In Japan, Chinese writer comes full circle
TOKYO (AFP) — Chinese author Shan Sa's identity has circumnavigated the world -- she lives in France, is impassioned by Japan and is now turning her attention to her homeland.
The novelist, whose real name is Yan Nini, has lived in Paris for more than half her life as part of a literary diaspora that stretched its wings as China began opening up to the world three decades ago.
Like many other emigre authors who write in a foreign tongue -- Dai Sijie in French or Ha Jin in English -- Shan Sa has written mostly in French, apart from her first book of poems when she was 10 years old.
Her books include "The Girl Who Played Go," which won an award in France and has been translated into English but remains unpublished in Chinese.
Her most recent book is "Shall We Meet in Tokyo at Four in the Morning?" in which she explores her own roots. It has been published first not in French but in Japanese in a collaboration with Richard Collasse, head of French fashion house Chanel in Tokyo.
"I enjoy living as a foreigner very much. This way of life -- to be a foreigner anywhere you go -- suits me in the end because I can have a perspective that is open and accepting," the 34-year-old told AFP in an interview.
Foreigners "can understand the suffering of a people, we understand their reactions that are sometimes illogical. We forgive their faults while being lucid at the same time," she said.
Such empathy is also evident as she steps into the shoes of wartime Japan -- a subject that would seem especially sensitive for a writer from China, where memories of Japanese atrocities run deep.
"The Girl Who Played Go," which was published in 2001 and won an edition of France's Goncourt award judged by young people, is a tragic love story about a nationalist Chinese girl and a Japanese soldier in Manchuria, where the Japanese made their base in northeast China after invading in 1931.
In a reflection of the attitude the Japanese took towards their Chinese colonial subjects, the book's Japanese protagonist muses: "Only the Japanese are heirs to a Chinese culture pure of any mix. We will deliver to its people peace and dignity. We are their saviours.
"The Japanese chose to be glorious in their action, and the Chinese in their death. The pathetic majesty of their collective suicide is sullied by a sad irony. To kill oneself too early is a shameful surrender," he says.
Shan Sa said she admired Japan because it succeeds in preserving "tradition, respect for nature, and the strictness of rules".
She described herself as an avid fan of Japan's medieval samurai knights and their "bushido" code of chivalry. Japan, she said, "gives inspiration in my daily life and it is a passion without reason.
"Personally I feel no grudges against Japan. I condemn war, but I do not condemn Japan," she said, adding: "China has very profound scars from the war with Japan (but) peace is never impossible."
Shan Sa also breaks rank with authors such as Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian who she sees as using their international status as a political platform from which to criticise the communist rulers of China.
The daughter of intellectuals and the granddaughter of a communist who was purged by the party, Shan Sa left with her family for Paris after the military assault on protestors in Beijing on June 4, 1989 and has lived there ever since.
In her latest book, Shan Sa recounts her girlhood in China in the form of letters between herself and Collasse, a longtime resident of Japan.
Shan Sa said it was difficult to recount the ordeal that she and millions of other Chinese had endured in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when, manipulated by Chairman Mao for his own political ends, young "red guards" abandoned school to rampage through the country.
She said the book enabled her for the first time to come to terms with her personal life after years of writing and setting stories as far afield as Macedonia.
She hesitated to generalise about the Chinese, as "I understand them," she said. "The Chinese underwent similar stories these past 100 years. That is why I have never had the desire to write about my life, of these very painful stories," she said.
"But I think it's good that I did it. Now at this age, I have come to the point of maturity where I can draw a line."
