be a failure. If my goal were to write a story about a character whom everyone likes, then of course I wouldn't be writing this. So it doesn't matter to me. It's OK to dislike Hu Yanjun and still to like this story. They're two different things. Your prose can often be quite spare, with few descriptive flourishes, and yet there's an underlying humour that can be explosively funny. Do you have a different goal to your reader's emotional responses when it comes to being funny? I like humour, particularly deadpan humour, what they call 'black humour' in literary studies. But it doesn't just come from translated literature: in the episodic novels of the Ming and Qing, you find traces of this sense of humour everywhere. Humour is not just an emotion, it's a worldview; an epistemology, perhaps. Understanding is a precondition for humour -- in Chinese, there's a saying: 'You smile when you see through someone.' Inflaming readers isn't a good thing; I want to entice them. It's when you understand something that doesn't exactly work logically. This is a 'broader', more spacious kind of understanding. Inflaming readers isn't a good thing; I want to entice them. The ideal is that I just do my own thing, write my own way, and other people are drawn in when they're drawn in. I'm against compulsion, forcing anyone else to accept what I write. I want to inspire readers to read actively. A writer's narration should be a little passive, a