Interview #177 — Ouyang Yu

by Terri Ann Quan Sing

Ouyang Yu is a poet, a novelist, and a literary scholar and translator. Over his decades-long writing career he has published an enormous volume of work in both English and Chinese—including the award-winning novel The English Class (2010). His more recent works include the novel Billy Sing (2017) and poetry collection Flag of Permanent Defeat (2019).

In May 2020, poet Ouyang Yu spoke to Terri Ann Quan Sing about the im/possibility of pursuing writing, the different textures of poems, and the mysterious connection between poetry and bodily fluids.

When did you begin writing? And what made you pursue writing?

The 20th of March in 1973 is the day on which I wrote a Chinese poem, a prose poem, and the first poem I’ve ever written. That was more than six months before I turned eighteen. I began writing much earlier but I don’t remember how early, perhaps as soon as I started school at the age of seven, as part of school assignments for class compositions. And what made me ‘pursue’ it? I don’t know. If you really want to know, I guess it’s the impossibility of pursuing any other things in Australia that made me ‘pursue’ the least profitable and the most risky thing, writing.

You’re a prolific writer across many forms—you’ve written novels, poems, criticism, literary translation, and more—what does a typical workday look like for you?

A typical workday starts with poetry. My days always start with poetry and throughout the day I write poetry. Perhaps five to ten a day, in both English and Chinese? Let me go and find how many I have done so far this month, from 1 May to 20 May, 2020—56 Chinese poems and 22 English poems, plus a lot that I haven’t copied from my mobile phone, averaging 3.9 poems a day, for this month, as there are better, much better months.

Four poems a day or more is certainly an enviable average! You’ve mentioned composing poems on your phone, but what are the usual conditions of your writing—do you sit at a desk; write by hand or computer; listen to music while writing; go for walks; smoke; stand and look out the window?

I have experimented with writing in all positions, sitting, standing, lying down and walking, certainly writing by hand, in rain and shine and in total darkness, as well as on board a plane or a ship or a bullet train, or a bus. Anywhere, anytime, any situation. Once I joked with Martin Harrison that the only situation in which you can’t write a poem is in the act of lovemaking. I think what he said is memorable: you can write on his back with a pen. And, of course, with a mobile phone, the act of speaking poetry and turning speech into words is made much easier than ever. Every time I take a daily walk out, I speak two to three or four poems on my mobile phone and the texture of these poems is vastly different from that of the written ones.

I am now putting all the Chinese poems I wrote in the 1990s (1990-1999) together in a book and have found lots written after I bought a mini-recorder in late 1995. The quality is so different from the capitalist way of sitting in front of a computer, writing, supposedly to make some money or make some commercial benefits, all so petty-bourgeois, very much like a proper writer, disgustingly. The fuel is the spirit to fight to the end of my life regardless, with literature and in literature.

I want to ask you about bodily fluids in your writing—excrement, ejaculate, mucous, urine, saliva, etc. often make an appearance—and in your scholarly work you’ve pointed to the homonymic relation in Chinese of 诗 (shī, poetry) and 屎 (shǐ, shit) as a productive way to think about avant-garde writing. Can you tell me a little about how you see bodily fluids in your work?

Bodily fluids are all there. You can’t ignore them. As my writing is hardly ever for but always against, the fluids form part of my opposition to the beautiful and decorative stuff in literature. I don’t prioritise them but I don’t shut a blind eye to them, either. After all, poetry always accompanies BM (bowel movements) as there is a mysterious connection between the two.

Can you say more about the mysterious connection between the two?

I don’t want to talk more about this except to say bowel movements are perhaps innately connected to the act of creative writing. If your bowels refuse to move, your mind is full of shit and you look shitty. While we pay so much attention to our appearances these days, our bowels, unmoved for days, are clogged up, like the world we live in today, clogged up with the shit of climate change. What we need to pay attention to is perhaps the interior, not so much the exterior. If you read the opening of the novel, Red Locust, by Mo Yan, and Brothers by Yu Hua, you’ll see both start with shit, an inseparable part of the creative writing process.

I want to ask you about your poem-objects—poems on leaves, toilet rolls, used tissues… first, will you describe some of them? When did you begin to make them? And what drives you to make them?

I have always loved art and I have always been an experimentalist with various genres. When I wrote profusely at the university and published little, only one poem published in Feitian（《飞天》）or Flying Skywards, a poetry magazine based in Lanzhou, Gansu,in 1983 before I came to Australia in early 1991, I guess it was the nature of my experimental writing that caused the massive rejection. I experimented with bilingual poetry, mixing English with Chinese in my poems. I put musical scores in my poetry. I used pinyin. I created picture poems. None of these were seen in the published work either then or now although some of my poems written in the 1980s are appearing in China-based literary journals today. This streak of experimentality I carried forward to my writing in Australia, which also explains why I always have rejection, so much of my writing deemed unacceptable. In a way, Australia matches China in its backwardness and its fear of the new and the unknown.

I now have sound poetry, screenshot poems, picture poems, bilingual poems, asemic poems, but I can’t even begin to send them anywhere except to get them out on my own bilingual blog. All the literary journals, here and elsewhere, like prisons, insist on confinements, the so-called qualities. My writing has spread to leaf-writing, tree-writing, toilet-roll writing, single-book publishing, handmade books, and whatnot, all parts of my daily writing and thinking. Last year, I had my work, toilet-rolls written with poetry, for example, featured in an art show in Melbourne, along with three other Australian-Chinese artists. And I have since been doing a number of new self-initiated projects, like the book-destruction project. I can only tell you this much. All these, in the end, are failure projects. A poet is born to fail, after all, so it’s quite fitting that he does all that.

In your latest book of poetry Flag of Permanent Defeat you’ve collected some of this older experimental work—some poems dating back to 1982. There is no introduction to the collection—but the poems are often accompanied by a date and location. I’m wondering if there’s an importance to you in showing these poems in their own time and place? And can you tell me a bit about the process of putting that collection together?

No introduction because I don’t need it and I don’t want to do it, not for the non-readers nor for the academics who don’t want to learn. What I hate is explaining. If people are interested and care to learn, they need to spend time and efforts trying to understand and not expect me to explain everything. Time and place? Of course important. Why do we record our date of birth and date of death as well as places where we are born and die but care little about the date of a poem’s birth and where it is born? The Australian way of deleting all that important information from a published book is absurd and ridiculous. They treat the poems like dead objects, the way they treat the fish, eating them dead, unlike the Asians who eat them live. Neither is more sublime than the other, I don’t think. After all, you eat meat. And even if you are a vegetarian, you still eat plants. Oh, I’ve forgotten how I put them together and the process is really involved and hard to explain. All I did is write bilingual poems over the years and I trawled through my years of poetic production and put them together in one go over the couple of years before the publication.

Your latest novel Billy Sing is based on the life of WWI ANZAC sniper William “Billy” Sing. I’m wondering how you first learned of him as a historical person—and what about his story inspired you to write the novel?

I heard about him when I did my PhD on the literary representations of Chinese in Australian fiction for the last 100 years from 1888 to 1988. And as time went by I began taking a more serious interest in him and his life. The very thing about him that interests me is his total failure, along with the failure of Australia in that war. What do we celebrate at ANZAC day if not the deaths of so many? And the point?

You’ve written about your frustration with white Australian interviewers and reviewers of your work—I’m thinking in particular of your poem ‘Interview With Yu’—“what do you write about in your poetry / shit nothing but shit / that’s not nice / i’m only telling you the truth”—has the reception of your work in Australia changed over the decades of your writing career?

I don’t really care whether the reception has changed or not. I write, therefore I am. And I might add that critics need also to be criticized and reviewers should also be reviewed if they are biased. No one is a god delivering final judgements even if he or she is white.

I love that. I mean, although whiteness has a hold over the status quo of publishing in Australia, that doesn’t mean they deserve respect as arbiters of what makes good art. Thinking about taste in art and literature, I’m reminded again of your poem ‘Interview with Yu’:

“you sound so bitter / i am you know what we have a melon / called literally bitter melon / and we all like its bitter taste / that’s not the point / that’s exactly the point i am making / i mean i am a bitter person like a bitter melon / you have to like me for my bitterness”

I’m wondering if you feel part of a literary and artistic community? And whose taste matters to you?

No but I hardly feel part of the literary and artistic community that is called Australia. I write, I live in this country, I send stuff out, I get rejected and I hardly get invited to any events, literary or artistic. But that doesn’t stop me from writing. As for whose taste matters, I’d say no one’s taste matters to me. I once said that reading Ouyang Yu is an acquired taste and that’s what it is. If you don’t like what I write, well and fine. I don’t care. I create my own taste. I cater to no one’s taste. We’ll just see who dies earlier than who and whose taste lasts. Probably no one’s does and that’s even better. The poem you quoted above is one I wrote a long time ago, in or around 1994. Much has changed and the ‘arbitrators’ now have gone to the social mental media—my coinage—and decide who to like. After a while, you can see, they’ll never click a single like for anyone Asian and what do you do? You return that unfavour with the same. That’s now a latent racism on the mental social media that one is aware of on a daily basis without voicing the concern.

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on a novel, into its eighth draft now, with over 170,000 words. Can’t tell you more than that.

I’d love to know more about your work as a translator of poetry from Chinese into English. What draws you to do this work? And what are some highlights from the many translations you’ve published?

It’s natural. I have Chinese and English and each is as good as the other, so naturally I did the translation both ways. As there’s so little interest in contemporary Chinese poetry in this part of the world—mind you, the lack of interest in Australian literature in China is about the same—I thought of showing them the real thing. It’s not until Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize that the situation improved. I had to start publishing my translation with my own publishing house, Otherland Publishing, before I got published by Five Islands Publishing, and Puncher & Wattmann, my highlights including In Your Face: Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English Translation (Otherland, 2002), Breaking New Sky: Contemporary Poetry from China (Five Islands, 2013), and my four translations released in 2019 by Puncher & Wattmann, and, of course, one of my highlights is my collection of poetry, titled, Self Translation and published by Transit Lounge, and I’m proud to say that I have been practising self translation since I was a university student in the early 1980s when I was twenty-seven or so.

Whose work inspires you? Who and what are you reading at the moment?

I don’t know whose at the moment, probably none, but I have always been inspired by the dead writers, Edmond Jabès, for example, and E. M. Cioran, for another. I have been daily reading twenty-odd books, some in Chinese and others in English. Can’t tell you how but that’s my way of reading and writing, meaning I’m writing a number of books at the same time each and every day, about 3 or 4 going on at the same time. One of the books I’m reading is Ducks, Newburyport, by Lucy Ellmann, the other is Complete Poems of Kenneth Koch and the third is a collection of Chinese writings, written in the early 1900s, about their bitter experiences in America in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Do you have any advice for emerging writers?

No, not really. Mine is too hard a life. I don’t want anyone to follow in my footsteps. There’s little money in writing, so why bother? And, honestly, as a migrant, one doesn’t have much hope as a writer in this country. Who wants to read you? Who wants to buy your books?

Before I ask you the final question—is there anything else that you’d like to add?

No, not really.

What does being Asian-Australian mean to you?

It means you don’t have a friend in this country. Thank you for your questions.