Heart of the countryside

Writer Li Er was not surprised when German Prime Minister Angela Merkel invited him for a talk, for the second time, during her visit to China last year. Merkel made the first request in 2007, but Li was looking after his cancer-stricken mother in Henan province and couldn't make the journey to Beijing.

When the two finally met, Merkel said she enjoyed Li's book because it provided her with a glimpse of China's contemporary countryside, a topic she wanted to learn more about.

What he didn't know back then was that the gift Merkel brought for Premier Wen Jiabao was the German translation of his 2004 novel Cherry on a Pomegranate Tree (石榴树上结樱桃).

Since his first short story published in 1987, Li has been widely respected in literary circles and by the casual readers for his profound observations and realistic depictions of change in China.

Despite his claim to be a "not very prolific writer", Li has published two novels and approximately 50 novellas and short stories, mostly within the past decade.

Born in 1966, Li was brought up in a rural village in Jiyuan county, Henan, until high school. One of his hobbies as a teen was to watch the poultry and livestock roaming freely on the dusty country road.

After all these years the writer, who now lives in Beijing, has not lost touch with those county tracks and the people he knew from childhood.

"When visiting relatives still living in Jiyuan I am able to tell their intentions from even the slightest movement," Li says proudly in an interview with China Daily.

Originally named Li Rongfei, the writer changed his given name to Er (洱, the left part meaning water, and the right part ear) because 700 km away from home, he still hears in his dreams the bellowing of the Qinhe River, a branch of the Yellow River flowing through his village.

Regarding his name, Li once joked he is at best a "fake Laozi", responding to a friend's joke that he bears the same original name with the ancient Taoist sage.

Nevertheless, Li says it is Confucianism that rings true in his life and writing.

As the first son in his family, Li observes the Confucian doctrine of filial piety. To take care of his mother, not only did he miss the chance to meet Merkel, he virtually gave up writing for two and a half years before she passed away.

His works are often, in one way or another, connected with Confucianism, either for the protagonists or in terms of the setting.

First published in 2002 and short-listed for the 6th Mao Dun Literary Prize (one of the most prestigious prizes in China), Truth and Variations (Hua Qiang) delineates the mired physical and psychological circumstances confronting Ge Ren, a revolutionary poet who has absorbed both traditional Confucianism and modern Western thoughts, in the 1930s and 1940s.

Historical truth about the life and death of Ge is worked together with historical documents, archives, and from the narratives of three people who spent time with him, spanning the revolutionary years in the 1930s and 1940s, the "cultural revolution" (1966-76) and the present day.

For Li, Ge is the ideal intellectual who retains his dignity and individuality, in the face of complex and agonizing circumstances. He believes readers will benefit from Ge's example.

"The problems facing Ge still bear relevance to the present reality, because history is just another form of everyday life," Li says, adding this would be the same for every reader, whatever their nationality.

"If you record the emotional reactions of Chinese and Western readers in the form of electroencephalograms, you will be able to see uncanny resemblances in their patterns," he says.

Cherry on a Pomegranate Tree portrays, satirically and sympathetically, the sophisticated contemporary rural life of a village inhabited by descendents of Confucius and Mencius.

Protagonist Kong Fanhua seeks her re-election as the village's committee director. But a woman villager's pregnancy, against the country's family planning policy, causes problems.

In most previous portraits of rural China it is described as a poetic utopia, as in Shen Congwen's Border Town (Bian Cheng), or the revolutionary battlefield for class struggle, as in Zhou Libo's The Storm (Baofeng Zhouyu); while contemporary writers tend to concentrate on the sufferings of rural life.

But all those added up do not constitute the whole picture, according to Li.

"There are burdens and there is suffering, but there is also joy and happiness. Rural life is extremely subtle and complex in today's drastically changing and globalizing context.

"TV and the Internet play important roles. For Western readers, it might be hard to believe that Chinese farmers can talk about political issues, such as the China-US relationship, during time off from their farm duties, or else they discuss Hollywood blockbusters at their dining table."

It is in this manner that Li narrates his own story about folk customs in rural China, about the problems and hopes it encounters as it moves toward modernization.

Li plans to write just three novels: one about history, a second about the reality, and a third about the future.

Truth and Variations is the one about history. Cherry on a Pomegranate Tree is preparation for the one about reality, which he is currently working on, and is about a Confucian intellectual's experience today.

"A central idea running through the three planned novels is that history is both reality and future, or reality is both history and future, or future is both history and reality," says Li, his remarks sounding like a philosophical tongue twister.