重音五问 | Five Questions with Na Zhong
大家好，我们是重音社。
“Five Questions with Friends”是我们新开设的灵魂拷问系列，在这里，我们将邀请我们认识的海外亚裔写作者们来讨（吐）论（槽）跨语言写作这个事情。这个名单越来越长啦，敬请期待，漏网之鱼也欢迎在后台和我们取得联系！
Accent: Why do you write in English?
Na Zhong: I studied English in college, but until one evening in my sophomore year, I remained unmoved by the language. The incident that would change my mind took place on the fourth floor of my college library, in the back where all the expensive books that no one read were on display, coated in dust and neglect. The evening of, I picked up from the bookshelf a biography about a writer named Virginia Woolf.
Becoming Woolf would lead me to To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One’s Own, and The Common Reader. It was the year of Shanghai Expo, I would bring my tattered, yellow-covered Mrs. Dalloway everywhere, reading it on the subway, in the park, during my volunteer work. It would also lead me to wonder if one day I would be able to join the English literary tradition. Many things have happened since then, many detours and pauses, but somehow I did begin to write in English, perhaps nudged by Woolf’s visionary prose and the mystery of fate.
A: What did you get from your MFA, anything good, awful, or meaningful?
NZ: MFA is the place where you learn the art of “becoming” well enough so that, once you leave the program, you know how to concoct the magical experience for yourself, again and again. You learn how to read like a writer in seminars, how to analyze and revise in workshops, and, when there are no classes, how to make friends and live a little.
A: What creative medium do you work in to take a break from your writing?
NZ: I’ve given up a lot of hobbies for lack of time, but the one that has remained with me is doodling. I paint with crayon sticks, which I bought at a discount from a small, dubious art supply store, which has been screaming “EVERYTHING MUST GO” for two years. I think I've been tricked.
A: Tell us a book/movie/play/artwork… that you have recently enjoyed.
NZ: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. I read a third of the novel seven months ago and was bored to death; last month I picked it up again and found the man an absolute genius. What has prompted the change in the past six months? The marathon journey I had with War and Peace and everything written by Henry James must have helped.
As confessed by the author, The Sympathizer is a fuck-America book, containing some of the fiercest criticism and most accurate observations of the country I’ve ever read. For instance,
“They believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent. You can’t have both. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence.”
Besides the power of its insight, the book is a linguistic tour de force, full of lyricism and imagination. See below for a combination of both qualities:
“A flash of light and sound blinded and deafened me. Earth and gravel pelted me and I flinched. My ears rang and somebody was screaming as I huddled on the ground, arms over my head. Somebody was screaming and it was not me. Somebody was cursing and it was not me."
A: Share with us some gossip about your writing community.
NZ: All the gossip I know came from dear Jiaoyang!
INTERVIEWEE BIO
Na Zhong was born and raised in Chengdu, China. A writer and literary translator, she has published with Lit Hub, The Margins, Asymptote, The Shanghai Literary Review, The Millions, Brooklyn Magazine, Words without Borders, among others. She is the translator of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Normal People. You can find her tweeting @nazhongwriting.