Ian Johnson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who has spent twenty years in China writing for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, as well as serving for five years on the editorial board of The Journal of Asian Studies. He is the author of three other books that focus on the intersection of politics and civil society, including The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao, and Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China. He is the senior fellow for China at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Ian Johnson will be in conversation with Bao Pu as part of our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Monday, November 27, 2023, at 6:00pm PT to celebrate the publication of his new book Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, out now from Oxford University Press. Register here!
Where are you writing to us from?
Brooklyn.
What is bringing you joy right now, personally/artistically/habitually?
I had a serious motorcycle accident when I was 24 years old that left my left shoulder permanently damaged. So for me, the thing that gives me the most pleasure is to be pain-free. A whisky from Islay or Campbeltown can help, but what always works is swimming. At least three times a week, I have to swim about 1500 to 2000-meters; afterwards, I feel comfortably tired and with a cup of malty-dark dahongbao tea from China, I can write through the morning.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
I’m interested in books that have an ambitious structure and use different points of view to tell a story.
One that has stayed with me for decades is Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers, which tells the story of a faked assassination and a police officer’s efforts to investigate the apparent murder—even though there is no body.
Similarly, Robbe-Grillet’s great movie “Last Year in Marienbad,” wanders and doubles back, the plot working itself into a fever that boils its way toward the conclusion.
Non-fiction can rarely be so ambitious (and still stay true to the facts, hence my problem with Kapuściński’s fable-like works being labeled non-fiction) but I tried to structure the plot of Sparks in ambitious ways: geographically—from China’s far west to its heartland and then back to its peripheries—and by using contrapunctual “theaters of memory” vignettes between each chapter to complement and challenge the main theses.
What books are you reading right now and would you recommend any to others?
I’d recommend Xu Zechen’s Beijing Sprawl, translated by Jeremy Tiang and Eric Abrahamsen, Two Lines Press, 2023. Xu portrays the world of migrant laborers on the far outskirts of the city—far beyond the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and the tourist-engorged hutong alleys of the old city. This is a place of concrete houses to cater to the millions who come to make a buck, who bicker, fail, succeed, and have a strange relationship with their country’s “grand capital.” It’s told in a series of interlocking short stories and as a whole gives us a composite vision of Beijing as one of the world’s great moloch-type metropolises—more like Döblin’s Berlin than the stylized gentility of Beijing’s past great writers, such as Lao She.
I also recommend Pleasures of Thinking, Penguin Random House 2023, by the late Wang Xiaobo, one of China’s most famous essayists and novelists of the late 20th century. Translated by Yan Yan, it has some of his most famous essays, especially “The Silent Majority,” which is one of the great calls to arms against forgetting and silence. I interviewed Wang in 1996 and have written about him extensively in The New York Review of Books and in my new book, Sparks. As a recent New York Times review noted, however, it is in need of an introduction for context; it’s a pity to go to the trouble of translating a classic and not go the final mile to give it the introduction it deserves.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
Since we’re dealing with a fantasy, I’d reopen Beijing’s Bookworm, which for two decades was one of Beijing’s great hangouts for locals and expats, before Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium closed it down in 2019. It’s so loved that its website is still kept alive as though it were still in existence: https://beijingbookworm.com/.
The bestseller would be Perry Link’s magisterial biography of the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, I Have No Enemies.
