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Su Tong, a fixture among Chinese fiction for decades, achieved international fame when his novel Wives and Concubines was adapted in 1993 by director Zhang Yimou into the Oscar-nominated film Raise the Red Lantern, and then again in 2009 when his novel The Boat to Redemption won the Man Asian Literary Prize. In this interview conducted by Montana State University Professor Hua Li, Su Tong delves into a range of his lesser-known works that are collectively called the Toon Street Series. Here the author speaks to these coming-of-age narratives in relation to his more recent works like The Boat to Redemption.
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Interviewer's introduction: Su Tong's coming-of- age narratives, represented by his Toon Street series (Xiangchunshu jie xilie ...), are an important component of his writing. The Toon Street Series includes such short stories as "Memories of Mulberry Garden" ("Sangyuan liunian" ...), "An Afternoon Incident" ("Wuhou gushi" ...), "The Sad Dance" ("Shangxin de wudao" ...), "Roller Skating Away" ("Cheng hualunche yuanqu" ...), and the bildungsroman novel North Side Story (Chengbei didai ...). The series explores a group of street teens' coming-of-age experiences during the Cultural Revolution. The fictional Toon Street setting is located in an unnamed southern city, which is modeled on Su Zhou, a city Su Tong knew intimately. In 2009, he wrote The Boat to Redemption (He'an ...), a mixture of the bildungsroman and the neo-historical novel. The novel further develops a number of themes from Su Tong's Toon Street Series: the rebelliousness of school dropouts, problematic father-son relationships, unful- filled love, chaos and ensuing repression, and the special ambience of a small southern town. Yet the novel is also a political allegory that subverts the Maoist belief in a revolutionary bloodline and in clear-cut class divisions, such as were prevalent during the Cultural Revolution.
I conducted this interview with Su Tong while I was revising my manuscript Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua: Coming of Age in Troubled Times dur- ing the summer of 2010. Therefore, this interview focuses on Su Tong's coming-of-age fiction in general, and that of The Boat to Redemption in particular. I am grateful to Yu Hua, who helped me contact Su Tong and hence made this interview possible....