After a three-year hiatus, author Mo Yan has written a new book examining yet another touchy subject.
By Chen Xiaoping and Yang Shiyang
Author Mo Yan is well-known in China for his sharp wit, elevated prose, and panache in exploring sensitive subjects. In the West, too, Mo is known for his satire and imagination. But, on the surface, his newest novel, “The Frog,” detailing the life of a rural doctor named Gu Gu, seems to abandon his typical way with words. Instead, Mo tells Gu Gu’s story in plain, quotidian prose, reflecting the traditional way rural people communicate.
Behind the facade, however, “The Frog” reveals Mo’s ceaseless interest in tackling solemn subjects, as he describes the tortuous path that Gu Gu, whose name sounds the same as “aunt” when pronounced in Chinese, must take as a gynecologist dealing with family planning policies in China.
“In China, family planning is a very sensitive subject, impacting the lives of millions across the country during the past 30 years, and evoking a lot of criticism from the West,” said Mo Yan during an interview with NewsChina. “Virtually every one of us has been influenced by the family planning policy, and every one-child family has made sacrifices and contributions to the country. This is the painful memory for us as a nation, as well as individually.”
A Literary Magnate
Mo is perhaps best known around the world for his novel “Red Sorghum,” which was in 1987 made into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou. He is also regarded as one of the greatest novelists in modern Chinese literature. His stories are often set in Gaomi, his home county in Shandong Province. Born in 1955, he came of age during a time of turmoil in China, and his long list of novels reflect a strong sense of history, but are marked with unrealistic, often absurd fantasies similar to the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Mo’s writing has been called powerful, visual, broad and grotesque, as with one of his most famous works, “The Republic of Wine.”
That novel was written in the latter half of 1989, a tumultuous year. The events in Beijing shaped the way Mo wrote the book. Instead of making loud, broad declarations with little substance, Mo asserted that a writer should use images to speak through the novel.
The story is pure fantasy. It tells the story of Ding Gou’er, a detective who is dispatched to the Republic of Wine to investigate local officials who hold regular feasts at which countless new-born babies are eaten. Few can resist the temptation to drink in the Republic of Wine, and the detective is no exception. In a state of drunkenness, he drowns in a latrine, despite repeated warnings not to imbibe.
When he finished the novel, Mo Yan discovered that nobody would publish it . When it eventually was printed, after much editing, domestic critics maintained a collective silence.
In 2001, “The Republic of Wine” won France’s Laure Bataillon award for foreign literature. Judges hailed the book as an unprecedented literary experimentation with bold ideas, a fantastic plot, weird characterization and novel structure that were beyond the normal reading experience of the average French reader, or for that matter, readers of the world.
Childhood experiences are often forever etched into memory, says Mo Yan. When he started reading the works of Lu Xun (1881–1936), a great twentieth-century Chinese literary master noted for his critical spirit, Mo devoured the great man’s words like a hungry lion–raw and whole. As a teenager, he absorbed Lu Xun’s spirit, which eventually bled out in his own creativity. The descriptions of the “table babies” and “baby-flesh feasts” in “The Republic of Wine,” some critics say, came directly from Lu Xun’s influence.
Mo Yan views himself as a writer who squarely faces stark realities and exposes the ugliness of life. He says that “The Frog,” which is widely considered more realist than his other works, is the companion to “The Republic of Wine.” The former is regarded as an allegory about the contemporary China, and Mo believes it is much more critical of reality than “The Frog.”
Gu Gu’s Story
In 2002, Japanese writer and Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Oe brought a camera crew to Mo Yan’s home village of Dongbei in Gaomi County, Shandong Province, to interview the writer. Mo revealed during the interview that he was working on a book about his aunt (gugu), a well-known gynecologist in the area.
