Through the past, darkly
The past came to Wang Gang like snowflakes. It was 1999 and three years since he had started, but not finished, writing English, the book that was to become his best-selling coming-of-age tale.
Wang, by then a published author and television producer, was nearly 39 years old and, as he recalls, wandering around the campus of his former school in Urumqi, Xinjiang, he already felt like an old man.
'It was winter when I returned there,' he says. 'It snows quite hard and the snow remains fresh and white, especially on my campus. There are a lot of old trees and when the sun shines, the snow melts from icicles, dripping from rooftops. It evoked a lot of memories of my childhood and adolescence. When I walked around the campus, I really wished to meet somebody from my old days, my teachers. In my memories they are still as young as I was then. But on campus I felt like a very old man. Every teacher I came across was much younger than me.
'These things from the past came at me like snowflakes.'
The recollections gave Wang the breakthrough he needed to go back to work on the novel, which was set in the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. But he also knew that to write a book 'you need more than memories', you need an idea.
His idea was to avoid the pattern of some writers from what he calls his 'father's generation', who framed the period in black and white, with the good people suffering and the bad plotting.
'I found that many old people, when they recall their past during the Cultural Revolution, they are the victims. They talk about how they were hurt and victimised, but I found that they also did things that were wrong and harmed other people. They only speak about their grievances and never about the crimes they committed.
'It is as if only other people were at fault and they are innocent. In the memoirs and articles they wrote ... their reflections on themselves and their regrets are rather limited. Every one of them is a criminal but they do not admit it.
'But I believe it is difficult to distinguish who was good and who was bad during the Cultural Revolution. So I tried to write a book that would be totally different from those of my father's generation.'
Doing so meant leaving out graphic accounts of the physical brutality routinely visited upon the victimised. Wang says he is unmoved by even the most detailed accounts of violence and that he didn't want to give the impression of trying to attract readers with similar material.
'But what should I write about if I didn't write about cruelty? This was one of the challenges,' he says.
The result is a world where it is not easy to distinguish between perpetrator and persecuted, where children and adults wield enormously destructive powers. 'From a very early age children were encouraged to tell on each other. We were constantly hungry and were told we were the happiest people in the world,' he says.
As author and reviewer Lijia Zhang wrote of English in the South China Morning Post: 'The key metaphor of the book, a Chinese-English dictionary, supposedly the only one in town, becomes the object of 12-year-old Liu's desire because it represents a new world he longs to reach. He even tries to steal the dictionary - breaking his leg in the process. Among the unfamiliar words he discovers are 'mercy' and 'compassion', baffling amid the cruel reality around him ... There is something uplifting about the book: it shows that human dignity exists even during the darkest days.'
As a screenwriter, Wang's credits include A World Without Thieves. Based on a novella by Zhao Benfu, the film stars Andy Lau Tak-wah and Rene Liu as a couple of career swindlers whose success is legendary. It earned a Golden Horse Award in 2005 for best screenplay adaptation. But for now, Wang's career seems to be in the bookshops rather than in movie theatres.
Since finishing English, Wang has turned his literary attentions to his decade-long sojourn in the freewheeling world of property development. That has inspired the book The Curse of Forbes, whose second instalment is forthcoming.
Wang is undoubtedly an authority on the business; from his well-appointed apartment in south Beijing, he agrees that he is a beneficiary of the mainland's economic reforms.
'In today's era of opening up and reform, I have lived much better than other people,' he says. '[But I still feel that] humanity is a strange animal.'
