MY 3 AMERICAN BOOKS.

YAN, MO

What follows is the talk given at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver, Colorado, on 20 March 2000.

Before I start, I should mention my American translator, Howard Goldblatt. My novels could have been translated by someone else and published in the United States, but the English versions would never have been so beautifully translated, if not for him. Friends of mine who know both Chinese and English have told me that his translations are on a par with my originals. But I prefer to think they've made my novels better. I admit that some people, with dubious motives, have told me he's added things absent in the original, such as descriptions of sex. These people were ignorant of the fact that he and I have an agreement that he'll translate sex scenes in ways that will appeal to American readers, which is why the English and Chinese versions may seem different.

Howard and I began our collaboration in 1988. We've exchanged more than a hundred letters and spoken innumerable times over the telephone. The sole purpose of such frequent contact is to perfect the English translations. Often, we confer over a phrase or an object with which he's unfamiliar. Sometimes, I have to call upon my primitive drawing skills to sketch something for him. From this you can see that he is not only a talented translator, but a serious and conscientious one. It's my good fortune to be able to work with someone like him.

My first novel translated into English was Red Sorghum. Before it was rendered into English, it was made into a movie by China's renowned director, Zhang Yimou, and won a major prize at the Berlin Film Festival. The novel became famous because of the movie. In China, when my name is mentioned, people say, "Oh, Red Sorghum!" Forgive my immodesty, but, as a matter of fact, Red Sorghum evoked strong reactions in China before it was made into a movie. So Zhang Yimou benefited from my novel, then my novel benefited from his movie.

I wrote Red Sorghum when I was still at the PLA Art College. It was the early 1980s, the so-called "golden age of contemporary Chinese literature." An enthusiastic readership inspired writers to become passionate about literature. People were no longer content to create or read stories written in traditional styles. Readers demanded that we be more creative, and we dreamed of nothing but becoming more inventive. A critic quipped that Chinese writers were like a flock of sheep being chased by a wolf, a wolf whose name was innovation.

At the time, I had just crawled out of mountain ditches, and didn't even know how to use a telephone, let alone possess any knowledge of literary theories. So the wolf of innovation was not chasing me. I hid out at home, writing whatever I felt like writing. Now that I have some rudimentary knowledge of theory, I realize that slavishly following trends is not true innovation; real creativity is writing honestly about things you're familiar with. If you've had unique experiences, then what you write will be unique. And being unique is new. If you write something different, you will have developed a unique style. It's like singing: training can change your technique, not your voice. No matter how diligently you train a crow, it can never sing like a nightingale.

In other talks I've given, I've brought up my childhood. While city kids were drinking milk and eating bread, pampered by their mothers, my friends and I were fighting to overcome hunger. We had no idea what sorts of delicious foods the world had to offer. We survived on roots and bark, and were lucky to scrape together enough food from the fields to make a humble meal. The trees in our village were gnawed bare by our rapacious teeth. While city kids were singing and dancing at school, I was out herding cows and sheep, and got into the habit of talking to myself. Hunger and loneliness are themes I've repeatedly explored in my novels, and I consider them the source of my riches. Actually, I've been blessed with an even more valuable source of riches: the stories and legends I heard during the long years I spent in the countryside.

In the fall of 1998, when I visited Taiwan, I participated in a roundtable discussion on childhood reading experiences. The other writers on the panel had read many books in their childhood, books I haven't read even now. I said that my experience was different, because while they read with their eyes as children, I read with my ears. Most of the people in my village were illiterate, but such words flew from their mouths that you'd have thought they were educated scholars. They were full of wondrous stories. My grandparents and my father were all great storytellers. But my grandfather's brother -- we called him Big Grandpa -- was a master storyteller, an old Chinese herbal doctor whose profession brought him into contact with people from all walks of life. He was very knowledgeable and had a rich imagination. On winter evenings, my brothers, sisters, and I would go to his house, where we'd sit around a dusky oil lamp, waiting for him to tell us a story. He had a long, snowy white beard, but not a single hair on top. His bald head and his eyes glinted under the lamplight, as we begged him to tell us a story. "I tell you stories every day," he'd say impatiently. "How many do you think I have? Go on, go home and go to bed." But we'd keep pleading, "Tell us a story, just one." And finally, he'd give in.

I've memorized some three hundred of his stories, and with minor changes, every one of them could become a pretty good novel. I haven't even used fifty of them. I doubt I could ever use up all the stories he told us. And the ones that haven't been written are far more interesting than those that have. It's like a fruit peddler who tries to sell the wormy fruit first. Someday, when the time is ripe, I plan to sell those stories of his.

Most of my Big Grandpa's stories were told in the first person, and they all sounded like personal experience. Back then we believed they were his own stories, and it wasn't till much later that I realized he'd made them up as he went along. His stories sprang from the fact that he was a country doctor who often saw patients in the middle of the night. They always started like this:

"A couple of nights ago, I went over to Old Wang the Fifth's house in East Village to check on his wife. On my way back, as I passed that small stone bridge, I saw a woman in white sitting on the bridge and crying. I said to her, `Big Sister, it's the middle of the night. Why are you out here all alone, and what are you crying about?' She said, `Mister, my child is sick, he's dying. Would you go take a look at him?'" My Big Grandpa said, "I know every woman in Gaomi, so this one had to have been a demon." He asked her, "`Where do you live?' The woman pointed under the bridge, `There.'" My Big Grandpa said, "`You can't fool me. I know you're that white eel demon under the bridge.' Seeing that her ploy had failed, she covered her mouth and smiled. `You've got it again.' Then, with a jerk of her head, she leaped under the bridge."

Legend had it that a white eel the size of a bucket lived beneath the stone bridge. It had transformed itself into human form to seduce my Big Grandpa. We asked him, "Big Grandpa, why didn't you go with her. Since she was so pretty ..." He just said, "Dopey kids, if I had, I'd never have come back."

Then he went on to another story. A few nights earlier, he said, a man came to see him, leading a little black donkey with one hand and holding a red lantern in the other. The man said that someone in his family was very sick. Now my Big Grandpa was a very conscientious doctor, so he got dressed and left with the man. The moon was out that night, and that little black donkey shone like fine silk. After the man helped him onto the donkey, he asked, "Sir, are you all set?" My Big Grandpa said he was, so the man slapped the donkey on the rump. Big Grandpa said, "You can't believe how fast that little donkey flew. How fast? All I heard was the wind whipping past my ears, and all I saw were trees on both sides of the road whizzing backward." We were dumbstruck. That donkey must have been like a rocket. He said he knew something wasn't right, and he must have run into demons again.

What kind of demons? He didn't know, so he made up his mind to wait and find out. Before long, the donkey descended from the sky and landed in a magnificent mansion, all lit up by lamps. The man helped my Big Grandpa down as a white-haired old lady came out of the house and led him to the sickroom. It turned out to be a woman about to give birth. Country doctors had to take care of every illness in the world, so delivering a baby was no big deal. He rolled up his sleeves to help the woman deliver her baby. He said this woman was also very pretty, unsurpassingly beautiful -- that was his favorite phrase in describing a pretty woman. And not only beautiful, but amazingly fertile. As soon as he grabbed hold of a hairy, furry baby, out came another head. My Big Grandpa thought, "Hey, twins!" But then another furry head poked out, and he thought it must be triplets; then out came another. Just like that, one after another, she delivered eight babies, all furry, with little tails. Cute as can be. It suddenly dawned on him. "Foxes!" he shouted, but the word was barely out of his mouth when ghost-like cries and wolfish howls erupted, as darkness descended around him. Scared witless, he bit his middle finger -- a fabled way of exorcising demons -- and wound up in a tomb, surrounded by furry little foxes. The adults had fled.

I also heard stories from my grandmother, my father, and other talented storytelling relatives. I've committed many of them to memory. Since they were told by different people, they have distinctively different flavors. If I were to relate all the stories they told, my talk today would be as long as the Great Wall. So now I'll tell you about my novels.

On the surface, Red Sorghum seems to be about the war against Japan. But in reality, it's about the folklore and legends told by my kin. Of course, it's also about my longing for the contentment of love and a life of freedom. The only history in my head is the legendary type. Many famous historical figures were actually ordinary people, folks like us. Their heroic accomplishments were nothing but the result of embellishment over a long period of oral transmission. I've read some American reviews of Red Sorghum. They struck a resonant chord when they viewed my novel as folklore. This story, which I wrote in the ancient form of storytelling, has been viewed by Chinese critics as a fantastic, new innovation, and I can't help but chuckle to myself. If this is innovation, then being innovative is the easiest thing in the world.

My second novel in English was The Garlic Ballads, which I wrote in 1987. In the early summer of that year, a major incident occurred in a Shandong county, a place famous for its garlic. The farmers had a great harvest that year, but were unable to sell their crops, owing to the corruption of officials. Tons of garlic lay rotting in the fields. So the outraged farmers trashed the county government building. There was widespread fallout, with lengthy newspaper reports. In the end, the officials were dismissed, but the farmers who led the rebellion were also arrested and jailed. This incident enraged me. I may look like a writer, but deep down I'm still a peasant. So I sat down and wrote the novel; it took me a month. Of course, I moved the setting to the kingdom of my literary production: Northeast Gaomi Township. In reality, this is a book about hunger, and it is a book about rage. I wasn't thinking about innovation when I wrote it, because I felt the need to vent the anger welling up inside me. I wrote it for myself and for all my peasant brethren. But after the book was published, critics continued to insist that I was striving for innovation. They pointed out that the novel was told from three perspectives: first, that of a blind man, a balladeer; second, the objective viewpoint of a writer; and finally, the perspective of the official voice. And they called that innovation!

In my hometown, there were indeed balladeers, most of them blind men. They generally performed in groups of three: one to play the Chinese lute, one to beat a drum, and the third to sing. Some were very talented, men who wove current affairs into their songs and improvised as they went along. As a child, I admired them greatly, and considered them to be true artists. When I was writing The Garlic Ballads, their hoarse, sad voices echoed in my ears. That, not innovation, was my muse.

My third novel is the recently published Republic of Wine. I began writing it in 1989 and finished it in 1992. It was published in 1993, to deafening silence. The clamoring critics had suddenly turned mute. I guess these noisy "experts" were shocked. They had been promoting innovation all along, but when true innovation arrived, they turned a blind eye to it.

There are still many improvements that could be made on both Red Sorghum and The Garlic Ballads, and if I were to rewrite them, I believe they'd be better. But with The Republic of Wine, I couldn't improve it, no matter what I did. I can boast that while many contemporary Chinese writers can produce good books of their own, no one but me could write a novel like The Republic of Wine. Deep down I know that even though I may look like a middle-aged man on the outside, my heart is still as young as when I was listening to my Big Grandpa's stories. I realize I'm getting older only when I look in the mirror. When I'm facing a piece of paper, I forget my age, and my heart is filled with the joy of a child. I hate evil with a passion, I ramble, I mutter as if dreaming, I rejoice, I raise hell, I'm getting drunk.

That's about all I have to say about The Republic of Wine. Please read this novel, which Howard and I created together. The sex scenes are from the original; he didn't spice it up a bit.

Now, he's translating my next novel, Big Breasts and Full Hips, a book as thick as a brick. If you like, you can skip my other novels, but you must read Big Breasts and Full Hips. In it I wrote about history, war, politics, hunger, religion, love, and sex. I tell you, if he asks me to cut some of the juicier parts, I won't do it. That's because the sex scenes in Big Breasts and Full Hips are among my most gratifying accomplishments. After he finishes the translation, you'll see how well I've done!

I'm pretty drunk now, so I'll stop here.

Beijing / Boulder, Colorado Translated by Sylvia Li-chun Lin

MO YAN was born in the Shandong town of Gaomi on 17 February 1956, the son of peasants. His childhood was characterized by bitter poverty and constant hunger. In February 1976 he was admitted into the People's Liberation Army, where he served until October 1997, when he accepted a position in the editorial offices of the Beijing Procuratorial Daily. He is a graduate of the Literature Department of the PLA Academy of Art and Literature and the graduate program of Beijing Normal University, where he received a Master's degree in literature. He began writing in 1980. His novels include Hong gaoliang jiazu (Eng. Red Sorghum), Tiantang suantai zhi ge (Eng. The Garlic Ballads), Shisan bu (Eng. Thirteen Steps), Jiu guo (Eng. The Republic of Wine), and Fengru feitun (forthcoming in English as Big Breasts and Full Hips). He is also the author of numerous novellas and short stories (collected into half a dozen anthologies), essays, and filmscripts. Red Sorghum was adapted into a film of the same name by Zhang Yimou; it received the Golden Bear Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1987 and garnered critical acclaim in both Asia and the West. His novels and stories have been translated into more than a dozen languages.