Mo Yan(Nobel prize in literature 2012): Excerpts From His Work

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Mo Yan wins Nobel prize in literature 2012

Novelist, the first ever Chinese literature Nobel laureate, praised for 'hallucinatory realism'

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• Alison Flood
• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 11 October 2012 12.38 BST
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The winner of the 2012 Nobel prize for literature is announced at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm Link to this video

Chinese author Mo Yan, who left school for a life working the fields at the age of 12, has become the first Chinese citizen ever to win the Nobel prize in literature, praised by the Swedish Academy for merging "folk tales, history and the contemporary" with "hallucinatory realism".

The win makes Mo Yan the first Chinese citizen to win the Nobel in its 111-year history: although Gao Xingjian won in 2000, and was born in China, he is now a French citizen; and although Pearl Buck took the prize in 1938, for "her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces", she is an American author.

The Nobel, worth eight million kronor, goes to the writer "who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction", with previous winners including Samuel Beckett, Doris Lessing and, last year, the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer. Over the past month the Chinese press has become increasingly vocal about the possibility of a Chinese writer taking the award, with commentors equating "bagging the prize to Chinese literature gaining the world's recognition".

With the Nobel going to a European seven times in the last decade, all evidence was pointing to a winner from outside Europe, and Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami emerged as the frontrunner at betting firm Ladbrokes. Mo Yan, at 9/1, "definitely slipped under the radar", said the firm's spokesman Alex Donohue.

Born in 1955 to parents who were farmers, Mo Yan - a pseudonym for Guan Moye; the pen name means "don't speak" - grew up in Gaomi in Shandong province in north-eastern China. The cultural revolution forced him to leave school at 12, and he went to work in the fields, completing his education in the army. He published his first book in 1981, but found literary success in 1987 with Hong gaoliang jiazu (Red Sorghum), a novel that an internationally successful movie by director Zhang Yimou, set against the horrific events that unfolded as Japan invaded China in the 1930s.

"He writes about the peasantry, about life in the countryside, about people struggling to survive, struggling for their dignity, sometimes winning but most of the time losing," said permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund, announcing the win. "The basis for his books was laid when as a child he listened to folktales. The

description magical realism has been used about him, but I think that is belittling him – this isn't something he's picked up from Gabriel García Márquez, but something which is very much his own. With the supernatural going in to the ordinary, he's an extremely original narrator."

Informing Mo Yan of his win today, Englund said the author, who was at the home in China where he lives with his 90-year-old father – was "overjoyed and scared".

Nicky Harman, a Chinese translator and lecturer at Imperial College, London, hailed Mo Yan's win as "amazing" news. "He's a great writer and will now be better known. That's good news for all Chinese writers, because it will bring English readers a bit closer," she said. "I'm sure they will be deliriously happy in China. He's very well thought of there."

SOAS professor of Chinese Michel Hockx, who knows Mo Yan personally, said the author was probably the most translated living Chinese writer, "very well known, very respected [and] although he's had his spats with the literary censors ... generally speaking not regarded as politically sensitive".

Hockx dismissed criticism from China that the author is "too close to the establishment to merit the Nobel". "I don't like the idea that Chinese writers are only good if they challenge the government – a good writer is a good writer. It's not a good yard stick of anything; are the only good British writers the ones who speak out against the war?" he said. "Choosing a dissident is the safe choice [for the Nobel committee] – to choose an author with a strong literary reputation, because of the strength and power of his work, is a very brave choice."

Speaking to Granta earlier this year, Mo Yan – one of a group of Chinese writers to travel to the UK for the London Book Fair – said that avoiding censorship was a matter of subtlety. "Many approaches to literature have political bearings, for example in our real life there might be some sharp or sensitive issues that they do not wish to touch upon. At such a juncture a writer can inject their own imagination to isolate them from the real world or maybe they can exaggerate the situation – making sure it is bold, vivid and has the signature of our real world. So, actually I believe these limitations or censorship is great for literature creation," he said.

Mo Yan, according to Hockx, "knows how to write a good story", filling his tales of remote communities "with a magical atmosphere, without shying away from the harsh and sometimes violent realities that he has witnessed". His 1996 novel Fengru feitun, translated into English as Big Breasts and Wide Hips in 2004, starts with the story of Xuan'er, six months old in 1900 when she is abandoned in a vat of flour, and follows her family's life through the war with Japan and the cultural revolution. Wa (Frog), Mo Yan's most recent novel, tells of the consequences of the single-child policy implemented in China through the story of a rural gynaecologist.

"He expertly handles the use of local language and dialect, and as his career progressed he became increasingly experimental with his narration, to the extent that he once even made himself a character in one of his novels," said Hockx. "All his novels create unique individual realities, quite different from the political stories that were told about the countryside in the Maoist years, when Mo Yan grew up."

The eminent professor of Chinese literature Howard Goldblatt, who has translated many of Mo Yan's works into English, compared the author's writing to Dickens in a recent interview with China Daily, saying that both write "big, bold works with florid, imagistic, powerful writing and a strong moral core".

Goldblatt said that the author's satirical novel Jiuguo (The Republic of Wine) "may be the most technically innovative and sophisticated novel from China I've read", while his Shengsi pilao (Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out) is "a brilliant extended fable", and Tanxiangxing (Sandalwood Death) "is, as the author contends, musical in its beauty".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/oct/11/mo-yan-nobel-prize-literature

After Fury Over 2010 Peace Prize, China Embraces Nobel Selection

China Daily, via Reuters

Mo Yan in Beijing in 2009.

By ANDREW JACOBS and SARAH LYALL

Published: October 11, 2012 145 Comments

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BEIJING — Two years ago, when the jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize, the government reacted with contempt and fury, scrubbing the announcement from the Internet, condemning the award as a “desecration” and calling it a Western propaganda tool intended to insult and destabilize the ruling Communist Party.

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Mo Yan signed autographs at a book fair in Frankfurt in 2009.

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Government officials even retaliated against Norway, the country that awards the peace prize, denying visas to Norwegian dignitaries and delaying shipments of Norwegian salmon for so long that the fish rotted before they could clear customs.

But all that seemed forgotten on Thursday, when word came that another Nobel, the 2012 literature prize, had been awarded to another Chinese citizen, the internationally renowned author Mo Yan, and China erupted into something close to a national celebration. The state-run CCTV interrupted its prime-time broadcast to announce the news; the nationalistic Global Times tabloid posted a “special coverage” page on its Web site; and in a glowing account, the state-run People’s Daily prominently wrote that the prize was “a comfort, a certification and also an affirmation — but even more so, it is a new starting point.”

The award will probably act as a huge boost to China’s national psyche, which has long suffered from a sense that its cultural accomplishments, at least in the eyes of the West, are overshadowed by its economic prowess.

“This will be embraced as an indicator that China has arrived in the world,” said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “The contradictions between their response to Liu Xiaobo’s prize and Mo Yan’s prize will not trouble them in the least.”

The award represents something of a shift, too, for the Swedish Academy, whose members choose the Nobel literature winner.

During the Soviet era, it consistently gave Nobels to Soviet and Eastern European dissidents, including Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Joseph Brodsky and Jaroslav Seifert. Similarly, the only two previous mainland Chinese winners under Communist rule, Mr. Liu and Gao Xingjian, who won the literature prize in 2000 and who gave up his Chinese citizenship for French citizenship, are both dissidents.

Indeed, the academy has rarely, if ever, awarded one of its prizes to a writer or scholar embraced by a Communist government. The Academy’s deliberations are shrouded in Vatican-style secrecy, but officials insist that neither politics nor any diplomatic or economic pressure from China played any part in the decisions.

“Basically, it’s quite simple,” said Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Academy. “We are awarding a literary prize, and it’s on literary merit. The political fallouts and effects don’t enter into it.

“That doesn’t mean we regard literature as unpolitical or that this year’s prize winner isn’t writing political literature,” he continued, speaking of Mr. Mo. “You can open almost any one of his books and see it’s very critical about many things to do with Chinese history and also contemporary China. But he’s not a political dissident. I would say he is more a critic of the system, sitting within the system.”

Mr. Mo, 57, is hardly a tool of the Communist Party; much of his work is laced with social criticism, and he is admired by readers of Chinese literature abroad as much as he is hugely popular in his own country. But he does not consider himself political, and his decision not to take a stand against the government — as well as his position as vice chairman of the state-run Chinese Writers’ Association — has drawn criticism from Chinese dissident writers.

In his novels and short stories, Mr. Mo paints sprawling, intricate portraits of Chinese rural life, often using flights of fancy — animal narrators, elements of fairy tales — that evoke the lyrical techniques of South American magical realists. His work has been widely translated and is readily available in the West, but he is perhaps best known abroad for “Red Sorghum,” an epic that takes on issues like the Japanese occupation, bandit culture and the harsh conditions in rural China, and which in 1987 was made into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou.

“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives,” the Swedish Academy said in the citation that accompanied the award, “Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition.”

The son of farmers, Mr. Mo was born in 1955 on the dusty plains of China’s eastern Shandong Province, where much of his fiction is set. A teenager during the tumult of the Cultural Revolution, he left school to work first on a farm and then in a cottonseed oil factory. He began writing, he has said, a few years later while serving in the People’s Liberation Army.

The author’s given name is Guan Moye; Mo Yan, which means “don’t speak,” is actually a pen name that reflects the time in which he grew up.

“At that time in China, lives were not normal, so my father and mother told me not to speak outside,” he said at a forum at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. “If you speak outside, and say what you think, you will get into trouble. So I listened to them and did not speak.”

Mr. Mo’s books have touched on many of contemporary China’s most sensitive themes, including the Cultural Revolution and the country’s strict family-planning policies.

One of his most famous books, “The Garlic Ballads” (1988, published in English in 1995), describes a peasant insurrection against government malfeasance, telling it in a semi-mythical fashion that avoids criticizing specific government officials.

But the book came in the aftermath of the 1989 student unrest, and was at first deemed too biting and satirical to publish, according to Howard Goldblatt, Mr. Mo’s American translator. Mr. Mo instead had the book printed in Taiwan; it was published later on the mainland.

Critics in the West have lavished praise on his work. “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” a huge, ambitious work narrated by five animals who are reincarnations of a man controlled by Yama, the lord of the underworld, “covers almost the entire span of his country’s revolutionary experience,” almost like a documentary of the times, the Chinese scholar Jonathan Spence wrote in The New York Times in 2008.

In its citation, the Swedish Academy noted that many of Mr. Mo’s works “have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.”

Michel Hockx, professor of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, said that Mr. Mo was part of a generation of post-Cultural Revolution writers who began looking at Chinese society, particularly in the countryside, through new eyes outside the party line.

“For a very long time Chinese realism was of a socialist realist persuasion, so it had to be filled with ideological and political messages,” Mr. Hockx said.

“But instead of writing about socialist superheroes,” Mr. Mo has filled his work with real characters, Mr. Hockx continued, while at the same time portraying rural China as a “magical place where wonderful things happened, things that seemed to come out of mythology and fairy tales.”

Still, some have criticized Mr. Mo’s failure to take a political stand. Last summer, he was publicly denounced for joining a group of authors who transcribed by hand a 1942 speech by Mao Zedong. The speech, which ushered in decades of government control over Chinese writers and artists, has been described as a death warrant for those who refused to subsume their talents under the Communist Party.

He was also criticized for attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009 after Beijing barred a number of dissident writers.

Mr. Mo later gave a speech at the fair that provided a window into his complex thinking.

“A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression‎,” he said. “Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.”

Andrew Jacobs reported from Beijing, and Sarah Lyall from London. Ian Johnson contributed reporting from Beijing, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Shi Da and Jonathan Ansfield contributed research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/books/nobel-literature-prize.html?pagewanted=all

Mo Yan: Excerpts From His Work

Published: October 11, 2012

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Below are selections from the work of Mo Yan who was awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday. The excerpt from “Red Sorghum” is reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. All other excerpts appear courtesy of Arcade Publishing. The books were translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt.

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• After Fury Over 2010 Peace Prize, China Embraces Nobel Selection (October 12, 2012)

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From the preface to “Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh” (2001)

Every person has his own reasons for becoming a writer, and I am no exception. But why I became the sort of writer I am and not another Hemingway or Faulkner is, I believe, linked to my childhood experiences. They have been a boon to my writing career and are what will make it possible for me to keep at it down the road. Looking back some forty years, to the early 1960s, I revisit one of modern China’s most bizarre periods, an era of unprecedented fanaticism. On one hand, those years saw the country in the grips of economic stagnation and individual deprivation. The people struggled to keep death from their door, with little to eat and rags for clothes; on the other hand, it was a time of intense political passions, when starving citizens tightened their belts and followed the Party in its Communist experiment. We may have been famished at the time, but we considered ourselves to be the luckiest people in the world. Two-thirds of the world’s people, we believed, were living in dire misery, and it was our sacred duty to rescue them from the sea of suffering in which they were drowning. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when China opened its door to the outside world, that we finally began to face reality, as if waking from a dream.

Pretty soon I learned how to talk to myself. I developed uncommon gifts of expression‎, able to talk on and on not only with eloquence but even in rhyme. My mother once overheard me talking to a tree. Alarmed, she said to my father, “Father of our son, do you think there’s something wrong with him?” Later, when I was old enough, I entered adult society as a member of a labor brigade, and the habit of talking to myself that had begun when I was tending cattle caused nothing but trouble in my family. “Son,” my mother pleaded with me, “don’t you ever stop talking?” Moved to tears by the look on her face, I promised I’d stop. But the minute there were people around, out came all the words I’d stored up inside, like rats fleeing a nest. That would be followed by powerful feelings of remorse and an overwhelming sense that I had once again failed to take my mother’s instructions to heart. That’s why I chose Mo Yan — Don’t Speak — as a pen name. But as my exasperated mother so often said, “A dog can’t keep from eating excrement, and a wolf can’t stop from eating meat.” I simply couldn’t stop talking. It’s a habit that has caused me to offend many of my fellow writers, because what invariably comes out of my mouth is the unvarnished truth. Now that I’m well into my middle years, the words have begun to taper off, which must come as a comfort to my mother’s spirit as it looks down on me.

***

From “Red Sorghum” (1993)

The ninth day of the eighth lunar month, 1939. My father, a bandit’s offspring who had passed his fifteenth birthday, was joining the forces of Commander Yu Zhan’ao, a man destined to become a legendary hero, to ambush a Japanese convoy on the Jiao-Ping highway. Grandma, a padded jacket over her shoulders, saw them to the edge of the village. “Stop here,” Commander Yu ordered her. She stopped.

“Douguan, mind your foster-dad,” she told my father. The sight of her large frame and the warm fragrance of her lined jacket chilled him. He shivered. His stomach growled.

Commander Yu patted him on the head and said, “Let’s go, foster-son.”

Heaven and earth were in turmoil, the view was blurred. By then the soldiers’ muffled footsteps had moved far down the road. Father could still hear them, but a curtain of blue mist obscured the men themselves. Gripping tightly to Commander Yu’s coat, he nearly flew down the path on churning legs. Grandma receded like a distant shore as the approaching sea of mist grew more tempestuous, holding on to Commander Yu was like clinging to the railing of a boat.

***

From “Republic of Wine” (2000)

The office was hermetically sealed by perfectly dovetailed doors and windows. Once again Ding Gou’er started to itch all over, and rivulets of sweat ran down his face. He heard Crewcut say consolingly:

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“Don’t worry, you’ll cool off as you calm down.”

A buzzing filled Ding Gou’er’s ears. Bees and honey, he was thinking, and honeyed infants. This mission was too important to be undone by carelessness. The glass in the windows seemed to vibrate. In the space between heaven and earth outside the room, large rigs moved slowly and noiselessly. He felt as if he were in an aquarium, like a pet fish. The mining rigs were painted yellow, a numbing color, an intoxicating color. He strained to hear the noise they made, but no dice.

Ding Gou’er heard himself say:

“I want to see your Mine Director and Party Secretary.”

Crewcut said:

“Drink up, drink up.”

Touched by Crewcut’s enthusiasm, Ding Gou’er leaned back and drained the glass.

He no sooner set down his glass than Crewcut filled it up again.

“No more for me,” he said. “Take me to see the Mine Director and Party Secretary.”

“What’s your hurry, Boss? One more glass and we’ll go. I’d be guilty of dereliction of duty if you didn’t. Happy events call for double. Go on, drink up.”

The sight of the full glass nearly unnerved Ding Gou’er, but he had a job to do, so he picked it up and drank it down.

He put down the glass, and it was immediately refilled.

“It’s mine policy,” Crewcut said. “If you don’t drink three, how edgy you will be.”

“I’m not much of a drinker,” Ding Gou’er protested.

Crewcut picked up the glass with both hands and raised it to Ding Gou’ er’ s lips.

“I beg you,” he said tearfully. “Drink it. You don’t want me to be edgy, do you?”

Ding Gou’er saw such genuine feeling in Crewcut’s face that his heart skipped a beat, then softened; he took the glass and poured the liquor down his throat.

“Thank you,” Crewcut said gratefully, “thank you. Now, how about three more?”

***

From “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” (2004)

The Japanese cavalry unit headed south along the riverbank all the way up to where Laidi and her sisters had left their shoes. There they reined in their horses and cut through the bushes up to the dike. Laidi kept looking, but they were gone. She then turned to look down at the dead sorrel, its head bloody, its big, lifeless blue eyes staring sadly into the deep blue sky. The Japanese rider lay facedown in the mud, pinned beneath the horse, his head cocked at an awkward angle, one bloodless hand stretched out to the riverbank, as if fishing for something. The horses’ hooves had chewed up the smooth, sun-drenched mud of the shoals. The body of a white horse lay on its side in the river, rolling slowly in the shifting water, until it flipped over and its legs, tipped by hooves the size of clay jugs, rose terrifyingly into the air. A moment later, the water churned and the legs slipped back into the water to wait for the next opportunity to point to the sky. The chestnut horse that had made such an impression on Laidi was already far downriver, dragging its dead rider with it, and she wondered if it might be off looking for its mate, imagining it to be the long-separated wife of Third Master Fan’s stud horse.

Fires continued to burn on the bridge, the now yellow flames sending thick white smoke out of the piles of straw. The green bridge flooring arched high in the air as it groaned and gasped and moaned. In her mind, the burning bridge was transformed into a giant snake writhing in agony, trying desperately to fly up into the sky with both its head and tail nailed down. The poor bridge, she thought sadly. And that poor German bicycle, the only modern machine in Gaomi, was now nothing but charred, twisted metal. Her nose was assailed by the smells of gunpowder, rubber, blood, and mud that turned the heated air sticky and thick, and her breast was suffused with a foul miasma that seemed about to explode. Worse yet, a layer of grease had formed on the roasted bushes in front of them, and a wave of sparking heat rushed toward her, igniting crackling fires in the bushes. Scooping Qiudi up in her arms, she screamed for her sisters to leave the bushes. Then, standing on the dike, she counted until they were all there with her, grimy-faced and barefoot, their eyes staring blankly, their earlobes roasted red. They scampered down the dike and ran toward an abandoned patch of ground that everyone said was once the foundation and crumbled walls of a Muslim woman’s house that had since been reclaimed by wild hemp and cocklebur. As she ran into the tangle of undergrowth, her legs felt as if they were made of dough, and the nettles pricked her feet painfully. Her sisters, crying and complaining, stumbled along behind her. So they all sat down amid the hemp and wrapped their arms around each other, the younger girls burying their faces in Laidi’s clothing; only she kept her head up, gazing fearfully at the fire raging over the dike.

***

From “The Garlic Ballads” (2006)

Gao Yang touched the drop of nectar with his tongue, and his taste buds were treated to a cool, sweet taste that relaxed him. He surveyed his three acres of garlic field. It was a good crop, the white tips large and plump, some at a jaunty angle, others straight as a board. The garlic was moist and juicy, with downy sprouts beginning to appear. His pregnant wife was on her hands and knees beside him, yanking garlic out of the ground. Her face was darker than usual, and there were fine lines around her eyes, like veins of spreading rust on a sheet of iron. As she knelt, knees coated with mud, her childhood deformity — a stunted left arm that inconvenienced her in everything she did — made the job harder than it ought to have been. He watched her reach down and pinch the stalks with a pair of new bamboo chopsticks; the effort made her bite her lip each time, and he felt sorry for her. But he needed her help, for he’d heard that the co-op was setting up shop in the county town to buy the garlic crop at slightly over fifty fen a pound, higher than last year’s peak price of forty-five. He knew the county had expanded the amount of acreage given over to garlic this year; and with a bumper crop, the earlier you harvested yours, the sooner you could sell it. That was why everyone in the Village, women and children included, was out in the fields. But as he looked at his pitiable pregnant wife, he said, “Why not rest awhile?”

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• After Fury Over 2010 Peace Prize, China Embraces Nobel Selection (October 12, 2012)

• Times Topic: Mo Yan

“What for?” She raised her sweaty face. “I’m not tired. I just worry the baby might come.”

“Already?” he asked anxiously.

“I figure some time in the next couple of days. I hope it waits till the harvest is in, at least.”

“Do they always come when they’re due?”

“Not always. Xinghua was ten days late.”

They turned to look behind them, where their daughter sat obediently at the edge of the field, her sightless eyes opened wide. She was holding a stalk of garlic in one hand and stroking it with the other.

“Careful with that garlic, Xinghua,” he said. “Each stalk is worth several fen.”

***

From “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out” (2008)

My story begins on January 1, 1950. In the two years prior to that, I suffered cruel torture such as no man can imagine in the bowels of hell. Every time I was brought before the court, I proclaimed my innocence in solemn and moving, sad and miserable tones that penetrated every crevice of Lord Yama’s Audience Hall and rebounded in layered echoes. Not a word of repentance escaped my lips though I was tortured cruelly, for which I gained the reputation of an iron man. I know I earned the unspoken respect of many of Yama’s underworld attendants, but I also know that Lord Yama was sick and tired of me. So to force me to admit defeat, they subjected me to the most sinister form of torture hell had to offer: they flung me into a vat of boiling oil, in which I tumbled and turned and sizzled like a fried chicken for about an hour. Words cannot do justice to the agony I experienced until an attendant speared me with a trident and, holding me high, carried me up to the palace steps. He was joined by another attendant, one on either side, who screeched like vampire bats as scalding oil dripped from my body onto the Audience Hall steps, where it sputtered and produced puffs of yellow smoke. With care, they deposited me on a stone slab at the foot of the throne, and then bowed deeply.

“Great Lord,” he announced, “he has been fried.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/books/mo-yan-excerpts-from-his-work.html?pagewanted=3&_r=0&ref=books