Poetics as Reincarnation A Conversation with Che Qianzi - Chinese Literature Today 25/03/2019 18:12

Poetics as Reincarnation A Conversation

with Che Qianzi
December 17, 2018 by Admin

Glenn Mott

Che Qianzi is from Suzhuo, a city that has remained important to his later work as a writer of both poetry
and prose. For many Chinese readers, Che is a rare prose stylist who writes passionately about his
hometown of Suzhou while channeling the style of far earlier times. In the art world he is known as a painter
who specializes in ink wash works, and as the sinologist Magheil van Crevel has pointed out, within poetry
circles he is known as China’s “poet’s poet.” While Che’s visual works echo popular traditional Chinese
calligraphy and ink wash styles, his poetry reKects a far more experimental disposition. In seeing the two art
forms side by side, one gains a stronger appreciation of the subtle experimentation that informs his visual
work and the traditional Chinese poetics and aesthetics that inform his unorthodox writing style. While he is
often associated with the so-called LANGUAGE school of avant-garde American poetry because of his
attention to the materiality of language itself, close readers of his work will Tnd that this focus is speciTcally
tuned to the physicality of the Chinese written language (its visual, aural, and etymological nature) and thus
arises from a very different set of cultural conditions. In a conversation with journalist and poet Glenn Mott,
Che discusses the relationship of his Eastern and Western inKuences and the different media he works in,

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granting his readers an unprecedented look into the poetics of one of China’s most elusive poets.

A conversation between Glenn Mott and Che Qianzi in a Beijing teahouse. And as with the ancient poets of
the Orchard Pavilion, the cup is passed downstream.

Glenn Mott: What is the state of your work now, in terms of poetry and painting? Generally the reputation
you have is a poet’s but increasingly your reputation is being made as a painter.

Che Qianzi: In addition to writing poems, I also write prose, novels, and scripts; it’s like new events being
added to the Olympics, to apply a metaphor from the recent sporting spectacle. I have written Tve or six
plays. Plays are my “pranks”: I wrote homophonic dialogues so when actors read those lines, the audience,
for the most part, will be led astray. It’s like this—my reputation may come from my poetry, but few people
can comprehend it, nor do they want to read it.

GM: Well, I think this is true all over the world. There are more people who want to write poetry than read it.

CQ: I have a larger readership as a prose writer, and in recent years some of my new readers only read my
prose. That is to say, I can beneTt from it—making some money. I have been making my living by writing
since I moved here ten years ago. However, we don’t have perfect laws and regulations about publishing at
present. Publishers conceal the print runs of my books, fall behind with my royalties, or even resell my
copyrights. I could do nothing about it but start to sell my paintings last year—cash transactions are
comparatively safer for me. I’ve been concentrating on my paintings for a few months every year in the past
two years. I devote myself to poetry writing once the art exhibitions are over. I will not spend more time on
painting because I still love writing poems. I quit writing prose since I started earning some money from
painting. Now I can Tnally write my poems one after another without being interrupted.

GM: So what’ve been the themes for your prose; what are your concerns now? Are you doing innovative
things with form, or is your focus strictly on thematic, topical issues?

CQ: I’ve published over ten collections of prose, covering gourmet food, gardens, reading, painting, tea, my
hometown, and so on. My prose work is more about a dream of my last life. Sometimes those pieces seem
weird even to me. Sensitive readers say reading my prose is like meeting one of the ancients, like they are

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going back to the lives of Chinese people before 1949, or further back, to the Ming dynasty or even Song
dynasty. I meet a lot of readers like this, who when they learn that I am the author, they say, “Ah! You are so
young!” Surely I’m not young anymore, only they expected to meet a much older guy.

GM: I’m interested in this idea. So the phrase is, “like a dream of my last life.” I like it—qian shi de meng
; it’s more concise in Chinese than it is in English. What are you getting at with that: “It’s like a dream of
my last life,” this idea of being old?

CQ: I believe that people have their last lives. My latest reincarnation, according to my observation, or to be
exact, comprehension, happened in the Yuan dynasty.

GM: So we are really talking about reincarnation, then? Talking literally.

CQ: With long intervals in between.

Now I regard the history of literature and painting as a process of unceasing reincarnation, which leaves
behind many traces. I am now interested in these traces, perhaps even more than the spirit, the material,
and the work itself.

GM: This is interesting. Let’s talk about spirituality, then. Is this a poetics of the spiritual? For instance, I see
poetry as devotional; it’s a devotional act. It can be a secular means of devotion. I don’t tend to see it as
artifact but as ritual, and I see this as a kind of net of attention we construct that catches everything as we
move through our lives, and if you are writing, you catch those things, they become part of your work. How
does spirituality enter into it for you? The spiritual for me is that poetry itself is ritual, but now you’ve
introduced a new element, that of reincarnation. Tell me about that. We’ve never talked about this belief in
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reincarnation. Could you be more speciTc?

STUDENT
CQ: You used the word WORK
“spirituality” and believe that reincarnation is spirituality, while I think reincarnation is
cultural identiTcation.

GM: Again your phrases catch me short. When you say, “reincarnation is cultural identiTcation,” to me it’s
like your saying “a dream of your last life.” How is that? For me, I tend to see culture as more temporal, so to
say something like “reincarnation is cultural identiTcation” is redeTning culture in a way I’m not used to.

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CQ: The identiTcation of culture is deqi , “to receive qi .”

GM: Qi as deTned in Chinese medicine?

CQ: Actually, the qi I am talking about here—there are many types—qi never dies out. The qi of mediocrity
reincarnates quickly; in other words, there are more chances for it to reincarnate, while for those with more
individuality or creativity, or those who kept the heterodox qualities, the chances are slim. That’s why I
believe Zhuangzi never experienced any reincarnations and still Kutters on top of our heads. Why do I
say that I belong to the Yuan dynasty? I recognized my last life as a poet in the Yuan dynasty. I know I am
the reincarnation of him. I remembered that I once wrote in my résumé that I was the reincarnation of a
Yuan poet called Yang Weizhen . Unintelligible text took up half of this résumé. I did that on purpose
because reincarnation, to a great extent, is beyond what language can express. Now another reason why
reincarnation is the identiTcation of culture rather than spirituality: When I said I am a Yuan poet
reincarnated, I identify his fate as my own.

GM: So, by recognizing the fate of the poet, you are going to share his fate in this life. How does the
identiTcation come about?

CQ: Not really. Before you recognize the fate of a poet, you need at Trst to recognize the culture imagined
by a certain language—the language understood by a certain culture. The recognition of a poet’s fate should
be linguistic in the Trst place, which is the same with the above-mentioned concept deqi. The
word deqi might be abstract and inscrutable for Westerners but it is totally speciTc and clear for me; I even
have an image of it in my mind, since I learned some acupuncture from my father in my youth. In the
present age this sort of recognition is my observation of misfortunes and hardship. Sure it’s cruel to use the
word “observation” here but there’s no better choice. We must learn to observe misfortunes and hardship
when they befall us, like you are not the one who experienced it. During the observation I am exhausted
(emptied) and, if lucky enough, I will meet my soul in the far distance, or you can call it “a second self” in
Western terminology. When I was observing the fate of Yang Weizhen, it was just like discovering the
cultural symbol of an age, which can only be shared but never be repeated. As to where the recognition
comes from, let me provide an example here: The reincarnation of mediocrity is by the recognition of
mundane life, while the reincarnation with a mission is the commitment to those relatively miserable and
dihcult cultures. Culture has many levels, even if we just talk about Chinese culture alone.

GM: On your understanding of mysticism—is this your own type of mysticism? Calligraphy takes this from

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folk belief to invention. Is it something like Blake’s vision? Is it visionary? Personal? Does it come from
traditional folk customs or is it a personal mystical visionary belief?

CQ: I am, or I might be, someone who has certain tendencies of mysticism but I am not a mystic. In my
opinion, once the mystery becomes a doctrine, it becomes a research object, and when it becomes a
research object, especially when it considers itself as the main body of research, mysticism is not
mysterious any more. That’s why I think mysticism is not mysterious at all, and that’s also why I feel myself
to be someone who has certain tendency of mystery, only this tendency is a more open view of nature and
life. Just like you said, it is “piety” and “devotional.”

GM: You write poems and also paint; do you see any similarities between your perspective and William
Blake’s mysticism?

CQ: I’ll need to think about it before I give my answer, but right now I would like to hear what you think of
the statement I just made.

GM: When this all becomes academic?

CQ: Let me elaborate on what I just said: The “projection port” of mysticism is being studied as a mystical
tendency. The study can never be more mysterious than mystical tendency itself because it—I mean the
mystical tendency—has uncertainty. The mystical tendency refuses to be studied, but it will establish trust.
And speaking of Blake, he and Ginsberg are both mystics to me. They are too certain.

GM: Well here’s my question: I’m trying to determine what is aesthetic and what is spiritual practice.
Aesthetic practice from spiritual practice . . . what distinguishes those? Because you said “when it becomes
doctrine”—I understand that—but do you mean “when it becomes an aesthetic”? What I’m trying to Tgure out
is how much of your belief is studied for the aesthetic properties of it, and how much is a spiritual belief.
Does this relate to a search for spiritual collagen in a culture of atheism? China’s latest pursuits? The real
question here might just be how far are we from talking about your paintings and poetry. Are we very far
away from that? In other words, how do aesthetics and spirituality come together in your work?

CQ: Sometimes I see reincarnation as poetics. In the years I devoted to the thinking of essence and
representation, I thought a poem must be new, original, “only new,” wei xin , that is, ri ri xin, you ri xin
, , “make it new, daily new.” But after I got the concept of reincarnation, I felt that sometimes

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traditional elements or reKections appeared in my poems, which in my earlier days I could not accept, or
would even be scared of, but I accept them with ease now. I think there is some trace left by a previous poet
during my reincarnation, which can also be seen as traces of my last generation or the life before. Now I
regard the history of literature and painting as a process of unceasing reincarnation, which leaves behind
many traces. I am now interested in these traces, perhaps even more than the spirit, the material, and the
work itself.

GM: So it’s the eternal recurrence. We have the idea of eternal recurrence from Pythagoras in Greek
thought, though its origins may be Eastern. But in your use of the term “reincarnation,” what separates this
idea of culture from mystical and esoteric thinking? Or is it simply that for you there is a reconnection to
Chinese folk belief or Chinese religious belief in reincarnation? Is it something fundamentally Chinese in
what you are doing? And if so, how is your use of the term “traces” (which are left by a previous poet)
different from the concept of eternal recurrence or tradition and individual talent? Like Eliot, you connect
with tradition, you recreate tradition. Or Ezra Pound’s slogan from the Chinese xin ri ri xin , “make it
new,” where the “it” is tradition. Is this idea of “traces” different from tradition and individual talent, or Pound’s
idea of getting history into the poem? “It” being tradition, constantly regenerating? Is it different from that, or
fundamentally based in Chinese mysticism and belief? It puzzles me because I’m trying to separate how
you, Che Qianzi, mean “reincarnation” in a kind of mystical way, and I don’t know how that connects with
your work through culture, so I’m trying to close the gap.

CQ: Ezra Pound, I think—as to ri ri xin , my view is as follows: ri ri is a process of reincarnation

without break, while xin means the completion of the reincarnation, which, of course, is a temporary
completion. Its eternity lies in the temporary completion—that it will never be completed fully or for good,
because the reincarnation will continue, and this is precisely the dynamics of ri ri xin . Well, actually, I
do not like the word “dynamics,” but I can’t think of a better one. So under the premise that I have to choose
one from them, I would choose Pound’s, which is closer to me.
GM: I’ll start here. So ri ri is the eternal recurrence, xin is the temporary completion of that cycle. It’s
close to what Pound got from the Chinese. The rest of it is your personal belief, right?

CQ: Yes, belief . . . for instance, it can be my faith to write a poem in an afternoon. But this kind of belief is
dihcult.

GM: So it’s a little like what I said at Trst, which is, for me poetry is a devotional activity, daily devotional
activity, just the activity, the doing of the thing. It’s like in calligraphy, you do it over and over in imitation. Not

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to devote yourself to imitation. The activity itself is devotional through process. If you do it only occasionally,
it doesn’t free your mind. If you do it constantly it frees you, that engagement in a kind of ritual. That’s what I
was saying.

CQ: I Tnd it quite interesting. There is no such word as “devotional” in my vocabulary. In my country, it is too
ideological a word.

GM: As in, “Serve the people.”

CQ: Yes, but the word as you use it means something different, I think, interestingly.

GM: Are poetics fundamentally . . . and here I use the term Aristotle deTned as “making” because otherwise
I don’t know what poetics mean . . . there’s a way in which we deTne terms differently, clearly, but what I
want to Tgure out is whether the poetics are different or the same. You know, this idea of ri ri xin is a
point on which we can agree. There is a point of connection. Partly because it’s a place where Western and
Eastern philosophy come together, and so whether it is called “reincarnation” or “eternal recurrence,” it
largely doesn’t matter, unless it’s a spiritual practice as well, because eternal recurrence is not a spiritual
practice, it’s secular.

CQ: This is a dihcult question.

GM: I doubt it’s a question at all. Let’s go with how these ideas show up in your painting. What can you
point to in your painting that, if we’re looking at the work, looking at the visual work, what do you want us to
see? I know that’s a strange question, but I’m asking it because it’s just a kind of simple fundamental
question about whether there is intention.

CQ: This is a question I’ve discussed before with friends. Some artists would ask me questions like, “What
do you expect the viewer get from your paintings?” I told them that the difference between us is that I do not
expect viewers to see anything whatsoever, because we often interpret “seeing” as “getting.” My only
expectation would be that viewers feel something—like, to feel bajed. Bajement is the best kind of
“getting.” When I’m creating a visual artwork, like a painting, I think there might be some anti-visual elements
in it, which would most probably be the intervention of poetry.

GM: Maybe we should talk about the tradition of court painters in China. Do you see yourself coming out of

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that tradition? You clearly come out of a literary tradition as a poet. And so what tradition of the poet-painter
do you come out of?

CQ: When it comes to the relationship between poems and pictures, we would talk of Wang Wei . In
one of his poems he said, “I’m a poet in this life but in my last life I must’ve been a painter.” “Painting-in-
poetry, poetry-in-painting,” Su Dongpo’s appraisal of Wang Wei, has already come to be regarded as
our esthetic tradition. But I see the relationship of poetry, calligraphy, and painting as sleepwalking. In this
kind of sleepwalking there is only one line, which is constantly extending, transforming, and we may also
say it is reincarnating. A poem’s last life would possibly be a picture, while a picture may also reincarnate
into a poem.

GM: Are you working within a tradition anyone would still recognize in the enormity of China’s national
ambition, or do you see yourself as developing discretely and alone? Poetry is often put to use, and poetry in
China has broken the bounds of literary traditions and entered the economy and social media landscape in
interesting and unexpected ways. For instance, there’s Jidi Majia , a cadre in Qinghai Province who is
running poetry festivals, there have been the search-engine parodies of Zhao Lihua’s “pear blossom verse”
and the like happening online, developers are using poetry to promote the opening of shopping
malls, and, most recently, Chongqing’s party secretary Bo Xilai is encouraging the use of poetry by
the founders to promote his “Sing Red Songs” campaign. Where do you Tnd yourself in all this? It seems
your work has taken a different and more discrete path than most of your contemporaries, perhaps in
response to your surroundings. How do you feel it’s going? Do you Tnd yourself more in line with painters
and that conversation? I guess it’s a question of ambition. Your ambition is elsewhere, what you are doing is
elsewhere. What do you think about the society of poets? Particularly poets who have been better
translated.

CQ: I think a poet should work independently from the multitude of other poets. While in terms of
objectives, it may be a changing position. In my early years I thought of acquiring something, like
recognition, by writing. But now I only write to not recognize something, to lose something. Poems are not
tools for communication, at least not in a larger sense. Poems are a private code. When I was writing, either
about the changes or the reincarnation, or even the sleepwalking thing, I was endeavoring to crack my
private code, which inevitably involves refusing to recognize something or someone.

GM: What is it? The people you refuse to recognize?

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CQ: Such as conservative academic paranoia, revolutionary amateurs.

GM: You don’t want to be circumscribed by a kind of recognition within the poetry community, would that
be accurate?

CQ: Not just the poetry community.

GM: You see poetry as resistance, ahrming resistance through change. To use the easy term, your poetry
for most people will be dihcult, especially in translation. Your painting, on the other hand, has a visual
immediacy about it in a way that transcends these other considerations of language. Your poetry is
sometimes tied to a set of poetic principles and thereby connects you to other schools and other poets.
While your painting, it seems to me, connects you to a deep tradition of ancient Chinese art. So when you
say poetry is resistance, you certainly don’t mean that about your paintings, do you? Does “poetry as
resistance” apply also to your paintings?

CQ: Yes, I have the same thought when painting. But I am more manipulated by the market when painting.
Moreover, I also need my painting to maintain my poetry writing at present; you know, poetry is my life. I
think I will never be released from this painful entanglement.

GM: How does your poetry extend to painting?

CQ: Chinese ink painting has at present turned into a kind of skilled trade, a total craftsmanship. What I
want to do now is something that engages my soul and imagination more, not just my hands. By doing so, I
refuse to recognize many painters, or certain concepts of painting as well as the history. Suzhou in
particular has launched many great painters throughout history, such as the Four Great Painters of Ming.
Such a lot of famous skeletons enabled the ink painters in my hometown to violate the corpses, to
plagiarize, both surreptitiously and Kagrantly. But what I am preparing to do is get back to the origin of ink
painting—by conjecture and betrayal. But betrayal doesn’t mean defecting to the West (like the modern
artists), it means growing again from the root, like a tree.

GM: Poetry then, prepared you to become the painter that you are, the painter who has found his own style,
rather than a skilled worker, rather than a painter just repeating the models. With poetry being a way to see
the world, then as a poet you had that notion of resistance to what is normative.

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CQ: Right.

GM: So without poetry, your painting could not exist. You’re technically skilled; clearly, if you want to you can
just paint. But the style you developed comes out of what you were doing in poetry. It’s a different art form,
but has the same concerns, the same lineage.

CQ: Poetry, calligraphy, and drawing are all transformations of a line.

GM: Can we talk a little about calligraphy? Calligraphy as painted poetry. Calligraphy is where everything
comes together.

CQ: I am in awe of calligraphy and would not venture to do it. Except when I get drunk.

GM: Other than developing an individual style in calligraphy. . . . or, to put it another way, calligraphy tends to
come out of copying. You copy the masters, and then you develop an individual style. Once you’ve become
adept at copying the styles of the old masters, what are you hoping to achieve in calligraphy? What is your
aim? What is it that interests you about calligraphy?
CQ: That’s an interesting question. Calligraphy is a tradition that doesn’t permit going against the grain. It
doesn’t allow me the stance of making my own rules; it’s autocratic and is a good approximation of the
Chinese system. I’m reluctant to do calligraphy because it throws my mind into a state of conKict. Art
requires progress, but when I do calligraphy, I feel the virtue of conservatism. This leaves me perplexed and
conKicted. Am I an artist without rebellion? Copying the master, as you just mentioned, is the one true way
to become a calligrapher. But one loses his individuality in the course of copying in order to learn the general
characteristics—calligraphy is here to serve the aesthetic needs of general characters. I think there is a
shortcut to the understanding of Chinese culture—it’s calligraphy. I’ve noticed that for some Western poets
and scholars I know, there are obstacles to understanding Chinese ink painting because they see references
to Western painting. But when it comes to Chinese calligraphy, there’s no reference, even though viewers
sometimes associate it with abstract paintings. In the Tnal analysis, calligraphy is the document of
existence. Sometimes I don’t consider calligraphy art, because more than anything else it makes me feel the
dilemma of real life. Another point I want to make clear is that I have never shown any appreciation of
modern Japanese calligraphy because it started with a hypothesis, which makes it hard for me to take it as
calligraphy work. I consider it abstract painting.
GM: So you don’t take cues from, say, abstract expressionism, the way I might look at something and be
reminded of Franz Kline or Robert Motherwell? You take cues strictly from Chinese traditional forms. This

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answers a question for me, which is that your original poetry—being clearly avant-garde—came from
modernism, but your calligraphy comes from absolutely traditional Chinese elements. Is that accurate?

CQ: Two things inKuenced my poetry: One is a not-so-important Chinese tradition, a tradition that is
ignored; the other one is modern Western literature and art.
GM: The Western part I think we know—it’s basically modernism and the things that were available to you
in translation. What about the traditional inKuences and the overlooked Chinese artist you just talked about?

CQ: From the perspective of literature, writers such as Li He , or Lu Tong , and Yang Weizhen, who
I just mentioned above, are all non-mainstream. Take Li He: If it were not for Mao Zedong’s admiration, Li’s
poem. . . . Actually, Li’s inKuence is still conTned to a very small group today. Most people still don’t treat him
as being in the mainstream tradition of Chinese poetry, while Li Bai , Du Fu , Wang Wei , and
Bai Juyi are considered orthodox. Li He is regarded as the “poem wizard.” As to Lu and Yang, they
perhaps belong to the ghosts and spirit-kind. The authentic Chinese tradition, in my opinion, mostly draws
inspiration from folk art, such as Kunqu opera , puppetry, shadow play, Suzhou ballad-singing, mud play,
the guqin , blue-printed batik cloth, paper cutting, and so on. And also fortune-telling, in which character
analysis is employed. I was intrigued by this game for a while. About characters . . . later on, I laid great
stress on the importance of the characters used in a poem. The origin of this can be traced back to the
inKuence that the analysis of Chinese characters had on me. It is considered to be superstition today, but
it’s an indispensable part of Chinese history. The characters really do contain such things as universal
information and the destiny of humankind as well as every individual. This has always been a thought of
mine.

GM: So we’ve talked about painting, calligraphy, poetry, and these are Chinese inKuences. Earlier I said we
know your Western inKuences but I think I was assuming too much. You said that when it comes to
calligraphy, you are not inKuenced by, say, abstract expressionism; in poetry, though, you acknowledged that
modernism has inKuenced you. What is the inKuence of modernism in general, or premodernism, even?
What is your most signiTcant Western inKuence and how does it intersect with traditional Chinese
elements?

CQ: I read Western poems, novels, and philosophies the same way I appreciate grass-style
calligraphy, caoshu . There are always some characters that are hard to make out or are totally
unreadable in grass-style calligraphy. I feel a little ashamed for not knowing any foreign languages, though
when I read texts in translation—modern or postmodern or even Romantic—I can’t help but notice some

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illegible elements as in grass-style calligraphy. At least, I treat those texts the same way I treat grass-style
calligraphy: I regard these unrecognized elements as freedom, liberty, and imagination, or even more,
something more important. It’s through the unreadable parts that I can combine the Chinese and Western
together.

GM: So in part your poetic style is a fusion style, based on misreading, really.

CQ: Right, I like misreading. You could say I’m obsessed with it.

GM: Sometimes with contemporary Chinese poetry (as with Eastern European poetry of a certain vintage),
there has been a kind of ideological fetish placed on the translations. And I think that your work resists that.
I mean the work itself resists it because of its ambiguity but also it is very particular, you know, as in, “the
walnut is a school, a school is a walnut.” In some ways you’ve been a party to this in the sense that people
would categorize your work as part of the Misty school. Even at that level, your poetry completely resists the
categorization. Ambiguity is more dihcult to shackle with ideology, which I think has been a trick of Chinese
poets since the Maoist era. It’s much easier to apply the fetish to Bei Dao’s work, to make it political.
This is more dihcult with you, so I will compare you more to Celan or some of the French surrealists. Have
you been inKuenced by French surrealism?

CQ: Celan did not Tnd his readers in China until recent years—his collection of poems was published in
2002, but his “Death Fugue” is famous here. I have known his work for a long time although I don’t think
much of that piece.

GM: And French surrealism has no inKuence?

CQ: Like Breton, Éluard, Aragon, Sartre even talked of the “socialist surrealism” of the Soviet Union in a
letter. Henri Michaux, also René Char, we cannot just say that they are super-realists, can we?

GM: I’m thinking of Michaux, the ink paintings.

CQ: Absolutely! Michaux is a genius, an outlaw, a destroyer!

GM: So French surrealism isn’t an inKuence then, but I wouldn’t call your images particularly surreal; what I
will call them is “hyper-particular.” You know, it is this idea put in “the walnut is a school”—do you read a

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Poetics as Reincarnation A Conversation with Che Qianzi - Chinese Literature Today 25/03/2019 18:12

phrase like “the walnut is a school, a school is a walnut” on a level of meaning, or do you read it as pure
language?
CQ: As language.

GM: And that’s what separates you from surrealism, because a line like that by a surrealist will be read for
the expansion of thematic meaning, not the language. So, language is construction; it’s linguistic.

CQ: I don’t have much to do with surrealism. I’m not that “automatic writing” kind. I’ll give myself pre-set
obstacles.

GM: One more question. When I say Yuanmingyuan , what does it mean to you, what will you
immediately think of?

CQ: I don’t think of anything special. I reject all that is given to me from the outside. To me, Yunamingyuan
has other meanings. The other day, I accompanied my wife to a bookstore near Yuanmingyuan to attend a
poetry reading. After that, we went to Yuanmingyuan. Then we sat under a willow watching another willow,
the kind of willow called Li Liu . The sky that day was very Pulan (short for Pulushi lan ,
“Prussian blue”), like a piece of a painting by the missionary Giuseppe Castiglione.

GM: You have a son in college. What’s he studying?

CQ: He’s studying Tlm directing.

GM: Do you think for his generation, Tlms are what poetry was to your generation?

CQ: To them, computers are more important.

Translated by Yan Ke , with grateful acknowledgement of the additional scholarship and

assistance he provided for this interview.

From Chinese Literature Today

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