Ciao a tutti! Avrei bisogno di un'informazione. Ho intenzione di scrivere la mia tesi di laurea sulla scrittrice Zha Jianying che ha scritto il libro Ba shi niandai fangtanlu. Qualcuno sa qualcosa a proposito?
Grazie in anticipo

Zha Jianying wears a short-sleeved turquoise jumper over a burgundy blouse. Small comfortable eyeglasses and casual dark-olive slacks with lots of pockets that zip rather than button. Red-leather house-slippers and maroon-colored socks. Given what she wears – and were it not for the natural elegance of her voice, the constantly expressive hands and a writer’s flair for bursting out well-honed sentences, even in speech – you might mistake her for a New England mother who owns a mini-van.

But she is too busy to be shuttling kids to soccer practice. Her new book, simply called, "The 80s," is taking China by storm and has made her a sought after cultural critic. Published earlier this year, the book has also a debate among intellectuals about the importance of the era, sending many who lived during the 1980s down memory lane. The book has even captured the imagination of Chinese young people, the post-80s generation, who are not old enough to remember the first decade after Deng Xiaoping’s opening and reform policy dramatically changed the face of the nation.

“The book is not about nostalgia,” says Ms. Zha, from her apartment in Beijing. “It’s a hard-nosed reflection of the period. I think part of my reasons for writing it might have originally stemmed in part from nostalgia. But the people I talk to in the book really take a critical attitude.” Zha spent much of the 1980s outside of China, and this extended absence, she says, was also one of the reasons she wanted to take on the project.

"The 80s" consists of an engaging series of interviews between Zha Jianying and 12 of the most influential creative minds of the 1980s, a line-up that reads like a Who’s Who of public figures: including rock star Cui Jian; novelist A Cheng; émigré poet, Bei Dao; musician Liu Suola; and from the art world, the artist Chen Daqing as well as the influential critic, Li Xianting.

Although Li and Chen were both active in Chinese art during the 1980s, they worked under different circumstances. Chen, the artist, was busy absorbing influences and experimenting in New York, while "Lao Li," as he is often called by those who know him, was busy in Beijing promoting the new art through the fledgling art magazine trade and by organizing exhibitions.

Both men, Zha notes, seem to take different attitudes about the era. Lao Li views the period as a time when artists were more honest and less concerned about the bottom line; Mr. Chen is more critical of the the 1980s as a period when Chinese people were a little too rough around the edges. Some of Chen’s remarks from his published interview have often put Zha Jianying under pressure from the media, who want to know whether she agrees or disagrees with Chen.

“Chen made one metaphorical　statement in the book about disco. Everybody said that suddenly people were dancing disco. And he says – you can read in the book – he says something like, ‘They might have thought they were dancing disco, but they looked liked sick patients who were taking their first steps out of a hospital bed.’ The “disco” statement was taken as a metaphor to define the naïve attitudes that people had during the 80s.

“His remarks were astute, but a little too harsh.” Ms Zha’says, her hands calmly expressive as she speaks. Sometimes they are so in sync with each other they resemble a pair of pale white birds. Other times, one hand rests on her chin, or when she concentrates, she makes a relaxed fist with her left hand while resting her right temple on the knuckle of her curled right index finger. But her hands only rest for a moment. After she finds the right word, they flurry again in unison as if they were dancing to Strauss.

“Yeah I think Chen was probably going too far. But after I made the book a survey, and two thirds of the people in the survey said they thought that the 1980s was a kind of ‘The Chinese Renaissance.' So these reporters were asking me, and I get this question a lot, ‘Do you agree with Chen Daqing or do you agree that the period was a Chinese Renaissance?’


She continues:“I usually respond that the 80s was somewhere in the middle. Chinese weren’t that naïve or rough about the edges but it wasn’t a Renaissance either. The quality of the work – in music, in fiction, in art-- across the whole cultural spectrum – was just too inconsistent. But isn’t that the state of art anywhere in any period? Art in the United States or Europe is inconsistent too, now as ever, which is why there are critics and critical viewers. There’s a lot of lament going around. Mr. Li Xianting – who as you know continues to be a leading art critic and art organizer here in China - he expresses some pessimism during our conversations that many artists are not making art for art’s sake but are more interested in chasing fame and fortune. I think [he may be disappointed] because he was here striving toward an idealist that of course couldn’t last."

Li’s ideals which he shared with many of the artists at the time, must have included the inclusion of the Chinese avant-garde in major museums and public acceptance. After some struggle, the Stars had achieved an exhibition of experimental art as early as 1980. But by February 1989 and the China/Avante-garde exhibition at the National Gallery, the official establishment were ready to grant the public a showing of the new art.

But that experiment ended abruptly when Shanghai-based artist Xiao Lu fired two gunshots into an installation she had made with co-artist Tang Song. Authorities intervened, the show was shut down and reopened only to be shut down again after bomb threats were called in to the Gallery.

After the Tiananmen Incident the following summer, whatever dreams Li might have had of the public (and officials) reaching out to embrace the artists were effectively shattered. By early 1990, many artists left China and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing was moved from its old location near the National Gallery to its current location near Huajiadi, beyond the 5th ring road and out of harm’s way.

“Li Xianting is not being sour about the 1980s,” says Ms. Zha, adding that “he continues to be very open minded about how things are developing. And he continues to be involved with the artists on a positive level.”

2. A winding road

he story of the woman behind the book may not be quite as convoluted as the history of Chinese contemporary art, but it has been a winding road. Born in Beijing in 1959 to intellectual parents (her father taught at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Zha Jianying is old enough to recall the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution. She spent a year in the countryside near Beijing even though, technically, she was too young to be there.

Then things changed. “In the spring of 1978, I was with the first group of students to attend Peking University [now known as Beijing University],” she says, with a hint of pride. Universities around China had just been reopened by Deng and students were returning to school after a long absence. The excitement at having the opportunity to learn was tangible and many of the students were already adults. “Compared to most of my classmates,” she says, “I was really young. I was 18 and they were in their late 20s or even in their 30s.”

Zha did not spend a full four years at Beijing University. She was granted a diploma, and in 1981 left China for the University of South Carolina in the United States. “I really had a hard time at first, because I spoke so little English. In China, my major had been Chinese literature, so when I first got to the States, I had to take remedial courses,” she laughs.

But the young grad student learned fast. Not only did she take a master’s degree in English literature from the University of South Carolina in 1984, by 1986 she went on to take a second master’s degree in comparative literature at Columbia University in New York. “I love New York,” she says. Today she spends much of her time in New York, where her husband serves as a dean at the New School.

“I gradually found that to be a professor wasn’t by thing,” she says. So in 1987 she returned to Beijing, planning eventually to return to the United States and get a job. By the spring of 1989 she had booked a ticket later that year to return to work in the trading business. In the meantime, she took a job at the Beijing office of The New York Times, a position she dropped in the summer of 1989 because she felt that her involvement with students around the square might lead to a “conflict of interest”because she was also acting as a journalist assistant.

“I did not leave because of Tiananmen – my flight reservation for the States was like 15 days after everything happened – but the event did confirm for me that I needed to go,” she says. Zha Jianying was unhappy in the trading business but she did find love and marriage, and from 1990 to 1995 she lived with her husband in Chicago. After 1991 she also started to make several trips back to China to research her first book, "China Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids and Best Sellers Are Transforming a Culture."

Written in English, the collection of essays was a commercial and critical success. Richard Bernstein at The New York Times said, “The result is a group of essay of sophistication and wit that [are] always attuned to the ironic content of modern Chinese life.” Later in 2003, the girl who once had to take remedial English lessons, received a Guggenheim Fellowship for non-fiction.

3. Touching down and reaching out

fter extended stints as far apart as Houston, where she worked for Voice of America and to Hong Kong, where she wrote a newspaper column that was later published in Mandarin as Talk East, Walk West <<说东道西>>, Zha Jianying landed in Beijing to work on the sequel to "China Pop."

“I quickly found out that it was going to be too difficult, going back and forth between Beijing and New York with my daughter and all our stuff.” Zha decided to take a second apartment in Beijing, where she could more effectively work on her book, and also because she wanted her daughter, now 10, to know Chinese.

By 2004, Zha was comfortably settled in Beijing and ready to work on her follow-up to "China Pop," but fate intervened, when she began taking part informally in editorial meetings at the "Time Out Beijing." Newly founded by media entrepreneur, Hong Huang, the Chinese-language magazine wanted to do a feature on important personalities from the 80s.


“After one or two interviews, I quickly realized that this was a much bigger project. So I asked Hong Huang if it would be all right to delay the feature and let me work on a book. She was very supportive and said that it was fine, and that the magazine would hold off on the feature until the publication of the book.” Two long years after she began working on the project, "The 80s" – both book and the feature – appeared in May 2006.

The response to the book has surprised its author. “San Lian – the publishers – did almost no press. Time Out did their issue, but besides that we only had one reading at the San Lian bookstore down near the National Museum. San Lian have the attitude that - ‘Well, it’s our job to get it published, we don’t have to promote it,” she says laughing.

But since its publication, at least 50 Chinese-language publications in the Mainland have covered her book, and 30 publications have interviewed her about the book.

What surprises her most is that many of the reporters and people who have responded to the book have been young, in their 20s or 30s, people who have no memory of the 1980s. She sees her younger readership as a sign: "This is a beginning,” she says of the conversations that have centered around her book, “a return to a desire to learn about the past, about people's parents and a past culture. People are reading this to learn about the past, and not for some pragmatic personal gain.”

Zha Jianying’s desire for the public connect to the past is evident. “Looking back is important to know where we are going," she says. "The Chinese are not religious. Here, history takes a central role. People get their moral lessons from history. Through history, you get a sense of what is good behavior – it really is like religion in the West.”

But there are also personal reasons for Zha Jianying to connect to the past, as well as to the future. Her apartment is full of objects from the past, and present: black and white photos of her great grandparents; an ink-and-wash painting of shrimp – executed in the style of Qi Baishi – by her great aunt, who studied with the master artist; a black stand-up piano against the wall, the perfect kind for a young student; toys and books for her daughter. “We are there parents. We want them to know us. It’s almost an existential quest.”

Near the end of her conversation, she speaks about first meeting the poet Bei Dao and she pulls out a sketch that Chen Danqing made of her when she was a student. The face is younger, but the determination is there; just as Chen’s style is still unformed, the lips on the woman in the drawing are silent, not yet knowing what to say. In many ways, it seems, this is the book that a Chinese author from her generation needed to write, a chapter that needed to be closed so that a new one could be written. Zha Jianying has not spoken for a generation; she has asked them to speak.

“For many of the people in my book,” she says, “this was the first time they were asked to speak at length about the 1980s, and besides just looking back, they have started comparing the past to the present, to see what is missing now,” adding that she feels the book came out at the right time and that people were ready to speak.

The cover speaks volumes about Chinese attitudes to the era as a kind of renaissance. It is bright gold, with rays of white light that emanate from what appears to be the sun, and a poetic script in dark red that reads The 80s, a simple title for a simpler time. “Many people feel that life then was pure”, Zha says, pointing to the enthusiasm of a country, newly opened and perhaps, a little romantic and a little naive.

“My book,” she adds, “is a small personal effort to capture an era.”


Toh ti ho fatto la tesi !
eheheheheheheh miracoli del copy and paste.

non so perche', ma me l'aspettavo!

ero pronta anch'io, ma giaguaro mi ha preceduta...........nnaggia!