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 watch as he becomes Ximen Donkey, Ximen Ox, Ximen Pig,, Ximen Dog, and Ximen Monkey, until finally he is reborn as a “a big-headed child,” and as Ximen processes through these lives, we see the rapid progression of contemporary China.

With such a fanciful and ambitious premise, the story runs perilously close to becoming kitschy. Lesser writers have gone that direction (and they probably sold more books. Dan Brown comes immediately to mind). Yet Mo Yan is able to walk this precipice between art and kitsch with aplomb. He uses Ximen’s various incarnations to illustrate and elucidate the last fifty-eight years of Chinese history. In Life and Death one sees the agrarian disaster of the Great Leap Forward, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, the period of opening up and corruption, and the tragedy of the many loveless marriages that resulted from the revolutionary spirit.

Life and Death is a story that is thoroughly Chinese, and it would be a marvelous, light-hearted history lesson for anyone with an interest in contemporary China. But Mo Yan is more than a pedantic jester, he is a poet of the human spirit. In the final assessment, Mo is concerned for the plight of his characters–be they donkey, pig, ox, dog or human. His story is alive, and history is merely the air the characters breathe. Mo’s compassion for his characters and willingness to poke fun at himself as the narrator are what keep this story on the high road of art.

By contrast, Ha Jin’s collection of short stories Ocean of Words takes a less fanciful look at one point in Chinese history. All the stories in Ocean take place in the far North of China during the early 1970’s–that period of time when border tensions with the former Soviet Union were such that both sides felt invasion was imminent.

Each story presents the plight of the soldier as they suffer through that peculiar brand of military idiocy that is the People’s Army. Ha Jin loves these men. He paints verbal pictures to draw in the reader. He is a deft writer. Yet, the broader impression from these stories is less impressive.

Ha Jin is educated in the tradition of American realism. He lives and teaches in the U.S. and , unlike Mo Yan, Ha writes primarily in English. His prose resonates with the likes of an Updike or Cheever, but though his style is smooth and his narrative voice engaging, Ha’s stories do not rise to the same emotional level as Mo Yan, and one wonders if his status as an affluent expatriot robs him of the ennui that infuses a writer like Mo. With Ha I feel as if I’m looking at Chinese history from a distance; with Mo I live that same history.

I respect them both, but I’m drawn to Mo Yan.