Lunch With the FT: 52 Classic Interviews Page 6
Does he worry about his own health? He’s dismissive: ‘Here I am at 61 and I’ve never felt better. I’ve never had a cleaner bill of health. I was just in the Mayr Clinic in Austria. They said, “We want to use you as an example of how we want people to end up.” They said I had the body of a 40-year-old.’
As our seafood platter arrives, Wood dips straight into the crab claws. ‘These are really cool. I don’t know which sauce you put on them.’ As he plumps for the shallots and vinegar, the conversation turns to Jimi Hendrix, with whom he shared a flat for six months in the late 1960s. ‘He didn’t think he was any good as a singer. I used to say, “Don’t worry about that voice.” He used to obliterate real life by being stoned all the time – and he couldn’t handle it. He didn’t realize how good he was.’ His last memory of seeing Hendrix alive, the night before he died in 1970, is haunting. ‘He was leaving Ronnie Scott’s [jazz club]. He had his arm around a girl and he looked really sad. I went out after him and said, “Jimi, you didn’t say goodnight.” ’
I try to lighten the mood by asking about the Wood clan – who all seem to have found jobs in the family business. He married Jo, a former model, 23 years ago after splitting with his first wife Krissie, another model. Jo is on the Stones payroll as his dresser and assistant on tour, in between running her organic beauty products business. His stepson Jamie is his manager, and his young- est son Tyrone is curating Wood’s latest exhibition at Scream.
The ‘Little Red Rooster’ ringtone on Wood’s phone sounds. He seems agitated. The call brings news, he says, of the Sun door-stepping his home in Kingston, south-west London. A few days after our lunch I realize that he had been given news that the paper was about to write a story about how during the week of our meeting, he was holed up with a young Russian waitress.
Whatever domestic earthquakes are going on in the background, he returns quickly to conviviality, suggesting we finish lunch with a drink elsewhere. Though he is great company, it’s something of a relief when his PR appears to steer him to his next engagement and saves me from making the decision. As we leave the hotel, the kitchen staff lift their ladles and knives in salute, out on the street car horns honk, and Wood poses for an endless round of photos with passers-by, loving every second of it. ‘That’s always been a big problem with me,’ he says with a grin that fades to exasperation: ‘I find it hard to get old and hard to say no.’
THE SADDLE ROOM
Shelbourne Hotel, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2
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12 x Clare Atlantic oysters €33
1 x seafood platter €44
3 x espresso €13.50
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Total €90.50
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9 AUGUST 2005
Yu Hua
The famished road
His early heroes were drawn from the Cultural Revolution’s tragic poster-boy outlaws. Now, post-Tiananmen Square, the novelist has the power to frame Mao, and bring peace to his belly
By John Ridding
The fried pigs’ livers with yellow wine were my idea – but the inspiration was really down to Yu Hua. In his masterpiece, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, the downtrodden hero, Xu Sanguan, eats the dish in the belief it will restore his strength. So it seemed fitting to give it a try, even if we were rather more fortunate than Xu, sitting in one of Hong Kong’s most venerable restaurants discussing the books that have taken Yu Hua from an enfant terrible of China’s literary scene to one of its leading lights.
Blood, violence and hardship run through this body of work as they course through modern China, from the civil war to the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the other trials that bedevil the lives of Yu Hua’s characters, typically ordinary people who both suffer and express their country’s upheavals.
In truth, Yu Hua’s bleak tragedies are leavened by uplifting themes of fortitude and family bonds. But they are still hard to square with the affable 44-year-old, who looks nearer his thirties, as he pauses for thought, dipping his chopsticks into the grey yolk of a ‘1,000-year-old egg’.
The traumas, like much of his writing, are drawn from experience. The son of a doctor and a nurse, he grew up in a hospital in the eastern Chinese town of Haiyan, against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution. ‘When my father finished a surgery we would see his coat stained with blood,’ he recalls. ‘My mother would carry tins of organs out and pour them into a pond behind the hospital. In summer, the pond would be covered with so many flies it looked like a thick blanket.’
If home was where the blood was, the street outside was a stage for the brutality that features in many of his works. ‘There was a lot of violence then – even in our small town. I saw with my own eyes people beaten to death on the street.’
Yu Hua started his own working life as a barefoot dentist. Given the macabre detail of his early works, it prompted Mo Yan, author of Red Sorghum (made into a film by Zhang Yimou), to comment: ‘I’ve heard he was a dentist for five years. I can’t imagine what kind of tortures patients endured under his cruel pliers.’
In the event, the patients were spared. Hating the job and jealous of the artists and writers he saw walking around town, Yu Hua determined to enter the local cultural council. With most novels and virtually all foreign books banned at the time, he drew inspiration from the ‘Big Character Posters’ that were plastered across the walls of Chinese towns denouncing ‘capitalist roaders’ and other traitors to Mao Zedong’s causes. Many of these victims were known to Yu Hua before they were swept into public and, generally, tragic local dramas, and later into his bestselling books.
His lack of formal training led to a sparse writing style – prompting some critics to cite Ernest Hemingway as an influence. But Yu Hua has an alternative explanation. ‘I went to primary school in the year when the Cultural Revolution started and graduated from high school the year it ended. That meant I never studied properly, and knew only 4,000 characters,’ he says. ‘That is why my style is sparse. Maybe Hemingway’s vocabulary was quite small too.’
As the style of Yu Hua’s books has evolved from experimental avant-garde towards more conventional narratives and commercial success, it is tempting to see a parallel with China’s recent evolution. The suggestion is reinforced by the fact that this former tyro of the Tiananmen Square era, who was involved in the student-led protests of 1989, is now comfortable with China’s recent development and his own move towards the cultural mainstream.
‘There must be some connection between my writing style and the general situation of society at that time,’ he acknowledges. ‘When I started writing, my style was rather radical and the characters in my books were completely under my control. I wrote like a dictator. In the 1990s, when I wrote the longer novels, I found characters had their own voices. This was an amazing experience and fundamentally changed my attitude to writing. Maybe this is a coincidence, but it is in some way consistent with the evolution of Chinese society, from highly authoritarian to more democratic.’
It is, of course, a relative progression. Yu Hua is tolerated rather than endorsed by Chinese officialdom and sails close to the lingering winds of censorship. While he denies he is a political writer, he sees the ‘truth of history’ as his driving force and the messages of his books have strong political symbolism. An unfortunate character in the novel To Live, for instance, is bled to death during a transfusion to supply a party official, a literal expression of the extreme sacrifices demanded by the state. Arbitrary and ruthless decrees frequently dictate the fortunes of his characters.
‘I don’t think they see me as a model writer,’ he jokes.
His books have never been banned – but neither does he expect official recognition or awards. ‘I am comfortable with this position. A writer should not have a cosy relationship with the government.’
The tacit toleration of Yu Hua’s books probably reflects his ‘rear view’ perspective and his focus on the monstrosities of Maoism. China’s current regime acknowledges mista
kes from that period, although it has so far rejected a ‘reassessment’ of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Yu Hua believes those chapters have closed, drawing a curtain on all-consuming ideology. ‘It is a good change. People may no longer believe in high missions and they are thinking of money all the time,’ he says. ‘These indeed may cause many problems in society. But no matter how problematic, it is better than using one ideology. Trying to make one billion people think the same, as in the Cultural Revolution, is the most dreadful thing.’
While the era of choreographed campaigns has passed, Yu Hua sees risks to stability in the localized protests that are now bursting through the fissures of China’s widening social gaps. ‘Almost all the political movements in China were started by Mao Zedong alone, and he alone could then regain control of everything; whereas today’s small-scale upheavals are everywhere and they are not initiated by the government. When they come together to become a tide, nobody can control it.’
On a personal and professional level, this evolution removes the ideological targets that Yu Hua hit so unerringly in his previous works, challenging him to capture the more complex currents of contemporary China. ‘Writing about the past is much easier than writing about the present. The present in China is constantly changing, and increasingly quickly,’ he says. ‘A European would need to live 400 years to experience such a sea change.’
Yu Hua has sought to chart this sea change in a new book due out in the summer. The two-part novel, still awaiting a title, records what he sees as the defining social shift in China – from the ‘self-denial’ of the past to the ‘self-indulgence’ and sensationalism of the present. ‘Today’s China is full of sensations. If you open the paper you will read about the most peculiar stories that could ever happen,’ he says. He cites a story about a rich Chinese man taking his dog to a sauna and then placing the dog on a separate bed for a massage. Such a scene is a long way from the struggles of his earlier works. In those times, a dog would have been a bizarre luxury, or lunch.
The tone of the new novel will be dark. ‘It is full of sarcasm and even more cynical than my previous novels, because I think that tone suits our age.’ Despite this, or possibly because of it, he sees no problems getting it published. He has yet to show it to publishers, but has already received an offer for an initial print run of 300,000 copies – a reflection of the following he has built as a writer and as a narrator of China’s unfolding history.
Amid the tumult of that history, it is a struggle to keep roots and memories intact. That is something that Yu Hua feels strongly about, personally. And as we move to the next dish – the head and legs of a lobster, with rice – it transpires that food is one way he seeks to preserve his own past.
‘When I was a kid I was crazy about a local dish – rice cake with shredded pork. It is something you rarely had the chance to eat then. It no longer tastes that delicious to me today, but even so, I have to eat it at least once a month. Otherwise I would feel uncomfortable,’ he says. ‘I eat this to make up for the past, because I ate too little at the time. I was constantly hungry as a kid.’
His experience of hunger rumbles through many of the most moving scenes in his books. When, in Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, Xu Sanguan is reunited with his first-born son banished because of doubts over his legitimacy, their reconciliation is sealed over a bowl of noodles. In To Live, the mute and starving daughter is unable to protest in a desperate struggle over a single sweet potato.
Those days created demons as well as dramas. Shuffling his chopsticks, Yu Hua reveals that he writes for self-restoration as well as for his readers. ‘I don’t write to cure other people’s souls. I write to cure my own soul. There are problems with my own soul, and I need to work on them.’
As the dim sum dessert arrives, and the warm and surprisingly potent Shaoxing Chiew wine takes effect, this soul is in good spirits. ‘Sometimes I eat for the past. But today’s meal is fantastic,’ he exclaims. ‘I feel I am eating for my present life.’
YUNG KEE RESTAURANT
Central, Hong Kong
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1 x fish maw with mushroom soup
1 x pigs’ livers with yellow wine
1 x beef brisket in superior soup
1 x lobster ball in black bean sauce
1 x garoupa with bean curd
1 x lobster with rice in soup
1 x dim sum dessert
1 x Shaoxing Chiew wine
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Total HK$2,480 (£170)
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Business
2 DECEMBER 2005
Prince Alwaleed
Royal subjects
Between diet tips and investment philosophy, the world’s fifth-richest man explains why he is uniquely placed to bridge the divide between east and west
By Simon Kuper
When would Prince Alwaleed like to have lunch? At 6.30pm. Where? At his hotel, the George V. Does he always stay there when he’s in Paris? Actually, he owns it.
The world’s fifth-richest man, worth an estimated $21.5bn, tends to own things. There are his chunks of Citigroup and News Corp, not to mention EuroDisney, Canary Wharf, Hewlett-Packard, Time Warner, and so on. Though one of his grandfathers founded Saudi Arabia and the other was independent Lebanon’s first prime minister, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal is considered practically a self-made man. He has even been called the Saudi Warren Buffett, chiefly for having turned an $800m purchase of Citicorp stock into a stake worth $10bn. Not content with being rich, the prince also believes he has a divinely ordained role to bring together ‘east and west’.
I wait in the George V’s lobby while the prince hangs with his buddies, Richard Parsons, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner, and Sandy Weill, chairman of Citigroup. Then he goes to pray.
When I am eventually led to his regular nook in the lobby, I discover that lunching with him is not exactly a tête-à-tête. It takes a while to identify him – moustachioed, bushy-haired and extremely thin – amid his entourage of aides. A cameraman slaps a microphone on my lapel: our ‘lunch’ is to be filmed. To complete the multimedia experience, a television is playing a tape of BBC World on fast-forward.
Noticing my surprise at the crowd, the prince’s private banker, Mike Jensen, jokes, ‘Don’t worry, you’re not paying for this!’
‘Only for three people,’ corrects the prince. I had said the FT would buy him lunch, and the prince has decided to slap an aide on to our bill. ‘I’ll have my salad,’ he tells the waiter. It’s a rucola salad with tomatoes that is not on the menu.
The prince, 50, is observing the optional six-day fast after Ramadan, a doddle for him as he rarely eats in daytime anyway. Speaking in double-pace English, which he more or less mastered during a stint at Menlo College in California, he explains, ‘I was very fat before. My peak weight was – do you want pounds or kilos? – 89 kilos. Then we went down to 60. No spaghetti, no bread, no butter, no meat. Complete moratorium. I eat only one meal a day.’
He has stuck to this regime for 15 years, although ‘one meal a day’ doesn’t mean he never otherwise eats: he says he broke his fast ‘just an hour ago’ and his printed schedule for today lists dinner at 2am.
Prince Alwaleed doesn’t just want you to think he is thin, however. He wants you to think he is a statesman. When his salad arrives, he ignores it as he explains his mission to unite people around the world. ‘God blessed me with a lot of wealth. After 9/11 a major division took place between Saudi Arabia and United States, west and east, and Christianity and Islam. And I believe my role, because of what God blessed me, is to try to bridge the gap.’
The next day he will be signing deals with Harvard and Georgetown universities to finance some of their Islamic studies. It’s all part of bridging the gap. ‘That’s why we focus on the east coast of America. Because that’s where the decision-making process is, with all respect to west coast, north coast or south coast.’
The prince’s most famous attempt at bridging failed. H
e donated $10m to New York City after the September 11 attacks. But he also called on the US government to ‘adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause’. Rudolph Giuliani, New York’s then mayor, returned the cheque, and accused him of trying to justify the attacks. A Saudi newspaper later quoted the prince blaming ‘Jewish pressures’ for Giuliani’s rejection.
Does His Highness regret his Palestinian statement? ‘A friend of a nation has to say the truth any time. Although, if you ask me a question, ‘If the Palestinian situation was resolved a day before 9/11, would 9/11 take place or not?’ Most likely it would have taken place, yes. I have no problem. All my friends sitting here: Mr Parsons, Christian man; Sandy Weill, a Jewish man, from Israel – from, from, from US. Muslim, Christian, Jewish – I don’t care about that.’
Indeed, by Saudi standards the prince is a liberal. Does he expect his uncle, King Abdullah, to move towards democracy? ‘You use the word “democracy”. I’ll say, “people’s participation in the political process”. Because there are many forms of it. I believe, for example, in people’s participation. I believe the fact that the municipal elections took place, there’s an indication that at the end of the day King Abdullah has in mind the introduction of elections at the Shoura level, our version of parliament.’