The full text of Mo Yan’s speech: The Storyteller

The full text of Mo Yan’s speech: The Storyteller (a 45-minute speech was given at the Swedish Academy at about 30 a.m. on December 8, Beijing time) Dear Rui...

Dear academicians of the Swedish Academy, ladies and gentlemen:

Through TV or the Internet, I think everyone here has more or less understanding of the distant Northeast Gaomi Township. You may have seen my ninety-year-old father, my brothers, sisters, my wife, and my one-year-old and four-month-old granddaughter. But there is one person I miss the most right now, my mother, who you will never be able to see.

After I won the award, many people shared my glory, but my mother could not share it.

My mother was born in 1922 and died in 1994. Her ashes were buried in the peach garden east of the village. Last year we had to move her grave further away from the village because a railway was going to go through there. After digging the grave, we saw that the coffin had rotted and the mother's bones had been mixed with the soil. We had to symbolically dig up some soil and move it to a new grave. From that moment on, I felt that my mother was a part of the earth, and what I said while standing on the earth was my talk to my mother.

I am my mother's youngest child. One of the earliest things I remember is carrying the only thermos bottle at home to the public cafeteria to open the water. Because I was hungry and weak, I accidentally broke the thermos bottle. I was so frightened that I got into the haystack and didn't dare to come out for a whole day. In the evening, I heard my mother calling my baby name. I emerged from the haystack, expecting to be beaten and scolded, but my mother neither beat me nor scolded me. She just stroked my head and let out a long sigh.

One of the most painful things in my memory is following my mother to pick up wheat in the collective field. The watchers came and the pickers ran away. My mother had small feet and could not run fast. When she was caught, the tall watcher slapped her in the face. She staggered and fell to the ground. The watchman confiscated the ears of wheat we picked up, whistled and walked away. My mother was sitting on the ground with blood coming from the corner of her mouth, with a look of despair on her face that I will never forget. Many years later, when the man guarding the wheat field, now a gray-haired old man, met me in the market, I rushed up to avenge him. My mother stopped me and said calmly to me: Son, the man who beat me is not the same person as this old man.

One of the things I remember most is that at noon during the Mid-Autumn Festival, our family had a rare meal of dumplings, with only one bowl per person. While we were eating dumplings, an old man begging came to our door. I picked up half a bowl of dried sweet potatoes and sent him away, but he said angrily: I am an old man. You eat dumplings, but you let me eat dried sweet potatoes. How did you grow in your heart? I said angrily: We can't eat dumplings only a few times a year. Each person has a small bowl and can't even eat half full. It's good to give you dried sweet potatoes. If you want it, get out! My mother scolded me, then picked up her half bowl of dumplings and poured them into the old man's bowl.

The thing I regret most is that I followed my mother to sell cabbage, and intentionally or unintentionally paid an old man who was buying cabbage an extra cent. After calculating the money, I went to school. When I came home from school, I saw my mother, who rarely shed tears, burst into tears. My mother didn't scold me, she just said softly: Son, you have embarrassed your mother.

When I was a teenager, my mother suffered from severe lung disease, hunger, pain, and fatigue, which put our family in a difficult situation, with no light and hope. I had a strong sense of foreboding, thinking that my mother would commit suicide at any time. Whenever I come back from work and enter the gate, I call out to my mother. When I hear her response, I feel a stone fall in my heart. If I don't hear her response for a while, I will be frightened and run to the wing and mill to look for her. Once, I searched all the rooms but could not find my mother. I sat in the yard and cried. At this time, my mother walked in from outside carrying a bundle of firewood. She was unhappy with my crying, but I couldn't express my concerns to her. My mother saw through my thoughts and said: Son, don't worry, even though I have no fun living, I will not go as long as the King of Hell doesn't call me.

I was born ugly, and many people in the village laughed at me to my face. Some of my classmates in school even beat me for it. I went home and cried bitterly, and my mother said to me: Son, you are not ugly. You don’t lack a nose or an eye, and your limbs are sound. What’s so ugly about you? Moreover, as long as you are kind-hearted and do good deeds, even an ugly person can become beautiful. Later when I entered the city, some well-educated people still mocked my appearance behind my back or even in front of me. I remembered my mother's words and apologized to them calmly. My mother was illiterate but had great respect for literate people.

Our family lives in a difficult situation and often has too much to eat, but as long as I ask her to buy books or stationery, she will always satisfy me. She is a hard-working person and hates lazy children, but she never criticized me as long as I delayed my work because of reading. For a while, a storyteller came to the market. I secretly ran to listen to books and forgot about the tasks she assigned me. For this, my mother criticized me. At night, when she was rushing to make cotton-padded clothes for her family under a small oil lamp, I couldn't help but retell to her the stories I heard from the storytellers during the day. When I got up, she was a little impatient, because in her mind, storytellers were all glib and dishonest people, and nothing good came out of their mouths. But the stories I retold gradually attracted her. From now on, every market day, she would no longer arrange work for me and would allow me to go to the market to listen to books. To repay my mother's kindness and to show off my memory to her. I will tell her the stories I heard during the day vividly.

Soon, I was no longer satisfied with retelling the stories told by the storyteller. I kept adding fuel to the fire during the retelling process. I would do what my mother wanted, make up some plot points, and sometimes even change the ending of the story. My audience is not just my mother, but also my sister, my aunt, and my grandma. They have all become my audience. After listening to my story, my mother would sometimes say worriedly, as if to me, or to herself, "Who will you be when you grow up?" Do you have to rely on being a talker to make a living? I understand my mother's concerns, because in the village, a poor-talking child is annoying and sometimes brings trouble to himself and his family.

The child I wrote in the novel "Cow" who was hated by the villagers because he talked too much has a shadow of my childhood. My mother often reminds me to talk less. She hopes that I can be a taciturn, stable and generous child. But in my case, I showed a strong speaking ability and a great desire to speak, which was undoubtedly a great danger. However, my story-telling ability also brought her pleasure, which made her fall into a deep contradiction.

As the saying goes, a person's status is easy to change, but his nature is hard to change. Despite the earnest teachings of my parents, I have not changed my nature of liking to talk, which makes my name Mo Yan very much like a mockery of myself. I dropped out of elementary school before I graduated. Because I was too young and frail to do heavy work, I had no choice but to graze cattle and sheep on the grassy plains. When I led the cows and sheep past the school gate and saw my former classmates fighting and making trouble on campus, my heart was filled with sadness, and I deeply felt the pain of a person leaving the group. After arriving at the deserted beach, I let the cattle and sheep go and let them graze on their own. The sky is as blue as the sea, the grass stretches as far as the eye can see, there is no human figure around, no human voice, only birds chirping in the sky. I feel very lonely, lonely and empty inside. Sometimes, I lie on the grass and look at the white clouds floating lazily in the sky, and many inexplicable fantasies come to my mind. There are many stories about foxes turning into beautiful women in our area. I imagined that a fox would turn into a beautiful woman to accompany me while tending the cattle, but she never appeared. But one time when a fiery red fox jumped out of the grass in front of me, I was so frightened that I squatted on the ground. The fox disappeared and I was still shaking. Sometimes I would squat next to the cow and look at the blue cow's eyes and my reflection in the cow's eyes. Sometimes I imitate their calls and try to talk to the birds in the sky, and sometimes I tell my heart to a tree. But the birds ignored me, and the trees ignored me. Many years later, when I became a novelist, many of the fantasies I had back then were written into novels.

Many people praise me for my rich imagination, and some literary lovers hope that I can tell them the secret to cultivating their imagination. To this, I can only smile bitterly. As the Chinese sage Lao Tzu said: Fortune lies in the presence of misfortune, and misfortune lies in the presence of blessing. I dropped out of school in my childhood and suffered from hunger, loneliness, and no books to read. However, like our predecessor writer Shen Congwen, I started reading the big book of social life early. The aforementioned listening to the stories of writers in the market was just one page of this big book. After dropping out of school, I mingled among adults and began a long career of reading by ear.

More than two hundred years ago, there was a great storyteller named Pu Songling in my hometown. Many people in our village, including me, are his descendants. I listened to many stories of gods and ghosts, historical legends, and anecdotes in the fields where we worked collectively, in the cowsheds and stables of the production team, on the hot bed of my grandparents, and even on the rickety oxcart. These stories were all closely connected with the local natural environment and family history, and gave me a strong sense of reality. I never dreamed that one day these things would become my writing materials. I was just a child obsessed with stories and listened to people's stories with fascination. At that time, I was an absolute theist, and I believed that everything had spirituality. I stand in awe when I see a big tree. When I see a bird, I will catch it and it will transform into a human being at any time. When I meet a stranger, I will also suspect that he has transformed into an animal. Whenever I came home from the recording room of the production team at night, boundless fear would surround me. In order to be brave, I would run and sing loudly. At that time, I was in the stage of changing my voice. My voice was hoarse and my tone was unpleasant. My singing was a kind of torture to my fellow villagers.

I have lived in my hometown for twenty-one years. During this period, the farthest thing from home was taking a train to Qingdao. I almost got lost among the huge logs in the lumber factory. So when my mother asked me what scenery I saw when I went to Qingdao, I told her in frustration: I saw nothing, only piles of wood. But it was this trip to Qingdao that gave me a strong desire to leave my hometown and see the world outside.

In February 1976, I was drafted into the army, carrying four "Compendiums of General History of China" that my mother bought for me by selling her wedding jewelry, and walked out of Northeast Gaomi Township, a place that I both loved and hated. An important period of my life began. I must admit that without the tremendous development and progress of Chinese society over the years, and without reform and opening up, there would not be a writer like me. In the boring life of the military camp, I ushered in the ideological liberation and literary craze of the 1980s. From a child who listened to stories with my ears and told them with my mouth, I began to try to tell stories with my pen. The road was not smooth at the beginning. I did not realize that my more than 20 years of rural life experience was a rich mine for literature. At that time, I thought that literature was about writing about good people and good deeds, or heroes and models. Therefore, although I published several works, their literary value was very low.

In the autumn of 1984, I was admitted to the Literature Department of the People's Liberation Army Art Academy. Under the inspiration and guidance of my mentor, the famous writer Xu Huaizhong, I wrote a number of short and medium-sized novels such as "Autumn Water", "Dry River", "Transparent Carrot", and "Red Sorghum". In the novel "Autumn Water", the word Northeast Gaomi Township appeared for the first time. From then on, just like a wandering farmer who had a piece of land, a literary vagabond like me finally had a place where I could settle down and live.

I must admit that in the process of creating my literary territory, Gaomi Northeast Township, the American William Faulkner and the Colombian García Márquez gave me important inspiration. I did not read them seriously, but their pioneering heroic spirit inspired me and made me understand that a writer must have a place of his own. A person should be humble and give in in daily life, but in literary creation, he must be bossy and arbitrary. I followed these two masters for two years, and then I realized that I had to escape from them as soon as possible. I wrote in an article: They are two scorching furnaces, and I am an ice cube. If I get too close to them, they will evaporate. According to my experience, the reason why a writer is influenced by a certain writer is basically because of the similarity in the souls of the influencer and the person being influenced. As the saying goes, there is a clear understanding between the two minds. Therefore, although I did not read their books very well, after reading only a few pages, I understood what they did and how they did it, and then I also understood what I should do and how I should do it.

Frankly speaking, when I was telling the story, I had no idea who would be my audience. Maybe my audience would be people like my mother, or maybe my audience would be myself. My own story started out as my personal experience, such as the beaten child in "Dry River", or the child who remained silent from beginning to end in "Transparent Carrot". I did get a beating from my mother for doing something wrong, and I did pull the bellows for the master blacksmith on a bridge construction site. Of course, no matter how unique a personal experience is, it cannot be written intact into a novel. Novels must be fictional and imagined. Many friends say that "Transparent Carrot" is my best novel. I do not refute this, nor do I agree with it. But I think "Transparent Carrot" is the most symbolic and meaningful of my works. The dark child with superhuman ability to endure pain and superhuman feeling ability is the soul of all my novels. Although I wrote many characters in subsequent novels, there is no character that is closer to my soul than him. In other words, among the characters created by a writer, there is always one leader. This silent child is the leader. He does not say a word but effectively leads all kinds of characters. On the stage of Northeast Gaomi Township, perform to your heart's content.

Your own story is always limited. After telling your own story, you must tell the stories of others. So, the stories of my relatives, the stories of my villagers, and the stories of my ancestors that I heard from the elders were like soldiers who heard the muster order. Welling up from the depths of my memory. They looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to write about them. My grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, wife, and daughter all appeared in my works. There are also many folks from Gaomi Northeast Township who have also appeared in my novels. Of course, I gave them a literary treatment, making them transcend themselves and become characters in literature.

My aunt appears in my latest novel "Frog". Because I won the Nobel Prize, many reporters came to her home to interview her. At first she answered questions patiently, but soon she became so annoyed that she ran to her son's house in the county to hide. My aunt was indeed my model when I wrote "Frog", but the aunt in the novel is very different from the aunt in real life. The aunt in the novel is domineering and almost like a female gangster at times. In reality, the aunt is kind and cheerful, and is a standard good wife and mother. The aunt in reality lived a happy life in her later years, but the aunt in the novel suffered from insomnia in her later years due to the great pain of her soul. She wore a black robe and wandered in the dark night like a ghost. I am grateful to my aunt for her tolerance and she was not angry because I wrote her like that in the novel; I also admire my aunt's wisdom because she correctly understood the complex relationship between the characters in the novel and the characters in reality.

After my mother passed away, I was so sad that I decided to write a book dedicated to her. This is the book "Big Breasts and Big Butts". Because I was confident and full of emotion, I wrote the first draft of this 500,000-word novel in only 83 days. In the book "Big Breasts and Wide Buttocks", I unscrupulously used materials related to my mother's personal experience, but the mother's emotional experience in the book is fictional or based on the experiences of many mothers in Northeast Gaomi Township. In the preface of this book, I wrote words dedicated to my mother’s spirit in heaven, but this book is actually dedicated to mothers all over the world. This is my arrogant ambition, just like my hope to write the small Northeast Gaomi Township into a microcosm of China and the world.

Every writer's creative process is unique, and the conception and inspiration for each of my books are also different. Some novels originate from dreams, such as "The Transparent Carrot", while others originate from events that occur in real life. But whether it originates from a dream or from reality, it must be combined with personal experience in the end before it can become a literary work with a distinctive personality, using countless vivid details to create typical characters, with rich and colorful language, and an ingenious structure.

It is important to mention that in "The Song of Garlic Sprout in Heaven", I let a real storyteller appear and play a very important role in the book. I regret using the storyteller's real name, but of course all of his actions in the book are fictitious. This phenomenon has occurred many times in my writing. At the beginning of writing, I used their real names, hoping to gain a sense of intimacy. However, after the completion of the work, I wanted to change their names but found it impossible. Therefore, there have also been cases where people with the same names as the characters in my novels came to my father to vent their dissatisfaction. My father apologized on my behalf but told them not to take it seriously. My father said in the first sentence of "Red Sorghum" that I don't care about my father, a bandit, so what do you care about? &n bsp;

The biggest problem I face when writing novels such as "The Song of Garlic Sprouts in Heaven" that are close to social reality is not whether I dare to criticize the dark phenomena in society, but that the burning passion and anger will make politics overwhelm the text, turning this novel into a documentary report of social events.

Novelists are people in society, and they naturally have their own positions and opinions. However, when writing, novelists must stand on the standpoint of human beings and write about all people as human beings. Only in this way can literature initiate events but transcend events, and care about politics but be greater than politics. Maybe it's because I have experienced a long and difficult life, which gives me a deeper understanding of human nature. I know what true bravery is, and I also understand what true compassion is. I know that there is a hazy area in everyone's heart where it is difficult to accurately define right and wrong, good and evil. And this area is a vast world for writers to display their talents. As long as a work accurately and vividly describes this twilight zone full of contradictions, it will inevitably transcend politics and possess the quality of excellent literature. It's annoying to talk endlessly about my works, but my life is closely connected with my works. If I don't talk about my works, I feel unable to talk about it, so I have to ask for your forgiveness.

In my early works, I was hidden behind the text as a modern storyteller. But starting with this novel, I finally jumped from the background to the front. If my early works were talking to myself without readers, starting from this book, I feel like I am standing in a square, facing many audiences, telling vividly. This is the tradition of world novels, and it is also the tradition of Chinese novels. I have also actively learned from Western modern novels, and I have also played with various narrative techniques, but I finally returned to tradition. Of course, this return is not a permanent return. "Sandalwood Punishment" and subsequent novels are hybrid texts that inherit the tradition of Chinese classical novels and draw on Western novel techniques. The so-called innovations in the field of novels are basically the product of this mixture. It is not only a mixture of domestic literary tradition and foreign novel techniques, but also a mixture of novels and other artistic categories, just like "Sandalwood Punishment" is a mixture of folk opera, just like some of my early novels drew nutrients from art, music, and even acrobatics.

Finally, please allow me to talk about my book "Life and Death Fatigue". The title of this book comes from a Buddhist classic. As far as I know, translators from various countries have a headache in translating this title. I have not studied the Buddhist classics in depth, and my understanding of Buddhism is naturally very superficial. The reason why I chose this topic is because I feel that many of the basic ideas of Buddhism are the true cosmic consciousness. In the eyes of Buddhism, there is no doubt that many disputes in the human world exist. The world under such a lofty perspective seems very sad. Of course, I did not write this book as a sermon. What I write about is human destiny and human emotions, human limitations and human tolerance, as well as the efforts and sacrifices made by people to pursue happiness and adhere to their own beliefs. The blue face in the novel who fights against the trend of the times by himself is a real hero in my mind. The prototype of this character is a farmer from our neighboring village. When I was a child, I often saw him pushing this creaking wooden wheel cart passing by the road in front of my house. The man pulling his cart was a lame donkey, and the one holding the donkey for him was his little-footed wife. This strange labor combination seemed so weird and out of place in the collectivized society at that time. In the eyes of us children, we also regarded them as clowns who went against the historical trend. Whenever they passed by on the street, we would throw stones at them with righteous indignation. Many years later, when I picked up the pen to write, this character and this picture appeared in my mind. I knew that one day I would write a book about him, and sooner or later I would tell his story to the world. But it was not until 2005, when I saw the mural of Six Paths of Reincarnation in a temple, that I understood the correct way to tell this story.

After I won the Nobel Prize for Literature, some controversy arose. At first, I thought the object of controversy was me. Gradually, I felt that the object of controversy was someone who had nothing to do with me. I am like a theatergoer watching the performances of all the people. I saw flowers falling on the winner's body, stones thrown at him, and sewage splashed on him. I was afraid that he would be defeated, but he smiled and emerged from the flowers and stones, wiped off the dirty water on his body, stood aside calmly, and said to everyone: For a writer, the best way to speak is through writing. Everything I should say is written into my works. The words I say with my mouth are scattered by the wind, but the words I write with my pen will never be erased. I hope you can read my book patiently. Of course, I am not qualified to force you to read my book. Even if you read my book, I do not expect you to change your opinion of me. There is no writer in the world who can make all readers like him. Even more so in times like today.

Although I don’t want to say anything, I must speak on an occasion like today, so I will simply say a few more words. In the 1960s, when I was in the third grade of elementary school, the school organized us to visit an exhibition on suffering, and we cried loudly under the guidance of the teacher. In order to let the teacher see my performance, I couldn't bear to wipe the tears from my face. I saw several students quietly wiping saliva on their faces to pretend to be crying. I also saw among the classmates who were really crying and pretending to cry. There was a classmate who didn't have a tear on his face, made no sound in his mouth, and didn't cover his face with his hands. He looked at us with his eyes wide open, showing surprise or confusion. Afterwards, I reported this classmate’s behavior to the teacher. For this reason, the school gave this student a warning. Many years later, when I confessed to my teacher for informing, the teacher said that more than a dozen classmates came to him that day to talk about it. This classmate passed away more than ten years ago. Whenever I think of him, I feel deeply guilty. This incident made me realize a truth, that is: when everyone is crying, some people should be allowed not to cry. When crying becomes a performance, some people should be allowed not to cry.

Let me tell you another story: more than thirty years ago, I was still working in the army. One night, I was reading in the office. An old officer opened the door and came in. He glanced at the seat opposite me and said to himself: Oh, no one? I immediately stood up and said loudly, am I not a human being? The old officer turned red when I pushed him, and retreated in embarrassment. I was complacent about this for a long time, thinking that I was a heroic fighter, but many years later, I felt deeply guilty about it.

Please allow me to tell you one last story, which my grandfather told me many years ago. Eight bricklayers who went out to work took shelter in a ruined temple to avoid a heavy rain. The thunder outside came in waves, and fireballs rolled around outside the temple gate. There seemed to be a dragon's roar in the air. Everyone was trembling with fear, and their faces were earth-colored. One person said: Among the eight of us, one of us must have done something bad that is harmful to nature. Whoever has done something bad should just walk out of the temple and accept the punishment, so as not to implicate good people. Naturally no one wants to go out. Someone else suggested: Since no one wants to go out, let's throw our straw hats out. Whoever's straw hat is scratched out of the temple door means that he has done something bad, and then he should be asked to go out and receive punishment. So everyone threw their straw hats outside the temple gate. Seven people's straw hats were scraped back into the temple, and only one person's straw hat was rolled out. Everyone urged the man to go out to be punished, but he naturally refused to go out, so they picked him up and threw him out of the temple gate. I think everyone has guessed the ending of the story. The man was thrown out of the temple gate, and the ruined temple collapsed.