Mo Yan

Mo Yan was born Guan Moye on March 5, 1955, and is a Chinese writer. His 1984 novella *A Transparent Radish* first drew attention, and the 1986 novel *Red Sorghum* made him famous internationally; the film adaptation of its first two parts won the Golden Bear in 1988. In 2012, the Nobel Prize in Literature went to him, with the committee citing work that “with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary.”

His pen name, “Mo Yan,” translates to “don’t speak.” He began using it in 1981 for pieces he submitted to the Baoding-based literary magazine *Lian Chi* while stationed there as a PLA soldier. The name splits the middle character of his birth name, Mo (謨), and also reflects the repressive atmosphere of his upbringing, when his parents frequently told him to keep quiet. Because his early payments came under this pen name, collecting them at the post office required a certified letter stamped by his work unit. To sidestep that recurring trouble, he eventually made Mo Yan his legal name.

Born in February 1955 to a peasant family in Ping’an Village, Gaomi Township, in northeastern Shandong Province, Mo Yan was the youngest of four children, with two older brothers and an older sister. His father had four years of schooling at a pre-revolutionary private school and a solid grasp of the Chinese classics; his mother could not read or write. Though the family was not rich, they were labeled upper-middle peasant during the class struggle campaigns because they had used their life savings to buy a plot of land. That classification led teachers to discriminate against him, and with the Cultural Revolution disrupting the curriculum, he left school in the fifth grade at age 11. He was put to work grazing animals on the grasslands, where, during long periods alone, he taught himself Chinese characters from a Xinhua Dictionary, his only book. In autumn 1973, he began working at a cotton processing factory, where he encountered a broader world, including sent-down youth from Qingdao whose familiarity with foreign literature and film made a strong impression. During the Maoist era, almost all pre-revolutionary and foreign writers were banned except Lu Xun, so his reading was limited and politically controlled, but he grew up surrounded by Chinese folklore and regional opera, which later nourished his writing.

For rural youths like Mo Yan, military service was a highly desired way out of the countryside, but his family’s upper-middle peasant status had blocked it. In early 1976, a friend from the cotton factory, whose father was a local military official, helped him enlist. After three years as a cotton worker, he joined the army at the end of 1976. When the college entrance exam was reinstated during his time in the military, he prepared for four months, only to discover that the local exam had been canceled that year. Still, while working as an army librarian, he read through the entire collection of over a thousand books in four years and started writing.

Mo Yan’s early literary model was Sun Li, known for a graceful, lyrical prose style. As translations of foreign literature became available in China during the 1980s, he, like many Chinese writers of his generation, was influenced by William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez; their magical realism gave him both a way to express himself and a practical method for navigating censorship. In 1981, his first works appeared in the literary magazine *Lian Chi* in Baoding, where he was stationed. In 1982, he was promoted and transferred to the PLA’s Joint Staff Department in Beijing. In 1984, he was admitted to the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Art based on his short story *Folk Music*, published in *Lian Chi* and modeled on Carson McCullers’s *The Ballad of the Sad Café*. He joined the first cohort of a two-year program, mostly made up of military cadres recommended for admission, in the Department of Literature newly founded by novelist Xu Huaizhong, who became his mentor.

That same year, 1984, Mo Yan published his first novella, *A Transparent Radish*, which brought him literary notice. Xu Huaizhong had originally titled it *A Golden Radish* but changed the name. Two years later, *Red Sorghum* (1986) appeared in *People’s Literature*, causing a great stir in literary circles and drawing Zhang Yimou to visit Mo Yan at the PLA Academy of Art to secure the film rights; that film became Zhang’s directorial debut and won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale. In 1987, Mo Yan’s novella *Joy* was published in *People’s Literature* but ran afoul of the Anti-Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign. The journal’s editor-in-chief, Liu Xinwu, was suspended and investigated, and the issue itself was recalled and destroyed. In April 1988, Mo Yan published *The Garlic Ballads*, based on an incident in Cangshan, Shandong a year earlier, when overproduction, collapsing prices, and predatory market fees drove farmers to riot outside the county government building. The novel’s sympathetic depiction of an anti-government riot did not draw immediate sanctions upon publication, but after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in June 1989, it was banned in mainland China and could only be published in Hong Kong and Taiwan for a time; it was unbanned four years later. The American sinologist Howard Goldblatt, after reading the novel, was so impressed that he decided to translate it.