Serve the Literati

Alex Pearson bound a community of bookworms. Every March in China thousands of people who define themselves as avid readers surrender two weeks of their spare time C weekends, lunch hours, and after work C to their local Bookworm- a happy marriage of restaurant, library, bar and book shop.

The attraction is authors. Talks by authors are put on all year, but the annual Bookworm Literary Festival is the bonanza for bookish China lovers.Select scribes are invited to make the trip, use the intimate venues to discuss what they are writing or have written, greet their (or soon to be) reading public, and have the relevance of their work explored C especially in relation to China. Many titles are by Westerners or Chinese writing about China or Asia, or stories set here; they may live here or not.Forget about having a simple business idea though; as much attention is paid to the menu as the library, and each Bookworm is committed year round to happenings that embrace music, debates, wine-tastings, poetry readings, writing workshops, trivia contests, clubs for kids, networkers and readers, and roundtables on issues of the day. But the business does its best work creating a space for Chinese and Western literati to promote a bit of cross-cultural understanding.

Alex Pearson started this as a one-woman café-soiree operation in a courtyard house, then met Peter Goff C a journalist who became her business partner. Today there are two Beijing locations, a third in Chengdu and a fourth in Suzhou. For it seems we all love what she loves C to read and hear, and sometimes write, about China.

The first Bookworm Literary Festival was in 2007 and the authors were often Anglophones who wrote business books, fiction or history that fell into the oeuvre of books satisfying the new surge of interest in the East. Increasingly, the Western writers who assumed the seat of honor before festival fans were not just telling stories directly about China, but perhaps writing detective fiction or fantasy novels or cookbooks with China as an inspiration and a setting. Every year more of the authors chatting with a hundred admirers in the sold-out backroom were Chinese writers whose works were, or soon to be, in translation. The festival conceived as a celebration of her patrons’ relationship with books quickly became about celebrating other relationships C the writer and the muse, the reader and the landscape of her interests, the self-exiled and the inhabitants of their adopted new home.

The Bookworm promotes these relationships all year round in fact C by giving over space to writers and readers, activists and hobbyists. Alex and Peter are very clear that the business is not about selling food, drinks or books. It’s not about their slogan indicating the magic triumvirate of desires fulfilled (Eat, Drink, Read); this is why she has not franchised her successful business model. It’s all about creating community. For China-relevant works and writer-relevant workshops, Alex’s establishments have little competition in Beijing or China. The events and clubs bring like-minded people together C and often Chinese and Westerners together C on the basis of tastes and needs that run on fraternity: brotherhoods inspired by wine, music, professional camaraderie, charity, the environment, being a newcomer, or being a parent. The lending library called out to the community to bring its used, its dog-eared, its spine-split favorites that didn’tfit on the bookshelf anymore and the Beijing location, nowhousing the cities’ largest English language lending library, groans under wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling books that a SWAT team of school children occasionally come in and sort back into alphabetical order. The modest library memberships have been taken up by 2,000 readers in Beijing, 800 in Chengdu and 300 in Suzhou.

The Eastern Scribes

This March there were more Chinese authors at its annual literary festival than ever before.The nature of Chinese-Western congress at a Bookworm event is defined by the ingenuousness C or truthfulness C that distinguishes the stars of the Chinese literati.“I do not write for the Western market,” says Li Er, a confessed admirer of Raymond Carver(in Chinese translation). Li Er uses his writing to think out loud about a China facing the idealism of the West from its current social reality. His first book, Coloratura, looks back to Hunan Province in the heart of the country C in his opinion the “Big Bang” of China’s 20th century. Cherry on a Pomegranate Tree is, loosely speaking, a novel of the present. Its message is thatnothing compares with the last five years of China’s internal revolution; the extent and importance of it decimates the significance of the decades of transformation that preceded 2005, according to Li. He will conclude his trilogy with a look into China’s future.

But critics say that if anyone’s work is still being read 30 years from now it will be Murong Xuecun’s philandering, embezzling anti-heros. People call him and say, “Hey, that’s me you’re writing about,” so he knows what he’s talking about when he comments on the descending moral values of ever-changing modern China. The book inspired a TV series and a movie, despite criticism of “immoral and anti-human” content. Murong declares a lack of interest in preaching to or corrupting the public: “Human nature includes both the beautiful and the ugly.” Dancing Through Red Dust is his new novel about the legal profession in China. Murong ventured into investigative journalism by joining, then exposing, a pyramid scheme with the slogan “Lies Make the World Beautiful.” This outfit was essentially brainwashing rural people into believing they could get rich by luring their families and friends into joining too.Toying with the idea of money as the recognized standard of anything’s value these days, he completed a scientific (and we hope tongue-in-cheek) analysis on the economics of love-making.

Yan Lianke echoes this head-on approach with his advocacy of “more bad books.” Authors in China today, he elaborates, need to look at how much they engage in self-censorship. To have complete freedom, he maintains, the writer must not write “with a publisher on his shoulder.” Contemporary Chinese novelists like himself must also make a break from the strong influence of stylistic models from Western literature, he feels. Yan Lianke has won two of China’s top literary prizes.

Novelist Bi Feiyu sees recent Chinese literature as falling into four categories: the first pair were “cultural revolution” works and the “Scar” literature that followed it. He deems them “too wrapped up in morality, right and wrong, and correct versions of the ‘truth’.” The Avant Garde writers that followed were obsessed with language; their characters were as thin as the stages that preceded it. The fourth is character-centered and the one he belongs to: “I told myself I would focus on character,” he explains, and recommends for the serious author “a return to child-like wonder.” This winner of multiple Chinese literary awards also co-scripted the international award-winning film Shanghai Triad. His acclaimed novels Moon Operaand Three Sisters have been translated into over ten languages, so his advice might be worth taking. On the matter of self-censorship or the control publishers exert he comments, “I want my politics within the scope of my art, not my art within the scope of my politics. What matters most is that any reader in any country realize the value of literature.”

The Western Scribes

Among those writing in English with an Eastern focus at the 2010 festival was Londoner Jonathan Tel. His collection of short stories The Beijing of Possibilities, opens with the provokative, “Beijing is the center of the universe. Ask anybody who lives there. The true Beijinger secretly believes that people living anywhere else, have to be, in some sense, kidding.”

Those other writers, the journalists, are the scribblers that offer the most consistent and accessible cultural bridge. Jane Macartney, now of The Times but with Reuters at the time of the Tibetan riots in 2008,commented on working with editors’ expectations in the latter establishment: “My editor was waiting for me to file a story about how badly the Tibetans were treated. Most of the people who died in the riot were Han, but the West has difficulty believing Tibetans or Uyghurs were responsible.”Guided by a professional desire to get the real story, she went to a hotel designated as the place in Lhasa where people registered their losses, and met a Han man in search of the one remaining member of his family not confirmed dead. That’s the story she filed. “It’s just not black and white,” she asserted. This year the Committing Journalism panel was moderated by Gady Epstein of Forbes Magazine, and regardless of who sits on it, it never fails to draw a heavy Chinese presence.

Evan Osnos of the New Yorker commented that China is not being taken seriously on environmental issues in the West, “As journalists we should be asking what is China doing well.”And according to panelist Jonathan Watts, it isn’t easy doing duty as a conduit of truth and understanding at this end C if you do things by the book that is. The Asia Environment Correspondent for the UK paper The Guardian was referring to querying officials via fax, waiting for responses, and submitting questions in advance of press conferences, all conditions that show little sign of relaxing despite requests for more spontaneous official news conferences.That said, Watts is cheered by stories being run in Beijing’s Global Times and China Daily offering criticism that would have been unthinkable two years ago. In a nod to Chinese journalists and their own hard work telling their country’s stories, The Guardian has actually inaugurated a Chinese Journalist Award.

The Story in Pictures and Lists

For bending the notions of what a literary festival is all about, however, we thank Guy Delisle, a Quebecois Canadian, for the festival’s first brush with a graphic novel: the animator accompanies his working wife around the world and has sketched life in pictures in these places,getting a critical thumbs-up for Pyongyang,and Chronicles of Burma. His Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China is an autobiographical work about the mishaps of a stranger in this rapidly changing country. And this year saw more champions of the spoken word take the stage: for poets-performers extrordinaire Steve Connell (American) and Benjamin Zephaniah (British) we can thank Alex Pearson for making a co-hosting arrangement with the JUE multi-disciplinary arts festival. She also supports the work of documentary filmmaker collectives by doing jointly promoted screenings with distributors. However, what festival would be complete without cookbooks for foodies, and the newest business book? This year it was Jack Leblanc’s Business Republic of China, complete with “a brief lexicon of selected China business terms for the unversed barbarian.”

Alex Pearson came here from her native Britain to study music at the Central Conservatory of Music in 1992. The small café-lending library was intended to serve Anglophone expats initially, but that goal soon expanded to Chinese readers of English books, and then to Chinese authors meeting their public as translations began to be more common. Chengdu in southern China, and Suzhou in the mid-east were selected as the next Bookworm sites based on being cultural cities and proven breeding grounds for Chinese authors and poets. The current address near Sanlitun Village in the heart ofexpat eating and dining in Beijing, is Alex’s third in this neighborhood, and a satellite Bookworm opened in a Beijing suburb last year. There are no big plans for the establishments other than to keep on doing what they do so well.

These statistics tell their own tale: the 2010 festival had 62 events, 70 authors, 70 volunteers and 4,600 audience members. Do a little research yourself. These authors have appeared for signings at the Bookworm; their works make for a healthy introductory reading list on modern China.