American literary giant: 1974

The "important interview" that Leia mentioned has arrived.

As she put it, she felt that Lynn's biggest selling point was that he was a taxi driver. This unconventional interview, conducted in a taxi, was scheduled for Thursday afternoon at 3 p.m.

In May, the sunlight slanted across the glass curtain walls on both sides of the street in Manhattan, making pedestrians appear lazy.

Lynn drove car number 35 to the New Yorker magazine office building and parked it next to a fire hydrant.

The reporter conducting the interview was Rebecca Walker, the lead reporter for the culture section of The New Yorker. She was in her early thirties, with short hair, wearing a beige trench coat, and carrying a large camera.

Standing downstairs, she saw Lynn's dilapidated taxi parked at the door and couldn't help but chuckle.

"Is this it?"

"This is it," Lynn said. "What do you think? Doesn't it have a lot of selling points?"

"Every detail is a selling point, Mr. Lin." She got into the back seat. "Go ahead, drive wherever you want."

Lynn shifted into gear and merged into the afternoon traffic.

The camera clicked.

"So," Rebecca flipped open her notebook with one hand, "where do we begin?"

"You are a reporter."

"Let's start with the most mundane question," she smiled. "The sales of *The Silence of the Lambs* have been breaking records, and your name has appeared in *The New York Times*, *The Village Voice*, *Publishers Weekly*, and during primetime on *The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson* in the past two months. Mr. Lynn, how do you view your current success?"

Lynn glanced at her through the rearview mirror, then looked back at the road ahead.

"I don't know," he said.

Rebecca's pen hovered above her notebook. She probably hadn't expected that someone who had just silenced a Columbia tenured professor in a nationally televised debate would say "I don't know" when faced with the first question.

Lynn merged the car into the traffic on Sixth Avenue.

"You don't know?" Rebecca repeated.

“What I mean is—” Lynn glanced at her in the rearview mirror, “what is success? I have five thousand five hundred dollars more than I did three months ago, I’ve moved to a leak-proof apartment, and I have a typewriter. My name is printed on the cover of a book. But I’m still driving this car, the same car.”

"You don't have to drive the car anymore," Rebecca said. "The advance payment plus royalties will be enough for you—"

"Is it enough for me to sit in my apartment, in front of a typewriter, waiting for inspiration to come? Inspiration doesn't fall from the ceiling."

The red light turned green. He started moving, crossing the intersection of 42nd Street and Broadway. The neon lights of Times Square were still on during the day, and signs for pornographic cinemas and Pepsi's GG logo hung side by side on the same wall.

"You're dodging my question," Rebecca said.

"I am answering your question."

"You say you don't know how to view your success. A person who quotes Shakespeare to refute a Columbia professor on 'The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson' can't possibly not know what he's doing."

Lynn remained silent for a long time.

As the car passed a newsstand, he glanced at it—on the shelf was today's *New York Post*, with Nixon's face on the front page. Next to it was a row of magazines, and he saw the deep red cover.

His book was there, sandwiched between two issues of Time magazine and one issue of Playboy.

"You want to hear the truth?" he said.

"I'm Mr. Lynn, a reporter for The New Yorker. I only listen to the truth."

"The truth is—I don't know what made me successful."

Rebecca's pen fell to the ground.

"I know my name is Lynn. I know I drive a taxi in New York. I know I wrote a book. But sometimes I sit in this seat and look in the rearview mirror, and I'm not sure if the person in the mirror is a taxi driver pretending to be a writer, or a writer pretending to be a taxi driver."

The car headed south, passing 34th Street. The shadow of the Empire State Building cut diagonally across the right-hand window.

"Is there a difference between the two?" Rebecca asked.

“Yes,” Lynn said. “Taxi drivers know what they’re doing. They know the route, how the meter goes, which blocks are congested, and what Manhattan smells like at three in the morning. Every action they take is certain. But writers don’t. Every word a writer writes isn’t sure if it’s right. They’re groping in the dark, and the darkness has no end.”

"So you continue driving a taxi because you need certainty?"

"No," Lynn said. Then he repeated it, even softer:

"No."

The road ahead forks. The left one is the ramp to the East River Tunnel, and the right one continues south along Park Avenue.

He turned on his right turn signal.

"I kept driving because I was scared."

Rebecca didn't press the matter. She was waiting for Lynn to speak for himself, while the red camera light flashed in the back seat.

"The Silence of the Lambs"

"Do you know what I was most afraid of when I was writing Hannibal? It wasn't the bloody scenes, the basement, or the cannibalism. What I was most afraid of was that he could very well be me, or some kind of despicable thing about me."

"What do you mean?"

"What I mean is, when you're writing a monster, you think you're creating it. But when you get to page fifty, you realize you're not creating it, you're digging. You're digging deeper and deeper into your own mind until you hit something—something you don't want to touch."

He parked his car on the side of the road.

Outside the car window, two construction workers sat on the edge of the sidewalk eating sandwiches, their hard hats resting on their knees. A pigeon circled around their feet.

"I don't understand," Rebecca said, puzzled.

"What I mean is, the reason I was able to write Hannibal is because I understand him. Not sympathize with him. I understand him. I understand how a person can switch seamlessly between extreme elegance and extreme violence."

"Isn't that the essence of writing?" Rebecca said. "Fiction is about playing someone else."

"Fiction is about impersonating someone else. But impersonating a murderer is different from impersonating a high school student. When you impersonate a high school student, you're reminiscing. When you impersonate a murderer—"

He stopped.

"You're imagining things," he finally said. "And imagining things will ruin you."

Rebecca wrote a long passage in her notebook.

"So," she looked up, "you said you wake up every day not knowing who you are, you're not talking about identity. You're talking about—"

"What I'm saying is, I'm not sure if writing is making me a better person or if it's showing me the bad side of myself."

What do you think?

Lynn thought about it for a long time.

“I think it’s both,” he said. “And that’s what confuses me. It’s happening in two directions at the same time. With every page I write, I’m simultaneously approaching some kind of light and some kind of darkness. It’s like—like a road you’re walking on, with a cliff on the left and a cliff on the right, and only a line in the middle. You can’t stop, because if you stop you’ll fall. You can only keep going.”

"Where to?"

"I have no idea."

These four words again.

But this time their weight is different.

Lynn shifted gears again and pulled the car away from the side of the road. The meter started ticking again.

"Rebecca."

"Um?"

"You just asked me how I view my success. I'd like to answer that in a different way."

"Please speak."

"Three months ago, I picked up a drunk cop in this car. He found my manuscript in my passenger seat, laughed, and said it was a huge joke that a Chinese taxi driver was writing about the FBI and serial killers."

"Now this book has sold tens of thousands of copies. It's number two at Barnes & Noble. I've been on TV. Some people criticize me, some people praise me. The publisher paid me. Hollywood directors asked me to revise the script. A French agent negotiated contracts for me."

He stopped at a red light.

"But you know what—what that drunk cop said is still stuck in my throat. Not because he insulted me. It's because he asked me a question I couldn't answer at the time."

"What's the problem?"

He said, "You?"

Outside the car window, a homeless man pushing a shopping cart slowly crossed the pedestrian crossing. The shopping cart contained plastic bags and a dirty quilt.

"'You?' Three months ago, I couldn't answer that question. But that day, I stood in the NBC studio and left a Columbia University professor speechless. That question is still on my mind."

"Still there?"

"It's still there. Because that question isn't about ability. It's about qualifications. Who gave you the qualifications? Who allowed you to write this story? What makes you think you have the right to open the drawers of other people's souls and rummage through them?"

"What does it mean to open the drawer of someone else's soul?" Rebecca asked, puzzled.

Lynn's voice lowered:

"Is 'The Silence of the Lambs' really my work? Was it an inspiration I came up with? I don't know, I really don't know. Just like two days ago, a screenwriter told me that I don't respect other people's work?"

Rebecca was stunned: "You mean you plagiarized 'The Silence of the Lambs'?"

"No. But the inspiration for it didn't just pop into my head."

This time, Lynn didn't lie.

He continued, "You can think of it as me having a precognitive dream; I dreamt about this story, and then I succeeded."

"So this just popped into my head?" Rebecca pressed.

"Two different things."

Lynn continued, "In your American parlance, The Silence of the Lambs was a gift from God. I pulled the manuscript out of that secret compartment in the passenger seat, I slipped it under the publisher's door, I tricked a bartender into pretending to be my agent, I signed the contract on a napkin. Not a single step was respectable. Not a single step was 'right'."

"But it happened."

"It happened. And every day I was waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, 'Sir, the show's over, please get back in your taxi.'"

The green light is on.

The afternoon sun shone on the office workers having lunch in the park; some were feeding pigeons, others were reading newspapers. A man in a suit loosened his tie, leaned back on a bench, and fell asleep, a newspaper covering his face.

"There's one more thing," Lynn said.

"Um?"

"Regarding success—you ask me what I think. I'll tell you my honest feelings."

He lifted his right hand off the steering wheel and glanced at his fingers.

"When I wrote about Hannibal, he smelled the female agent's scent through the glass. He named the lotion. Readers all over the world remember that scene. But do you know what I really wanted to write about?"

"What?"

"What I want to write is not what he smelled. What I want to write is—when he was smelling, the female agent didn't back away. She stood still. She was afraid. But she didn't back down."

"Why not return it?"

"Because she knew that if she backed down, she would forever be a person controlled by fear. She would rather stand there and let a man-eating monster smell her than become a person who runs away."

Lynn put his hands back on the steering wheel.

"What is success? I don't know. But I know I'm standing in a place where many people are listening to me. Critics, journalists, professors, readers. They're judging me. They're categorizing me. Chinese American. Taxi driver. Popular writer. Gimmick."

"I can go back. Back to the taxi. Close the door. Pretend nothing happened. Nobody will blame me. Nobody will notice if a taxi driver stops writing books."

"But I will not back down."

Why?

Lynn did not answer.

He drove onto a quiet street in the Lower East Side. Brownstone apartment buildings lined both sides, fire escape ladders etched in rusty Z-shapes on the walls. A maple tree sprouted from a crack in the sidewalk, its canopy just enough to block out half the sky.

He parked the car on the side of the road and turned off the engine.

The engine went silent. The meter stopped. Only the breathing of two people remained in the carriage.

"Because going back is more terrifying than standing there," he finally said.

Rebecca looked at his profile—half bright and half dark, illuminated by the afternoon sun.

"May I quote your words?" she asked.

"Whatever. You'll change it into a better sentence anyway."

Rebecca closed her laptop. She leaned back in the leather seat in the back and looked out the window at the maple tree that had sprouted from the crack in the roof.

"One last question."

"Um."

"What will you write about in your next book?"

Lynn thought for a moment.

He looked in the rearview mirror. Rebecca was reflected in the back seat, the quiet street outside the car window, and his own eyes.

"I don't know," he said for the third time.

But this time he smiled.

"All I know is that it's my own. I didn't take it from someone else."

Rebecca nodded. She opened the car door, stepped out with one leg, and then turned back.

"Lynn".

"Um?"

"After this article is published, you'll likely receive even more letters. Some will criticize you, some will idolize you. Are you ready?"

Lynn restarted the engine. The heating pipes began humming again, blowing out a rusty, hot air. He put his hands back on the steering wheel—at twelve o'clock, on his left, just like every day.

"I'm a taxi driver," he said. "Every day I'm preparing to greet the next stranger who gets into the back seat."

Rebecca got out of the car. The car door closed.

Lynn sat in the driver's seat, watching her back as she drove through the quiet street, walked to the maple tree, paused for a moment, took out her notebook from her bag, flipped through a couple of pages, and then turned and walked into an apartment building.

He sat alone for a while.

The meter reset to zero.

Then he shifted gears, released the handbrake, and drove car number 35 off the street, merging into the Manhattan traffic.

Same as yesterday.

Same as the day before yesterday.

But the person behind the steering wheel is no longer entirely the same. He himself can't quite put his finger on what's changed. Maybe nothing has changed. Maybe the only change is—he now knows what he doesn't know.

Perhaps, perhaps, is the only honest starting point for writing.