MCLC: Link on Mo Yan

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Rowena He <rowenahe at gmail.com>
Subject: Link on Mo Yan
***********************************************************

Source: NY Review of Books (12/6/12):
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/

Does This Writer Deserve the Prize?
By Perry Link

==============================================
Red Sorghum
by Mo Yan, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
Penguin, 359 pp., $17.00 (paper)
       
The Garlic Ballads
by Mo Yan, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
Arcade, 290 pp., $14.95

Big Breasts and Wide Hips
by Mo Yan, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
Arcade, 532 pp., $17.95 (paper)
      
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
by Mo Yan, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
Arcade, 540 pp., $16.95 (paper)
      
=============================================

On October 11 Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy in
Stockholm, announced that the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2012 will go
to the fifty-seven-year-old Chinese writer Guan Moye, better known as Mo
Yan, a pen name that means “don’t talk.” (The name is said to have
originated in advice his parents gave him as a school-age boy during the
Mao era.)

The news was greeted with elation in Beijing. A member of the nine-man
ruling Politburo, Li Changchun, immediately sent a letter to the
state-sponsored Chinese Writers Association, of which Mo Yan is a
vice-president, calling the prize “not only an embodiment of the
flourishing progress of Chinese literature but also an embodiment of the
continuing rise in the overall strength of our state and its international
influence.” The official media exulted that, at last, a “mainstream”
Chinese had won a Nobel Prize, for which “the Chinese people have waited
too long.” A week later, officials announced plans to spend $110 million
to transform Mo Yan’s home village into a “Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone.”

Simultaneously, a storm of controversy welled on the Chinese-language
Internet both inside and outside China. Did this writer, compared to
others who might have won, deserve the prize? And should a prize of this
magnitude go to a writer who is “inside the system” of an authoritarian
government that imprisons other writers—of whom Liu Xiaobo, winner of the
2010 Nobel Peace Prize (a “convicted criminal,” in the Chinese
government’s view) is only the most famous example? A satirist named Wang
Xiaohong tweeted her worry for the deceased Mr. Nobel, whom she imagined
as squirming in his grave:

Two years ago my people gave a prize to a Chinese, and in doing so
offended the Chinese government. Today they gave another prize to a
Chinese, and in doing so offended the Chinese people. My goodness. The
whole of China offended in only two years.

Satire aside, Wang Xiaohong is correct that Nobel Prizes are closely
watched and coveted in China—even more, in general, than they are
elsewhere. Like Olympic gold medals, they are viewed as signs of the
world’s respect—which, over recent centuries, many Chinese have felt to be
less than it ought to be. The insecurity that underlies this quest for
respect appears in especially sharp relief in the case of the Nobel
literature prize, where China in essence hands over judgment of its
cultural achievement to a committee of Swedes. (One committee member,
Göran Malmqvist, reads Chinese, but the others rely on translations.)
China does have its own literary prize, the Mao Dun Prize, which Mo Yan
won in 2010. But neither Mo Yan nor almost anyone in China would compare
it to a Nobel. (Mao Dun was a writer of political fiction during the late
1920s and 1930s; he served as Mao Zedong’s minister of culture from 1949
to 1965, and has a reputation—deserved—for tedious prose. But the main
reason for the second-tier reputation of the Mao Dun Prize is that it is a
domestic, state-sponsored prize.)

In recent years China’s Communist rulers have been especially sensitive to
Nobel prestige, and have had to deal with a frustrating historical record.
Eight Chinese have won Nobel Prizes in the natural sciences, but six of
these were citizens of Western countries (the US, the UK, and France) when
they won their prizes, and the other two were citizens of the Republic of
China on Taiwan.1 
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/?p
agination=false&printpage=true#fn-1> There have been two Peace Prize
winners, but one, Liu Xiaobo, embarrasses the regime that has put him in
prison, and the other, the Dalai Lama (who won in 1989), has lived in
exile since 1959. (China’s rulers call the Dalai Lama a “splittist” and a
“wolf in sheep’s clothing,” but cannot conveniently say he is “not
Chinese,” because that would acknowledge that Tibet might not be part of
China.) After Gao Xingjian, a Chinese whose works denounce Communist rule
in China, and who took French citizenship in 1997, won the Nobel
literature prize in 2000, state-sponsored media in China said that the
Nobel committee had “lost authority” and was “a small clique of so-called
literary experts who harbor extremely unhealthful attitudes toward the
Chinese people.”

Mo Yan’s prize required a sharp reversal of those judgments, and there is
no sign that anyone in state media found this difficult to do. It is their
job to promote the state, not to be consistent. Now it was the turn of the
other side, dissidents and anonymous freethinkers on the Internet, to
attack. Some criticized the Nobel committee, but their main criticism was
of Mo Yan himself, primarily for some of his recent political choices. At
the opening ceremonies of the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2009, he read
an officially vetted speech in which he claimed that literature should be
above politics; but, when Chinese authorities ordered a boycott of a
session where the freethinking writers Dai Qing and Bei Ling appeared, Mo
Yan joined the walkout, later explaining that he “had no choice.”

In December 2009, after the announcement of Liu Xiaobo’s unexpectedly
harsh prison sentence of eleven years, Cui Weiping, a film scholar,
conducted a telephone survey of more than a hundred prominent Chinese
intellectuals to get their responses. Many, at personal risk, expressed
disgust and told Cui she could publish what they said. Mo Yan, who also
gave permission to publish what he said, said, “I’m not clear on the
details, and would rather not comment. I have guests at home right now and
am busy.”

But most galling to Mo Yan’s critics was his agreement, in June 2012, to
join in a state-sponsored project to get famous authors to hand-copy Mao
Zedong’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” in
celebration of their seventieth anniversary. These “Talks”—which were the
intellectual handcuffs of Chinese writers throughout the Mao era and were
almost universally reviled by writers during the years between Mao’s death
in 1976 and the Beijing massacre in 1989—were now again being held up for
adulation. Some of the writers who were invited to participate declined to
do so. Mo Yan not only agreed but has gone further than others to explain
that the “Talks,” in their time, had “historical necessity” and “played a
positive role.”

At a news conference following the announcement of his Nobel Prize, Mo Yan
asked that his political positions be kept separate from his writing. The
Nobel “is an award for literature, not politics,” he said. Some of his
critics on the Internet have flatly rejected this distinction. (One
tweeted that “if a chef layered in feces presents me with a meal, it
doesn’t matter how delectable the food is; I’m going to have trouble
swallowing it.”) The deeper question, though, is how and to what extent a
writer’s immersion in, and adjustment to, an authoritarian political
regime affects what he or she writes. The issue is both subtle and
important, and Mo Yan provides a useful example of it.

Mo Yan became famous in the late 1980s when the filmmaker Zhang Yimou made
his novel Red Sorghum, a saga of life in rural Shandong during the
Japanese invasion in the 1930s and 1940s, into a prize-winning film. Liu
Xiaobo, who knew Mo Yan at the time, later wrote that one reason for the
film’s tremendous success was that

<<it drew freely upon the themes of raw sexuality and adultery. Its theme
song, “Sister, be gutsy, go forward,” was an unbridled endorsement of the
primitive vitality of lust. Against the backdrop of fire-red sorghum in
desolate northwestern China, under the broad blue sky and in full view of
the bright sun, bandits violently abduct village women, wild adultery
happens in the sorghum fields, bandits murder one another in competition
for women, male laborers magically produce the widely renowned liquor
“Six-Mile Red” by urinating into the heroine’s brewing wine, and so on.

<<All of this…not only sets the scene for marvelous consummations of male
and female sexual desire; it creates a broader dream vision that carries
magical vitality. That Red Sorghum could win prizes symbolizes a change in
national attitudes towards sex: “erotic display” had come to be seen as
“exuberant vitality.”>>

Mo Yan points out, correctly, that Red Sorghum took considerable heat from
the authorities in the 1980s. Then, at least, he was no sycophant. The
work not only defied sexual taboos; it portrayed a version of Chinese life
under Japanese occupation that was radically at odds with official
Communist accounts of heroic peasant resistance. Mo Yan, Zhang Yimou, and
others were viewed as young rebels.

Oe Kenzaburo, the Japanese novelist and essayist who won the Nobel
literature prize in 1994, said in his acceptance speech:

<<By sharing old, familiar yet living metaphors I align myself with
writers like Kim Chi-ha of Korea and Zheng Yi and Mo Yan, both of China.
For me the brotherhood of world literature consists in such relationships
in concrete terms…. I am now deeply worried about the destiny of those
gifted Chinese novelists who have been deprived of their freedom since the
Tiananmen Square incident [i.e., the June 4, 1989 crackdown].>>

Oe could not know at the time how “destiny” would turn out very
differently for the two young Chinese writers he admired, Zheng Yi and Mo
Yan. Zheng Yi had drawn Oe’s attention for Old Well(1984), a romance set
against the background of the centuries-old quest for water in a parched
area of rural Shanxi province. Like Red Sorghum, the story had been made
into a prize-winning film. Oe told me in 1997 that he liked Zheng’s
“vertical orientation”—old wells penetrating deep into the earth and
“spirit trees” stretching in the other direction toward the heavens.
(Zheng was then working on a long novel called Spirit Tree, in which there
was a touch of magic in his account of Chinese village life.) In 1989
Zheng Yi supported student protesters at Tiananmen, was listed for arrest
by the government afterward, lived underground in China for three years,
then escaped on a small boat to Hong Kong in 1993, and has lived in exile
in the US ever since. He has continued to write prolifically, always in
absolute candor about his criticisms of the Chinese government.

Mo Yan, in both politics and literature, chose a different path. Every
serious Chinese writer and artist in the post-1989 era has had to face the
choice of whether and how much to stay “inside the system.” Many, like Mo
Yan, stay unambiguously inside, making larger or smaller accommodations to
official guidelines even as they publicly preserve the fiction that they
are doing no such thing. (At his recent news conference Mo Yan observed,
deadpan, that “we live in an era of free expression.”) During the last two
decades of economic boom, money has become another important inducement
for staying within the system. Zhang Yimou, the filmmaker who did Red
Sorghum, moved further and further “inside” until, in 2008, he was invited
to choreograph the spectacular opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics
and commented (apparently without irony) that only a state like China’s or
North Korea’s could engineer such an extravaganza.

Most of the writers who choose to go “outside” the system—Liu Binyan, Su
Xiaokang, Zheng Yi, Liao Yiwu, and others—have accepted exile as the price
for saying what they think, without adjustments. Ha Jin took the unusual
step of departing not only China but the Chinese language; he writes only
in English, in part to be sure that even subconscious influences do not
affect his expression. Some who chose exile after 1989 later changed their
minds and returned to China. Xu Bing, the installation artist, lived in
New York from 1990 until 2008, then went back to China to be
vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. The distinguished poet
Bei Dao also returned and now spends most of his time in Hong Kong. The
regime welcomes the return of famous figures, because this helps to
burnish its image. It offers them money, position, and more freedom than
it allows to others—but never full freedom.

The main challenge for Mo Yan beginning in the 1990s was to find a
literary voice that he could use in the long term. Red Sorghum had been a
genuine breakthrough, but only because of the political situation of the
1980s, when Chinese writers could make their names by “breaking into
forbidden zones.” Red Sorghum had broken into two: sexual libertinism and
truth- telling about the war with Japan. But by the 1990s there were fewer
forbidden zones awaiting break-in, and those that did remain (the 1989
massacre, corruption among the political elite, and topics like Taiwan,
Tibet, and Xinjiang) were so extremely forbidden as to be untouchable. Mo
Yan needed something else.

The voice that he has embraced has been called Rabelaisian, but it is even
more earthy than Rabelais’s. The animal nature of human beings—eating,
excreting, fighting, screaming, bleeding, sweating, fornicating—abounds,
as do certain traits that animals eschew, such as bullying, conniving, and
betraying. Sometimes, but not always, Mo Yan’s expression is ironic, and
it includes flights of imagination that critics have compared to the
“magical realism” of Gabriel García Márquez. (It is doubtful that Mo Yan
has read either Rabelais or García Márquez; these are similarities, not
influences.)

Mo Yan writes about people at the bottom of society, and in The Garlic
Ballads (1988) he clearly sides with poor farmers who are bullied and
bankrupted by predatory local officials. Sympathy for the downtrodden has
had a considerable market in the world of Chinese letters in recent times,
mainly because the society does include a lot of downtrodden and they do
invite sympathy. But it is crucial to note the difference between the way
Mo Yan writes about the fate of the downtrodden and the way writers like
Liu Xiaobo, Zheng Yi, and other dissidents do. Liu and Zheng denounce the
entire authoritarian system, including the people at the highest levels.
Mo Yan and other inside-the-system writers blame local bullies and leave
the top out of the picture.

It is, however, a standard tactic of the people at the top in China to
attribute the ordeals of the populace to misbehavior by lower officials
and to put out the message that “here at the top we hear you, and
sympathize; don’t worry that there is anything wrong with our system as a
whole.” Twenty years ago, when Chinese people had access only to
state-sponsored news sources, most of them believed in such assurances;
today, with the Internet, fewer do, but the message is still very
effective. Writers like Mo Yan are clear about the regime’s strategy, and
may not like it, but they accept compromises in how to put things. It is
the price of writing inside the system.

Mo Yan has written panoramic novels covering much of twentieth-century
Chinese history. “Rewriting history” has been a fashion in Chinese fiction
since the 1990s; it holds great interest for readers who are still
struggling to confront the question of “what happened?” during and after
the country’s Maoist spasm. For writers inside the system, a dilemma
arises in how to treat episodes like the Great Leap famine (1959–1962), in
which 30 million or more people starved to death, or the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution (1966–1970), which took the lives of another two or
three million and poisoned the national spirit with a cynicism and
distrust so deep that even today it has not fully recovered. Today’s
Communist leaders, worried that their power could suffer by association
with these Maoist disasters, declare the topics “sensitive” and largely
off-limits for state-sponsored writers. But a writer doing a panorama
cannot omit them, either. What to do?

Mo Yan’s solution (and he is not alone here) has been to invoke a kind of
daft hilarity when treating “sensitive” events. His Big Breasts and Wide
Hips (1996), which spans the entire twentieth century, follows the life of
a man obsessed with female body parts. In Chapter Six the book gets to the
Great Leap, when China’s rural economy collapsed because of the forcible
interference of Mao’s agricultural policies, including his insistence that
rice stalks be planted close together (farmers knew this wouldn’t work but
risked their lives if they said so) and his advice that new species of
plants and animals could be created by cross-breeding—for example, of
tomatoes and pumpkins to produce giant tomatoes.

Mo Yan has great fun with the craziness but leaves out the disaster. Cross
a rabbit with a sheep? Why not? A volunteer in Big Breasts speaks up:
“Sheep sperm into a rabbit is nothing. I don’t care if you want me to
inject Director Li Du’s sperm into the sow’s womb.” Everyone present then
“broke up laughing.” Meanwhile there is no sign of a famine. When the
breast- obsessed protagonist needs some goat’s milk, somebody just goes
out and buys it. In Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006), another Mo
Yan panorama, stretching from 1950 to 2000, the victim of a public
humiliation session during the Cultural Revolution is accused of having
impregnated a donkey. The victim suffers wicked taunts for four pages,
after which “the crowd laughed uproariously” as he is made to eat a turnip
that represents a “fake donkey dick.”

Defenders of Mo Yan, both on and off the Nobel Prize committee, credit him
with “black humor.” Perhaps. But others, including descendants of the
victims of these outrages, might be excused for wondering what is so
funny. From the regime’s point of view, this mode of writing is useful not
just because it diverts a square look at history but because of its
function as a safety valve. These are sensitive topics, and they are
potentially explosive, even today. For the regime, to treat them as jokes
might be better than banning them outright. In a 2004 article called “The
Erotic Carnival in Recent Chinese History,” Liu Xiaobo observes that
“sarcasm…has turned into a kind of spiritual massage that numbs people’s
consciences and paralyzes their memories.”

Is there more to Mo Yan’s thinking than he puts into print? For him, like
all inside-the-system writers in China, we need at least to keep this
question open. At a news conference on October 12, he answered a
reporter’s question about his fellow Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo this way:

<<I read some of his writings on literature in the 1980s…later, after he
left literature and turned to politics, I haven’t had any contact with
him, and I don’t understand much of what he has been doing since then. I
now hope, though, that he can get his freedom as soon as possible—get his
freedom in good health as soon as possible—and then be able to study his
politics and study his social systems as he likes.>>

The statement was quickly hailed by some of Liu Xiaobo’s supporters. Here
was the new Nobel laureate speaking up for someone whose very name had
been banned from China’s state media. Moreover Mo Yan’s words were
themselves quickly expunged from the domestic Chinese Internet, so the
authorities must have been angered by them. Mo Yan had apparently produced
a statement of conscience.

The statement certainly has value, but to me there is a more plausible
explanation for it than courage of conscience. Police and propaganda
officials in China stay in close touch with influential people, including
both establishment figures and dissidents. There are “chats,” sometimes
over tea, about what a person should or should not say or do in public.
When something as spectacular as a Nobel Prize comes along, it is
inconceivable that the recipient would not be summoned for one or more
chats, and the question of what Mo Yan should say about Liu Xiaobo must
have come up. It is an obvious question. Reporters from the world press
were asking it almost from the moment Mo Yan’s prize was announced, and it
will be even more unavoidable when he travels to Stockholm to collect his
prize. (Chinese citizens on the Internet have raised the question, too.
One tweeted that “if Mo Yan has guts, he will stand next to an empty chair
when he speaks in Stockholm.”2

One way or another, Mo Yan will have to have a shuofa—a “way of putting
things.” And what way might be least damaging, from the regime’s point of
view? If Mo Yan were to say to the world that Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who
deserves to be in prison, Mo Yan’s own image would plummet, and the glory
of his winning of the prize—a glory that the regime wants to enhance and
to ride upon—would also nosedive. On the other hand, if Mo Yan were
genuinely to side with Liu Xiaobo, who has written many times that “going
to prison for one’s words” is always and in principle wrong, that would
not do, either. The optimum might be a mild middle-of-the-road statement
about hoping that Liu gets released soon.

One phrase in Mo Yan’s statement adds special plausibility to this
interpretation. He repeats the “freedom” phrase in order to stress that it
be freedom in good health. Does Mo Yan know about Liu Xiaobo’s current
state of health? I doubt it. Only Liu Xia, his wife, has seen him in
recent months, and she is bound to strict silence on pain of cut-off of
her visiting privileges. Mo Yan may simply be taking into account the fact
that the health of other dissidents has suffered, sometimes very
seriously, while in prison. But we do know that the Lius are likely to be
under pressure from the regime to accept exile from China. Dissidents in
exile cause much less trouble to authorities than they do at home. The
blind rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, who fled last April from house arrest
in Shandong to the US embassy in Beijing, is now in New York, where he
causes the regime much less headache than he did when he was in either
Shandong or Beijing.

And what may this have to do with “good health”? The favorite euphemism of
the regime when it ships dissidents overseas is to say they “are seeking
medical treatment.” In June 1990, for instance, when the dissident
astrophysicist Fang Lizhi was released to go to Britain (Chinese
authorities insisted he spend at least six months in “a third country”
before going to the US), “medical treatment” was the regime’s pretext in
negotiating with British diplomats. Fang tolerated the word-game even
though there was nothing at all wrong with his health. Was Mo Yan’s “in
good health” phrase something that Chinese authorities had supplied to
him, perhaps to prepare the way in international opinion for Liu Xiaobo’s
“seeking medical treatment abroad”? I don’t know. But it seemed one
possible explanation for why the phrase popped up in Mo Yan’s statement.

The fact that Chinese censors expunged Mo Yan’s comments from the domestic
Internet is fully consistent with this interpretation. The target of the
“release in good health” word-game (if that’s what it is) may be not the
Chinese people; it may be the international community, the ones who will
receive Liu Xiaobo, if he is exiled, and the ones whose good impressions
of the new Chinese Nobel laureate the regime dearly wants to preserve.

Chinese writers today, whether “inside the system” or not, all must choose
how they will relate to their country’s authoritarian government. This
inevitably involves calculations, trade-offs, and the playing of cards in
various ways. Liu Xiaobo’s choices have been highly unusual. Mo Yan’s
responses are more “normal,” closer to the center of a bell curve. It
would be wrong for spectators like you and me, who enjoy the comfort of
distance, to demand that Mo Yan risk all and be another Liu Xiaobo. But it
would be even more wrong to mistake the clear difference between the two.

1. These two, Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, later became US citizens
as well as very “friendly” to the PRC. ↩
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/?p
agination=false&printpage=true#fnr-1>

2. Liu Xiaobo’s Peace Prize certificate was placed on an empty chair in
Oslo in December 2010, after which authorities banned the phrase “empty
chair” from the Chinese Internet. ↩
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/?p
agination=false&printpage=true#fnr-2>

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