King Lear Goes to China

Jeffrey Wasserstrom speaks with Xue Yiwei and Nan Z. Da about Shakespeare’s legacy in China.

By Jeffrey WasserstromDecember 5, 2025

• History

• Cultural Studies

XUE YIWEI WAS BORN in China in 1964, just before the start of the tumultuous Cultural Revolution decade (1966–76). Nan Z. Da started her own life in China during a different era, a decade after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. Xue is known primarily for his novels, and—though he has been living in Canada for more than two decades now—he writes fiction in Chinese. Da, who is known primarily for her work as a literary critic and has lived in the United States for most of her life, is now teaching at Johns Hopkins University and publishing mainly in English.

Despite these differences, there are both general and specific reasons to bring these two intellectuals together in joint conversation. Each has engaged with LARB on multiple occasions in the past: Da as a reviewer and a moderator, and Xue as an interviewee (first in 2017 and then again in 2020). Broadly speaking, a shared hallmark of both Xue’s fiction—including his novel Celia, Misoka, I, which Megan Walsh reviewed for LARB when it published in 2022—and Da’s criticism is a cosmopolitan sensibility, as well as an interest in crossing the borders that separate different parts of the world and different genres of literature from each other. More specifically, each has written a book that brings together both their homeland, China, and King Lear.

Xue’s “Lierwang” yu 1979 (“‘King Lear’ and Nineteen Seventy-Nine”) is a remarkable work of fiction that includes elements of memoir. Written in Chinese and currently awaiting a full English-language translation, it has been greeted warmly by critics: Lin Gang—whose Chinese-language essay can be read in a 2021 issue of Chinese Literature Today, where it appears in an English translation by Stephen Nashef as “Xue Yiwei’s ‘King Lear’”—went so far as to hail it as the “first Chinese novel to truly follow in the footsteps of Western modernism.” Lin celebrates it for its “beautiful flowing prose,” and for Xue’s construction of new characters who in many ways parallel those in Shakespeare’s classic to add a new “evocative” dimension to a familiar story. For her part, Da brings China and the same timeless play together in The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear, a work of criticism out this year that also includes elements of memoir—and, perhaps unsurprisingly, contains discussion of Xue’s novel. Da’s book has also earned accolades. Ai Weiwei crowned it a “brilliant achievement,” while Peter Gordon, writing in the Asian Review of Books, described it as “compelling and enjoyable.” after reading it, Gordon noted, he couldn’t help but “envy” the students who get to learn about Shakespeare from Da.

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JEFFREY WASSERSTROM: How did you each learn about Shakespeare? Did you see a play, read about one of his stories, hear adults mention him?

XUE YIWEI: It was in 1971, when I spotted a copy of an English version of King Lear in the hovel my grandparents were living in. This was in the No. 4 Production Team of Lixin Production Brigade of the Lijingpu People’s Commune, Ningxiang County, Hunan. The first Shakespeare play I saw was the film version of Hamlet, with Laurence Olivier in the title role. That was in 1979, in the Workers’ Club of the factory community I was living in. I recount the experience like this in my novel Dr. Bethune’s Children: “To be or not to be? All of a sudden, the question that Hamlet raised in Mandarin resonated through the movie theatre. Cut to ocean waves hitting the rocks. The fury of the sea under Elsinore drowned out Hamlet’s confusion.”

NAN Z. DA: I was hit over the head with the basic plot of Romeo and Juliet at least six times before I left China at the age of six in 1992. No one knew what happened between the beginning and the end. It was just “teenage love death death.” As I say in the last chapter of my book, only the most blunt and over-the-top 儿女情 (teenage romance) could siphon love clean away from the state. Romeo and Juliet has a curious relationship to Lear—Cordelia’s death is also caused by needless delay, to name one similarity—but so does every Shakespeare play.

When exactly did you first think about writing a book dealing with King Lear? Why did that play in particular grab you?

NZD: A professor at the University of Chicago—James Redfield—planted the idea in my mind. His approach to Lear was Coleridge’s approach to Lear. By that I mean that Professor Redfield knew that the first and most important thing to tell others about Lear was that we were wrong about Lear’s relationship to flattery. What actually happens is that Lear hears one answer, gives a third of his kingdom, hears the second answer, gives another third. He had already decided what to do; his daughters’ answers were, in a sense, meaningless. This further means that everyone who says “Lear rewarded those who flattered him most” is wrong. Maybe what he does is better or worse, but it’s not what we remember.

Lear wrongs others—but he is also wronged by readers, playgoers, scholars, any passerby. Maoist Chinese history is characterized by severe wronging: wronging people over what they said, what they did, or what even happened. My sense was that only ingenious works of literature could actually capture wronging and illogical violence in real time.

XY: I have been haunted by King Lear for more than half a century. But for the first three decades, it was not the play itself—it was the existence of the little copy I encountered as a seven-year-old boy. I wondered why my grandfather cherished the book, not having used the pages to roll a cigarette or to wipe his bottom as toilet paper. Later, I wondered why my grandfather dared to keep an English book in the heyday of the Cultural Revolution, when he was labeled a “class enemy.” Still later, when I was reading the play, it was the father-daughter relationship that grabbed me. My grandfather has two daughters. There’s a contrast in character and social status: one provides him with various privileges to survive the hardship, one with filial obedience and unconditional love.

It was around 2005 that I first thought about writing a family saga based on my grandfather’s experience and his love of Shakespeare. In March 2010, as part of my application for the M Literary Residence Program, I wrote the following: “My project deals with the troubled life of a Chinese Anglophile who, suffering all kinds of misfortune under Mao’s regime, constantly recollects his university life in the late 1930s and his two traumatized first lovers who compete with each other for his love while sharing with him their love of Shakespeare.” I first announced that my next novel would be about a Chinese King Lear—and would focus on five decades of Chinese history, from 1930 to 1980—in an interview published in Shenzhen on August 8, 2011.

If you were ever to write another book in which a famous dramatic work figured centrally, what work would you focus on? Another play of Shakespeare’s, a Chinese theatrical work—perhaps even a film or television show?

XY: Maybe Death of a Salesman. Because on the famous evening of its China premiere, May 7, 1983, I was sitting right behind Arthur Miller. This dramatic incident has haunted me for a long time; I mentioned a little of it in Celia, Misoka, I.

NZD: I would really like to write about the 16th-century Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West. It was written by Wu Cheng’en, who was a very interesting character. Shakespeare wanted to know how far a “taming” can go; so did Wu Cheng’en, I think. I’ve never seen a taming like the one in Journey to the West—or such freedom, or such restriction. Journey to the West also pulls something off: two incompatible religions and worldviews are made so compatible [by the end] that you don’t remember one was not the other [to begin with]. It’s like The Scarlet Letter in that way. A significant historical transformation is compressed into a single lifetime, a single journey. It does the change at warp speed. Reading these works feels like standing inside a crucible, experiencing the fastest speed at which A can become B.

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Nan Z. Da is an associate professor of English at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (2018).

Xue Yiwei is the acclaimed author of 20 books, including Desertion (1989), Dr. Bethune’s Children (2011), and Shenzheners (2016).