Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh (2 page)

One old-timer talked about all the famous dishes he had seen as a waiter in a Qingdao restaurant: braised beef tourne-dos, pan-fried chicken, things like that. Wide-eyed, we stared at his mouth until we could smell the aroma of all that delicious food and see it materialize, as if it had dropped from the sky. The “rightist” student said he knew someone who had written a book that brought him thousands, maybe tens of thousands, in royalties. Each and every day the fellow ate
jiaozi
, those tasty little pork dumplings, at all three meals, the oil oozing from inside with each bite. When we said we didn't believe anyone could be so rich as to eat
jiaozi
three times a day, the former student said scornfully, “He's a writer, for goodness sake! You understand? A writer!” That's all I needed to know: become a writer and you can eat meaty
jiaozi
three times a day. Life doesn't get any better than that. Why, not even the gods could do better. That's when I made up my mind to become a writer someday.

When I started out, noble ambitions were the furthest thing from my mind. Unlike so many of my peers, who saw themselves as “engineers of the soul,” I didn't give a damn about improving society through fiction. As I've said, my motivation was quite primitive: I had a longing to eat good food. To be sure, after gaining a bit of a reputation, I learned the art of high-sounding utterances, but they were so hollow, even I didn't believe them. Owing to my lower-class background, the stories I wrote were filled with the commonest of views, and anyone looking for traces of elegance or graceful beauty in them would likely come away disappointed. There's nothing I can do about that. A writer writes what he knows, in ways that are natural to him. I grew up hungry and lonely, a witness to human suffering and injustice; my mind is filled with sympathy for humanity in general and outrage over a society that bristles with inequality. That's what my stories are all about, that's all they
could
be about. Not surprisingly, as my stomach grew accustomed to being full when I wanted it to be, my literary output underwent a change. I have gradually come to realize that a life of eating
jiaozi 
three times a day can still be accompanied by pain and suffering, and that this spiritual suffering is no less painful than physical hunger. The act of giving voice to this spiritual suffering is, in my view, the sacred duty of a writer. But for me, writing about the suffering of the soul in no way supplants my concern for the physical agony brought about by hunger. I can't say whether this is my strength as a writer, or my weakness, but I know it is what fate has decreed for me.

My earliest writing is probably better left unmentioned. But mention it I must, since it is part and parcel of my life story and of China's recent literary history. I still recall my very first story. In it I wrote about the digging of a canal. A junior militia officer begins the morning by standing before a portrait of our Chairman Mao and offering up a simple prayer: May You Live Ten Thousand Years, May You Live Ten Thousand Years, May You Live Ten Thousand Years! He then leaves to attend a meeting in the village, where it is decided that he will take his production team to a spot beyond the village and dig a gigantic canal. To show her support for this enterprise, his fiancee decides to postpone their marriage for three years. When a local landlord hears of the planned excavation, he sneaks into the production team's livestock area in the dead of night, picks up a shovel, and smashes the leg of a black mule scheduled to pull a cart at the canal work site. Class struggle. Reacting as if the enemy were at hand, the people mobilize themselves for a violent struggle against the class enemy. Eventually, the canal is dug and the landlord seized. No one these days would deign to read such a story, but that was just about all anyone wrote back then. It was the only way you could get published. So that's what I wrote. And still I wasn't able to see it into print — not revolutionary enough.

As the 1970s wound down, our Chairman Mao died, and the situation in China began to change, including its literary output. But the changes were both feeble and slow. Forbidden topics ran the gamut from love stories to tales of Party blunders; but the yearning for freedom was not to be denied. Writers racked their brains to find ways, however roundabout, to break the taboos. This period saw the rise of so-called scar literature, personal accounts of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution. My own career didn't really start until the early 1980s, when Chinese literature had already undergone significant changes. Few forbidden topics remained, and many Western writers were introduced into the country, creating a frenzy of Chinese imitations.

As a child who grew up in a grassy field, enjoying little formal education, I know virtually nothing about literary theories and have had to rely solely upon my own experiences and intuitive understanding of the world to write. Literary fads that all but monopolized literary circles, including recasting the works of foreign writers in Chinese, were not for me. I knew I had to write what was natural to me, something clearly different from what other writers, Western and Chinese, were writing. This does not mean that Western writing exerted no influence on me. Quite the contrary: I have been profoundly influenced by some Western writers, and am happy to openly acknowledge that influence. But what sets me apart from other Chinese writers is that I neither copy the narrative techniques of foreign writers nor imitate their story lines; what I am happy to do is closely explore what is embedded in their work in order to understand their observations of life and comprehend how they view the world we live in. In my mind, by reading the works of others, a writer is actually engaging in a dialogue, maybe even a romance in which, if there is a meeting of the minds, a lifelong friendship is born; if not, an amicable parting is fine, too.

Up to this point, three of my novels have been published in America:
Red Sorghum, The Garlic Ballads
, and
The Republic of Wine. Red Sorghum
exposes the reader to my understanding of history and of love. In
The Garlic Ballads
I reveal a critical view of politics and my sympathy for China's peasants.
The Republic of Wine
expresses my sorrow over the decline of humanity and my loathing of a corrupt bureaucracy. On the surface, each of these novels appears to be radically different from the others, but at their core they are very much alike; they all express a yearning for the good life by a lonely child afraid of going hungry.

The same is true of my shorter works. In China, the short story has little standing. In the eyes of writers and critics alike, only novelists count as worthy creators of fiction, while writers of shorter fiction are practitioners of a petty craft. Forgive me when I say that this is wrong-headed. The stature of a writer can only be determined by the thought revealed in a work, not by its length. A writer's place in a nation's literary history cannot be judged by whether or not he is capable of writing a book as heavy as a brick. That must rest on his contributions to the development and enrichment of that nation's language.

I venture to say, immodest though it may seem, that my novels have created a unique style of writing in contemporary Chinese literature. Yet I take even greater pride in what I've been able to accomplish in the realm of short stories. Over the past fifteen years or so, I have published some eighty stories, eight of which are included in this collection, selected by my translator, with my wholehearted approval. They represent both the range of themes and variety of styles of my short story output over the years. Once you have finished this volume, you will have a good picture of what I've tried to do in my shorter fiction.

“Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh” is my latest story (it has recently been filmed by China's preeminent director, Zhang Yimou, under the title
Happy Days)
. While at first it may appear to deal primarily with the “downsizing” problem facing today's Chinese workers, in line with the Chinese saying, “Alcoholism is not really about alcohol,” there is more to the story than meets the eye. What I also want to show is how young couples in love are forced to sneak around to share their love. “Abandoned Child,” written in the mid-1980s, concerns one of contemporary Chinese society's thorniest problems — enforced family planning in a pervasive climate of valuing boys over girls. Decades of governmental efforts in implementing a one-child policy have produced impressive results in China's urban centers, where the long-held concept of “boys are better than girls” has undergone a change. But in the countryside, families with more than one child are still the norm, and the general disdain for baby girls is as prevalent as ever. Unchecked population growth remains China's most serious predicament, and a host of social problems emanating from the one-child policy are already beginning to appear.

“Man and Beast,” also written in the 1980s, continues the family saga of
Red Sorghum
and describes how, under extraordinary circumstances, the last shreds of humanity can give rise to a blaze of glory. Toward the end of the 1980s I wrote “Love Story,” a tale of puppy love. Set in the ten years of the disastrous Cultural Revolution, when hundreds of thousands of young men and women were sent from the cities up to the mountains and down to the countryside, the story tells of a young country boy who falls in love with a city girl much older than he, an uncommon turn of events. But it is precisely this feature that allows me to explore the concepts of sadness and beauty.

“The Cure,” “Iron Child,” and “Soaring” are all part of a series of short pieces I wrote during the early 1990s. “The Cure” is a tale of cannibalism and cruelty, and “Iron Child” and “Soaring” can be read as fables. Finally, there is “Shen Garden,” one of my last stories of the twentieth century. What I want to show here is how a middle-aged man turns his back on the love of an earlier time and eventually compromises with reality. In today's society, many Chinese men who have achieved success, even fame, live hypocritical lives. Deep down, their existence is little more than a pile of ruins.

As I have said, I am a writer with no theoretical training; but I possess a fertile imagination, thanks in part to China's popular traditions, which I am intent on continuing. I may be ignorant of high-flown literary concepts, but I do know how to spin a bewitching tale, something I learned as a child from my grandfather, my grandmother, and a variety of village storytellers. Critics who base their views of literature on scientific theories of one sort or another don't think much of me. But let's see them write a story that captures a reader's imagination.

M.Y.

Beijing, 2001

Translator's Note

The term
shifu
is a generic and generally respectful term for skilled workers and the like; widely used, it has, in a sense, replaced other terms, such as “comrade.”It is common in China to use kinship or professional forms of address in preference to given names.

The Shen Garden in the story of that title, which was located in the southern city of Shaoxing over a millennium ago, is famous as a metaphor for encounters between once married couples. It is where the Southern Song poet Lu You is said to have met Tang Wan, whom his parents had forced him to divorce.

“The Cure” (literally, “effective medicine”) is an updated version of the famous story “Medicine” by Lu Xun (1881— 1936), twentieth-century China's most renowned literary figure. In the earlier story, a child is treated for consumption with the blood of a beheaded revolutionary, but dies nonetheless; it too is a caustic satire on contemporary society and politics.

The translator thanks the editor of the Hong Kong magazine
Renditions
for her editorial suggestions on the story “Soaring” and for permission to reprint. “The Cure” appeared in slightly modified form in my anthology
Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused
(Grove Press, 1995). As always, my thanks to Li-chun for checking the manuscript and to Mo Yan for his generosity and cooperation. Both have made the translator's job especially rewarding and enjoyable.

Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh

1

D
ING SHIKOU, OR TEN MOUTH DING, HAD WORKED AT THE
Municipal Farm Equipment Factory for forty-three years and was a month away from mandatory retirement age when he was abruptly laid off. Now if you put shi (+), the word for
ten
, inside a kou
, the word for
mouth
, you get the word tian (
), for
field
. The family name Ding can mean a strapping young man. As long as a strapping young man has a field to tend, he'll never have to worry about having food on the table and clothes on his back. That was his farmer father's cherished wish for his son when he named him. But Ding Shikou was not destined to own land; instead he found work in a factory, which led to a far better life than he'd have had as a farmer. He was enormously grateful to the society that had brought him so much happiness, and was determined to pay it back through hard work. Decades of exhausting labor had bent him over, and even though he wasn't yet sixty, he had the look of a man in his seventies.