In fact, he had written over 150,000 words, but had become disillusioned with the book. So, he dropped “The Frog” and turned instead to writing “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” which became a huge breakthrough for him. It was not until after he was finished with that book that he finally turned his attention back to “The Frog” (in Chinese this word is pronounced the same way as the word for “child”).
But, he was not happy with his original version. It seemed to him convoluted and the language too formal, so he scrapped it and started all over again, this time telling the story through a series of letters between a Chinese student of literature, Ke Dou, and a Japanese writer. The letters were written in a style that was free of pretense and full of a desire to connect and tell a real, human story.
Ke Dou tells the Japanese writer about Gu Gu, who began working in the village clinic at the age of 16. At the beginning of her career, Gu Gu’s main job was to deliver babies. By the 1970s, nearly every child in the village was delivered by Gu Gu. But, when the government implemented the family planning polices, she had to take on a new responsibility: abortions.
Approaches to Reality
In most of Mo Yan’s works, his approaches to reality are manifested in one or both of two ways. The first involves Mo exploring human nature based not on social constructs, but on personal perspectives, thus transcending class barriers and unmasking the hypocrisy of so-called “pseudo-human nature” promulgated by most mainstream literature. The second involves his intervention in reality, under the prodding of his strong sense of responsibility.
Works that take the first approach can be called “neo-humanistic,” or “neo-historical.” Mo’s 1996 novel, “Big Breasts and Wide Hips,” falls into this category.
He wrote the book as a dedication to his mother, who died in 1995. It came to him after witnessing a improverished woman breastfeeding at the entrance of Beijing’s Jishuitan subway station. The woman looked haggard and exhausted, but the children, twin boys, appeared to be healthy and content. The scene was the pathos that inspired Mo to write the book about his mother’s life. The story begins with the birth of her last child and ends with her death at the age of 95. Mo was one of eight children born to her.
The mother in Mo’s story lived and suffered through nearly every period in the history of contemporary China. Her experience reflects the time, through wars and disasters described objectively, and also the relationship between religion and social life.
In 2003, “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” was published in Italian, and in three months, 7,000 copies were sold. The next year, English and French editions were published. Mo Yan was invited to attend a literary festival in Mantova, in northern Italy at the end of the summer that year. Comparisons between the setting and epic nature of Mo’s novel to areas and stories from Europe abound. One critic compared the scenes of retreat in “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” to those in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” Critics also said that the mother in the novel suffered unimaginably, but she managed to survive, rather than passively resign. Some praised her maternal toughness as indicative of what made Chinese survival possible over the last millennia.
Mo Yan considers his “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” his most important work. “You may not read any other works of mine,” he says. “But you must read ‘Big Breasts and Wide Hips’ if you want to understand me.” “Big Breasts and Wide Hips,” also offers accounts of the land reforms in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and the reform and opening up since the late 1970s, all of which were launched under the Chinese Communist Party. But Mo moves beyond typical ways of viewing these events, shedding political or class paradigms, and instead examines them through personal points of view, and covers more than one angle.
“I want to interpret history through the experience of specific individuals,” Mo explains. “Bloodcurdling atrocities were perpetuated by the Nazis during World War II. But if we pick an ordinary German soldier for study, we may discover that he was an amiable man. He may have had a wife, children, parents and grandparents. His hands might tremble when slaughtering a chicken. How and why had the war turned him into a cold-blooded butcher? This is my point of departure from where I set out to understand and interpret the history.”
January 2010
