Mo Yan once drank so much he almost died. In the early 1980's the famous Chinese author succumbed to the toxic effects of too many shots of clear grain alcohol and one huge, warm bowl of red sorghum wine, just like the "18 Mile Red" vintage from his novel and film Red Sorghum.
"They gave it to me fresh from the fire in a big black bowl," he says. "And I drank it all down. I still don't remember what happened after that."
He does know that he spent the next three days in a hospital bed recovering. The experience put him off spirits for good but he still drinks wine and beer. And it didn't keep him from writing Republic of Wine, a novel obsessed with excessive drinking from cover to cover.
Terrible Corners
This hefty tome, which was just published in English for the first time by Arcade Publishing in a translation by Howard Goldblatt, is set in the fictional Chinese province of Liquorland. It features a motley cast of evil characters, from a superhuman imbiber and cannibal called Diamond Jin to a scaly, demonic dwarf who leads a murderous band of revolutionary infants.
Mo Yan has said before that one of his greatest literary influences is the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Certainly Republic of Wine shows the fruit of his devotion to the king of the magic realists. Mo Yan's novel is a surreal, fractured tour through the fantastic and a glimpse of the terrible corners of a doomed society. Many of the multiple narrators are drunk most of the time and peering through their sozzled viewfinders a reader can binge heartily--but without the hangover.
Mo Yan says he got the idea for the novel from a newspaper article he saw titled "I was a professional drinking companion". It was written by a well-educated man who, because of his politically incorrect family background, was sent to a coal mine in the Northeast Chinese hinterlands. When officials there discovered his incredible ability to drink huge quantities of alcohol without getting drunk he quickly became the darling of the mine administration who hired him to host banquets for visiting dignitaries.
Drunken Dreams
The man's genetic pre-disposition for drinking and the culture of corruption and excess that his job represented at once revolted and fascinated Mo Yan.
"There is a terrible truth, which is that people--once the basic questions of home and enough to eat are settled--will turn to this gorging, feasting, all kinds of over-indulgence," he says. "The waste is just deplorable. This story in the paper I saw together with this social phenomenon made me write Republic of Wine."
The many metaphorical uses of drunkenness are powerfully employed in Republic of Wine. People become drunk on power, lust, and greed. People are transported by a charismatic man expounding on alcohol.
"When speech streams from that organ called your mouth, it is like a melody, a rounded flat river, a silken thread from the rear end of a spider waving gossamerlike in the air, the size of a chicken's egg, just as smooth and glossy, and every bit as wholesome. We are intoxicated by that music, we drift in that river, we dance on that silken spider thread, we see God. But before we see Him, we watch our own corpses float down the river..."
Hunger, Loneliness
But despite the many possible interpretations of drunkenness Mo Yan won't be pinned down on the meaning of alcohol in the book. He leaves it open.
"I can say that alcohol in this novel is not just "alcohol"," explains Mo Yan. "It can and does represent other things as well, and yet while I was writing it I intentionally left those possibilities open because I felt if I had a concrete meaning for this metaphor of alcohol and being drunk that it would really hurt the story. I would rather leave it open. Each reader should find their own meanings."
Alcohol is not the only vice in this novel. There is also cannibalism. Special agent Ding Guo'er is sent to Liquorland to look into charges that people there braise and eat baby boys. But the "crack investigator" is stymied in his dimwitted snooping efforts by the constant insistence on "another toast, another toast." The Liquorland diet of fresh babies, explained in perversely sumptuous descriptive detail, is the last nail in the coffin of this morally corrupt imaginary society.
"Why do they want to eat children? Simple, they've grown tired of eating beef, lamb, pork, dog, donkey, rabbit, chicken, duck, pigeon, mule, camel, horse, hedgehog, sparrow, swallow, wild goose, common goose, cat, rat, weasel, and lynx so they want to eat children."
Man of Earth
Mo Yan (whose real name is Guan Moye) says that as a child he spend most of his time hungry. At one time during the Cultural Revolution he and his family were reduced to eating grass and leaves. Despite having a large family, his chores meant that he spent most of his days alone on the remote hillsides of Shandong province where he grew up. The twin pillars of his childhood and adolescence, he says, were hunger and loneliness.
"In the end it was a very good thing for my own creative abilities," says Mo Yan.
Enlisting in the army in 1976 gave him the security and the free weekends he needed to cultivate those abilities. In 1981 he published his first novel, Falling Rain on a Spring Night, and has since written six more full length novels and dozens of short stories.
He gained world wide recognition when his second book Red Sorghum was made into a movie in the late 1980s. The film launched the careers of the director, Zhang Yimou, the star, Gong Li and the author. The only other of his novels in English now is Garlic Ballads, an indictment of provincial and county level corruption in China.
Garlic Ballads was also inspired by a newspaper article about a peasant uprising and was passionately written in thirty days. Having grown up as a peasant himself Mo Yan felt a deep sense of sympathy for the struggles of subsistence farmers and a sense of responsibility to give something back to his roots.
These titles are all available at Amazon.com:
Garlic Ballads
Republic of Wine
Red Sorghum
NOTE: There will be a bilingual preview of "Republic of Wine" and a book signing with Mo Yan at the China Institute in New York City Sunday, March 26, 2000 from 4 pm to 5:30 pm. For more details visit the China Institute Web Site.
