SHIFU, YOU'LL DO ANYTHING FOR A LAUGH
By MO YAN
Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. New
York: Arcade Publishing, 2001. 224 pages, $23.95
Jeffrey C. Kinkley
Some Stockholmologists predicted that a Chinese would win the Nobel Prize
in literature in 2000, and of those many bet on Mo Yan. He lost this time,
but he's under fifty and wonderful books continue to pour out of him.
Much of Mo Yan's world fame is still due to his novel Red Sorghum, made
into a Zhang Yimou film that confirmed the emergence of Chinese cinema
into the international commercial mainstream. Mo Yan's novels are made
for the movies. Those translated into English-Red
Sorghum, set in the Sino-Japanese War (a hero is skinned alive
in the film); The Garlic Ballads, in which peasants boil over into full-scale
revolt against communist officials; and The Republic
of Wine, whose cannibalistic cadres literally "serve the
people"-are noted for wide-screen technicolor images, struggles to
the death, outr¨¦ and savage peasant superstitions, and packs of wild dogs
devouring the dead-all memorably rendered amid gaudy wildflowers and crimson
sorghum.
The short stories in Shifu, You'll Do Anything
for a Laugh reveal different sides and moods of the author,
but they still suggest that if Mo Yan were a painter, he'd be a fauvist.
Mo Yan's brilliant colors and shocking exaggerations, his variously beastly,
terrified, or distracted characters-flat but deeply outlined-and stunning
magic-realist touches are wonderfully captured by Howard Goldblatt, his
gifted translator. Some works allude to China's ghost-story tradition,
but Mo Yan eschews the fully abstract or mystical. He always has some
thing on his mind to say, to ridicule, or to allegorize, from
the dog-eat-dog society of China today, to the eternally bestial nature
of humankind.
Two stories here that are set in Gaomi Township, Mo Yan's answer to William
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, look like sequels to Red
Sorghum. The novel shocked filially pious China when its narrator
entered the mind of his father to tell the tale. In "Man and Beast,"
one of the stories in this collection, the same narrator, or so it appears,
enters the mind of his grandfather as the latter descends into a wolf-like
existence after escape from a Japanese POW camp. The prose is exciting
and heroic: "Blood flowed powerfully through his tiny veins, building
up strength, like a taut bowstring." It is a curiously Japanese tale,
reminding one of those soldiers of the Rising Sun who hid out for decades
in the Philippines. In another story, "Soaring," two Gaomi families
swap their beautiful daughters as marriage partners for their undesirable
sons. One girl doesn't want to go, and she manages to fly above the treetops,
though she can't quite get away. Overtones of Chinese myth, ghost stories,
and Frankenstein movies merge when the superstitious villagers shoot her
down with bows and arrows. Yet, beforehand, they discuss how to bring
that fairy down as matter-of-factly as if she were a cat on a limb.
The image of men struggling with dogs for possession of corpses appears
in "The Cure," set in communist times, when state executions
provided human gall bladders aplenty for use as folk medicine; this surely
is Mo Yan's ironic tribute to Lu Xun's classic tale "Medicine."
"Iron Child" is a gruesome bit of surrealism (or Stephen King-like
fantasy) mocking the Great Leap Forward. A boy abandoned by society during
that late-1950s man-made famine, his parents drafted to smelt steel in
backyard furnaces, discovers a taste for all that bad iron that Mao loved
so much more than food for the people. A gang of boys consumes iron as
a snack. The locals are discomfited but at no loss to solve the problem:
"Catch the Iron Demons!" they shout. The blurred line between
fantasy and reality is explored more leisurely, from the back of a taxicab,
when a husband humors his wife, who is looking for a nonexistent "Shen
Garden," in a story by that name.
Three tales without "magic" may seem more unusual to readers
who know Mo Yan through his blazing sagas. The "Love Story"
of a rusticated girl in the Cultural Revolution does in a few pages what
Wang Anyi, whom many consider today's finest conveyer of feminine (though
not necessarily feminist) sensibilities in the modern Chinese novel, typically
achieves in several chapters. Black humor unfolds in the title story about
"Shifu," an aging laid-off worker who discovers a secret niche
for himself in the new New China by
turning an abandoned bus into a "hotel" for people's midday
trysts. In the final story, a young man discovers an "Abandoned Child"
in a field of sunflowers-a girl baby nobody wants. Mo Yan speaks for once
as if in his own voice, about the national shame of female infanticide.
"So, it seems, I awakened to the Truth." Cinematic novels remain
Mo Yan's forte, but this collection has something for everyone.
Jeffrey C. Kinkley, a professor of history at St. John's University, is the author of Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China and The Odyssey of Shen Congwen.