| Chapter : | Introduction: Hunger and Loneliness: Mo Yan’s Muses in Becoming a Writer |
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he once declared that “Chinese literature cannot be separated from world literature.”19 In his preface to the previously mentioned book, A Room Seen through the Keyhole: Ten Short Stories that Have Influenced Me, Mo Yan briefly recollects his encounters with stories by these writers, all foreign except Lu Xun, and how each of them inspired his own writing. Mo Yan’s favorite foreign author is William Faulkner. In a 1993 essay titled “Shuoshuo Fukena zhege laotou” (
) [Talk about the old fellow Faulkner] and in a speech he gave at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2000, Mo Yan disclosed how much his Northeast Gaomi Township was a result of stimulation by Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County.20 He frankly admitted that prior to reading Faulkner, he had written in accordance with teaching materials used in the classroom.
Gabriel García Márquez also seems to have had a great influence on Mo Yan. His Macondo Town in One Hundred Years of Solitude was as inspirational to the Chinese writer as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. As a point of departure, Mo Yan began to explore, imagine, (re)create, and transcend his hometown, Northeast Gaomi Township, which has been an inexhaustible source for his creativity. Combining legendary heroic ancestors from historical records with his own imagination, Mo Yan tried to “establish a republic of literature” (
), in his