I also doubted whether I had the talent and skill needed to pursue a career in literature. Like the friend who knew the youth era, I may not be a writer or a good writer in my lifetime. But it doesn't matter. Literature as a profession can fail, but the conversion that language has enabled me to find is the spiritual home to which I will go again and again.
Perfect assumption
Han Shaogong
Writing is clearly not the best pastime. We can't deny that fishing, dancing, chess, traveling, bowling can also be entertaining and more beneficial to health than writing. In fact, with the exception of a very few geniuses, the writer's life is often a little lonely, and even forces himself to be anxious and exhausted, and the time of distress is more than the time of joy.
If writing is seen as a profession, there is no reason why it must be kept. All walks of life can lead to success, especially in today's commodity consumption society, where there is a higher rate of return than writing, and more opportunities and shortcuts are shining seductively in the vast market from time to time. There are many things that a person can do. A world also requires people to do a lot of things outside of literature. With my mediocre qualifications, I have also been a highly talented student in mathematics, a production captain, and an editor-in-chief of a magazine, which is enough to support my confidence in changing my career.
So why write?
There are many writers and many big writers who have answered this question. They say they write to be happy, to make a living, to get ahead, or because they can't do anything else, and so on. These statements are not prevarications or jokes, and if they are indeed what they say, then these writers can only be removed from my mind without delay. Fundamentally, literature is not a practical art, not a coat that can be changed at any time. People who treat literature as a coat for the time being, there must be no literature under the coat, and there will not be much popularity.
A writer in Taiwan said that people can be divided into men and women, rich and poor, Eastern and Western, but there is also a very important division, that is, to divide people into poets and non-poets. That's something I very much agree with.
Not long ago, I met an old friend of the Zhiqing era during my travels, and talked to each other in a guest house. This friend came from a poor family and had a unsuccessful career, and although he loved novels, he had almost never written anything. But I was amazed at the extent of his focus on literature. More importantly, his reading is in his heart, and his literary interests and beliefs in life are integrated, and he is not so much reading works as he is always pursuing the meaning and aesthetic pursuit of his own life.
All excellent works, I mean those who make people feel that they are no longer my works after reading them, and can only belong to such readers. Because of the troubles of his livelihood, he may not be able to write books in his lifetime, but compared to him, some of my fellow writers are just some sellers with a strong sense of operation, and they have repeatedly won in the literary field but have never had literature in their bones, just like in the love field, they have repeatedly won but never loved - the couples in their eyes will always only have the taste of coats.
In front of this friend of Mune, I once again confirmed that to choose literature is actually to choose a spiritual direction, to choose a way of life and attitude--this has nothing to do with whether a person can become a writer or a writer. When the world has become a world of language, when people's thoughts and emotions are mainly nurtured and presented by language, the writing and interpretation of language has transcended all professions. Only the awakened soul will not lose its thirst and sensitivity to language, and will always try to cleanse itself on a rainy night or a certain starry sky in the sea of language.
I don't want to say that I'm not going to do anything other than literature in the future. I also doubted whether I had the talent and skill needed to pursue a career in literature. Like the friend who knew the youth era, I may not be a writer or a good writer in my lifetime. But it doesn't matter. Literature as a profession can fail, but the conversion that language has enabled me to find is the spiritual home to which I will go again and again. Because only a beautiful language can do this: once you find it, everything is starting all over again.
June 1994
Excerpt from Han Shaogong's Self-Selected Works 4: The Assumption of Perfection, Writers Press, 1996
Photography \ Cai Bin
Han Shaogong is a famous chinese writer and thinker. Representative works include short stories such as "Looking West to the Thatched Grass" and "Returning Home", novellas such as "Daddy and Daddy", "Reporting the Government", etc., novellas such as "Maqiao Dictionary" and "Book of Day and Night", long essays such as "Shannanshuibei" and "Hints", theoretical monographs "Afterword to the Revolution" and translations such as "Unbearable Lightness in Life" and "Record of Trepidation". He has won the Lu Xun Literature Award, the National Outstanding Short Story Award, the "Outstanding Writer Award" of the Chinese Literature and Media Award, the Chevalier de la Chevalier de La Francie, the Newman Chinese Literature Award and other domestic and foreign literary awards, and more than 30 foreign translations have been published abroad.
Novel | "The Revision Process"
Han Shaogong | Flower City Press
November 2018 | RMB 45.00
Illustration: Web
EDIT: Anran
Review: Du Xiaoye