Six lives in search of a character: the 2009 Newman Prize Lecture.

Yan, Mo

It seems ironic to ask someone called "Mo Yan" to speak in front of so many people. Thirty years ago, when a man with the name "Guan Moye" took a character from his given name, Mo, split it into two characters, and changed it into Mo Yan, he did not fully realize the implications of this rebellious act of changing both family and given names. Back then he was thinking that he should have a pen name, since all major writers had one. As he stared at the new name that meant "don't talk," he was reminded of his mother's admonition from way back. At that time, people in China were living in an unusual political climate; political struggles came in waves, one more severe than the one before, and people in general lost their sense of security. There was no loyalty or trust among people; there was only deception and watchfulness. Under those social conditions, many people got into trouble because of things they said; a single carelessly uttered word could bring disaster to one's life and reputation as well as ruination to one's family. But at a time like this, Mo Yan, or Guan Moye, was a talkative child with a good memory, an impressive ability to articulate, and, worst of all, a strong desire to express his views in public. Whenever he felt like showing off his eloquence, his mother would remind him, "Don't talk too much." But as the saying goes, it's easier for a dynasty to rise and fall than for a man to change his nature. As soon as he was away from his mother's watchful eye, out came a torrent of words.

In Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, the novel that won the Newman Prize, there is a Mo Yan who spews incessant nonsense and incurs everyone's displeasure. Though I cannot say that this Mo Yan is the real Mo Yan, he isn't far off.

Literature comes from life. This is, to be sure, an apt description, a sort of eternal truth. But life encompasses boundless experience, and all a writer can use is a sliver of his personal life. If a writer wants to continue to write, he must strive to expand his life experience and fight the desire to pursue wealth and leisure. Instead, he must search for suffering, which is the salvation of an established writer, even though in the pursuit of suffering one can stumble upon happiness. Therefore, the greatest wealth of a writer is the suffering he happens upon in his search for happiness. This, of course, is purely coincidental, not something that can be planned. So I believe that, in addition to talent and hard work, fate is indispensible to one's literary success.

A writer can produce many works in his lifetime, but only one or perhaps a few will be remembered by his readers. As of now, I've written ten novels and nearly a hundred novellas and short stories. I cannot say for sure which one, or ones, might pass the test of time and continue to be read. The jury, in a way, made that judgment for me when they awarded the Newman Prize to Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. So if two of my novels will be read by later generations, I believe that Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out will be one of them, partly because it won the prize, but especially because it brings into play some of the most important experiences of my life. I have said elsewhere that the novel was written in the short span of forty-three days, but it took forty-three years to germinate and develop. In the early 1960s, Guan Moye was still in elementary school.

Every morning during the calisthenics broadcast after second period, he would see an independent farmer with the surname Lan pushing a cart with wooden wheels, something that was no longer in use even then. It was pulled by a gimpy donkey accompanied by Lan's wife, a woman with bound feet. The wooden wheels grated shrilly against the dirt path by the school, leaving deep tracks. Guan Moye remembered all this. Back then, like all the other kids, Guan Moye felt nothing but disgust and disdain for this stubborn farmer who had insisted upon working independently instead of joining the commune, and even joined them in the evil act of pelting him with stones. Lan Lian resisted the pressure until 2966, when, under the cruel persecution of the Cultural Revolution, he could no longer hold out and took his own life.

Many years later, after Guan Moye became Mo Yan, he wanted to turn the independent farmer's story into a novel. The commune system was abolished in the 1980s, when peasants were allotted parcels of land, essentially making them independent farmers again. Mo Yah was particularly impressed by Lan Lian, an exceptional peasant who dared hold to his own views and wage a war against society, to the point of sacrificing his life to preserve his dignity. There has never been another character like him in contemporary Chinese literature. But Mo Yan delayed writing the novel because he had yet to find the right narrative structure. It was not until the summer of 2005, when he saw in a famous temple the mural of the six transmigrations of life, that he had an epiphany. He decided to let a wrongly executed landlord pass through the lives of a donkey, an ox, a pig, a dog, and a monkey before being reborn as a big-headed baby with an incurable, congenital disease. The loquacious baby recounted the many strange and uncommon experiences of his lifetimes as domestic animals, while examining, from the perspectives of those animals, the transformations of the Chinese countryside over the past fifty years.

Someone once asked me about the connection between the Mo Yan in the novel and the real-life Mo Yan. My response was: the Mo Yan in the novel is a character created by the writer Mo Yan, but is also the writer Mo Yan himself. In fact, this is the connection between a novelist and all the characters in his novels.

University of Oklahoma

March 5, 2009

Translation from the Chinese

By Sylvia Li-chun Lin

Sylvia Li-chun Lin is Associate Professor of Chinese literature at the University of Notre Dame. She is an accomplished translator and author of Representing Atrocity in Taiwan: The 2/28 Incident and White Terror in Fiction and Film. Her interview with Gao Xingjian appeared in the May 2008 issue of WLT.