Mo Yan

Mo Yan: The Hungry Child Who Would Not Speak

In Stockholm in December 2012, days before collecting the Nobel Prize in Literature, the laureate was asked about censorship in China and compared it to airport security: unpleasant, necessary, something you submit to before you fly. Within hours Herta Müller had called his selection "a catastrophe," Salman Rushdie had called him "a patsy of the regime," and Ai Weiwei had called his lecture "powerless, disgraceful, a betrayal and a sellout." The man at the centre of it writes under a pen name that means, in Chinese, *don't speak*.

Gaomi, and the Famine

Guan Moye was born on 17 February 1955 in Gaomi, a farming township in Shandong province that would eventually become, in his fiction, a place as fully imagined and as recurrent as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. His family farmed, and their classification as middle-class landowners was enough to get him expelled from elementary school during the Cultural Revolution. He was twelve. He went to work — first in agriculture, then in a factory.

The formative fact of his childhood was not politics but hunger. He lived through the famine of the late 1950s, and he has been unusually direct about what it did to his imagination, describing his entire body of work as the "yearning for the good life by a lonely child afraid of going hungry." Food, appetite, gorging and starvation run through every novel he has written, sometimes as comedy, sometimes as horror, and often as both in the same paragraph.

The Army Taught Him to Read

In 1976, the year Mao died, he joined the People's Liberation Army. It was the making of him. The PLA Art College was where, by his own account, he first discovered what literature actually was — a man in his twenties with no secondary schooling encountering the idea of the novel as a form. He published his first short story in a literary journal in 1981 and later took a master's degree at Beijing Normal University, while continuing to insist that he has "no theoretical training." He joined the Communist Party in 1979.

Red Sorghum and the Invention of a Territory

*Red Sorghum*, published in 1986, made him famous and, after Zhang Yimou filmed it in 1987, made him internationally visible. It is a novel about peasant resistance to the Japanese invasion, told with modernist fracture and a sensuality that Chinese fiction of the period had not permitted itself. It also established the pattern that critics have argued about ever since: it dismantled the official Party account of the resistance only to replace it with something older and more primitive — a celebration of peasant virtue and a lament for the vitality lost to urbanisation.

*The Garlic Ballads* (1988) is the anomaly in the catalogue, an openly political novel about a genuine scandal in which corrupt officials compelled farmers to grow garlic and then let the harvest rot. He never returned to that mode with the same directness.

Liquorland

*The Republic of Wine* (1992) is his most formally ambitious book: a detective, Ding Gou'er, is sent to investigate reports that officials in a place called Liquorland are eating children, and the investigation dissolves into drunkenness, nested narratives and a death by drowning in a vat of vomit and excrement. *Big Breasts and Wide Hips* (1996) is a family saga spanning the century, conceived as a hymn to motherhood and narrated by a man who never manages to wean himself — a figure for a nation's arrested development, and also a very great many pages about breasts.

Then *Sandalwood Death* (2004), *Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out* (2006), and *Frog* (2009), the last a reckoning with the one-child policy. The Swedish Academy's citation named the quality that unites them: hallucinatory realism, merging folk tale, history and the contemporary. The comparisons offered were Faulkner and García Márquez, though the deeper debt is to Chinese oral storytelling — the market-square teller who can hold a crowd through digression, obscenity and sudden violence.

The Laureate and the Party

Mo Yan's reputation in the West as a dissident was always a misreading. He had been a Party member since 1979 and served as vice chairman of the China Writers' Association. In 2012 he took part in a commemorative project in which prominent writers hand-copied characters from Mao's "Talk at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art" — the founding document declaring literature subordinate to class struggle. When the Nobel was announced, the Party's propaganda chief Li Changchun welcomed it as a reflection of China's national strength and influence. Mo Yan declined to call for the release of the imprisoned laureate Liu Xiaobo, then serving eleven years.

Why Mo Yan Is Called a Genius

The case rests on a specific and demonstrable capacity: he built a complete fictional world out of one township and then wrote it at a scale and pitch nobody else attempted. Gaomi in his novels holds a century of Chinese history — invasion, revolution, famine, reform, the one-child policy — and he found a register capable of carrying all of it, in which farce, atrocity, myth and reportage sit in the same sentence without the sentence breaking. That is genuinely hard. The Academy's phrase "hallucinatory realism" was an attempt to name a technique that had no existing label. His defenders, among them the scholar Charles Laughlin, locate his significance in a caution-to-the-wind boldness, arguing that the grotesque comedy is satire operating where direct statement is impossible.

The counter-case is substantial and comes from serious people. Perry Link has argued that Mo Yan systematically avoids the regime's atrocities, rendering the Great Leap famine — in which some thirty million died — as comic episode rather than catastrophe, which is a strange evasion for a novelist whose subject is hunger. Anna Sun has argued that his language itself was damaged by Maoism. Critics of *The Republic of Wine* note that its supposed subversion is buried under pleonasm and repetition; the later novels are widely thought to show declining power. And the man who chose a pen name meaning "don't speak" did, at the decisive moment, not speak. Pankaj Mishra's rejoinder is worth weighing — that Western writers demand martyrdom from authors under authoritarian rule while excusing their own complicities — but it defends the man, not the claim of genius. What survives is a formal achievement: a real invention in the novel, made by someone who left school at twelve.

Legacy

Mo Yan was the first citizen of the People's Republic to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the prize arrived with the Chinese state's blessing rather than in defiance of it — which is exactly why it remains contested. What is not contested is the fiction's reach: Gaomi is now on the literary map permanently, translated into dozens of languages, and the argument about whether its author was brave or accommodating has become part of how the world reads it.

Achievements

• Notable work: Red Sorghum
• Notable work: The Republic of Wine
• Notable work: Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out
• Notable work: Big Breasts and Wide Hips
• Worked as writer, novelist and teacher