5:32 pm HKT Aug 19, 2014 CULTURE
Jack Livings’ new book, ‘The Dog’. Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Jack Livings spent time in China as a student and an English teacher in the ‘90s. The American author recently published “The Dog,” his first collection of short stories, set in the contradictory landscape that is modern China.
The stories touch on everything from a factory owner forced to donate vast sums of money to charity in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to a retired racing dog rescued from becoming dinner to a fictionalized account based on the true story of a group of glassworkers charged after Mao Zedong’s death with creating a crystal sarcophagus in just 10 months—a task that normally takes three years.
The author, who works in the licensing division at Time Inc. in New York, talks about the challenges of writing about China from afar, precision of language and finding the human element in a story. Edited excerpts:
Where did you draw your inspiration for the characters in your stories?
“The Dog” [the story from which the book takes its name] is based on a story one of my English students told about this horrible experience she had where they were going to take a racing dog out to the country and barbecue it and she stepped in and said no. I didn’t start writing that till I had been back for at least five years, but that story just stuck with me.
Several came from ideas based on news stories I read. A couple came from a weird mix of my own sick brain and things I was reading at the time. Very few actually contained any characters based on people I met.
Why did you want to write fiction about China?
I’m a fiction writer. That’s how I look at the world. I admire what writers like Evan Osnos and Peter Hessler [who have written nonfiction books about China] do. But if I were going to write nonfiction about China, I would have had to be there for at least 10 years.
For a fiction writer, distance is a good thing, although it can lead to horrible mistakes if you’re not careful.
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