The Humor of Mo Yan
Mo Yan as Humorist
Alexander C. Y. Huang
These days I can point out an Audi, a Mercedes, a BMW, and a Toyota; I also know all about U.S. space shuttles and Soviet aircraft carriers. But at the time, I was a donkey, a 1958 donkey. This strange object, with its four rubber wheels, was clearly faster than me, at least on level ground. Allow me to repeat Mo Yan’s comment: A goat can scale a tree, a donkey is a good climber.
— Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006)
32 ı W orld Literature Today
and bureaucrats alike find themselves in comic and sometimes absurd situations.
Similar to other contemporary writers who parody socialist realism, Mo Yan has blended the bawdy and humorous modes to construct counternarratives to the grand narrative of the nation-state. In East German writer Thomas Brussig’s 1996 novel Helden wie wir (Eng. Heroes Like
Us, 1997), the first-person narrator asks in a selfreflexive and playful tone: “The story of the [Berlin] Wall’s end is the story of my penis, but how to embody such a statement in a book conceived as a Nobel Prize–worthy cross between David Copperfield and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire?”2
Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine, a parody of Chinese food culture written in the reinvented genres of detective and epistolary novels, and Life and Death
Are Wearing Me Out (2006), use a similar strategy to create a sense of comic absurdity. Toward the end of The Republic of Wine, on his way to Liquorland on the invitation of Li Yidou, a doctoral student in “liquor studies at the Brewer’s College” there, the character Mo Yan reminisces that:
Back when I was leaving Beijing, my bus passed through Tiananmen Square, where . . . Sun Yat-sen [commonly referred to as the father of the Republic of China, founded in 1911], who stood in the square, and Mao Zedong [leader of the People’s
illustration: cong zhang
O
ne of the most energetic writers in contemporary China, Mo Yan has been at the
Alexander C. Y. Huang
These days I can point out an Audi, a Mercedes, a BMW, and a Toyota; I also know all about U.S. space shuttles and Soviet aircraft carriers. But at the time, I was a donkey, a 1958 donkey. This strange object, with its four rubber wheels, was clearly faster than me, at least on level ground. Allow me to repeat Mo Yan’s comment: A goat can scale a tree, a donkey is a good climber.
— Mo Yan, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006)
32 ı W orld Literature Today
and bureaucrats alike find themselves in comic and sometimes absurd situations.
Similar to other contemporary writers who parody socialist realism, Mo Yan has blended the bawdy and humorous modes to construct counternarratives to the grand narrative of the nation-state. In East German writer Thomas Brussig’s 1996 novel Helden wie wir (Eng. Heroes Like
Us, 1997), the first-person narrator asks in a selfreflexive and playful tone: “The story of the [Berlin] Wall’s end is the story of my penis, but how to embody such a statement in a book conceived as a Nobel Prize–worthy cross between David Copperfield and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire?”2
Mo Yan’s The Republic of Wine, a parody of Chinese food culture written in the reinvented genres of detective and epistolary novels, and Life and Death
Are Wearing Me Out (2006), use a similar strategy to create a sense of comic absurdity. Toward the end of The Republic of Wine, on his way to Liquorland on the invitation of Li Yidou, a doctoral student in “liquor studies at the Brewer’s College” there, the character Mo Yan reminisces that:
Back when I was leaving Beijing, my bus passed through Tiananmen Square, where . . . Sun Yat-sen [commonly referred to as the father of the Republic of China, founded in 1911], who stood in the square, and Mao Zedong [leader of the People’s
illustration: cong zhang
O
ne of the most energetic writers in contemporary China, Mo Yan has been at the