I have always felt out of step, a bit different… Rather like the characters in my books - they’re all bandits, artists, the kind of people who don’t care what other people think, who defy any kind of authority on principle, who reject social convention and embrace a kind of utopian ideal.

I was sixteen years old at the time of Tian’anmen. Instead of studying I was hanging out with my friends in the street and in parks, talking, debating, criticising the ‘system’. Confident and passionate, I was suffused with idealism and wanted to throw Confucianism out of the window. I was a communist, yes, but what interested me was a collective life that was chosen, not imposed. And I hated the way young people couldn’t express themselves freely. When I got home in the evening, in the privacy of our Beijing apartment I would remake the world with my father, a professor of contemporary literature, and my two older brothers. We would talk through the night about democracy, personal freedom… I was young and sensitive, I lived in a ‘bubble’ and I didn’t understand anything much about the ways of the world. Later I was to be bitterly disappointed by those very students, those youthful firebrands who so quickly turned to business, in thrall to the dollar. I’ve loathed politics since then, even though of course it’s part of everyday reality for all Chinese people.

After I’d finished my four years of studying at the University of Beida (Beijing University), including one year of compulsory military service, which I would rather not remember, I left for Paris to study French literature. One more escapade to get away from the clutches of my father, a wounded intellectual who had messed up his career as a writer because of the Cultural Revolution and transfered his dreams to his only daughter. He was too clingy, too imposing, like the stereotypical paternal structure indelibly locked to Chinese culture. Like so many young Chinese, I couldn’t bear the weight of ‘all the hope’ on my narrow shoulders.  I was reading Camus, I devoured French films like Betty Blue and The Lovers of Pont Neuf. I nearly got married to a Frenchman – a moment of madness which thankfully I didn’t go through with. I was obsessed with western culture, the culture of the majority. I was very selfish and unbending. To be honest, apart from this love affair which I’m not sorry didn’t come to anything, my four years in Paris weren’t particularly happy years. I discovered a conservative world with too many rules and an almost total absence of imagination amongst Parisiens. A sort of ‘finishing school’ for life, deadly dull. In contrast, from a distance Beijing seemed to me a city full of life, shimmering with a thousand lights, a third world city perhaps but but so alive, like Delhi or Buenos Aires! A city where you could still appreciate the values that have been lost in western democracies, like respect for one’s elders, family solidarity, an awareness of the other. Beijing is a city that I love deeply today, it’s where my friends live and I have my bearings. Overcome with longing, I came back to China at the end of 1998 with the idea of going into the film business. But it was too complicated a world for me, and I prefered to change direction completely. The idea of going back to writing, the need to express myself on social themes, the impulse to find a way to put my ideas forward, became a powerful urge. Encouraged by my friends, by writers and poets, I decided to make a go of it: articles, poems, criticism, intellectual salons… I dived into the world of literature with a real sense of pleasure. When I wasn’t working, alone and in silence, I would read Tang dynasty poems for hours on end, or I would immerse myself in the political writings of Lu Xun. When I think that Wei Hui’s book Shanghai Baby, where she recounts her sexual adventures in minute detail, had a bigger print run than the philosophy of Lu Xun, what a tragedy! We have to be careful that we aren’t dragged down by these sirens of an overly commercialised literature. The nineties was the era of the sex memoir. Today the fashion is for fictionalised historical novels, a kind of Chinese version of The Lord of the Rings. Another genre…

For me, writing is like going back to one’s roots. It might seem odd, but in today’s China I feel free. That’s right, free…