Wang talks English but it comes out as riddles

By Jules Quartly (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-03-31 09:39

Award-winning novelist Wang Gang's latest work is available in English.

Author Wang Gang enjoys joking around, preferably over a drink or two, and it's often hard to tell whether he's being serious or just saying something for its shock value.

Talking in Chinese about his best-selling novel, English, Wang describes life during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) as "constant war, real or imagined, and nothing to eat".

"Today, people are getting richer and everyone's getting fat," he says. "Money changes everything for the better, of course."

He professes not to see any downside to this material progress and it is only toward the end of the interview that he admits that being overweight can be unhealthy, or that capitalism has its problems too, like the economic crisis.

Wang has previously been quoted as saying writers should be more like the women who give "massages" at hair salons and should stick together.

He is certainly entertaining and so are his novels. He has published three so far in addition to working on film scripts, but it was English that won him national recognition and a major literary prize in 2005.

"It changed my life because people started paying attention to me," he says, acknowledging that the need to be noticed is one theme of the book and part of his personality.

Now that English is in English (published this month), the almost-mythical journal of discovery that Wang constructs appears to have come to a successful conclusion.

It's set in the author's native Urumqi, Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, and the teenage protagonist, Love Liu, is deeply influenced by his overtly Westernized teacher from Shanghai who has an English dictionary.

This was a rare prize during the "cultural revolution" and Liu breaks a leg (literally) stealing it.

Although Wang neatly sidesteps the issue of which parts of the semi-autobiographical novel are fiction - "It's so long ago even I don't know now which is which" - he admits that part was true.

Previous 1 2 Next Page