| Chapter : | Introduction: Hunger and Loneliness: Mo Yan’s Muses in Becoming a Writer |
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jianzhi (
) [paper cuts]. Geographically, Gaomi County is located on the Jiaodong (
) peninsula, where summer floods are characteristic and as a result, long-stalked crops such as sorghum reap extra benefits from nature. Though the region is famous for its strong sorghum liquor, the vast red sorghum fields have also provided outlaws with an arena for their deeds, good and bad. These heroic figures serve as prototypes for some of Mo Yan’s characters, and their acts of indiscretion contribute to these characters’ richness, vividness, and liveliness.
Political circumstances in Mainland China have contributed abundantly to Mo Yan’s creations as well. First of all, the Communist Party carried out meticulous examinations of class status, and the classification of people’s social origins and family backgrounds was prevalent in China: Mo Yan’s family members were categorized as middle peasants. Proletarians included workers, lower-middle peasants, and poor peasants, and the objects of their dictatorship were capitalists, landlords, and counterrevolutionaries, and so forth. Peasants were fundamentally divided into five categories: landlords, rich peasants, middle peasants, lower-middle peasants, and poor peasants. The last two categories enjoyed the highest political prestige, while the first two were labeled as class enemies.11 Middle peasants, generally believed to be able to sustain themselves and their families, were “the objects of unity and education” (
);12 they were marginalized and alienated politically even though materially they were not much better off than the poor and lower-middle peasants. In order to live a safe and peaceful life, middle peasants had to earn the trust of party members and of other peasants who were poorer than they; any wrongdoing could easily lead to political discrimination. In an essay describing his hometown experience, Mo Yan recounts the following memory of his childhood: When he was twelve years old, he once labored on a construction site for sixty days, breaking stones at first and pumping the bellows for the blacksmiths later. One day, the young Mo Yan was so hungry that he uprooted a radish from the field of the production brigade. As soon as he started eating the radish, a poor and lower-middle peasant caught him and beat him up before sending him to the leader of the construction site, who called together all