Shuang Xuetao: Writing Rouge Street, a Home for Exiles of Chinese Modernity

Several times during our Zoom call, Shuang Xuetao excuses himself to fill his mug with water; he’s hungover from a night of drinking, he explains. I’m nervous enough to need a drink myself, I joke. After all, how often does someone get the chance to interview one of the most promising Chinese writers of his generation?

Shuang doesn’t miss a beat; he just asks what time it is where I am (11 p.m. in Connecticut), then says, grinning, “Perfect time to start drinking.”

He is a writer, I soon discover, to whom the art of the undersell comes so naturally, you are almost taken in by his rough-hewn, guileless persona. But when we talk craft, I detect traces of erudition hidden in his populism. He criticizes China’s literary fiction for being too cloistered and academic; I find out later that many of his short stories premiered in well-received Chinese literary journals. He jokes that Jeremy Tiang, his translator, speaks better Mandarin than he, then demonstrates his love for local vernaculars and a suspicion of “official registers,” of which Mandarin is exemplary. He defends genre fiction and the tastes of ordinary people, but the words of Ivan Turgenev and Lu Xun — two luminaries of “high literature” — fill his characters’ psyches.

Alongside Ban Yu and Zheng Zhi, Shuang is a representative of China’s New Dongbei Literature. Born in the 1980s, this cohort of writers came of age during the country’s transition from planned economy to free market, raised by parents cut loose from jobs at state-owned enterprises and thrown into the cruelties of the free market, who were left with the dilemma of preserving their dignity or stooping to make ends