CWN#6.5: A Conversation with Ban Yu
The past and future of "New Dongbei Literature"
Welcome back to the Cold Window Newsletter! The next full post on internet fiction is not ready to come out of the oven yet, so in the meantime, I want to share some segments of a conversation I had with the Dongbei (Northeastern) author Ban Yu 班宇 in Shenyang earlier this year. Ban Yu was the third author featured in this newsletter for a reason—he’s one of my favorite storytellers, mostly because of how he mixes tense plots and stark landscapes with occasional sudden bursts of tenderness and lyricism. In the last few months, he’s appeared in English in Granta (the story “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” 《肃杀》, translated by the inimitable Tony Hao) and topped the annual Harvest Literary Magazine best short story list with a mystical new story in Chinese called 《飞鸟与地下》 “The Bird and Underground.” 《逍遥·游》 Carefree Days, a 2023 film adaptation of the short story with the same title, will have its first mainland Chinese release later this year.
Below, Ban Yu and I talk all things “New Dongbei Literature”: its genesis among the children of Shenyang’s laid-off factory workers, its rise into (and imminent departure from?) the national spotlight, and whether we should be using the term “Dongbei Renaissance” at all.1
For more insight into the national (and increasingly international) phenomenon of Dongbei literature, I strongly recommend Granta’s interview with Wu Qi 吴琦, editor of the Chinese literary journal One-Way Street 《单读》。An excerpt of the interview is newly available on Paper Republic. Look out as well for Hunter, a new collection of fiction by Shuang Xuetao and translated by Jeremy Tiang, out later this year.
Andrew Rule: How do you, as an author, see the relationship between Dongbei stories and their non-Dongbei readers within China?
Ban Yu: Many people from Dongbei who read my stories tell me that it feels like I’m writing about their own family. The stories reawaken a part of a shared experience inside these readers. Their perspective when they enter the story, and my perspective as the writer of the story, are more or less identical, or at have a lot of overlap.
But for non-Dongbei readers, at least in my experience, their understanding of the Northeast in recent years mostly comes popular media. Dongbei has become something for people to look at; it’s very easy for it to become a kind of spectacle.
If they’re relatively knowledgeable readers, then their earliest understanding of Dongbei might come from Xiao Jun 萧军, Xiao Hong 萧红, Duanmu Hongliang 端木蕻良, these writers from the 1930s. But most readers from outside Dongbei might feel that they’re reading a sort of literary skit, that they’re getting a chance to understand these Dongbei people a little better, maybe more deeply than they could through a skit.2 So I think that’s what their initial impression would be.
But also, so many more people have read your work by now than back in 2018 or 2019. That must also affect how people approach Dongbei fiction today as well.
It does affect it a bit. It’s true, many of these stories, including Shuang Xuetao’s and mine and some of Zheng Zhi’s as well, are a sort of rumination on memory. Our stories from around 2018 brought people back to the turn of the millennium, which basically all Dongbei readers had experienced, or at least had some memory of it.3 That period of our experience might not have been brought up much in Chinese literature up to that point.
When authors like Mo Yan and Yu Hua write about the 1980s, they often take rural areas as the default setting. But Shenyang was one of the earliest industrial centers, and its urbanization happened on the early side, so I often think of our category of Dongbei fiction as city literature.
City literature?
Yes, and that’s quite different from those stories that are rooted in the countryside. Most of us were born in the 1980s, and I discover that writer friends my age who come from elsewhere in China, from Jiangnan for instance, still conceptualize their lives around the countryside. But, for us, we were already had “child of the city” as part of our identity growing up. Those other writers might write more about small-town life, or village life, but those things are totally absent in my memory. I never experienced them. My life always took place among factory complexes and workers’ apartments. I can only sincerely write my own experience.
It’s true, I’ve noticed that in all the Dongbei fiction that I’ve read before, whether it’s Shuang Xuetao, Zheng Zhi, or Yang Zhihan, village life almost never enters into it.
Because we don’t have that kind of life experience! That material just doesn’t move us.
The “child generation” (子一代) narrative style is another characteristic of your group of writers. That’s also quite different from the prior generation of Chinese authors writing about history.
This has to do with the position of the narrator. I find that our narrators often occupy the same position, which is that of an observer of history. What is the “child generation”? Well, back then, I was a young person, a child. I could only observe my parents’ generation, my mother and father, and watch how they navigated the waves of that period—the waves of the economic transition—and then loyally and truthfully record it all. I mean, that period seemed to drop some people right off a cliff, others plunged down into a lake of fire, and a few people moved straight upwards, like they were taking an elevator into the clouds. So you were exposed to a huge abundance of scenes and images. The “child generation” isn’t just an age group, it’s not just an identity; more than that, it’s a way to achieve as clear-minded and restrained of an observer’s point of view as possible.
I’ve thought quite a bit about the bystander quality of these narrators, because it’s actually quite related to translation. I’ve always felt that, even though Dongbei fiction isn’t especially well-known in the West yet beyond Shuang Xuetao’s novellas, it’s still awaiting a much larger readership.
Did you see that recent issue of Granta?
Yes, exactly, I think that’s a sign that awareness is on the rise. I think this literature has huge potential in translation. And international readers are always looking at Chinese history from a bystander’s perspective. Even when they read a novel by Mo Yan, with more direct historical narration, there’s still a bit of distance there, which has to be filled in somehow. But stories from a bystander perspective might be easier to grab an international reader’s attention. It might feel more familiar.
I’m just thinking out loud here, but new Dongbei writing, and also new Southern Chinese writing, sometimes makes me think of American minority literature—you know, fiction by second-generation immigrants, like children of Dominican or Mexican immigrants. The United States has some great writers like this.
You’re right, I had never thought of this comparison.
But they really do give me a similar feeling. Because in our urban upbringings, we were dropped forcibly into these urban environments. The cities didn’t grow naturally, they were planned: “From today onward there is a city here, you have to become a city dweller now, you have to have the basic qualities of an urban factory worker now, you have to think like one.” This was a break with all of Chinese tradition up until then—the formation of a totally new tradition.
I can see the connection, especially for Latino immigrant literature, which very often is narrated from the viewpoint of children. Asian-American literature has this too.
Have you read anything by Junot Díaz? I really like his novels. But it’s quite interesting, it seems that this group of American writers mostly also started to become truly popular after 2000. So we’re actually all writing from a similar period in time.
Do you think that concepts like “Dongbei Renaissance” and “New Northeast Writers’ Group” are becoming detached from what is actually being written?
I think terms like these are just a rough generalization. You can’t clearly say what the defining characteristics of any of the writers in these groups actually are. These terms are a sort of marketing, a way that the media talks about it. It’s up to every reader, every listener, every viewer to reconsider all of these authors on their own merits and differentiate between them, try to understand what each one is trying to say.
Still, while I don’t really accept these terms, I also don’t totally reject them. I don’t think they have much to do with my own writing—they’re just phrases used by others. I just want to do my own thing.
Actually, we’re already seven or eight years into the “Dongbei Renaissance,” or since our earliest work started to become recognized. How can you keep talking about the same things [memories of the laid-off generation]? If you keep talking about them, you’re going to start repeating yourself. Of course, Dongbei is like a treasure trove, it still has deeper veins of history that can be pulled out.
If you and other writers gradually write less and less that’s directly related to the laid-off generation, will the concept of “New Northeast Writing” still remain useful?
This is a great question. I think that this concept is both geographically and temporally specific. It might only exist between, for example, 2018 and 2028—that might the only time this group of authors produces work within that category. In a few years, we might not write about these things anymore, and then we’ll only have a shared origin left, which is that we’re all from Dongbei.
If you use this very constricted definition of “New Northeast Writing,” it seems that there are actually very few authors who write within it.
Yeah, only a few.
Will there be more in the future?
I don’t really think there will be more. Shuang Xuetao and the rest of us, we’re all basically the same age, children of the 80s. The next group of writers to emerge will definitely be younger than us. They don’t have personal experience of that period of decollectivization. “New Dongbei literature” really is a temporally specific concept: it only exists among these few authors for these few years. It’s like a crystal—it formed, it occupied a certain time and space, and what comes afterward won’t really be a part of it anymore.
Thanks for reading! Soon: several ways of looking at the fractal madness of Chinese internet fiction genres. See you then.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. I may share some other highlights from my conversations with Dongbei authors in the future, and in general I’m hoping to feature more conversations about literature in this space going forward. If you want to talk, reach out!
For slightly older generations, much of the Northeast’s cultural footprint on the rest of China came from humorous, down-to-earth televised skits (小品). Most famous were those performed by the actor Zhao Benshan 赵本山 in the annual Spring Festival Gala, which have lived on as memes in the internet age.
Following the transition to a market economy and subsequent loss of profitability of many state-owned industries, factories in Northeastern China engaged in mass layoffs of workers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, crippling many urban communities in ways that are rarely acknowledged in official narratives of China’s economic development.