Discovering Mo Yan

On her way home one night recently Corrie was listening to NPR, and they were discussing the just-announced winners of the Nobel prizes: Chemistry, Physics, Literature and Peace. Econ came later. She heard them discussing the Chinese writer who's been banned multiple times in China and continually aggravated the government because he advocates reading foreign literature and generally broadening horizons. His style was described as "hallucinatory realism". That really caught Corrie's attention. That sounded to her like it could be used to describe my fiction style, and some of the other styles of writers we both enjoy.

A rabble-rousing author who's been banned and writes with a style called hallucinatory realism? That's right up my alley. She couldn't remember his name, but that's an easy fix with the internet.

His pen name is "Mo Yan", but his real name is Guan Moye. In the traditional Chinese way of people-names, Guan is his last name.

Mo Yan translate to a command: Don't Speak. It was something he was told over and over by his parents when he was a boy during the post-revolution political climate.

Very cool, I remember thinking, and went about looking up his books online. Amazon had one of his most recent books, Life and Death are Wearing Me Out, for a reasonable price, as well as most of his others. I found the webpage for the actual publisher of his work, and was more inclined to support them directly, because the difference in price was negligible, and, well, the continual thriving of small presses make me happy.

I thought about it, but waited.

Corrie, that weekend, had an expiring coupon for a steep discount from DSW, a shoe store, and a pair of falling apart slip-ons, so we decided to go to Orange County and get some shoes. 

As we pulled into the mall's parking lot and found a spot, I remember saying, "Do you think they have a bookstore?" Mall's are all beginning to lose their bookstores. It's a sad sign of the times. The entrance we chose to walk in on happened to have a used-bookstore as the very first place you can see. Good sign, eh?

In a used bookstore there are a few writers I look for: Pynchon, Murakami, Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Tom Robbins...I always look for Pynchon for other people; with Murakami you never know what'll be around; I still need a copy of Jesus' Son; there's only two Wallace novels I don't have (he only wrote three); and Tom Robbins is like Pynchon light.

Perusing the shelves, I found this instead:

It was marked as five bucks.

This is Mo Yan's second novel, and it's based on a true historical incident: an angry village stormed a government office when the government official wouldn't buy their crops.

Historical background: have you ever bought the mesh sock with the five or six bulbs of garlic for 99 cents? I have. I don't anymore, but not because I'm upset about supporting Chinese agricultural-industry over American. I just can't use that much garlic, and I cook dinners five or six times a week.

Well, in the late 1980s, the Chinese government went to villages and told the farmers that they should plant only garlic, and the government would pay handsomely for it because it would all get sold to the west. I guess in this particular year, there was a garlic glut, and too much garlic meant nobody got paid. So the good and angry farmers stormed the office.

Book observations: about halfway through, I can report a few things. One, something Norm and dad will be able to appreciate, the chapters oscillate between storylines and timelines, like our pal the Ruke-man. The first chapter has the arrest of one of the main characters after an "incident"--the storming and trashing of a government office. Our character's cousin get's away from the cops. The second chapter takes place maybe a year before the "incident", and shows the cousin from the first chapter's courting a young lady who's been betrothed to an old man.

One of Mo Yan's themes here is the conflict between the rural Chinese farming society and the Cultural Revolution's ideas about marriage and sexual freedom. Jinju, the young lady being wooed by Gao Ma, the big and studly cousin to Gao Yang, who get's arrested in the opening scene, has been betrothed to some old ass-hat, which is against the law. She's in love with Gao Ma, but that will ruin her family.

The odd chapters have the aftermath of the incident, and how Gao Yang's treated by the police, while the even chapters follow the tumultuous year leading up to the incident. The pattern breaks down around the middle of the book, as we follow Gao Ma off after his escape in the beginning of the first chapter (and of course by now we know him).

The material is pretty trippy, so I guess "hallucinatory realism" is not a bad descriptor.

But...but this book is almost like one long beat-down scene. That's what I would really tell someone about it. Every section of every chapter has some kind of ass-kicking, rib-breaking, projectile-vomiting thing going on. I think "oozed" is one of the most frequently used verbs, besides of course the regular verbs like "to be" and "to go" and their conjugated forms. There's one scene in a jail cell shared by four ladies. The four-guys-in-a-jail-cell scene happened earlier, and ended when one of the guys had to lap his own pee up off the floor. In the lady's scene, an older lady we're following, near the end of the scene, find her blanket is covered with lice. She starts to pluck them and squish 'em dead, only to find this is too tiring, so she decides to use her molars to crush the lice. She spits them out afterward. Using her few remaining teeth is much better for her, for their syrupy flavor almost makes her forget her situation.

Squishing lice with your molars and their sweet flavor making you almost forget about being jailed.

What else is there to say?