up the trade rights of Fuzhou and chose it here. Sixty or seventy years later, the vision of the British was revealed. After the Japanese occupied Shanghai and most of the coastal ports, Wenzhou did not fall into the hands of the Japanese army due to its remoteness and remoteness, and became a very important commercial port in China, with foreign merchant ships weaving. It was not until 1944, when the Japanese army feared that the American army would land in Wenzhou and repeat the Normandy strategy, that it sent heavy troops to occupy Wenzhou.
I had been working in a car transport unit before I went abroad, was interested in traffic matters, and wanted to write a book about the first person to drive a car into Wenzhou. When I put the story into the background of industrial civilization entering Wenzhou after Xinhai, it was all alive. I couldn't travel during the pandemic, so I sat down to write this book. Now that the manuscript has been preliminarily completed, this will be an important book for me.
【Biography】
Chinese writer Chen He.
Chen He, formerly known as Chen Xiaowei, born in 1958, a native of Wenzhou, Zhejiang, served as vice chairman of the Wenzhou Writers Association, and went abroad in 1994 to run a pharmaceutical business in Albania. He immigrated to Canada in 1999 and settled in Toronto.
As a representative figure of overseas Chinese writers, Chen He has published many works in journals such as Harvest, Contemporary, and People's Literature, and has authored novels such as "Deadly Journey", "Night Watch", "West Nile Disease", "Sarawak War", "Muppet" and other novels, and won the first "Uddhav Novel Award" for his novella "The City in Black and White Movies".
Professor Chen Qingfei of Huaqiao University.
Chen Qingfei, a native of Songxi, Fujian Province, doctor of literature, professor of the School of Literature of Huaqiao University, overseas Chinese literature and Taiwan-Hong Kong literature research center, master tutor of "Overseas Chinese Literature Theory and Criticism", director of the China World Chinese Literature Research Association. His main research areas are overseas Chinese literature, Hong Kong literature, and modern and contemporary literature.
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