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Subject: DEBATE WITH YANG LIAN
From: marjan <marjan@kud-fp.si>
Date: Wed, 06 Aug 1997 19:05:19 METDST

* * * * *

Debate between Yang Lian (chinese poet, guest of the 100
days) and members of the Deep Europe workshop
Tuesday, 5. 8. 1997, 13.00 at Hybrid WorkSpace, Orangerie,
dx, Kassel

-- transcribed by Inke Arns --


Andreas Broeckmann: We had a conversation for about five or
ten minutes where everybody spoke in their native languages
and so because there is overlapping areas of the languages
somebody always got it, and sometimes there was
misunderstanding. It's really interesting to see the
differences when somebody speaks his own langage and suddenly
you see that whole cultural background, you get a sense of
that territory. You know about that....

Let me briefly introduce you - this is Tom Bass, he is
American and he lives in Budapest, Hungary. Inke Arns lives
in Berlin, and Luchezar Boyadijev he is from Sofia in
Bulgaria. Inke and Luchezar were also at the lecture last
night.

I would have an introductory question: Could you explain
again why you hesitate when people say that you are a chinese
writer?

Yang Lian: Well, I always feel that this question is a bit
too limited or too narrow, because the nationality is only
one example of the common human situation. Well, if I call
myself chinese it's only because of the depths of being - of
the life which I experienced in China.If I can really express
myself in my poems and the poems reach that depth, I can call
myself chinese because this experience somehow must have been
special or interesting, different from others. But if I
couldn't do something like that, then the chinese is only a
birthplace or a passport or a kind of language we have
learned since our childhood. It has no real meaning. To me
even less than that, because I was not born in China and I do
not have a chinese citizenship anymore - all those things
were not decided by myself. Actually, now, the only meaning
of the chinese is in my language and in my poems.

Andreas Broeckmann: Which parts of your life did you actually
spend in China? How old were you?

Yang Lian: I was born in Switzerland. My parents went back to
China before I was one year old. That was in 1956 until I
left China in 1988, so I was about thirty-two years old.
Well, it was a most strange period actually. Before 1949,
Chinese people always thought that they were lost in this
condition of the world. In the first half of the century in
China people tried to be modern, and tried to run close to
Western society, but certainly after 1949, after the
Communist Party got to power, all Chinese people were told
that *we are the future of the world*.
And we jumped from the really far past into the future: we
were left with what we are, in an empty space. This was a
most dramatic change. Only in the late seventiesin or in the
eighties, we had a chance to think back to chinese history
and to history in this century. The time when I was in China
I got a chance to look into this history or the cultural
tradition and especially - myself.

Luchezar Boyadijev: I agree fully with what you said, about
being told at some point that we are the future of the world.
But after 1989, I started referring to myself as a survivor
of utopia. Because real socialism was in a way an attempt to
build up utopia. My question is: In your words yesterday,
there were some delicate nuances between language and
tradition which I did not quite follow through. I wanted to
ask you: You write in Chinese, and you live in a basically
english speaking context. So your actual direct link with
chinese language as it is spoken in various parts of China -
I realized there are various dialects or jargons - it must be
an extremely rich language. On the other hand, you said that
poetry, in order to attempt to get the full meaning, you have
to look and read in between the words and even behind the
words. The fullness of a language is somewhere in between and
behind the words. So, my question is: If you are not living
in a chinese context, do you feel you are loosing some of
this rich meaning or the spoken language now? On the other
hand, does the English language, which is not even anymore
Yanglish or Pigeon-English - it's Pigeon-Yanglish now, and
it's getting richer everyday - so does that context somehow
influence your poetry? Not with words, but the spaces in
between the words?

Yang Lian: Well, that's a very rich question! The first thing
is about tradition and language - especially my language. I
think in China, and also myself, there was for a long time a
misunderstanding to put the tradition and the modernity as
two opposite things. Tradition means past, and the modernity
means present. Only after 1976,when the cultural revolution
had passed, we suddenly felt, that people like Mao Zedong or
the Chinese government, their way of thinking and their way
of doing - even if they used *new* words, their way of
thinking was absolutely the same, or even worse than the
traditional autocratic power. Automatically, we felt that the
tradition and the past had not left us. Tradition and past
were still among us, and even more, they were inside us.
This experience really made us think about what's exactly the
meaning of tradition. If you said, OK, tradition is antique,
well, those antiques, in fact, in China have been distroyed
almost completely. But people didn't realize that tradition
was still inside them. And this is why the shadow of the past
is always coming back with the new words. From this
understanding - and I think some of the contemporary writers
realized that - we can only get to a living tradition through
our everyday creative thinking and writing, or even leaving.
This means, the one side is so-called tradition and the other
side is the self. I think I created this sentence which is
"to rediscover tradition within yourself". I try to put these
two things together. This means to get away from this
opposition between the tradition and the modernity. But these
two things are interlocked to each other. This means, every
living tradition must be based on one's self. Like even
Konfuzius or Lao-tse, all these classical Chinese
philosophers - they have a very strong self - a special form
of writing, a special style of language, and all very, very
different, very special. This is why they became the so-
called root of Chinese culture. Without them, we would not
have any tradition. On the other side, as a contemporary
Chinese poet, within myself, I have to have a special
understanding of my own tradition, this must be part of
myself. Tradition and the self should be linked to each
other. When I was in China, I wrote poems which made people
crazy, made them hate me, because I talked tradition a lot,
and they said: "Where *is* the tradition? You don't talk
about Lao-tse, about Konfuzius, sometimes you talk about the
I Ging, but we cannot find the I Ging in your poems! What do
you mean about tradition!?"
I think that the tradition should be rediscovered by one, and
as differently and as special as possible. But people don't
like that, because it's not a common knowledge which they can
quickly look up in a text book in school or university. But I
didn't care about that. I kept going my way until, for
political reasons, after 1989, I'd become an exiled writer.
In the beginning. of course, the western language and culture
was absolutely strange and different.
At that moment, I chose a special form for my poems - short
poems. I read three of the short poems last night, which are
from this part. This form is much more simple than the form I
used when I was in China. When the form is a little bit more
simple, you can try to touch what's my reality now. I try to
touch it more and more, even from this Western life
experience. There is the book "Ghosts speaking" which has
been published already in German. It's a collection of prose.
In the piece of prose titled "Ghosts speaking" I especially
put two layers: one is a strange life, and the second is a
very crazy feeling about language - about foreign language
and about my own language, which to myself is not a foreign
language. With the change of place, my Chinese is becoming a
real foreign language in the Western world. I live at the
same time in two worlds and two languages, Western and
Chinese. The outside and the inside at the same time. I am
one person, but within myself, there is a big distance
between everything. For me, it is still quite difficult to
understand the Western language or life - but it's
interesting to understand this new situation within myself.
This becomes something very interesting and even very
exciting for my thinking and my writing, because it's a new
experience. It's different from what I had when I was in
China. From these experiences I get some energy to support my
writing and to go deeper and deeper.

Luchezar Boyadiev: Just one more direct question: I presume
your poems are not published in China now? What would be the
reaction of the Chinese public to your poems now?

Yang Lian: Two of my books have been banned after the
Tiannamen massacre in China. The first time my poems have
been published in China in the first underground poetry
magazine in Bejing in 1991. They did put a group of my poems
on the front page. I asked them: Don't do that, because I am
an outsider, so the will not give trouble to me, but they
will give trouble to *you*. Their answer made me quite moved.
They said: We have to *do* something! We cannot only wait,
you know. At that time it was really hard. After that, after
1993, in some small magazines - they found some of my
writings outside China, and printed them in those magazines.
I never sent anything to official publications because, in
fact, I have my idea, which is: Not only the government
banned the poets, but sometimes, because of our taste, we
banned them too! When I now open those official magazines, I
just cannot imagine I could publish something among this kind
of writing! That is the problem. I don't think really that
the government had that power, but I think that poetry is
somehow special or something. It is necessary to ban *them*.

Andreas Broeckmann: For this workshop in the Hybrid Work
Space we chose the title "Deep Europe" because we have a
network of people from all across Europe who are involved in
media culture in the broadest sense. We have a mailing list
on the Internet - that's how we stay in touch with each other
- and from time to time we have these meeting places where
groups of us get together at conferences or we do workshops
like this. First, the network was about making contacts
between East and West Europe. It's been going on for 1, 5
years and now there are a lot of good contacts both between
East-West and East-East, and the West-West contacts are now
the most difficult (Laughter from Deep Europe). France can be
really far away... So, we were looking for a word that would
not be East / West or something, but would give a different
dimension to our discussions about the contemporary culture
in Europe. That's why we chose this adjective "deep".
Luchezar, maybe you can give your reading of the notion of
"Deep... Europe"? Because I would then like to ask Yang Lian
something about that.

Luchezar Boyadijev: The notion is a metaphor which could be
problematic. In the logic of this metaphor, deepness or depth
is where there are a lot of overlapping identities of various
people. Overlapping in terms of claims over certain
historical past, or certain events or certain historical
figures or even territories in some cases. It could be also
claims over language or alphabet, it could be anything.
Europe is deepest, where there are a lot of overlapping
identities.

Andreas Broeckmann: So, there is some sort of mapping of
culture and of the depth, of identities onto the geography.
There is a relationship somehow between mentalities and
geography, but at the same time they are disconnected because
the mentalities live in people, and people move around all
the time. So, something that we also experience with the
network is that in our relationships, we easily bridge the
territorial borders, although the territory also means
someting, in terms of our culture. (Addressing Yang Lian)
Because you're even more disconnected or separated now from
this notion of territoriality in your identity, I was curious
whether you have ideas about that. What is your relationship
with China, which parts of China do you identify with, what's
the Chinese culture that you inhabit, in terms of your
location in the world?

Yang Lian: That's very interesting, actually. I love this
word "deep". If you got the magazine no. 1 by documenta
(documenta documents no. 1), there were two of my articles.
There was a special part where I did talk about the two words
"deep" and "new". That's why, when I saw "Deep Europe", I
thought, whow, that sounds quite alright to me actually. In
my understanding, the word "deep" is not only something that
shows in reality, in front of your eyes, but something
behind, like behind the words, the ideas or the thinking. In
good conditions, it can create reality. It's not political
thinking which directly tries to change something, but it
tries to change some deep things. I think that's it what is
interesting. Also about chinese culture.

I grew up in Bejing, which is not as dramatic / romantic as
Tibet for example. Bejing is maybe like Moscow. It's a common
place, people come and go. I don't really like to talk only
about local culture or folk arts or folk songs. When I saw
those contemporary Chinese artists, who like to use these
folk things, folk culture, characters of Chinese for example,
especially to the Western world, I say: It's easier to sell
like this, or to be popular - but it's not *deep* enough.
To me it's your own special understanding of the background
you come from, where you live in, which is so importatant and
so interesting. In my writing I am always trying to show the
situation of the human being, through Chinese culture.
Chinese culture is quite interesting and special. e.g. the
language. This culture is completely different from European
culture. Because of the different tradition, the characters
of the language is so different - it has been called a visual
language. Every character has a complete meaning. The
characters can be used without the subject, like "I", "you",
or "she" / "he". The characters for the verbs do not change.
There is no past time, no present, no future form. The verbs
are always the same. That's different from German, English or
French. So, Chinese in fact is a very abstract language.
European languages somehow have a hold on the very concrete
reality - "it happened yesterday", "it happened five minutes
ago", "it happens now". In Chinese we do not only talk about
the time of the movement, when something happened. When we
are writing, we talk only about the situation. Drinking is
not "I am drinking now" - no, the word "drink" includes all
the people in the past, the present and the future who drink.
You see, the possibilities of language somehow shows, that
the situation of our lives - which is probably quite sad -
somehow never has changed. I called my lecture "Concentric
Circles" because it includes different times and different
spaces, but in the center is the understanding of myself.
I try to find a way of communication between myself and
Chinese language and what has been written in Chinese
cultural tradition. So, if every contemporary Chinese writer
could discover Chinese tradition by himself, then it could be
a very interesting task to compare with another culture -
e.g. with European culture. (...)

Cultural misunderstanding is a reality. (...)

* * * *
This is the first half of the interview / debate we did with
Yang Lian.
You can find the whole interview on Radio Internationale
Stadt (RIS)
http://www.icf.de/cgi-bin/RIS/ris-display?870805944, on
RealAudio.

Inke Arns, Deep Europe, Hybrid WorkSpace, Orangerie,
documenta X, Kassel
6. 8. 1997, 18.00