Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 8/8-9/8)

Yilin Zhong in Sydney. March 2017

https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU

Novel Chinatown Interview

(Part 8/8)

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 8-9 video length: 12’56’’


Interviewer: (In Chinese)Why do you want to answer these questions in English?

Yilin Zhong: The reason I want to talk in English is, even though Chinese is my mother tongue language, some kind of thing is quite weird, that when I was writing this novel, even I was writing it in Chinese, but you know, I was educated in the UK, and all those kind of illegal immigration things and the literary theories, such as subaltern studies, and post-colonial studies, and so on, all those literary terms I’d learned in England, from the English context. So even though I wrote this novel, the fiction in Chinese, actually the main spirit, or the main thought behind this story, behind this fiction, are all in English. That was ten years ago.

That’s why when I was getting interviewed by the Chinese media, when I was talking about it, even I was talking in Chinese, but everything I was talking about was actually English culture, you understand? It’s the English literary theory, or Western literary theory, or the Western culture/understanding of this kind of thing. So it’s quite tricky.

I still regard myself as a Chinese, but in some way, I think my spirit or my soul was constructed by the Western culture and Chinese culture altogether. So I feel more comfortable to speak in English when I was talking about this fiction in depth. About its construction, about its background behind, and its literary theory things and understanding, and the cultural thing. And another reason is because all the story was happening in London, in the UK, so I should have written it in English, but I couldn’t, my English is just not that good enough, but when I was trying to express my thought deep in depth about how I created this story, how I created this fiction, I would prefer to use English, not my mother tongue but still a kind of, my mother tongue of theory.

Interviewer: (In Chinese)Is it also for English audience, in order to make them understand this, or hope they can have some new law or rules to protect those illegal migrants?

Yilin Zhong: No no no, it’s none of my business. I’m a writer, all I concern or all I do is just to write a fictional story as good as possible. That’s my aim. Whatever happened AFTER the work is written or published, it’s none of my business anymore. I don’t care about the audience to be honest, so even if some readers love this book, or hate this book, it’s none of my business anymore. I don’t care. I wrote it, you can choose to like it, or not like it, it’s not my business.

It’s like my baby. Okay, I bear a baby, I educated the baby, and whatever when the baby become an adult, that’s him. It’s nothing to do with me anymore, I’m just his mother, that’s it.

Interviewer: (In Chinese)When you were walking on the Greenleaf Street where you used to live, what kind of feeling you have? Is it a kind of lost memory, or something you tried to remember? Because when we visited there the other day, you couldn’t even remember which house is it now. Do you feel you have abandoned that piece of memory, but now you are back to walk in there again?

Yilin Zhong: When I was walking alongside the Greenleaf road that day, actually I don’t feel much homesick or anything. Because that was just one place I have lived in the UK, in London. Probably one of ten, or one of twelve, because I have been living here for fifteen years and I cannot remember how many houses I have lived already.

It’s just a kind of memory of my past, even though I couldn’t even remember what the door number is, where I was living, but, as I said, it doesn’t matter. Because all those characters, all those friends, were still vivid in my mind, and they were never disappearing. No matter where I live, no matter where I used to live, it doesn’t matter. Because all those people, all their story, and their lives, were still in my mind, in my memory, it will be everlasting.

Interviewer: (In Chinese) You said the physical Chinatown is a kind of imagined community, do you think the Chinatown in your book is also an imagined community?

Yilin Zhong: Definitely. Any kind of Chinatown is a kind of imagined community. It’s just by different ways.

For example, I went to Paris and I went to New York, they all have Chinatown as well. It’s actually a massive big Chinatown, comparing with London ones; London one is very small in the central (London), just one very small corner street, with some Chinese restaurants, but in New York for example, they have a massive (area), a kind of zone, the whole area is complete Chinese restaurants and Chinese supermarket, and everything. They got everything. There’s no difference between the New York Chinatown and the actual small town in China, at all.

Even though, even everything is in reality, still it’s a kind of imaginary community, because we all know it’s not China, we all know it’s in America or in London. So it all happens, the word China is all happened in people’s mind, in their imagination.

It is one of the very famous literary theories, in the late twentieth century, I know it’s quite interesting, now it’s not really up-to-date, but still, that content is there. That’s why I said I would prefer to be interviewed in English, because all those thoughts I have is in English, and if I were to say it in Chinese, I’ll have to translate everything. That’s a kind of tricky (thing to do). But only in this kind of way.

Interviewer: (In Chinese)When you create a person in your fiction, how do you do it?

Yilin Zhong: How do I create those fictional characters, this is a very complicated question. Because technically, it requires a lot of work to do, and I will try to answer it in a simple way.

When I was young, I started to write short stories, fiction of course, at eleven or twelve years old, and some were released in the same year when I was twelve -- assuming it was written well, otherwise it wouldn’t be released in Shanghai Youth literary magazine. At that point, all characters are completely purely fictional, because nothing happened at all, the one released in Shanghai magazine.

It’s a story about how a boy, ‘I’ was a boy in the fiction, ‘I’, the boy how to save people from the fire accident; it’s about that story. It’s a very short story, I think no more than one thousand words? But it was fine. It was fine even when I read it today. But the whole story is fictional, and the characters, ‘I’, a boy was a fictional as well, so how to create that story, and how to create that character? I think it’s just something natural at that moment, because I don’t have that experience at all, I’ve never experienced any fire accident and save people or something. It just came out, I don’t know why I wrote it actually, even now.

It just happened. But that was not the first fiction I have written. The first fiction I wrote, -- it’s quite interesting, I think, for my writing history, that’s quite interesting, I never remembered this, but today by this question, now I remember, the first ever fiction I wrote about, was I as a man, a boy, teenager, same age as me, oh no, I was twelve at that time, but I wrote a guy who is fourteen years old. Why fourteen years, you will know it very soon. He, ‘I’ in the short story, I fell in love with my next table classmate, who is a girl. She’s very pretty.

Not because she is pretty I fell in love with her, but because we had some deep communication or whatever, you could call it soul mate or whatever. (laughed) And then we communicated very well, so I had some special feeling for her, and I think I was in love with her. But, in China, it was completely banned, you could never fall in love before you were eighteen or something like that. So it was completely destroyed by our teacher, the middle school teacher, and then I was really sad.

Video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuEmIT1UkZE

Finally the end of the story is, because of that, the girl had to be leaving, be forced to leave this middle school we used to study together, and she was sent to another middle school by her parents -- only because, we didn’t even touch hands, but she fell in love with me, or I fell in love with her, or something like that, everything was just purely by talking, we never had any physical touch at all, but because of that, she had to leave the school and changed to another school, and ‘I’ as a boy, a fourteen years old boy, I felt so confused by this. And the title of this short story, was ‘Confusing’, or how do I translate it, ‘The Complicated Puzzle’. (laughing)

So that’s the story I wrote when I was twelve, and I’ve never experienced any romantic or you know, emotional feeling, or something like that; but I wrote this story as my first work. Please note, that the first story and the second story I wrote, (in those stories,) ‘I’ was always a boy.

(Laughing) I don’t know why. It’s a kind of, complete fictitious thing, that’s why I think I really enjoy being a fictional character. Now I’m just creating another female fictitious character ‘Juliet’, as me.

--- The End ----

Written by: Yilin Zhong