Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [16]
Jin Yong also liked my interview. He knew I’d been born in Hong Kong and spoke Cantonese, so he invited me to come and work for Mingbao. I became an editor there and wrote articles about the mainland for the China section of the Mingbao Daily. From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, I interviewed quite a few famous members of the older generation of mainland writers and artists. I established a network of contacts, witnessed a number of major events, and deepened my understanding of the mainland. In 1992, Jin Yong retired and I was given a post on the mainland. At the same time, my mainland girlfriend, Wen Lan, decided to go abroad, basically breaking up with me, so instead I decided to go back to Taiwan.
Now I was at the Taiwanese United Daily. I collected the articles I’d already written and planned to publish a volume of interviews with famous mainland cultural figures. I thought at the time that it would be my greatest contribution to posterity. These venerable personages ranked as national treasures—and where they had already died and my interview represented their parting words, its worth would be beyond question. I probably worked too slowly, revising the book over and over, and so I missed my opportunity. When Endowment and Remembrance: In Search of One Hundred Forgotten Mainland Masters of Art and Literature was finally published, the atmosphere in Taiwan had changed. The book didn’t even make the Kingstone Bookstore’s bestseller list; it was featured in the weekly book-review section of the United Daily, but nobody discussed it again after that. Lee Teng-hui was the president of Taiwan and ethnic conflict was growing increasingly acrimonious. The people of Taiwan were concerned about the dangers of a cross-Strait war and not about mainland-Chinese culture.
After the publication of my book, everybody in the trade labeled me as a “China expert” or “an expert on mainland issues”—in other words, they were not interested in me.
So I decided to change my image. If I couldn’t write a literary masterpiece, I could at least write popular bestsellers. Books about war in the Taiwan Strait were big sellers at the time, so I read up on the nationalist and communist militaries to see what sort of angle I could take. I decided there were too many books following this trend and so I gave up, but I did learn something: if you want to ride a wave, you better get on early.
I wrote a detective novel called Thirteen Months, but it bombed.
People were becoming instantly famous by writing about their philosophy of life, so I wrote a book on life philosophies, but it bombed, too.
Management studies were all the rage, so I wrote several books on secret workplace-survival strategies, but they bombed, too.
My books on life philosophies and office management were really opportunistic works; they wouldn’t sell, and I had to admit it. But Thirteen Months should not have been confined so easily to oblivion. It was certainly an excellent piece of innovative Taiwanese detective fiction. Unfortunately, contemporary Taiwanese readers were used only to Japanese detective works or Agatha Christie whodunnits. They didn’t know how to appreciate the black humor and ironic worldly sophistication of American-style hard-boiled detective novels. Perhaps I wasn’t a first-rate writer, but I consoled myself with the self-mocking words of Somerset Maugham: among second-rate writers, I was definitely first-rate.
Finally, an opportunity came my way when some foreign author published a book on emotional IQ, or “EQ,” and it sold like hot cakes in Taiwan. I immediately pulled together all the information I’d amassed over the years about Chinese culture, from philosophies of life to business management, and quickly came out with a book entitled The Chinese EQ.
Just as I expected,