Escaping the Censors’ Gaze: Lai Wen on Sci-Fi and the Need for Chinese Protest Literature Today

Last September, I received a letter from the UK publisher of Tiananmen Square, asking if I would consider blurbing the novel. I was busy finishing work on my own book, The Book of Secrets, which was just a few months from publication. I intended to take a quick look at Lai Wen’s novel, but I was instantly pulled in and couldn’t put it down.

Lai Wen (a pseudonym) comes from my hometown, Beijing, which is also the setting of her novel, though we came of age in different political times: I was born in late 1950s; Lai and her main character were born in 1970s. My childhood was ruined by The Cultural Revolution, whereas their youth was shaped by the storm of China opening to the West. I wanted to get to know to this woman—so her editor introduced us and we started chatting about the different Chinas in which we lived. We got on so well that it made me wish we’d known each other our whole lives.

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Xinran: China is now a very different country from the one we left, especially with its acceleration since the 1980s. What do you think is the biggest change from your China and the China today?

Lai Wen: I think one of the major positive changes is in the status of women. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the practice of foot-binding was still commonplace and women were seen primarily in terms of the practical value they held in cementing property relations through arranged marriage and providing men with children. The practice of child brides was commonplace especially in the countryside.

With the rise of the communists there was a little more hope, at first. Both men and women were taken into the People’s Liberation Army, and they wore similar uniforms to denote a new epoch of equality. Child-marriage and arranged marriages were prohibited.

But in reality many of the old practices continued. The concubinage which existed under the old imperial bureaucracy was recreated by having many young, idealist revolutionary women supplied to important military men or local Party bosses for sexual purposes under the guise of getting a “revolutionary education.” Many young communist women were married off to important army officials with little say in the matter. Some of the accounts from this time are truly horrific.

I think about your wonderful novel Miss Chopsticks, which is based on the prejudiced idea that men are described as “roof beams,” strong and hold up the house and the community, but women are “chopsticks,” fragile and pretty tools to be used and ultimately discarded. In that novel you describe three sisters who relocate from their village to the big city and in so doing they carve out their own independent identities and lives.

I was moved by your novel because it describes something very real. In the 1980s, a more market-centred economy unleashed great waves of immigration from the countryside to the city. I think this was integral in loosening the shackles that bound women to the domestic sphere and many of the patriarchal standards that came with it.

XR: I can’t agree with you about it enough! Chinese culture and society have always involved a lot of restriction. Even when the feudal system came to an end, the reverence that the Chinese people held for their emperors transferred to their political leaders.

The information ordinary Chinese people could obtain from the public media (radio, television, and newspapers) has long been under the control of the state. For people who have lived all their lives in China without the opportunity to travel, it is impossible to imagine the freedom to read, watch, and listen to whatever they like, and to communicate with the rest of the world.

LW: I hope you won’t mind me saying that you were a pioneer with regards to this, through the very brave radio show you hosted in the 1980s and 1990s that allowed Chinese women from all walks of life to phone in and talk about their experiences.

When I grew up in the 1970s, even girls like myself who had access to education were really taught very little about our bodies and sex. But because the lives of Chinese women are much more visible now, sex education and changing gender roles are more common.

We saw this recently with the Chinese #MeToo movement. Chinese women circumvented state censorship on social media by using the rice bunny hashtag or emoji (“rice bunny” is pronounced “mi-tou” in Mandarin) and were able to share their stories of sexual harassment and assault. I think finding their voice gives women more power, which is part of a tradition I feel you helped establish.

XR: I moved to the UK in 1997 after forty years of life in China. My four years of “English Studies” in China couldn’t help me order a meal or ask for directions in the street. In London, English sounds so different with Indian, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, French, Italian accents—even Chinglish! What do you find are the biggest differences in everyday life between the UK and China?

LW: The thing that was most striking to me when I first moved to England was the distance between generations. When I first met my partner, his own parents were both still alive and well. But they were expats living in Spain. Those were the days before Skype and instant messaging systems, so communication between our worlds was infrequent to say the least. It might consist of a score of expensive phone calls in a given year, perhaps a single visit to Spain if we were lucky.

This was completely different to my life growing up in China. There, all the generations often lived together in the same apartment or house; grandparents, parents, and children all merrily bumping up against one another. A more communal life has both its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, everyone was living in each other’s pocket, which leads to a boisterous, clattering, argumentative, messy, and volatile family life with little privacy.

But it was also one in which you were aware of the moods—the emotional weather—of those around you and you could better support each other for that reason. It was more difficult to slip into loneliness, to have that feeling of isolation so many of us have today.

One of the good things about a more communal household is that everybody looks after everybody else, but this can sometimes allow the state to shirk certain responsibilities. In fact, I suspect it made it easier for the Chinese government to carry out a mass privatization of the health service in the 1980s.

When an elderly person gets sick, the duty of care primarily falls on the family. With certain conditions this is manageable but with something like dementia—something I talk about in my novel, an awful but complex disease—most families are ill-equipped.

When I first came to England, the NHS was a revelation to me. I remember those early days, and a little later, with the birth of my first child—the support and peace of mind the NHS provided during that terrifying, exhilarating time. I think the NHS is more than simply an organization.

For me it came to represent a certain type of Britishness: progressive, orderly, sensible, but fundamentally kind. It is a real tragedy that successive governments have stripped it down through privatization. I feel they have not just stolen an economic component of the nation, but also a spiritual one.

XR: What excites you about the literary scene in China today?

LW: I think Chinese science fiction is particularly good. It’s something that often sucks in the fundamental social conflicts and contradictions of a given time and remodels them through these incredibly creative and vast fantasy worlds. The earliest Chinese science fiction novels weren’t all that great, to be frank, but they still told you a lot about Chinese society, our way of life, our fears and our hopes.

Lu Shi’e’s New China, published at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the first examples of homegrown Chinese sci-fi/fantasy. The memory of the Opium Wars—the defeat by foreign powers and the vast numbers of the population who remained addicted to the drug—was still raw.

In his novel, one of the central characters is a genius doctor who invents medical techniques that can pull the population out of an opium-induced stupefaction and supercharge their minds. China then goes on to experience a period of intense rejuvenation, emerging as an economic and cultural superpower where peace and prosperity reign. The novel itself is somewhere between wish-fulfillment and prophecy, as many of the novels from that period were.

I think that the creative and original wave of science fiction coming out of China can be understood in the context of our history. Throughout the twentieth century, change was occurring at a frenetic, world-shattering pace. The final Manchu/Qing dynasty ended in 1911 and then power was dispersed amongst hundreds of local war lords jockeying for position; then Kuomintang was able to unite China under a modern nationalization program.

There was the Second World War, the civil war, Mao’s communists, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, until, eventually, the country was opened up under Deng Xiaoping. Today, China has emerged as a dominant global power.

So many Chinese people born in the last hundred years have lived through successive social systems and different economic models compressed into a handful of decades. Chinese science fiction reflects this. During the period of Communist dictatorship, the genre tended to be more sterile, reduced to the level of propaganda for the Party, but in the 1980s and 1990s science fiction went through something of a revival under Deng’s administration.

While censorship was still robust, science fiction and dystopic fantasy enabled cutting political and social commentaries to fly under the radar. Nineteen Eighty-Four made it past the censors, for instance, and many of the classics of Western science fiction were accessible to people during this time, along with Hollywood films such as E.T.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the most famous Chinese science-fiction writers lived through this period—writers such as Han Song and, most famously of all, Liu Cixin, whose most successful novel, The Three-Body Problem, has been made into a Netflix series.

XR: I really admire your knowledge of Chinese science-fiction. I have hardly read any of those books. I just realized that my own reading list of Chinese literature, from fifty-five years of reading, contains mostly nonfiction or historical fiction. I think I’m mostly drawn to these genres because they’re part of a healing process, a way to process the pain and suffering of my childhood during the Cultural Revolution. These books have helped me understand my roots, my country, and my people. What does it mean to you to be a Chinese author?

LW: Of course, I am very proud of the richness and the heritage of my own culture. But I also don’t wish to be defined entirely by it. A lot people talk a lot about cultural appropriation, and the discussion comes from a good place—it is difficult for certain groups to have a voice in the literary arena and this movement is an attempt to remedy this, to reserve a space for marginalized writers and not have others speak on their behalf.

While I think it is vital to lift up the literary work produced by those who have been sidelined due to race, gender, class, or nationality, I also think strong works of literature should have a universal tenor. As a reader I hope to be able to understand and empathize with a novel about the experiences of an upper class white male artist living in Los Angeles, even though I am not in any way part of that demographic.

The American and British novels that the character Lai reads in Tiananmen Square were influential in shaping who I am. And when I write in English, I find “cultural appropriation” to be a necessary part of the work. In the novel I sometimes use Americanisms or British slang because I felt that the Chinese equivalents in direct translation weren’t always as colorful and vivid and wouldn’t have the same resonance.

And so, I hope to “appropriate” as much as I can from other cultures and languages. I see them as streams flowing into world literature, enriching and replenishing it.

Can Xue recently said in an interview that major influences in her work were Western writers—such as Kafka, Tolstoy and Shakespeare—but that she digs them up in order to “replant [them] in China’s deep soil.” Ideally, that is what I am aiming for too.

XR: What do you hope readers take from your book?

LW: The students of Tiananmen were defeated in the most horrific ways, but all these years later I still don’t feel despair. I hold the memories of those we lost close and I marvel at their courage, which was so much greater than my own. I still feel frightened and to this day I remain a timid, shy individual.

But I know what bravery is because I witnessed it firsthand—the most incredible, wonderful, death-defying bravery born from love and hope, the exuberance of youth, and the struggle for change. So despite the novel’s occasionally grim subject matter, I hope the reader will also take away a feeling of hope and optimism for the future.

The nature of the Chinese state apparatus today is quite chilling—an authoritarian power with vast financial and technological means, locked into the oppression of ethnic minorities such as the Uyghurs. The state also allows the sweatshop-like conditions endured by millions of industrial workers to persist.

In China, there is no democratic system by which these abuses can be challenged. I believe that the force that can end these abuses and change the political system is the Chinese population itself. That is why it is so important to return to the events of Tiananmen Square, so that people can understand not only how powerful the student movement was but also its limits.

So, we can learn what can be done better during “the fire next time”—to borrow the phrase from James Baldwin. I hope my novel helps emphasize the power of popular protest today.

XR: Are you going to write another book? If so, what is it about?

LW: I have been trying to write a novel loosely based on Alice in Wonderland, set in a fantasy-dystopia with a feminist slant. But it’s still in its early stages.

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Tiananmen Square by Lai Wen is available via Spiegel & Grau.