Also by Mo Yan
Red Sorghum
The Garlic Ballads
The Republic of Wine
Copyright © 2001, 2011 by Mo Yan
Translation copyright © 2001, 2011 by Howard Goldblatt
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
Arcade Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or
[email protected].
This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-61145-564-9
Contents
Preface
Hunger and Loneliness: My Muses
Translator's Note
Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh
Man and Beast
Soaring
Iron Child
The Cure
Love Story
Shen Garden
Abandoned Child
Preface
Hunger and Loneliness: My Muses
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.
As a child, I knew nothing about photography, and even if I had I couldn't have afforded to have my picture taken. So I am able to piece together an image of my childhood based solely upon historical photographs and my own recollections, although I daresay that the image I conjure up is real to me. Back then, five- or six-year-olds like myself went virtually naked all through the spring, the summer, and the fall. We threw something over our backs only during the bitterly cold winters. Such tattered clothes are beyond the imagination of today's children in China. My grandmother once told me that while there is no suffering a person cannot endure, there is plenty of good fortune one can never hope to enjoy. I believe that. I also believe in Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest. When someone is thrown into the most perilous circumstances, he may well display surprising vitality. Those who cannot adapt die off, while those who survive are of the best stock. So I guess I can say I come from superior stock. During those times, we had an amazing ability to withstand cold. With our bottoms exposed, we didn't feel that the cold was unbearable, even though feathered birds cried in the freezing weather. If you had come to our village back then, you'd have seen plenty of children with their bottoms exposed or wearing only a bit of thin clothing as they chased each other in the snow, having a wonderful, rowdy time. I have nothing but admiration for myself as a youngster; I was a force to be reckoned with then, a much finer specimen than I am now. As kids, we had little meat on our bones; we were sticklike figures with big rounded bellies, the skin stretched so taut it was nearly transparent — you could just about see our intestines twist and coil on the other side. Our necks were so long and thin it was a miracle they could support our heavy heads.
And what ran through those heads was simplicity itself: all we ever thought about was food and how to get it. We were like a pack of starving dogs, haunting the streets and lanes sniffing the air for something to put inside our bellies. Plenty of things no one would even consider putting into their mouths these days were treats for us then. We ate the leaves off trees, and once they were gone we turned our attention to the bark. After that, we gnawed on the trunks themselves. No trees in the world ever suffered as much as those in our village. But instead of wearing our teeth down, our peculiar diet made them as sharp and strong as knives. Nothing could stand up to them. One of my childhood friends became an electrician after he grew up. There were no pliers or knives in his tool kit; all he needed was his teeth to bite through wire as thick as a pencil — those were the tools of his trade. I had strong teeth too, but not as strong as my electrician friend's. Otherwise, I might have become a first-rate electrician rather than a writer.
In the spring of 1961, a load of glistening coal was delivered to our elementary school. We were so out of touch we didn't know what the stuff was. But one of the brighter kids picked up a piece, bit off a chunk, and started crunching away. The look of near rapture on his face meant it must have been delicious, so we rushed over, grabbed pieces of our own, and started crunching away. The more I ate, the better the stuff tasted, until it seemed absolutely delicious. Then some of the village adults who were looking on came up to see what we were eating with such gusto, and joined in. When the principal came out to put a stop to this feast, that only led to pushing and shoving. Just what that coal felt like down in my belly is something I can no longer recall, but I'll never forget how it tasted. Don't for a minute think there was no pleasure in our lives back then. We had fun doing lots of things. Topping the list of fun things to do was gleefully eating something we'd never considered food before.
The famine lasted for a couple of years or more, until the mid-1960s, when life improved. We still didn't have enough to eat, but every person was allotted about 200 pounds of grain per year; that combined with the wild greens we foraged in the fields was enough to get by on, and fewer people starved to death.
Obviously, the experience of going hungry cannot, by itself, make a writer out of someone, but once I became a writer, I had a deeper understanding of life than most because of it. Prolonged hunger made me realize how very important food is to people. Glory, causes, careers, and love mean nothing on an empty stomach. Because of food, I lost my self-respect; because of food, I suffered the humiliation of a lowly cur; and because of food I took up creative writing, with a vengeance.
After becoming a writer, I began to think back to the loneliness of my childhood, much the same as I thought back to my experience of going hungry every time I sat at a table piled high with good food. The place where I was born, Northeast Gaomi Township, is situated at a spot where three counties converge. It's a vast, sparsely populated area that lacks adequate transportation. As far as the eye can see, my village is surrounded by weed-covered, low-lying land topped by wild-flowers. I had been taken out of school at a very young age, so while other kids were sitting in classrooms, I was taking cattle out into the field to graze. Eventually, I got to know more
about cattle than I did about people. I knew what made them happy, angry, sad, and content; I knew what their expressions meant; and I knew what they were thinking. On that vast stretch of uncultivated land it was just me and a few head of cattle. They grazed calmly, their eyes appearing as blue as the ocean. When I tried to talk to them, they ignored me, caring only about the tasty grass on the ground. So I'd lie on my back and watch puffy clouds drift slowly across the sky, pretending they were a bunch of big, lazy men. But when I tried to talk to them, they ignored me too. There were lots of birds up in the sky — meadowlarks, common larks, and other familiar types I couldn't name. Their calls moved me deeply, often to the point of tears. I tried talking to them too, but they were much too busy to pay any attention to me. So I lay there in the grass feeling sad, and began to let my imagination run wild. In my dreamy state of mind, all sorts of wonderful thoughts poured into my head, helping me gain an understanding of love and decency.
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.
My dream of becoming a writer was formed early on, back when one of my neighbors, a college student majoring in Chinese, was labeled a rightist, kicked out of school, and sent back to the countryside to work in the fields. We labored side by side. At first he couldn't forget he'd been a college student, as his elegant way of speaking and refined manners made clear. But the rigors of country living and the backbreaking labor quickly stripped away every vestige of his intellectual background, and he became a common peasant, just like me. During breaks out in the field, when our grumbling stomachs sent a sour taste up into our mouths, our greatest entertainment was talking among ourselves about food. We, along with some of the other field hands, would trade descriptions of delicious foods we had eaten or heard about. It was truly food for the soul. The speakers would invariably have us all drooling.
One old-timer talked about all the famous dishes he had seen as a waiter in a Qingdao restaurant: braised beef tourne-dos, pan-fried chicken, things like that. Wide-eyed, we stared at his mouth until we could smell the aroma of all that delicious food and see it materialize, as if it had dropped from the sky. The “rightist” student said he knew someone who had written a book that brought him thousands, maybe tens of thousands, in royalties. Each and every day the fellow ate jiaozi, those tasty little pork dumplings, at all three meals, the oil oozing from inside with each bite. When we said we didn't believe anyone could be so rich as to eat jiaozi three times a day, the former student said scornfully, “He's a writer, for goodness sake! You understand? A writer!” That's all I needed to know: become a writer and you can eat meaty jiaozi three times a day. Life doesn't get any better than that. Why, not even the gods could do better. That's when I made up my mind to become a writer someday.
When I started out, noble ambitions were the furthest thing from my mind. Unlike so many of my peers, who saw themselves as “engineers of the soul,” I didn't give a damn about improving society through fiction. As I've said, my motivation was quite primitive: I had a longing to eat good food. To be sure, after gaining a bit of a reputation, I learned the art of high-sounding utterances, but they were so hollow, even I didn't believe them. Owing to my lower-class background, the stories I wrote were filled with the commonest of views, and anyone looking for traces of elegance or graceful beauty in them would likely come away disappointed. There's nothing I can do about that. A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him. I grew up hungry and lonely, a witness to human suffering and injustice; my mind is filled with sympathy for humanity in general and outrage over a society that bristles with inequality. That's what my stories are all about, that's all they could be about. Not surprisingly, as my stomach grew accustomed to being full when I wanted it to be, my literary output underwent a change. I have gradually come to realize that a life of eating jiaozi three times a day can still be accompanied by pain and suffering, and that this spiritual suffering is no less painful than physical hunger. The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of a writer. But for me, writing about the suffering of the soul in no way supplants my concern for the physical agony brought about by hunger. I can't say whether this is my strength as a writer, or my weakness, but I know it is what fate has decreed for me.
My earliest writing is probably better left unmentioned. But mention it I must, since it is part and parcel of my life story and of China's recent literary history. I still recall my very first story. In it I wrote about the digging of a canal. A junior militia officer begins the morning by standing before a portrait of our Chairman Mao and offering up a simple prayer: May You Live Ten Thousand Years, May You Live Ten Thousand Years, May You Live Ten Thousand Years! He then leaves to attend a meeting in the village, where it is decided that he will take his production team to a spot beyond the village and dig a gigantic canal. To show her support for this enterprise, his fiancee decides to postpone their marriage for three years. When a local landlord hears of the planned excavation, he sneaks into the production team's livestock area in the dead of night, picks up a shovel, and smashes the leg of a black mule scheduled to pull a cart at the canal work site. Class struggle. Reacting as if the enemy were at hand, the people mobilize themselves for a violent struggle against the class enemy. Eventually, the canal is dug and the landlord seized. No one these days would deign to read such a story, but that was just about all anyone wrote back then. It was the only way you could get published. So that's what I wrote. And still I wasn't able to see it into print — not revolutionary enough.
As the 1970s wound down, our Chairman Mao died, and the situation in China began to change, including its literary output. But the changes were both feeble and slow. Forbidden topics ran the gamut from love stories to tales of Party blunders; but the yearning for freedom was not to be denied. Writers racked their brains to find ways, however roundabout, to break the taboos. This period saw the rise of so-called scar literature, personal accounts of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. My own career didn't really start until the early 1980s, when Chinese literature had already undergone significant changes. Few forbidden topics remained, and many Western writers were introduced into the country, creating a frenzy of Chinese imitations.
As a child who grew up in a grassy field, enjoying little formal education, I know virtually nothing about literary theories and have had to rely solely upon my own experiences and intuitive understanding of the world to write. Literary fads that all but monopolized literary circles, including recasting the works of foreign writers in Chinese, were not for me. I knew I had to write what was natural to me, something clearly different from what other writers, Western and Chinese, were writing. This does not mean that Western writing exerted no influence on me. Quite the contrary: I have been profoundly influenced by some Weste
rn writers, and am happy to openly acknowledge that influence. But what sets me apart from other Chinese writers is that I neither copy the narrative techniques of foreign writers nor imitate their story lines; what I am happy to do is closely explore what is embedded in their work in order to understand their observations of life and comprehend how they view the world we live in. In my mind, by reading the works of others, a writer is actually engaging in a dialogue, maybe even a romance in which, if there is a meeting of the minds, a lifelong friendship is born; if not, an amicable parting is fine, too.
Up to this point, three of my novels have been published in America: Red Sorghum, The Garlic Ballads, and The Republic of Wine. Red Sorghum exposes the reader to my understanding of history and of love. In The Garlic Ballads I reveal a critical view of politics and my sympathy for China's peasants. The Republic of Wine expresses my sorrow over the decline of humanity and my loathing of a corrupt bureaucracy. On the surface, each of these novels appears to be radically different from the others, but at their core they are very much alike; they all express a yearning for the good life by a lonely child afraid of going hungry.
The same is true of my shorter works. In China, the short story has little standing. In the eyes of writers and critics alike, only novelists count as worthy creators of fiction, while writers of shorter fiction are practitioners of a petty craft. Forgive me when I say that this is wrong-headed. The stature of a writer can only be determined by the thought revealed in a work, not by its length. A writer's place in a nation's literary history cannot be judged by whether or not he is capable of writing a book as heavy as a brick. That must rest on his contributions to the development and enrichment of that nation's language.
I venture to say, immodest though it may seem, that my novels have created a unique style of writing in contemporary Chinese literature. Yet I take even greater pride in what I've been able to accomplish in the realm of short stories. Over the past fifteen years or so, I have published some eighty stories, eight of which are included in this collection, selected by my translator, with my wholehearted approval. They represent both the range of themes and variety of styles of my short story output over the years. Once you have finished this volume, you will have a good picture of what I've tried to do in my shorter fiction.