Huang Yuning, Xiao Bai (The Paper, illustrated by Jiang Lidong)
Translator and publisher Huang Yuning's first collection of personal stories, "Eight and a Half Parts", was recently published, including eight fictional works "Call Transfer", "Three Forks", "Water", "You or Plants", "Happiness is within reach", "Mercury is Busy", "A Thousand Miles to Ride", "Literary Patient" and a non-fiction work "Overseas Relations". At the invitation of the Shanghai Review of Books, Xiao Bai, a writer who has just won the Novella Award of the Seventh Lu Xun Literature Award for "Blockade", talked with Huang Yuning about the new book.
"Eight and a Half Parts", by Huang Yuning, Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, published in August 2018, 325 pages, 48.00 yuan
Xiao Bai: "Eight and a Half Parts" is about to be on the shelves to meet with readers. How much time did you spend on this collection of novels? Is the order of the novel collections arranged according to the time of writing?
Huang Yuning: The order of the novel collection is not arranged according to the time of writing. In fact, there is no too strict division, that is, I discussed it with the editor, and roughly arranged it according to the theme, the length, and the reader's feelings that we speculated. The entire collection contains a total of eight short stories and more than 100,000 words. These works were published with a strip, which should add up to about three years. There are also individual articles that were written before that, such as the non-fiction essay "Overseas Relations", written in a fictional way, which was "converted" into half in my collection (the literal meaning of "eight and a half" is derived from this), which should be five or six years ago. I put it at the end of the novel collection, somehow going back to my "fictional history" starting point. It was at that point that I started trying to jump back and forth between fiction and nonfiction. At that time, I felt very excited, and I had the so-called creative impulse. I don't know if you feel that way. I think some people are born with imaginary desires that may be temporarily suppressed, but one day they will flare up. When I was very young, I would hide in the tent and make up stories, and almost every day I would make up and fall asleep, and then my mother told me that she was worried about it for a while, afraid that I was mentally ill. From that beginning, until I start writing novels after i have gone around in circles, there must have been some inevitability here—just waiting for the day when it would detonate.
Xiao Bai: So the internal logic of this book in editing is the fictional "history of desire". Indeed, the novel is very hard and torturous, and it is difficult to make it without a heartfelt desire and motivation. In your last collection of essays, I wrote you a short preface in which I "predicted" the birth of this collection of novels (hahaha). At that time, I said that you would definitely write a novel, and you did complete such a collection of novels in a very short time. That "desire and motivation" must be very strong. Speaking of "imaginary desires", which of these novels satisfy you the most? Or let's put it another way, which of these novels are your favorites? We know that often the view of the author and the reader is often different on this point, and the author usually cherishes works that at first seem difficult to achieve with the intention of writing, but end up satisfactorily completed.
Huang Yuning: Your statement is interesting. Since it is a "fictional history of desire", I must consider the desires of the reader in addition to my own desires. Call Diversion and The Three Forks are put at the forefront because, relatively speaking, they are probably the most complete in the entire collection, and they are also the most balanced between the desires of the author and the desires of the reader. They all write about relationships that are commonplace in the city—I wanted them to be everyday enough to be within reach when I designed the plot. However, through the constant change of perspective, through narrative technology, these ordinary character relationships eventually step by step towards extreme dramatic scenes. I'm obsessed with structures like this, and I hope you think the ending isn't credible when you look at the beginning, but I'm going to use narrative to make you believe it —it's the magic of narrative. I hope that the reader will be able to capture what I want to express by feeling this magical process. These two articles, as well as the following "Water", have similar motives. However, if you say that the views of readers are not the same, then I must mention the two stories with science fiction overtones at the back of the list: "A Thousand Miles and a Single Ride" and "Literary Patient". I'm the least sure of their acceptance. I don't know what readers who like science fiction will think, or what readers who don't like science fiction will think. I wanted to write about how it felt like Black Mirror, but I wasn't sure if I achieved that effect. But, in any case, when I first started writing, I didn't know that I would write such a story, and this feeling that made me unbelievable was indeed something that writers should especially cherish.
Xiao Bai: You mentioned the technology of fiction, and as soon as the reader hears about the technology, it seems that it has nothing to do with us, that is your author's business. In fact, all narrative techniques, or you call it the art of fiction, are ultimately designed to allow the story in the author's mind to finally "reach" the reader completely and smoothly. Technology is all about finding a simpler, richer, and more effective way. For example, in the "Call Transfer" article, you use a first-person perspective, which on the surface is the most common, but in fact it is very difficult, you have to enter an inner world that is completely different from you and the author himself: men, small towns in the interior, liars, seeing the world in his own way, talking, and making daily responses. There are a lot of difficult things here, it seems simple, but it actually requires a lot of skill, how do you get into such a character who thinks what he thinks, what he can say?
Huang Yuning: Novels are written in various ways. For me, although the experience is not very much, it seems that some excitement points have gradually formed. I think I'm a little bit "transvestite" when I'm fictional—the more different the costumes and props are from myself, the more fun it seems to make me write about. I'm not so fond of going around in circles in my comfort zone. The male protagonist in "Call Transfer", except for the characteristics you said are completely different from mine, he is a substitute driver every night, and I have not even learned to drive. Almost everything I design for this person is something I rarely touch in real life. In fact, trying to get close to these unfamiliar venues is not the most difficult part, I can read, search, cut and paste material from many social news, capture the dialogue of the characters on the subway, in the hair salon, and outline the reasonable causes and consequences for these only words - I enjoy this process. However, the point is that the material is only the material, and it is best not to use them directly in the novel, but to let them be coiled in the mind, and be sure to let the bullets fly for a while. The advantage of this is that when the material has accumulated to a certain amount, you no longer always struggle with whether I am in line with the identity of a rookie liar, and you begin to believe that your vision is his vision.
Xiao Bai: From the material into the heart of a character, the process must not be as simple as you say-
Huang Yuning: I have laid some groundwork for this liar's person to cheat at least not just for money, but to enter a world through the Internet interface that he doesn't have a chance to enter in real life. When I wrote about the time he went to theater to watch "The StreetCar of Desire," I understood what I really wanted to write about. Peeking through his strange character into the world with which I had long been familiar—theater, artists, literary youth—what had been taken for granted would become special, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes particularly pathetic. So, you see, at the end of the day, I'm actually still writing about something I'm familiar with, but I need to get a whole new perspective through this liar. In addition, in "Call Forwarding", it is not all first-person, and in two verses, I will transform this first-person into a second-person, so that his narrative changes from "I" to "you". This "you" can be understood as his self-questioning and self-answering, the perspective from which he questions himself internally, and the external perspective from which the author examines him. As I write this, there is a little attempt to form symmetry or confrontation with the first person.
Xiao Bai: Some fiction writers are very trusting of language, and when the narrative is chaotic, they believe that dynamic language will find its own way out. Some are not. It feels like you're closer to the previous author. The narrative of these short stories is closer to a kind of linguistic carnival, and they often reproduce themselves from a sentence or a word. I know that after you finish the first draft, you rarely make particularly large adjustments and changes, and I have always been very confused, because I usually keep revising, from the first draft to the final delivery of the manuscript for publication, many times will look completely different. I'm probably the equivalent of the latter type of author, who always trusts language and always feels like I don't have the full writing I want to write. After reading your collection of short stories in its entirety, I seem to understand a little bit why you rarely make drastic adjustments after completing the first draft, because you believe in the language, that it has led the story in the right direction, and that it is right. Is this true?
Huang Yuning: Because of your words, I flipped through "Call Transfer" and "Three Forks" for a while, and found that my writing style was indeed a bit "talking and rushing". I can't deny the thrill that "the carnival of language" brings me. Some kind of sudden poetry, an image that precedes narrative logic, a witty phrase that I am reluctant to give up no matter what, a layer of fresh and interesting metaphors, may subtly change the direction of the narrative. Will such willfulness get out of control? For the time being, in the story I have written, I don't seem to have encountered an example of completely writing on a fork in the road, and in the end I always seem to be able to return to my preset track. However, if the novel is longer, like you wrote "The Concession", I may face more difficulties, and I am afraid that I will have to rewrite it. A while ago I was writing an article for Carp magazine about "hysterical realism", and I concentrated on reading several novels that are known for their "carnival of language", and found that the really outstanding works, such as "Neutral" and "A Brief History of The Seven Kills", have a very tight structural design behind them - an almost paranoid rigor. Carnival needs to be balanced structurally.
"Concession", by Xiao Bai, CITIC Publishing Group, published in April 2018
Neutral, eugenides, translated by Wan And Ye Zun, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2012
Xiao Bai: I am not talking about the anticipation and design of the structure in advance. That of course there will be, even in short stories. I'm actually talking about trust or disbelief in language and narrative: Are these words and phrases accomplishing what I'm trying to say? Is there something more accurate, simpler, better?
Huang Yuning: Haha I don't have the same serious perfectionist tendencies as you have... Or to put it this way, it's a bit like love. Is it possible for you to meet a perfect object? The perfect thing could only be the reflection in the water of Naxos. When you're in a relationship, you're obsessed with the "superpowers" you seem to have that you can turn stones into gold. A flower is not just a flower, but a garden. The moment when those sentences suddenly sounded beautifully in the ear was the happiest moment of the hard labor of writing a novel, and there was no reason not to grasp them and trust them.
Xiao Bai: The lives of these middle-class characters in the novel always seem to maintain a shaky balance. It feels as if the narrator is expecting some kind of dramatic "crash" in the lives of these characters, or a secretly optimistic attitude toward some kind of "possibility of collapse", is that right?
Huang Yuning: The word middle class seems to have entered our common vocabulary in the past decade, right? China's middle class, which is generally vaguely scratched out in ambiguous standards, has been in a mental state of mind between confusion, guilt, and insecurity (or both) almost from the moment it is labeled — so that the terms "middle-class anxiety" and "middle-class" are almost as long as they are.
Xiao Bai: Yes, in fact, the word middle class can only be said here, borrowed for the time being. For example, I don't remember where I saw a piece of data, and it wasn't necessarily very accurate. In China, it said, more than half a million people currently account for more than five percent of deposit accounts, and people with a bachelor's degree or above account for almost five percent of the total population. We know that a lot of household deposits tend to be concentrated in the name of a family member, so in fact that deposit number may have to be discounted a little more.
Huang Yuning: Is there really that little? Maybe it's a bit biased to look at savings and academic qualifications. I didn't particularly deliberately use the lives of the middle class as the subject of the novel, but you can actually see stories suspending them in mid-air in Three Forks or Call Transfer. I'm familiar with this group of people, and I should belong to this group of people in essence. I'm familiar with their habitual anxiety of always finding their place on the city's ladders. They are obsessed with order, grow up as honor students, and are willing to believe that there is a standard answer to every difficult problem. Like the "black trick" between the couple and the suspected third in "Three Forks", they reflect each other's embarrassment like mirrors. What I want to spy is how they react when they step into the air and lose their center of gravity. You say I'm "expecting" some kind of dramatic collapse, or perhaps, but that's a literary motive. I like atwood's quote: "If literature is compared to animals hidden under stones, then the poem expresses the mentality and mood of people who put the stones on after viewing these animals; the novel portrays more like the contradiction between people and animals in a specific situation: people stab them with small sticks, poor creatures in danger, or struggle to defend themselves, or wait to die..." Sometimes, I hope that my writing can competently fulfill the function of "small sticks".
Xiao Bai: You wrote a novel about future novels, can you tell me what you think about the future of novels? Is it optimism or pessimism?
Huang Yuning: This novel is called "The Literary Patient." Robots were winning the world of Go, so my motivation for writing was simple, not even creative—I wanted to design a global competition in the novel to see if it was possible for a robot to take the novelist's job. Moving down this motive, though, wasn't that simple, I had to design the scenes and the rules of the game, tell a little story, and, more importantly, I quickly discovered that it didn't mean much to whoever won or lose the design— I didn't really care about it. I am concerned with the relationship between the author and the reader, with the essence of the novel (or story), the history, the reality and the future. In the novel, artificial intelligence and writers are pitted against reality SHOWs, testing a bunch of standardized data for their work, which is a sensor that can accurately measure readers' micro-expressions, eye changes, blood pressure, heartbeat and adrenaline, and is a powerful and pervasive algorithm. I think that's the crux of the matter. Even if artificial intelligence has not yet written a powerful enough story, today's human beings have become more and more accustomed to being controlled by algorithms - we can feel the tightness, efficiency and recklessness of this control when we read any 100,000 plus WeChat official account.
Xiao Bai: Yes, even every word, every grammar and rhetoric, which is applied to the text individually and in combination, may bring about the electrochemical reactions of the brain to the reader, and may be covered by algorithms.
Huang Yuning: If the future direction of fiction will change significantly, whether positive or negative, the main reason behind it is probably also related to this. Am I optimistic or pessimistic about this? It's hard to say for sure. Perhaps, like the two reversals of The Literary Patient, I let you see the possibility of victory when you feel that humanity is about to lose; but if you read further down, you will not be relieved by this victory, because there is another reversal later—when you have read it all, you may be able to find a place of judgment between "optimism" and "pessimism". Also, a little vignette. More than a year after the novel was published, the Nobel Prize was announced to be suspended in 2018 due to a scandal at the Swedish Academy of Letters, and there is no timetable for when it will resume. Calls for a new literary prize were soon raised in Swedish cultural circles. This situation is very similar to the setting at the beginning of my novel, the literary prize that claims to be fighting against the Nobel Prize is called the "Noah Prize", and its slogan is "To save a story is to save the whole world". That novel is written more willfully, mixed with many such jokes, incisions, applause, tributes or ironies, and readers who have enough foreign literature reading may resonate a little.
Xiao Bai: Which of these novels do you like the most, or which characters?
Huang Yuning: The hero in "Call Transfer" who exerts the most force, his trajectory from the county town to the provincial city to the international metropolis, is the kind of character who can't get a book for a few minutes but refuses to go to a place like Maotanchang Middle School to re-read. He's a bit of a brain, he's cynical, a little more three-dimensional than our stereotypes of small-town youth. In the city, he lives in the city's old workshops in disrepair, working odd jobs during the day and driving at night, lurking in the gray areas of the city. The novel gives him an unexpected opportunity to "intern" in telecommunications fraud, and he seems to have a little more curiosity than other scammers. His sense of existence in the city, which he had never realized before, was realized in this paradoxical way—he thus had the opportunity to transgress the class and play the other, and finally he found that these people were actually involuntarily playing others. In the capacity of the novella, I give a lot of information to this character. In addition, in other works, I have a principle when designing characters, that is, to more or less constitute a refresh for the reader's daily experience. For example, the relationship between the three characters in "Three Forks", the so-called affair, or the unspoken rules of the workplace, are not what you imagined at the beginning - I hope that what will be shown in front of the reader is both typical and atypical characters, and your understanding of him (her) will go through a process. Whether it is Qian Sumei in "You or Plants" or the man upstairs in "Water", there is this attempt in it.
Xiao Bai: So your favorite character, in terms of the novel's (for the time being) middle-class environment, is actually an interloper, a troublemaker, a factor of instability?
Huang Yuning: Right. You could say he's a bit like Gatsby or Rastigné or Jullien, but actually I don't want to design him to be so idolistic, he should be more ordinary, weaker, more humble. There is a French film, Ou Rong's "Entering the House", about how a student infiltrates the family of a literature teacher, peeks into and observes their lives. The plot of Call Transfer is very different from this one, but this movie gave me a little inspiration when it came to designing the positioning of the characters. Still, at the end of Call Shift, I was still influenced by a little nineteenth-century influence, giving this weak little man a little bit of comical heroism. I don't know what you think of such an ending, but it would be too idealistic. So, in order to balance, I cracked it at the end, subverted it a little, and gave the whole story the feeling of being in the theater. It seems that by now, you really can't think about things in the way of the nineteenth century, and you can't help but put a postmodern protective device on the text to get through it.
Xiao Bai: Well, that movie was very exciting when it discussed the boundaries between virtual and real. You don't want the characters he harasses because he breaks in to make a real difference? It feels like there's always a compromise in these stories, one that doesn't want those people to succeed or let them crush to pieces.
Huang Yuning: Actually, it has changed a bit. Because of the intervention of this unknown liar, Nu Wenqing eventually gave up her obsession with the director - of course, in a yin and yang way. However, I understand what you mean, this change and intervention are quite passive. Probably because I'm not optimistic enough to get to the point where the heavily fortified urban order – whether reasonable or not – I don't see the possibility of radical change. For the time being, this seems to exceed my ambitions for this story.
Xiao Bai: Or so to speak, do you think you have written these stories thoroughly? For example, when there is an emotional and gender conflict between men and women in a novel, have you ever written a "polite point"?
Huang Yuning: How to look at and show gender conflict - this is actually a problem that plagues many female writers. I think what you said about "politeness" is indeed a very interesting observation. I said earlier that I have a "transvestite" tendency when writing novels: when I have a virtual male perspective, because there is a clear sense of fiction, I sometimes deliberately inject more sympathy — saying "sympathy" may be a bit serious, roughly a tolerance based on trying to understand. For example, the rookie con artist "I" in "Call Transfer" and the husband K in "Three Forks" who is forced to start a "pre-publicized affair". Rather, in the part of my female perspective that should have been most handy, I perhaps left no room for "introspection" at a more complex level, such as wife J and "third party" L in "Three Forks". L's mentality is very complicated, she is both a beneficiary and a victim of the unspoken rules of workplace sexual rent-seeking, and when she is used by her boss to exclude K, she even arranges a "sexual compensation" that is almost performative in order to seek a conscience balance. This strange and complex mentality is, in a way, even more poignant – gender politics seeps into the subconscious of the characters. I think that, relatively speaking, although the narrative from a male perspective is quite enjoyable, exciting, and interesting, in terms of grasping the subconscious, I may still go a little deeper when dealing with female characters.
Xiao Bai: Teacher Li Jingze said that your novel has the shadow of the British writer McEwan - "female McEwan" - he seems to say so. You have translated several of McEwan's works, his novels were published in China, most of which you participated in planning or reviewing, do you think your novels have been influenced by him?
Huang Yuning: Teacher Jingze is joking, not serious. But for my personal writing, McEwan certainly had a big impact. In particular, McEwan's mid- to late-period works, his relatively neutral tone, large amount of information, sophisticated empiricist attitude, tendency to focus on the complexity of the problem over sharpness, and even the method of designing "McEwan-style moments" in the story structure are all things that I am clearly aware of what I am learning and imitating when I write. McEwan is the benchmark for good fiction for me. I wish I had learned more than just the skin. If I write a long story in the future, I also hope to be like him, have the time, have the ability to be more amazingly enthusiastic, and devote myself to investigation - usually Mr. Mai's investigation time is much greater than his writing time, and the high density of his work is based on his investigation habits.
Xiao Bai: After this collection of novels is published, will you continue to write novels? Will you still have time to continue doing literary translation? Can you tell us what your future writing plans are?
Huang Yuning: The translation in the past two years has indeed been drastically reduced, and the first criterion when selecting works is whether it can have a more direct stimulus to my writing. For example, two years ago, I gave up translating McEwan's Children's Act and chose Hilary Mantel's Assassination, which I was relatively unfamiliar with, because the latter was a collection of short and medium stories, and the style was more fierce, which may have given me a little fresh excitement for the novel i was just starting at that time. In the next few years, fiction writing should still be the focus, and I think I have several well-framed stories to be written, and maybe a long one of them. As for translation, it's a haven when inspiration is stuck, and it may go on and off, but the cycle is bound to be much longer than in previous years. Compared to creation, translation is a homeland that I can return to at any age, and I don't necessarily rush to the present.
Assassination, by Hillary Clinton Mantel, translated by Huang Yuning, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, July 2017
Sweet Teeth, by Ian McEwan, translated by Huang Yuning, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, June 2018
Xiao Bai: In addition to editing, translating and creating, you also host a studio in the "Get a Daily Listen to Book" column to introduce some important works of world literature to the audience.
Huang Yuning: Actually, at first I was half-convinced. On that show, I was dealing with a strong science and engineering audience—most of them didn't have time to read novels, and stories didn't seem to be of any direct use to their work, to worldly success. Listening to the data is not bad, and readers often come to Weibo to feedback their feelings about these interpretations, and I gradually began to feel fun, feeling that the basic work of popularizing these famous works still has a lot of room to expand. If we borrow a metaphor that science students love to hear, these interpretations of ours are like sharing game guides. The magic of dismantling the narrative of a novel—both in the shoes of the game designer and the gamer—is my daily interest, so why not share it with you? The technique of the novel's narrative was originally developed and evolved in the height of the dao one foot and the height of the devil. So overall that's a good thing. For me personally, having the opportunity and excuse to re-read Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby or Wuthering Heights is a great pleasure in the past year.