Yang Jiang's Newest Interview (1/2)

One of the ways that Yang Jiang has a direct influence on a popular audience is the interview. Despite her very common protestations that she does not like doing interviews, that she would really rather not be bothered, and that she wishes her audience to take her books as the message she wants to send to the world, still, a number of interviews have appeared since 2003.



My classmate Hao Ji recently directed me to a new interview with Yang Jiang. Note the complexity of the media broadcast here: I heard about it from Hao Ji, a Peking University graduate who saw it online because he keeps up with literary figures and literature news generally.

He directed me to read the interview on douban.com, a social networking site where a user named "Kalimantan" ( 加里曼丹) posted the interview. Kalimantan's profile page shows that he or she is also a highly literate, book-loving reader with a diary, a photo album, recommended readings, favorite books, and other like-minded douban members with whom Kalimantan is connected. Kalimantan, though, has reposted the interview from the interviewer's blog.

The interviewer is Lily Hsueh 李黎 and her blog is hosted on the website of The China Times, a Taiwanese newspaper. According to her profile there, she is a moderately successful writer of fictoin, essays and some poetry; her personal webpage features excerpts from her work. A note in the douban post says that this interview was published in the April 2009 issue of the literary magazine Panorama Monthly 万象. The magazine itself does not appear to even have a webpage.



So before I even start on this interview, I want to contemplate what sort of phenomena I'm talking about here. I'm interested in the iconic influence of this literary figure, and I'm finding that she is a topic featured widely on a swath of the internet used by a community of readers. These readers have a common set of values that I will elaborate on in a moment. For now, just think about this:

First, Hao Ji and Kalimantan consider Yang Jiang to be a major figure in the general world of good books and good, intelligent people. Just thinking about Yang Jiang brings up a world of stability based on learning and living well. You can actually see, by looking at Kalimantan's profile page, how Yang Jiang fits among other topics, issues, friends, favorite books, even photographs! In this way we can begin to see Yang Jiang's place as an ingredient in contemporary Chinese letters the way we can taste olive oil or semolina flour in the Mediterranean diet.

Second, the community of readers is a cross-straits community. Taiwanese like Lily Hsueh have to actually cross the straits to see Yang Jiang, but the reader following her in online communities can actually cross from a mainland Chinese social networking page to a Taiwanese newspaper blog, and back and forth, with no sense of disconnect. There is no border here -- the topic is the same, and readers from the mainland and from Taiwan use the same terms. That seems to me to be evidence that Yang Jiang is the kind of cultural icon who brings Chinese communities of readers together.

That seems...not insignificant!