German writer brings message of hope
By Yang Guang (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-05-29 07:44
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Katrin Schmidt seems the stereotype of an intellectual - serious, cool, and reticent. The 52-year-old German writer only smiled once, and then just faintly, during the two-hour salon with Beijing's literature enthusiasts.
The Berlin-based writer arrived for the first time in Beijing on May 23, in the wake of a reading tour to Shanghai and Nanjing. The salon organizer, Goethe Institute China, obviously didn't expect the swarm of readers, most in their 20s and early 30s, who packed the 100-seat venue, some standing in the back and along the aisle.
After all, the German Book Prize winner has only one short story, Learning the Blues, published in Chinese in the May issue of Nanjing-based foreign literature magazine Yi Lin.
Schmidt was honored with the German Book Prize and its attendant 25,000 euro ($30,600) last October, beating five short-listed authors including Nobel laureate Herta Mller, for her novel You're Not Going to Die. It is a story about how the heroine Helene Wesendahl, left unable to speak or move after a brain aneurysm, discovers a past self that she finds difficult to reconcile with the present during her rehabilitation.
The power and poignancy of the novel are intensified, given the fact that Schmidt herself suffered from a brain aneurysm in 2002.
"I'm dying," she told her husband, a psychologist.
"You're not going to die," he answered.
His words became inspiration for the now much-sought-after novel.
But the writer, now fully recovered, clarifies that Helene's story and her own experiences coincide only where the disease is concerned. Through the novel, she wishes to provide hope and confidence to patients stricken with similar diseases.
Before her first visit to China this May, Schmidt had only vague impression of the country from her husband and parents-in-law, who stayed in China for five years during the 1950s.
Both from East Germany, her father-in-law worked as a proofreader in an international publishing house in Beijing, and her mother-in-law first taught in a university in Shanghai and then was transferred to Beijing.
"My husband was taken care of by a Chinese nanny and went to a kindergarten in Beijing. When he left China, he was only able to speak Chinese, not German," she says.
"I thought there would be a lot of bicycles on Nanjing Road before going to Shanghai, while the city has actually become an international metropolis."
Schmidt says she read Confucius, Sun Yet-sen, and ancient Chinese poems when she was young, but also admitted her lack of knowledge regarding works of her contemporary Chinese peers. But her conversation with writer Bi Feiyu while in Nanjing, was a good way of starting to change that.
"He is just wonderful," Schmidt comments on the Nanjing-based writer who is best known for his portrait of the female psyche, adding that she was especially impressed by the screening of the film adaptation of Bi's The Wang Village on Earth (Diqiu shang de Wangjiazhuang).
Schmidt started writing poems before adolescence, but decided she wouldn't live by her pen. She studied psychology in college and has worked as a psychologist, editorial journalist and social scientist.
Now a professional writer, she writes what she wants to, in disregard of the reader and publisher.
"If I am not able to get published anymore, I would quit writing and find another job. It is as simple as that."
"My husband has been supporting me all these years. But I won the prize and became the focus of attention, he is not used to it. I am a little confused as well," she admits.
A mother of five children, Schmidt says that till the book her life hadn't changed since her first child was born 31 years ago. Now thanks to a scholarship, she is finally embracing a change this year - staying in Rome with her youngest son, 13 years old.