“I’m Writing About the Era that Rushes Towards Us”: Interview with Chinese Novelist Ba Longfeng (Part 1)
Abstract
This interview with Chinese novelist and screenwriter Ba Longfeng examines his literary response to the profound social transformations accompanying China’s modernization and its emergence into what Ba describes as a new historical era. Against a Western publishing environment that disproportionately presents Chinese literature through narratives of political oppression, poverty, trauma, and social dysfunction, the interview introduces Ba’s effort to depict an alternative dimension of contemporary Chinese experience: optimism, cultural confidence, internationalization, and “positive energy” (正能量). Focusing principally on his forthcoming English-language novel Silk Road Romance, Ba discusses his transition from the tragic rural realism of Forever Lost, My Love toward an international and youth-oriented literature reflecting the material and cultural transformations of contemporary China. He explains his incorporation of American popular culture and Hollywood into a narrative of Silk Road cultural exchange, emphasizing a global literary perspective based on dialogue rather than cultural prejudice. Ba also offers a critique of contemporary literary individualism and what he regards as an excessive preoccupation with suffering, mundane experience, and stylistic experimentation. In contrast, he advocates the recovery of grand social narratives grounded in ordinary human experience, arguing that literature must capture both individual lives and the larger historical forces transforming them. Finally, through the journey of Silk Road Romance protagonist Yashir, a Central Asian Dungan woman returning to her ancestral homeland in China, Ba explores cultural belonging, diaspora, civilizational exchange, and China’s growing connections with the wider world along the modern Silk Road.
Keywords
Ba Longfeng, Chinese Literature, Silk Road Romance, Positive Energy, Contemporary China, Silk Road, Cultural Exchange
