A Subversive Voice in China: The Fictional World of Mo Yan By She ...

One of Mao’s fantasies was the nationwide steel smelting campaign. One million local backyard steel furnaces were set up, scattered all over China, and every family was ordered to submit all kinds of metal products—only to produce steel of such poor quality that it had no use at all. Because cooking utensils were among the items confiscated, people were unable to cook at home and instead had to dine in public dining halls. In Mo Yan’s “Tiehai” () [Iron child], the history of steel smelting and public dining is turned into a surrealistic and ironic story. These policies of Mao led, in John Fairbank’s words, to “an all-time first-class man-made famine” ¹⁴ that, according to Jonathan Spence, “claimed 20 million lives or more between 1959 and 1962. Many others died shortly thereafter from the effects of the Great Leap—especially children, weakened by years of progressive malnutrition.”¹⁵

Mo Yan was one of these children who suffered from the general lack of food and from malnutrition in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He lived in a large family and there was never enough food to go around, so the young Mo Yan was always hungry. He cried at nearly every meal because he never had enough to eat; he longed to become a writer once he learned that a writer could have meaty dumplings as often as he wanted.¹⁶ Mo Yan’s deep memory of this large-scale famine has become a rich source for his writing, both fictional and biographical. Interestingly, this experience has led him to ponder the phenomenon of the extravagance of gluttony in contemporary China—a theme (discussed more fully later) that is reflected in his novels The Republic of Wine and Forty-One Bombs.

Mo Yan was obliged to drop out of school as a fifth-grader for political reasons. During the early stage of the Cultural Revolution, Mo Yan—inspired by the revolutionary news from his older brother—took part in the editorial work of a “rebel” school newspaper which flouted the authority of his school’s teachers. Consequently, Mo Yan was kicked out