Letters: Thinking about a New Foreigner’s Fiction on China
I have been thinking a lot over the past month about the possibility of a laowai fiction on China. Fiction exists already, and plenty of it on China, but there seems a huge potential for something epic – we can have traveller's tales and creatively remade stories and events from old China, but now that so many foreigners live and love and are a part of places in China, what would it mean to somehow 'novelise' all this as a really quite interesting experience?
This has been inspired, I think, by living together with a variety of foreign students unlike anything before. This has refreshed and impressed upon me the meaning of friendship. It has also been wonderful to go out into the city and meet Chinese friends, to exist together to make plans to do things together. And this is all rather dull by comparison to what I see other people doing.
At the same time, it's been made clear to me from other people that could be no more than a beautiful dream. In fact, no sooner was this idea running through my mind than I impossibly began to see the bathos of so many endings to stories written in a few simple words at the end of a chapter in a book-never-to-be written: "and he left China forever" Since there's the possibility of exit from this world, the idea of a heartfelt literature beyond travel-writing seems eternally out of reach. Horatio Nelson Lay reportedly told his subordinates over a hundred and fifty years ago to always know one thing about being a foreigner in China – you are a guest and always will be. I would say I have been familiar with members of three generations of China Professors from days in university back home, for whom even being a guest in the mainland has been oftentimes a great difficulty.
But I can't help feel a colossal divide has emerged between myself and them. In a way, as I have written about in a report on rereading Simon Leys' book, we have become superficial by comparison in some of our understandings, certainly in our occasional attitudes, but then again it might be said we are on a path to creating something like a new type of 'person' for the twenty-first century – the 'Westerner' in the modern East, perhaps, or simply the creations of a confusion of values, really emotionally perceived and lived for the first time in such large numbers, at least as far as Westerners are concerned, and at least in a non-colonial setting.
New people, and a new literature? The possibility seems particularly engrossing for China, where only a bad book would attempt to romanticise 'the Dragon', and where the experience of the traveller is in a sense as irrelevant to literature as the analysis of the anthropologist. Foreigner's literature in China must be a rejection of all of this. I read recently that 'home is where you get your bread'. Now, since our friends in China want us to stay and so many of us start things that it would take real commitment to give any meaning to, since so many can envisage the home where we get our rice and vegetables, why should we feel like Mr. Lay?
That is I think the sine qua non on the possibility of foreigner's literature in China. Going beyond the questions of staying or not staying, forgetting about the idea of exit in a commitment to relationships and our own dreams. Then there are the really interesting questions of what the book will actually read like – will we even be able to call it 'Western literature'? Will it read 'differently' in Chinese and English / French / German / other languages?
My hope is that this literature, if done well, might even escape the categorizations and labelling of its chosen language. I've only flirted briefly with the question of structure and content, but as I see it, as written above, these will have to be large scale structures with as many, if not more characters than Hongloumeng and Western fantasies. 'Cultures', if there be any, can indeed be set against each-other, but only to show both their relative equality and sameness. If this is achieved, it's perhaps only a matter of author's personality, experience and imaginative skills whether we romp into tragedies, comedies, family-epics, love-stories or some potpourri of all four and others. Is that world literature?
Ed A.
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