Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [15]
The third type is made up of publishing-house editors. Some of my books have been published in simplified-character editions and have sold pretty well, so editors often approach me wanting my next book. The problem is, I’ve not been able to write a single sentence for the last couple of years now; the best I can do is market a few of the older works I wrote in Taiwan that haven’t yet been published on the mainland. I’ve repackaged a couple more of them and they’re due out soon in simplified characters. Sometimes they take me to meet their editors-in-chief—who used to be nobodies, but who have become managing directors. Most of the time they’re not interested in my books; they’re concerned just about market share and the next big thing. Once in a while, as a major figure in the Taiwanese cultural world, I get to meet some officials of the Chinese News Service, the Ministry of Culture, the Taiwan Affairs Office, or the United Front Work Department. It’s terrific to be an official in China today. They all cut quite a figure and, no matter what rank they occupy, when they talk they’re all very impressive. They treat the Taiwanese like their little brothers, and all they ask is that we treat them like our big brothers.
I’m not being immodest when I say I’m a major figure in the Taiwanese cultural world. I was born in Hong Kong, and it was only after I finished elementary school in Tiu Keng Leng refugee camp that I followed my parents to Taiwan. Still, I have always genuinely thought of myself as Taiwanese. I’ve always loved to read, and I decided I wanted to be a writer while still at secondary school. While studying journalism, I came second in a short-story competition. I know it was because I went to Cultural University instead of National Taiwan University that I didn’t win the first prize.
It made me so angry that I wrote a satirical story called “I Want to Go Abroad” in the style of Chen Yingzhen, but I didn’t dare get it published. I circulated it among my classmates, who really liked it. Some dissident students tried to enroll me in their group, which made me both excited and anxious. I was just a student, my parents had worked their fingers to the bone so that I could go to university, and I had to watch out for my future. I didn’t publish that story until after the media controls were lifted many years later. It came out in the New Life evening paper, but by then it was no longer topical and young people didn’t understand what I was satirizing.
After graduation, I got lucky with a scholarship to a Catholic university in Jamaica. I practiced my English every day and devoured novels in the library. I was obsessed with the hard-boiled detective novels of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. My MA thesis compared the logic of Charlie Chan with Western detective novels. I slogged for a year and a half, right through the summer vacation without taking a break, and got my masters degree.
In the library one day I read in the Hong Kong Mingbao Monthly that an overseas Chinese in New York was starting a Chinese-language daily called Huabao, and his managing editor was one of the judges who had given my student story its second prize. I got in touch straight away and was given a job. That’s how I finally made it to Manhattan.
The Huabao was really small fry—it wasn’t even on sale outside Chinatown. After working there a couple of years, I got pretty depressed. I was so bored that I wrote a novel called The Last Greyhound to Manhattan. I never imagined that this overseas-student novel would allow me to squeeze into the ranks of Chinese-language writers for the rest of my life. I wrote it in the modernist stream-of-consciousness style, and I still don’t know how I did it. Most people don’t know that over the years this book has sold a hundred thousand copies in Taiwan. While I was in New York, the famous martial