Yilin Zhong

《唐人街看不见的居民们》|Chinatown’s invisible residents A screenshot of a map showing Chinatown in central London’s Soho. Home to Chinese restaurants, bakeries and other Chinese-run businesses, it is a popular tourist destination. Zhong looks beneath this surface in “Chinatown”. 《上海日报》的英文报道：《唐人街看不见的居民们》（作者：须勤  中文翻译：钟宜霖） Chinatown’s invisible residents By Xu Qin | August 30, 2015, Sunday | ILLEGAL immigrants have rarely been welcome in any place, at any time in history. And by their legal status — or rather lack of it — they are often invisible to much of the general population; non-citizens. “Most people have only the faintest idea of how their life is ‘under the radar’ because, as part of the subaltern class, they tend to hide away from the public eye, and are thus invisible,” writer Zhong Yilin told Shanghai Daily at a recent interview. 非法移民历来很少会在任何地方收到欢迎。由于他们的法律身份--或者说缺乏合法的身份--在大多数情况下，他们都是一个看不见的群体：非居民。 “大多数人对这个神秘群体的生活一无所知，作为底层群体的一部分，他们大多都会试图躲避公众的视线，所以才会变得看不见。”作家钟宜霖在访谈中告

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 s

Yilin Zhong in New York, June 2016 https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 6/8-7/8) 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 6-7 video length: 14’07’’ Yilin Zhong: (continued) But you know what, now I’m forty, I couldn’t write that book now. Even though all those memories and all those events are still there, and I still remember them all, if you destroy that book and ask me to write that again, I couldn’t do it now. That’s the difference. Because I had passion at that time, I had the passion to write down all those stories that happened around me in Beijing, at that time. I had all those experience, it’s not perfect experience, but I had passion to write them down in that way. Now I’m forty, those stories and those experiences I still have it, but I can never write it down again. Because I lost

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 poi

Yilin Zhong in Paris https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU Novel Chinatown Interview (Part 3/8) 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 3 video length: 11’46’’ Yilin Zhong: (continued) I was the lucky one. But to meet those people is not the only lucky part I had, another lucky part I had is, I wrote them. I wrote them down. I didn’t imagine I would have written them down myself, even, but it just happened. I wrote it twelve years ago, it was a book I wrote twelve years ago, but as I said, it was so difficult to get published, that’s why it was just released recently. Because the main society just thought, those people are not important, those people are not existing, why would we bother, to even write about it? Interviewer: (In Chinese) Can you talk about how fiction presenting the theme of reality? My question i

(Novel Chinatown book cover) Novel Chinatown Documentary Interview (Part 2/8) 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 2 video length: 11’48’’ https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU Yilin Zhong: (continued) So Chinatown is the best example of that (literary theory). Now that’s the first impression Chinatown gave to me when I was just a student, and I was a tourist as well, at the first week I came over to London, that’s the scene I have seen. So apart from I felt, oh, everything here is from China, that’s so good! So I can have Chinese food, and I could meet Chinese people even in London, that’s quite exciting. But apart from that, nothing more. Nothing much more. Because I only left China for about one week, there’s not much difference I would tell, at that point. However, one year later, when I was trying to finish m

Yilin Zhong in London on 9/9/2017 Novel Chinatown Documentary Interview (Part 1/8) Time: 16 th  February 2017 Venue: London Interviewer: UCL Documentary Film student Shi Yi Han Interviewee: Yilin Zhong (Author of book Chinatown) Topic: Chinatown, the novel Part 1 video length: 11’48’’ https://youtu.be/KvciZDc_cWU Interviewer: (In Chinese) Shall we talk about the name, you name this novel ‘Chinatown’, do you think this is the real scene of Chinatown in your heart? Yilin Zhong: The reason I named this book as Chinatown, I have said it in the postscript, that initially I couldn’t find what the main subject or theme of this book is, and that’s why although I had met those people two years ago before I started writing it, in the past two years, I couldn’t have written it, only because I couldn’t find a line, or the story line, or whatever you call the theme, to write about it. And the reason I wrote about it was (two years later) I met Amazon’s

【伦敦单身日记】之    露天花园的周末派对：论成为作家的必要条件 随便想起来写两句。 昨天和闺蜜去酒吧的时候，在门口被一个英国男人搭讪，假装问路，我们随便敷衍了他几句后离开，然后我对她说：“这人一看就是个想跟我们搭讪的。”女友笑道：“是啊，一个英国人还跟我们俩（中国人）问路，不过看着衣着倒也还行，过得去。”我说：“什么啊，一听他开口说话就知道他层次不高，虽然上过大学但是没什么教养，我不用看他脸（而且我也的确压根连看都没看他一眼）就知道他是 working class 出身的人。”女友大笑道：“不会吧？你就这么几句话（他总共跟我们说了不到三句话）都能看出这些来？”我笑道：“那可不是，别忘了我是干什么的。” 少顷，我们俩在酒吧里坐了下来，看里面的人来人往。这是一家伦敦高级夜店，需要 VIP 或者客人名单才能进来，而且还要付入场费。理论上来说在这里走来走去的人都是有点档次，或者说有点身份的人。然并卵，我和女友虽然都是单身，却是一个男人也没有看上。好容易我看到了有一个长相和穿戴都还不错的男人，可惜又不是我喜欢的类型，于是我便跟女友笑道：“你身后 60 度的那个男的还不错，可惜不是我的菜。” 她回头看了一眼说：“人家已经有女朋友了啊，不是在跟她聊天吗？” 我说：“我们进来的时候他们才刚开始说话的，聊天还不到两分钟。” 女友再次惊讶：“这你也知道？” 我笑道：“这算什么啊，我还知道一定是这个女的主动搭讪他的，但他并不对这个女的感兴趣，他跟她现在聊天，只是因为他还没有找到他看上了的女生而已。” 女友听我这么说，已经完全不能够相信了。因为直到这时候，我们俩进入这家酒吧还不到五分钟。 我叹气：“你也不想想，我就是写小说的，我观察一个人只需要三十秒，就能看个底儿掉。我还告诉你吧，这个帅哥虽然长得还不错，但是个大男子主义者，而且今天晚上 （这天是星期五） 他是一个人到这里来喝酒的，说明他平时人缘也不好，很 tough ，不好相处，所以没什么朋友。” 女友已经惊得一句话都说不出来了。 然而，直到此时， 我所说的这些仍然完全没有任何证据可以证明，对吧？ 所以呢，和你们一样，她很容易就会想，既然你是写小说的，那么这些，一定就是你自己虚构出来的吧？ 哈哈。。那你们就错了。