Jordan Dotson reflects on fifteen years as an expat writer in China, the colorful scene in Shenzhen around 2010, utopias, and what it takes to keep writing.
Deva Eveland: Your bio mentions that you moved to China to study classical poetry. What drew you to this genre?
Jordan Dotson: That’s a good question. Actually, I studied poetry writing as an undergraduate, and at that time, my only real goal was to get my MFA, pray for publication, and daydream about university teaching jobs. Back then, I’d never even thought of China. I knew nothing about the country or the culture at all. Then, during my final semester, I took a class called “Poetics of Ecstasy” which had really excellent homework. One night, I hunkered down in the library with a collection of ecstatic poetry titled The Erotic Spirit, edited by the great Sam Hamill. The book included a poem titled “Bamboo Mat,” written by the minor Tang Dynasty poet, Yuan Zhen. And it blew me away. This one poem literally changed my life.
It was one of those moments that you can only have when you’re still guided by a teenager’s heart, like the first time you really hear Bob Dylan’s lyrics and the world seems clear in an instant. In only twenty-two translated words, the poem conveyed this wistful depth of silence that overwhelmed me. It was a poem of love lost, tight and haunting, that rang true over a millennium later, despite permutation from Ancient Chinese, to Modern Chinese, to English. Yet, what struck me most about this poem was how similar it was to the best country music I’d grown up singing as a child. This guy, I thought to myself, could sit beside Hank Williams in a bar and they’d stagger out later, best friends.
That night I checked out a half dozen collections of Chinese poetry, some boring, some translated so horribly they made no sense, and some which were astonishing, like Ezra Pound’s interpretations. Through it all, what stuck with me was this eerie interweaving of silence and lyrical imagery that seems to be innate to Chinese. Before long I made the rash but fortuitous decision to defer graduate school and move to China, to start studying the language, and figure out what this universal magic was that existed between modern American folk musicians and Chinese poets who’d been dead for a thousand years. Of course, I quickly realized that I’d never be able to learn Chinese to the degree required to be a scholar, but even today, Tang and Song poetry, and even some earlier Six Dynasties stuff like Tao Yuanming, represents my own personal definition of perfect literature, lyricism, and art.
DE: Can you talk a little bit about where the idea of a cow unicorn came from?
JD: I lived for a time in a beautiful little village by the sea, with boats in the harbor and a tourist promenade, and where the local villagers had worked as sailors and fishermen for centuries. They spoke their own language among themselves, though sometimes you could get Cantonese or a smattering of English or Mandarin out of them, and they drank a lot of beer and threw wild barbecue parties on Tomb-Sweeping Day. A lot of foreign banker types lived in the hills outside the village, and the place was a jewel. The only truly multicultural place I’ve ever seen in my life. One of the things I loved the most about the village was this herd of ancient, mangy cows that tromped about like they owned the place. They’d stop traffic and poke their heads in the coffee shops, and no one ever acted as if this were strange. Sometimes they got to be a nuisance, but really they were as much a part of the community as anyone else. My friend used to wonder why the local government never slaughtered them and gave the villagers a big steak feed. One day I was walking to the swimming pool while the cows milled about the pier, and everyone just let them go about their business, kind of like a mother who’s learned to ignore a rowdy toddler. So, I was watching this cow nosing around a fish tank in an open-air seafood restaurant, with nobody shooing it away, and I couldn’t help but laugh. “Nothing ever surprises these people,” I thought. And right then, with that thought, the story appeared almost fully formed in my head.
In many ways it’s inspired by Gabriel García Márquez’s story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” but saying that feels like a disservice to the village. It’s a beautiful place that kind of exists outside of time, with no subway and no high-rise apartments, where biracial, trilingual, barefoot kids dangle from the banyan trees, and fishermen smoke on the docks all night, and pythons occasionally eat people’s poodles, and it’s the only place I’ve ever been where a unicorn might really appear, and this is my love song to it.
DE: How has the experience of living in China affected your writing?
JD: Now that is a big question. I lived in Shenzhen for fifteen years, so it’s difficult to separate writing from life. In the end, however, I think it’s not China that’s affected my writing as much as the realities of living between cultures and languages. We read about the romantic escapades of expat writers, in Paris in the 20s for example, but that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s the sense of living physically in a place while never truly belonging to it, and knowing that you probably never will. Even after fifteen years, I’m still a foreigner, always and forever straddling borders and languages, always standing in customs lines, and I think many long-time expatriates and immigrants around the world understand this feeling. Transnationalism, if you will. The great novelist Xu Xi writes about this beautifully, and it’s something that seems to dwell within my subconscious and leaks out into stories. A sense of a world that is permanently new, permanently uncomfortable, and in some ways, permanently undiscoverable.
Recently I finished editing the collection to which this story belongs, and only after the fact did I realize how the characters were all running to or away from borders, discovering new worlds, and crossing lots of rivers and immigration lines. So perhaps living in Shenzhen-Hong Kong has affected my writing more than I realize.
DE: What is the writing community like in Shenzhen?
JD: I wish I could tell you. I live a fairly solitary life, and haven’t engaged much with the artistic community of Shenzhen since its wild golden age from about 2007 to 2012. Back then, there was a quirky little restaurant and bar named La Casa, which was a miraculous place, an island of misfit writers and musicians. The owner, David Seymour, was a blue-collar rock star in Canada in the 90s, and he created this unbelievable community of people, from nearly every continent, singing in Chinese and writing in French and painting in whatever language painters paint in, Irish probably, and it was a place where artists of all kinds just felt immediately at home. Especially the adventurous, often shady, pie-in-the-sky dreamers and cowboys that Shenzhen attracted in those days. People would walk by and see the speakers on fire, and a broken, bloody guitar on the wall, and Russian and Dongbei girls dancing on the tables, and a Hunan bluesman shredding on a Gibson, and this grizzled Jiangsu bartender, Big Hammer, philosophizing about pizza dough and attracting foreign girls like fireflies, and they’d stop and say, “What in the world is happening here?”
My poetry career ended there as I turned to songwriting for a number of years, which I think taught me more about writing than any academic workshop. We’d drink Xinjiang Black Beer and argue about Milan Kundera and Haruki Murakami, Leonard Cohen’s phrasing and Jay Chou’s miraculous compositional spark. It was really an extension of David’s gregarious, junkyard prophet sort of personality, and a lot of us walked in there as eager, youthful idiots and walked out a few years later as quiet, thoughtful, disciplined, bilingual writers and musicians. It was similar to The Bookworm, Peter Goff’s wonderful place in Beijing, which sadly closed last year, except La Casa was just a little grungier, a little more late-night, and with a lot more Springsteen on the stereo.
Back then there were lots of literary magazines and underground poets hanging about, and formal and informal writers circles. But sadly, I got older, as one does, and lost touch with the young people who give any writing community its energy. The music scene is as good as ever, but La Casa vanished, like a very good dream, in the sea of nightclubs and office towers. But Shenzhen really does have a special magic, unique among the other major Chinese cities, so I’m sure there are still plenty of talented writers churning pages there today.
DE: Working on anything new? How is the current state of the world affecting your creative process?
JD: Luckily enough, my writing proceeds as normally as always, even while the world seems to dissipate around us. I’m a slave to my routine, and I learned long ago that turning off my phone and getting in my three to four hours of work every day ensures that I always feel solid and centered. Salman Rushdie had this great bit, in an interview I think, around the time his memoir came out. When he was hiding out from the fatwah, living in these strange, hidden enclaves with death threats swirling around, he had to confront the question of how to write. Was he going to continue? It wouldn’t be easy. It wouldn’t be comfortable. He was moving constantly and wouldn’t have a charming little writers shack in which to escape from the world. But do you need comfort to write? Are you going to do it, or not? To be a writer, you have to write. The world around you doesn’t care how you do it. It only cares that you get it done. Maybe this is why I’ve always been skeptical of artists’ residences. If you need the stars to align perfectly so you can create something meaningful, then you’re probably not going to have a very long career. That doesn’t mean I scrap opportunities together whenever they come. I demand long periods of silence and undistracted focus, and everything else in life revolves around that. So, even as shrieking people in masks pass by outside the window, I just sit down and get to work. Writing is a sanctuary, in that way. It doesn’t need a sanctuary to occur. It is the sanctuary.
That said, I also haven’t been on social media in years, and I don’t watch or read any news, so it’s probably easier for me than for others. That stuff is poison. Like terrorism people willingly purchase as a consumer product. I don’t understand it.
So, here I am, in my new home in Virginia, and the world of the novel I’m writing seems far more real than the one in which I live. It’s a fun, surprising story of a utopian island off the coast of South America, similar in many ways to the village of “The Unicorn King.” Looking at the state of the world right now, I think we could all use a little hope and assurance that utopias do exist, within us if not without, no matter what these caterwauling demons in the media would have us believe.
Jordan Dotson was born in Appalachian Virginia. His recent work has appeared in decomP, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Eunoia Review, and Scoundrel Time, for which he received the 2019 Editors’ Prize. He is also co-writer of Incognito, a China-US co-production which won Best Original Screenplay at the 2020 AFMA Film Festival in Los Angeles. A graduate of the University of Virginia with an MFA from City University of Hong Kong, Jordan recently relocated to the US after living in China for 15 years.