From the Desk of Joanne Wang
In 1993, Toming Jun Liu, professor of English at California State University, L.A. interviewed Mu Xin when Mu Xin lived in New York. Here is an excerpt:
Liu: What are your thoughts on fiction?
Mu: I feel that it would be tedious for a person to have only one life. It would be much better to have two or three lives going on simultaneously, hence my desire to split or transmute the self by means of fiction. The first-person narrator is a preference of mine since in my fictional works I can, by such means, arbitrate and master those I's. The bags are fake but those things inside the bags are real. Some of my readers and editors believe that those fictional I's are the author's own self; they have mistaken the bags for the real thing. When the bags are real, things inside the bags could then become fake.
Liu: How do you consider and handle such subjects as "remembrances of things past"? Can you please elaborate on that?
Mu: What interests me is not "things past" but how to achieve simultaneously two I's through remembrance: one is long dead, the other is still living. According to a traditional custom in China, "the dead take priority." In the old days, for example, a feudal official traveling with his entourage would have his subordinates drive everyone else to the sides of the road and make them stand in silent awe. But if there was a funeral procession on the same road, the official and his entourage had to make way for the procession; it did not matter if the dead in the coffin was a nobleman or a commoner. This I in the present looks at the I in the past with the same kind of respect. However, the present I often instills into the past I certain "possibilities"; in other words, I let him do, within the realm of fiction, certain things I wanted to do then but did not or could not do.