Liang Hong Interview

Liang Hong, “No matter where the currents of this era take you, you have to keep hold of yourself”[1]

Introduction and Translation by Selena Orly and David Ownby

Introduction

Liang Hong (b. 1953) is a professor of literature at Renmin University in Beijing, as well as a novelist, but she is best known for her non-fiction work, particularly for what is now a trilogy based on Liang village, her hometown in Henan.   In the first volume, China in One Village 中国在梁庄 (2010), Liang “rediscovers” her home village after having lived in Beijing for some twenty years, spending several months there, talking with friends and family, taking stock of what has changed and what has not.  The second volume, Leaving Liang Village 出梁庄记 (2013), explores what migrant labor has meant to the village and villagers, and is based on interviews Liang carried out with some who had left and some who had returned.  Finally, in January this year, she published her third book, Liang Village Ten Years On 梁庄十年, noting the changes that have taken place in the village and its people’s lives over the course of the last decade. 

Throughout, she displays impressive gifts of sympathy, empathy, and narrative skill, as she tells villagers’ stories of family collapse, alienation, solitude, suicide, pollution, corruption, and political indifference—as well as of occasional triumphs and many instances of patient endurance.  The English-language version of Liang’s first volume just came out, ably translated by Emily Goedde, and would make excellent reading for students at all levels.

The interview translated here, published in the prestigious humanities journal Lens, appears to be part of a “pre-publication” publicity tour for the third volume of her trilogy, which came out earlier this year.  As such, it is “commodified” in the way that much of Chinese cultural life is now commodified, but the interview is interesting nonetheless, both for what Liang (and her 18 year-old son, also present at the interview) says as well as what she does not say. 

What she says is that it is high time to humanize China’s vast rural population, to get past the discourses of urban and rural, modern and traditional, and simply embrace them for what they are and what they have experienced.  What she does not say is anything having to do with politics.  There is no mention of reform and opening, of socialist transformation.  Her first book is similarly apolitical, perhaps suggesting that political discourse as practiced in China at present might be something else to set aside.     

Translation

In the future, I plan to write something about Liang Village every ten years

Lens: This year marks ten years since of the publication of China in One Village, and you just mentioned that you are writing a new book?

Liang Hong : When I realized it had been ten years, I was quite moved. Time flies. I've kept following it all these years, and wanted to write a Liang Village Ten Years On, where I would talk about what the village is like, and what has happened to the people I described in the first book ten years later.

My father passed away, as did some other elderly people, some houses were built, some spaces were reconfigured, it sort of sounds like a village gazetteer. So I would like to write about Liang Village every ten years, as long as I live, until my own death. This will be Liang Village in ten years, twenty years, thirty years, forty years ....... Can I make it forty years? I don't know (laughs), but in any case, it will be an ongoing record of the changes in a contemporary Chinese village.

Lens: What do you think has changed the most in Liang Village in this past decade, and is there anything that hasn’t changed?

Liang Hong : What has changed the most is people, and what has changed the least is also people. The passing of the generations is most obvious thing in the village. There are less old people,  while the newborn children are toddling around the village as they grow up. This is the biggest change, and the life cycle is very natural. But it also feels emotional, unlike in the city, where the neighbors who live across the street may not know each other and have no contact. Death in the village is very public, and everyone attends the funeral. At the same time, macro-level policies like the land policy also affect the future development of the entire village. It is still a very big trend for young people to leave the village to find work, but once they earn some money or get married and have children, they come back to the village and build a house, which is a particularly big change.

Lens: Many villages have encountered real problems in the process of modernization. Have things improved in Liang Village in the past ten years?

Liang Hong : The basic problems are still there, such as children's schooling, environmental problems, and problems of village management. But we can’t say nothing has changed. They’ve cleaned the river up a bit, and young people’s thinking and behavior have become more open. This is a slow process of change, but I think that in terms of  the overall situation, China's problems are still very prominent in the villages, and are particularly pronounced here.

Lens : Did you see a different hometown in Jia Zhangke's documentary?[2]

Liang Hong : There were some differences that stood out. Looking at my hometown through someone else’s eyes suddenly made me see how broken down our house is, how the river is not as big as I thought it was, how there was less water than I thought...I also felt quite embarrassed, like bringing a guest home and suddenly finding that the table is dirty. But more importantly, it confirmed me as a Liang Village person, because my thought was, why couldn’t things be a little better. This feeling is actually quite interesting.

It’s normal that your feelings about your hometown change

Lens: Your home village has always been the major theme of your works. Why is your hometown so important to you? What is the difference between you and your son’s views of your hometown? 

Liang Hong: Liang Village is my hometown, but not my son’s. He has lived in Beijing since he was a child and cannot possibly have the deep feelings for Liang Village that I do. This is the way things are, but this kind of change is also very natural. When I write about Liang Village, I write about the new generation of young people, peasants who go to work in the cities, and feelings the children of these migrant workers have for their hometown are relatively weak as well. These children have lived with their parents outside the village since they were little, and then suddenly they are sent back to the village to go school as a teenager. When that happens, they have to reconnect to the village, because they feel a certain distance as well.

So I think this kind of flesh-and-blood relationship may only exist for people like me who lived in the village for 20 years. Your childhood and youth have been grounded in it since the day you were born. You spend every day there, and every pain and joy you experience is shared with that place. So I can have feelings for the river, the trees, and the houses in the village. But this does not mean that kids now have no feelings. 

Lens: Actually, for many young people who grew up in the cities, the concept of a home village is meaningless, and their emotional connection with such a place is becoming weaker and weaker.

Liang Hong: I think it still has something to do with how individuals grow up, for example, for my son, Beijing is his hometown. (asking the son) Where do you think your hometown is?

Wang Yiliang: I don’t think I really have a hometown to speak of, although it sounds wrong when you say it like that. This place is where I live, I live here in Beijing, but to say it's my hometown doesn’t really stir up any deep emotion in me. Because I usually process a lot of information, I have to learn a lot of things in school every day, and when I get home from school, I’m on my cell phone, I listen to the radio, and see all kinds of things. It's not like the old days when I would walk down the street after school every day and look at the place I live. We have a lot less feelings for a particular place, and the natural emotional connection is not as deep as it once was. So I think it's an inevitable phenomenon that hometown feelings become weaker, it's a very normal thing.

Liang Hong: Another thing is that what we call our hometown is a place that people look back on after they have left a place where they have lived for a long time, and only then does it become a hometown.

Lens: When you were young, did you think about leaving home?

Liang Hong:  I don’t think I had any definite ideas about it.  But you should know that for all village children at the time, the reason why parents wanted you to study was so that you could buy your food instead of growing it, and change your residence permit from rural to non-rural.  If I could go to college, then I could teach, which meant that I would have a salary.  Otherwise, you have to rely on your labor, which meant that you might not have clothes to wear or food to eat.  The point of education in the villages is to get you to the point where you can pass the entrance exam and keep studying, at which point your life has more security.  I seem to have  been a bit slow to catch on to this, and I really can’t say whether it was my destiny to do what I do, that I absolutely had to get out of the village.  I think it was just that I really liked to read, and that that was a stronger motivation.  But at the same time, we were really poor, and school was the only way out.

Everyone is imagining what we call a village

Lens: Many people tend to think that the Chinese village is a deserted village, but this is perhaps because we are looking at the countryside with urban eyes, and in fact, people in the countryside have their own way of looking at things and would say that is not as bad as people imagine.  What do you think?

Liang Hong: I think the village is something that everyone is imaging, constructing in their mind’s eye what we call a hometown. Even if you’ve lived in the village for twenty years, once you leave it, it’s still your imagination. Our understanding of the village is often influenced by a much larger discourse, such as the common idea that "the city is better", and we tend to understand village life in a flat, simplistic way. As a living community, the village cannot be completely bad. It has lasted for so many thousands of years, and surely has the resilience to survive and move forward. It is surely not a bad habit that many people return to the village and build a house when they make some money.   Because it is their home, it is a very important place, and no matter if it is good or bad, it is always here, and to value that is a very basic emotion. I also think the countryside is very resilient, like a sponge, which always returns to its original shape.

We cannot say the village is a paradise, some kind a glorious place, because this surely is not what it is in real life. But neither can we say that the countryside is an extremely bad place with no sense of morality, and that should no longer exist. You can’t make simple judgements of a thing, be it the village or the city, because in fact both are very complex and worth thinking hard about. 

Lens: How should we view differences between the countryside and the city?

Liang Hong: I feel like talking about a village is like talking about a culture. We should not see it as a fixed, closed concept, because villages are lots of things. When we define a concept in a way that is too narrow and closed, we are actually narrowing or closing down certain life possibilities.

When I was back home this time, one day I happened to run into Grandma Wu, whom I wrote about in China in One Village. Her granddaughter was taking her out on her little pink scooter, all dressed up and her hair nicely combed.  They were going to Wuzhen to get a haircut. I was thinking that her dressing herself up a bit to go to Wuzhen is actually the same thing as us dressing up in fancy clothes for today’s interview.

I met a person who had been dancing in Wuzhen for thirty years, a woman in her sixties. This old woman, whose husband is paralyzed at home, spends her days sweeping the street and dancing while she sweeps.  She’s dying for someone to talk to but no one talks to her. I thought: what is she looking for? Her life is so narrow, so quiet , with no possibility of any breakthrough. And yet she continues to dance, making lots of noise. I think the louder the noise, the more lonely she is, but at the same time, it shows how strong her desire for life is. She is crying out.

This kind of inner yearning is what I want to write about. In fact, many of our ideas about the countryside, things that are so familiar that we no longer question them, are a lot less clear when we apply them to individuals, and our preconceived ideas have obscured their inner richness. We are all influenced by big ideas like village and city, tradition and modernity.

I think that in China, even now, we need to get past what we think of as the gap between the countryside and the city, and we need to reexplore everything. There are a lot of ideas we should just get rid of, and take another look at certain images that the government has created, or that the system has created, or that we have created in our own minds.   Then we can see that everyone’s life is the same, because we all have inner constraints, inner yearnings, inner richness, and of course inner desolation too.

Culture, on the other hand, in fact refers to how you structure your life, and when the structures have advanced to the point to become customs and habits, then we call them “culture.”  My fear is that people look at “culture” as if it were something special, and forget how ordinary it is.  When we say “culture,” it lacks an everyday quality, it lacks a groundedness in our common sense understanding of the lives we lead.

Lens: These days, many people in the countryside share their lives through videos on Kuaishou and TikTok. Do you think this technology will help shift the discourse and make it easier for people in the countryside to be seen?

Liang Hong: I still don’t know what to think about that. Everyone wants to be seen, but there are very few ways for people in the countryside to express themselves, and there are very few opportunities to be seen by others or to broadcast yourself to the outside world. On Kuaishou and TikTok, everyone can be seen, you can even do a video of people eating for an hour, which may become some kind of virtual communication, which creates a feeling we might call "I am being seen." This is a very good thing, and everyone has the opportunity to do it, although there is the question of costs, but at least the possibility is there.

On the other hand, I am actually very cautious, because very often people in the countryside must present themselves as some kind of spectacle. Is this a normal self? Does this really qualify as communication with the outside world? I wonder.
But in general, I think maybe after ten or twenty years, when everyone gets used to this, we won’t need so much eye-candy. If things can get started, then they can develop, and things will change slowly.   I like to keep my eye on new things like this, believing that there is always a glimmer of possibility. I think we need possibilities so much in our lives, don't you?

Because I really love this place, I really treasure the people

Lens: When did you start writing when you were little?

Liang Hong: It depends on what you call writing. I often like to say that we kept a weekly journal in third grade, and for every entry other people wrote, I wrote two. In fact, when I was still very young, I liked writing, and this probably had something to do with me being relatively quiet and liking to think my own thoughts.

Lens: You keep mentioning the river in your hometown, what does it mean to you?

Liang Hong: I think there is probably a river in every human heart, whether it is actually there or not. Because river water is always flowing, it is particularly close to the softness of nature and of the human heart. Every day during my childhood, especially in summer, I would always run to the river behind our house The river is like a certain part of my soul, and I like to describe both of them. The first thing I do every time I come home is walk along the river as it winds into our village, and then I feel that I’m home and that this is my hometown. It is all very concrete. I think rivers can really nurture a person and cultivate a person's emotional coloration. At least for me, the more I write, the more I feel that I can't live without that river. I have to write about it whenever I think about it, and I feel very happy whenever I think about it.

Lens: What kind of relationship do you think there is between the countryside and literature?

Liang Hong: Nowadays, fewer and fewer people are writing rural literature. As young people leave the countryside at younger and younger ages, many of the people writing in this generation may not have any experience in the countryside at all, so naturally they will write less about it. After all, however, China is still in a stage of transition from an agricultural to an industrial society, and villages cannot just disappear overnight. And even if villages disappear, the rural mindset will still be there, and this rural mindset is precisely what we call the Chinese way of thinking. For a long time to come, this will be at the base of our unique collective character, our national character. Therefore, I think that even if contemporary writers do not write about the countryside, as long as they write about Chinese life, what we call Chineseness will still be there.

Lens: Is there a sense of responsibility in your generation of writers that comes from the villages?

Liang Hong: I don't have any great sense of responsibility, I write because I need to, I want to, I love to, I don't feel that I have to defend the countryside, and I don't really like this idea of a great responsibility. While writing may come with a certain responsibility, I still respect my personal feelings more. Because I really love this place, I really treasure the people. I feel that, starting from this place, I might be able to relate to something bigger. But I focus first on this group of people, so that I can really get inside their hearts and see how they relate to the world.

The pandemic for me is like a wrinkle in my spirit

Lens: This year you published a novel called Four Forms. You wrote on WeChat that during the pandemic the content of Four Forms unexpectedly reverberated in reality. There’s a line in the book that says, "The disorder of civilization is not only the ravings of the underground, but also the reality on the ground.” How to understand this disorder?

Liang Hong: Four Forms is written from an underground perspective, and it tells the story of three spirits of the afterlife who return to the human world. My goal was to write about the problems in our contemporary life, in our civilization, to figure out what has gone wrong and what is happening.  So I’m describing a state of disorder. What we call the disorder of civilization is in fact a longing within the human spirit that is either not realized or is realized in a distorted way. And this is what contemporary life often looks like, because despite our scientific advances, people’s inner spirit remains unfulfilled. So unexpected things happen all the time that appear to make no sense at all, making us think “what era am I living in?  How can this be happening?”  This speaks directly to our spiritual state.

Lens: What should we do?

Liang Hong: It's actually very difficult, and I don't think anyone can do anything about it, it just means we have to try to stay awake to a lot of things. Everyone feels some kind of loss, some kind of longing, and all we can do is cultivate a basic alertness to our own spirit. But as to the big issues of our times, we have no way to propose solutions, we’re not politicians, or economists, not to mention that many things are actually beyond our ability to make a difference. So the only thing I can do as an individual is stay alert, awake to holding onto possibilities, the possibility to think. This is particularly important.

Lens: Has the pandemic given you anything new to think about?

Liang Hong: Actually, my life is quite a mess. My son just graduated, and everyday life is quite busy. During the pandemic, I didn't write all that much, and I felt sort of lost, wondering why should I bother, sort of "If life is like this, why should I write?” Still, even if I haven’t come up with a solution, this period of reflection has been quite helpful for me. At the very least, after these months, I feel that my internal spirit has suddenly come alive and I feel that I will keep writing. This was not a sudden transformation, but a slow awakening. The pandemic was to me like a really deep wrinkle in my spirit that appeared all of a sudden, and I’ve tried to iron it out, so that is looks smooth and I sort of forget about it, but in fact it may come back. 

Lens: What do you think about this era we are living in?  Is it good or bad?

Liang Hong: I don’t dare judge, and I think it is actually impossible to judge. It is difficult to judge whether an era is good or bad, because we are in the middle of it, and we’re swept along, we’re moving along with it. But one thing is certain, this era is in the midst of a huge change. What I mean to say is that no matter where the currents of this era take you, you have to keep hold of yourself, each one of us has to, which is some kind of resistance, right? Holding on to this place in your own way is the same thing. So do not underestimate your own power, although we may not be able to resist and stop the flood, but as long as we are standing here, standing firm, like a stake in the ground, then we’ll just keep standing.

You have to face your own life, you have to look directly at your own life

Lens: What do you think of young people nowadays? Those born in the 2000s are now college students.

Liang Hong: I am in fact particularly nervous about using the word "generation" to refer to a group of people. Each person is first an individual, but at the same time shares some common features with other people. I don’t want to make a hasty judgement that this generation has no sense of responsibility anymore, as if some generations are worse than others. I think that each generation can find what it calls its responsibility from within its own environment. I think that every era has its own problems, but at the same time, can create good things. This is actually something I am not pessimistic about, I am not that pessimistic.

Lens: Just now your mother was talking about her views of young people, so what do you think of your parents' generation?

Wang Yiliang: People of my mother’s generation didn’t have access to as much information.  Of course the amount of information in the world is huge, but it did not come as fast as the information on the internet now. The so-called generation gap is fundamentally about the different ways of handling information. The older generation was confronted with more complex and disorderly information, and the way they knew the world was more instinctive and emotional, kind of a holistic way of knowing. For example, if they happened across some noodles with preservatives that were poisonous, they would probably think that is the preservative is toxic than the noodles were toxic, but my generation might be more quantitative or scientific about it,  asking what kind of preservatives they are, how they are digested in the stomach, where they are metabolized…..

This is a shift from abstract knowing to more concrete knowing, which is simply two different ways of knowing. We can’t say their way is bad, because it is the result of hundreds of thousands of years of screening. I just feel that how our generation does things is new, new methods for a new era.

Lens: Nowadays, many young people who choose to leave their villages to work in other cities are caught in an awkward situation, as they have no feelings for their hometowns and cannot establish new connections in the cities they work in. It's like they don't belong anywhere. How should they deal with this situation?

Liang Hong: Perhaps many people have this experience of having a shallow connection to the place they live. It’s because they started school young, maybe even starting boarding school quite early, then went to university, and moved to another place after graduation, so they have been in constant motion from childhood to adulthood without integrating into a concrete place. This may be the common state of modern people, a sense of wandering, rootlessness, and loneliness. But on the other hand, it also breeds some new things, such as more freedom, because you don't feel that you have to protect any particular place.  If the whole world is mine and none of it is mine, then you look at this world with a freer and more equal attitude.

I think this feeling is also quite good, there is no need to be particularly pessimistic about it. It's about transforming this sadness or inner experience into a state of reflection, rather than focusing on the sadness itself. This is an ability we need to have. And it seems to me like this condition will probably be the norm in the future, in that there will be groups of people with no sense of home, but they will not experience this as a displacement or a loss.

Lens: So what advice would you give to young people working in big cities, those who have left their hometowns?
​
Liang Hong: I think we have to face up to the lives we are living now. You put down roots in your work, you put down roots in the place you rent, you put down roots in that building of yours, they are all your home. You have to face your own life, you have to look directly at your own life. There is no point in always feeling that you do not like your job, or wondering how come this city is like this. When you face it directly, you will establish a positive relationship with it, and it will slowly develop a connection with you. Let it unknowingly take root in your heart, and it will become your home. If everyone can have a positive, open attitude, this should gradually eliminate a certain feeling of loneliness. This is probably my only suggestion, anything else is really difficult.

Notes

[1]梁鸿, “不管这个时代的激流怎么走，你都要守住自己的这一点,” published online on September 5, 2020.

[2]Translator’s note:  Jia Zhangke is a famous film director in China, and in 2021, he produced a documentary on the theme of writers who come from rural villages.  Liang was one of the writers he chose, and he shot some of the footage in Liang Village.  In English, the documentary is called “Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue.”  Read a review here and see the trailer here.