MCLC: Mo Yan's acceptance speech (8)

Denton, Kirk denton.2 at osu.edu
Tue Dec 11 09:51:32 EST 2012


MCLC LIST
From: Tommy McClellan <tmmcclellan at gmail.com>
Subject: Mo Yan's acceptance speech (8)
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Costas Kouremenos: it seems I may owe you an apology. In a little personal
climax of annoyance on my part at what I see as growing hysteria against
Chinese writers who try to ply their trade without opening themselves and
their families to catastrophic consequences, I may have mistaken your
simple honest question about footbinding as a snide suggestion that Mo Yan
would lie about his mother. Sorry for that. (By the way, according to the
speech, Mo Yan's mother was not working hard in the fields, she was
gleaning. The speech never suggests she was capable of hard agricultural
labour. However, as far as I know, women with bound feet, north and south,
certainly did participate in heavy agricultural labour over several
centuries - slowly, painfully, weakly.)

A. E. Clark: thanks. Your comments are perfectly reasonable and
instructive, and certainly more polite than my rather intemperate message
(which I half-expected Kirk to censor as 'unworthy' of this forum)
deserved. I have tried to present a limited defence - or rather, a few
words of defence - of Mo Yan in the context of the Nobel Prize. I would
never try to suggest that the Chinese system provides much hope at all at
present of promoting free speech in literature, etc. etc.

Tommy McClellan




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