November 17, 2017
MONTREAL — Xue Yiwei, who has been hailed as China’s “most charismatic literary stylist,” is virtually unknown among English-language readers. With the recent English translation in Canada of his 2010 novel “Dr. Bethune’s Children,” which is written in the form of letters to Norman Bethune, a Canadian doctor who died on the front lines of the Communist resistance to the Japanese occupation in 1939, that is about to change.
Mr. Xue is not unlike the narrator of his book, a Chinese historian living in exile in Canada who has become disillusioned with his birth country. He moved to Montreal from Shenzhen 16 years ago on a “skilled immigrant” visa. He is still widely read in China, and his collections of short stories and essays have made critics’ Top 10 lists in Asia, but his recent experience trying to get “Dr. Bethune’s Children” published in China has made him a bit disillusioned with his birth country.
One after another, editors turned him down. “Dr. Bethune’s Children” couldn’t appear, Mr. Xue was told, because the attitude of the novel’s expatriate narrator was judged as harmful to China’s reputation. One editor in Beijing presented a detailed plan to restructure the novel in a way that would elide references to the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, subjects that remain taboo in China. Mr. Xue refused to make the changes, and decided to seek publication outside of China. A Chinese-language edition of “Dr. Bethune’s Children” was released in Taiwan in 2014.
This puts Mr. Xue, 53, in an unusual position: He is neither completely banned, nor completely accepted in his native country. Authors who live in China and write about controversial topics often find their entire oeuvre banned, while writers who regularly get into print are suspected of self-censorship. Almost all published authors belong to the China Writers Association, which demands its members pledge their loyalty to the Communist Party; Mr. Xue never joined. Of his 16 novels and collections of essays and short stories, all but three have been published in China. The problem, for Mr. Xue, is that the books currently banned there, “Dr. Bethune’s Children” among them, are the ones he deems his most important.
Mr. Xue is considered a “maverick” in modern Chinese literary circles, said Ha Jin, the National Book Award-winning author of “Waiting.” “He is outside the literary apparatus, completely on his own.” Added Mr. Ha, who is based in Boston: “Established writers in China may pay attention to big ideas but they are so isolated and confined within the system they can’t really think differently.”
The line between unfettered self-expression and maintaining a readership in China is one Mr. Xue has been walking since he made his literary debut in 1989 with “Desertion,” about an amateur philosopher’s Kafkaesque efforts to quit his government job. A month after he published that first novel, he joined in the protests in Beijing and Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province. He recorded his response to the suppression of protest in Tiananmen Square, and elsewhere in China, in a novella titled “December 31, 1989,” which captured the mood of dejection among his intellectual friends and was published in magazines in Taiwan and Guangzhou.
“The reaction to its publication was very severe,” Mr. Xue recalled as he sat on the balcony of his apartment in a high-rise overlooking Montreal’s Mount Royal Park. “They never came to me personally, but they came to my friends. They tried to shut down the magazine I had written for. I still don’t know who ‘they’ were. Somebody, a friend, told me I should not write any more. For my own benefit. Those words were very important for me.”
For five years, Mr. Xue refrained from publishing under his own name. He returned to school, earning a doctorate in linguistics at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. The few stories he wrote were published under a pseudonym.
Mr. Xue’s literary rehabilitation came in 1997, by which time he’d found a comfortable position teaching Chinese literature at Shenzhen University. “Desertion,” ignored by reviewers when it was published, won a major award in Taiwan, and a leading critic in Beijing counted it among China’s most important philosophical novels. By then, however, he had already decided to move to Montreal.
“I could see what was happening in China,” he said. “At the high point of my writing, I had to hide myself. Even after that, the conversation with publishers was not comfortable.”
Mr. Xue enrolled in literature courses at the Université de Montréal. A period of extraordinary productivity followed, during which Mr. Xue’s reputation in his homeland grew, but he remained almost unknown to readers outside of China.
“I marginalized myself,” Mr. Xue said. “Voluntarily. But I remained an essential writer on the literary scene in China.”
According to Michael Berry, a professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, “It makes sense that Xue wants to be removed from the cacophony of changes happening in China every day. The outsider perspective living in Montreal lets him explore opinions a writer in China wouldn’t dare to touch upon.”
Initially a safe haven in which to write, Montreal has become a home for Mr. Xue and he’s excited about the public attention and awards he’s received in his adopted country. In April he accepted the Diversity Prize at Montreal’s Blue Metropolis Festival for the English translation of his short story collection, “Shenzheners,” which is modeled on James Joyce’s “Dubliners.”
Mr. Xue’s long expatriation in Montreal has also increased his confidence and fluency in English; he rewrote many of the passages in “Dr. Bethune’s Children” for the English translation. The growing recognition of his work in Europe and North America also means that opportunities for self-expression, as well as his literary future, will no longer depend on being published in China. Yet he worries that one day his voice will no longer be heard there.
“In this materialistic era, I believe literature is more crucial than ever for the conscience of my motherland,” Mr. Xue said.
On his balcony, Mr. Xue opened a parcel that had just arrived in the mail, one he’d been awaiting, he said, for a quarter-century. It contained three hardcover copies of a new Swedish translation “The Empty Nest,” his fourth novel, first published in 2014.
“When I was at my lowest point,” said Mr. Xue, “after I’d been told I shouldn’t write any more, a friend told me, ‘Don’t worry, in 25 years you’ll be published in Stockholm.’”
With a slight smile, he added: “I guess that day has come.”
Taras Grescoe is the author of “Shanghai Grand: Forbidden Love, Intrigue and Decadence in Old China.”
