2012 Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech?
Respected members of the Swedish Academy, ladies and gentlemen:
Through television or the Internet, I think all of you here, to the distant northeast township of Gao Mi, have already had more or less understanding, you may have seen my ninety year old father, saw my brother and sister my wife and daughter and my one year and four months of granddaughter. But there is one person I miss the most at this moment, my mother, that you will never get to see. When I won the award, many people shared in my glory, but my mother could not.
My mother was born in 1922 and died in 1994, and her ashes, buried in a peach orchard east of the village. Last year, a railroad was going through there and we had to move her grave further away from the village. Upon opening the grave, we saw that the coffin had rotted and the bones of our mother had become mixed with the soil. We had to symbolically dig up some soil and move it to the new grave, and it was from that moment that I felt that my mother was part of the earth, and that what I stood on the earth to say was to say to my mother.
I was my mother's youngest child.
One of the earliest things I remember is carrying the only handful of hot water bottles in the house to the public **** canteen to turn on the water. Because of my hunger and weakness, I broke the hot water bottle by mistake, and I was so scared that I burrowed into a haystack and didn't dare to come out for a day. In the evening, I heard my mother calling me by my maiden name. I burrowed out of the haystack expecting to be beaten and scolded, but my mother did not beat me or scold me, but only stroked my head and let out a long sigh under her breath.
One of the most painful things I remember is going with my mother to the collective field to collect ears of wheat. The guards of the wheat field came, and those who were collecting ears of wheat fled, and my mother, who was small-footed and couldn't run fast enough, was caught, and the tall guard slapped her. The tall guard slapped her and she fell to the ground, shaking her body. The guards confiscated the ears of wheat we had picked up and whistled as they left. My mother, bleeding from the corners of her mouth, sat down on the ground with a look of despair on her face that I will never forget. Years later, when the man who had guarded the wheat field became a gray-haired old man and met me at the market, I rushed up to take revenge on him, but my mother held me back, and said calmly to me, "Son, the man who hit me is not the same person as this old man. "
One of the things I remember most vividly is that at noon one Mid-Autumn Festival, our family had a rare meal of dumplings, with only one bowl per person. Just as we were eating dumplings, a begging old man, came to our door, I picked up half a bowl of dried sweet potatoes to dismiss him, but he said indignantly: "I am an old man, you eat dumplings, but let me eat dried sweet potatoes, how do your hearts grow?" I said angrily, "We don't eat dumplings more than a couple times a year, and we can't even eat half full with a small bowl each! It's good enough to give you dried sweet potatoes; take them or leave them!" My mother reprimanded me, then picked up her half-bowl of dumplings and poured it into the old man's bowl.
One of my greatest regrets is that when I followed my mother to sell cabbages, I intentionally or unintentionally overpaid an old man who was buying cabbages. After counting the money I went to school. When I came home from school, I saw my mother, who seldom shed tears, in tears. My mother didn't scold me, but just said softly, "Son, you have disgraced my mother."
When I was a teenager, my mother suffered from a serious lung disease, and hunger, sickness, and toil left our family in dire straits, with no light or hope in sight. I developed a strong sense of foreboding, thinking that my mother would take her own life at any moment. Whenever I returned from labor, I would call out to my mother as soon as I entered the front door, and only when I heard her response did I feel that a stone had fallen to the ground. If I didn't hear her response, I would run to the kitchen and the mill in fear of my life. Once, having searched all the rooms without seeing my mother, I sat down in the yard and cried, when my mother came in from outside with a bundle of firewood on her back. She was upset at my crying, but I couldn't voice my concerns to her. My mother read my mind and said, "My son, don't worry, even though I don't have the slightest pleasure in living, as long as Hades doesn't call me, I won't go."
I was born ugly, many people in the village laughed at me to my face, and a few overbearing classmates at school even beat me up 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 eyes, and you have sound limbs, so where is your ugliness? And, as long as you have a kind heart and do more good deeds, even if you are ugly, you can become beautiful." Later, when I entered the city, there were some very educated people who still mocked my looks behind my back or even to my face, and remembering my mother's words, I apologized to them calmly.
My mother could not read or write, but had great respect for those who could. Our family had a difficult life and often ate without food, but whenever I asked her for books and stationery, she would always fulfill me. She was a hard worker and hated lazy children, but she never criticized me whenever I delayed my work because of reading books.
There was a time when a storyteller came to the fair. I sneaked off to listen to the book, forgetting the work she had assigned to me. For this, my mother criticized me. At night, when she was hurrying to make cotton clothes for her family with a small oil lamp, I couldn't help but retell her the stories I had heard from the storyteller during the day, and at first she was a little impatient, because in her mind, storytellers were smooth-talking, unprofessional people, and from their mouths, nothing good could come out. But the stories I retold gradually attracted her. In the future, every market day, she will no longer give me row work, acquiescence to me to go to the market to listen to the book. To repay my mother's kindness and to show her my memory, I would tell her the stories I heard during the day in vivid color.
Soon, I was no longer satisfied with retelling the stories told by the storytellers, and I kept adding to them as I went along. I would throw in my mother's favor, make up plots, and sometimes even change the ending of the story. My audience was not only my mother, but also my sister, my aunt, and my grandmother. After listening to my stories, my mother would sometimes say worriedly, as if to me, but also to herself: "Son, what kind of person will you become when you grow up? Are you going to make a living by being a poor talker?"
I understand my mother's concern, because in the village, a poor-talking child is annoying, and sometimes brings trouble to himself and his family. The child I wrote about in my novel, "The Cow," who was disliked by the village people because he talked too much, was a shadow of my childhood. My mother often reminded me to talk less, she wanted me to be a quiet, peaceful and generous child. But in me, it revealed a great ability to talk and a great desire to talk, which was undoubtedly a great danger, but my ability to tell stories brought her pleasure, which put her in a deep contradiction.
As the saying goes, "You can't change who you are", and despite the advice of my parents, I have not changed my nature of talking, which makes my name, "Mo Yan", very much an ironic reference to myself.
I dropped out of school before I graduated from elementary school, and because I was too young and weak to do heavy work, I had to go to the deserted grassy beaches to graze the cows and sheep. When I passed by the school gate with my cows and sheep, and saw my former classmates playing around in the schoolyard, my heart was filled with sadness, and I y realized the pain of a person, even a child, after leaving the group.
At the deserted beach, I let go of the cows and sheep and let them graze on their own. The blue sky was like the sea, the grass was endless, and there was not a single human figure to be seen around me, not a human voice, only birds chirping in the sky.
I felt very lonely, very lonely, and my heart was empty. Sometimes I lie on the grass and look at the white clouds lazily floating in the sky, and many inexplicable fantasies come to my mind. There were many stories of foxes turning into beautiful women circulating in our place. I fantasized that a fox would turn into a beautiful woman and come to graze cattle with me as a companion, but she never appeared. But once I was so frightened that I crouched on my butt when a fiery red fox jumped out of the grass in front of me. The fox ran out of sight and I was still trembling. Sometimes I would crouch beside the cows and look into the blue eyes of the cows and my reflection in their eyes. Sometimes I would mimic the chirping of birds trying to talk to the birds in the sky, and sometimes I would speak my heart out to a tree. But the birds ignored me and the tree ignored me. Many years later, when I became a novelist, many of the fantasies I had back then were written into my novels. Many people praised me for my rich imagination, and there were some literature lovers who wanted me to tell them the secret of cultivating imagination, to which I could only give a bitter smile.
Just as the Chinese sage Laozi said, "What goes around comes around, and what goes around comes around", I dropped out of school in my childhood and suffered from hunger, loneliness, and the lack of books to read, but I also began to read the great book of social life at an early age, just like our predecessor, Shen Congwen, did. The aforementioned going to the bazaar to hear the bookman tell a book is only a page in this big book.
After dropping out of school, I mingled with adults and began a long career of "reading by ear". More than two hundred years ago, my hometown produced a great storyteller, Pu Songling, and many people in my village, including me, were his heirs. I listened to many stories of gods and ghosts, historical legends and anecdotes in the fields of collective labor, in the cowsheds and stables of the production team, in the hot beds of my grandparents, and even in the rickety oxcarts, all of which were closely linked to the local natural environment and family history, and which gave me a strong sense of reality.
I never dreamed that one day these things would become my writing material, I was just a child who was obsessed with stories, listening to people's narratives with intoxication. I was an absolute theist at the time, I believed in the spirituality of all things, I would see a big tree and stand in awe. When I saw a bird, I felt that it would change into a human being at any time, and when I met a stranger, I suspected that he had changed into an animal. Whenever I came home from the production team's workhouse at night, I was surrounded by boundless fear, and in order to strengthen my courage, I ran and sang loudly at the same time. At that time, I was in the stage of changing my voice, my voice was hoarse and my voice was hard to hear.
I lived in my hometown for twenty-one years, during which the furthest I got from home was a train trip to Qingdao, and nearly getting lost among the huge timbers of the lumber mills, so much so that when my mother asked me what sights I had seen in Qingdao, I told her in frustration: nothing, just 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 the four books of "A Compendium of China's General History" that my mother sold her wedding jewelry to help me buy, and walked out of the northeast township of Gaomi, a place that I both loved and hated, to begin an important period in my life. I must admit that without the tremendous development and progress of Chinese society over the past 30 years, and without the reform and opening up, there would not have been a writer like me.
In the boring life of the military camp, I ushered in the ideological liberation and literary boom of the 1980s, and I began to try to tell stories with my pen from a child who listened to stories with his ears and told them with his mouth. The road was not smooth at first, and I didn't realize at that time that my more than twenty years of experience in rural life was a rich mine of literature. At that time, I thought that literature is to write about good things, is to write about heroes and models, so, although also published a few pieces of work, but the literary value is very low.
In the fall of 1984, I was admitted to the Department of Literature of the People's Liberation Army Academy of Art, and under the inspiration and guidance of my mentor, the famous writer Xu Huizhong, I wrote a batch of short and medium-sized novels, such as Autumn Waters, Dead River, Transparent Carrot, Red Sorghum, etc. In the novel Autumn Waters, I wrote a series of short and medium-sized novels, which were written by the famous writer Xu Huizhong. In the novel "Autumn Water", the word "Gaomi Northeast Township" appeared for the first time, and from then on, just as a wandering farmer has a piece of land, I am such a literary tramp, finally have a place to settle down. I must admit that in the process of creating my literary territory "Gaomi Northeast Township", William Faulkner of the United States and Garcia Marquez of Colombia gave me important inspiration. I didn't read them seriously, but their bold spirit of opening up the world inspired me to realize that a writer must have a place of his own. One should be humble and retiring in everyday life, but in literary creation, one must be bossy and dictatorial. I followed these two masters for two years, i.e., I realized that I had to run away from them as soon as possible, and I wrote in one of my essays that they were two burning furnaces and I was an ice cube that would evaporate if I got too close to them. In my experience, the fundamental reason why a writer is influenced by a particular writer is because of the similarities between the souls of the influencer and the influenced. As the saying goes, "the heart is in the right place". So even though I didn't read their books very well, after reading only a few pages, I understood what they did and how they did it, and then I understood what I should do and how I should do it.
What I was supposed to do was really simple, and that was to tell my own story, in my own way. My way is the way of the marketplace storytellers I know, the way my grandparents and the old people in the village tell their stories. Frankly speaking, when I tell them, I don't think of who will be my audience, maybe my audience is those people like my mother, maybe my audience is myself, and my own stories, at first, are my personal experiences, such as the child who suffered from a severe beating in "The Dead River", or the one who never said a word from the beginning of the book "The Transparent Carrot", and I was indeed beaten up by my father for having done something wrong. I have indeed been beaten by my father for doing something wrong, and I have also pulled a bellows for a master blacksmith at a bridge construction site. Of course, no matter how strange the personal experience is, it is impossible to write it into a novel as it is. A novel must be fictionalized and imagined, and many friends say that The Transparent Carrot is my best novel, which I don't refute or agree with, but I think that The Transparent Carrot is the most symbolic and meaningful one of my works. The child who is pitch black, with a superhuman ability to endure pain and a superhuman ability to feel, is the soul of all my novels, and although I have written many characters in later novels, none of them, more than him, is close to my soul. Or it can be said that there is always a leader among a number of characters portrayed by a writer, and this silent child is a leader, who does not say a word, but powerfully leads the characters of all shapes and sizes, and performs to his heart's content on the stage of the northeast township of Gaomi.
Our own stories are always limited, and after telling our own, we must tell the stories of others. So the stories of my relatives, the stories of my village people, and the stories of my ancestors that I had heard from the mouths of the old people poured out from the depths of my memory like soldiers hearing the order to assemble. They looked at me with expectant eyes, waiting for me to write about them. My grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, brother, sister, aunts, uncles, wife, and daughters have all appeared in my works, as well as a lot of folks from the northeast township of Gaomi, who have also appeared in my novels. I have, of course, literaryized them all, so that they transcend themselves and become characters in literature.
My aunt appears in my latest novel, Frogs. Because I won the Nobel Prize, many journalists came to her house for interviews. At first she answered questions patiently, but soon became so fed up that she ran to her son's house in the county to hide. It is true that my aunt was my model when I wrote Frogs, but there is a world of difference between the aunt in the novel and the aunt in real life. The aunt in the novel was bossy, sometimes like a bandit, but in reality she was kind and cheerful, a standard wife and mother, and in reality she lived a happy life in her old age, but in the novel she suffered from insomnia in her old age because of the great pain in her heart, wearing a black robe and wandering in the darkness of the night like a ghost, and I thanked my aunt for her forgiveness, and that she didn't get angry at me for writing about her like that. I also admire my aunt's wisdom in correctly understanding the complex relationship between the characters in the novel and those in reality.
After my mother's death, I grieved so much that I decided to write a book dedicated to her, and this was that book, Bountiful Breasts and Hips. Because I had a plan, because I was emotionally charged, I wrote the first draft of the 500,000-word novel in just 83 days.
In the book, I used the material related to my mother's personal experience with impunity, but the emotional aspects of my mother's experience in the book are fictionalized or taken from the experience of many mothers in the northeast township of Gaomi. On the preface of this book, I wrote the words "Dedicated to my mother's spirit in heaven", but this book is actually dedicated to all mothers in the world, which is my arrogant ambition, just as I hope to make the small "Northeast Township of Gaomi" a microcosm of China and even the world!
This is the first time I've written a book on the subject.
The creative process of writers is unique, and the idea and inspiration for each of my books are different. Some novels originate in dreams, such as Transparent Carrots, while others begin with real-life events, such as The Song of Garlic Scarecrows in Paradise. But whether it originates in dream or in reality, it must be combined with personal experience in the end, in order to turn into a literary work with distinctive personality, with countless vivid details shaping the typical characters, colorful language and ingenious structure, and it is necessary to mention in particular that in The Song of the Garlic Shoots in Paradise, I have let a real storyteller appear on the scene, and play a very important role in the book. role in the book, and I am very sorry for using the real name of this storyteller, but of course, all of his actions in the book are fictional. In my writing, this phenomenon has occurred many times, at the beginning of the writing, I used their real names in the hope of gaining a sense of intimacy, but after the completion of the work, I wanted to change their names but I felt that it was no longer possible, so it also happened that people who had the same name as the characters in my novels approached my father to vent their dissatisfaction, and my father apologized on my behalf, but at the same time, he also advised them not to take it seriously. My father said, "In Red Sorghum, he said in the first sentence, 'My father, this bandit seed,' and I don't even care what do you care?"
Possibly because I have experienced a long and difficult life, so that I have a more profound understanding of human nature, I know what true bravery is, but also understand what true compassion is. I know that everyone's heart has a hazy zone that is difficult to accurately characterize as right and wrong, and this zone is a vast world for literary artists to show their talents. As long as a work accurately and vividly depicts this hazy zone full of contradictions, it will inevitably transcend politics and possess the qualities of good literature.
In my early works, I was hidden behind the text as a modern storyteller, but starting with the novel Sandalwood, I finally jumped from the background to the foreground. If my early works were talking to myself, without a reader in sight, from this book onward, I felt that I was standing in a square, facing a large audience, telling it in color, which is the tradition of the world's novels, and even more so, the tradition of Chinese novels. I have also actively learned from the modernist novels of the West, and I have also played with all kinds of narrative tricks, but I finally returned to the tradition, and of course, this return is not a static return. Sandalwood Penalty and the novels that followed it are hybrid texts that have inherited the tradition of classical Chinese novels and borrowed techniques from Western novels. The so-called innovations in the field of fiction are basically the products of this mixture.
Lastly, allow me to say a little more about my book Fatigue of Life and Death. The title comes from a Buddhist classic, and I understand that translators in various countries had a headache trying to translate it. I have not studied the Buddhist classics in depth, and my understanding of Buddhism is naturally very superficial. The reason why I take this as my title is that I feel that many of the basic ideas of Buddhism are truly cosmic consciousness, and that many of the strife in the world of man are meaningless in the eyes of the Buddhists, and that the world of man under such a supreme vision appears to be very pathetic. Of course, I did not write this book as a sermon, and what I wrote is still about the destiny of man and man's I wrote about human destiny and human emotions, human limitations and human tolerance, as well as the efforts and sacrifices made by people in pursuit of happiness and adherence to their beliefs. The blue face in the novel who fights against the trend of the times with his own body is a real hero in my mind. The prototype of this character is a farmer from our neighboring village, who, in my childhood, was often seen pushing a squeaky wooden wheelbarrow through the road in front of my house. Pulling the cart for him was a lame donkey, and leading the donkey for him was his small-footed wife. This strange combination of laborers seemed so odd and anachronistic in the collectivized society of the time, and in the eyes of us children, we saw them as clowns moving against the tide of history, so much so that we would throw stones at them with righteous indignation as they passed down the street, and then, years later, when I picked up my pen to write, this character, this image, came to my mind, and I knew that I knew that one day I would write a book about him, that sooner or later I would have to tell his story to the world, but it wasn't until 2005, when I saw a mural of the Six Paths of Reincarnation in a temple, that I realized the right way to tell the story.
When I won the Nobel Prize for Literature, it sparked some controversy. At first, I thought I was the subject of the controversy, but gradually I felt that the subject of the controversy was someone who had nothing to do with me. I was like a theatergoer watching the performance of the crowd. I saw flowers falling all over the man who had won the prize, and stones being thrown at him and sewage being poured on him, and I was afraid that he would be broken, but he smiled and got out of the flowers and stones, wiped the dirty water from his body, and stood frankly to one side, and said to the multitude.
The best way for a writer to speak is to write. What I should have said is written into my work; words uttered with the mouth are dispersed with the wind, words written with the pen never die. I hope you will have the patience to read my books.
Even if you read my books, I don't expect you to change my opinion, there is no writer in the world who can make all readers like him. This is especially true in times like today.
Although I don't want to say anything, I have to speak on an occasion like today, so I'll simply say a few more words.
I am a storyteller, and I am still going to tell you stories. ( Inspirational World www.lizhi123.net )
In the 1960s, the school organized us to visit an exhibition of suffering, we were led by the teacher to cry loudly, in order to be able to let the teacher see my performance, I could not afford to wipe away the tears on my face, I saw that there are a few classmates quietly wipe spittle on their faces to pretend that they are tears, I also saw in a piece of real crying and fake crying classmates I also saw that among a group of students who were crying for real or not, there was one student who did not have a single tear on his face, did not make a sound from his mouth, and did not cover his face with his hands; he looked at us with his eyes open, with a look of surprise or confusion in his eyes. Afterwards, I reported this student's behavior to the teacher. For this, the school gave the student a warning. Years later, when I confessed to the teacher for my tattletale, the teacher said that there were more than a dozen classmates who came to him that day to tell him about it. This classmate passed away more than ten years ago, and whenever I think of him, I feel y sorry. This incident made me realize one truth, that is: when everyone cries, some people should be allowed not to cry, and when crying becomes a kind of performance, even more so, some people should be allowed not to cry.
I'll tell another story: more than thirty years ago, when I was still working in the army, I was reading a book in my office one evening when an old officer pushed his way in, glanced at the seat across from me, and muttered to himself, "Oh, there's no one there?" I then stood up and said in a loud voice, "Does that mean I'm not a person?" The old officer was so flushed with embarrassment that he retreated, and for a long time I gloated over the incident, thinking that I had been a valiant fighter, but years after the fact I felt y guilty about it.
Please allow me to tell the last story, which is many years ago, my grandfather told me heard: there are eight out of work masons, in order to avoid a storm, hid in a broken temple, outside the sound of thunder a burst of tight as a burst of a fireball, rolling around outside the temple door, the air seems to have squeaked a dragon call, all the people are scared, face like dirt, a man said: "Of the eight of us, there must be one who has done something bad to hurt heaven and earth; whoever has done something bad, walk out of the temple and receive punishment yourself, lest the good people should be implicated." Naturally no one was willing to go out, and another person suggested, "Since everyone does not want to go out, let us throw our straw hats outward, and whoever's straw hat is scraped out of the door of the temple means that whoever has done a bad thing is invited to go out and be punished." So everyone threw their straw hats out toward the temple door, seven people's straw hats were scraped back into the temple, only one person's straw hat was rolled out, everyone urged this person to go out to be punished, he naturally did not want to go out, the people then lifted him up and threw him out of the door of the temple, the end of the story I guess we all guessed that the person was just thrown out of the door of the temple, and the broken temple collapsed with a bang.
I am a storyteller.
I won the Nobel Prize in Literature for storytelling.
Many wonderful stories have happened since I won the prize, stories that have convinced me that truth and justice exist.
I will continue to tell my stories for years to come.
Thank you all!
Author's Biography
Mo Yan (real name Guan Muye, February 17, 1955-), born in Gaomi City, Shandong Province, is a famous contemporary Chinese writer. He is a visiting professor at Qingdao University of Science and Technology, and an honorary doctor of letters at the Open University of Hong Kong. He rose to prominence in the mid-1980s with his folklore works, which are full of complex emotions of "nostalgia for the countryside" as well as "resentment towards the countryside", and has been categorized as an author of "root-seeking literature". "In 2011, he won the 8th Mao Dun Literature Prize for his novel Frogs, and on October 11, 2012, Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his "use of magical realism to fuse folklore, history, and modernity," making him the first Chinese writer to win the prize.