Yang Lian: Conversation

Andreas Broeckmann: We had a conversation for about five or ten minutes where everybody spoke in their native languages and so because there is overlapping areas of the languages somebody always got it, and sometimes there was misunderstanding. It's really interesting to see the differences when somebody speaks his own language and suddenly you see that whole cultural background, you get a sense of that territory. You know about that.... Let me briefly introduce you - this is Tom Bass, he is American and he lives in Budapest, Hungary. Inke Arns lives in Berlin, and Luchezar Boyadijev he is from Sofia in Bulgaria. Inke and Luchezar were also at the lecture last night. I would have an introductory question: Could you explain again why you hesitate when people say that you are a chinese writer?

Yang Lian: Well, I always feel that this question is a bit too limited or too narrow, because the nationality is only one example of the common human situation. Well, if I call myself Chinese it's only because of the depths of being - of the life which I experienced in China. If I can really express myself in my poems and the poems reach that depth, I can call myself Chinese because this experience somehow must have been special or interesting, different from others. But if I couldn't do something like that, then the Chinese is only a birthplace or a passport or a kind of language we have learned since our childhood. It has no real meaning. To me even less than that, because I was not born in China and I do not have a Chinese citizenship anymore - all those things were not decided by myself. Actually, now, the only meaning of the Chinese is in my language and in my poems.

AB: Which parts of your life did you actually spend in China? How old were you?

YL: I was born in Switzerland. My parents went back to China before I was one year old. That was in 1956 until I left China in 1988, so I was about thirty-two years old. Well, it was a most strange period actually. Before 1949, Chinese people always thought that they were lost in this condition of the world. In the first half of the century in China people tried to be modern, and tried to run close to Western society, but certainly after 1949, after the Communist Party got to power, all Chinese people were told that “we are the future of the world”. And we jumped from the really far past into the future: we were left with what we are, in an empty space. This was a most dramatic change. Only in the late seventies in or in the eighties, we had a chance to think back to Chinese history and to history in this century. The time when I was in China I got a chance to look into this history or the cultural tradition and especially - myself.

Luchezar Boyadijev: I agree fully with what you said, about being told at some point that we are the future of the world. But after 1989, I started referring to myself as a survivor of utopia. Because real socialism was in a way an attempt to build up utopia. My question is: In your words yesterday, there were some delicate nuances between language and tradition which I did not quite follow through. I wanted to ask you: You write in Chinese, and you live in a basically English speaking context. So your actual direct link with Chinese language as it is spoken in various parts of China - I realized there are various dialects or jargons - it must be an extremely rich language. On the other hand, you said that poetry, in order to attempt to get the full meaning, you have to look and read in between the words and even behind the words. The fullness of a language is somewhere in between and behind the words. So, my question is: If you are not living in a Chinese context, do you feel you are loosing some of this rich meaning or the spoken language now? On the other hand, does the English language, which is not even anymore Yanglish or Pigeon-English - it's Pigeon-Yanglish now, and it's getting richer everyday - so does that context somehow influence your poetry? Not with words, but the spaces in between the words?

YL: Well, that's a very rich question! The first thing is about tradition and language - especially my language. I think in China, and also myself, there was for a long time a misunderstanding to put the tradition and the modernity as two opposite things. Tradition means past, and the modernity means present. Only after 1976,when the cultural revolution had passed, we suddenly felt, that people like Mao Zedong or the Chinese government, their way of thinking and their way of doing - even if they used “new” words, their way of thinking was absolutely the same, or even worse than the traditional autocratic power. Automatically, we felt that the tradition and the past had not left us. Tradition and past were still among us, and even more, they were inside us. This experience really made us think about what's exactly the meaning of tradition. If you said, OK, tradition is antique, well, those antiques, in fact, in China have been destroyed almost completely. But people didn't realize that tradition was still inside them. And this is why the shadow of the past is always coming back with the new words. From this understanding - and I think some of the contemporary writers realized that - we can only get to a living tradition through our everyday creative thinking and writing, or even leaving. This means, the one side is so-called tradition and the other side is the self. I think I created this sentence which is "to rediscover tradition within yourself". I try to put these two things together. This means to get away from this opposition between the tradition and the modernity. But these two things are interlocked to each other. This means, every living tradition must be based on one's self. Like even Konfuzius or Lao-tse, all these classical Chinese philosophers - they have a very strong self - a special form of writing, a special style of language, and all very, very different, very special. This is why they became the so-called root of Chinese culture. Without them, we would not have any tradition.

On the other side, as a contemporary Chinese poet, within myself, I have to have a special understanding of my own tradition, this must be part of myself. Tradition and the self should be linked to each other. When I was in China, I wrote poems which made people crazy, made them hate me, because I talked tradition a lot, and they said: "Where “is” the tradition? You don't talk about Lao-tse, about Konfuzius, sometimes you talk about the I Ging, but we cannot find the I Ging in your poems! What do you mean about tradition!?" I think that the tradition should be rediscovered by one, and as differently and as special as possible. But people don't like that, because it's not a common knowledge which they can quickly look up in a text book in school or university. But I didn't care about that. I kept going my way until, for political reasons, after 1989, I'd become an exiled writer. In the beginning, of course, the western language and culture was absolutely strange and different. At that moment, I chose a special form for my poems - short poems. I read three of the short poems last night, which are from this part. This form is much simpler than the form I used when I was in China. When the form is a little bit simpler, you can try to touch what's my reality now. I try to touch it more and more, even from this Western life experience. There is the book "Ghosts speaking" which has been published already in German. It's a collection of prose. In the piece of prose titled "Ghosts speaking" I especially put two layers: one is a strange life, and the second is a very crazy feeling about language - about foreign language and about my own language, which to myself is not a foreign language. With the change of place, my Chinese is becoming a real foreign language in the Western world. I live at the same time in two worlds and two languages, Western and Chinese. The outside and the inside at the same time. I am one person, but within myself, there is a big distance between everything. For me, it is still quite difficult to understand the Western language or life - but it's interesting to understand this new situation within myself. This becomes something very interesting and even very exciting for my thinking and my writing, because it's a new experience. It's different from what I had when I was in China. From these experiences I get some energy to support my writing and to go deeper and deeper.

LB: Just one more direct question: I presume your poems are not published in China now? What would be the reaction of the Chinese public to your poems now?

YL: Two of my books have been banned after the Tiannamen massacre in China. The first time my poems have been published in China in the first underground poetry magazine in Beijing in 1991. They did put a group of my poems on the front page. I asked them: Don't do that, because I am an outsider, so the will not give trouble to me, but they will give trouble to “you”. Their answer made me quite moved. They said: We have to “do” something! We cannot only wait, you know. At that time it was really hard. After that, after 1993, in some small magazines - they found some of my writings outside China, and printed them in those magazines. I never sent anything to official publications because, in fact, I have my idea, which is: Not only the government banned the poets, but sometimes, because of our taste, we banned them too! When I now open those official magazines, I just cannot imagine I could publish something among this kind of writing! That is the problem. I don't think really that the government had that power, but I think that poetry is somehow special or something. It is necessary to ban “them”.

AB: For this workshop in the Hybrid Work Space we chose the title "Deep Europe" because we have a network of people from all across Europe who are involved in media culture in the broadest sense. We have a mailing list on the Internet - that's how we stay in touch with each other - and from time to time we have these meeting places where groups of us get together at conferences or we do workshops like this. First, the network was about making contacts between East and West Europe. It's been going on for 1, 5 years and now there are a lot of good contacts both between East-West and East-East, and the West-West contacts are now the most difficult (Laughter from Deep Europe). France can be really far away... So, we were looking for a word that would not be East / West or something, but would give a different dimension to our discussions about the contemporary culture in Europe. That's why we chose this adjective "deep". Luchezar, maybe you can give your reading of the notion of "Deep... Europe"? Because I would then like to ask Yang Lian something about that.

LB: The notion is a metaphor which could be problematic. In the logic of this metaphor, deepness or depth is where there are a lot of overlapping identities of various people. Overlapping in terms of claims over certain historical past, or certain events or certain historical figures or even territories in some cases. It could be also claims over language or alphabet, it could be anything. Europe is deepest, where there are a lot of overlapping identities.

AB: So, there is some sort of mapping of culture and of the depth, of identities onto the geography. There is a relationship somehow between mentalities and geography, but at the same time they are disconnected because the mentalities live in people, and people move around all the time. So, something that we also experience with the network is that in our relationships, we easily bridge the territorial borders, although the territory also means something, in terms of our culture. (Addressing Yang Lian) Because you're even more disconnected or separated now from this notion of territoriality in your identity, I was curious whether you have ideas about that. What is your relationship with China, which parts of China do you identify with, what's the Chinese culture that you inhabit, in terms of your location in the world?

YL: That's very interesting, actually. I love this word "deep". If you got the magazine no. 1 by documenta, there were two of my articles. There was a special part where I did talk about the two words "deep" and "new". That's why, when I saw "Deep Europe", I thought that sounds quite alright to me actually. In my understanding, the word "deep" is not only something that shows in reality, in front of your eyes, but something behind, like behind the words, the ideas or the thinking. In good conditions, it can create reality. It's not political thinking which directly tries to change something, but it tries to change some deep things. I think that's it what is interesting. Also about Chinese culture. I grew up in Beijing, which is not as dramatic / romantic as Tibet for example. Beijing is maybe like Moscow. It's a common place, people come and go. I don't really like to talk only about local culture or folk arts or folk songs. When I saw those contemporary Chinese artists, who like to use these folk things, folk culture, characters of Chinese for example, especially to the Western world, I say: It's easier to sell like this, or to be popular - but it's not “deep” enough. To me it's your own special understanding of the background you come from, where you live in, which is so important and so interesting. In my writing I am always trying to show the situation of the human being, through Chinese culture. Chinese culture is quite interesting and special. e.g. the language. This culture is completely different from European culture. Because of the different tradition, the characters of the language are so different - it has been called a visual language. Every character has a complete meaning. The characters can be used without the subject, like "I", "you", or "she" / "he". The characters for the verbs do not change. There is no past time, no present, no future form. The verbs are always the same. That's different from German, English or French. So, Chinese in fact is a very abstract language. European languages somehow have a hold on the very concrete reality - "it happened yesterday", "it happened five minutes ago", "it happens now". In Chinese we do not only talk about the time of the movement, when something happened. When we are writing, we talk only about the situation. Drinking is not "I am drinking now" - no, the word "drink" includes all the people in the past, the present and the future who drink. You see, the possibilities of language somehow show, that the situation of our lives - which is probably quite sad - somehow never has changed. I called my lecture "Concentric Circles" because it includes different times and different spaces, but in the centre is the understanding of myself. I try to find a way of communication between myself and Chinese language and what has been written in Chinese cultural tradition. So, if every contemporary Chinese writer could discover Chinese tradition by himself, then it could be a very interesting task to compare with another culture - e.g. with European culture. (...)

Cultural misunderstanding is a reality. (...)

Debate between Yang Lian and members of the Deep Europe workshop

http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9708/msg00026.html