Spy Novel Writer’s Career

Mai Jia is one of the hottest writers in recent years. His spy novels are bestsellers and the television dramas and films adapted from his spy novels are blockbusters. As a matter of fact， “Deciphering”， his first spy novel that won national fame， is widely recognized as a genre pioneer that is New China’s first ever successful spy novel. Many of his spy novels won top literary prizes and film awards. Some media describe him as the founding father of new intelligence novels in China and the founding father of commercial intelligence movies.

Mai Jia is the penname of Jiang Benhu， born in 1964 in a village in rural Fuyang， now a county-level city under the jurisdiction of Hangzhou， the capital city of Zhejiang Province. His parents were farmers and he grew up as a village boy who spent half of his time studying in school and half of his time working in farmland.

In those years， there were only two ways out for rural people: joining the army and becoming an officer or going to college and getting an assigned city job after graduation. Without these two， you would stay in village forever. Mai Jia was a good student of science， but in his spare time， he was a fervent reader of classic Chinese novels and had a penchant for literature.

In the summer of 1981 he passed the threshold score level of the annual college entrance examination. At that time Mai Jia had not yet made up his mind on the college where he would study in the next few years. He ran into a military officer at Fuyang People’s Hospital while having a physical checkup， a must for successful applicants. The two struck up a conversation. It turned out that the officer was from PLA Information Engineering College. The student was convinced that it was a good college. He was recruited into the college and after graduation he became an intelligence officer in 1983. It was through his military service in the army that Mai Jia got to know some people who existed in shadow and served the country at the expense of their lives. Many of them couldn’t even tell their family what they did. This experience gave Mai Jia an opportunity to know the existence of such people and such a worthy cause.

In 1986， Mai Jia began to write seriously. His career began with keeping a diary. The budding writer had used up 36 notebooks before he decided to write a single story. In 1988 he mailed his first story to Kunlun， a literary bimonthly published by the PLA Art Press. Ren Haibo， editor-in-chief spotted the story and published it in the magazine. The late 1980s were years when literature was all the rage in China and the bimonthly’s issue volume was 800，000. Through this literary publication， Mai Jia became well known. The generals of the Nanjing Military Command were surprised to learn that there was such an established writer working in one of their military units. The 24-year-old Mai Jia was transferred to the headquarters of the Military Command. His major work was to write documents and in his spare time he continued spinning his yarns.

In 1997， after spending 16 years in the military service， Mai Jia left the army and worked as a playwright at the television drama department with Chengdu Television. At that time， television dramas were divided into a few genres such as romance， war， kongfu， detective， modern life， and ancient drama. But Mai Jia wanted to produce something unheard of before. He wanted to write about spies as he had known.

Mai Jia began to write “Deciphering”， his first spy novel. The story relates a rich business family in the south of the Yangtze River Delta. It is not only a family of business wealth but also a family of math geniuses. Rong Jingzhen， a talented mathematician， turned his mind to the deciphering work and lived in the shadow for decades. His achievement helped stabilized the young People’s Republic.

Mai Jia made painfully slow progress at first. Averagely he spent 8 hours a day writing this novel， but sometimes he could only write 600 words a day. He spent a few years writing the story which had been in his mind for more than ten years and the original novel was 1.1 million words long. He then began to delete. The final version was 210，000 words. This novel marked the start of his long series of honors.

“Plot in the Dark” is the second spy novel Mai Jia authored. Set in the background of Korean War， the story relates how Chinese intelligence people worked to thwart foreign spies. The first 50，000 copies of the novel were sold out in the first ten days when it was launched in 2003. It has sold more than 700，000 copies. In 2006， a television drama based on this bestseller was screened， touching off rounds of re-screening at provincial television networks across the nation.

From 2003 on he won many top literary prizes and film awards. In November 2008， his “Plot in the Dark” won a Mao Dun Literary Award， the first of its kind awarded to a spy novel.

Mai Jia had a very good job in Chengdu as a playwright， but he missed his parents in Hangzhou. In July 2008， he came back to Hangzhou with the arrangements of the Hangzhou Municipal Government and became a member of the Hangzhou Federation of Literary and Arts Circles.

Though Mai Jia was born in Fuyang， a county only dozens of kilometers away from Hangzhou， he did not visit the provincial capital until he was 11. With a map of Hangzhou given by his father， the boy toured the West Lake and thought it was very beautiful. Mai Jia chose to come back to Hangzhou for one reason: he wants to live near his aging parents. Now he lives in a 130-m2 apartment near the West Lake Culture Square in the heart of Hangzhou. He has a studio in Westbrook Wetland， a national park in a suburb near the city proper.

Mai Jia met his future wife Huang Yin when he was taking a writers’ course in Nanjing University. They fell in love. Huang still remembers receiving love letters from the promising writer and feeling touched by well written letters.

After they got married， they moved several times from city to city. Huang is the woman behind the success of the writer. The wife takes care of the chores and Mai Jia focuses on writing.

When Mai and his family moved back to Hangzhou， the wife and the son were total strangers in the city. They spent days snooping around and familiarizing themselves with the city’s essentials and directions and locations.

“The Sound of Wind” is another blockbuster spy story Mai Jia authored. Set in a background of the Chinese Resistance War against Japanese Invaders， the story relates how resistance spies went through a Japanese counterintelligence move aimed to ferret them out. It won two top literary awards in 2007 and in 2009; it received six nominations for Golden Horse Awards in Taiwan and won the Best Actress. His latest two novels “The Words of Wind” and “Walking on the Blade” are being made into a film and a television drama.

Mai Jia doesn’t think he will focus on spy novels. He would like to explore entangled emotions in his future novels. □