The Sigla Blog

While translating the poetry of Lily Yu, a ninth century Chinese poet, Justin Hill discovered that a colourful, controversial life. His new book, ‘Passing Under Heaven’, looks at a woman who was a concubine, a Taoist nun, a courtesan and is recognised one thousand years later as China’s greatest female poet. Sinéad Gleeson asked him about the book, his writing and his experiences of living in China.

Your first book was also set in China, why did you decide to continue the Oriental setting?
I’m not sure it was a conscious decision to stick to an Oriental setting. It was more that I was working on the translations of the poetry at the same time as I was working on ‘The Drink and Dream Teahouse’.

After I had finished ‘Teahouse’ I went to what would become ‘Passing Under Heaven’ full-time just to keep myself working. I had a brief break when I reworked ‘Ciao Asmara’, but then went back to ‘Passing Under Heaven’ - which I was coming at in a very fragmentary way - and seeing how the pieces would fit together.

Modern China has obviously had a huge influence on my adult life. China is a great setting for a writer: the stories there are much more compelling, partly because the choices that people face are more fundamentally life or death choices.

Although, ‘Passing Under Heaven’ is still set in China, as a writer it felt completely different to ‘The Drink And Dream Teahouse’. The two are fundamentally different books.

‘The Drink And Dream Teahouse’ was a snapshot of China now, with a large cast of characters. It dealt with the mix of old and new and the impact of history on the different generations - and was set in a world that was almost the opposite of 20th Century China: multi-cultural, modern-thinking and open-minded for its time.

‘Passing Under Heaven’ was set over the lifetime of a single woman, in an open and outward looking, multicultural Tang Dynasty, which I found (and especially Changan) much more reminiscent of modern Western cities like London or New York.

Something that is common to both books however, are the western stereotypes of China through which all western readers come to China and which a writer must keep in mind.

Oriental settings allow you to play with a lot of Western preconceptions of Chinese life (bamboo, old monks, limpid water) - which I had a lot of fun with in ‘The Drink And Dream Teahouse’, mixing these Zen stereotypes in with diesel fumes and confused crowds of peasants.

Again, ‘Passing Under Heaven’ came at China in a very different way - almost inside the stereotypical image - and so I wanted to deal with that in a way that made that stereotype alive and by bringing it so vividly to life, to stop it becoming a stereotype.

Having said all that, Picasso had a Blue Phase, I think my Oriental Phase is over: mainly because I don’t have anything left to say about it.

Where did you first hear about the real-life character of Lily?
I came across her in an anthology of Chinese literature, where there was little said about her except that she was the most distinct female Tang voice and the salient dates of her life (birth, marriage, death). I think it was those dates and her youth when she died that really struck me. Not only was she the foremost female voice from the Tang Dynasty, but she achieved all that by the age of twenty-six.

‘Passing Under Heaven’ definitely qualifies as historical fiction, did a lot of research come with that?
Yes! And it was a new challenge for me as a writer as all my previous work had been set in the modern world and in worlds that I was already very familiar with. There was certainly a challenge in recreating a world that was as close as I could make it to a world a thousand miles and a thousand years distant.

But also I didn’t want this to read like a fictionalised ‘Guide to the Tang Dynasty’ - and having done all that research I had to make sure that it didn’t dominate the story, which is the life story of a girl who happens to become a poet.

Was it a difficult project?
I think this was the hardest book I’ve worked on so far. After ‘The Drink and Dream Teahouse’, which has a large cast of characters and spans one year, I wanted to push myself in a very different direction, to use a smaller set of characters and also to contain within the 400-odd pages of a book, an entire person’s life.

Whereas before I cut ruthlessly as I went along, with ‘Passing Under Heaven’ I gave those characters or story lines a lot more lee-way, meaning that I went up a lot of blind alleys, and I think I ended up cutting about half the book out. I think it’s made a better book, but that’s something individual readers will have to find out for themselves.

I suppose another difficulty was that I love to give my characters free rein on the book, meaning that I create them and then they lead me through the story, rather than me leading them.

‘Passing Under Heaven’ was a little different here in that I had a number of signposts that I had to get my characters to and I had to get them to emotional states that would require fairly drastic actions. That meant I had to create characters I could hold over the emotional cliff.

Looking back I suppose a lot of cutting involved slightly different Minister Lis or Lily Yus, whose story would not have ended the way it did in real life.

There’s seems to be very little difference between Lily as concubine and courtesan in the book, was this deliberate?
You know, I think there are differences, which may be small, but which are important. Lily as the courtesan is more guarded and a little harder, and I think it is her guarded nature as a courtesan that brings about the ending of the book. Maybe the key difference is that she is too frightened of the consequences of trusting someone again.

Would she have been considered a feminist in her day?
If the Tang Chinese had the word ‘feminist’ then yes - she would. But I don’t think the word (or character) existed, and therefore I doubt the concept did. Until the last 100 years - if even that long - strong or independent women were described in terms of men, or they were written off as mad/bad/sensitive.

Was she a feminist in our understanding? I think so. She certainly established herself as an independent woman in a male dominated society. She perceived the inherent sexism of Tang China, and more than that she wrote poems that highlighted it and protested against it.

But I think even more than a feminist, through her poetry I had the impression that Lily Yu was an individualist. She was interested in getting equal access to the civil service exams not so much for all women, as for herself.

She was quite an influential poet of her time, are her poems well known outside of China?
Until two years ago I think she was almost completely unknown. But as I was working on ‘Passing Under Heaven’ an American translator (David Young, I think) produced a complete set of her poems. Still, I imagine this has reached a very limited audience.

How do people feel about Lily today in China?
Surprisingly, considering how much the Communist government has done to promote equal rights in China, Yu Xuanji is almost unknown. But I think that is partly to do with the manner of her death, and also because she is such a distinct and individual voice that she might be seen as promoting individual freedoms.

When I asked my friends about her then they had not heard of her, and were delighted to help me track down the original poems.

In recent years, there have been a lot of books written about the experience of women in the Orient (’Memoirs of a Geisha’, ‘Wild Swans’, ‘The Tale of Murasaki’) - how do you feel about your work being grouped with those books? I suppose the easy answer is that I’d love to sell half as many as ‘Memoirs of a Geisha’ or ‘Wild Swans’, and it is very interesting that there is such an interest in the experience of the Oriental woman in traditional societies. In that way, it’d be an honour to be grouped with them.

But I’m not sure I would group my work with any of these writers (although I have to admit to not having read ‘The Tale of Murasaki’). I hope I’m doing something more literary, and I also try and keep my work relevant to modern life.

Why did you become a writer?
I was ten and I put down ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and told myself, in the way that most children say they want to be nurses or firemen, that I wanted to be a writer. I think what attracted me was that a writer could create a world in the head of a reader.

There is something incredible that a spark of imagination in a writer’s head can reveal a story that they write down and then it gets picked up in another time or place, and then that story can clone itself in the head of another.

At school they tell you how to become accountants, lawyers, teachers, etc, but no one tells you how to become a writer. So it’s up to everyone to find their own way there. I think my motivations have changed as I have grown, and as I have gotten published.

When I was young I thought I’d get published in my fifties, or if I was lucky, in my forties, after numerous failed attempts, because that was how everyone seemed to get published. But then my first book was published when I was 24-years-old, which then left me with the feeling: OK, what now?

After each book I seem to feel that I have nothing left to say about the world, but it only takes a little while to get back thinking about life and living - and then the ideas start to return.

You’ve done a lot of travel writing, do you have any plans to write more books in this area?
As I said before, the best writing comes from a need to say something. If I return to Eritrea I am sure I will write another travel book. Or if I go back to volunteer work then I am sure I will see things that I think someone has to stand up and witness. The world we live in seems an incredibly mad place to me: and what is amazing is that most people seem to think it is normal.

What’s next for you?
I think I’m returning home, to Yorkshire, with a novel that looks at some of the inherent insanity of modern life. The part of Connemara I live in reminds me of North Yorkshire. Landscape has a huge influence on personality, and I see a lot of similarities between the people here and those in Yorkshire villages.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve been given as a writer?
I heard it last week on RTÉ. An Irish chick-lit writer who had her first book published, about a country house (sorry can’t remember the name) who said don’t write so much about what you know as about what you’re passionate about.

I’m going to keep that in mind when I start the next novel.

If I was to give advice, I often find young people asking me how to become a writer and the first thing I would say is not to become a journalist. People often think that one leads into the other, but I think journalism will stifle your efforts to create a distinct voice. For people who are journalists already I recommend a year doing something completely different - to get journalism out of your head.

Finally, what’s the last good book you read?
I think ‘Stupid White Men’ was the last book that made me passionate about something. There are so many books that seem to be about nothing in the world. I think writers should ask themselves whether the world needs another book about a 30-something that moves to London and has problems in life.

Unfortunately I think writing and reading use the same part of your brain so I try and read stuff that’s pretty light when I am writing - or poetry. The last good poetry book I read was ‘The Blue Book’ by Owen Sheers, which is brilliant.

Having said that, I have a pile of books to take with me next week, and I am going to sit on a boat in the Ionian Sea and read for two weeks solid. Good books demand a certain level of time and attention to be fully appreciated, so I have a pile that I’ve been saving.

‘Atomised’ by Michel Houellebecq has been on my must-read list for two years now; my first Iain Banks (a friend recently told me I was not well-read because I’d never read Iain Banks); James Elroy, because I’m curious to see what he does with the English language; and I cannot wait to start rereading all my Raymond Carver collection because he is a master of his art.

Sinéad Gleeson

Review: Passing Under Heaven
Review: The Drink and Dream Teahouse