Mai Jia: The Dan Brown of China?

To Encourage Reading Is a Deed

Many readers assume Mai is highly intellectual. On the contrary, Mai is, as he put it, quite clumsy in real life.

“My intelligence is mildly below average, which I am not ashamed of. In our era, there are so many smart people and smart things like the Internet or smart phones. But they complicate and rush our lives. I often say the value of intelligence is sometimes negative.”

“An opinionated writer,” is Mai’s comment of himself. Having been writing for a dozen years with no success or accomplishments, Mai did not give up. He does not enjoy the hustle and bustle of being famous because, “a writer should not indulge himself in fame; writing is done in solitude.”

Mai writes slowly, at a daily pace of hundreds of characters. If he writes one thousand, in the afternoon a half might be picked out. Mai remarked: “Before, my novels are my package, or a piece of diploma which makes me a little different from others. But now, I live my own life where anguish and happiness are spontaneous. Now, I realize novels are not my personal belongings, rather, they are some worldly possessions that I’ve been longing for.”

Since 2012, he started the Mai Jia Literature Ideal Valley, a bookstore he built from the ground up. This is a public project shaped after the Shakespeare Books. The store is free of charge. Gratis coffee and book-reading aside, it provides a complimentary writing space for young writers that have been shortlisted in the Guesthouse Producers program. The place is a magnet for book lovers and is always full.

To encourage people to read more, the Ideal Valley launched the seven-days-for-one-book program. By reading every morning for 15 minutes, a book can be completed in one week and 52 books in one year. Just as Borges put it, if there is paradise, it must look like a library.