Wang talks English but it comes out as riddles

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

"I wanted the English book so much I took it," he says. "My teacher's response, when he found out, was to give it to me as a present."

It was a defining moment, not just for the character Liu, but also for Wang, as a new world of possibilities opened up for him.

"When I learned English I found out about life, things I had not known up to that point. English represented the things we wanted but couldn't get, like political culture and democracy," Wang says.

"We couldn't get them then because of the cultural reaction and even since the reform and opening-up we haven't got all of them."

Wang says he's not worried about being politically correct or getting censured for speaking his mind.

In person and in his writing, Wang seems to enjoy taking a poke at authority figures. Liu's relationship with his teacher is so all-consuming his parents' influence is diminished by comparison, a situation that also parallels Wang's life.

"My mother and father were so busy they did not have so much time for me," he says. "That's why I was so close to my teacher."

Books, too, seem to have become surrogate parents and Wang is most animated when talking about his favorite authors, like Stendhal, Guy de Maupassant and Leo Tolstoy.

Why no Chinese in the list? "When we started to read books Chinese authors weren't that good," he says. "Now we have Liu Xinwu and Mo Yan, so things have improved."

As for the English translation of English his publisher asked him to read the first chapter and that's all he managed. "I'm told it sounds like an English writer, rather than a translated novel," he says.

This appears to please him, but with such a contrarian it's hard to tell.

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