THE UNIVERSITY OF WEST ALABAMA'S LIVINGSTON PRESS www.livingstonpress.uwa.edu Q & A with Xujun Eberlein Q. About half of your stories in Apologies Forthcoming are set during China’s Cultural Revolution, and another half in its aftermath. What sets you apart from other English fiction about this period? A. So much of what I see in English literature about China is “victim literature,” which tells horror stories of victims during the Cultural Revolution. While that is needed, it gives only a partial picture, and a partial picture hinders understanding. As Milan Kundera once noted, man tends to look for clearly distinguished good and evil, as he has an irrepressible desire to judge before understanding.       An astounding fact, one that is largely either ignored or unseen by Westerners, is that the Cultural Revolution was an "all-people movement."  By this I mean virtually everyone in China, at various stages of that movement, participated. There was often no clear divide between victims and victimizers, and people took turns to be in both positions.  At any given point during that decade-long period, as well as immediately before and after, victimizers were turning into victims and vise versa. For some, it was only after they themselves became victims, that they recognized their own part in victimizing others. For others, that recognition never arrived. The Cultural Revolution was a period of history that inflated politically-based hatred and conflict to the extreme. We are talking about non-personal hatred here. In all the conflicts, there was a great tragic sameness – violence of one group of people against another, which we still see around the world today.       Another controversial perspective that I bring out in my stories is the strong idealism of the young generation of Chinese that became the Red Guards. Yet the fact remains that the Red Guards did commit numerous acts of violence. An important issue is thus the relationship between idealism and violence.      It is my intention to tell stories from more than one perspective, showing what actually happened during the period when I was a young witness. Several stories in this collection can be called participant stories instead of victim stories. It is not my concern to point fingers, rather I strive to portray reality in the full variety it has, and hope that brings a deeper understanding to readers. Q. You lived through the Cultural Revolution decade as a child and teenager. Can you tell us something personal about your inspiration for the collection? A. My big sister died at age 16 as a Red Guard. She was both a participant and a victim of the Cultural Revolution, but foremost she was my dear sister. Her death planted in me a "Cultural Revolution Complex." For three decades after her death in 1968, I couldn't bear to look back at that summer, yet the wound in my heart was never healed. It was after 9/11 I finally began to write a memoir piece about her. I cried constantly when I was writing and revising it. This nonfiction piece, titled "Swimming with Mao," was later published in Walrus in the summer of 2006. The story titled "Feathers" in this collection is a fictionalized account of that same incident, from a different angle by a more distant narrator. That story then became the first of a bunch featuring young protagonists of the time. Q. In “Second Encounter” the characters look back on a scene where a gun misfires – is that based on a true story? A. No, but it is based on something similar that happened to an old family friend. He was in charge of a group of soldiers at the end of China’s civil war, and made a decision to let an "enemy" go. Years later that man, an average peasant really, ran into him and thanked him profusely for sparing his life. Our friend, however, had forgotten the original incident. Q. The women in your stories are not particularly feminine. Is this from your character or does it reflect more on the time? A. It does reflect strongly on the time. We were brought up in the notion that “woman can hold up half of the sky” (Mao's words), and many of us took that to heart. We mistook physical sameness for gender equality. There were, of course, still girls that were naturally feminine, but they often hid their nature. Q. Your stories are fiction, but many certainly read as if they are true stories. To what extent are they dramatizations of real events in your life? A. A great deal of what I write is drawn directly from my own experience, and quite a few characters are derived from people I knew. Most of the stories are set where I grew up - in Chongqing and the surrounding countryside. I did go to the countryside after High School and I really did accidentally freeze a chicken to death there. # Buy the Book About the Author Xujun Eberlein is an immigrant writer.  She is the author of APOLOGIES FORTHCOMING, a short story collection that won the Tartt First Fiction Award and also a runner-up for the Drake Emerging Writer's Award. Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Literary Review, Asia Literary Review, Brevity, Iron Horse, Meridian, Michigan Quarterly Review, New England Review, Night Train, Post Road, Prism International, Stand, StoryQuarterly, Walrus, and elsewhere. In addition to literary magazines, she also wrote for Foreign Policy, LA Review of Books, theAtlantic.com, and the New America Media. Recipient of an artist fellowship in fiction/creative nonfiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, her writing has been recognized by The Pushcart Prize and The Best American Essays. She holds a Ph.D. in Transportation Science from MIT and an MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from Emerson College.