Calling the Mirage Island is one of the first Phoenix Literary Award-winning works written by Li Lu, a post-90s generation from Shanghai. The book was published by Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House in July 2022. The story is set on a foggy island and tells the secret history of a group of children and their stories of growing up. What is the riddle behind Calling the Mirage Island? What is the reality and thinking behind the mirage? Bookdao interviewed Li Lu to find out the story behind the scene.
Li Lu, whose real name is Gong Yihan, was born in Chongming Island, Shanghai in 1990. She used to be a journalist and started writing poetry and novels in 2014, trying to explore the relationship between the universe, time, and human beings through her writing. Leeloo is the name of the heroine in the movie The Fifth Element, which Li Lu adapted as her pen name in middle school. Among all the first Phoenix Literary Award-winning writers, Li Lu is the youngest. Her focus on the description of illusions, and the rare quality of a realistic portrayer shown in her works earn her the reputation as a dream maker of words. In November 2019, her short story collection All the Rare Birds was published by Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House, which is part of its New Youth Book Series.
Li Lu's realistic and fantastical writing brings us a magnificent story, but we can also see that the story returns to Shanghai's local customs and nature, focusing on the traditional family style unique to Shanghai, and vividly depicting the human relationships in Shanghai's vernacular that are both detached and intimately connected. Under the fantasy perspective of the teenage protagonists, there are also many pages devoted to natural science, mathematics, astronomy, and other elements, which not only exist as the undertones of the characters in the novel but also play a key role in the fate of the characters and the promotion of the plot.
Bookdao: Why is the name of this book Calling the Mirage Island?
Li Lu: This novel was conceived after writing All the Rare Birds. The first definite thing was to write about nature and the life of the island, about the human affairs on the island. The other thing that was certain was that the island was definitely not Chongming Island itself, but an incarnation of Chongming in another world. Shortly after writing it, a friend sent me a poem by Tomas Transtromer, After a Long Drought, in which a line touched me: "It's possible to call the mirage island. It's possible to hear the gray voice." Then I decided to name the long story Calling the Mirage Island.
Bookdao: When I read Calling the Mirage Island, I could feel that the life of Li Lu had been incorporated into Suye's. Did you want to be a writer since you were a child like her? Do you also hate the depiction of reality? Who is the most influential writer in the field of magic and science fiction for you?
Li Lu: I don't hate realistic descriptions, on the contrary, in Calling the Mirage Island, there is an almost "indulgence" in writing about daily life. Without the support of these details, even the most exciting plot would be very weak. The writers who influenced me a lot when I was a teenager were: Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Charles Schulz, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Milorad Pavić, and so on. They all have one thing in common, that is, they trigger strong emotional stirring and thought vibrations in me during the process of reading. For me as a teenager, it was these kinds of writers who brought me amazement and who made me reacquaint myself with reality.
I remember it was around 1993, or 1994. I had just started kindergarten, and one morning, my grandmother took me to kindergarten, and I sat with her on a tricycle (a unique form of transportation in a small town). We didn't talk, I just watched the traffic on the street. Suddenly, the image of a child in school uniform sitting on the back of his mother's bike flashed in my mind for no reason. At that moment, I felt like I knew something, but I couldn't say anything. I was anxious, confused, and had a vague feeling, and it was only years later that I was sure that this feeling was the very doubt of "reality".
Bookdao: What are the literary works that have influenced your fiction writing?
Li Lu: When it comes to the works that influenced my creation, I can name a long list in one breath, so I'll just say the one that impressed me the most. It was in my first year of high school in 2006, and like many teenagers who love literature, I used to hang out in bookstores to spend my time. One day, as usual, I wandered into the foreign literature section and found three collections of Calvino's works: The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Invisible Cities, and Cosmicomics. Flipping through them at random, I find "THE novel": The Distance of the Moon. It opens with a quotation: "At one time, according to Sir George H. Darwin, the Moon was very close to the Earth. Then the tides gradually pushed her far away." The words that follow in the novel cast a spell on me.
And recently, I was asked to write an introduction to War and Peace by Shanghai Translation Publishing House, so I read the book again in its entirety, and to my surprise, some unforeseen spiritual strength came out of me, and I gained some courage to live. Tolstoy chose to go back in time when thinking about the dilemmas of the times, and he wrote with great effort for six years, and from his departure in his later years, the dilemmas seemed to be one after another. And I was even more certain of this when I reread this magnum opus: there are no definite answers to the questions of the day, and it would be of no benefit for me to sigh hypocritically here. This led to a firm conviction to be an "unconscious activist".
Bookdao: How do you start to think of a book? Do you think of the characters first, or do you first set up the plot for the story? Please tell us about your personal feelings for the main character Su Ye, Li Shiwei, and Luo Xi.
Li Lu: There are many things that inspire creativity, and it's not necessary to think of specific characters. Sometimes it's an emotion, sometimes it's a surrounding image, sometimes it's a dream, a fragment of life, or even a smell. Suye, Li Shiwei, and Luo Xi may all map some of my personal experiences and emotions as they write, observe nature, and devote themselves to cosmic exploration, and I do the same. In other words, most children have had dreams of one kind or another, and in the wear and tear of the years, these dreams either fade or morph, but do not disappear. They are ready to be awakened.
Likewise, they also have the shadow of my childhood friends. Many of the stories in the book really happened, and I never deliberately made up any plot but shaped various distortions of reality. For example, Suye and Li Shiwei used two bells held by a hemp rope as a means of communication, which is a real experience of my childhood friend and me. Under the joint immersion of memories, dreams, and the search for the future, those once intimate people and things are transmogrified. It can be said that the novel provides a space for memories to reside in, where the past, present, and future can be accommodated at the same time.
Bookdao: How did the experience of studying film art and working as a journalist influence your writing? Did you consider bringing Calling the Mirage Island to the screen when you were writing?
Li Lu: There were many unforgettable or thrilling moments when I was a journalist. One year, when I was shooting the fishing on the Yangtze River, I fainted in the stern of the boat and was paralyzed by the big waves. I was used to riding in boats, but I didn't expect to surrender in an instant in real nature. Another time, shooting Chinese sturgeon, and interviewed a Chinese sturgeon expert in a shallow area, after a while, someone in the back of the houseboat suddenly shouted to us: high tide! The expert reacted quickly and ran, and I ran after him without knowing why. About two minutes later we boarded the houseboat, almost at the same time, the tide rose and the houseboat, which had been parked in the shallows, instantly floated up in the enclosing tide. Everything was a blur at that time, I didn't know why I was going to work, I didn't intend to write, and I didn't even know I was afraid. But this experience did leave an indelible impression on me, and every time I write a report is the process of twisting time and space into a rope, which will bring me more thoughts and inspiration.