[xmca] Continuation: Chinese novelist and Chinese politics: Mo Yan

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

I mistakenly responded to one of David's notes to him when the original was
to the whole group. For those interested in the
novel/politics discussion thread, it follows below.

Note that David's book is available on Amazon.
mike

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 2:22 PM, kellogg <kellogg59@hanmail.net> wrote:

>   Mike:
>
>
>
> Well, maybe I misunderstood. I was only twenty-four at the time, and I had
> studied Chinese for only three years and then dropped out to see the world.
> So let me give you a kind of potted history of modern Chinese lit, courtesy
> of Fang.
>
>
>
> Fang says that modern Chinese novels really date from the May Fourth
> period (that is, the big demonstrations against the Treaty of Versailles
> that eventually led to a national interest in Russian literature and the
> founding of the Communist Party). We know that French realist novels (Zola)
> became available in the twenties. "Baogao" (reporting or documentary)
> literature became briefly popular (Elizabeth Gaskell was translated into
> Chinese!), and Lu Xun began to write short stories that were very clearly
> Russian inspired (e.g. "Diary of a Madman"). This was the literature of the
> anti-Japanese war and the Civil War, and when people criticize Mo Yan for
> copying out the "Talks at the Yenan Forum" they are really criticizing this
> period, because what Mao said at Yenan was essentially what all modern
> Chinese writers of the time believed:
>
>
>
> Fierce browed, I coolly defy a thousand pointing fingers
>
> Head bowed, like a willing ox I serve the children
>
>
>
> (You can see that some of the immense power of these lines by Lu Xun,
> which Mao quotes in the Yenan Forum talks, comes from the translation--the
> rhyming "fierce browed--head bowed" exists in English but not in Chinese.
> But Chinese has other resources, including tonal pattern, and to dispense
> with rhyme in Chinese is very different from dispensing witih rhyme in
> English. That's what I mean when I say that some of the freshness of the
> writing is from translation; when Mo Yan writes of a woman's nipples
> peeping up like hedgehogs the effect is rather coarse, rustic, and vulgar
> in Chinese, but not in English.)
>
>
>
> The period after the Civil War was not particularly fruitful for novels,
> and the usual Western view of this of course centres on the ideological
> domination of the Communist Party. I think what really happened was that
> the whole country was focussed on mass literacy, and so a lot of the
> literature this time was in the form of comic books and pamphlets. The
> Cultural Revolution really broke out over an opera, not over a book, and
> when my wife was growing up the main source of literature was opera (and
> translations of Gorky, Gogol, Victor Hugo, and Zola). My mother-in-law
> learned to read and write from these.
>
>
>
> In some ways, it was precisely the non-political literature that was the
> most political. The "Scar" literature was a literary reflection of the fall
> of the Gang of Four. People like Dai Houying were mostly writing melodramas
> about the sufferings of the "zhiqing", the educated youth (a high school
> education is meant!) who were sent to the countryside to be peasants and
> who struggled and eventually succeeed to get back to being city people
> again.
>
>
>
> So the lit that I read in the eighties was not political to me. It
> was a kind of reaction to that. For example, Zhang Xianliang, like Dai
> Houying, wrote about "zhiqing" who got married while they were in the
> countryside and found it difficult to get divorced so they could move back
> to Shanghai or Beijing. But Zhang actually made the wives who stayed behind
> the heroines of this books; life in the countryside was treated as a kind
> of life, not a tragedy from which sensitive youths had to spend their whole
> lives recovering. That was the attraction of the "Xibei Feng", including
> the films of the fifth generation, films like "Red Sorghum" "King of
> Children", "The Old Well", "Qiu Ju", "Ju Dou", "The Horse Thief" all of
> which were made in the Xi'an studio under Wu Tianming. Chen Kaige, Zhang
> Yimou, and Tian Zhuangzhang got their start there, and Mo Yan's books first
> came to international attention through these films.
>
>
>
> ("Red Sorghum" sounds exotic in English, but of course in Chinese it's a
> wild grass, an inedible famine food, only good for making wine. That's what
> I mean when I say that the lit changes in translation.)
>
>
>
> To me, "King of Children" (Haizi Wang, by Ah Cheng) was the best of the
> best. It was a film which completely changed my life when I first saw it in
> China, and I think that my whole interest in child development really dates
> from then (I started seriously studying Vygotsky shortly afterwards, when I
> left China after 1989 to do graduate studies in England). I think it was
> the very first Chinese film to enter the Cannes film festival, and this
> caused a big stir. But most people and the government were quite
> suspicious; it looked like a movie about very ugly looking poor people in
> the countryside who couldn't really read or write and did rather silly
> things, and so the general feeling is that foreigners liked this film and
> others like it because they wanted to laugh at China's misery. When "King
> of Children" did not win the Golden Palm, the China Daily wrote that it had
> won "The Golden Alarm Clock" for the most boring film at Cannes (a film
> director I knew actually believed that there was such a prize and wanted to
> know how much money was involved!).
>
>
>
> China feels like a big country surrounded by very small countries, and I
> think that for many years people just didn't understand that only a very
> few foreigners took an interest in Chinese films and Chinese literature.
> Wang Meng, who was a great novelist (and also Minister of Culture during
> the 1989 events) wrote a wonderful short story that really explained this
> to people--it was about a family which decided to start eating Western
> breakfasts in the hope of becoming more like Westerners. I don't think
> anybody really got the joke; you would have to write a story about a
> Western family suddenly deciding to eat a Chinese breakfast, and it
> wouldn't have at all the same effect (see, THAT'S what gets lost in
> translation).
>
>
>
> The problem, it seems to me, is that a lot of what I read about  Chinese
> art in the Western media is similar; it is written almost entirely from
> the point of view of whether the artist--Zhang Yimou, or Ai Weiwi or Mo
> Yan--approves or disapproves of something called Western democracy. That
> is--are they writing about us? And what do they think of us? Are they
> laughing at us or are they suitably admiring of our values? I think that
> what people don't like about Mo Yan is that he tells us that Chinese people
> are not thinking about us at all.
>
>
>
> (Of course, that's not strictly true, because some Chinese have learned
> that the foreigners who take an interest in Chinese films, books and
> paintings are few, but in general pretty rich!)
>
>
>
> Oh, the book. It's available on amazon; I think there's a copy for a penny!
>
>
>
>
> http://www.amazon.com/In-Search-China-Kolowalu-Books/dp/0824814037/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360102601&sr=8-1&keywords=In+Search+of+China+%2B+David+Kellogg
>
>
>
> I agree, incidentally, with the second, unfavorable, review.
>
>
>
> dk
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --------- 원본 메일 ---------
>
> *보낸사람*: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> *받는사람* : kellogg <kellogg59@hanmail.net>
> *날짜*: 2013년 2월 05일 화요일, 13시 31분 51초 +0900
> *제목*: Re: [xmca] Chinese novelist and Chines politics: Mo Yan
> That is AMAZING, David.
>
>  I was caught by your idea that anti-scar writers were "marketing to
> foreigners" which I think I misunderstood (and maybe misunderstand!).
> Later you talk about their writing in some sense being "better" in
> translation. And Chinese not being interested. And them being like
> Gogol and Doestoevsky. And that they describe reality with replicable
> examples of "the same behavior" appearing in recognizable variants. THAT
> is a lot of think about!
>
>  Getting to the painting as well ia too far a stretch for me without a
> whole
> lot better zoped than we have on xmca!!
>
>  How do we find a copy of your book and your translation?
>
>  mike
>
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, Feb 4, 2013 at 7:56 PM, kellogg <kellogg59@hanmail.net<http://mail2.daum.net/hanmail/mail/MailComposeFrame.daum?TO=kellogg59@hanmail.net>
> > wrote:
>
>>     Oh, dear! How embarrassing. I'm afraid I haven't read anything of Mo
>> Yan since Hong Gaoliang (Red Sorghum). So Mike and Sheila are just way
>> ahead of me on this. All I can do is tell "when I..." stories, and that's
>> not going to impress Mike.
>>
>>
>>
>> When I arrived in China in the early eighties, people were still reading
>> "Scar" lit, that is, books by Chinese intellectuals who went down to the
>> countryside "to learn from the poor and middle peasants" during
>> the cultural revolution and found that they couldn't return to the cities
>> very easily when the cultural revolution were over. They were bitter and
>> angry, and they mostly wrote about how badly treated they were.
>>
>>
>>
>> Then there were people like Zhang Xianliang, Ah Cheng, Jia Pingwa and Mo
>> Yan, who wrote what I would call anti-scar lit--books about the people left
>> behind, full of recognizably ugly people, hard lives, and black, black
>> humor. People said it was the Chinese equivalent of "magical realism" but I
>> think that was mostly a marketing technique for foreigners; I thought it
>> was much more like late nineteenth century Russian literature: Gogol and
>> Dostoevsky and of course our great master Lu Xun. I was in my twenties and
>> hitch-hiking around a lot of the places where this stuff was being written,
>> and it was the literature I loved. But many Chinese, including my close
>> friends and of course the Chinese government, were rather hostile to it,
>> both because it was so well-received abroad and because it had so little in
>> common with the kind of thing people wanted to read about in China.
>>
>>
>>
>> In my very small way, I was part of it too. I translated stories by my
>> friends Liu Fei and Tang Min (whose father was a revolutionary hero from
>> Shandong, the same area as Mo Yan). One of the stories ("The Mysterious
>> Miasma of Taimu Shan", which is in my first book "In Search of China") was
>> very close to the one you read about in Garlic Ballads, but it was about
>> jasmine tea rather than garlic and the hero is pressed to death in a rice
>> threshing machine and then reincarnated as a cow. Unfortunately, Tang Min
>> didn't change the names at all, so the relatives of the villain sued her
>> and she went to prison for a year. I had to leave China for a while too.
>>
>>
>>
>> Looking back on it, I think Mo Yan is absolutely right. We should have
>> changed the names, both to protect the real people left behind and to
>> achieve the kind of historical indeterminacy that Mo Yan is so good at.
>> It's true that some of the actual freshness of the writing is caused by
>> translation, but that's hardly his fault, nor is it limited to Chinese
>> writing (I like to think that some of Tang Min's brilliance was my
>> translation, but I can only sustain this illusion by not re-reading what I
>> wrote).
>>
>>
>>
>> I think that a lot of the complaints about Mo Yan from westerners are
>> simply reflections of the fact that the cold war is over, and
>> bourgeois intellectuals everywhere seem to believe that just because THEIR
>> ideology is the only one left standing we are living in some kind of a
>> post-ideological era. Everybody in China knows there is a "dissident
>> industry", and that it's easy to get money from gullible foreigners by
>> mouthing the phrases they like to use. Nobody takes that sort of thing
>> seriously, least of all the people who actually do it.
>>
>>
>>
>> Now the game is to see how close you can actually get to telling your
>> patrons right to their faces that you are milking them without cutting off
>> the dairy supply. Ai Weiwei has gotten pretty close, but not as close as
>> some painters I know.
>>
>>
>>
>> David Kellogg
>>
>> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --------- 원본 메일 ---------
>>
>> *보낸사람*: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com<http://mail2.daum.net/hanmail/mail/MailComposeFrame.daum?TO=lchcmike@gmail.com>
>> >
>> *받는사람* : "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu<http://mail2.daum.net/hanmail/mail/MailComposeFrame.daum?TO=xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> >
>> *날짜*: 2013년 2월 05일 화요일, 09시 20분 53초 +0900
>> *제목*: [xmca] Chines novelist and Chines politics: Mo Yan
>> David Ke-- Serendipitously, my wife and I have been reading another novel
>> by Mo Yan and this review discussing the relationship of his work to
>> politics came up in the NY Times.
>>
>> What do you think of his work and the artist/politics issues the review
>> brings up? The book we are reading, *The Garlic Ballads,* certainly paints
>> a grim picture.
>>
>> mike
>>
>>
>> > ‘Sandalwood Death’ and ‘Pow!’ by Mo Yan
>> > <
>> http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=InCMR7g4BCKC2wiZPkcVUpiQ8PLA0Fte&user_id=bd31502e6eb851a9261827fdfbbcdf6d&email_type=eta&task_id=1360022377834687>
>> By
>> > IAN BURUMA
>> >
>> > The novels “Sandalwood Death” and “Pow!,” by Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan,
>> > combine literary imagination with a peasant spirit.
>> > Or, copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://nyti.ms/14viz0e
>> > <
>> http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=InCMR7g4BCKC2wiZPkcVUpiQ8PLA0Fte&user_id=bd31502e6eb851a9261827fdfbbcdf6d&email_type=eta&task_id=1360022377834687>
>> To
>> > ensure delivery to your inbox, please add nytdirect@nytimes.com<http://mail2.daum.net/hanmail/mail/MailComposeFrame.daum?TO=nytdirect@nytimes.com>to your
>> > address book. Advertisement
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