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

EVERY PERSON HAS HIS OWN REASONS FOR BECOMING A WRITER, AND I am no exception. But why I became the sort of writer I am and not another Hemingway or Faulkner is, I believe, linked to my childhood experiences. They have been a boon to my writing career and are what will make it possible for me to keep at it down the road.

Looking back some forty years, to the early 1960s, I revisit one of modern China's most bizarre periods, an era of unprecedented fanaticism. On one hand, those years saw the country in the grips of economic stagnation and individual deprivation. The people struggled to keep death from their door, with little to eat and rags for clothes; on the other hand, it was a time of intense political passions, when starving citizens tightened their belts and followed the Party in its Communist experiment. We may have been famished at the time, but we considered ourselves to be the luckiest people in the world. Two-thirds of the world's people, we believed, were living in dire misery, and it was our sacred duty to rescue them from the sea of suffering in which they were drowning. It wasn't until the 1980s, when China opened its door to the outside world, that we finally began to face reality, as if waking from a dream.

As a child, I knew nothing about photography, and even if I had I couldn't have afforded to have my picture taken. So I am able to piece together an image of my childhood based solely upon historical photographs and my own recollections, although I daresay that the image I conjure up is real to me. Back then, five- or six-year-olds like myself went virtually naked all through the spring, the summer, and the fall. We threw something over our backs only during the bitterly cold winters. Such tattered clothes are beyond the imagination of today's children in China. My grandmother once told me that while there is no suffering a person cannot endure, there is plenty of good fortune one can never hope to enjoy. I believe that. I also believe in Darwin's theory of the survival of the fittest. When someone is thrown into the most perilous circumstances, he may well display surprising vitality. Those who cannot adapt die off, while those who survive are of the best stock. So I guess I can say I come from superior stock. During those times, we had an amazing ability to withstand cold. With our bottoms exposed, we didn't feel that the cold was unbearable, even though feathered birds cried in the freezing weather. If you had come to our village back then, you'd have seen plenty of children with their bottoms exposed or wearing only a bit of thin clothing as they chased each other in the snow, having a wonderful, rowdy time. I have nothing but admiration for myself as a youngster; I was a force to be reckoned with then, a much finer specimen than I am now. As kids, we had little meat on our bones; we were sticklike figures with big rounded bellies, the skin stretched so taut it was nearly transparent you could just about see our intestines twist and coil on the other side. Our necks were so long and thin it was a miracle they could support our heavy heads.

And what ran through those heads was simplicity itself: all we ever thought about was food and how to get it. We were like a pack of starving dogs, haunting the streets and lanes sniffing the air for something to put inside our bellies. Plenty of things no one would even consider putting into their mouths these days were treats for us then. We ate the leaves off trees, and once they were gone we turned our attention to the bark. After that, we gnawed on the trunks themselves. No trees in the world ever suffered as much as those in our village. But instead of wearing our teeth down, our peculiar diet made them as sharp and strong as knives. Nothing could stand up to them. One of my childhood friends became an electrician after he grew up. There were no pliers or knives in his tool kit; all he needed was his teeth to bite through wire as thick as a pencil those were the tools of his trade. I had strong teeth too, but not as strong as my electrician friend's. Otherwise, I might have become a first-rate electrician rather than a writer.

In the spring of 1961, a load of glistening coal was delivered to our elementary school. We were so out of touch we didn't know what the stuff was. But one of the brighter kids picked up a piece, bit off a chunk, and started crunching away. The look of near rapture on his face meant it must have been delicious, so we rushed over, grabbed pieces of our own, and started crunching away. The more I ate, the better the stuff tasted, until it seemed absolutely delicious. Then some of the village adults who were looking on came up to see what we were eating with such gusto, and joined in. When the principal came out to put a stop to this feast, that only led to pushing and shoving. Just what that coal felt like down in my belly is something I can no longer recall, but I'll never forget how it tasted. Don't for a minute think there was no pleasure in our lives back then. We had fun doing lots of things. Topping the list of fun things to do was gleefully eating something we'd never considered food before.

The famine lasted for a couple of years or more, until the mid-1960s, when life improved. We still didn't have enough to eat, but every person was allotted about 200 pounds of grain per year; that combined with the wild greens we foraged in the fields was enough to get by on, and fewer people starved to death.

Obviously, the experience of going hungry cannot, by itself, make a writer out of someone, but once I became a writer, I had a deeper understanding of life than most because of it. Prolonged hunger made me realize how very important food is to people. Glory, causes, careers, and love mean nothing on an empty stomach. Because of food, I lost my self-respect; because of food, I suffered the humiliation of a lowly cur; and because of food I took up creative writing, with a vengeance.

After becoming a writer, I began to think back to the loneliness of my childhood, much the same as I thought back to my experience of going hungry every time I sat at a table piled high with good food. The place where I was born, Northeast Gaomi Township, is situated at a spot where three counties converge. It's a vast, sparsely populated area that lacks adequate transportation. As far as the eye can see, my village is surrounded by weed-covered, low-lying land topped by wild-flowers. I had been taken out of school at a very young age, so while other kids were sitting in classrooms, I was taking cattle out into the field to graze. Eventually, I got to know more about cattle than I did about people. I knew what made them happy, angry, sad, and content; I knew what their expressions meant; and I knew what they were thinking. On that vast stretch of uncultivated land it was just me and a few head of cattle. They grazed calmly, their eyes appearing as blue as the ocean. When I tried to talk to them, they ignored me, caring only about the tasty grass on the ground. So I'd lie on my back and watch puffy clouds drift slowly across the sky, pretending they were a bunch of big, lazy men. But when I tried to talk to them, they ignored me too. There were lots of birds up in the sky meadowlarks, common larks, and other familiar types I couldn't name. Their calls moved me deeply, often to the point of tears. I tried talking to them too, but they were much too busy to pay any attention to me. So I lay there in the grass feeling sad, and began to let my imagination run wild. In my dreamy state of mind, all sorts of wonderful thoughts poured into my head, helping me gain an understanding of love and decency.

Pretty soon I learned how to talk to myself. I developed uncommon gifts of expression, able to talk on and on not only with eloquence but even in rhyme. My mother once overheard me talking to a tree. Alarmed, she said to my father, Father of our son, do you think there's something wrong with him? Later, when I was old enough, I entered adult society as a member of a labor brigade, and the habit of talking to myself that had begun when I was tending cattle caused nothing but trouble in my family. Son, my mother pleaded with me, don't you ever stop talking? Moved to tears by the look on her face, I promised I'd stop. But the minute there were people around, out came all the words I'd stored up inside, like rats fleeing a nest. That would be followed by powerful feelings of remorse and an overwhelming sense that I had once again failed to take my mother's instructions to heart. That's why I chose Mo Yan Don't Speak as a pen name. But as my exasperated mother so often said, A dog can't keep from eating excrement, and a wolf can't stop from eating meat. I simply couldn't stop talking. It's a habit that has caused me to offend many of my fellow writers, because what invariably comes out of my mouth is the unvarnished truth. Now that I'm well into my middle years, the words have begun to taper off, which must come as a comfort to my mother's spirit as it looks down on me.