Big Breasts and Wide Hips

Mother and Her Century

She is never named beyond her title. Throughout the novel’s 552 pages and across almost a century of Chinese history, she is simply Mother—the matriarch of the Shangguan family in the fictional Gaomi County of Northeast China, the same Shandong territory Mo Yan has made his imaginative province across his entire career. She has nine daughters and one son. The son, Jintong—who narrates much of the novel—is sickly, dependent, unable to fully separate from his mother’s body or her sustaining presence, and in this he is the novel’s deliberate anti-hero: the child least equipped to survive what the century demands, saved repeatedly by the women around him.

The historical canvas is enormous. The novel begins in the early years of the twentieth century and moves through the Japanese occupation of the 1930s and 1940s, the civil war between Communists and Nationalists, the Communist revolution of 1949, the famines and violence of the Maoist era, the Cultural Revolution, and finally the chaotic capitalism of the reform period. Mo Yan does not summarize these events; he renders them through the bodies and decisions of specific people. Mother’s survival through all of it—through rape, starvation, the deaths of children, the ideological convulsions that destroy families and communities—is the spine around which the century’s atrocities are organized.

Mo Yan’s style is characteristic: earthy, excessive, hallucinatory, unwilling to sentimentalize or to moralize. The births and deaths and sexual encounters are rendered with a physicality that the Western literary tradition more often screens out. This is part of the novel’s argument: that the body—specifically the maternal body—is the continuous thread through historical discontinuity, that what survives catastrophe is not ideology or institution but the basic capacity to produce and sustain life.

The Body as History

The novel’s title is its thesis. Breasts and hips—the signs of female fertility, the body’s capacity to nourish and to bear—are set against the abstracted violence of political history as its antithesis and its underground continuation. Every ideology that passes through Gaomi County in the twentieth century claims to reorganize human life on rational principles; every one of them requires the destruction of bodies, and particularly female bodies, to maintain itself. Mother’s body, which absorbs everything and continues to function, is Mo Yan’s image of what persists beneath the ideological surface.

This is carnivalesque in the Bakhtinian sense—the earthy, the bodily, the reproductive as the counter-principle to the official, the abstract, the violent—but it is also feminist in a way that Mo Yan’s critics have not always acknowledged. The novel was banned in China when it was first published, partly for its depiction of Communist atrocities but also because its insistence on the centrality of the female body was politically inconvenient. The Chinese government’s complicated relationship with the novel—banned, then permitted, then banned again—tracks the instability of official ideology’s relationship to the kind of history Mo Yan is telling.

The nine daughters each represent a different response to historical pressure: collaboration, resistance, accommodation, flight, martyrdom. Together they form a comprehensive typology of female survival strategies in twentieth-century China. Jintong, the son, is by contrast a figure of paralysis and regression—a man who cannot stop needing his mother’s breast and who stumbles through the century without purpose. The contrast is not subtle, but it is effective: the novel makes no secret of its view that the women have understood something about how to survive that the men, drunk on ideology and abstraction, have refused to learn.

Mo Yan in Context

Mo Yan received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, and the award was immediately controversial in a way that the prizes to Saramago or Müller were not. The controversy centered not on his fiction but on his person: his membership in the Communist Party, his apparent endorsement of Chinese censorship practices in a public statement, and his silence on the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo, who had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. Some writers and critics argued that the Nobel committee had honored a state-approved author while a genuine dissident was in prison; others argued that Mo Yan’s fiction, including Big Breasts and Wide Hips, contains more honest confrontation with Communist history than his public statements would suggest.

Big Breasts and Wide Hips is the most useful text in this debate. The novel’s depiction of the Communist revolution—including its violence, its betrayals, its destruction of families—is not hagiographic. The Communist soldiers in the novel are not heroes; they are one more wave of armed men passing through Gaomi County, and Mother’s relationship to them is the same as her relationship to the Japanese and the Nationalists: survival first, ideology nowhere. If this constitutes political courage in the context of Chinese publishing, or merely the license that a celebrated author is given to push certain boundaries while respecting others, is a question without a clean answer.

For readers coming to Mo Yan for the first time, Red Sorghum is the shorter and more immediately gripping entry point—the Gaomi County trilogy in compressed form, with Mo Yan’s hallucinatory style at its most controlled. Big Breasts and Wide Hips is the more ambitious undertaking, a novel that requires more patience but offers more scope. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006) is his most formally inventive work, narrated by a landlord reincarnated through multiple animal forms; it is the novel to read after this one.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Mo Yan’s most ambitious novel is an overwhelming achievement: a century of Chinese history told through one family’s bodies, with the maternal as the organizing force that survives everything ideology can inflict on it.