No time to be funny

Yan Lianke says he is the most boring and the least humorous Chinese writer. [Photo by Zhan Min/China Daily]

Chinese writer Yan Lianke is a humorous man. Like his novels, his conversation is often witty and is full of plans that sound absurd at first but are real and sad when you digest them.

For example, the 57-year-old says that when he read his first foreign novel, Gone With the Wind, he was 20 years old. Before that all he read was Chinese revolutionary literature, so he thought all literature in the world was red.

He was 20 in 1978 when China started reforming and opening up, recovering slowly from the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

But Yan insists that he is the least humorous writer in China.

"I never try to be humorous either in writing or in speaking. For me, everything is tragic, survival, lives or life. Especially in this land, there is far more tragedy than humor. But this is the cultural difference between East and the West," says Yan in a dialogue with French writer and journalist Renaud de Spens at Institut Francais de Chine in Beijing.

Yan has eight works published in French, including the latest, The Chronicles of Zhalie, in September.

Globally, Yan's fiction has been translated into more than 20 languages.

"We say that the reality we represent in our works is a great tragedy, but people in the West regard it as satire and humor. When I wrote Serve the People!: A Novel, my heart was full of sorrow. They all say that Yan Lianke is the most humorous Chinese writer, but I think I am the most boring and the least humorous," says Yan, the Franz Kafka Prize winner in 2014.

"Reading my novels is not a pleasant experience. I understand that readers may hate me after reading them, but they will remember me."

He says that writing is also torture for him. At home in Beijing, Yan sits down at a desk at half past 7 or 8 in the morning, and works for two hours to write about 2,000 characters.

"I know writers like Wang Anyi say that writing is a happy thing, but for me it's very painful. After writing 2,000 characters, I do not talk to anyone. The happiest thing for me is to go to my study and watch National Basketball Association games on TV," he says.

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