Journalists From China

"Genocide can be hidden for a while with friendly visits, but one day it will be revealed."

"Imagine that a valuable property of yours was being traded between two people right before your eyes—without your permission—and one of those people was a thief who had stolen your possession. At the same time, the other was a prominent person from your neighborhood who knows well that you are the rightful owner. How would you feel? Naturally, you would despise the thief’s shamelessness and [feel] deeply disappointed in the indifference of the prominent man. …Our call may not sound appealing to overly “realist” politicians, but it is the most reasonable call for those who believe in the power of truth, trust the right course of history, and have strategic foresight. Those who turn a deaf ear today will one day regret it when [the People's Republic of] China has taken complete control over the world. Finally, I remind all politicians around the globe that in international trade and politics, it is wise, strategic, moral, and lawful to speak with the valid owner of the goods, not with the thief."

"A language survives through natural social use, not through staged symbols."

"Some fear that without [Radio Free Asia], the world will forget the Uyghurs’ suffering. I do not share that fear."

"Can someone who has ignored a genocide at home truly feel empathy for suffering elsewhere?"

"I think Chinese is a difficult language to translate. Every time a draft translation of my work lands on my desk, I read it as if it were someone else’s work. I think I have the ability to stay detached and read my own work objectively, because when I read a translation draft, I rarely compare a sentence or a paragraph with my original work. The only time I do is when I discover a passage that doesn’t sound right. I don’t nitpick. It’s unfortunate that Chinese is a such a unique language, with origins so different from Western languages, so every time I read a translation, I feel something is lost, some of the strength or color."

"I like to play with words. In English, there's only one or two ways to say something; in Chinese there are 30 ways."

"Any suffering registered in your mind makes the emotion deeper. Maybe as a writer, I am constantly looking for tragedy."

"It’s always challenging to portray foreign characters in a novel that is told mainly from a Chinese perspective or, you may say, in a Chinese story."

"I believe all free thinkers, all artists and writers, should be independent from the mainstream so they won’t take the value system or moral standards of the mainstream for granted. They should take it as their duty to question and doubt the way of life and way of thinking of the majority. I am glad to live overseas as a Chinese writer, to remain independent and critical of both sides."

"What makes me choose to write a particular story as fiction only depends on how interesting the story is and how much literary and aesthetic value I can see in it. In China, I don’t believe there are enough good literature and artistic works of aesthetic value that have been created on this war. So far, most are just crass propaganda. Literature doesn’t stop war, but it helps us understand what war can do to human hearts, and what worst or best behaviors war can trigger from us."

"Under normal circumstances, I will not travel until a novel is finished.If there is an agreed itinerary, I will calculate the time at home, enough to write a lot of work. If I am writing a novel and encounter an urgent matter of traveling, I will be very upset and even painful. If more than half of the work has been written, and the tone of voice of this work has been formed, then I will feel better, otherwise, when I come back from a trip and sit at the desk, I want to give up because the tone is out of tone and the sense of language is weak."

"Of course, the vision of many works, such as the sense of picture and imagery, is actually unconscious by the writer. If the writer is conscious, he will write very artificial things."

"Death is not completely tragic, perhaps it will be the completion of a redemption, or the beginning of a rebirth."

"My dream is to write with both pens, in English and Chinese. I want to be more truthful and more straightforward when I write in English."

"I consider myself as having two selves. One self is Chinese and more delicate, more subtle, in terms of language. But the English self is young and audacious, and I say what I want to say."

"It’s frustrating seeing things lost in translation. Some expressions are just so Chinese, or so English, you have to switch your thinking to English in order to write it with spontaneity and naturally."

"The pity is my expression in English is still young and not subtle enough. It’s not quite there. I read English very well, I know what good language is, and I want to reach the level of Nabokov and Conrad."

"But it’s frustrating, that you know what good literature is but you cannot get it totally right."

"I don’t think a novel has a function or a mission such as teaching somebody something. Instead, I think a novelist, by writing a story in the most vivid way, with poetry of language and by sharing it with the public, is willing to discover the truth about the story together with the readers. I have written stories about women suffering during wars and after wars, because I think that no matter who wins or loses, women on both side are the ultimate victims. Their bodies are the last part of a defeated country to be conquered, to be violated. They are the mothers, wives, and daughters of soldiers whose lost lives leave voids in the women’s lives, too deep to be filled."

"I think the Chinese are a people of survival. We are all wonderful survivors. We have risen in population during the last century, a century in which wars and famines have happened all the time. We have survived natural and political disasters almost every other year during the last sixty years. Without optimism I don’t think my people could live until today. I have gone to poor rural areas in China and seen destitute people joke and jest and laugh. I can imagine Chinese at the bottom of society, surviving like them over thousands of years. They must have a good sense of humor to go through hardship, and they must have learned how to steal whatever small pleasure they can to hold on to their dear life. I can’t imagine that any people could survive so many centuries of sorrow if to live only means to suffer. They have learned to steal joy, however little, out of the overall suffering."

"Don’t you think all women need to be admired, and welcome it? Admiration comes out of sensitivity and attention. Admiration includes paying attention to every detail of her body, decoding her body language, being sensitive to her subtlest gestures, being aware of all the expressions behind her expression. Women always feel that the people closest to them don’t understand, don’t comprehend them; that they lack the sensitivity that comes from true passion. Without this sensitivity and understanding, women lack a sense of security and don’t have the impulse to open their hearts completely."

"I realized that on the internet, you can hide in invisibility, so speaking with another person is kind of like speaking to another part of yourself, or like confessing to a priest of your own creation. So it becomes very daring, very frank, with a desire to give the burdens you carry in your heart to the other person, to have that other person share the burden. Secrets are very heavy, and someone who keeps a huge secret cannot live carefree. Over time, the corrosiveness of secrets can erode the most intimate relationships."

"As I mentioned previously, on the internet everyone enjoys being nameless, having the privilege and protection of anonymity. It is like a person hiding in a crowd; if the crowd curses, he curses along with it, and only by cursing along with it does he feel safe. But if he doesn’t curse along with it, he loses the crowd’s protection and is not safe. On the internet many people tell the truth, or attack others, or curse others, anonymously, thinking that if they can disappear into the vast ocean of the anonymous crowd they can feel safe."

"I don’t consider myself a successful screenwriter. I write screenplays because I have no choice. Often I’m simply the director’s last resort. I think that good novel-writing emphasizes characterization. It’s the personality that makes a good movie or novel character unforgettable."

"But these days in China the authorities don’t grant my novels official book licensing numbers, so there’s no way to publish them in China. For that reason, I’m considering writing in English again. I swim every day, and when I swim, I feel that swimming laps back and forth is rather boring, so I think about a novel’s structure, its beginning, its characters and such, and that way I enjoy swimming more. After I have swum for a few more months, maybe I can talk more concretely about my next project."

"I was disillusioned with the communists after they shot the students at the square. But now I'm disgusted with this country [US], as well. I thought the US was such a free land. I don't know where else I should go to now. I was just naturalised."

"I don't see myself in the circle of Asian-American writers. My English is only that of a 15-year-old. I don't feel confident enough to write about contemporary America. China has been the subject of my writings, no matter where I am. However, I'm not completely Chinese - more an outsider of China's affairs. I have the right to speak on the subjects that I lived through"

"There are still many problems that aren't answered in China. As a writer, I have to keep searching for truth. The Chinese government still neglects many mistakes that were made during the Cultural Revolution and covering the facts. We need to revisit the old wounds."

"Good stories will keep haunting me for years. They will mature and want to be born. I can't help it."

"With books or film I want to commemorate our youth and the sacrifices they made. No matter how bitter the time was, there is always something beautiful. I want to satisfy my nostalgia and hope [my work] is touching enough to move audiences who may not have the same experiences."

"From early on, I was nourished in a literary way. I didn't realize that there was a writer already living in me"

"Looking back, and forward, many Hans and Tibetans today do not measure their relations by just when, in what ancient dynasty, their unity began or was formalized. Rather, they see as the common meaning of their overall and particular histories, all China's nationalities contributing, from the earliest times to the formation and stability of the historically formed multinational entity."

"Different indeed from any colonial or semi-colonial path is the road of Tibet within socialist China. As we have seen from facts and figures, Tibet is massively assisted and in no way exploited by the majority nationality. Economic errors were made, involving waste of labor and funds, which was true in other areas of China as well, but nothing was taken away from the Region and its people for the material benefit of anywhere else."

"After we joined other work groups in transplanting rice, harvesting wheat, afforesting bare hills or digging a canal. All this made us, as nothing else could, forever a part of this land, shaped, tilled, and watered by the soil of so many generations, and now in a state of active rebirth. Whenever we saw new watercourses, roads, or tree-belts, we felt that we,too, had helped create them. Such a feeling is hard to describe by any who have not worked truly mutually, not formonetary wealth, but for a common aim."

"We are indeed living through tremendous days, weeks and months that do indeed “shake the world” ― rejuvenating, revivifying, scraping all the barnacles off the mind and scraping off those who have themselves become barnacles on the cause."

"The absence of greed; faith in an ever-better future; the spirit of service to the people; the prevalence of mutual aid, rarity of theft, and readiness of all ranks of society, and particularly of the youth, to volunteer despite fatigue and peril."

"My basic ideas have not changed. I see no reason to change them."

"Already before my teens, amidst the country's surrounding internecine wars and famines, I saw gaunt, ragged refugees flooding into Tianjin. Some begging tearfully for food, some offering to sell their children ... On a forever unforgotten winter morning, ... I came upon a boy of twelve or so, ... crouching stiff and dead in a doorway where he had tried vainly to seek shelter from the freezing night wind."

"There are ... almost certainly more really active people. And these people are amply sure that they are China, China's future. Not that they say it. But it is apparent in every confident word and action, and smile. I became ever more convinced then that Yan'an was the shape of things to come in China, and the next decade would prove it."

"I see a completely different China which is totally different from the China under the rule of Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek. This China is full of hope and free from starvation and defeatist sentiment."

"We always think there are stories to do and we don’t think, ‘maybe this environment should be better’. We’ve always felt we could do anything we wanted. It was just based on what our priorities are."

"China also has this kind of problem ... China had the ‘women hold up half the sky’ revolutionary slogan — but the actual situation, the actual status of women — I think is a very profound issue."

"Revealing the truth to the public requires layers of checking and multiple source verification. Good journalism can safeguard interests and foster changes of rules."

"The role that we journalists have to play is very large because China does not have elections and there are so many restrictions."

"Reform is an accelerating process, as soon as it starts, it will move faster and faster."

"Laughable rumors. I’m not stepping back or stepping down. You could say I’m stepping up."

"No one cared about the facts. My stance was all they cared about...We always say that some members of the public are unaware of the truth and can be easily duped. But I’m concerned that there are also officials who are unaware of the truth and can just as easily be manipulated."

"I am scared...In front of me is the virus. Behind me is China’s legal and administrative power."

"Over the past year and eight months, I have experienced a lot of things. Some of it can be talked about, some of it can't, I believe you understand."