"Shiqisui De Qingqibing" (So Young) is published in April, 2018. [Photo courtesy of People's Literature Publishing House]

China.org.cn: Since its publication, "Mercy" has been compared to Yu Hua's "To Live." What are your thoughts on that? 

Lu: If you must compare, I think "Mercy" is more like Yu Hua's "Chronicle Of a Blood Merchant." 

Every writer inherits something from the previous generations of writers. I acturally was reading Lu Xun's "The True Story of Ah Q" when I wrote "Mercy." 

China.org.cn: Chinese writers born in the 1970s and 1980s are often compared with the older generations, and some argue that the younger generation are not living up to the literary achievement of those who are born in the 1950s or 1960s. Do you agree?

Lu: For Chinese writers like Ge Fei and Yu Hua, they experienced all the literary movements since 1979, but writers like me who did not begin writing until around 2008, we have never experienced any. When I began writing, I felt like the room was already packed with furniture and it was hard to move around. I had to find a space to put in my stuff.  

Writers who are born in the 1970s and 1980s indeed cannot compete with the previous generation, either collectivley or individually. But if you say we don't set our minds on pursuing great literature, that's not true. It is not a problem unique in China. In American literature for instance, writers now are nothing compared to Faulker and Hemingway and their generation. The world is faced with the same problem. 

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