Mo Yan, 莫言, and Orhan Pamuk – Nobel prize storytellers of rural and urban life

 We compare this year´s Nobel prize laureate of literature, Mo Yan from China, and a previous Nobel prize laureate, Orhan Pamuk from Turkey, and the  stories of  their rural and urban childhoods in eras of transition .

Short stories of Mo Yan

Mo Yan 2012 Nobel Laureate of Literature

A couple of weeks ago it was announced that Mo Yan from China will get the Nobel Prize in Literature 2012. Karin ´s first thought was: We have a given topic for our next blog! And Karin actually had read stories of Mo Yan, which many Swedes had not (and not even Jie it turned out!). He obviously was not so well-known among the broad public, which often is the case for many literature prize winners.

Although he had been mentioned as one of five hot candidates, it seemed to take the commentators with surprise when the prize was announced. The expert commentator in the Swedish television embarrassingly had to admit that he had not read any book of Mo Yan. Mo Yan´s books are published in Swedish by a very small publishing company and the books are totally sold out since some time, so you cannot get them in Swedish. But the printers are most probably working hard now to print more copies!

Even if it came as a surprise for some, he has been recognized in literary circles for a long time. It was said on Swedish TV that his name had been mentioned for many years in the Nobel Prize committee. On the front page of one of his books, “Shifu , You´ll do anything for a laugh”  (translated to English and published 2001), there is also a quote from the 1994 Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo OE saying : “ If I were to choose a Nobel laureate, it would be Mo Yan”.

Eating dumplings, “Jiaozi”, – three times a day. Life doesn´t get any better than that!?

Mo Yan is a story-teller telling about the tough life of poor farmers on the Chinese country side, which he himself has long experience of. He was born into a peasant family in a small village in Gaomi county in Shandong province in Eastern China. In his childhood he experienced bitter poverty and he worked in the fields from a young age.(source: Chinese writers on Writing, 2010, Trinity University Press). He has said in interviews that what made him start writing was that he wanted to eat dumplings and avoid hunger.

“When I started out, noble ambitions were the furthest thing from my mind. My motivation was quite primitive:I had a longing to eat good food.”

Someone had told him about a writer who could eat dumplings, jiaozi, three times a day. “That´s all I needed to know. Life doesn’t get any better than that. Why, not even the gods could do better. That´s when I made up my mind to become a writer some day.” (Source: Chinese writers on writing)

 

Dumplings – Jiaozi

Stories of the hard life in the Chinese countryside

Mo Yan is depicting Chinese farmers amid changing lifestyles and values, and telling realistic stories of life in the poor countryside, with real hunger and loneliness. He also see as his sources of inspiration the traditional tales and myths that storytellers around him were telling when he was growing up .

“While city kids were drinking milk and eating bread, pampered by their mothers, my friends and I were fighting to overcome hunger. We had no idea what sorts of delicious food the world had to offer. We survived on roots and bark, and were lucky to scrape together enough food from fields to make a humble meal. The trees in our village were gnawed bare by our rapacious teeth. While city kids were singing and dancing at school, I was out herding cows and sheep, and I got into the habit of talking to myself. Hunger and loneliness are themes I´ve repeatedly explored in my novels, and I consider them the source of my riches. Actually, I ve been blessed with an even more valuable source of riches: the stories and legends I heard during the long years I spent in the countryside.” (Source.: Chinese writers on Writing. Trinity University Press ,2010)

 

Picture of Chinese countryside home

Karin: Do the Chinese people know about Mo Yan, Jie? Have they read his books?

Jie: I can’t say many people have read his books (me, neither), but his name was known to many before the prize since one of his novels has been adapted into Zhang Yimou’s famous film Red Sorghum, Hong Gao Liang(红高粱). When I went to college, Mo Yan was one of my literature professor’s favorites, so from that perspective it proves that he’s quite popular among scholars and literature fans.

Karin: How will the prize influence the interest for literature in China? I think in Sweden (and in large parts of the world) it will open up the eyes for Chinese literature .

Jie: Chinese don’t seem to have reading as a hobby as much as the Swedish people, and this prize obviously helps to push the Chinese people to read more. In China’s money-oriented society, the status of literature is extremely low. So this is good news for Chinese literature. Mo Yan’s books are a great hit now in Chinese speaking places, (mainland, Taiwan and HK).

As for me or my peers, we have received too much information about the suffering of the Chinese people, especially those in rural places.  And as the next generation of our parents , who suffered so much, youngsters are more apolitical today, and are more interested in their inner pain than the physical suffering and sacrifice.

Karin: That is interesting, Mo Yan actually has said that after a while he realized that ”a life of eating jiaozi three times a day can still be accompanied by pain and suffering, and that this spiritual suffering is no less painful than physical hunger” (Source: Preface to the book, “Shifu, you´ll do anything for a laugh” ).

Stories about life in the big city Istanbul

Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk

 

Karin: It is interesting Jie, when I was going to Istanbul this summer, you suggested I should read a book about Istanbul by a Turkish Nobel Prize winner in literature, Orhan Pamuk (Nobel Prize 2006). I had never heard of him and could not find the book in Swedish book stores but I bought a copy of it Istanbul.

Jie: Wow! I’m really surprised about this! His works are much published in China and are seen everywhere in bookstores. In fact, I borrowed his books from the college library which holds several of them. Maybe because China was like Turkey, the glory of the times that was gone with the wind and we all know that we miss the good old days!  

Orhan Pamuk, which is about the same age as Mo Yan, is sort of opposite to him in the background and what he writes about. But they also have some similarities. Pamuk writes about his childhood in the very big city of Istanbul , where he was part of a rich family who lived together in a big house. He writes in a melancholic but also humoristic mode about the former imperial city, which was downgraded to a normal city when the country was transformed to a republic in the beginning of 20^th century . It makes you understand the importance of Istanbul in world history, and the grand heritage from the Bysantine and Ottoman empires. But also the sudden transformation to a non-relevant city, when the government was moved to the new capital city, Ankara.( Although nowadays the city is regaining in importance again, it is now one of the top tourist cities in the world. See our previous blog, August 2012)

“After the Ottoman empire collapsed, the world almost forgot that Istanbul existed. The city into which I was born was poorer, shabbier and more isolated than it had ever been before in its two-thousand year history.” …”Still, the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all bitter memories of the fallen empire…” But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past…” (Source: Istanbul, by Orhan Pamuk)

An editor has similarly described one of Mo Yan´s stories as “a desire for a lost world, a world that possessed a vitality and machismo lacking in the present.” (Source: Kirk Denton (ed), in “China – A traveler´s literary companion, 2008”.)

But unlike Mo Yan, who worked in the fields from early age, Orhan Pamuk spent his childhood mainly indoors in the family house and seldom was allowed to go out in the fresh air. “Sun fresh air, light. Our house was so dark sometimes stepping out was like opening curtains too abruptly on a summer´s day, the light would hurt my eyes”…”Accustomed as I was to the semidarkness of our bleak museum house, I preferred being indoors”. His description of his childhood, like Mo Yan´s,  depicts loneliness…

Old mansion in Istanbul

Karin: What do you think about Pamuk´s books Jie?  How would you compare them with Mo Yan´s ?

Jie: I think this is a typical ‘self-identity’ issue relevant to the critical changes of historical periods. The changes of Istanbul, as that of little Pamuk’s family, reflects the great historical changes of the certain times, which nourishes most of his works with its good old days. But Mo Yan’s books wouldn’t bring up such issues for it focuses more on nowadays. And I think watching some of Zhang Yimou’s early films would help to understand Mo Yan’s books better because they both concentrate on the fate of common people.