Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 4/8-5/8)

Yilin Zhong in Chinatown. July 2017

https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU

Novel Chinatown Interview

(Part 4/8-5/8)

Time: 16th February 2017

Venue: London

Interviewer: UCL Documentary Film student Shi Yi Han

Interviewee: Yilin Zhong (Author of book Chinatown)

Topic: Chinatown, the novel

Part 4-5 video length: 9’41’’

Yilin Zhong: (continued) If you look at all those backgrounds, and if you dig inside all those characters’ possibilities, that’s quite another story already, I could have written a pure novel just about his mother. But that’s not my job, my job is trying to focus on A-bao: why she became a prostitute, one by one step. That’s the most important key point, and I couldn’t erase that, I couldn’t delete that part. I couldn’t lie to all my readers, just to make this story seems to be more reasonable, or seems to be more believable, or more like reality. I couldn’t do that.

Because it is what happened, and I couldn’t change it on this point, very very crucial, cruel point. So I have to keep it. After that, of course, as other things happened, one by one, so she became a prostitute. But as I said, partly it’s her fault, but not all her fault. It’s just everything all added up together, and sadly, it just happened to her.

And trust me, everyone, every single character has their story line, and they have their logic of doing all kind of mad things, even mad things. As I said, even her boyfriend’s mother, she did that for a reason. She became psycho for a reason. And that was a reason our artist or writer needs to find out.

Interviewer: (In Chinese)When you are presenting their lives, you are more presenting their motivation in the background, the social situation that driving them have become such persons?

Yilin Zhong: Yes. That’s my understanding: if you want to make your character as true as in reality, you have to find out everything in the background, what happened before that and after that. Because every character, they are not existing just for this one piece of paper, one piece of the story, they have their own history. They have their personal history, they have their background, they have their family and relationship, their emotional experience, everything behind them. 

It’s not like the Hollywood film, sometimes you just see a character, the only reason he appeared in this film, was just to be killed, for example, just for two seconds. In a novel writing or in a fictional writing, you cannot do that. If you want to make all your characters stand up as a character, as a real person, you have to find all their past and all their future. You have to give them a story line and their logic to become today.

Interviewer: The before and after, based on the actual reality, or this could just be generalized by imagination?

Yilin Zhong: Technically for writing, you have to do that as a writing (imagination), if it’s a pure fictional character. That’s for me. That’s how I work. But taking this example, A-bao, she got a real sample from the reality life, so I took those five key points to create this story and created her life. But in any way, whether your material was from the reality, or you’re completely writing a fiction, still, that’s what I’m talking about, if you want your character to be stand up as a real person, you have to construct her with her bones, with her muscle, blood, mind, heart, organs, everything. Otherwise it will be a paper, it would be a piece of paper, it’s not a character, it’s a fake one (person).

That’s why lots of my readers after reading my novels, always think: ‘Oh, he must be a real man! She must be a real woman!’ They don’t believe it’s all fictional. Because I did all the work.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ss9BuQ-eqzQ

Interviewer: How do you collect stories?

Yilin Zhong: OK, how do I collect all my stories, all my materials. I think for all writers, if you want to be a writer, the first thing is you need to collect all the materials. Some writers, they do write based on their own experience, their experience of their past, their own childhood, experience of everything. I could have done that as well. But my way is more naturally, that I collect all the stories while I’m growing up and I’m living. 

So that’s the way I collect all the stories. But I never mean to do that with some kind of purpose of writing a novel. I never do that. So there is some difference. I don’t do like, I want to write a novel, then I go to live with them, and I collect all the material, no, I never do that.

What I do is, I just live naturally and see what happens. Whatever the life brings to me, I will remember it, I will get it, but I never have any purpose to use them one day. Until one day, suddenly there’s some point, which I will call it as inspiration. For me, only one day when I met some kind of point as my inspiration, the I will think, OK, I need to write this down. I only write it as a kind of work or fiction or whatever, until one day the inspiration comes out. Maybe to other people or other writers it’s not called inspiration, because for them, the material itself is a kind of inspiration, but for me it’s different.

I got all the material already in my past life, but I need some point. It’s like a box, I gathered all those, all my past experience and life into a box, and I need the key. So my inspiration is not the box at all, because it’s always there, in my heart, in my memory, but I need a key. As long as one day, suddenly I got one inspiration or the key, then the box will be opened. Then I will see, okay, what’s inside, I need to find this, and this, okay, this will be the work for me. I put it aside, and then I start to structure the work I am going to write. 

But as I said, the inspiration is far more important to me, because it’s not very often I could get it. I have to wait for the muse, otherwise I just couldn’t write. Even all the material is there, in my box, and there’s a plenty of them. Sometimes I even forget because it’s too much. And I never writing them down, because I believe if something is important, I’ll always remember it; if something is not that important, then I will just forget it. So there’s no point that I write down every day of my life, there’s no point of that. But when one day when I want to write about something, about this or that, then I will try to recall all my memories.

Now it comes to another question. We all know that, when you are getting older, you got more experience and you got more materials of course, so, how could you write as a young writer?

Let’s say, I started my creative writing when I was five, I wrote poems, and then I started to write short stories when I was eleven or twelve, and I started to write my first novel when I was fourteen. At that age, when I was five, twelve, and fourteen, how could I get that much experience to write a novel? I’m just a teenager, I know nothing. I even don’t know how to write all the Chinese characters yet. So how could I got all those experience? That’s another thing.

For all those young writers, I would say, don’t worry, you have the best thing that I don’t have right now. Even though I got all the material, all my experience, and all the skills on how to write, but you have one thing that I don’t have right now: Passion.

You have passion. So even though your material is poor, your experience is less than us, but you have passion. You have your love. You have the passion of everything includes writing. You have passion of love, you have the natural born elements, so don’t worry about it, if I have started to write a novel or fiction when I was twelve, you can do it as well. It’s all about if you want it. If you want it, you will have it.

Interviewer: When you are a young writer, do you think you are more into your passion?

Yilin Zhong: I think so. Actually I think, if you read my another novel, Personal Statement, I wrote it when I was twenty-three years old. I just graduated from the university, not having much experience on the society at all, but I wrote a novel about the whole Beijing’s cycle, the society. In that book, all kinds of people, all kinds of level of the society, I wrote all those characters in that novel. It’s called Personal Statement. I wrote it when I was twenty-three...(to be continued.)

 (End of part 4/8-5//8)


Written by Yilin Zhong