On 11 October 2012, the Swedish Academy announced that Mo Yan had received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his perform “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary”. At the age of 57, he was the 109th recipient of the award and the first ever resident of mainland China to receive it-Chinese-born Gao Xingjian, a citizen of France, having been named the 2000 laureate. Swedish Academy head Peter Englund stated: “He has such a damn unique way of writing. If you read half a page of Mo Yan you immediately recognize it as him”.
Guan Moye, much famous by the pen name Mo Yan, is a Chinese novelist and quick story writer. He was referred by Donald Morrisonin U.S. news magazine TIME as “one of the most famous, oft-banned and widely pirated of all Chinese writers”. He is greatest famous to Western readers for the novel Red Sorghum Clan, in which the Red Sorghum and Sorghum Wine volumes were later on adapted for the film Red Sorghum.
“Mo Yan”, pen name of Guan Moye which means “don’t speak” in Chinese. In an interview with Jim Leach, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he explains that his name comes from the warning of his father and mom: one should not speak his mind in the public, due to China’s revolutionary political situation from the 1950s, when he grew up. The pen name also relates to the topic matter of Mo Yan’s writings, which reinterpret Chinese political and sexual history.
It is in the reform and opening up period that Mo Yan started his career as a writer, publishing dozens of short stories and novels in Chinese. His first novel Falling Rain on a Spring Night, was published in 1981. Many of his novels have been translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, professor of East Asian languages and literatures at the University of Notre Dame.
Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum Clan (《红高粱》 hong2 gao1 liang)is a non-chronological novel about the generations of a Shandong family between 1923 and 1976. The writer bargains with upheavals in Chinese history such as the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Communist revolution, and the Cultural Revolution, but in an unconventional way; as an example by portraying the suffering on the invading Japanese soldiers.
The Garlic Ballads(《天堂蒜薹之歌》tian1 tang2 suan4 tai2 zhi1 ge1), his second novel, is based on a correct story of the farmers of Gaomi Township rioted against a government that will not buy its crops. The Republic of Wine(《酒国》jiu3 guo2) is actually a satire around gastronomy and alcohol, which uses cannibalism as a metaphor for Chinese self-destruction, following Lu Xun. Big Breasts & Wide Hips(《丰乳肥臀》feng1 ru3 fei2 tun2) deals with female bodies, from a grandmother whose breasts are shattered by Japanese bullets, to a festival where one of the child characters, Shangguan Jintong, blesses each woman of his town by stroking her breasts. The book was controversial in China simply because some leftist critics regarded Massive Breasts’s perceived negative portrayal of Communist soldiers.
Yan’s writing style is maximalistic, headlong, sloppy to be sure, but bursting with life; or rather, lives-a human and otherwise. A Chinese landowner is executed at the dawn of the Cultural Revolution, and the story follows him literally to hell and back, again and again as he’s reborn in a progression of animal incarnations. Each time, he winds up near his former family and participates in its dramas, goes on animal adventures, and witnesses the hardships, cruelties, and absurdities of life in China over the last half-century. Mo Yan himself shows up as being a character from time to time.
