The World According to GAO

There ought to be a Nobel Prize for readers. Consider the terrible isolation of the reader, for example, turning the pages of Gao Xingjian’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, “Soul Mountain,” a beautiful, confusing, thought-demanding book full of questions and no answers. Whom can you talk to about the self and the soul and the constrictions of culture? Or about the perversions of social will on the pure, animal needs of the individual? On page 506, the loyal reader is told that God is a small green frog on a snowy windowsill in Sichuan province, that conclusions are bogus, the self is elusive and nothing can be understood.

And he gets the $900,000.

Last October, Gao Xingjian (pronounced gow shing-jen) became the first Chinese Nobel laureate (poet Bei Dao has been a past finalist), yet officials in Beijing were not happy about it. “Soul Mountain,” which won him the award, has been banned in China since 1985. One state newspaper, the Yangcheng Evening News, called him “an awful writer.” Chinese officials refused to attend the prize ceremonies in January. In China, Gao, 61, a playwright, critic, painter and novelist, has been considered a dissident writer since his play “Bus Stop,” in which eight characters wait for a bus, was banned in 1983, described by a government official as “the most poisonous play written since 1949.”

We meet here on one of the city’s signature gray winter days (no wonder they read so much). Gao, who has come here from France, where he has lived since 1988, is polite and handsome in a black cashmere coat. He hardly moves when he talks. Underneath some of his answers to some questions is a well of warmth; others he has answered so much they skim the surface of his expressiveness. We talk as he heads to the University Bookstore, where the signatures he will inscribe on 80 “stock” copies of “Soul Mountain” are too beautiful for the day.

Mabel Lee, who translated “Soul Mountain,” is traveling with Gao on the book tour and translating for him; he speaks French and Mandarin but not English. Lee, who is neat, with cropped white hair and a black leather jacket, keeps saying, “I am not a translator.” She does not speak French. Each time I show the slightest inclination to speak in French, she tries, albeit politely, to abandon us. An honorary associate professor of Chinese Studies at Australia’s University of Sydney, Lee came to work with him almost by accident; she was visiting a friend in Paris in 1995 and decided to visit Gao. She asked if he had a translator for “Soul Mountain,” and he said no.

“The first chapter was by far the hardest,” she says, “because I had never done it before. “His writing is like poetry. It can be very natural, like speech, but also classical. He is trying to depoliticize language.”

“I thought ‘Bus Stop’ was a comedy,” Gao says when asked about the play that made him an enemy of the state. “But during the Cultural Revolution, it was perceived as something entirely different. Why? Because the authorities lack humor,” he says, smiling mischievously.

“He’s trying,” Lee explains, “to force people to think.”

“Soul Mountain” has received mixed reviews. The glowing ones compare Gao to Thomas Mann, Herman Melville and even Henry David Thoreau. The translation has been criticized as wooden. Other reviewers have grumbled about how its use of pronouns is confusing. Gao divides the author’s self into “I,” “you,” “he” and “she,” and each chapter has one of these narrators.

“I wanted,” he says, “to move away from characters and to emphasize the loneliness of the narrator. There’s a great deal of loneliness in Communist China. Let’s say the situation in China exaggerates human loneliness, which exists everywhere. This is because at various times you were afraid to speak freely.”

There is a great sense of freedom in the book and a strong feeling of what Gao calls “primitive” loneliness. “I never expected it to be published,” Gao says. “I had begun to censor my own work, and I wanted to write something without self-censorship.” After “Bus Stop,” government officials began to carefully scrutinize Gao’s work.

In 1983 he was diagnosed with lung cancer, the disease that killed his father. After two weeks of quigong exercises (Taoist exercises not unlike tai chi), the tumor disappeared. Gao began a six-month journey, 9,300 miles into western Sichuan and the forests of Yunnan, following the Yangtze River like a pilgrim through metasequoias and linden, maple and plum trees, looking for Lingsham (which translates as “soul mountain”).

“I was looking for the other China,” Gao says. “The China of dragons and colors and stories.” State culture, he has written, is soul-killing. Micro-cultures are soul-enhancing. Gao traveled among Daqi people and Miao, through the Ba kingdom and the Haiba in Tibet. He listened to dream sacrifice songs and watched dragon-boat ceremonies. “In the end,” he wrote, “to forget one’s ancestors is a crime.”

Gao’s current wandering in the U.S. is almost as peripatetic, a strange book tour from Washington, D.C., to Seattle to New York. Rick Simonson, manager of Elliot Bay Bookstore in Seattle, says, “Mysterious things happen,” when asked how Gao ended in Seattle. (“Par grand hazard” is Gao’s explanation.) Elliott Bay has a huge and loyal clientele. Thirteen years ago, the store had its first reading with Toni Morrison. Five years ago a secret reading with Salman Rushdie drew 1,000 people.

“Soul Mountain,” which was published first in Australia and only recently released by HarperCollins in the U.S., “has done well here, even before the Nobel,” Simonson says. A reading Saturday night was organized by Seattle Arts and Lectures and Elliot Bay Books at A Contemporary Theatre, ACT. More than 400 tickets sold.

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Gao was born in Nanjing, in eastern China, during the Japanese invasion. He had a Westernized, liberal upbringing; his father was a senior official in the Bank of China, as was his father’s father. His mother, an amateur actress raised in an aristocratic household and educated by American missionaries, possessed many translations of Western writers such as Steinbeck, Balzac and Baudelaire, as well as surrealists and Russians.

In 1960, during the Great Leap Forward, Gao’s mother was sent to the country to work, and she drowned in an accident. “She was very important to me,” Gao says. Asked if the woman he recalls at length in “Soul Mountain” who is raped repeatedly by local boys and drowns was based on his mother, he says “yes.”

Gao graduated in 1962 from the French Department of Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing. After this, he joined the Communist Party and was elected leader of a Red Guard faction. When he left the Red Guard, his wife denounced him. They divorced, and he began five years of manual labor at a cadre school in the country.

The Cultural Revolution began in 1966 and lasted until Mao’s death in 1976. Gao worked as a translator of the French edition of “China Reconstructs” and also translated Beckett and Ionesco. During his “re-education” in the 1970s, Gao would wrap his manuscripts in plastic and bury them under the floor of the hut where he lived.

Gao has written 18 plays, four books of criticism and five novels (not including one he wrote when he was 10).

Conversation, slipping among French and Chinese and English, is a little awkward, but we all relax when the subject of men and women comes up, a huge and complex part of the book. “It is,” Gao says in French, “the most interesting of subjects. I like, in particular, discussing it with women. There are three things that are beautiful: women, nature and art.” Gao has been married two times, and will not, he says today, do it again. But he has a girlfriend.

“I couldn’t live without love,” he says, “because the world is so horrible.’ For a moment, we three forget which language is being spoken. “At bottom,” he says, “there is no difference between men and women everywhere. At bottom, literature does not have a national identity, either. When I read translations of Western authors as a child, I wasn’t reading foreign literature.”

Gao renounced his party membership in 1989, after Tiananmen Square. He became a French citizen in 1998. His most appreciative audience, so far, has been in France. “My French readers think ‘Soul Mountain’ is a book about themselves, not about China. There’s a greater freedom in China now than before, but still not as much as an artist feels in France. In the past century, politics has interfered too much in peoples’ lives. This is not limited to China. It’s the same all over.”

Gao lives in a working-class suburb of Paris called Bagnolet (he hasn’t moved since winning the prize). When he first came to France, he began, after seeing Picasso’s drawings, to draw in ink and to learn more about Western art. His drawings are exhibited regularly. “Painting has been my profession,” he says. “It has provided the resources for me to write.” His next novel to appear in English, “One Man’s Bible,” about his experience with the Red Guard, is being translated by Lee and will be published by HarperCollins some time next year.

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“Here are some words,” I tell Gao, “that appeared frequently in ‘Soul Mountain.’ Tell me the first thing that comes to mind when I say them.” I want to see if he is still game for a little Dada exercise.

“Freedom.” “Wonderful.”

“Will.” “Important.”

“Lonely.” “Necessary.”

“Blood.” “J’ai peur.” (“I am afraid.”)

“Meaning.” “Nonsense.”

“Culture.” “Ocean.”

“Self.” “Quelquefois, l’enfer.” (“Sometimes hell.”)

“I may not believe in ghosts,” Gao says when asked about his religion, “but I have a reverence for what can’t be known. Pre-communist Chinese culture wasn’t so bad. It was full of traditions that were destroyed by the communists. I have a religious feeling. Young people in China today follow fashions. Following fashion is a kind of mob mentality. I have always been anti-fashion, anti-trend. Even as a child, I preferred hiding in a corner and not doing what everyone else did.

“Apart from soccer,” he says, “things that everyone wishes to do are suspect. And I was smart enough to know that I had no future,” he says smiling, “in soccer.”