Xujun Eberlein - a writer you should read now!

In 2006 I spent time in Beijing. It was a confusing, demanding and ultimately frustrating experience, compounded by my inability to speak the language. China left me with no clear impressions but with many fragmented or faceted ones, so I was keen to read Xujun Eberlein’s collection Apologies Forthcoming, to see if it would help me recalibrate the kaleidoscope of my own, highly limited, experience of China.

One of the most satisfying things, to me, in reading these stories, was their contemporary resonance – unless you’ve been to China in the past few years and seen the pace of change alongside the timelessness of certain belief systems, it is almost impossible to understand what little we hear of Chinese politics and economics, but as Xujun has it, ‘that was how the pointy tip of the awl emerged from the pocket’ – often all we see in the West is the tip of the awl, the purpose and value of the tool are hidden from us inside the cloaking behaviours of China’s public face. As I write this, China’s third space mission is about to undertake a space walk. The idea of a space walk is stale news, it's hardly made it onto national TV or radio here in the UK, but for China, and Chinese acquaintances of mine, this is a vindication of something that the west never even thinks about – the decades of investment China has made in independent space travel. If we think about it at all, we think China ‘missed the boat’ or ‘shows off’ with this insistence, but the truth is much more nuanced. For many Chinese this is a validation of years of sacrifice and effort, a culmination not just of a project, but of a team, that, like the team involved in the Olympic Games, has created a Chinese vision of something already well established in the West. Team is a very important concept in China, and one of the themes that emerges so beautifully from Xujun’s work is that of the nature of the team, whether it’s a class of students or a group of villagers, and that the preparedness of an individual to sacrifice their preferences or beliefs to that of the group is so taken for granted that it isn’t even considered laudable – it is the only thing to do.

I harp on about this so much because Chinese literature is – from the very limited experience I have of it – both a diaspora of note and one of the most fascinating and productive literary forms of our generation. Whether you read Ha Jin or Wei Hui or today’s interviewee, you will find not just illumination about China, but forms of writing, stylistic devices, techniques and tropes that are taken for granted in the literature of that culture but forgotten or not yet discovered in our own. Such richness is a rarity and Xujun’s own writing style, which is relaxed and open with a focus only on salient detail, is a refreshing change from the dense emotional jumbling that seems to mark much of modern Western writing.

There’s a confidence about Xujun’s writing which is based not so much on power or bravura as on having something worth saying, and knowing how much needs to be said. Like the pointy tip of the awl, Xujun Eberlein finds the right places to expose the truth and when I had read her collection I realised that it would have better prepared me for China than a dozen guidebooks. I had so many questions to ask Xujun that it was difficult to narrow them down to an interview that wouldn’t take her a month to answer, but I’m confident that the questions and answers below will give you some insight into this very fine writer whose work deserves a really wide audience.



1. Apologies Forthcoming has a central theme, or perhaps a central reef onto which all the stories are somehow driven - and that theme is the Cultural Revolution and its effects on Chinese society. Many Westerners, myself included, have had a one-sided view of this amazing social phenomenon. How much did it affect you, growing up in China?

Tremendously. It ordained my life trajectory and formed what I am now. It was in that period when I grew from a child to an adult. It broke completely my dream of becoming a great mathematician, yet it made me mature early and become a writer instead. It also broke my family. My dearest big sister died as a Red Guard. I witnessed my parents being denounced and humiliated. Adding more to this is the fact that the participants I personally knew of were all good people during normal time. So the question of what made people behave as they did during that abnormal time has always intrigued me.

2. The stories in the collection are not linked, but as I've said, they have a thematic relationship - was it evident to you as you wrote them that this was going to be the defining feature of each one, or did you discover this linkage when you came to select material for publication?

When I began to write the stories, I did not know there was going to be a book. Later it came as a surprise that the stories were all thematically related. But in retrospect, I really shouldn't have been surprised, because I was simply writing about things that happened during the most significant period of my life.

3. In recent decades, China has changed massively, does it feel to you that you have a responsibility to 'represent' China to the West through your fiction? For example, there are forms of systematized violence in many of the stories which may shock or surprise readers - did you hesitate to expand on this aspect of Chinese life during certain periods of the Revolution?

Not at all. One good thing about America is that I feel no constraints on subject or content as a writer here. In daily life, sometimes, when I hear people expressing their naïve, over-simplified, or ignorant views about China, I have the urge to tell them "No, things weren't like that." However that kind of sentiment becomes irrelevant in the process of writing fiction. I don't think fiction should carry any agenda. My mind is occupied by plot, characterization, choice of details, etc., and has no room for a superficial agenda. Good fiction should let the characters speak, not the author. As far as readers are concerned, the only consideration that affects my writing is that my story not bore them.

4. The collection is very beautiful - it features four illustrations, which is very unusual for adult fiction. Did you have to persuade your publisher to include the paintings or was including artwork part of your initial submission to them?

In China, I grew up reading novels which often had illustrations.
I guess I did not realize this is unusual in the US. My opening story, "Snow Line," alludes to a piece of art titled "Dandelion." The artist, Mr. Wu Fan, is a renowned "literati artist" in Sichuan, a very classic kind. "Dandelion" was his signature work and won a gold medal in the 1959 international block prints competition. During the Cultural Revolution that gold medal became a criminal indictment for him and nearly killed him.

Mr. Wu is a friend of my parents, and his daughter is one of my closest friends. The genesis of "Snow Line" actually came from the daughter; she had been the model for the little girl in "Dandelion." So when my publisher was doing the typesetting, the thought came to me that artwork would add a nice dimension to the story.

I discussed this with my publisher, Joe Taylor, and he was willing to accommodate my wish, though he said he could only do black-and-white. I didn't think that would be a big issue for block prints. Last summer when I visited Chengdu, I asked for Mr. Wu's permission to include his work in my book, and he generously agreed. I ended up using three works from him, each fits nicely with one of the stories. His daughter did the sketch for "Men Don't Apologize." It looks great in the book and I'm very thankful to Joe and the Wu family.

5. You're working on a memoir at present - how do you decide what material is 'fiction' and what is 'creative non-fiction'?

That's a very good question. I don't think I ever tried to divide true-life materials that way. Those can be used in either fiction or non-fiction where I see fit. In fact some of the same details appeared in both of my fiction and non-fiction works, though they are presented in different styles. I do think fiction and creative non-fiction have their own distinguishable presentation styles.

6. You're a short story writer, a memoirist and a journalist: is it easy to move between these disciplines?

No, not very easy. Especially if I have been writing non-fiction for a while, it takes a lot of mood brewing for me to switch to the fiction state of mind.

7. What language do you dream in? And does language, in your experience, shape the way you think and communicate - can you say things in Chinese that you could not say in English?

Dreams are an interesting thing. I think for most of the time I dream in Chinese, but sometimes in English as well. It's also strange that the settings in my dreams are almost always in China, but the characters are both Chinese and Americans.

Certainly there are many things that I can say in one language but not the other. This is true of both Chinese and English. But when I'm awake, I mostly think in English now. If I want to think in Chinese, it takes some deliberate effort to switch.

8. If you were abandoned on a desert island, with just one book for company, what would it be?

Chairman Mao's little red book? :-) Seriously, when thinking about it, there are few books that I want to read a second time, mostly because I am easily bored by repetition. Perhaps one exception would be The Complete Works of Shakespeare - in English this time around.

Xujun's short story collection, Apologies Forthcoming, is available from Amazon and all good bookstores.

Dandelion by Wu Fan, courtesy of Xujun

And the glorious A.L. Kennedy shares her own experience of the Moniack Mohr course here! I’d love to pretend she wrote this as a response to my humble journaling on the subject but no … it’s just a coincidence. And I’m sure the rogue apostrophe in the last sentence is a typo …

What interested me most about this (apart from the fact that I’d managed to fool a tremendously astute woman into believing I was one of the ‘charming’ of this world – or maybe she was just being nice) was her response to the film/TV industry almost entirely matches my own gut feelings on listening to her, and two other accomplished film/stage/TV writers, talking about the process of getting something ‘made’.

In other news, I have spent the entire day baking: apple tart, chocolate banana cake, beetroot and cheese pie and bread, rather than deal with the chronology problems in the novel I am currently writing. Bah humbug, I am still a procrastinator, even if procrastination produces baked goods. Must do better tomorrow – less flour, more words!

PS These cows are Highland Cattle - I passed them on my daily walk around Moniack Mohr - they are not visual commentary on A.L. who is rather gorgeous, or the other charming people who took part in the residential week.

Strange, serious and sundry success

Strange and serious went hand-in-hand on the day I met fellow writer Jo Horsman in Brighton for coffee. The serious bit was the wide-ranging discussion about all things writerly, and the strange was the passer-by who was taking his corn snake for a walk through the middle of town … and stranger still the affinity between Jo and said snake, who got on like a pair of kindred spirits separated at birth! Jo's organised an excellent new initiative - a performance event for flash fiction writers in Brighton and the surrounding area - the first night is 14th October, I shall be going along to listen a cheer and if you want to find out more, email Jo at sparksbrighton@hotmail.co.uk or if you want to make a submission do so to the same address, with a story of 1000 words or fewer in the body of an e-mail.

Sundry successes arrived in the post today. I knew the Crimewave was on its way, because Daniel Kaysen told me so. It’s the second time Daniel and I have keptcompany together (the previous time was the University of Hertfordshire Writing Award which we were both shortlisted for but didn’t – either of us – win) and it’s always a pleasure to share pages with him.

The other success is Carmel Lockyer's - she/I has/have a story Ultimate Burlesque, a charity anthology which is part of Burlesque Against Breast Cancer, where I share pages with another writer known to me, Donna George Storey! So I’m looking forward to this evening’s reading, when I can start with Daniel and Donna’s stories and then work my way through the rest of the two publications at my leisure.

What happens when you become a product?

If you haven’t seen the video of "Christian the Lion", you need to watch it first.


Wonderful, isn’t it? It’s a three hankie story if ever I saw one.

But … Sony Pictures has purchased the rights to the story of Christian and the two men: John Rendall and Anthony "Ace" Bourke.

John Rendall, now living in Australia was amazed to discover how popular the Youtube video has become. “If it’s made people more aware and more interested in conservation and the protection of the environment, we’re very pleased,” he said.

Bless him for his simplicity. Because, in my jaded experience, the most likely outcome of the story being turned into a movie, is an exponential growth in the illegal breeding of lions, a massive surge in the death of lionesses in the wild in an attempt to take their cubs, and a sudden explosion of cuddly cubs seen in the arms of Hollywood starlets. And that’s without mentioning the ‘training methods’ used by some Hollywood big animal suppliers. I won’t load a video of that, because it’s utterly unwatchable, but if you really want to know, google animal training and shock collars – and don’t say I didn’t warn you about the appalling cruelty involved.

Of course John and Ace didn’t know, when they found Christian for sale in a shop that should have been ashamed of itself even then, what would happen, nor that these short years in their lives and his, would become emblematic of some communication company’s desire to take our money. But they should know by now. Those who deal with environmental issues, especially those relating to predators, know that any public attention for the cause has both positive and negative outcomes – and the negative can be devastating. The theft of Golden Eagle eggs from nests in Scotland was a direct result of media stories about the successful breeding of two pairs of birds which described the location of the nests.

If you write about wildlife it’s always in the back of your mind that your words might have an unexpected outcome – while John and Ace didn’t set out to cause problems for lions, they may find that their heartwarming story has some heartbreaking consequences.

Writing courses

I did threaten you with this - the literary version of 'What I did on my Holidays'! Here it is, five days on an Arvon course for your delectation and delight ...

Day 1

I arrived at Moniack Mohr (MM) with the hangovery feeling of somebody who hasn’t slept and the low grade irritability of somebody who feels hungover but has done nothing to deserve it.

Dinner – good. Lots of people though, and names to learn, and then sitting on very soft sofas with other people, all of whom seem to (a) know each other’s names (b) have some idea what they want to get from the week (c) manage their nervousness better than I do. A L (or Alison, as I must learn to call her) Kennedy, leads us in a relaxation exercise which actually works. One of us (not me) falls asleep …

After dinner – not so good. Talking to Gill Dennis who is a nice man from Oregon as well as being a shit-hot screenwriter, I discovered that my screenplay, written in blood in May, revised in June and sent in July, had somehow not got to Alison Kennedy, or Gill, and we are now in September. I went upstairs, thanked whatever intuition told me to bring my laptop, and downloaded the screenplay onto my memory stick. I can’t say any of this made me happy, or boosted my confidence.

At MM we all take it in turns to cook dinner – not individually but in groups of three or four or so. I was supposed to be cooking on Wednesday but swapped to Tuesday so that I can get my cooking session out of the way and hope that by the time I get to sign up for the on-on-one sessions with Alison and Gil they might actually have read some of the screenplay. It’s frowned on to have one-on-one sessions on your cooking day, as it takes you away from your kitchen duties. All this organisation and planning makes me nervous – I’m sure I’ve misunderstood something and will cock things up. I’m also deeply unhappy about the screenplay not having been read: I might as well not have written the thing at all. I came upstairs early – 10pm, although I suspect I should be downstairs socialising and being jolly because I feel a bit demoralised and at the same time despise myself for this preciousness and know that I shouldn’t feel it: lots of people didn’t even send anything in because they didn’t know they could (were supposed to?) and so I am in the same position as them. It doesn’t feel like it though – it feels like I’ve been fucked over somehow.

MM itself, what I’ve seen of it, is sturdy rather than beautiful, in lovely countryside which I hope to explore a little tomorrow. My single room is small, basic and more than adequate.

Day 2

These are better days … as Springsteen had it. I woke at 06:30 and lay as still as possible until I heard somebody else moving about – neurotic or what? But the day was glorious, sunshine and heather, a sheep tang in the air like woolly jumpers hung on the washing line, Angus made porridge for breakfast and it was excellent. Nobody has died at home since I left yesterday morning and generally I feel much more confident about being here. And I went for a walk and met a man with a dog who loved me with the extreme lovingness of dogs who rarely meet new people to wag themselves at. Of course, all that may fade as soon as we assemble for our first session, it usually does.

I was interested when we did our introductions last night to find how many of the participants are already in the fillum world in some way: designing, acting, producing and how all these people want to write – and yet when you talk to screenwriters they tell you they are the lowest and least-considered of the whole production team: interesting then that so many want to take on the role. Also interesting, three of those who work in broadcast media talked about having their idea beaten or knocked out of them by others and wanting to gain confidence through the course. It is obviously as brutal a world as the gossip has it.

The pattern is to be ‘lectury things’ (Alison Kennedy’s phrase) from ten until lunch – free writing time in the afternoon – and ‘something’ in the evening. Gill Dennis kicked off today’s session. He is very nice, with fine features, like Dirk Bogarde: a face not so much mobile as nuanced. At dinner last night I mentioned Angelina Jolie and he said something about her being a much nicer and more genuine person than she comes across in the media. It took a couple of seconds for me to register that I was talking to a man who could comment with some confidence and insight on the Jolie/Pitt home life!

So session one. Gill took us through a series of questions that illuminate character: what was the most terrifying, the most shameful and the most joyous thing that happened to you? Two brave participants actually sat and answered a series of these questions (email me at kay(at)klsexton-adsl(dot)demon(dot)co(dot)uk if you’d like the list in full) from their own lives. It was at times harrowing to listen and empathise but when we were asked to pull out the significant inessentials the whole exercise became revelatory – themes, linked events, even apparent coincidences ran through true stories told by people who hadn’t even seen those connections for themselves. And that, Gill told us, is how you go to the heart of a character: their shame and terror make the audience empathise with them and their pursuit of joy gives the audience something to hope for. Brilliant stuff which I have expressed appallingly badly, but you had to be there to see how Gill made it work.

Today, instead of having any tutorials, I was part of Team Tuesday, doing the cooking: moussaka, vegetarian moussaka and fruit salad. I think I was quite content not to have to sit down with Alison and Gill and talk about my screenplay and so when the list went up for tomorrow I made sure I put my name down for a tut with each of them before my nerve could go. Pathetic. Why travel to Scotland for five days to sit at the feet of such luminaries and then avoid the chance to have their critical insight on my work? Why indeed? Not because I can’t take criticism – simply because I am embarrassed and panic about things like having to knock on doors and introduce myself. And yes, I can hear every student I’ve ever taught laughing derisively at the idea that I’m shy and retiring, but it’s true – I would walk ten miles rather than knock on a door.

Day 3

Something decisive happened today – I talked to Gill and decided that writing screenplays is not going to be a big part of my future. This, which was already an intuition I’ve expressed to several people, crystallised around the reality of the accounts he and Alison have been giving of the way screen-writing works – and it’s definitely a process that I would find consuming, frustrating and in the longer term impossible to sustain. So that’s the meta-picture. The micro-picture is some good advice from Alison about the screenplay I’ve already written and how to make it work better (jettison 50%, change location, keep one character alive who dies half-way through) all of which makes me feel energised about the craft of getting that one nailed, even if I never write another in my life.

Terrible confession time – instead of doing screenplay things, I have spent the afternoon taking the lessons Gill and Alison have been teaching and converting them to lessons about novels – and they are equally golden applied that way, particularly if you’re not a visual writer. I also went for a walk and refreshed my memory about the landscape of the region, which is spectacular and comes at you in several dimensions: there’s the view, and then the wind which forces itself on your attention by equal amounts of pushing you sideways and invading your sinuses with the scent of heather and wet grass and pine, and the sounds – an osprey way in the distance like a bratty kid dropping its ice-cream and blaming its little brother, the air in the pines and the sound of frogs who, for reasons mysterious, were crossing the road in their numbers, with a sort of tiny hot-water-bottle flopping sound. I ended up standing beside one frog as a Land Rover screeched up the hill and had to swerve round me, because I couldn’t let it run over the poor creature and if I bent down to pick up the frog it might have run over me instead through not seeing me in time. The driver is probably used to batty writers in the road though: for all I know, there’s a sign about us in Gaelic ‘beware – writers ahead’.

Dinner was fantastic, especially as I played no part in the cooking of it, the wind howled round the cottage in a satisfyingly Heathcliffian fashion during the evening, and Gill took us through significant scenes in Walk the Line, a film already good and made more so by his inside information.

Day 4

We started the day by examining opening scenes and wrote as faithful a version as we each could of the first 15 scenes of No Country for Old Men – tomorrow we’ll get feedback on it. Ugh. Tut with Gill who said something nice about my screenplay and then told me how, should I choose to, I could make it a much better screenplay. He was right and I’m going to do it, just to prove to myself that I can. In the afternoon I sat and looked at the current novel under revision and the new novel being drafted and saw that there was not enough immediacy to the opening of any of the chapters and got down to editing and revising with a happy heart.

In the evening, after a walk that was more like a fight against the elements one way and a being blown, kite-like all the way back at disturbing speed, and a dinner that was wonderful (and full of ballast; I should have walked after it, the wind would not have shifted me an inch on the return journey) John Byrne came to talk to us. Actually he showed us The Slab Boys and then sat and chatted – no ‘talking to us’ went on because he's far too nice a man and I was transported to the gorgeous but dark world he created for the Channel 4 version of his stage play and loved everything about it. But then, everything he said afterwards (including that it took eight years for the production to get off the ground) reminded me that I’m happy to have crossed this business off my list of potential future activities. John was so dry-humoured and yet so utterly without pretension that we kept him talking probably much longer than we should have done. I hope he got home safely.

Day 5

I have had enough. Too much. Not that everybody isn’t lovely – because they are. I’m just overwhelmed by the sheer exuberance and vitality of everybody around me, and the more clearly they come into focus, the more fragmented I feel myself becoming and certainly my ‘work’ (how very pretentious that sounds) is strained by being surrounded by others – it becomes little reflections of things that have gone on around me the past few days. Okay, that makes no sense at all. I don’t mean I’m writing vignettes of the course (although actually I am taking a story told by one participant and building it into my novel!) but that moods and thoughts and even the expressions on the faces of the people around me are turning up in the current bout of writing without me consciously intending them to.

Gill’s unpicking of the first 15 scenes of No Country for Old Men was masterly. Alison gave us an exercise on getting into a character’s skin which was disturbingly successful. The whole day was fantastic and I am completely wiped out, struggling even to put one word in front of another when somebody asks me something.



Most people read something of their work in progress in the evening, after a venison dinner that topped all other dinners and a piper to pipe us to table. It was impressive to hear the range of work that we’d all been undertaking during the five days. It’s been a really fascinating and rewarding week - and I am so, so glad that tomorrow I’m going home.

Prizes for Titles and angst

The Diagram prize is The Bookseller magazine's award for oddly named publications, and Greek Rural Postmen and their Cancellation Numbers has won the Diagram of Diagrams, for the weirdest title in the past three decades. Perhaps unsurprisingly it’s published by the Greek Hellenic Philatelic Society of Great Britain. The ninety-one year old author/collator has spoken on Radio 4 of the fascination the subject of Greek philately has for the specialist – a very gentle and unassuming man, and seemingly totally underwhelmed by the gentle fun poked at his book – I rather liked him. But it does confirm the point I was trying to make about titles, doesn’t it?

Next week I shall be in Inverness-shire, at the Arvon Foundation’s Moniack Mohr. I think I might keep a journal to reveal how at least two of my writing neuroses (living in proximity with others and reading aloud) are tested by the course. At least that way it will look as if I’m really writing when I am simply scribbling about my own fears and failures! So no updates next week, but possible heart-baring misery the week after.

Never judge a book by …


But we all do, don’t we? Judge books by their covers, that is. For example, I recently read Leila Aboulela’s excellent novel, Minaret. On the left is the version I read. And although I took it from the library shelf, I think that was because I am a sucker for a certain kind of illustration, which I think of as early fifties Americana, like this:









And that’s exactly what the cover made me think of – so, intrigued, I picked it up. But the cover below, for the very same book, looks rather like a Fry’s Turkish Delight advert from the cheesy 1980s (a period which does feature heavily in the novel, oddly enough) and I would simply have passed it over.











Finally, this one, still the same novel, simply leaves me cold – the elements are right individually, the woman has wonderful eyes, but it feels like multi-culti chick-lit and that’s not my bag.

None of these covers actually seems to me to do justice to a very simple and moving story of faith, loss and love, which is paced beautifully with the inclusion details of tiny domestic moments set against memories that are both painful and redemptive. I can’t imagine many people are as thrilled by 1950s illustration as I am, and the cheesy cover is just cheesy to my eyes, leaving a third cover that seems far too young and far too girly – of course it’s difficult to market novels that seek to illuminate a different cultural context within the predominant one, and even more difficult, at present, to market novels with any kind of Islamic theme. Still, I can’t help feeling that sheer luck caused me to pick up a novel that I thoroughly enjoyed once I had spotted it, and that luck isn’t really what book jacket marketeers should be relying on. I’m about to investigate what does make me pick up novels where the writer and the novel are both unknown to me, and will report back on my results in a couple of weeks – but do any of you know what makes YOU choose one book over another, when everything but the first impression is equal?