Since the end of last year, writer Qiu Huadong's new work "Havana Waves" has appeared on many literary good book lists and has been favored by readers. I have to say that Qiu Huadong is an important writer active in the contemporary literary world, and in the past two years, he has published several works of different styles, of which the "Beijing Biography" published at the end of 2020 has been printed five times so far, and it can sell tens of thousands of copies under the epidemic, which can be said to be a very best-selling.
One winter morning, Qiu Huadong was interviewed exclusively by a reporter from Beijing Youth Daily and talked about the things he wrote. He said he spoke slightly faster and had an amazing memory. Three thousand years of history of Beijing city and more than thirty years of personal writing experience, he told the story, in the rapid shuttle between history and reality, experience his ranger-like "good skills", as well as explorer-like faith.
The sunlight outside the window brings warmth and colors the dialogue, and there seems to be a majestic snow-capped mountain and a vast sea in front of you...
Biography
Qiu Huadong, a famous contemporary writer, was born in Xinjiang in 1969 and his ancestral home is Henan. He currently works for the China Writers Association. He is the author of 12 novels, including "The Promise of the Night", "The Breath of the Day", "The Confession of Noon", "Flowers and Dawn", "The Professor's Dusk", "Telescope", "The Man Who Rides the Flying Fish", "The City of Giannida", "The Prisoner of Time", etc., 32 novellas such as "Starlight in The Hand", "Environmental Drama Man", and more than 180 short stories such as "Community Man" and "Fashion Man". He has published more than 100 kinds of monographs such as novels, film and architectural reviews, essays, travelogues, and poems. Many of his works have been translated into Japanese, Korean, English, German, Italian, French and Vietnamese.
My concern is how to gain courage in the absence of life
Reporter: Since the end of last year, "Havana Waves" has been frequently on the list, and some readers have read the stories in the book and feel as if you have experienced it yourself? What is the origin of the writing of this book?
Qiu Huadong: When I wrote this book, I had a deep experience, in the past 20 years, I have met many Chinese in any part of the world, and I have also met some interesting Chinese, and they all have their own unique stories. For example, there was a female writer who said that she went to Antarctica to run a marathon. Another poet said that he climbed the seven peaks of the world, and he pursued "seven plus two", and also went to the South Pole and the North Pole. Seeing that there are so many new ways of living in Chinese, I want to write it out.
There is also an internal cause, which is due to the experience of life. I felt like at 50, walking along, the people I was traveling with suddenly disappeared. There are also white-haired people who send black-haired people, how sad. These changes in life cause great suffering, often to be endured and resolved by one person and a family. As soon as I heard this news, I was very sad in my heart, and I thought how else would they live?
In fact, "Havana Waves" is written in such a set of stories, every family, every life, encounters different problems. For example, "Looking at the Clouds" is about a father who takes his daughter who has lost his mother from China, drives through the entire Eurasian continent, all the way to Seattle, and sends her to college. Along the way, their inner wounds healed in the various experiences of watching the clouds, and the father and daughter also reached a reconciliation. Another article, "Only the Sea Is Not Sad", tells how a father who lost his ten-year-old son resolved his inner sadness through free diving, and finally found the courage to live in the sea. I especially like these two, which are the inner impulses of us 50-year-old middle-aged people – although there is a very cold side to life, we still have to try to get the meaning of life.
In the absence of life, how to go to the wider world to gain the courage to live is what I am most concerned about. As a writer, fiction is the answer and a kind of self-healing.
Reporter: The story takes place all over the world, and the protagonist has a variety of lifestyles, how was it conceived?
Qiu Huadong: I used to like to look at all kinds of paper maps, and everywhere I went, I had to find local maps. On an airplane, the small screen in front of me is often set as a route map, and I can see where I have flown at any time during a long flight. Therefore, as long as it is the road I fly through, the earth, mountains, and cities under the route, I can always recall it and become a rich route in my memory.
The maps I collected can take me far away, to the depths of time and history, and let me discover, speculate, and imagine the historical scenes where time and space intersect.
Before writing this collection of stories, I liked my own globes, some three-dimensional, and ones that shined throughout. With the globe in hand, there is a sense of solidity of "a small globe in your hand". Sometimes, I wonder, can I write stories about Chinese in these places? I also love to watch documentaries about the ocean, such as "Blue Planet", "Galapagos Islands", etc., I have watched it several times, often while watching it, while describing the fragments I see in literary language, which have become the material support for my writing.
I write novels that stretch out from a small inspiration or detail. For me, the trigger point of each of these nine novels is a small feeling, impression, and gradually expanded and filled into a novel by my experience and imagination. I also feel that as a writer, you have to be respectful, friendly, and responsible to your readers. I added some knowledge and experience to the story I conceived, such as diving and mountaineering, which made the novel novel with a sense of novelty, and the effect of knowledge, and the novel became interesting and good to look at.
Reporter: How do you feel about completing a work of a different style than before?
Qiu Huadong: The biggest charm of the novel lies in its completion, which is the "glaze change" of inspiration and conception. All nine novels turned out to be completely different results from what was originally conceived. These nine protagonists all have their own lacks and difficulties in life, and also have a strong desire to survive and courage. That's exactly what I'm trying to achieve with this set of novels: in the age of globalization, Chinese stories are already wonderful.
I've been writing novels for over thirty years since I was fifteen. In terms of subject matter, I can still come up with new ideas, I am more skilled in expressive techniques, and my understanding of the world is more profound. I often ask myself: Keep writing, can I still surpass myself? The completion of this set of novels gave me more confidence to write them down.
For Beijing,"Li Chuan", I wanted to present the sense of space I experienced
Reporter: I'm curious, the styles of things you write are different, especially "Beijing Biography", originally you wrote a novel, how did you write this non-fiction?
Qiu Huadong: In 2017, I once met Han Jingqun, the editor-in-chief of Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House, and he asked me what book I had been reading recently, and I said that I was reading "The Biography of London", which was written by British writer and journalist Peter Akroyd, very thick, with 800,000 words. After reading it, I felt in my heart that I had lived in Beijing for 30 years and should also write a book for Beijing. Unexpectedly, he listened to his heart, and it didn't take long to sign a contract with me.
As soon as the contract was signed, I was a little anxious, because I wanted to write it later, but it turned out to be early. Fortunately, I collected a lot of information about Beijing, wrote an outline according to the 3,000-year history of the founding of the city, and determined the structure of the main chapter and the sub-chapter. I think that every foreigner who comes to Beijing can take a look at it in his hand, oh, a book in hand, three thousand years of Beijing's history is not worried, and he can easily understand the historical culture and spatial changes in Beijing.
Reporter: How is the history of three thousand years presented? It doesn't sound like an easy task. Why do you want to give Beijing a biography?
Qiu Huadong: One of the characteristics of my "Biography of Beijing" is that I focus on the growth of the sense of urban space in the past 3,000 years, and the mutual shaping of the city and people. I found that many books about Beijing are mostly about historical events and characters that happened in Beijing, and I have grasped the sense of space in Beijing, but I am not an architecture book. I wanted to present this sense of space. For example, there is a stage that is Beijing City, and they write about all the people and things on the stage, but the stage itself is ignored. My protagonist is the city of Beijing, which has grown for 3,000 years and is also a huge living organism, so I have been writing from the beginning of Jicheng and Yandu to the international metropolis of Beijing in the 21st century and Beijing after 2020 - the city of the future.
I am a new Beijinger and have a lot of love for Beijing from the beginning. When I first came, I had the mentality of north drifting, and later became a new Beijinger, with an extra layer of stability than north drift. This state of affairs has made me particularly sensitive to changes in the city of Beijing. I love architecture and read a lot of architecture books. I often go around on Saturdays and Sundays. When I look at maps, I often imagine some kind of intrinsically connected route that might drive changes in urban space.
Living in Beijing, I have a lot of empathetic life experiences, such as Jinsong in the 70s and Fangzhuang in the 80s. Especially in the early 1990s, Beijing entered a new round of development, and it was obvious that various high-rise buildings were rapidly standing up. I even looked at how tall the building was, and at that time we often bet, such as seeing the new capital building, they asked me to say how high, I said this is 180 meters, and then I checked, basically the same. I remember writing about the 2020 Beijing City Sub-Center, and I drove over to feel the two banks of the canal, and the spatial structure of the sub-center. I also went in and out of Daxing International Airport, and on closer inspection, the sense of space was experienced by myself.
After the book came out, they all said, you are still quite fresh, writing all the way to the present, and one-third of it is written in Beijing after 1949. Some friends who have studied Beijing have also pointed out some minor problems, and these places have been revised when they are republished. In fact, in some places, I left a foreshadowing, for example, during the Republic of China, I wrote two sub-chapters of "Zhengyangmen Railway Station" and "Lao She", in fact, this sub-chapter can be extended indefinitely, and can be filled in slowly. In short, this non-fiction "Beijing Biography" is an expression of my love for Beijing.
Reporter: You are really familiar with Beijing. Speaking of which, you not only have a small family in Beijing, but also a youth who struggles for this city.
Qiu Huadong: When I graduated, I was assigned to an organ unit in Beijing, and later I was admitted to a newspaper as a reporter. The profession of journalist requires a very keen grasp of changes in the city. Slowly, running news during the day and coming home at night I still like to write and write.
In the early '90s, there was a news story that had a big impact on me. It was a Spider-Man in the Jingguang Building who fell to his death while working at height. During the day, I sent a 200-word text message after running the scene, and I was still sad when I came home at night... Later, he wrote a novel "Spider-Man". The silver Spider-Man in the novel is lonely, but he is very happy, he lives every day above the city, and his vision of the world is higher and more open than ours. Later, he found a female Spider-Man, and they also gave birth to a small Spider-Man. Writing such a novel actually helps me to dissolve the sadness in my heart to a large extent.
Where the news ends is where literature sets out. A news, in fact, after it ends, often brings writers deeper humanistic thinking. Through literary imagination, I turn news events into literary works. For example, when I saw a fashion exhibition on the street, I wrote about a fashion person, and when I saw a public relations company, I wrote a publicist, and in the past decade from 1992 to 1999, the changes in Beijing have attracted me a lot, and I have written urban novels that are more poetic and prominent in imagery. Write about young people who come to Beijing to find the realization of their own life value, their frustrations, joys and pains, and so on. I also wrote about the rapid changes in Beijing, and the urban landscapes of Liangmahe, Sanlitun and Guomao Business District also entered my works as a background. The contemporaneity of these works is considered by some literary researchers to be urban literature and became my writing style at that time.
The martial arts instructor is also my language teacher; reading is the mother of writing
Reporter: I've heard the novel "Ten Heroes" in the audio before, and it's hard to imagine that several books in this series are the same author.
Qiu Huadong: I practiced martial arts for six years from the first year of junior high school to the third year of high school, when there was a martial arts team in our school, practicing four hours a day, practicing boxing, practicing equipment, practicing knives and guns. Later, my martial arts instructor Huang Jiazhen became my high school Chinese teacher, my martial arts practice was not the best, and he always gave me a high score in my essays.
I remember very clearly that three or four years ago I went to Shanghai to visit Teacher Huang Jiazhen, and he was about to celebrate his eightieth birthday. I haven't seen him in 20 years, and the teacher is very happy. That day he took out all his weapons, all kinds of knives, guns, sticks and swords, including more than twenty kinds of hidden weapons, and put them in a room. I was particularly touched by how he welcomed me in this way. Chen Cang, a Shanghai novelist who went together, was also very excited, and later, on a whim, I carried a particularly large and heavy knife downstairs. In the garden, the 79-year-old teacher Huang raised the knife with a lunge with one hand, and the key is that his knife is raised in a line with the body, which is particularly difficult to do. I wanted to do it again, but it didn't work at all. At that time, I thought that it was rare to have such a teacher who was both literate and martial arts in the process of growing up in my life, and I should write a martial arts novel dedicated to Teacher Huang Jiazhen to wish for his birthday.
When I was in junior high school, I liked to watch martial arts, Jin Yong, Gu Long, Liang Yusheng, and I was often excited to see it. At that time, he also wrote a martial arts novel. In the past two years, I have read a lot of canonical history, anecdotes and miscellaneous notes, Song Dynasty scripts, and chivalrous novels, and the interest of that year has once again urged me to write. One day on a whim, I began to write from the Assassin Yu Rang in the Spring and Autumn Period, sorted by age from far and near, and wrote all the way to the Qing Dynasty's "Sword Pipe", combing out an evolution of The Chinese chivalrous spirit that has lasted for two thousand years.
Reporter: How to maintain the motivation to create when writing works of different styles?
Qiu Huadong: I write a lot of stuff. I write novels, but I also write literary notes, novels, essays, etc. I don't like to be considered a static writer. In order to maintain my interest, I often change hands, writing contemporary with my left hand, writing history with my right hand, and perhaps trying science fiction in the future. Hopefully readers will see my changes as well.
When I write, I used to listen to pure music, such as listening to pipa and other ancient songs when writing "Ten Heroes", for a while I often listened to "Guangling San", listening more, there was Ji Kang who played iron in front of me, the image of a young chivalrous guest... Writing Havana Waves listened to all kinds of symphonies. Music can stir up and down emotions, stimulate a lot of imagination, and it is easy to settle in, which is a way for me to write myself.
Reporter: I just said that you started writing at a young age, how was it inspired in the first place?
Qiu Huadong: I was born in Changji City, Xinjiang, a small city on the edge of the Gobi Desert, and when you look up, you can see the Snow Peak of the Tianshan Mountains. In the fifth grade of primary school, I read "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" and "Dream of the Red Chamber", and although I didn't understand it, I felt that there was a kind of literary style in it. After junior high school, I bought literary magazines at the newsstand, like "Youth Literature", "Harvest", "Contemporary", and when I bought them home, I felt that it was different from the commentaries I listened to when I was a child, and there were writers who could write about the life around me. Reading is the mother of writing, and reading will constantly stimulate potential and broaden horizons.
I began writing at the age of fifteen, a melancholy teenager who entered adolescence, writing novels, poems, and expressing my chest. At the beginning, I wrote, according to the Xinjiang customs, imagining some anthropomorphic stories of animals, such as writing about how a fire fox evaded the tracking of an old hunter, etc., and wrote about twenty articles, with 200,000 or 300,000 words. The Sichuan Children's Society published the "Little Writers Series" series and published a collection of novels I wrote. It was 1988, I was preparing for the college entrance examination, and in the summer I was admitted to the department of Chinese of Wuhan University without exams. I couldn't believe it at the time, but I thought I was lucky to go to a major university because of literary writing.
Reporter: What are some unforgettable memories of going to college for you?
Qiu Huadong: For me, the most important thing about college is to broaden my horizons. I was reading in alphabetical order in the library, starting with the a-word, finding out all the writers at the beginning of the a-word and reading it, abcd... Read it down in turn. At that time, the literary atmosphere of the school was very strong, including the Wave Stone Literary Society and the Luojia Poetry Society. We spent years studying the works of different types of writers and poets, and wrote many novels and poems.
Sometimes I give lectures in college, and I always tell college students that although we are in the Internet age, reading is still a particularly important growth factor. I think that the finiteness of a book precisely determines its infinity. Moreover, reading is a complex cognitive process that evokes rich life experience, so I still hope that everyone will have time to read more.
Writing is like playing with mud; this place is home
Reporter: What kind of talents do you think writers need to have?
Qiu Huadong: I agree with this sentence: observe, experience, imagine, a writer can become a good writer as long as he has any of these three talents. I think observing life and observing the details of people is an ability. For example, listening to pedestrians on the road is very interesting. Some people are particularly observant, such as Chekhov. Some people have a deep experience, talk about a relationship, and can write 50 novels, such as Qiong Yao. Some people belong to the imagination is very strong, such as Tolkien, who wrote "The Lord of the Rings", he completely recreated a world.
Reporter: I feel that writing is very enjoyable for you.
Qiu Huadong: As far as writing itself is concerned, the joy of creation is enormous. We can move the lives of others into the work, recreate them, and express our views on life and life, which is actually a sense of accomplishment. Writing also has the joy of a game, like playing with mud as a child, there is a joy in it, but also a sense of satisfaction.
Reporter: It's amazing, your mentality is not like that of people over fifty years old, even the hair is a head-up posture.
Qiu Huadong: The mentality is young, which may have something to do with growing up in Xinjiang, and when you go out, you see snowy mountains and deserts, and your mood is open. When I was a child, I envisioned many extreme sports, such as diving and mountaineering. In the first two years, I also went to the fitness fighting room to fight boxing, and when I looked around, there were very few people who still practiced fighting at my age.
Reporter: What is the state of life in ordinary times, in Beijing for so many years, will there be nostalgic memories?
Qiu Huadong: I am a very casual person. Although I was born in Xinjiang, my hometown is Henan, and I find it difficult for me to write a hometown in the literary sense. Teacher Liu Xinwu discovered this feature of me early on, and he said that I wrote a lot of "words that coexist with life and space". In my opinion, this place is my hometown, and Beijing is also my hometown.
Text/Reporter Li Zhe Courtesy photo/Qiu Huadong