Turning words into gold
Author uses popular themes of alchemy and longevity to explore a historic culture clash, Mei Jia reports.
It’s said that modern chemistry was partly founded by alchemists. In China, there was similar “dark tradition” along history’s path, but the Chinese alchemists were Taoist priests who produced medicines they claimed would make people live longer.
Legend says that Emperor Qinshihuang, who commissioned the making of the Terracotta Warriors, also dispatched large number of alchemists to create pellets of longevity, about 2,200 years ago.
Well-known writer Zhang Wei, who was born in Longkou city in Shandong province, says more than half of the emperor’s alchemists were from the Jiaodong Peninsula, where his hometown is situated, and the tradition was thus carried on.
Five years after winning the prestigious Mao Dun Literature Prize with a 10-volume magnum opus You’re On the Highland, Zhang has produced a dramatically shorter new novel, The Secret Pharmacist, focusing on the Taoist alchemists who worked from the turn of 19th century to the 20th in his hometown.
It’s a “surprisingly strange, mysterious and fresh” combination of romance, traditional Chinese belief and the 1911 revolution, says Shi Zhanjun, veteran critic and editorin-chief of People’s Literature magazine.
The Secret Pharmacist, recently released in Chinese by People’s Literature Publishing House, features a young man who’s the sixth-generation owner of the influential alchemist/pharmacist Ji family on the peninsula.
The novel tells about the master of ancient medical skills stepping into a new modern world, encountering the revolution that is to reshape the country, meeting and falling in love with a beautiful, selfreliant woman from the opposing side — the Western-style hospital.
“Among my works, this book has the most abundant points worthy of inter cultural discussions with Westernreaders ,” Z hang tells China Daily after the book launch in Beijing.
Zhang was an archivist for a short period before being a writer, where he had access to rarely seen material and sources for his literary creation.
“The story was solid with historical characters and events, like Master Ji’s brother, Xu Jing, is based on early revolutionary leader Xu Jingxin, who planned many uprisings with his friend Sun Yat-sen; and the Western hospital mentioned was real — and established 20 years earlier than Peking Union Medical College Hospital,” Zhang says, noting some facts that aren’t even available by internet search.
Zhang says he found that the focus of Xu’s life was the revolution, for which he was ready to sacrifice everything at any time.
“But Xu also wrote a book on alchemy and philosophy of longevity,” he says. “The contrast interested me.”
Such conflicts under pin the novel. While the Ji family cures and saves the lives of the revolutionary heroes with traditional medical wisdom, and is resentful of the Western hospital for attracting customers away, Master Ji has to go to that hospital to treat a problem with his teeth, under disguises and a false name.
“It’s interesting to note that the peninsula is one of the early bases when Christianity reached the country. The hospitals and schools helped to nurture new forces for the 1911 revolution,” Zhang says.
“While conflict is one story, I went more with the exchanges and integration of different cultures and ideas at the time, which finally made today’s China possible,” he adds.
Chen Xiaoming, veteran literary critic with Peking University, says the era Zhang depicts in the book is the one when the older agricultural civilization is declining, and also is rocked by Western culture.
“Lots of world-class literature masterpieces are about such clashes at historical crossroads. Zhang’s work shows similar excellence and his deeper insights into history,” Chen says.
Z hang ,60, has published 20 novels in a 43-year writing career. But he still found it difficult to finish the new novel, saying it’s hard to balance history and fictional stories.
“I spent some 20 years preparing for the story, two more years on writing. Then I put it aside for criticism and spent three more years on rewriting,” he says.
Like a sower of seeds, he has a habit of preparing a story idea for decades, and he waits for the seeds to grow into real maturity.
He even tries three different approaches in the book: one with a fictional archivist of our time as the introduction, one with a first-person account of Master Ji as the text, and one with the housekeeper’s diary as a postscript.
Zhang acknowledges that longevity and alchemists are much-loved themes for online fiction and popular stories.
He says stories for entertainment simply toss in answers for the questions raised, while a serious writer offers the passion, routes and methods of addressing those questions.