MCLC: Mo Yan's acceptance speech (9,10)

Denton, Kirk denton.2 at osu.edu
Wed Dec 12 10:27:16 EST 2012


MCLC LIST
From: Costas Kouremenos <enaskitis at gmail.com>
Subject: Mo Yan's acceptance speech (9)
***********************************************************

Tommy McClellan: No problem, apology accepted. The internet forum medium
is by nature full of such potential misunderstandings.

Costas

===========================================================

From: James Keefer <jamesrk at shaw.ca>
Subject: Mo Yan's acceptance speech (10)

Source: Bloomberg News (12/11/12);
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-11/mo-yan-s-nobel-parable-of-a-patsy-
.html

Mo Yan¹s Nobel: Parable of a Patsy?
By Adam Minter

On Monday night, the Chinese author Mo Yan accepted his Nobel Prize in
Literature in Stockholm. It was a big event for him, and an even bigger
one for China¹s newspapers and microblogs.

The interest was predictable: Mo is the first non-dissident Chinese
national to win a Nobel Prize, and his award is thus celebrated as a
moment of international recognition that has long eluded the world¹s most
populous country. In 2010, Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese dissident
author and activist won the Peace Prize -- the first Chinese national to
win any Nobel - - much to the chagrin and embarrassment of the Communist
Party he critiqued. Fair or unfair, Mo and his prize were destined to be
viewed in Liu¹s shadow, and Mo was destined to be asked about -- and
perhaps made to answer for -- Liu.

The Chinese view Mo first and foremost as a soft-spoken writer of
muscular, often cruel novels of the Chinese countryside. He inspires
tremendous national pride (especially since the Nobel). Before his big
win, Mo had never demonstrated much interest in speaking up politically.
His name is actually a pseudonym that means ³Don¹t Speak,² and he claims
to have adopted it in honor of his father¹s orders to him during the
Cultural Revolution.

Still, Mo is surely not naive about political matters. His role as vice
chairman of the state-chartered Chinese Writers¹ Association makes him a
target
<http://www.rectified.name/2012/10/15/is-mo-yan-a-stooge-for-the-chinese-go
vernment/> of critics who seek to diminish
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/dec/06/mo-yan-nobel-prize/?p
age=1> his work as soft-core agitprop and certainly informs his
understanding of the costs and benefits of speaking up on political issues.

Mo¹s spoken words since winning the Nobel have only seemed to complicate
perceptions of him among those who insist on defining him politically. In
October, he spoke in support of Liu¹s release
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-20598875>. Last week in
Stockholm <http://topics.bloomberg.com/stockholm/>, he declined to comment
on the dissident at all. Late last week, he gave now-notorious comments
seeming to suggest
<http://world.time.com/2012/12/07/chinas-nobel-laureate-mo-yan-defends-cens
orship/> that censorship is a necessary safeguard, much like an airport
security check. On Monday, his brief speech
<http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2012/yan-speec
h.html> after receiving the prize imagined the horror of a world without
literature. He could variously be interpreted as a man genuinely
conflicted, a government patsy or a sly critic of the Communist Party.

Over the last week, the discussion among Chinese of Mo¹s true feelings has
raged more fiercely than at any time since he won. The surge of interest
came in part because of Monday¹s ceremony but more notably from an
unexpected Internet sensation: Mo¹s Nobel lecture
<http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2012/yan-lectu
re_en.html> at the Royal Swedish Academy on Friday. By early Saturday
morning, the video and transcript had gone viral with tens of thousands
<http://weibo.com/1640601392/z8J2H1pBF> -- if not many more -- views. By
the end of the weekend, it was the subject of editorials in some of China
<http://topics.bloomberg.com/china/>¹s most important newspapers. And by
Monday morning, discussion of the speech was one of the top trending
topics on Chinese microblogs.

What animated many of the tweets and editorials were three odd parables
that Mo told at the end of his lecture, without offering any
interpretation of them. In China, where censorship requires astounding
feats of metaphor as a matter of daily online life, highly opaque Nobel
Prize-quality parables are guaranteed to attract eager problem solvers (if
only as literary Sudoku to be solved by weekend¹s end).

All three parables have received some attention, but it is the third one
which has China¹s netizens in a sort of Talmudic tizzy. As told to the
academy, it begins: ³A group of eight out- of-town bricklayers took refuge
from a storm in a rundown temple. Thunder rumbled outside, sending
fireballs their way. They even heard what sounded like dragon shrieks. The
men were terrified, their faces ashen.²

Mo describes how the eight men decide that their group is cursed by the
presence of one who must have committed a crime against the heavens. To
determine who, they agree to throw their hats toward the open door.
Whoever¹s hat flies out the door is the guilty one and must spend the
night in the storm. Mo continues: ³So they flung their hats toward the
door. Seven hats were blown back inside; one went out the door. They
pressured the eighth man to go out and accept his punishment, and when he
balked, they picked him up and flung him out the door. I¹ll bet you all
know how the story ends: They had no sooner flung him out the door than
the temple collapsed around them.²

Many microbloggers, likely among them readers of Mo¹s novels and the petty
cruelties that the powerful inflict on the powerless within them,
reasonably sense politics of a sort in the tale, though not the kind of
politics that can necessarily be interpreted as a critique of the
Communist Party.

Guo Jing, a reporter and popular host with the state-run China National
Radio, took such an approach via a tweet
<http://weibo.com/1425431523/z8QHufB3e> to Sina Weibo, China¹s most
popular microblog, on Sunday: ³Mo Yan demonstrated his political attitude
in the last story of his speech: A nation with a mob mentality but without
beliefs, a sense of independence, and a spirit of repentance, will earn
collective retribution.²

Li Xingwen, a columnist for Party-owned Beijing Youth Daily, offered two
plausible deconstructions that also seem to blame Chinese society, and not
the ruling Communist Party, for whatever tragedy the temple collapse
represents. He wrote in an editorial
<http://bjyouth.ynet.com/3.1/1212/09/7668623.html> on Sunday: ³On one
hand, the survival or extinction of Œthe one and the seven¹ in the damaged
temple suggests that society has its own justice and evil can¹t escape a
final judgment; on the other hand, the story is about democracy at a
crossroads: The majority¹s tyrannical policies were stupid and they
finally ate their own bitter fruit. Via these three stories Mo Yan showed
his viewpoint: never follow the crowd, never protest for show, and never
encroach on personal freedom in the name of the majority.²

Not every interpretation is quite so flattering to Mo, or to the Communist
Party. Indeed, across Weibo -- and in less obvious ways, in Chinese
newspapers -- the Chinese seem genuinely conflicted about how to interpret
their new Nobelist¹s tale. In a Saturday tweet
<http://weibo.com/1755315677/z8MVf71MT> by Weibo user Kai Yan, Mo is both
a Communist Party pawn and a satirist whose subject-matter is China¹s
all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee: ³Mo Yan¹s prize was
controversial and recently he supported censorship. He was also condemned
by the global media for not joining those who support Xiaobo¹s release.
However, his acceptance speech was interesting. One story in his speech
was about eight masons who took shelter from rain in a temple Š this is an
obvious satire of the Communist Party¹s court intrigues.²

It¹s obvious to Kai Yan, at least. For others, it remains a cryptic
curiosity. Still, for all the discussion of Mo¹s politics, there¹s an
undeniable online consensus that China¹s first literary Nobelist should be
left to do his work without having to answer such questions (especially
when posed by foreign media). Most online commentators are more concerned
with the first half of the lecture, in which he offers elegiac
remembrances of his mother and hometown and how they made him the man --
and the writer -- he is today.

One popular tweet <http://weibo.com/1417075813/z8Kkppn3K>, later forwarded
thousands of times <http://weibo.com/1197161814/z8LHt7q6c> on Sina Weibo
(most notably it was quoted in a Sina Weibo tweet
<http://weibo.com/1197161814/z8LHt7q6c> by Kai-fu Lee, former president of
Google China, and then forwarded by his followers), sums up the sentiment:
³I have not read Mo Yan¹s books, but after listening to his speech I know
why he would win. He has a good mother and extended family, he¹s honest
and kind-hearted, he has a life of hardship and rich experience, he is
good at observing and remembering Š he is a calm and ordinary Chinese.²

Mo¹s politics, whatever they may be, will likely remain a matter of
dispute for years to come. But his standing among a Chinese public that
embraces and identifies him as one of their own won¹t falter because of it.

(Adam Minter, the Shanghai correspondent for the World View blog
<http://www.bloomberg.com/view/world-view/>, is writing a book on the
global recycling industry. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the author of this article: Adam Minter at
ShanghaiScrap at gmail.com.








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