One Man's Bible Read Free

to China, or would you like to? And if you do go back to China, do you have any idea what you will find there?
    Gao: Since it was announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has condemned my works and criticized them harshly. All of my works are now banned from getting into China or being published in China. What author would want to return to a country that banned his or her books?

Translating Gao
    Mabel Lee on Gao Xingjian
    The essay that follows is based on Gao Xingjian’s writings and on Mabel Lee’s conversations with Mr. Gao during the 1990s.
    Writer, dramatist, critic, and artist Gao Xingjian was born in China (Ganzhou, Jiangxi Province) on 4 January 1940 during the Japanese invasion. His father was a senior employee of the Bank of China. As the bank retreated from place to place before the enemy advance the family library remained intact, travelling with bank property under armed escort. From early childhood Gao grew up reading his way through that sizeable collection of Chinese literature and a small number of volumes on Western literature and art. His love for the theatre also began in the early years of his life when his mother became a performer in a patriotic national salvation theatre group. It was also his mother who insisted that he keep a diary and who got him in the habit of writing. This practice later grew into an addiction for linguistic expression of his rich imagination and intense curiosity about life.
    While his parents were preoccupied with surviving in war-torn China and then with diligently remaking themselves into citizens of New China (established in 1949), Gao succeeded in providing a solid literary education for himself through his own readings. At the same time he developed a passion for oil painting. It was his ambition to enroll in an art college so that he would one day be able to paint like the European masters. (It was only in 1979, however, when he saw the works of the masters in the museums of Europe, that he realized his aspirations were unachievable. He turned to Chinese ink paintings, with considerable success—from 1987, he supported himself in Paris through the sales of these works.)
    On completing high school Gao enrolled at the Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing, where he majored in French literature. He graduated in 1962 and was assigned to work as a French translator and editor in the Foreign Languages Press. It was a stroke of good fortune for Gao’s later career that he had studied at the Institute, for as more and more books were banned, he was able to access French editions. In fact, he voraciously read his way through the shelves of books in the libraries of both the Institute and then his workplace before all books in foreign languages were banned during the course of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
    As a young adult, Gao Xingjian was already a writer with an obsessive desire for self-expression. However, he was aware that what he wrote was clearly at odds with Mao Zedong’s directive that literature and the arts must “serve the masses.” During the Cultural Revolution, when stringent measures were imposed on writers, he knew that his writings were highly problematical, and that there was no possibility of his having them published. As a compulsive writer he in effect wrote for himself. He was author, reader, and critic of his works; this is a stance he still resolutely adheres to in all of his writings. Even while undergoing “re-education” and living the life of a peasant in the 1970s, he continued to write but took the precautionof wrapping his manuscripts in plastic and burying them in the earth floor under the heavy water vat in his hut. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, rather than risk having to face dire consequences for his accumulated writings, he burned several kilos of manuscripts (ten plays, and many short stories, poems, and essays). For him it was an ordeal to part with what he