Chen: Bella, you have become famous at home and abroad with the publication of your Trilogy of Love Stories. Can you tell us something about the process of your writing? Why do you take the 9/11 Event as the background? How long did it take you to finish the three volumes? Did you expect today’s success? Some scholar says you follow the Hollywood stereotype of love story, how do you think of it?
Bella: I understand that the 9/11 Event is still a sensitive and unpleasant topic to American people. They don’t want to talk about it. However, if it can cure the wound to be silent, I would rather do it too. The question is, that pains suppressed in heart cannot be dispelled. But literature is a way to heal the wound, and it has a magic power to save one from deep sufferings. I write the Trilogy because I think the 9/11 Event is not only a disaster for the Americans, but also for the people of the whole world – as a Chinese woman, I have been suffering from the substantial pains. I spent more than a whole year to write (and to shed tears) the Live-Death Wedding of 9/11 and the other two books. I hope all those who bear the sufferings would benefit from my writings. I intend to lead them to get rid of their surprise and sorrows by taking them to my secret garden of music in the natural forests of Norway, which exposes the emotional journey of a Chinese girl who lost her qua-bridegroom in the 9/11 Event, to tell people “how to cure the wound with passions of love, and how to get back your love by pouring out your lost of love.” Honestly speaking, I never thought of success, and even today success is still far away from me. As for the criticism that I follow the Hollywood stereotype, I certainly don’t agree since I only write out of my heart.
Chen: Professor Wang Ning (Foreign Languages Department of Tsinghua University) says, you “are a creator of modern utopia but having a classical heart, good at weaving various utopian dreams.” He also praises, “in view of Bella’s cultural and aesthetic deposits and her great potential in literary writing, she is equal to all the writers who are now active and enjoy popularity among audience in the literary circle in China. But she is obviously better than the latter if you consider her skillful mastery of Chinese language and her surprisingly rich imaginations. It seems no contemporary Chinese writers are so much concerned as Bella for the common disaster of human being and try to reveal people’s inner world with such an insight. She belongs to the new generation of romantic writers.” This is quite a high appraisement. What is your response to it?
Bella: He over praised me. I have just begun my literary career and devoted myself to writing for only a little more than a year. How could I have reached that high level? I would rather take his words as an encouragement. Although I have been immersed in various cultures (Chinese, Japanese, European and American) and understand art (music, fine art, and design) to a certain extent, I still need a long time to refine myself if I want to assimilate those cultures in my writings. As for my concern for the common disaster of human being, I think it is the responsibility of every writer and even of every citizen of the global village.
Chen: Have you seen the criticism about your work by a famous critic named Meng Fanhua? He says you are writing only for the middle class and puts your work in the category of “ ‘modern’ in the context of globalization”, which does not serve the laboring people at all. How do you look at his criticism?
Bella: Meng Fanhua’s criticism about my work is a valuable treasure to me. I think what he said is pertinent and frank. I have been thinking of his criticism and wish in future I would be able to listen to his instruction personally in Beijing. In fact, those fashionable modern things are decreased in my later works. I have realized that only a wan heart needs the sumptuous scenes to serve as a contrast. In my future writings, I would try to dig the simple and unadorned but glittering things, for instance, humanity and belief. As for the question of writing for whom, I believe everyone must write about the life that is most familiar to him/her. I have left China for fourteen or fifteen years, and I am really very ignorant of the life of the ordinary people there. However, as more and more Chinese people are running along the road toward a better life or a life similar to the middle class, I hope my novel would provide them with a dream for more freedom and more romantic love.
Chen: Professor Chen Xiaoming (Chinese Department of Peking University) said, “The novel implies a strong Oriental feeling – a poetic emotion in depression and despair. Perhaps this is where the value of the novel lies: it represents the common conception of values and the innermost memory of national feelings. The novel intends to express the significance of love to individual life and even to the human being.” And Professor Ye Shuxian (CASS) said, “Sex is not sexuality in itself. It cannot and should not be stripped from spirituality and become a separated existence. Of course, it also cannot be stripped from human body and human fate.” In an age when “sex for sex” is welcomed as McDonald fast food, what do you want to express in your novel? A good writer should keep his/her responsibility, where is your responsibility represented?
Bella: Yes, what my Trilogy describes is indeed the affinity between love and sex and the significance of love to individual life and to the whole human being. This is my view of love, and also my sense of responsibility. I oppose mere sex without love. Sexual intercourse without love and soul is the act of walking corpse. It is proper to compare wild, mere sex to McDonald fast food, for that sort of sexual act does not leave any sense of sweet feelings. Some newspapers and journals say McDonald fast food is rubbish-like food. Although I disagree with this opinion, I believe the function of fast food is just to fill the stomach. Physically, people may feel hungry for sex as they feel hungry for food. But only a love of integrity of soul and flesh can it last. And a lasting love is a feast, a feast with red wine, music and blooming flowers in candlelight.
Chen: The ideal of An Boshun, “the first publisher in China”, is “to create eternity, to write nobility, and to give the broad masses a dream.” Is your cooperation resulted from your common ideal of writing? Another coordinator of yours, famous critic Bai Ye said, “It is hard to find among domestic writers a novel that is similar or close to Bella’s romantic novel of pure love, which blazes a new trail. Among the writings of love stories, Bella’s is unique and irreplaceable ……” Are you preparing to establish a literary market of Chinese classical romanticism? Do you have confidence in such a market?
Bella: No doubt Mr. An Boshun and Mr. Bai Ye are two most important men in my literary career. Without their encouragement and inspiration, I would not have continued my writing after I finished my Live-Death Wedding of 9/11. Therefore, availing of this opportunity, I would like to express my gratitude to them. An Boshun once said, “For more than ten years, I have been preaching, as a priest, my ideal of writing or my conception of aesthetic: ‘to create eternity, to write nobility, and to give the broad masses a dream’. I believe in Hegel’s aesthetic principle of “absolute truth”, and think that in our world there is a common spirit that transcends race, region and ideology, and that there is a vocation for honesty, kindness and love. I have rarely received encouragement from the mainstream ideology in my life. But readers and writers have generously given me many honors. Thus I am doomed to be lonely whatever I do. Every time when I do something, I would have to struggle with the extreme realism and the audience fed up by it with a solemn and stirring idealism and a preparation to sacrifice myself. When China is becoming gradually a political and economic giant, I hope it would also become a noble gentleman in culture and politely embrace the colorful cultures of the world.” What An Boshun said is just my idea about writing. As everyone knows, it is now an age that has lost its dreams and its classical concerns. My purpose of writing is to pour out my own inner feelings, but more than that, my greatest ambition is to find the lost dreams and concerns and return them to the people.
Chen: Sentimental Casablanca is generally accepted as the best among the 9/11 Trilogy of Love Stories. Could you talk something about the process of your writing? What is its theme?
Bella: I would say that Sentimental Casablanca is a sad elegy, traveling through life and death, rather than a love story with burning passions. Its theme is just the paragraph on the title page: “If our civilization can teach us how to let the attractive force of sex flow properly and subtly, how to keep the fire of love pure and lively and make it glittering, shining or burning with varied forces in different ways, then perhaps we would be able – should be able – to live in love for our whole life.” In front of the heart that has experienced love, in front of the sufferings and hardships that have befallen the human, and in front of those still-weeping souls, I really cannot turn away, for my compassionate concerns that are fused into my blood by nature lead me to pour them out wildly. How I hope the human love can overcome the madness of the age! Some scholar said that “I am a romantic writer who is concerned for the human sufferings and has an insight into the inner world of people and produces a strong force with a soft voice.” (See Wang Ning: Sorrows Filled with True Human Feelings) I am grateful to these words, for it is what I dream for and I would struggle for it in my whole life. Indeed, I am a person with tragic feelings and romantic colors.
Chen: On your personal website I have seen a picture of you and Ba Jin together, perhaps taken when you were a young girl. Ba Jin, now over a hundred years old, is the prince of the literary circle in China. Does he have any influence over your decision to take the path of literature? I feel that in the picture you look like a character in Ba Jin’s novel. Do you think so?
Bella: I always think that the free talks with Grandpa Ba Jin have moved my young soul toward literature. Ba Jin used to be simple and unadorned, always wearing a white ordinary cotton shirt. He was attentive when talking with you, and his eyes, full of intelligence, shining behind his glasses. I remember I wrote a prose entitled To Grandpa Ba Jin, which won the special prize sponsored by the Teachings’ Newspaper in Xi-an. Although more than ten years have passed, the paragraph Grandpa Ba Jin wrote on the title page is still fresh to me: “…… I came to the world with two empty hands, but I cannot leave the world without having something left. My heart has been burning for decades. Even when it becomes ashes with my bones one day, its sparks would not be extinguished in a storm. The warm ashes would be mixed with earth and let the advancing people take me to a place I have never been.” This great concern and its impact on me would live with me forever. By the way, I would like to mention my interactions with Japanese famous writer Matsumoto, which also made me feel very much moved. I remember once we were having dinner together in a restaurant at the Hot Spring, and when I told him I watched the Japanese movie Sand Machine during our talk, he giggled, simple and honest, and praised my spoken Japanese. Later I realized that great writers are first of all the son of nature, exposing their souls without any reservation in front of human and earth. When I was a youth, I used to have a long pigtail and wear a white shirt and a black velvet skirt, which gave the impression that I am a girl from a good family. Many people said that I did not belong to that age but to the new women of 1930s. (Laughing) Now I return to the simple and true and do not put on makeup. I call myself a Canadian countrywoman.
Chen: When you wrote Sentimental Casablanca, did you have any special sufferings or any spiritual shocks?
Bella: Well, in the course of writing the book, there happened something thrilling. One evening, when I watched the Chinese program on TV, I noticed the following report: The broke out of war on Iraq once again shows the power of TV. Channel 1 and 4 of CCTV and various local TVs for the first time spare no expense to cover the war everyday in a rolling way. Huang Jing, a correspondent specially sent to Qatar by Shanghai TV, asked a question in fluent English to General Franks at the first press conference in Qatar and was praised by the General: “good question”. Huang Jing? A war correspondent? Seeing the beautiful young girl, I could not believe my eyes. …… In November 1994, (after I finished my overseas life in Japan) when I presented my new book, A Woman’s Notes in Japan, in the Shanghai International Studies University, a beautiful naïve student girl holding a book in her hand run toward me, all sweated and breathless, and asked me to autograph the book for her, saying that she feared she was late. Then I gave her my address. Later the girl wrote to me pretty often and told me about the anxieties and dreams of a young student girl. Soon I went abroad again and our correspondence stopped. But the girl left me so deep an impression that I dreamed of her several times. When I wrote Live-Death Wedding of 9/11, indeed, the girl always jumped up into my mind. Thus I have my protagonist somewhat based on her and even have her background set in the Shanghai International Studies University. Perhaps this can be seen as my complex of Huang Jing. Thanks to the internet, I have received an email from little Huang Jing just at this moment when I am answering your questions. She said in the email that she is grateful to me for what I wrote on the title page of A Woman’s Notes in Japan: “One would have many dreams in life, and you should try to let the dreams come true.” She told me that she had tried to follow those words, that she had realized some of her dreams, and that she would continue to make more dreams come true. …… Tears dripping down my face blurred my eyes, and what I want to say to Huang Jing is: “Little Huang Jing, you are really excellent! You have realized the dream that I cannot make it become true. Isn’t my greatest dream to be a war correspondent?” Here I feel a stronger sense of responsibility as a writer: her/his works should be inspiring people, moving people, and even influence people’s whole life.
Chen: Why did you say, “Your first love is your first forests of Norway and your secret spiritual garden”? Could you say something about your first love?
Bella: Indeed, my first true sense of literature comes from my first love – a platonic love. It seems like a movie, filled with unforgettable romance and poetic meanings. The matchmaker is Guangzhou Wenyi, a journal in which many young boys and girls would have their works published and get to know each other. I clearly remember that the boy published a story entitled Night Voice, which is about his understanding of the love of his father’s generation, very moving and sensational. Thus in my prose Echoing Afar, I mentioned his story. He is a young poet of the Zhuang nationality, living in Guangxi, over thousand kilometers away from Shanghai. We began to have correspondence, which naturally brought about emotions between us. Then we met, after correspondence with each other for several months (at the end of 1986). I went to Nanning and Beihai to see him. It is the only meeting. In my first book, The Night of Tokyo, I described my first love in details. True, I cannot forget the time when we walked together in the Park of Woods in Nanning, in the villages of the backward Zhuang nationality, and along the primitive beach at Beihai. Even at that moment, I felt the desolate and the distress that befell people in a sudden, which had been an unknown to me since I used to lead a carefree life in a big city. Indeed, since then I have come to realize, perhaps preliminarily, the meaning of nature and literature and feel my heart filled with sympathy for people’s sufferings. Spiritually speaking, my first love is indeed the first forests of Norway and the secret garden. Sixteen years have passed when looking back at the time of my first love. Sixteen years may not be too long for ordinary people, but my own experience may be several generations longer than theirs. As the boy of my first love said (thank God, we have got in touch again recently), “Sixteen years are very sharp for a soft life, but only an instant for a rock standing in wind”
Chen: Bella, It seems your blood is filled with passions. You live with passions, love with passions, and write with passions. I’d like to know what kind of passions dominates your life.
Bella: Yes, three sorts of passions have been burning within myself since my youth: the passion of longing for classical romantic love, the passion of fascination with art, and the passion of deep concern and sympathy for human sufferings. These three passions dominate my soul and life. Perhaps it is these passions that force me to wander or travel afar from time to time.
Chen: You describe in your book such a plaintive love that many people praise you as “the goddess of love”, and some even regard you as “an ambassador of love”, as Yao Ming, who was also born in Shanghai, is regarded as “an ambassador of sports”. Do you also have amorous feelings in your own life? Would you have marriage again? As many American readers curiously asked, where will this lovely Chinese woman wander next?
Bella: (Laughing), when have I become “an ambassador of love”? I am willing to take this title! Needless to say, if I find a true love, I would still be “amorous”. I think romantic love not only lies in emotion and sex, nor only in external charming and internal coquettishness, but also lies in an artistic and poetic mood, or what may be called graceful and elegant. For instance, I often play on the piano in moonlight – when the room is dark, with only the moonlight shedding on the black-and-white keys of my triangle piano and my naked burning body. Isn’t it very romantic? Imagine what will happen if my lover is in the room! There must be “thousands of amorous things”. It is hard to say if I would have another marriage. What is most important is to have a true love. I cannot foretell where I would wander next. But I have to go from one stop to another until the end of my life.
Chen: Can you tell me what you are writing now? What kind of works would you present to American audience after the Trilogy of Love Stories of 9/11? What is your aim of writing? Obviously you are not writing for surviving as many Chinese writers. But fame and wealth are always attractive to people. How do American publishing houses contact you? Who is your agent? Is there an American publishing house that has bought out the right of all your works?
Bella: I am writing another “Trilogy of Love Stories of My Family”, of which the first volume is about to be finished, entitled Life in Half a Century, telling of the sufferings of my father’s generation. I write about a man’s lived experience in the “red march”, through which I want to reveal the rich humanity and interpret the eternal theme of love and death. I write with deep feelings and a sad pen a complicated story of “thousands of glittering gold bars cannot buy a life”, to tell people that sufferings are not only a tragedy of life but also a wealth of life. The second volume is entitled King of the Sea, which I have finished the outlines. I will produce a full image for the males in Shanghai, depicting emphatically a Shanghai-man named D, who travels back and forth throughout the world, painfully struggle for the best, and look for light in constant changes. The third volume, Talent of Beijing, is a continuation of “my own” love story, which is connected to the plot of Sentimental Casablanca. As for fame and wealth, it is hypocritical to say they are no attractive. But why don’t I think of it very much? I write because I have a lot of stories to tell and many thoughts to pour out. It seems that I have to write twenty novels in six or seven years, otherwise I would be sleepless at night and feel stifled and even may collapse. Perhaps there is too much sediment in my heart. I hope readers would not take me as a prolific writer – I don’t even have the intention to be a writer. Literature is always a dream to me, which leads me to a sort of self-salvation and remedy, and particularly to a release of my body and soul. I don’t know techniques of writing and the play of reservations. What I have is only what feel deeply. But I hope readers would not necessarily miss my books, for I write for myself with my heart, and for the future with my past experience. With truth and purity, with sadness and romance, every time when I write, I cannot help shedding tears, for I myself often feel being moved. As for the publication of my works, I authorize An Boshun to be responsible for all the rights. He is a member of Singapore National Publication Corporation (Group) and head of its Modern Writing Center in Beijing.
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