Su Tong still remembers the Little Red Book he clutched in his hand on his first day of school in 1969. It was the Cultural Revolution, and the six-year-old who would go on to become one of the mainland's best-known authors was excited about starting Qimen Primary in Suzhou. Yet school was a disappointment. 'There were 30 to 40 children in the class. We sat there and recited Chairman Mao's sayings. That was all we did,' he recalls 40 years later.
Su, born Tong Zhonggui in 1963 in the canal city of Suzhou, is the freshly minted Man Asian Literary Prize winner for The Boat to Redemption, published on the mainland in the spring and out in English this month. A novel about a father and son living in self-exile on a riverboat during and after the Cultural Revolution, Su believes it's his best work ever. 'This isn't a simple coming-of-age story or a look back at the Cultural Revolution, it's a novel about a quest, for love and hate, for father and mother, for identity,' he says by telephone from Nanjing.
Su has often pushed the boundaries. He is fond of telling how, following plenty of rejections, his first short story appeared in Youth Spring magazine in 1983 after an editor took it to read on the toilet. Things picked up from there and Su gained domestic and international fame with Wives and Concubines, a novella trilogy made into Raise the Red Lantern by award-winning film director Zhang Yimou in 1991.
Su has long been fascinated with the experiences of childhood and loves paraphrasing Russian writer Leo Tolstoy: 'No matter what you write about, in the end you always return to your childhood.' The roots of his own writing stretch back to a poor, brick-floored home by a north Suzhou canal. A Cultural Revolution childhood wasn't lacking in drama.
There was the summer of 1966, with violence at its peak, when a bullet slammed into their front door. A mob, emboldened by the lawlessness, was shooting randomly. The bullet became a jewel in the memory box of Su's mind. 'It is my first memory and it points to my future as a writer.'
Another, entirely different memory may have been even more formative, giving Su's works a philosophical depth missing from other contemporary Chinese writers: the power of loneliness. At nine, he was diagnosed with nephritis, or inflammation of the kidneys, and was left home alone for a year. His maternal grandmother lived with them 'but she had a son with a grandson, so that was more important. She used to go to take care of him,' Su remembers.