A special kind of performance: Can Xue on the course of a Chinese writer

Chinese avant-garde writer Can Xue recounts her journey from working as a ‘barefoot doctor’, workshop employee and tailor in 1980s China to being a writer, and recalls how she fell in love with performance as a child

By Can Xue for The Writing Life Around the World from Electric Literature, part of the Guardian Books Network

I have been fascinated by performances since I was three years old. But in my younger days my performances were very special—I performed in my mind. So no one around me knew my secret dramas.

Sometimes alone in my room, I would begin my drama. There was a fire and a lot of smoke in my home, and my grandma was too sick to move, so I supported her by her arm and ran out of the room with her. How happy both of us were!

Why did I learn to make clothes?… I badly needed time for my performances

Writing fiction freely was dangerous in those dark days in China

Our customers always interrupted my writing. So my time was fragmentary—ten minutes, fifteen minutes...

In the 80s in China, some writers wrote beautiful experimental fiction, but all of them returned to traditional writing

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