The Surging News reporter Gu Ming
Recently, Taiwanese writer Guo Johnson's second work in the mainland, "The Seeker", was published. The novella, written in 2020, was praised by Wang Dewei as "the best work he has created so far, and it is also a rare masterpiece of Taiwanese novels in recent years."
For most mainland readers, the understanding of Guo Johnson began with the publication of "Broken Generation" in 2018. The novel, first published in 2015, is the last part of a trilogy of gay worlds and a gay review of Taiwan's history after Guo Qiangsheng's return to Taiwan's literary scene – the first two being "Children of the Night" (2010) and "The Man Who Confused the Country" (2012). The prominence of "Broken Dynasty" has made many critics compare it with Bai Xianyong's "Evil Son", Zhu Tiantian's "Notes on Wild People", and Qiu Miaojin's "Crocodile Notes".
Born in 1964, Guo Qiangsheng published his first collection of novels as early as 1987, "As a Companion", which included his creations in high school and college, and was very young. The two subsequent works published, "Take Out Your Handkerchief" and "Don't Dance When You're Sad", are about urban love stories. In the 1990s, he studied theater in the United States, but also left fiction writing. After returning to Taiwan, he worked in the theater and created several good plays. In 2005, he left again, left the theater, and returned to campus to start the Institute of Literary Creation.
Although Guo Johnson has maintained contact with the literary circle over the years, it was not until 2010 that he officially returned to the literary world as a novelist and became an important writer of Taiwan's stalwart generation with the "gay trilogy" that has attracted much attention.
The latest episode, "The Seeker," tells the story of an unwanted tuner and Lin Sang, who has just lost his wife, in Guo Johnson's own words, a 40-year-old bald man and a 60-year-old man. Unexpectedly, after publication, it was very popular, not only won the annual award of the 2020 Taiwan Literature Golden Classic Award and the first prize of the Taipei Book Fair Award "Novel Award", but also the praise of Taiwanese writers and scholars such as Wang Dewei, Zhu Tiantian, and Jiao Yuanpu. In June this year, he won Taiwan's top literary honor, the Lianhe Pao Literary Award, with "The Seeker". On the occasion of the launch of the simplified version, we interviewed Guo Johnson to chat with him about this new work and about literary writing from the perspective of comrades.
Guo Johnson
The Paper: You started writing novels when you were in middle school, and after studying in the United States, you had a thirteen-year suspension of writing. In the epilogue to The Seeker, you say that during these thirteen years, you have developed self-doubt and confusion about writing. What did you suspect at the time? Confused about what? Why dare to face it now?
Guo Qiangsheng: Like you said, I began to publish novels in high school, and I published books before I graduated from college, so the whole twenties seemed to be on the road, and I felt that writing was also valued. After the age of 30, I found myself in a more chaotic situation. Of course, there are many aspects, and if I could make a clear briefing here, I wouldn't have to write a book. Some problems after passing, thinking, and growing up, creation becomes a very important way. Some people like to call it "healing," but I don't think so. Healing, not to say that writing is very comfortable to vent at the moment, for me is that you have to write it out, write it in place, and find out afterwards that in fact, the process is to help you find a way out, you have to enter the creative thinking process, in order to have a new view, find a new way. Jokingly, if that article was written badly, I felt that it hurt more and my mood was worse. So from stopping writing for a while to coming back to writing, for me, it's a bit like seeing a mountain and a mountain.
If I really want to talk about those thirteen years, I can't talk about it very carefully, because many, life, feelings, of course, also have their own thinking level, creative level. For example, life, feelings, in 2015 I faced, that book is called "Why not seriously sad", is a bit of a memoir style of prose collection, talking about the family, talking about the objective environment in the past ten years, the situation, the changes of the times, and I experienced the suicide of my lover in the United States, my own depression, but also experienced "9/11", the death of my mother's cancer and so on. There is also the level of thinking, artistic belief or pursuit, I think this is not something that can be told in prose, and a story must be recreated to be able to express these more abstract things. That's why I said in the epilogue of "The Seeker" that this book is actually related to the thirteen years that have been paused, once confused, and passed, and there is no such a process of intermediate pause that makes me precipitate, how to really express my thoughts on thinking and art, human nature, and other more abstract things. In the end, you still have to use writing to help you settle yourself in.
Taiwanese version of "Why Not Seriously Come to Sorrow"
Why dare to face it now? In fact, that period of time is very important, just like "Why Not Be Serious to Grieve", you have to face the core problem and really find out what you are seriously facing. In the matter of writing, it is very important how to face it, to learn to let go, to start to let go. At the age of 30, you know that in the United States, every place, every society, every culture, they are promoting something to you, such as the United States has something that they think has cultural value. Gay groups are also telling you what identity you are. Back in Taiwan, these issues are also there. In this world, there are all kinds of different ideas that have been being sold and instilled. At that time, I was in my thirties, very young, and I thought it was a multiple choice question? Do I have to choose which side I am? It's easy to get stuck thinking like this, so I pause to let me learn a lot of things, let go of a lot of the original rules. For example, if you're guided by these outside worlds and think it's a multiple-choice question, that's bad. If it's not based on their multiple choice questions, does that mean you're creating your own options? I want to joke that as a creator, you can't even create your own options, then your creation must also have problems, you are also following others, copying other people's ideas. So, after understanding this later, I felt that what I had faced in the past, which I had created in "The Seeker", was that this story was a very lonely story at the bottom level- that was also the unanimous reaction of many people after reading it. When you let go, don't take sides, don't join an organization or system, it's a very lonely feeling. However, this is a very important sedimentation process before really letting go, to face and accept this loneliness.
The Paper: Did you go to New York with your lover to study?
Guo Johnson: No, we met after going to the United States to study. I tell you, I was a virgin before I went to the United States, so that was also my first love. Before that, I hadn't really thought about comrades at all. Of course I know my own tendencies, but in our day — the 1980s — there was not much talk about it at all.
The Paper: So, when you were in Taiwan, you were still relatively depressed?
Johnson Guo: Absolutely. I went to college in 1982 and was completely ignorant. There is also a very important part involved in this, which is why writing stopped later. Before it was so loud, what you really needed and was most likely to write down was what you couldn't say, and if you wanted to write, you were simply telling a lie, and you couldn't write about the real experience of life. So, as I said before, make your own options, not whether you should come out, whether you want to come out. I think it's very important to write anyway to go back to what you believe and be honest about the experience of your own life, and if that's not done, there really isn't much point in writing.
The Paper: Why did you choose to study theater in New York at that time?
Guo Johnson: At that time, in the Department of Foreign Languages of National Taiwan University, there were American exchange scholars every year. When I was a junior or a senior, I happened to be a yale theater professor for two consecutive years, and all I taught was theater. Honestly, I was not a very hard-working student in college, and only in these two drama classes did I feel that I really learned a lot and was also interested. So in college, I had a good foundation in theater.
In the 1980s, when I went abroad to study, many people in the liberal arts department probably changed their careers and ran to study MBA and computer science. I am very stupid, I have always been whether writing or reading, is to make myself more aware of myself, reading is not for others to read, and even writing papers is not only to see what is popular outside or which data is easier to obtain, I am using reading, using writing to answer their own questions. So at that time, I chose to study drama, or I felt more loyal to myself.
Speaking of drama, in more depth, I later recalled why I opened up in drama so quickly, and both American professors felt that I was very good, which was not unrelated to comradehood. You can understand very well what it means to play, perform and role, and that makes sense. Under the different pedagogy of the teacher, I know very well what performance is, what theatrical is, what drama is.
The Paper: Do you mean that you grew up playing a "normal person" in front of your family and classmates?
Guo Johnson: Of course I need it. In that closed era, how you don't get bullied, how not to be discovered, that has to be a little skilled, and you have to be very good at playing.
The Paper: Recently, I just happened to watch the TV series "The Magician on the Flyover", which is based on the novel of the same name by Taiwanese writer Wu Mingyi, which has such a plot, and students with a little girlish or homosexual tendencies will be bullied by their classmates.
Guo Johnson: I am still lucky, because boys in our liberal arts class, even if they study business, political history, and sociology, are usually more delicate. Later, I saw that the boys in other classes who had a more obvious feminine temperament would be teased and teased. So, I'm pretty grateful to my high school classmates.
The Paper: After returning to Taiwan, you began to work in theater, and you also launched several good and well-known plays, why did you leave the theater after 2005?
Guo Johnson: Yes, this is another blow. When I was still in the United States, I went back to Taiwan to do a play, and it was also produced in Hong Kong; after returning to Taiwan, I did two plays, one of my own script, and the other was the American playwright Tennessee Williams's "Desire StreetCar". I don't know if the mainland will also have such a phenomenon when it first opened up, and everyone is very hungry to grasp the so-called good things, new things, and hot things abroad. I thought it strange at that time that their new ones now also have roots, but they actually grow out of the roots, not float out of thin air. At that time, when I went back to Taiwan, I found that a big problem was that no one had patience, and felt that as long as many things could be kept up with or in line with each other, it was directly that we imitated a very similar foreign country, indicating that we also had it. But where that thing came from, we don't know. In terms of drama, no one is doing classic plays, no one is really reading classics, not even the drama department has ever read them. At that time, I was quite surprised. I saw what they were doing, practicing their bodies, their voices, and the teacher told them to improvise and go to the text, and it was very trendy, but they hadn't read any scripts at all. So, I find a way for myself to precipitate myself, and I teach my students well, starting with reading. I think that's too important. There is a vein behind every thing, you have not really read it, just look at an eight-point image with your eyes to imitate, these forms, so-called trendy things, a period of time has passed.
The Paper: Mainland audiences probably knew more about Taiwanese drama at that time, probably Lai Shengchuan and Lin Yihua.
Guo Johnson: Many theater directors have returned from abroad, and they must have seen that Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Wilde are still so valued in the West, and students have to read their plays. But they don't teach these students when they return home. Maybe it was also catering to a social trend of the time? Doing realistic dramas is inferior.
Looking back at my thirteen years, although I didn't write with a pen, I was still thinking about this problem in my head. Therefore, I put a lot of energy into what should have been the first creative research institute in the Chinese world to replace papers with creation. We are very solid to recruit some students in, starting with how to read and teach, and I told them that you can't just look at the works of your Taiwanese contemporaries or current literary awards, just look at these works how you can write, I want them to read a lot of classic things. It is still effective to go back to read the classics, and we have also run ten creative research institutes, but if we look at it now, more than half of the people who practice are sixth, seventh, and eighth graders, and they have performed well in taiwan's literary circles.
The Paper: For example, what are the ones?
Guo Johnson: Like Gan Yaoming, we graduated, as well as Sun Zi commented, Xu Rongzhe, Zhu Guozhen, Fang Zi... Wait a minute. Even younger were Lian Mingwei, Ren Mingxin and Lin Dayang, who wrote poems, and Chen Xiamin, the founder of the Comic Point Cultural and Creative Society, who were all students we taught at that time.
"The Seeker", Beijing Daily Publishing House, Republic, July 2021 edition
The Surging News: The opening sentence of "The Seeker" - "In the beginning, we were all just souls, not yet bodies", which is the origin of the whole novel. Then you tell a mythical story: In order to make the soul flesh, god used angels to play music to lure the soul to have a body from then on. How did you get such an inspiration?
Guo Johnson: I will not use the term "inspiration", my things will probably settle for a long time, and the story of "The Seeker" has been vaguely in my heart for a long time, so it is not an inspiration under any circumstances. I often tell students that there is no inspiration that thing, many things you want to think about long enough, really precipitate, and then brew, sometimes you have to write down to know, do not say that inspiration is coming, you know that it will be successful or write like that, are modified and modified, most of the time with that "aura" has gradually drifted away.
Going back to this story, the opening paragraph says that we are souls, not bodies, and you can say that my first three novels—"Children of the Night", "The Man Who Confused the Country", which Wang Dewei called the "Gay Trilogy", and "Broken Generations"—have ghost characters in them, and that ghost, in fact, the focus later on is not a ghost, but a soul. Therefore, this is also a process of slow birth and conception. I would say that there is a "ghost" in every text, which is actually a "soul". In the previous collection of essays, I dealt with the theme of sadness, and this time, I want to use this ghost to deal with the theme of loneliness, especially the loneliness of an artistic creator. I think there is always a conflict between the soul and the body, we Chinese call it "love", if artists want to reconcile the soul and the body, they must send their feelings to something, so we have these literature and art. These lonely artists, by finding a place to put their "feelings", enable sentient beings to experience deeper, invisible things in the soul. So, it's a step-by-step, long experience, taking shape slowly, not a sudden inspiration. Classical music is also a very important piece of my exposure in New York, because I studied theater, and the Taiwanese students who studied at that time did not read theater, so I usually got closer to the international students in the music department and the art department, and had some understanding of their learning process, and I would think of starting from the perspective of music, with a little distance to watch and analyze my own loneliness as a writer.
Many novelists work in which a novelist as an intellectual speaks on his own, unable to really delve into another character. For me, actually creating a character is part of the process of writing a novel that is more enjoyable and fulfilling. It's lonely to talk about the path of writing in the work, and there are so many such works, so I created a character like a tuner in "The Seeker".
The Paper: In fact, there are many literary works with the theme of loneliness, and even almost every classic literary work can be interpreted as lonely. How do you understand the concept of loneliness? Is it artificially magnified by us? Like the tuner in "The Seeker", although he did not become a famous musician, he found what he really liked to do, found his sustenance in music and life, do you think this is loneliness? Shouldn't this be said to be a very happy thing?
Guo Johnson: No, we feel that it is quite happy to have our own sustenance as artists, because most of us see artists who have become recognized. Happiness may not be something that artists really care about. Unless it's not published at all and doesn't go on stage, I think every artist has struggled with whether or not to be recognized. The tuner in the book has not been recognized, how can he find a place for himself, and what should he do in life? Therefore, for him, the process of breaking free from the shadow of failure, jumping out of the musical dreams of every music student, let him really know himself. In the end, it was only by accepting loneliness that it brought him peace.
I don't know what happened in the mainland, but almost every child in Taiwan has to be sent to study music, and many children really feel very painful. I also know a lot, play to junior high school, play for ten years and then give up, because for them, there is no real pure fun. There are many such examples. So, the loneliness of this tuner I write about is a certain uncompromising loneliness about the environment of his time, not the loneliness of withdrawing melancholy.
The Paper: Critics have said that in "The Seeker", "qin" = "love", although it is writing piano, writing music, in fact, it is still writing about the feelings between people, just like every piano hopes to meet a person who understands its own playing, meets a good tuner, so have you set such a metaphor before writing? In "The Seeker", almost all of the characters written about have had a helpless emotional choice, as the Taiwanese writer Zhou Fenling said in the commentary, love is always the ultimate art in your work, because it is imperfect, even full of holes. Are you a love pessimist or a love imperfectionist? The novel mentions the lifelong "partnership" relationship between the piano player Hurt and the soprano Nina, do you think this love relationship is ideal?
Guo Johnson: I think the focus should be more on this thing. The piano is actually a physical and mechanical thing, the notes are not language, and they will not tell a story, but why in different excellent pianists, they can pop their own taste, pop their own interpretation. I think this is the more important metaphor in the novel. You infuse your soul and feelings because your interpretation can make a thing that is only a thing in itself come alive, make it a sentient thing.
In fact, in the matter of feelings, I will feel that you have no way to expect the other party to respond to you in what way, all you can do is to pin your best on it. In fact, the whole world environment is ruthless, and you can only use your interpretation to pay attention to him, turning a ruthless thing into a sentient thing.
Now I really don't know what comes to mind when people use the word "love", but if I only think about it, love is of course a tragedy in nature. In our existing culture or habits, how can love not be a tragedy? married? After marriage, it is really transformed into another thing, then it is not the essence of love, there is family affection, partners, comrades-in-arms... So in the end, what your question says is "like every piano wants to meet a player who understands itself", I think, instead, it should be reversed, not waiting for others to play you, but to learn to be able to interpret, to play, to be able to tune, to accompany. If everyone thinks that no one will love me, I am a precious piano, but no one will come to understand me, just like Fromm said very early in "The Art of Love", too many people expect someone to love, they all want to be loved, but no one knows how to love. Love if you have something worth loving, know how your soul is placed, how it is sustenance, my attitude towards love is like this. Because love always has an end, if it does not end, it is just grafted into another thing.
The relationship between Richt and Nina, what I want to show in the novel is sadness. An interesting thing is that I didn't know when I wrote it, and then Jiao Yuanpu told me, "Don't you know, Richter and Nina, one is gay, one is Lesbian" (Lesbian). So, do you see this as the ideal relationship? Of course, they think the ideal is good. I don't think the two of them are very reluctant, just to fake, to hide their eyes, I think they are more like a pluralistic family, that is, a family-like relationship - if love is for the sake of family. This logic I have always found quite strange, the elements of a family, trust, care, understanding, as well as in the mind, in all aspects of the like-minded, these are also in the relationship between Richt and Nina, but also can be started.
The Paper: So what do you think about the legalization of gay marriage?
Guo Johnson: Of course, there is no harm - in terms of political momentum, it is good to be visible in the symbolic sense, but the key is that the real practice is not so fast. In the 1980s, there was no such thing as gay marriage in the United States, they were still in a period of fear of AIDS, they were still fighting for human rights, but then I would see that in the gay community in New York, there were people in their 60s, 50s, 40s, 30s, and 20s, and that was the diversity of the community itself, and you saw a lot of people in their fifties with their partners for 20 years. Therefore, in such an environment, their gay marriage, in my opinion, has long been normalized, and in the end it is only a local legality. That's already in their daily lives, and everyone is accustomed to it. But now, I don't know why when it comes to gay culture, especially in Taiwan, I always see young people in their twenties.
Of course, the legalization of gay marriage has its significance, but it also has a lot of supporting facilities. Taiwan has been through for four or five years, and there is no subsequent discussion. If two people in love can start a family, very real problems, taxation, finance, inheritance, how to deal with these? What happens next if they want to have children? What should I do if my child is born and educates? How will such a child go to school in the future? What to do in school? After these problems have been solved, there is a legalization of gay marriage in the United States. Taiwan established that homosexuality is legal in 2017, but I have not yet received a gay wedding post.
To some extent, the whole environment is still scrupulous.
Another funny thing, I once asked a young student, saying that you are great, go to sit-ins every day, go to protest, you are so supportive of gay marriage, so do you want to get married? He said, no. Did I say did you come out with your family? He said, no. I asked why? He said, I'm afraid my parents are sad and will not be able to stand it. I'm just jokingly saying, your parents will be sad, other people's parents won't be sad? What double standard are you? So a bit confusing.
Gay issues sometimes become a archway to put there, and I thought the younger generation would be more open to face it now, but it didn't. If he wanted to be a comrade, he left home and went to Taipei, cutting off with his family, which was very divided and did not really integrate. In a comrade's life, every piece must be able to fall into the positioning, I think, then this identity is the real identity. So you know, at that time, it was said that the medical system had a partner to sign and give up first aid, that was the ideal situation, you don't say comrades, now many of our parents have signed a non-emergency agreement, most of the children are also respected, but as long as there is a child in the hospital to make trouble, the doctor does not dare not help. This is our sentiment.
Therefore, just at the beginning, there are still a lot of supporting facilities, medical, educational, legal, economic, property, and now there is no further downward movement, just wait and see.
The Paper: How do you understand the emotional relationship between the tuner and Lin Sang in the novel?
Guo Johnson: This story, which I narrate in the first person of a tuner, is better used in the art of fiction, and is not actually a completely trustworthy narrator, because when a person tells his own things, the real psychological situation is for the reader to analyze what he says, not that what he says is true. Looking more deeply, the tuner has always believed that he is very weak, and he has no money, no reputation, and no good education, he says that Lin Sang has money and is very strong, but this whole thing is what he is expecting to happen, his active component is more than Lin Sang's active component, and he himself did not realize it, otherwise he would not have left that sentence when he first met Lin Sang in the music classroom: Is your piano okay? When they touched, they met, and he left this sentence, so that there was a follow-up between the two.
A person who feels that he is a passive, unimportant role for a long time, there is a psychology called "learned helplessness", that is, the helplessness in a relationship, which is not real, but learned. After the tuner met Lin Sang, his life changed, perhaps he himself did not realize it, but we readers can see that he is not completely passive. Therefore, his account is only a one-way confession, and it is not completely credible.
The interesting thing about the relationship between these two people is that, relatively speaking, Lin Sang is a person who has seen the world, older than the tuner, and his ex-wife is a musician, of course, he has met many comrades, not complete strangers. On the contrary, the tuner, when he was a child, was accepted as an apprentice by a pianist from New York, and he did not know in his heart, so of course, it was very closed at that time, he did not understand, but there was a kind of excitement that could not say why, and he felt hurt emotionally, and he did not contact any comrades after that. Therefore, the relationship between the two of them, if you look deeper, Lin Sang may be able to see more clearly than the tuner himself what kind of person he is.
For Lin Sang, in the time after the bereavement of his wife, he may also have a new understanding of his growing environment from childhood, his role in the whole life and workplace. He didn't have real same-sex friends, only some drinking buddies and buddies in the mall, but because he was sad, he put it down and had the opportunity to become a real friend with a same-sex person for the first time. He was able to talk to the tuner, not just talk about wine,, and business.
So, I feel like both sides are trying to break something consciously and unconsciously. For Lin Sang, with his age, with his professional strength, he is more conscious, and he may actually be able to see that the tuner is a comrade who has not come out, very depressed, and very lonely. However, the tuner himself may just attribute the feeling thing to the fact that I am a failed musician, because my origins and my conditions are not good. He did not face it, but Lin Sang would know better, and the tuner was also making some adjustments and breakthroughs. So, the tuner is more unconscious, as I just said, he has slowly gone from thinking that he is weak and passive to beginning to take the initiative in his own life. This is rare in depictions of male relationships. Therefore, I was also surprised that everyone responded so enthusiastically after the publication of this book. Honestly, this is the story of a 40-year-old bald man and a 60-year-old man, but everyone read it very much.
In fact, each of us may have a very ugly, very loser, very old, very tired self in our hearts, and then we were seduced by this story.
Comrade Guo Johnson's trilogy of "Children of the Night" and "The Man Who Confused the Country"
The Paper: The American writer E.L. Doctorow once said that the career of writers is to document the power movement of their time. Wondering what you think of the identity of a writer and the "writer's career"?
Guo Johnson: I don't know what others think, I myself think that a writer is a person who has no "career" to do, you think of it as a career, you have to run it, it involves interpersonal relationships. I don't know what Doctoro's words were, but I was able to keep writing them because I didn't think of them as a carer.
But I think it's not just about recording the movement of power, it's actually more like you've been feeling the interaction with power, it's in the process of this interaction, your self-confidence and your self-reflection on where you stand, rather than saying that there are many movements in society, you just remember it. It's not that taking to the streets is called interacting with power, in fact, each of us is in the interaction with various powers every day, but have you changed in this interaction? Are you being consumed? What is the result of the interaction? You have to be very honest about examining or looking at yourself and writing it down, which is a goal or motto for me to write.
One more thing about the identity of the writer. I would think that, in general, the longer each of us lives, the farther we are away from our autonomous selves, because as I said earlier, everyone has to force you to choose a side, throw you a bunch of norms, values, etc. I hope that after reading my work, people will be able to think of finding what they have lost. It doesn't necessarily mean that what you lose is bad, maybe you are willing to exchange it yourself, you give up, but you have to know that you live this life, what you have lost, you have to dare to face it. For what is lost, usually my pen will have some reflection on it.
The Paper: In the novel "Broken Generation", you reviewed the changes in the comradely gathering place in Taipei, which is very meaningful to review the history of the gay affirmative action movement in Taiwan, but you once explained in an interview that "Broken Generation" and "Children of the Night" and "Confused People", although they are all gay perspectives, are exploring the relationship between the mainstream and the non-mainstream, including the squeeze of heterosexual culture on the gay community, and the mainstream and non-mainstream within the gay community. Throughout Asia, the gay affirmative action movement in Taiwan has done a good job, and the legalization of same-sex marriage is also mentioned at the end of "Broken Generation", so where do you think the most important mainstream and non-mainstream contradictions within the gay community are at present? Will the affirmative action movement in Taiwan focus on these aspects in the future?
Guo Johnson: When I was in my twenties and thirties, the whole world was playing the identity politics card, and as I am now almost 60 years old, I think it should not only focus on comrades and comrades-related issues, I think it is more important for everyone to understand the society seen from the perspective of comrades, or the prediction and diagnosis of this era. The gay perspective should not be limited to the gay community, but also for politics, economics, education, and society as a whole, it is a different perspective.
In the last century, everyone was talking about physical autonomy and lust autonomy, and at this age, I hope that everyone can really know the existence of a gay perspective, which is very important for understanding the truth of society, otherwise, you will only think that you can get everything by fighting for power. Comrades should establish a perspective that is directed at the wider masses and can help the whole era and society, not be wrapped in the perspective of sexual orientation. In fact, comrades in the removal of carnal lust, there are many situations that can resonate among people of different cultures or classes.
The Paper: For example, in "Broken Generation", it is written about the tragic situation of elderly comrades?
Guo Johnson: Yes, why is this so, Comrade Ming ming will be old! The likelihood that they will die alone is definitely much greater than that of the average person. Therefore, many situations of comrades will be seen before others from their point of view. It is not limited to comrades, many different societies, different classes, are linked or resonant. Like the problem of lonely death in old age, many heterosexuals do not believe that their children will abandon them, or feel that their children are property. Comrades, on the other hand, have their blind spots. Just like me, now almost 60 years old, seeing the old comrades of our generation, there is no other sustenance, only understand the era they lived in. But Funky, taiwan's most famous bar after it opened in the 1990s, also closed long ago. They have no other life experience, nor have they expanded, and the only accumulated experience is still not out of the box of 20-year-old fresh meat, such as my friends who are about 60 years old, quite funny, and pass me pictures of small fresh meat in the group every day. How are you? Don't you have anything else to do? Why do we still live in the way we are twenty or thirty years old? Yes, not many people are as worried as I am, so like to think about problems, but they have always been like this, do not know what to do, as a comrade experience, after the age of 30 did not grow.
However, the visibility of the main consumer market and the main force is not in these people. The problem, then, is that by the time they are fifty or sixty years old, they still don't know anything, they don't want to develop the experience of their comrades, and they still keep the values or cognitions they had at the age of 30. Of course, there are a few who can develop consciously, automatically, and spontaneously. Further, to develop it involves the supporting problems mentioned earlier. If you have a match in each field, those who are aware of the hindsight have the opportunity to develop different aspects. However, there is no external environment, so comrades in their fifties and sixties can only be stuck there, there is no way to go to the school gender education class to tutor the life of comrades, nor can they do public consultation and social work in the medical unit. If he is a very accomplished person in the mall, retired at the age of fifty or sixty, what can he do? Can he inspire the next generation of gay entrepreneurs? No. Therefore, the outside world is still closed, but we have built a archway in the middle. Only when the external environment changes will those who are aware of it develop new life experiences.
Now the epidemic is very serious, Taiwan found a chain of infection last month, that is, the comrades' online dating, the relevant units said that the number of confirmed cases in the gay dating circle suddenly increased. The people of the gay movement loudly tarted that you were stigmatizing us. Therefore, if equal rights really has become a consensus, it is impossible to say the word "comrade" on scientific issues such as medical treatment and health, which feels stigmatized. For example, if some people in the slightly older and more backward Wanhua area of Taipei were infected, is it that the middle-aged and elderly people in heterosexuality are also being discriminated against? Some of these grandfather shops hang sheep's heads to sell dog meat, saying that they are drinking tea, in fact, there are some ladies as accompaniment, many lonely grandfathers in this place are some people who are in poor economic conditions of fifty or sixty, sixty or seventy years old, they will only be accepted and served here, and they will not be abandoned. The big epidemic in Taipei is from these grandfather shops, and everyone's words have discrimination against the elderly. Therefore, when the chain of infection of gay dating circles appears, comrades are very sensitive, and the sound of rebound is very loud.
Therefore, not only for comrades, but also for the old and weak in heterosexuality, it is still very unfair. Comrades can not only see their own unfairness, I think, comrade perspective to see whether there is a so-called more common fair, to anti-discrimination, can not say that as long as I am not discriminated against, others are not discriminated against it is not my business.
The Paper: In an interview with United Literature magazine, you said that in "Broken Generation" to explore the existentialism of the new era, you need to think about the question: For example, what is the "existence" of comrades? After God is dead, what will happen when the relationship we used to believe in the unity of sex, marriage, and family also faces disintegration? Can you talk about your thinking on these two issues at the moment?
Guo Johnson: I can only answer these two questions with my personal experience and opinions. I really feel now that comrades exist to fight against the idea that they can hide their eyes and ears and see the whole world as the same, and that they must make a sound so that the world can standardize everyone in a single way without so smoothly. The gay perspective can sometimes help to find a lot of things that have been deformed and strange in society for a long time, such as getting married and having children, passing on generations for hundreds of thousands of years, and the people who have walked into this cycle are tired and exhausted, too busy to breathe, but how many people will have the opportunity to stop and think about whether this thing is a problem in the end? Why has the divorce rate been rising? Why is there less birthrate?
For myself, I want to borrow my writing, to borrow my role—on the other hand, as a literary educator, a critic, to spread out this comrade's perspective as much as possible, not to be flattened so easily. I can even say that I can come back to writing, and the status of comrade makes me more focused on doing my own thing. In a way, whether it's writing, taking care of my birth family, my elderly ninety-something father, it allows me to focus on deciding what's most important.
What will be the state of sex, marriage, and family? I don't have a marriage relationship, but I can find out from the widespread popular culture that many American dramas now talk about couples divorcing when they see the introduction. If you put gay and heterosexual together, go back to the beginning, I have always felt that it is important for people to honestly examine their interaction with power, you choose marriage or not, you choose family or no family, all right, but please explain well, because of what you do. Don't use marriage as a tool, but talk about benevolence and morality; when it comes to love, it is obviously selfish, but it is also said that it is sexy. So as a literary person, you must be able to speak honestly to yourself and honestly face your own insecurities and fears. Marriage doesn't have to be for everyone, and no one says it's guaranteed to be successful. It is even a joke that heterosexual marriages stipulate that a man and a woman are prescribed, but it does not stipulate that these two people must love each other, right? Therefore, people who say that comrades must love each other when they get married can. There are too many gray areas here, and everyone must have a clear understanding of themselves in their hearts.
"Broken Dynasty", Democracy and Construction Press, Houlang, June 2018
The Surging News: "Children of the Night", "The Man Who Confused the Country", "Broken Generation" are all written from the perspective of comrades, but in "The Seeker", the elements of comrades are only a faint hidden line interspersed in it, why does such a change occur?
Guo Johnson: Doctorow said that the novel is a record that has already happened, but I think the novel also has to produce some meaningful assumptions, predictions and breakthroughs. I think that in the world of men, when everyone is fifty or sixty years old, is it possible that the original framework will become different? At different stages of life, is it necessary to develop a new ethic? There are certainly all kinds of attractions between people, a boss can get the loyalty of subordinates, subordinates can win the trust of superiors, even if two people are heterosexual, there is a magnetic field between them. In this story, it is still a gay perspective, but I am not dealing with the identity of a comrade. The comrade's perspective tells me that I should now take everyone to experience something different.
Generally speaking, people over the age of forty or fifty, whether gay or heterosexual, have no other way to develop friendships. After retirement, heterosexuals, only some family friends or old work partners, are not in the original workplace network, how do they know different people? In the novel, I told that two people from the north and south of the world met, which was an opportunity for them to have an interaction that they had not imagined before. And this interaction is on another level, you can't simply say that they are friendship or love. Just like the life-and-death friendship between Boya and the child in ancient times, do you say that is love? I think of course there is an element of love. Why was this kind of thing preached in ancient times, and now this era sounds like a myth? To some extent, everyone's life experience has been flattened and narrowed. So, I hope that this novel can break through this and make people feel like I'm back in the soul after reading it. The voice of the soul is more important than the external identity, the outer class. Of course, I'm all this age, and it's really weird to write about little fresh meat grabbing boyfriends. Therefore, "Broken Generation" for me is the end of a stage trilogy that looks at the 30 years of gay issues and the gay movement from scratch. Next, of course, there will be a gay perspective - I can't pretend to be a heterosexual, but at this age, I still hope to lead everyone to imagine the next step, imagine how fifty years old, without the skin, how to do business, not just record.
The Paper: Are there any new writing plans?
Guo Johnson: My works will brew for a long time, even when I don't sit in front of the computer to write, I am still thinking about writing, because all the things that have entered life before will suddenly ferment slowly one day. Of course, I always have some very concerned and need to answer the view of life in my heart, such as I read, I write, if I can't go back to a deeper understanding of myself, can't let me continue to go down, then it is not the meaning of my writing. However, I will not know whether I have a mature idea until one day I feel that I can write it down. So, I'm not going to pre-announce what science fiction or historical novel I'm writing and what plans I'm working on.
The Paper: Are there different genres that you want to try, such as the science fiction you mentioned?
Guo Johnson: I think that by presetting the framework, it becomes a business. Style, that's not how it changes. I just write about my emotions or my concern for life very sincerely. Maybe in the end it grew into science fiction, or maybe no one knew before it was written.
Editor-in-Charge: Han Shaohua
Proofreader: Luan Meng