Mo Yan - Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh

Up to this point, three of my novels have been published in America: Red Sorghum, The Garlic Ballads , and The Republic of Wine. Red Sorghum exposes the reader to my understanding of history and of love. In The Garlic Ballads I reveal a critical view of politics and my sympathy for China's peasants. The Republic of Wine expresses my sorrow over the decline of humanity and my loathing of a corrupt bureaucracy. On the surface, each of these novels appears to be radically different from the others, but at their core they are very much alike; they all express a yearning for the good life by a lonely child afraid of going hungry.

The same is true of my shorter works. In China, the short story has little standing. In the eyes of writers and critics alike, only novelists count as worthy creators of fiction, while writers of shorter fiction are practitioners of a petty craft. Forgive me when I say that this is wrong-headed. The stature of a writer can only be determined by the thought revealed in a work, not by its length. A writer's place in a nation's literary history cannot be judged by whether or not he is capable of writing a book as heavy as a brick. That must rest on his contributions to the development and enrichment of that nation's language.

I venture to say, immodest though it may seem, that my novels have created a unique style of writing in contemporary Chinese literature. Yet I take even greater pride in what I've been able to accomplish in the realm of short stories. Over the past fifteen years or so, I have published some eighty stories, eight of which are included in this collection, selected by my translator, with my wholehearted approval. They represent both the range of themes and variety of styles of my short story output over the years. Once you have finished this volume, you will have a good picture of what I've tried to do in my shorter fiction.

“Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh” is my latest story (it has recently been filmed by China's preeminent director, Zhang Yimou, under the title Happy Days) . While at first it may appear to deal primarily with the “downsizing” problem facing today's Chinese workers, in line with the Chinese saying, “Alcoholism is not really about alcohol,” there is more to the story than meets the eye. What I also want to show is how young couples in love are forced to sneak around to share their love. “Abandoned Child,” written in the mid-1980s, concerns one of contemporary Chinese society's thorniest problems — enforced family planning in a pervasive climate of valuing boys over girls. Decades of governmental efforts in implementing a one-child policy have produced impressive results in China's urban centers, where the long-held concept of “boys are better than girls” has undergone a change. But in the countryside, families with more than one child are still the norm, and the general disdain for baby girls is as prevalent as ever. Unchecked population growth remains China's most serious predicament, and a host of social problems emanating from the one-child policy are already beginning to appear.

“Man and Beast,” also written in the 1980s, continues the family saga of Red Sorghum and describes how, under extraordinary circumstances, the last shreds of humanity can give rise to a blaze of glory. Toward the end of the 1980s I wrote “Love Story,” a tale of puppy love. Set in the ten years of the disastrous Cultural Revolution, when hundreds of thousands of young men and women were sent from the cities up to the mountains and down to the countryside, the story tells of a young country boy who falls in love with a city girl much older than he, an uncommon turn of events. But it is precisely this feature that allows me to explore the concepts of sadness and beauty.

“The Cure,” “Iron Child,” and “Soaring” are all part of a series of short pieces I wrote during the early 1990s. “The Cure” is a tale of cannibalism and cruelty, and “Iron Child” and “Soaring” can be read as fables. Finally, there is “Shen Garden,” one of my last stories of the twentieth century. What I want to show here is how a middle-aged man turns his back on the love of an earlier time and eventually compromises with reality. In today's society, many Chinese men who have achieved success, even fame, live hypocritical lives. Deep down, their existence is little more than a pile of ruins.

As I have said, I am a writer with no theoretical training; but I possess a fertile imagination, thanks in part to China's popular traditions, which I am intent on continuing. I may be ignorant of high-flown literary concepts, but I do know how to spin a bewitching tale, something I learned as a child from my grandfather, my grandmother, and a variety of village storytellers. Critics who base their views of literature on scientific theories of one sort or another don't think much of me. But let's see them write a story that captures a reader's imagination.

M.Y.

Beijing, 2001

The term shifu is a generic and generally respectful term for skilled workers and the like; widely used, it has, in a sense, replaced other terms, such as “comrade.”It is common in China to use kinship or professional forms of address in preference to given names.

The Shen Garden in the story of that title, which was located in the southern city of Shaoxing over a millennium ago, is famous as a metaphor for encounters between once married couples. It is where the Southern Song poet Lu You is said to have met Tang Wan, whom his parents had forced him to divorce.

“The Cure” (literally, “effective medicine”) is an updated version of the famous story “Medicine” by Lu Xun (1881–1936), twentieth-century China's most renowned literary figure. In the earlier story, a child is treated for consumption with the blood of a beheaded revolutionary, but dies nonetheless; it too is a caustic satire on contemporary society and politics.

The translator thanks the editor of the Hong Kong magazine Renditions for her editorial suggestions on the story “Soaring” and for permission to reprint. “The Cure” appeared in slightly modified form in my anthology Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused (Grove Press, 1995). As always, my thanks to Li-chun for checking the manuscript and to Mo Yan for his generosity and cooperation. Both have made the translator's job especially rewarding and enjoyable.

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DING SHIKOU, OR TEN MOUTH DING, HAD WORKED AT THE Municipal Farm Equipment Factory for forty-three years and was a month away from mandatory retirement age when he was abruptly laid off. Now if you put shi (+), the word for ten , inside a kou , the word for mouth , you get the word tian ( ), for field . The family name Ding can mean a strapping young man. As long as a strapping young man has a field to tend, he'll never have to worry about having food on the table and clothes on his back. That was his farmer father's cherished wish for his son when he named him. But Ding Shikou was not destined to own land; instead he found work in a factory, which led to a far better life than he'd have had as a farmer. He was enormously grateful to the society that had brought him so much happiness, and was determined to pay it back through hard work. Decades of exhausting labor had bent him over, and even though he wasn't yet sixty, he had the look of a man in his seventies.

One morning, like all other workday mornings, he rode to the factory on his 1960s black and obstinate, clunky Grand Defense bicycle, which presented quite a sight among all the sleek lightweight bikes on the street. Young cyclists, male and female, first gave him curious stares, then steered clear of him, the way a fancy sedan gets out of the way of a lumbering tank. As soon as he pedaled through the factory gate, he saw a group of people clustered around the bulletin board. The voices of a couple of women rose above the general buzz, like hens about to lay eggs. His heart fluttered as he realized that what the workers feared most had finally happened.