ContactInterview with Su Wei
(from summer/fall 2010 issue of Washington Square)
Austin Woerner:
You've lived in the U.S. for over two decades now, you're an American citizen; your daughter was born here, speaks fluent English, and is a member of
her high school's cheerleading team. Do you still consider yourself an exile?
Su Wei:
Yes, by all means. That's an interesting question—just recently I published several poems in an overseas Chinese newspaper, in answer to the
sentencing of the dissident Liu Xiaobo. Right afterward my computer was overrun with viruses, and I thought, maybe this wasn't a coincidence. I told
Kang Zhengguo [another political exile and author of Confessions] and he said, why would the Chinese government hack your computer over a couple
of poems? Your work is published in the mainland now, you're well-accepted. You're part of the mainstream now.
In many people's eyes, writers like Kang and me have entered the mainstream, at least in America. We teach at Yale, we've assimilated into American
society. But I'm still an exile, because I'm a dissenting voice, I speak out and criticize the actions of the Chinese government. In that sense I will
always be on the margin.
AW: Do other Chinese exile writers still see you as an exile?
SW: It depends. Other Tiananmen exiles, those who are still active in politics, sometimes ask me whether I've, you know, washed my hands of the whole thing, gone straight. I tell them yes, if going straight means quitting the political movement, in which I used to be a significant player. Back in 89, when I was in Paris, I was one of the initiators of the first overseas democracy organization, Federation for a Democratic China. I even wrote part of the manifesto.
AW: So you were much more politically active back then than you are now?
SW:
Definitely. After Tiananmen I was one of the most outspoken representatives of the exiled intellectuals. I'm not saying that to brag—I took on that
role for practical reasons. In 19TK Professor Leo Ou-fan Lee at University of Chicago used some grant money—from a MacArthur, I think—to shelter some
of the most prominent dissidents, including Liu Zaifu, Gan Yang, and Li Tuo, all writers and scholars. I was one of them. When the editor of The Nineties Monthly, Hong Kong's New Yorker-equivalent, flew to Chicago to profile us, none of the other intellectuals felt they could
speak out publicly—their situations were complicated. Only I felt free to step forward. I didn't have Party connections, I wasn't married, and my
parents were in Hong Kong, so I could say anything without endangering my family. So I spoke on behalf of all the exiled Chinese intellectuals.
Back then we had a lot of fantasies. The Soviet Bloc had just collapsed, and we imagined the PRC was next. When I was in Paris right after Tiananmen
the dissident community was like a little government-in-exile.
AW: So you were expecting to return to China?
SW: Of course. Everybody was. We were all quite naïve. The most pessimistic of us, a philosopher named Gan Yang, predicted we wouldn't be able to go back for fifteen years. Me, I thought seven or eight. The most optimistic ones thought it would be over in two or three. I never would have imagined that I'd still be here, twenty years later.
AW: When did you realize that things wouldn't change so quickly, that you might never go back?
SW: The truth is, I had an inkling very early on. Soon after I left China I wrote an essay comparing political exile to the Italian philosopher Gramsci's description of prison at noontime. Life as an exile is boring, I wrote. The sun's right over your head, you can't see your own shadow. It feels meaningless, and it's hard to keep going. So the only thing we can do, I said, is return to our vocations, the things we do best—and try to contribute to society. Politics isn't my trade, I said. I'm a writer. So not long after the Federation for a Democratic China was established, I told them I was quitting.
AW: So your life as an exile has been, in a sense, a gradual turning away from politics toward literature for its own sake.
SW: Yes, though that turning away was a product of the circumstances. Adorno said, "there is no poetry after Auschwitz"—I understood that sentiment very deeply. After Tiananmen, whenever I picked up my pen to write, nothing literary would come out. All I wanted to do was criticize, attack.
AW: So when did there start being poetry again?
SW: It wasn't until 1993, four years after Tiananmen. At that time I was at Princeton, as part of an exile group called the Princeton China Initiative. Princeton has a tradition of supporting exiled intellectuals—Einstein and Thomas Mann both had positions there—and the university was hosting twenty or so of the most prominent Chinese exiles. I was beginning to feel depressed, because it was becoming clear to me that I just wasn't interested in these political things. Our role there was expressly political—and I could only feel happy if I was writing literature. So I started to write a novel, inspired by a local legend in Danzhou County, Hainan Island, where I was "re-educated" during the Cultural Revolution. That's how Witching Vale came to be.
AW: When I went back with you to Hainan, it struck me that you spent your youth in another kind of exile.
SW: Of course. The Song Dynasty poet Su Dongpo, one of China's most famous exiles, whom I like to claim as an ancestor, spent his last years in Danzhou County in Hainan. Hainan is famous as a place of exile—many famous scholars and officials were sent there throughout Chinese history. Even as a teenager I had an awareness that I was following in their footsteps.
AW: Could you talk more about the image of exile in Chinese culture? What does exile mean to the Chinese?
SW:
Well, for one, it has very romantic connotations. Zheng Yi [one of the most outspoken Tiananmen fugitives, and #1 on China's "most wanted" list] and I
often joke, "How many people get the chance to be exiles? How romantic!" We're proud of ourselves, to tell the truth. Here we are, facing down one of
the most powerful governments in the world, and we can stand here and say, I don't care! And meanwhile they're watching our every move. And so in a way
that's proof of our own power.
Exile, in its narrowest definition, means leaving your country, your culture, your roots. But if you define it more broadly, it means being an
outsider, living on the margin. According to that definition, all of traditional Chinese literature is exile literature. The famous historian Sima Qian
wrote: "It was in captivity that King Wen produced the Book of Changes, amidst hardship that Confucius penned the Analects, in exile that Qu Yuan gave
us Encountering Sorrow, upon losing his kneecaps that Sunzi wrote the Art of War. And the poems of the Book of Odes were, in the main,
the sages' cries of anger and indignation." Traditionally, in China—as in the West—all writers and intellectuals are, in a sense, exiles. To become a
writer, you need to be an outsider.
And I've always been an outsider. Growing up, I wanted to be part of the mainstream, to win approval from my superiors. But I was also very outgoing,
extroverted, and I was always coming off as better than other people. Under the Communist system, as in traditional China, to advance within the system
you need to "be stupid." My parents were always telling me, remember son, the greatest wisdom is stupidity—da zhi ruo yu. I couldn't play
stupid, and that got me in a lot of trouble.
When I was in college, the Chinese department got to nominate one of its students to enter the Party, and everybody thought I'd be chosen. But I
wasn't. Later someone told me the Party members had said, "letting Su Wei in would be like giving wings to a tiger." They saw me as a threat. In
America I never feel that I need to hide my light under a bushel. But in China that's the way it is.
AW: On the subject of being an outsider, I was wondering: do you think that being so distant from your material, both in terms of time and space, makes your vision clearer as a writer?
SW: Interesting point. It's true. When [the critic] Li Tuo interviewed me about Witching Vale, he said if this novel had been written ten years earlier, it would have become a classic. But I couldn't have written it ten years earlier. I was able to write it because I was in America. I had more perspective, I could see over my own walls. The distance set me free.
AW: So you really felt that leaving China stimulated your imagination?
SW: Yes, yes. In part that's because I wasn't so constrained. In China, there are lots of taboos, and I always felt I had to hold myself in. But in the U.S. it doesn't matter. Of course, since I publish in China I still need to be mindful of those taboos. But in literature you don't need to wear your politics on your sleeve. Imagination is the horse and politics is the cart. And though the political critique in Witching Vale is hidden, it's still there, and it's harsh.
AW: So as a member of an exile community, I imagine you've witnessed the many different paths an exile can take. What have the stories of the other exiles been like, in the long run? How have they been similar to yours, and different?
SW:
Well, first of all, I'm lucky. When I fled Tiananmen, there was a poet with us named Lao Mu. He was very well-known back in those days, moreso than I.
Now, he's a homeless person, mentally ill, begging for food in the Paris subway.
I'm one of the luckiest of the exiles. And that was because of practical reasons—I'd studied abroad in the States in the early eighties, and I had an
American degree, so I was able to teach and eventually get this position at Yale.
AW: So after traveling so far, do you ever have a kind of yearning to return? If so, what kind of return?
SW:
Yes. Even I, unsentimental as I am, un-nationalistic as I am—even I still dream that one day someone will say to me, Su Wei, come back, there is a
place waiting for you. But in my heart I know there's a quid pro quo—as long as it's not under the Communist system. Under the Communist system,
I cannot go back to China and call it my home. It's not possible. And as Su Dongpo says, "my home is where my heart's at rest." And my heart is at rest
in literature. I write, therefore I am. Writing is my home.
Yet a leaf must fall to its roots. What will I do after I retire? Perhaps I'll spend more time in China, because I have loved ones there, and a
familiar culture. Perhaps I'll fly back and forth, spend half the year here, half in China. That's a possibility. But I will go back. I'll still want
to go back.
AW: Which brings me to my last question: what is it like as a writer, writing in your own language while everyone around you speaks an unfamiliar tongue? What is it like living in a country where people can't read what you write?
SW:
The real medium of literature is universal—it's imagination. Nature. Love and death. Language is only a vehicle. Of course, language is still very very
important to me. I wrote once about a Austrian Jewish intellectual, Stefan Zweig, who committed suicide in Brazil after World War II. The Brazilian
government treated him as an honored guest. But he killed himself. And in his suicide note he wrote, the country of my mother tongue has disappeared,
my mother tongue has disappeared.
But there's another German-language writer, Thomas Mann, who when asked why he left Germany said: my language is my country, wherever I go my country
follows.
And that's why I'm so lucky. In most fields, my mother tongue would be my greatest hindrance, since to assimilate you need to learn another language.
But for me, my mother tongue is my occupation. Even in Yale classrooms, in front of some of the world's brightest and proudest students, I can raise
the proud head of my language. I can hold up my head in front of you. My language, my most basic reflex, which would in any other situation be my
greatest weakness, is my greatest strength. That's why I say I'm a lucky exile. I'll never be a Stefan Zweig. I'll be another Thomas Mann.