Neither Proud nor Prejudiced

Abstract

In her speech at the Chinese Literature Bo’ao Forum on November 3, 2015 (published in Literature and Arts Newspaper, Issue 3, November 23, 2015), Lu Min highlighted the pressure many contemporary Chinese writers feel to write modern, urban novels. She identifies the primary source of this pressure as originating with foreign publishing houses and literary agents, and then observes that it has since begun to permeate the mindset of Chinese writers and publishers as well. Though she states a firm disagreement with this preference for urban writing, she explains why the preference has come to be established, pointing to the tastes of foreign readers (who may find more rural or “local color” stories difficult to identify with), the impulse of foreign readers to treat literature as a window that will provide them with a view of China and the Chinese people, and the assumption on the part of Western readers that urban living is the life Chinese writers know best. It is the final point that Lu Min pursues for the duration of the speech, offering the rationale behind her disagreement with the assumption that Chinese writers are urbanites. While acknowledging that she and many of her generation do live in cities today, she contrasts this to their early years, which most of the prominent names in the contemporary Chinese fiction world spent in the countryside. She describes the effects this upbringing has had on their psyche, including a preference for speaking in dialect when they are most emotional and a more rustic mindset that underlies even their experience of the city. Though most of this generation of writers has become adept at urban living, there is a fundamental sense in which they remain outsiders to the city, not having fully absorbed urban mindsets, at least not to the degree that rural mindsets have been displaced by them. She argues that the most that these writers can do is offer their insights into a small piece of urban China, but that those insights are never fully expressive of the true Chinese urbanite’s experience. However, even as she acknowledges these limitations, Lu Min ultimately embraces the demands made on Chinese writers by the Western publishing scene, viewing the tension between the writer’s experience and the public’s expectations as a force that challenges neatly delineated identities and, in so doing, forges from that self-contradictory experience a literature that is fresh and uniquely Chinese. From Issue 2 of Chinese Arts and Literature, published by Xanadu Press, 2016; reprinted by permission of Chinese Arts and Literature.