| Chapter 1: | History: From Fatherland to Motherland to Playland |
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Chapter 1
History
From Fatherland to Motherland
to Playland
In the mid-1980s, Mo Yan was largely responsible for originating the trend among post-Mao Chinese novelists of writing historical fiction, particularly the genre of family history. Hisbook The Red Sorghum Family was one of the earliest novels depicting the romances and sufferings of one family’s ancestors, the grandparents of the first-person narrator. Big Breasts and Wide Hips, which appeared nearly ten years after the first novel, is again a family story interwoven with the modern history of China.27 Interestingly, Mo Yan seems to have formed a habit of producing one historical novel (covering a relatively long time span) roughly every ten years—after The Red Sorghum Family in 1987 and Big Breasts and Wide Hips in 1996, Mo Yan published another historical novel, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, in 2006. Unlike the previous two works, which cover a range of history approximately from the republican period to the 1970s or the 1980s, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out is set exclusively in the Communist era, recounting Chinese