As a local boy made good, Yan is acutely aware of the hazards that accompany a publicized homecoming: having to serve as the guest of honor at interminable banquets, being the dedicatee of countless toasts. Inevitably, though, word gets out, and when, in June, I travelled with him from Beijing, where he lives with his wife and son, to Luoyang, the city nearest his ancestral village, a friend had arranged a dinner in his honor.
Luoyang, in Henan Province, is an arid backwater, but its position in the Yellow River Basin made it one of the cradles of Chinese civilization. For fifteen hundred years, from the eleventh century B. Nowadays, Luoyang is best known for the Longmen Grottoes, where tens of thousands of Buddha statues have been carved into cliffs on the banks of the Yi River.
Little of this illustrious past was visible as we drove from the train station. But soon we entered a disorienting simulacrum of the past: a labyrinth of imperial gardens, stone bridges, and pagodas with crimson eaves. Past a lily pond and a copse of weeping willows, a group of men and women stood dressed in Tang-dynasty robes. Now sixty, he is trim, with a boxy build and an abundant thatch of graying hair, which sweeps across his forehead in uneven, bristly bangs.
His default expression is one of good-natured equipoise, relaxed but attuned to the minutiae of the shifting world around him. But his international reputation has grown.
He won the Franz Kafka Prize in , has twice been short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize, and is often mentioned as a likely recipient of the Nobel. Yan does not exempt himself from his critique; his books often feature an alter ego, also named Yan Lianke, a hack writer who periodically goes back home to gather material.
