the situation has deteriorated. Besides strict and subtle censorship, there is also the tyranny of the book market. Now they are also required to serve the people with their arts. That is the same arts policy once imposed by Mao. We all know that genuine literature might not appeal to the masses. But the writers there have to obey, because the state controls the means of literary production.
Fall seem to flourish in the absence of any ostensible censorship in the United States. Should we read these differing accounts of artistry as reflections of your own career as a writer? Could one make the argument that art produced in historical moments of repression is, perhaps, more powerful and suggestive than work produced without external, political conditions? Yes. T. S. Eliot says in Four Quartets, “Only through time time is conquered.” A writer of my kind tends to seize a moment of history and describe it with clarity and insight so that the moment can be preserved in art, which might fortunately transcend history. In addition, the act of writing is also to give order to one’s life and to retain one’s sanity. This writing act is opposite to propaganda and is intended to serve truth.
Have the conditions for the production and reception of art, across the arts, changed since your departure from China almost 30 years ago? In my personal case, they have changed radically. Because I write in English, I do not fear censorship or depend on China’s book market. But for writers in mainland China,
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WEBER
A Good Fall also emphasizes an aesthetics of simplicity in writing. David in “Choice” admonishes his student to write in simple English, and Professor Meng in “Shame” has made a career of acknowledging the mastery of Ernest Hemingway, who is well known for his austere writing style. Hongfang, in fact, seems to want to model his own writing on Hemingway’s aesthetics. Does Hemingway resonate particularly with Chinese sensibilities of writing, in that there are unspoken depths behind simple language? Is he, for that reason, perhaps an “exemplary” author in the way Chinese academia has construed the canon of American literature? Finally, do you see affinities between yourself and Hemingway’s work. Your writing, after all, is as self-consciously compact and resonant in its elegance as is Hemingway’s, and you too have expressed your preference for the short story form? I like Hemingway a lot, but I feel more affiliated to Chekhov and Gogol, who have been my masters in short fiction. Indeed, I tend to be simple in my writing style. Perhaps this might have something to do with poetry. Traditional Chinese poetry is simple and compact, which might have shaped my sensibility since poetry has been part of the education of Chinese writers for a long time.
In your most recent book, A Map of Betrayal (about which more later), one of your narrators, Lillian, makes a similar point about the writing of her Chinese graduate students: “They mistook verbos-
THE CONTEMPORARY WEST
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