Chinese · b. 1955
Mo Yan is a Chinese novelist whose hallucinatory, carnivalesque fiction draws on Chinese folk tradition to depict a century of violence and transformation in rural Shandong Province.
Born Guan Moye in Gaomi, Shandong Province, Mo Yan grew up during the Cultural Revolution and joined the People’s Liberation Army as a young man partly to escape rural poverty. His pen name — “Mo Yan,” meaning “don’t speak” — reflects the conditions under which Chinese writers have long operated, though the irony is that he has spoken voluminously: his body of work is among the most ambitious in contemporary Chinese literature, in scope, scale, and formal ambition.
Red Sorghum (1987), his international breakthrough, is a vivid, violent account of his grandfather’s generation’s resistance against the Japanese invasion, narrated from a perspective that includes the dead and the unborn. The hallucinatory quality owes something to Faulkner and García Márquez but is deeply rooted in Chinese folk storytelling traditions. Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, and Frog are among his other major works — each a panoramic attempt to render the sweep of twentieth-century Chinese history through the lens of a single region and its people. His Nobel Prize in 2012 was controversial: some writers and activists objected to his apparent support for Chinese censorship and his political positioning. His defenders argued that his literary achievement — the creation of a vivid, entirely original fictional world — stands independently of his politics. Zhang Yimou’s film adaptation of Red Sorghum, made in 1987, is excellent and helps illuminate the source material.
by Mo Yan
A writer in rural China sends a series of letters to a Japanese playwright about his aunt—a village midwife and family planning enforcer under the one-child policy who delivered over ten thousand babies, then spent decades enforcing forced abortions and sterilizations. One of the most direct literary reckonings with China's one-child policy.
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by Mo Yan
A landlord executed in 1950 is reincarnated through a series of animals—donkey, ox, pig, dog, monkey—on the farm his family was forced to surrender during China's land reform, witnessing half a century of Chinese history from a uniquely non-human vantage point. Mo Yan considered this his finest novel.
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by Mo Yan
In 1930s Shandong Province, a fierce and beautiful woman is taken in a palanquin to marry a leper she has never met, falls in love with her palanquin bearer, and helps lead resistance against the Japanese invasion — narrated by her grandson from a perspective that includes the dead and the supernatural.
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by Mo Yan
Mother is the matriarch of the Shangguan family in Northeast China. Through her eyes—and through the nine daughters and one son she bears—Mo Yan tells the story of China's twentieth century: the Japanese occupation, civil war, the Communist revolution, the Cultural Revolution, reform and opening. An epic of endurance told through the body, specifically through the mother who survives everything.
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by Mo Yan
Chinese peasant farmers are ordered to plant garlic by the local government, producing a glut that the government then refuses to buy. When the farmers take their protest to the county seat, the response is brutal. Told in three voices—a blind street musician, a villager in prison, and a young woman—Mo Yan's most overtly political novel.
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by Mo Yan
A special investigator is sent to a coal-mining region where there are rumours that officials are eating babies prepared as delicacies. His investigation collapses into drunkenness and corruption. Interpolated throughout are letters between 'Mo Yan' and an aspiring writer named Li Yidou, whose own stories appear in the novel. One of the most formally experimental works of Chinese fiction.
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