Literary Master 1983

Chapter 323, "The Subway," Published

On the other hand, unlike Ma Shitu, who was always laughing and joking, Yu Qie quickly showed his irritable side in the documentary.

The Metro series caused a sensation when it was published in the United States at the end of the year.

Suddenly, countless people came to visit Yu Qie, or to take something from him. The film crew of "The East Wind Prevails Over the West Wind" saw that Yu Qie had suddenly become a different person from before; he had become a writer who was "more Western than Westerners."

If this was still within Yu Qie's capacity for self-cultivation, then another matter touched a raw nerve with Yu Qie.

He discovered that the novel had been edited by the publisher, with some superfluous "oracle bone script" phrases omitted. He felt as if he were back on the shores of Yanda Lake, being subjected to the nonsensical comments of the Weiming Poetry Society, when Yu Qie flew into a rage and summoned Harper's people to give him a dressing down.

"Who told you to delete my novel? This person must leave my novels, or I will never work with Harper again."

"Yu, you signed a contract with us..."

"Do you think I can only write Metro in my lifetime? This is just the beginning, and you're going to miss out. If you don't change it, I will do everything I can to change publishers and tell every reader that it's a version I don't acknowledge."

Shao Qi and the others were dumbfounded: they all understood English, and Teacher Yu frequently mentioned American swear words in the text.

Harper was indeed panicked.

Yu Qie is only in his early twenties, and he will clearly be in his most prolific period of creation for the next two or three decades. Two major conditions ensure that he will remain a world-class writer for the foreseeable future: one is the unparalleled writing story brought about by his "Colombian journey," which makes it highly likely that he will reach the age where he can directly win the Nobel Prize.

These legendary stories will endure as time goes by.

Then one day, something like this happened: a group of old men from the Swedish Academy were discussing the Nobel Prize selection. Yu Qie may not have published any works at the time, but they realized that Yu Qie was getting old, so they found an excuse and suddenly awarded him the Nobel Prize for a novel he had written many years ago.

And this novel may not even be Yu Qie's most classic novel.

The world's media, upon hearing the news, were not surprised, but rather had an expression of "Oh, this should have happened a long time ago."

The other is the East Asian market represented by Yu Qie.

This is a market larger than Europe and the United States combined. A writer's achievements cannot be measured by data, but data is also indispensable.

Harper asked Lucy, Yu Che's old classmate, to act as an intermediary, but Yu Che still didn't give her any face.

He said, "If you had actually studied at Yenching University for a few years, you would know how I treated those people. I treated everyone the same."

Harper then conducted an internal investigation and discovered that it was not due to intentional deletion or alteration. Rather, it was because the American printing industry had become semi-electronic, and their font library did not contain "Oracle".

To publish this book, the oracle bone script characters were all manually pre-designed patterns in a computer. However, errors were still inevitable.

Westerners don't recognize these words at all, making them even more prone to making mistakes.

Yu Qie's attitude did not soften. He believed that it was a typesetting error, and since no one had corrected it, someone had to be punished.

To appease him, Harper had no choice but to find a scapegoat and fire him.

So during the reprint of the novel, Harper mobilized a team of more than ten people to do only one thing: communicate with Yu Qie to see if the content in the book was the same as what he meant.

People were coming and going in Yu Che's room, and everyone was being extra careful. Harper had booked several rooms next to the hotel where Yu Che was staying, only about ten meters away from him. The cameras showed that the publishers hunched over and knocked on the door more gently as they got closer to Yu Che's room.

Is there something strange about this?

Boston University is a nationally renowned university. Archaeologists, biologists, and others often reside temporarily in the vicinity.

They realized it was like the evolutionary history of humankind, from apes to Homo sapiens. Only here, it was the reverse. Tens of thousands of years of human history unfolded within a mere dozen meters; time had reversed.

The film crew witnessed this scene and looked at each other in bewilderment.

Some people think that Yu Qie's actions were too impolite to Americans. We are a nation of etiquette.

Some people criticize Yu Qie while strangely feeling a sense of satisfaction! If I were working for a private newspaper, I could write honest things like, "Yu Qie said what I wanted to say and did what I wanted to do."

I like to tell the truth.

The CCTV production team was so curious that they interviewed the American booksellers. Shao Qi asked, "Is this normal among writers? Don't you think Yu Qie is too harsh?"

“Not at all harsh, Mr. Yu is a very good person! It’s all our fault. We got his ethnic totem wrong, which is a big problem. You know what? Mr. Momadi threatened to launch the Great Indian Walk, and we didn’t know that it was also a part of Indian culture.”

Time magazine reporter Liu Xiangcheng then asked a strange question with a smile: "If I were to call you a 'son of the beach' like he did, would you talk back to me?"

Harper's people seemed to have heard something incomprehensible!

"Of course, I'm speaking to you based on strength now. You have no right to be angry with me. How dare you? You son of the beach! Forever a son of the beach!"

Liu Xiangcheng was actually quite pleased and took out a pen to write down this dialogue: "This is the different answer I wanted."

……

Yu Qie's reputation, built up over half a year, finally paid off, with "Metro" selling far better than "2666". The first edition of 5,000 copies sold out within a week, followed by a reprint of 30,000 copies, which were sold out in pre-sales, so another 100,000 copies had to be reprinted.

Harper's team estimates that the book will eventually sell at least two million copies in North America within three years, and then remain in the top 30 of the bestseller list for traditional novels in the United States for a long time, with two to three hundred thousand copies sold each year.

Some publishers from South America and Central America also came after hearing the news, though these regions were not within Harper's purview.

Carmen has collaborated with these publishers for many years, and novels by authors such as Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez have been published there. In Europe and other regions, however, Carmen publishes directly through her own publishing houses. To persuade Yu Che to grant her the copyrights, Carmen announced that she would prepare a mysterious gift for him.

What mysterious gift?
It's nothing more than some luxury item, or a private invitation from some great writer of the last era... or buying Chinese cultural relics to give to Yu Qie in order to please him.

Carmen is a woman who is first and foremost an agent, negotiating lucrative contracts for writers around the world and earning a cut of the profits; in addition, she is also the head of a publishing company in Europe, especially in places like Spain.

Therefore, Carmen rightfully agreed to the request that the publishing rights for the Metro series throughout Europe belong to her.

She even hopes to acquire the book's copyright in Japan.

Yu Qie refused them all.

"Yu, why don't you ask what gift I'll give you?"

Yu Qie said, "A gift is a gift, and a contract is a contract."

Carmen and Yuche then argued, but Yuche wasn't the kind of person Márquez was afraid of arguing. He wouldn't back down at all, and said, "The thing Márquez both appreciates and hates about you is that you took him in when he was down on his luck, but you also put shackles on him." "No, you're different from Gabo. I'll treat you very well," Carmen said.

Yu Qie nodded: "Yes, I'm completely different from Gabo. Before I met you, I was already a decent writer, and after meeting you, I'm still the same person. Stop playing those papal games at work. You know I didn't get all this because of you."

Carmen was stunned.

“You once said that no matter how Márquez wrote it, you would give him a thousand dollars a month for living expenses. In this way, you obtained the copyrights to both Márquez and Vargas Llosa’s novels… Although they received some compensation after they became famous, they still lost a lot of wealth.”

“If there were a Yuqie Museum, I wouldn’t need the people of Wanxian to pay for it. I would donate it to the public for free and use it for tourism. That’s something I’ll do when I’m nearing my death. If I were wanted by a government like Chile again, I wouldn’t hide like Márquez. I would build a bunker that even a bunker-buster couldn’t get into.”

"And what did I do? I wrote novels in there and watched them die on the ground."

Yu Qie said, "Although I am not short of money, I am not as easy to talk to as Márquez."

Carmen was so angry that she slammed the door and left. But more than ten minutes later, she came back and apologized: "Yu, I was too agitated earlier."

Yu Qie acted as if nothing had happened: "Let's renegotiate the contract. I got too excited."

The production team felt that the footage from the past few days was even more exciting than what they had recorded in the previous two weeks.

He was like a giant magnet, sometimes drawing people so close that they were driven to their deaths, and other times easily pushing them away with a single turn of his head.

He only accepts communication methods that he decides.

So this is the influence of world-class writers.

Then, Yu Qie discovered that his novel's sales seemed to be low.

Is it really worth holding a celebration party for just 5,000 copies?

The standalone edition of "The Fiancée's Letter" was published in 84. It sold more than eight million copies in mainland China in three years. With the addition of various revised comic book editions, the total sales are probably in the tens of millions.

This is not an isolated case.

Chinese writer Li Cunbao's novel "Garland at the Foot of the Mountain" has sold over five million copies, enough for him to live off the book for the rest of his life.

Isn't it said that Americans have very strong purchasing power?
Why not buy a book?

Was the promotion done poorly? Or was the "Oracle Bone Script" printed incorrectly, making readers unwilling to read it?

In a discussion session for seasoned readers, Harper’s team subtly explained why an initial print run of 5,000 copies is impressive in the United States: traditional novels are very expensive in the US.

It's extremely expensive.

The world-renowned novel *One Hundred Years of Solitude* sold fewer than three million copies in the United States. Many of those sales took place after 1982, the year Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize.

A novel in the US typically costs at least ten dollars, while a Chinese novel costs around two yuan. Based on the exchange rate, publishing one book in the US is equivalent to publishing forty copies in mainland China!

Furthermore, ten dollars is for a super-cheap edition book, and Americans typically buy two books—one to read and one to collect. Publishers then design various hardcover editions of novels to precisely target this consumerism. Their secondhand book market is very developed.

Harper owns a hardcover series similar to Iwanami Shoten's "World Classics Jungle," where most books are 16mo format, bound in genuine leather, with gold-stamped and embossed covers, gold-plated edges on three sides (all in 22k gold), and silk linings...

Then, a book sells for between sixty and seventy dollars.

The paper they used was high-grade acid-resistant paper, which was difficult to wear out, would not discolor, and had excellent toughness. This type of paper was unheard of in mainland China at the time, when pulp was scarce, because it was the paper later used to print US dollars.

Harper used a simple analogy to describe it: "The first three thousand copies of One Hundred Years of Solitude published in the United States took two weeks to sell out. At the time, we thought that was quite remarkable."

Yu Qie immediately understood!
It turns out the novel wasn't unpopular; it was just too popular.

This book is indeed a hit!

The book review system in the United States is highly developed, and many people make a living as book reviewers. The book reviewers immediately noticed this book: it was written by a very popular Chinese author, and the story was about nuclear war... well, Chinese people are qualified to write about nuclear war.

French, British, Soviets, Chinese, and us, and perhaps a few evil countries... that's about it.

Keep reading.

A Chinese-American wakes up beneath the Boston subway… oh, it turns out to be a post-apocalyptic bomb shelter. He climbs to the surface, ready to begin saving the world.

Isn't this just a regular science fiction novel?
It seems insignificant.

But as the reviewers continued reading, their expressions gradually turned serious. The novel's literary merit lies hidden within its content; it discusses numerous issues of the human world, yet integrates them so aptly; it offers a projection of the future world order, not mere fabrication; it is precise enough to cover the currency, production methods, ideologies, and philosophies of the nuclear wasteland era… It's like an encyclopedia; just thinking about the sheer scale of this literary project is enough to understand its profound literary quality.

This literary quality reaches its climax at the end: everyone is thrilled by the protagonist "Li's" adventure, hates the creatures on the ground, and wants to save the human race that has been driven underground.

But they discovered that the creatures on the ground were intelligent beings... They just had different languages, different skin, and different colors.

NO! That's not how it is! How could it be like this?

Some people with a modicum of common sense have already realized that this is about myself. It's about how Westerners persecuted Native Americans, and even other former colonies.

This is not an overinterpretation, because Yu Qie himself is a Chinese writer who has always spoken out for the Third World.

In the novel, the strange script and the cultural origins, along with "Li's" ethnicity, all ultimately point to a powerful Eastern nation. When the reader grasps this point, the grand narrative deception laid out throughout the book is complete. It transcends the text, jumps out of the picture, and simultaneously interrogates both the protagonist "Li" and the reader within the story.

Then "Li" chose to press the nuclear button, perishing together with the enemy.

The story ends abruptly here, leaving the reader initially furious: How could you do this?!
We could have lived together peacefully!
But is that really true?
This is not a science fiction novel, but a realistic novel.

Think about what has happened in human history. Where did those Native Americans go? Why is the Third World still poor? Their soil, water, and food... have all been taken away.

You want me to be your slave? No, we might as well both die!

Was pressing the nuclear button the best answer? "Li" did the right thing.

As a result, the reader will calm down from their excitement and fall into melancholy.

(End of this chapter)