Two Reviews of Chinese Writers
"My story begins on January 1, 1950..."
So begins Mo Yan's Life and Death are Wearing Me Out. The narrator is the landlord Ximen Nao, and on this first day of January 1950, Ximen Nao is executed as a bad element, an impediment to the revolution, a bourgeois blackguard. How can Ximen's story begin with his execution? Here is where Mo Yan's wit first exerts itself, for the story is not about Ximen Nao the man, but it is about the reincarnated Ximen Nao. We wat...