Behind the Scenes with the White Peony:
An Interview with Kenneth Pai Hsien-yung

Interviewed and translated by Ursula Friedman

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MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January 2025)

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[*Note: The interview was conducted in Santa Barbara on February 25, 2023. Passages in blue were originally spoken in Mandarin Chinese; those in black in English.]

Ursula Friedman (UF):  You were isolated for five years as a child due to a contagious strain of tuberculosis. How did this period of isolation influence your creative writing and shape your personality?

Kenneth Pai (KP):  My grandmother originally lived in the countryside in Guilin, Guangxi province. Later, my father invited her into our home, and I lived next door to her. She was very kind to me. We would cook special meals for her, like chicken soup, and she would share with me. We didn’t know that she had tuberculosis (TB). I caught it from her when I was seven or eight years old. Then, when the Japanese arrived, we fled to Chongqing, and I ran a mild fever every day. After an X-ray screening, they found that a large area on my left lung had been infected, leaving a gaping hole. Second-stage TB. I remember that after seeing the X-ray, my father’s face fell. He was very anxious. That was during the Sino-Japanese War, when many people caught the disease, and there was no special cure. Many people died of lung disease, it was almost a fatal diagnosis. I was very lucky, because our family could afford to drink milk and eat chicken, keep up good nutrition, and then I got calcium injections every day to calcify my lungs. I was quarantined for four, almost five years, until I was 14. Why? Because there were so many children in our family.

TB was a highly contagious disease at the time. So I lost my childhood years. I didn’t have a childhood. I saw children playing outside, but I was locked in a small room all by myself. I remember that little room in Chongqing. Chongqing is a mountainous place—have you ever been to the mainland? Chongqing has changed a lot recently. When I was in Chongqing, it was all muddy, yellow soil, but now it has been transformed into a modern city. We lived halfway up a mountain. And my little room, separated off from the others, was nestled on the foot of the mountain. I watched the activities down below from above—my brothers, my cousins—the children all playing down below. Anyway, I felt that I was deserted, abandoned. So I became very—I wasn’t like that before! My mother used to say that I was a very active child! I was even overbearing. Lung disease changed my entire being, and I became very sensitive. People were all afraid of approaching me, because I was sick, they were afraid of getting too close. My brothers and sisters all gave me a wide birth. Second, I became very sensitive to other people’s pain. Since I was sick myself, it was easy to understand the pain in other people’s hearts and develop empathy for them.

A French newspaper, Libération, asked many writers all over the world the question, “Why do you write?” I responded, “I wish to render into words the unspoken pain of the human heart.” I think it’s because I understand the pain in other people’s hearts. You’ve read my novels. I am writing about the suffering—the unspoken suffering—in other people’s hearts. This has a lot to do with my childhood. It took me years, after I recovered, before I could open up again. [Until I opened up,] I was very nervous and uptight. When I was in middle school, I was afraid to interact with my classmates. It was not until I started college that my old self came back.  My childhood returned to me, so I founded Modern Literature (現代文學) and made many friends. It took me years, a long time, to recover my old self.

UF: No wonder you were able to write such a tragic story about a pair of elderly intellectuals—“Winter Night” (冬夜)—at the tender age of thirty!

KP: Back then, I wrote about my current life, that of an old professor. When I was thirty, I wrote about seventy-eighty-year-olds, old professors!

UF: And now, you’re very young!

KP: [Laughs—]

UF: “Winter Night” strikes me as a black-and-white movie. There’s a scene in which the character Ya Hsing 雅馨 stands by Beihai Lake. Films and poetry seem to have exerted a powerful influence on your literary expression.

KP: People wrote very romantic poems during the May Fourth Movement. At that time, young people in China could fall in love, so I imitated their style. Indeed, the story reads like a black-and-white film.

UF: Just like in the stage play Crystal Boys, the mise en scène is a bit gloomy at first, and then suddenly, Phoenix Boy, wearing a pair of crimson pants, appears out of the blue. It’s very striking and cinematic indeed.

The intellectuals in “Winter Night” seem to represent two different groups of intellectuals; the first symbolizing the champions of traditional Chinese literature, and the other fanatics of Western literature and culture. How would you evaluate the May Fourth Movement and the Cultural Revolution? What is the connection between the two?

KP: The May Fourth Movement has long since passed, but when writers were writing about it back then, it still exerted a lasting influence on us. From the beginning of the twentieth century, the Chinese psyche was deeply influenced by the May Fourth Movement, which instilled in us a kind of self-awareness, liberation of the self. That’s one aspect, absorbing Western influences. The other was holding on to China’s own traditions, those cultivated during the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern dynasties. Suddenly, those anti-traditional poets sprung up. Yes, there are periods in Chinese history where poets were anti-traditional, anti-societal. At that time, the West still exerted a considerable influence on China, but China held on to its own traditions. For example, many of our Chinese traditions are Confucian in nature. However, our traditional cultural heritage also includes Daoism and Buddhism, which are in conflict with Confucianism, like in Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢), they complement each other, but there is also tension between them. Chinese culture is full of complexity and contradiction. During the May Fourth Movement, “new literature,” “new women,” and “new youth” were all popular slogans. Everything was new!

Actually, unwittingly, it prepared the way for Communism, for the Communist revolution—the destruction of traditional values. It shook the foundation of Chinese traditional society. One group, represented by Yü Ch’in-lei 余钦磊, and the other by Wu Chu-kuo 吳柱國, two trends. The first trend was that of Western Romanticism, and the latter, re-evaluation of the Chinese tradition. Hu Shi 胡適 ascribed to both trends. I was very young at the time of the May Fourth movement, in my twenties or thirties. Those rebels rebelled against their heritage, against tradition. China was in crisis, because of the political and social background. China was in crisis because of the First World War and the Paris Conference.

UF: Also the Treaty of Versailles—

KP:  Japanese aggression swept toward the west, and it triggered nationalism in China, along with a wave of democratic yearnings, which paved the way for the May Fourth Movement. Professor Tse-Tsung Chow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is an expert on the May Fourth Movement. I recommend his book [The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China, Harvard University Press, 1967]. After reading his work, you’ll understand the complexities of the movement. I now approach the May Fourth Movement from a critical point of view because I have a critical distance, so I can view it objectively. At that time, yes, China was in crisis, so people demonstrated and there was all sorts of fanfare. Patriotism and nationalism were triggered. But the lasting effect of May Fourth was to destroy traditions. Back then, no matter whether traditions were good or bad, they were all burned up. The development of radicalism, later, became Communism. The turn left—all the literature, political trends, they all turned left.

UF: Later on, during the Cultural Revolution, China’s precious traditions, including kunqu 崑曲, were all replaced by ideological arts like Model Theatre productions.

KP: During the Mao era, these traditions were all replaced. The Cultural Revolution was nihilistic, wiping everything out. The persecution of the intelligentsia parallels Stalinism, and the Great Purge. They went further—Mao Zedong, the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, was even more terrifying than Stalinism.

UF: On a happier note, are there parallels among Dream of the Red Chamber, Peony Pavilion (牡丹亭), and Crystal Boys?

KP: I have loved traditional Chinese literature ever since I was a child. Tang poetry, Song poetry, Chinese ci, and Chinese drama. Though I studied British, American, and other foreign literatures, I am deeply passionate about Chinese literature. If I were to pick two books from the Chinese literary tradition that influenced me most and that I like the most, the first would be Dream of the Red Chamber and the second would be Peony Pavilion. I have taught Dream of the Red Chamber for decades at UCSB. Later on, I also taught it at National Taiwan University, clocking one hundred hours of teaching.

UF: You taught every single chapter in Dream of the Red Chamber!

KP: Yes, I taught every single chapter! I taught it as a three-semester course. Did you know that my lectures were edited into a three-volume book entitled, Pai Hsien-yung Interprets Dream of the Red Chamber (白先勇細說紅樓夢).

UF: An annotation to your “Bible.”

KP: It is 1,000 pages long! Anyway, Dream of the Red Chamber is my literary Bible. Yes, it exerted a great influence on me, and it led me to the philosophy of Buddhism. I learned Buddhist concepts from this book, and I also learned a lot about writing from this book. It’s a literary masterpiece that is extremely well-written. From a writer’s point of view, I ask: Why is this part written this way and that part that way? So I approach the book very differently from your typical reader or scholar. I read it to learn writing techniques. I am amazed at how Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹 could conceive such an interesting literary universe, a supernatural world. And then there’s a realistic world. These two worlds were mixed so well.

UF: For instance, a stone that’s reincarnated.

KP: Exactly. Why is Dream of the Red Chamber written so well, and what are the symbolic meanings behind it? Red Chamber actually is a highly symbolic novel. You can decrypt the secret codes everywhere, all of them are meaningful. Back then, during the Qianlong Era, the aristocrats loved watching plays. Whenever there were parties or banquets, they would always watch theatrical performances. Back then, they all watched kunqu. Kunqu was at its height during the eighteenth century, so most of the performances in Dream of the Red Chamber are kun opera.

If you remember one scene, the emperor’s concubine, Baoyu’s 寶玉 sister, Yuanfei 元妃, goes back to visit her family, remember? There’s a big fanfare, they build the Prospect Garden大觀園 for her visit, and when they try to entertain her, what do they use? Theatrical performances. So Yuanfei元妃, she picked four chapters from the popular kunqu back then. Each piece of kunqu, its story and background, actually tells the fate of the whole family, the fate of the individuals, very subtly. You know, for example, the first piece is called 《一捧雪》. That’s the name of a very precious jade cup, “a handful of snow.” And the owner of the jade cup was an official during the Ming Dynasty. The late Ming Dynasty was very corrupt, so a corrupt official learned about this jade cup, and he wanted this piece, so he confiscated all the objects in the household, and of course he took away the jade cup, and that implied that eventually the Jia home would also be confiscated at the very end.

UF: Wow, it foreshadowed that!

KP: So if you don’t pay attention to the theatrical performances, you will lose the meaning of the novel. So the four theatrical pieces, each symbolizes the fate of the whole household, the fate of the emperor’s imperial concubine herself, and the fate of Baoyu and the fate of Daiyu 黛玉. So the four performances are not random at all (不是隨便點的). Every detail in Red Chamber denotes something far beyond itself. This book is absolutely amazing! (很厲害這本書，這本書不得了!) You don’t notice, since it’s very smooth on the surface. You think, oh, just ordinary theatrical performances. No! During the visit of the imperial concubine, the fortune of the Jia household was at its height. So when it’s at its height, and an undercurrent, some kind of warning, is already there. So all these very subtle references make this book very difficult for someone with no Chinese cultural background to understand. When I taught this book at UCSB to my American students, I had to go into great detail to explain, “Why this? Why that?” So there are a lot of cultural barriers in reading this book, but it’s a great book! I think it’s a world classic. For me, it’s number 1.

UF: And Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu 湯顯祖 is number 2?

KP: Actually, Dream of the Red Chamber was greatly influenced by Peony Pavilion. Tang Xianzu’s plays are about love, about resurrection, about Daoism, about Buddhism, same with Red Chamber—love on many levels. So when I talk with my friends, I have a great difficulty in translating the Chinese term qing情 into English. It’s not love. It’s more than love. It’s not feeling. More than feeling. It’s not sentiment. It’s very hard to translate. It’s much bigger and more fundamental. It’s not only love between men and women. It’s more than that. Tang Xianzu and Cao Xueqin, they all wrote about these things. So these two works have greatly influenced me. I would have to talk hours about Peony Pavilion. You go ahead and watch the documentary film and also “Peony Pavilion Behind-the-Scenes.” It’s still going very strong, nineteen years later. They performed last night at Suzhou University. They have given 427 performances worldwide. They came to the United States, to London, and Athens, everywhere—Taiwan, Hong Kong!

UF: One day, it will come to Broadway and the East Coast!

KP: Yeah, it should. Three nights of performances, nine hours. We have subtitles, both in Chinese and English.

UF: I wish I could travel back in time to experience Santa Barbara’s “Peony Pavilion Week” in 2006.

KP: So both of these books had a great influence on me. One is the greatest novel in Chinese literature. One is the greatest play, greatest single piece of drama in Chinese history. It’s like Romeo and Juliet.

UF: Better than Romeo and Juliet, much richer!

KP: Romeo and Juliet, it’s immortal. Tang Xianzu and Shakespeare, they were contemporaries. Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet two years before Peony Pavilion. And they both died in the same year, 1616. Isn’t that a coincidence? So in the West and in the East, they both wrote great love stories, great plays…

UF: I would also like to ask how the qing (情) in Crystal Boys was influenced by Dream of the Red Chamber and Peony Pavilion. The qing in this novel represents so much more than the love between A-Feng 阿鳳 and A-Long 阿龍.

KP: Consciously or unconsciously, when I write, I want to stay away from Peony Pavilion and Red Chamber. They have too much influence on me. But after it was done, unconsciously, I found a lot of influence. For instance, the New Park in Crystal Boys, in a way, it’s like the Prospect Garden in Dream of the Red Chamber. These boys, actually they haven’t lost their innocence, in spite of being male prostitutes, still, in their very heart, in their very essence, they still maintain their innocence, you know? That’s why you don’t find them evil.

UF: They never “sinned.”

KP: They were desperate. Their parents kicked them out—they were abandoned by their families, by society, by their schools. They struggled to survive. They did a lot of bad things, but they were not bad at heart, you know? Especially A-Feng. Some people have told me, “A-Feng is Lin Daiyu!” A-Feng also cries a lot, weeping for seemingly no reason at all.

I was shocked! Lin Daiyu, you know, was very willowy, sensitive. Yes, Lin Daiyu was born with karma from a previous life, right? She was a plant by the Divine River, so she was a divine plant. So A-Feng, it seemed to me, he was also born with a karma from a previous life. He was born this way, without a father. His mother was raped, and she didn’t even know who the father was […] A-Feng’s mother was born with nie 孽 [sin] inherited from her previous lives. A-Feng is representative of all the niezi. He has the heaviest karma from a previous life. So his encounter with Longzi, Dragon Prince, was also fated, just like Baoyu and Daiyu, the tragedy between them.

UF: Will A-Feng come back to life? I’m interested in the smile in the adaptations. Director Cao Ruiyuan 曹瑞原 said it’s a smile of forgiveness. What do you think?

KP: Yes, I think so. That’s the only thing he could repay Longzi’s love with.

UF: –with his own heart?

KP: Yes, with his own life, his own heart. At that moment, he is giving him back his heart.

UF: Literally giving him back his “heart” through the smile of forgiveness?

KP: Yeah. We interviewed one Russian, one British person, they were also moved to tears.

UF: I also cried many times when watching the DVD production. I compared the 2014 and 2020 productions—Yang Jinhai 楊金海 undergoes a gender transformation. Yang is lesbian Tomboy-type in the 2014 production, and then their male gender is restored in the 2020 version.

KP: We restored Chief Yang’s gender in the 2020 production. It’s faithful to the novel. They all perform very well, right? Every one of them.

UF: Tang Meiyun 唐美雲, the actress that plays the female Chief Yang, she’s an opera star!

KP: Yeah, I know! She was a star. Both of the Chief Yang actors were great, both the male and female versions. But anyway, this play has drawn a lot of tears from the audience, I think because it’s not only about some homosexuals or some homosexual love. It’s more than that. It’s about the relationship between father and son, between mother and son, between brothers, and also between lovers. All kinds of qing.

When I asked the audience, “Which scene moved you the most?” Their answers were all different. A-Qing’s visit to his mother, that was very moving, and someone else told me, “The scene when Longzi, Dragon Prince, stabbed A-Feng!” Some people cried.

UF: Both A-Feng and Longzi took flight!

KP: They took flight! Oh, so passionate, so romantic! What did you think of it? I think dance played a great role in the play, right?

UF: Yes, because it’s nonverbal, body language, and because of the silence of A-Feng. Just because he doesn’t speak, doesn’t mean he is passive. On the contrary, he expresses his inner world through dance; he is wild and free, and doesn’t submit to anyone’s control.

KP: And he flew in the sky like a Phoenix, A-Feng! Our choreographer, Wu Sujun 吳素君, she was excellent.

UF: And she also helped you choreograph Peony Pavilion?

KP: Yeah. The Flower Fairies have a dance that she choreographed. The Flower Spirits. Anyway, this play, if you ask the question about the relationship between Peony Pavilion, Dream of the Red Chamber, and Crystal Boys, I think you are right, there’s a lineage between these works. I’m glad you enjoyed watching the play.

UF: I enjoyed comparing the play with the novel. And with the short story “Sky Full of Bright, Twinkling Stars” (滿天裡亮晶晶的星星), the Chinese versions are all very different. I enjoyed comparing your different drafts of Crystal Boys that you donated to the UCSB Library’s Special Collections. I found it’s very difficult to say which one is the original because all of them are wonderful. And I found many different beginnings and prefaces. One draft of Crystal Boys starts with, “In the Fall, our humanity was painfully restored” (在墜落中, 我們痛苦得恢復了我們的人性). This brilliant line didn’t appear in the published version. I consider all of these “drafts” equally authoritative “originals.”

KP: So you compared all these different versions?

UF: Yes, I enjoy them all, because I’m a fan. The published version is wonderful too, but so are each and every one of the drafts.

KP: This anthology has included my “Sky Full of Bright, Twinkling Stars.” In Another Part of the Forest: An Anthology of Gay Short Fiction, edited by Alberto Manguel and Craig Stevenson.

UF: So you are canonized among Tennessee Williams, Ray Bradbury and William Faulkner, and everyone else you studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop! Of course, “Twinkling Stars” deserves a place in this literary constellation!

KP: Anyway, since you mentioned “A Sky Full of Bright, Twinkling Stars,” do you think it’s well-translated?

UF: Yes, it’s very well-translated. The names are very difficult to translate.

KP: My co-translator, Patia Yasin, she did a great job. Unfortunately, she passed away. Did I tell you, she was a Russian Jew, who grew up in the Village, in New York?

UF: Ah, so that’s why the dialogues are so well-translated! And the editor George Kao, too, I see all of his marks on the drafts in the UCSB library. It reminded me of kun opera—in every time period, kun opera is performed and styled differently. It’s hard to say which is the most authentic version. I mean, Crystal Boys’s different versions are all important, equally authoritative “originals,” just like in Peony Pavilion, there may be many ways of performing, but it’s difficult to say which is the only “authentic,” authoritative version.

KP: I hate to say this, but our production is the most faithful to Tang Xianzu’s original, according to many critics. It’s a three-night production, and they said we grasped the spirit, the essence of Tang’s original. Of course, the original is 55 chapters long, but we condensed it into 27. We discarded some of the “distractions.” But we kept the essence, the spirit of this play. So many scholars say ours is number 1.

UF: So you didn’t invent a new script. You only cut, added different lighting, costumes, the sleeves…

KP: Of course, we only edited, we cut out the superfluous details, because it’s too long, the text in those days runs 50, 55 chapters, maybe it would take a couple of months to perform. But in those days, they gave parties all the time, they ate dinner, and then they watched the performances leisurely, not like in a modern theater, when you have only one, maybe three, nights to perform. But we kept the original lyrics, because it’s poetry. With Tang Xianzu, it’s all poetry. Beautiful poetry.

UF: Lindy Li Mark translated it into English, maintaining the poeticism and lyricism of Tang’s original lyrics.

KP: Not an easy feat! Subtitles are length-restricted. There is a full translation of Peony Pavilion by Cyril Birch, a professor of Chinese at UC Berkeley. There’s another translation produced by a mainland Chinese translator. The subtitles have to be concise, short—they have to fit within the length—

UF: And project them up onto the screen?

KP: You watch them and see. Also, you can’t have any footnotes, so you have to translate.

UF: It’s amazing that one person single-handedly translated all the supertitles.

KP: She herself could perform kunqu. She taught kunqu at Berkeley, and her English is perfect…You told me you could not find translations of “Lonely Seventeen” (寂寞的十七歲) and Like a Tree (樹又如此). “Lonely Seventeen” I translated myself! It was part of my MA thesis through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I don’t know if it’s published anywhere, but anyway, it’s part of my MFA thesis. At the Writers’ Workshop, you write a collection of short stories for your thesis, so I translated it myself. Like a Tree, a friend of mine has translated, but I couldn’t find the original version now, I don’t think it exists in an authentic translation yet. That piece has been chosen for many anthologies in Taiwan and also in China.

UF: It’s so moving, and there’s a lot of foreshadowing in the piece, just like in Dream of the Red Chamber.

KP: I wrote about these camellias. They are all here, on the right-hand side—[gestures towards garden in the backyard]. So it’s been more than fifty years, I think, since I planted them with my friend.

UF: They are truly alive in spirit, it’s so amazing to see them. Fifty years is a long time. And the Italian cypresses–?

KP: The Italian cypresses, they all died (on the left-hand side), because they found a fungus underground… So that piece is featured in many anthologies, and also on Youtube, you can find Like a Tree. They made a lot of videos about it—in one of them, I read passages from it. So anyway, what else about “Winter Night”?

UF: I found it very cinematic, and I was interested in the two groups of intellectuals, and your commentary, because it seems “winter night” is symbolic, so the “winter night” of a person’s life is their old age, and the whole setting, every aspect of it, is very symbolic.

KP: By the way, did I tell you? “Winter Night” has been translated into Polish.

UF: And Crystal Boys is also being translated into Polish?

KP: Crystal Boys is still being translated into Polish, they’re doing it right now. Do you read Polish?

UF: No, but my grandfather does. I will send it to him when it’s finished.

KP: I was surprised that a Polish publisher wrote me and said they wanted to translate Crystal Boys into Polish. We have an English, French, Japanese, Vietnamese, Italian, Dutch, and German versions. We have translations in all these languages. We are adding the Polish version. A Korean publisher is also interested. So Crystal Boys is spreading around the world.

UF: And you yourself speak many languages too? Guilinese, Shanghainese, Mandarin, English, Japanese, French?—many, many languages.

KP: Yes, many languages, because I lived in Chongqing, so I speak the Szechwan dialect. And I spent some time in Shanghai, I went to school in Shanghai, so I can speak Shanghainese. I went to school in Hong Kong, so I can speak Cantonese.

UF: Those definitely qualify as different languages, they’re not just “dialects.”

KP: You might find in my fictional works, that I use several different dialects for the characters.

UF: Watching the stage play version of Crystal Boys, there’s a part where A-Qing’s mother speaks in a traditional language, perhaps Hokkien, and I can’t understand—

KP: It’s Taiwanese, but you can read the subtitles. It’s to make it more authentic.

UF: Zhou Xiao’an 周孝安 and Zhang Yijun 張逸軍 conducted an aerial dance sequence together, but in 2014 Zhang flew solo. Another actor, Wu Zhongtian 吳中天, played the part of Dragon Prince in that production.

KP: Yes, A-Feng in the 2014 version was played by Wu Zhongtian. In 2020, we thought—let them fly together!

UF: So it isn’t that Wu Zhongtian didn’t have aerial dance skills in 2014, but rather than you hadn’t conceptualize a dual aerial dance back then.

KP: The second Longzi, Zhou Xiao’an, he is not a dancer either. So he had a great risk of flying and falling. Each time they flew up there, my heart went up to the ceiling with them—I was so anxious, so nervous.

UF: It’s amazing how the aerial stunts during the stage play create a sense of distance between the two characters—one up high, one down low, and then when they finally fly together, it’s really special.

KP: And then suddenly, they descend down back to Earth—that’s amazing! Do you think it’s effective?

UF: Extremely effective, because when I watched the stage play for the first time in 2014, I thought, “Everything is perfect! The only thing I would change would be to have them fly on stage together, because it would accentuate the dramatic tension between the characters.” And then when it really happened in 2020, I was crying and clapping [as I watched the DVD].

KP: Because they are different actors, you have a different sense, different flavor, to the whole play. I like the second version better. We changed some things to make it smoother.

UF: If you could choose one character to play in Crystal Boys, who would it be?

KP: Papa Fu.

UF: Yes, Papa Fu, that actor was amazing. He seems to be a war general himself.

KP: And the encounter between Papa Fu and Longzi, that was moving as well. And Papa Fu’s funeral scene, the ritual, I liked that too.

UF: As I watched the funeral scene, I thought of your short story, “A Sky Full of Bright, Twinkling Stars,” because of the way the boys approach the Lotus Pond, each holding a lantern, they are “twinkling,” exactly like the stars in the beginning of the story, and I thought, “the stars are coming out!”

KP: Yes, it was amazing.

UF: I also wanted to ask about the calligrapher, Tong Yangtze 董陽孜 (Grace Tong, 1942- ). The calligraphy style on the cover of Crystal Boys is strikingly similar to the characters in the Peony Pavilion set.

KP: Tong wrote all those characters! All of the covers are her calligraphy. She’s a great fan of mine. We have known each other for sixty years. I knew her back when she was in high school.

UF: I think the calligraphy is very important, because it adds breathing spaces to the opera. And the breathing spaces in all of your theatrical productions, and silences, are breathtaking.

KP: Yes, she’s a great calligrapher.

UF: Who did the portrait for the Du the Beauteous Maid 杜麗娘 for your youth version of Peony Pavilion?

KP: Xi Song 奚淞, another great fan of mine. I’ve known him for fifty years. They are all long-time friends of mine, so they all participated in my production. They themselves are very famous. Xi Song is a very famous Buddhist painter. He paints Boddhisatva Guanyin and oil paintings. He’s very famous.

UF: It adds so much depth. Also, Zhou Youliang’s 周優良 music—the breathing spaces—we have empty space. And with the calligraphy, we also have blank space on the set.

KP: You watch the kunqu DVDs, notice the very subtle, very beautiful movements—the music, the poetry, and of course, the story. These actors are excellent.

UF: Yu Jiulin 汪世瑜 and Shen Fengying 沈豐英 were coached by the veteran kunqu actors Zhang Jiqing 張繼青 and Wang Shiyu 汪世瑜, respectively. It’s so important that you rescued these retired actors so that the art of kunqu can be passed down to the next generation.

KP: I know. You can watch the whole story, especially this documentary, Multiflorate Splendour (奼紫嫣紅開遍). It tells the story of how I created the magazine Modern Literature (現代文學), and my play (遊園驚夢), my movies, kunqu production, and my Dream of the Red Chamber lectures.

UF: So Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream was based on a performance by Mei Lanfang you watched in Shanghai, and then you yourself adapted it into a short story, and then you adapted it back into a theatrical production.

KP: I was nine when I watched it in Shanghai for the first time, so it stayed in mind. I didn’t understand it at all, but the music stayed in my mind, but then eventually my whole life became associated with Dream of the Red Chamber and Peony Pavilion.

UF: So you wrote down the memory and then re-produced it. “Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream” is one act from Peony Pavilion, and later you produced the whole thing!

KP: I want to put in some words for Crystal Boys, the TV series. The TV series was shown in 2003. Cao Ruiyuan, the director, I think it’s fate. I didn’t know him. We had never met before. He was thinking of doing a TV series on Crystal Boys. And that particular day, I had an appointment with a friend at a coffee shop at the Shangri-La hotel in Yuandong. I was waiting for my friend, and she was late. That was Cao Ruiyuan’s forty-fifth birthday [Note: it was actually his thirty-ninth birthday, according to Cao]. He wanted to spend it alone, so he went by himself to the same coffee shop as me. He was thinking of doing Crystal Boys, he was making notes. And then, as he was sitting there by himself, in the reflection in the window, he said, that’s Pai Hsien-yung!

UF: That’s fate!

KP: So he came up to me, and he said, “I want to make a TV series of your Crystal Boys. Isn’t that something? It’s a PBS TV series in Taiwan.

UF: The series is so important, because having Crystal Boys shown on everyone’s personal living room TV screen helped raise awareness [of LGBTQIA+ individuals].

KP: I know, that’s different. Yes, it exerted a great influence, socially, because, as you said, it was screened on family living room TV’s.

UF: The whole family watching together, cultivating acceptance [for gay individuals].

KP: I know, and also, the first time the premier was shown on PBS [Public Television in Taiwan], it was prime time, 8:00pm. It created a sensation. And then, PBS repeated it five times.

UF: Five times, on loop?

KP: Yes, five times, consecutively. Five times in a row. That’s how popular it was. Everybody at that time watched it, and it had a great influence. I think it opened up the road for the legalization of Same-Sex Marriage in 2019. When Crystal Boys, the novel, first came out in the early 1980s, there was silence. Nobody knew how to deal with this book. They didn’t know how to deal with it. No bad reviews, either. They just kept silent, until the 1990s. And suddenly, it opened up, so Crystal Boys’ influence became widespread.

UF: And Howard Goldblatt’s English translation is wonderful. For a person who’s maybe not gay, to understand the lifestyle, you have to be educated.

KP: Of course, I helped him with the translation. We talked a lot together. I know him personally. I knew him then, and we discussed some of the terms and the scenes. He has a Taiwanese wife. Anyway, the TV series has exerted a great influence on the public. That’s why I said, socially, it had a great impact. But I didn’t expect it to be translated into many major Western languages.

UF: In the West, it’s often called “China’s first modern gay novel.” But it’s much more than this, in terms of the nuanced portrayal of qing. But that’s how they marketed it, with a half-naked figure on the cover. I was so surprised, after reading it, thinking, “This isn’t a sex novel.” There are no sex scenes. But it’s marketed that way.

KP: Some people asked me, “Why didn’t you write more sex scenes?” But that’s not the issue there. Of course I deal with the sex scenes. But that’s not my major concern. I could do it. Like The Plum in the Golden Vase [金瓶梅, a late Ming novel written in vernacular Chinese which included explicit depictions of sexuality]. But it was not necessary in this novel.

UF: I was also very disturbed to read many reviews that equated Pai Hsien-yung with A-Qing, interpreting the novel as autobiographical, saying that you were probably also kicked out of the house for being gay by your military father.

KP: No, my father has great respect for me. They had it wrong. Because I wrote “Lonely Seventeen” and Crystal Boys—in both of these works, the father kicks the son out of the house. But it’s not the case for me, personally. My father, although he was strict (he was a military man, a general), he had a kind heart, especially for me. He was much more forgiving of me, because I had been ill for some years. In a sense, he saved my life, you know? He was much more lenient toward me. But not toward my younger brothers. Actually, my father’s favorite son is my younger brother, but he got flogged, because my father’s expectations of him were too high. He couldn’t meet my father’s expectations. He was a rebel anyway.

UF: The father in Crystal Boys is very cruel. Every episode opens with the same scene of the father kicking his own son like a dog. But the scene in the stage play version is not as violent.

KP: Because he was a frustrated soldier, you know. He was deprived of his title and all that. So he had a lot of pent-up frustration. He represents all those military men who fled from China to Taiwan.

UF: What do you think it will take for same-sex marriage to be achieved in mainland China, or just better acceptance of gays and lesbians? Because Taiwan has come so far, and by reading your Crystal Boys, and especially the stage play version, if it could be brought to the mainland, it would change a lot of minds. Especially the father’s transformation, it could move a lot of parents.

KP: After the Communists took over, all literature with a gay theme was banned, with the exception of Crystal Boys. Crystal Boys was published in China. I first went back to China in 1987. In the same year, it was published by Beifang wenyi, in Manchuria. And then, the next year, 1988, Renmin wenxue, the most official PRC publisher, published Crystal Boys. And from then on, there were eight publishers, eight versions of Crystal Boys circulating in China, north and south. I don’t know why they let this book slide without any revisions. So it’s the original version. That was most unusual. So Crystal Boys has a widespread influence in China, too. Many gay boys first read about homosexuality from Crystal Boys, and also, pirated copies of the TV series were circulating. At that time, I was told it was sold for only 18 RMB. But they were very well-made. I got a copy of the pirated version. So it was quite influential in China. It’s even on Bilibili…

UF: Yes, I watched Crystal Boys the stage play on Bilibili, which my students call B站/“Stop B”.

KP: [laughs]. You did? You found it on Bilibili, right? So even stage plays are shown on Bilibili. There are many comments scrolling across the screen. So we have a novel, a TV series, a stage play, and a film version—they all made it to mainland China. So in the mainland, this book and the TV series also have a great influence. So many gay people in the mainland wrote to tell me how they were influenced by Crystal Boys.

UF: What did you think of the film directed by Yu Kanping 虞戡平? Did you participate in the film production?

KP: At that time, it was censored. They cut out many things. That’s why it has some disconnection there. The film is not perfect.

UF: Yes, some parts with Xiaoyu 小玉 …

KP: Xiaoyu is played by a girl in drag. You didn’t notice that? So I think the TV series was much more successful, and also the stage play.

UF: There’s a song in the stage play version, “Falling Lotus Flowers” (蓮花落). You must have participated in the composition process.

KP: There’s an interesting behind-the-scenes story. I thought the theme song was very important, so we got hold of the lyrics writer, Lin Xi 林夕, from Hong Kong. He was such a big shot, you know? He wrote the first version, I read it and I said, “It’s good. But it doesn’t fit in with our play.” It was about the protests in the gay movement. That doesn’t fit in with the play. I sent it back. Also, the songwriter, Chen Xiaoxia 陳小霞, she was also a big-shot in the popular song industry.

UF: Also the singer, Yang Zongwei 楊宗緯.

KP: It’s a long story. Chen Xiaoxia wrote the music, and I heard it. I thought it was too smooth, too flat. I said, “No, it should be high-rising, crescendoing like a butterfly on a fine day…” So I returned it too. My God! Chen Xiaoxia was ok, she re-wrote it, but Lin Xi, he was very bitter. He and Chen Xiaoxia were friends. Chen Xiaoxia later told me that Lin Xi called her and complained about the situation for two hours, and I felt bad, so when I was in Hong Kong, I tried to make it up to Lin Xi. I invited him out for lunch with me, but he refused to meet me. We had a celebration in Taipei. He moved to Taipei from Hong Kong. (Many people have fled Hong Kong recently.) So we had a celebration in Taipei, but he refused to show up. He was still bitter about it, but he did rewrite the lyrics. That was good. The ones you heard are wonderful.

I’m the one who chose Yang Zongwei. His singing—

UF: A throbbing vibrato tenor, like a cello.

KP: Yeah, his singing is so moving. So that’s the story behind the song.

UF: Did you also choose the composer Zhou Youliang for your production of Peony Pavilion? His music is great, too.

KP: Yes, it’s wonderful. He’s a great composer, but he wanted to steal the limelight. He wanted to show off. And sometimes, in the program, or brochure, the photographer didn’t use his photos, because they were focused on the actors, not on the composer. He was angry with me. I said, “I didn’t do that.” He wanted a whole picture of himself.

UF: Maybe he felt he was competing with Tan Dun 譚盾, the composer for Peter Sellars’ and Chen Shizheng’s 陳士爭 production. Maybe he wanted to be the next Tan Dun.

KP: I had to deal with all of these problems as the producer. But in the end, the result speaks for itself. It came off well.

UF: You’re a global “general.” You have “troops” from all over the world, all working together.

KP: Oh, we had a great time. Our Peony Pavilion production came here, to Santa Barbara, Berkeley… We had a tour of the four UC campuses.

UF: UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, UCLA, and UC Santa Barbara? It seems Chancellor Henry Yang from UC Santa Barbara did a lot behind the scenes to help make the production happen. He wrote letters to all of these Chinese leaders asking for increased investment in kunqu.

KP: Yes, Chancellor Yang used to be the Dean of the Engineering School at Purdue University, before coming here. He is just a super chancellor! He uplifted UCSB. Any more questions about Crystal Boys?

UF: I also compared “A Sky Full of Bright, Twinkling Stars” with Crystal Boys. There are some similarities between the short story and the novel, but maybe they’re only tangentially related. The “Guru” in “Twinkling Stars” is very different from Chief Yang Jinhai in Crystal Boys. The setting of “New Park” (now the 228 Peace Memorial Park) is one similarity.

KP: Only the setting, the atmospheres are similar, but the characters are all different. After all, one is a short story, and the other is a novel; the literary mediums are very different. But there is some connection, yes. I think “Twinkling Stars” was the origin [for Crystal Boys]. I wanted to tell the story of all the gay people, especially the gay people at the lowest level, they suffered the most, and they were despised and ostracized by society.

UF: Yes, many of the characters in Taipei People (台北人) seem to be aristocratic, or from the upper-class, but this story is different.

KP: Taipei People is not entirely [about the lives of upper-class people]. There are many levels—soldiers, nannies, you know. But Crystal Boys mainly contains characters from the lower ranks of the social echelon. I wanted to tell their story, how they suffered from social ostracization. Yes, that was my purpose, to write about them.

UF: You always capture the spirit of a city. “The Eternal Snow Beauty” (永遠的尹雪艶) captures the spirit of Shanghai. And also “Death in Chicago” (芝加哥之死). You only spent a very short time in Chicago, and yet, your personification of Chicago is spot-on. I know it’s an accurate portrayal, because I’ve spent a lot of time there. I love your depiction of Chicago as a rotting sarcophagus containing millions of souls of the living and dead. That really captures the spirit of the city!

KP: When I was studying in Iowa, during Christmas vacation, all the dormitories were shut down, so I had to move out. Chicago was very close to Iowa City, so I took a train and went to Chicago. I was struck by the big city. It was also very gloomy and windy.

UF: I recognize some of the places—South Clark Street in Chinatown, the apartment where the PhD student, Wu Han-hun 吳漢魂, lives. When we studied Yu Dafu’s 郁達夫 “Sinking” (沈淪), I chose your “Death in Chicago” as a companion piece because I believe it’s a modern version of “Sinking.” Many international students wrote about how moved they were by the piece.

KP: That story has been translated into German, and also English, by Margaret Baumgartner. I think it was published in The Chinese Pen [autumn 1976].

You mentioned how I got the inspiration for the stage play version of Crystal Boys from Benjamin Britten’s adaptation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. The dance scene between Longzi 籠子 and A-Feng, that was the hardest part. We couldn’t afford to flop in that scene. If we used the conventional structure with dialogue, that wouldn’t work. It would have become ridiculous, it would have sounded absurd. There’s too much. I thought, “A-Feng shouldn’t speak.” So we asked, “What will we do?” I’ve seen Death in Venice by Benjamin Britten. You know the story, right?

UF: Yes, von Aschenbach pursues Tadzio, a Polish boy who doesn’t speak. Also, Luchino Visconti did a movie adapted from Mann’s novella [Morte a Venezia].

KP: In Death in Venice, they didn’t have dialogue together.

UF: But there was dance.

KP: So for Benjamin Britten, Aschenbach had a solo, and Tadzio expressed himself through dance. They inspired me. I thought, “We can do that, too!” Let A-Feng dance to express his passion, his suffering, all that. And Longzi would have a monologue. It came off. It worked.

UF: I couldn’t help but draw a comparison with Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, when suddenly the girl in red emerges from the black and grey, contrasting the Nazi’s brutality with hope. The explosion of color is also very effective in the stage play version of Crystal Boys.

KP: It impressed the audience very much. They all said, “This is the climax of the whole play.”

UF: It seems that Longzi’s love for A-Feng is extremely possessive—he wants to “own” A-Feng’s heart. Since he’s not speaking, many people might think he doesn’t have his own opinions, or that he is passive. But that’s not the case. He soars, wild and free, on stage, even without speaking. And later on, A-Qing isn’t willing to be controlled by Longzi. So I learned a lot about love from watching the play. You shouldn’t control the other person.

KP: Right, you can never possess someone else. As for A-Qing, that’s different. A-Qing realizes that Longzi is attempting to displace his affection for A-Feng on him. A-Feng is the one in his heart, not A-Qing. He knows that A-Qing doesn’t truly love him. A-Feng is his true and only love. This is also a subtle psychology.

Actually, Longzi is seeking redemption for his tragic past. He is trying to redeem himself and to start a new life with someone, and eventually, at the end of the story, he meets a cripple, and he helps him go through surgery, at the very end of the novel. Remember when Longzi is in New York, he meets a Puerto Rican boy? It’s the same kind of redemption, to redeem his own soul.

UF: There’s also a similar description at the end of “Twinkling Stars”: “The boy was called Little Jade; he was a pretty-faced little thing, but he was a cripple, so not many people paid him attention. The Guru put his arm around the boy’s shoulder, and the two of them, one tall, one small, supporting each other with their incompleteness, limped together into the dark grove of Green Corals.” The word “cripple” (跛子) is also used in the English translation of “Winter Night”:

“There was one girl student who asked me, ‘Was Byron really that handsome?’”

“‘Byron was a cripple,’ I told her, ‘Probably a worse one than I am.’”

She looked so stricken that I had to comfort her. ‘But he did have a devilishly handsome face— ’”

UF: I wanted to ask you a question about critical distance. You were an exile, living all over the world, for much of your life, always moving around, and your true homeland may exist in traditional Chinese culture. Do you have a different perspective on Chinese history and culture now that you are living overseas? Could you have produced these works living in Taiwan and China?

KP: My childhood was spent on the mainland. It was a very important influence on my writing. My memory of the old China was gone. That China had collapsed. That’s why in Taipei People, you find a very deep nostalgia for the past, trying to reclaim the past, but of course, it’s not possible. And also, for me, the Republic of China has also collapsed, has declined, disappeared, on the mainland. So the Republic of China in Taiwan is another chapter in the history. It’s a different country. So the people in Taipei People, they yearn for their lost country. Of course, they spent their youth, or the most successful parts of their lives, on the mainland, and in time, they decline. That’s why I quoted the poem by Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫 (772-842):

朱雀橋邊野草花    Beside the Bridge of Birds rank grasses overgrow;

烏衣巷口夕陽斜    O’er the Street of Mansions the setting sun hangs low.

舊時王謝堂前燕   Swallows that skimmed by eaves painted in bygone days,

飛入尋常百姓家.   Are dipping now among the humble home’s doorways. (see Xu Yuanchong 許淵衝. 300 Gems of Classical Chinese Poetry. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2004.)

In the third and fourth centuries, in northern China, the Western Jin empire was established. And then, by the third century, the Western Jin capital was invaded by the various barbarians—Xiongnu, and so forth. And so the Jin dynasty court moved to Nanjing from Luoyang in Henan during the Eastern Jin. Because the people of the Eastern Jin yearned for their former days in Luoyang, I quoted this poem as a parallel. The Western Jin dynasty moved from Luoyang to Nanjing, and the Republic of China moved its capital from Nanjing to Taipei, so it’s a historical parallel. That’s the major theme of my Taipei People. Just like many centuries ago, the people of the Eastern Jin longed for their lost country.

During the Southern Song, they also wrote memoirs about the Northern Song, with its capital in Kaifeng, which was later moved to Hangzhou. There are so many ups and downs, dynastic cycles in Chinese history, with one dynasty succeeding another. There are many poems about this. I think I inherited this tradition in Taipei People.

UF: And you wrote Crystal Boys in Santa Barbara, and so you gained some distance, too, from the community in New Park in Taipei.

KP: Yes, I wrote it in Santa Barbara. The environment is totally different. It’s not like the world in Crystal Boys at all. There’s so much sunshine here!

UF: I wonder how Crystal Boys would have been different if you had written it in Taipei. did the sense of distance and displacement [from writing about a marginalized community in Taipei while living overseas] help you gain a critical perspective on your own writing?

KP: Yes, distance. I distanced myself from all of that, so I could write more objectively.

Works Cited

Cao Xueqin. The Dream of the Red Chamber. Tr. David Hawkes. 4 vols. Penguin Classics, 1986.

Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫. “Wuyigang” 烏衣港. In Xu Yuanchong 許淵衝, ed. 300 Gems of Classical Chinese Poetry. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2004.

Pai Hsien-yung. Crystal Boys. Tr. Howard Goldblatt. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1989.

Pai Hsien-yung. “Death in Chicago.” Tr. Margaret Baumgartner. The Chinese Pen (Autumn 1976).

Pai Hsien-yung. Taipei jen/Taipei People. Trs. and foreword by Pai Hsien-yung and Patia Yasin. George Kao (ed.). Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2000.