Home // February.6.2019 // Jon Maniscalco

Unpacking the Scene: an Interview with Robert F. Delaney

Since 1995, Robert F. Delaney has been covering China as a journalist for Dow Jones Newswires, Bloomberg News, and the South China Morning Post. His debut novel, a social thriller titled The Wounded Muse, was released last October by Mosaic Press. A summary:

Qiang returns to his homeland of China from Silicon Valley to find Beijing undergoing a chaotic transformation in the lead up to hosting the 2008 Olympic Games. Wrecking balls are knocking down entire neighborhoods to make way for new structures more in line with the government's vision of a modern China. Qiang begins shooting footage of the tumult, and when he's suddenly arrested by local police it falls on his sister Diane and an American journalist Jake to figure out how to end the detention. With different ideas about how to approach a vast Chinese security apparatus, Diane and Jake have difficulty trusting each other. Dawei, an itinerant Jake befriended years earlier, returns to Beijing to retrieve a memento that has suddenly become valuable and finds himself ensnared in Diane's plan to force the authorities to release Qiang. Jake must then decide who survives.

Based on real events, The Wounded Muse takes place in a city, and a culture and country, undergoing transformation on a scale previously unseen, where in the wreckage of forgotten communities people are pushed to psychological extremes to secure their position. Our interviewer Jonathan Maniscalco connected with Delaney to discuss the background of the book, the origins of his interest in China, and his perspective on current affairs.


Above: The Wounded Muse. Below: author Robert F. Delaney.

Jon Maniscalco: Your knowledge of China is clearly extensive and reflects the long time you spent there, but what first attracted to the country in the early nineties? Was it journalistic intrigue of how an emerging superpower was dealing with the fallout of Tiananmen Square around the world while covering it up at home? Or was it a general fascination of the ancient country's history and culture? Or maybe something else?

Robert F. Delaney: China wasn't yet emerging as a superpower in the early 90s, at least as far as I could tell. At that point, everyone interested in Asia was studying Japanese. China came to the forefront of my consciousness when I started studying Kung Fu while I was in college. I was at my most impressionable period then as are many people. My college experience was a bit stunted because I lived at home in a suburban Philadelphia subdivision through the full four years, so I think I was looking for something unique. I had been on the swim team and track team in high school, but kung fu was different. There was a philosophy that underpinned the practice. It wasn't just about going faster or scoring more points. The artistic aspect of kung fu fascinated me. I even did an independent study one semester about the martial arts in America. I had to read up on Taoism and Buddhism, and it was the first time that I enjoyed reading about a subject for school. It didn't feel like a task I had to accomplish to get to the next level. That reading led me to The Search for Modern China by Jonathan Spence, which takes you through the unique characteristics and main historical events of each of the dynasties, and a few other texts. So when the Tiananmen protests broke out and ended with the crackdown by the government, I was riveted. It was the first news story that I followed closely, every day looking for the next development. None of what I read in my books about Taoism and Buddhism, together with what I was getting in the news about Tiananmen Square, helped me understand how China got to that point. It was clear to me then that I'd have to get to China somehow.

JM: It seems like political tension between the US and China has been increasing. Do you believe the commonly cited grievances on either side are legitimate? And if so, are they being handled in a proper and intelligent way?

RFD: Okay—nothing's ever handled in a proper and intelligent way when it comes to economic superpowers these days. The days of intelligent statecraft, like we had in the days of FDR and Truman, have given way to chest-beating and pandering to social media audiences. I would say that Washington's approach to Beijing needed to change because China was keeping intact rules of engagement that were agreed to in 2001, when the country was very far behind the US and the rest of the G7 economically. The US government could no longer settle for pledges from Beijing that it would start leveling the playing field for non-Chinese in its massive and fast-growing marketplace. They had been making them for many years, but in practice doing the opposite. So a new, more aggressive approach was necessary. But regardless of how much China may have overplayed its hand, its government deserves more respect than the Trump administration is offering. Right now it's all “give me this, that and the other thing, or else. And don't bother trying to talk to me until you do”. That's dumb, and particularly ineffective when you're dealing with China. Look—you can talk tough and keep the negotiations going at the same time. That would give China more leeway to make some meaningful concessions in a way that doesn't make them look weak. The way Trump is prosecuting this trade war forces Beijing to take an equally inflexible response. The losers will be all the US companies and communities that might benefit from a negotiated further opening of China's markets.

JM: The conflict of The Wounded Muse centers around what the vast majority of your readers would consider an egregious violation of freedom of the press and also shows a scene that the same readers would categorize as a shocking invasion of privacy. Is there anything you comment you have to those readers regarding freedom as a concept in China?

RFD: The basic details of that scene you refer to actually happened, according to a very good friend who worked as a diplomat for a European government in the late 1990s. He was the one being photographed in bed in a hotel room with another man. I'm not an expert on diplomatic blackmail tactics, so I can't say whether or not the US or UK governments have ever used the same kind of measures against Chinese diplomats. I suspect it can get ugly all around.

Attitudes about privacy in general, though, are very different in China and most Western democracies. The vast majority of Mainland Chinese know that their communications are subject to surveillance, particularly if the discussion is political. There's no raging debate in China about the sanctity of our online communication and social media data the way there is in the US and Europe. I'd say this is because Western culture is descended from the Aristotelian tradition of intellectual adversariality as a way to ensure good governance. China's intellectual culture is rooted in Confucianism, which stresses deference to the wisdom of elders as a way to maintain harmony. Given these fundamental differences, is it any wonder that the two cultures would have different attitudes about privacy?

JM: Do you see any disconnect between the political tensions in China and how the people themselves feel towards the United States?

RFD: That's a complicated question. The way Mainland Chinese people feel about the US ranges widely, from those keen to get to America for the relative economic and intellectual freedom the country offers to those who see the US as nothing more than an aggressive, hegemonic power, where domestic political infighting has got to the point where talk of freedom, democracy and rule of law are a joke. I don't know that the political tensions are affecting what ordinary Mainland Chinese think about the US. They respect their government, but that doesn't mean that they buy all of the message the propaganda machine puts out about other countries.

JM: The gay community depicted in the novel seems vibrant, but very closeted. Since many readers will be unaware of LGBTQ rights in China I was hoping you could give some insights into the current state of the gay community in China. Do you believe things are getting better?

RFD: I haven't lived in China since 2007, so I can only comment on the gay community up until that time. The gay community was very active and open in limited contexts. Destination, Beijing's largest gay bar and dance club at the time, was always crowded and loud, especially on the weekends. There's a lot of socializing, particularly in “expat” circles and in the integration between these groups and local Chinese gay men who have exposure to, or experience, outside of China.

Up until I left Beijing there were occasional police raids on gay bars, instances where the police were looking for drugs, but these bust-ups had become very few and far between. I suppose you could say the fact that this was still happening at all was terrible, but you need to understand that ten years earlier, a place like Destination would never have been allowed by the authorities. There was a lot of progress in the 90s and the 00s as the authorities came to realize that the gay community was no threat and there was no point in ostracizing them. Still, there's not the kind of acceptance in China like you have in the US or UK, where, for example, LGBT characters have become commonplace in even the most popular TV series. You don't have large Chinese corporations sponsoring Pride events. In the West there's more questioning about the need for Pride or “gay ghettos” now that so much of gay life has become mainstreamed. In China there are no Pride events or gay ghettos as far as I'm aware.

JM: This being based on a true story there must be some parallels between yourself and the character Jake, who expresses nothing but disdain for the maybe-Midwestern (debatably-Southern?) state he’s from. I understood this rejection of where he came from as driving him toward for the kinds of achievement that could grant him admission and acceptance into a highly romanticized New York. Was this drive and goal personal to you, or simply a way to expand on Jake’s character?

RFD: Jake is about seventy-five percent me. Although the details of his background are different, the feeling he has about always being an outsider is very consistent with how I have always felt from my earliest days. Much of that stems from sexuality. Most LGBT people know from an early age that they're different, and learn to hide these differences until they're at a point in their lives where they feel it's safe to be themselves. For someone like Jake, who went through his adolescence in the 80s, the closet is your comfort zone. You're disconnected when you're in the closet and disconnection becomes an orientation every bit as defining as sexual attraction.

For Jake and me both, moving to the other side of the world to become a foreign correspondent was very important in the pursuit of self-acceptance. Firstly, moving to China in the early 90s was the ultimate form of disconnection. Beyond that, we both needed some defining characteristics that were more interesting than sexual orientation. I'm terrible with numbers, so I was never going to distinguish myself as an entrepreneur or a physicist. Grammar made the most sense to me, so I figured a career in some form of writing was my best shot at success. I remember at one point, when I got my first byline in The Wall Street Journal, I had a feeling that I could make everything about my past disappear, including my high school experience and everything about the non-descript, lily-white, suburban subdivision I grew up in.

We both grew up in single-parent households, but Jake differs from me in that he had an alcoholic mother who couldn't be bothered to put food on the table. My mother was quite fixated on packing lunches for my brother and me and having dinner ready by 6:30 even though she was holding down a full-time job. So in a way Jake had to overcome more than I did.

JM: I understand that many of the themes in the novel were developed in an earlier short story collection that placed as first runner-up in a competition co-sponsored by Penguin/Random House and the University of Toronto. Can you talk about the challenges you dealt with in making the switch from journalism to fiction while working on that collection, and then rethinking that project into novel form?

RFD: Making the transition from news writing to novel writing was excruciating. While I worked on quite a few feature stories as a journalist, the majority of my work in the newsroom was chasing breaking news and trying to be the first with a complete story. This kind of writing is all about conveying information in the most efficient way possible. You're not allowed to go off on tangents or dwell on details about anything not directly related to the story's lead paragraph. As a newswire reporter, you're judged on how well and how quickly you can do this. Writing a novel is the opposite. Novelists must explore odd facets of the situations and characters they write about. What is it about the color of room that makes a character uneasy? What obscure memory does it dredge up? People giving me feedback told me a million times to “unpack” the scene, which is very difficult after years of hearing editors tell me to narrow the focus and stop getting hung up on details. And so when I started to listen to my mentors, the results were cliched and cringeworthy. It took a long time to learn to unpack the scenes in a way that would be worth the attention of a reader. At least, I'd like to think that many of the scenes are handled that way.

JM: Are you working on another novel? And if yes can readers expect similar themes in this next one?

RFD: On the advice of a mentor, I revised The Wounded Muse to remove a central character, a Chinese-American woman stuck between her hyphenated cultures. She will be a central character in my next book. I find identity politics in the US so annoying now that I feel determined, as a gay, white man, to write the story of a straight Asian woman.

Robert F. Delaney moved to China in the early 90s, when the government set in motion an economic reform program to counteract the trauma of 1989 and re-establish Beijing's position as the seat of a powerful nation. He now splits his time between Toronto and New York City. Readers can follow his work at http://robertfdelaney.net.

Banner graphic: A photo (cropped) showing Beijing at night, taken from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut Tim Kopra, and tweeted to the public on 20 March 2016. This file (photo reference ISS047-E-011999) is in the public domain in the United States because it was created by the Image Science & Analysis Laboratory, of the NASA Johnson Space Center. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted."

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