AT A FORMER maid's chamber converted into an artist's studio in the Latin Quarter of Paris, a worker is helping Shan Sa hang two framed pieces of her calligraphy. 'Just a bit to the right and a hair lower,' the mainland Chinese novelist, poet and painter says in fluent French, the tone of her voice soft and undemanding. 'No. Now it's a bit too low.'
The hanging gives me a moment to observe the surroundings, which transport me from Paris to China: a painting of an orchid that appears fragile on its long stem; a work entitled Ecstasy with a base of broad horizontal brushstrokes in grey, copper and steel blue, evaporating as they rise into delicate, elliptical wisps of contour; black Chinese characters on the white base of a table lamp; and in the centre of it all a large table covered with a white cloth on which sit three pots of different-sized Chinese brushes and large molten-coloured rocks engraved into name seals.
After the calligraphy is hung, I try to make out the characters, which at first I think are simply in a style too cursive to recognise. No wonder I am confused: I was thinking in the wrong idiom. 'The left one is the word 'man' in French,' Shan explains when I give up. 'On the right, that's the French word for 'cliff'.'
French words written vertically in sweeping Chinese brushstrokes. The image seems to encapsulate Shan herself: she is best known for three published novels all set in China but written in French. Each one has been critically acclaimed. Novels one and three won the prestigious French Goncourt prize; novel two, the Prix Cazes.
At the age of 30, Shan has mastered and bridged cultures in a way few writers have. Born and raised in Beijing, she was pressed by her mother - a professor and researcher in linguistics who has written one novel - to pursue the arts. At six, when her brother went to take exams to enter a music conservatory in Haidian district, the intellectual heart of Beijing, Shan tagged along. Without having registered, she took the exam anyway. Her brother failed; she was accepted into the conservatory, where she took up the lute-like Chinese pipa.
Already a calligrapher and painter, at 12 Shan won a national prize for poetry writing in Chinese, a talent that she taught herself. At the end of senior middle school, she was accepted into China's number one seat of learning, Beijing University, where she planned to study Chinese culture.