Mo Yan (2012 NOBEL PRIZE WINNER IN LITERATURE)

- Raised from a family of farmers

- Born in Shandong Province, China on March 5, 1955
- MORE THAN 6 SIBLINGS HER MOTHER GAVE BIRTH BUT 4 SURVIVED
- His first novel was Falling Rain on a Spring Night, published in 1981
- Pen name: Don’t speak, real name: Guan Moye (Mo Yan has explained on occasion that the
name comes from a warning from his father and mother not to speak his mind while outside,
because of China's revolutionary political situation from the 1950s, when he grew up)
Mo Yan, a pseudonym for Guan Moye, was born in 1955 to parents who were farmers and grew
up in Gaomi in east China's Shandong Province in north-eastern China. The dusty, agricultural
plains of Shandong, where he grew up is also where much of his fiction is set. He left school at
age 12 during the Cultural Revolution to work, first in agriculture and later in a cottonseed oil
factory, according to his Nobel biography. In 1976 he joined the People's Liberation Army to
escape rural poverty and began to study literature and write. Mo Yan married in 1979; his wife
and children stayed in Gaomi County.
Mo Yan said his pen name (Mo Yan), which means “don't speak," is actually a pen name that
reflects the time in which he grew up. “At that time in China, lives were not normal, so his father
and mother told him not to speak outside," because at that time “If you speak outside, and say
what you think, you will get into trouble. So I listened to them and did not speak."

Gb - 1988

The Garlic Ballads, originally published by the People's Liberation Army Publishing
House, was set in mythical Paradise County, where practically nothing has
changed. At the suggestion of the government, the peasant began to grow garlic,
but a bumper harvest leads to disastrous events following the activities of the
"market administration". The story was based on the real-life Cangshan Garlic
Incident of 1987 in Mo Yan's native province. Readers noticed the obvious parallel
with corrupt Communist officials and rotting crops. "A big mouth is the cause of
most problems," is told to Zhang Kou, a blind minstrel. He gets stabbed in the
mouth with a policeman's electric prod. Shortly after the 4 June 1989 Tiananmen
massacre, the novel was banned, most likely because of Mo Yan's sympathetic
representation of an antigovernment riot. Four years later the book appeared in a
"revised" edition. The novel's final version (thus far) dates from the late 1990s.

Summary: Garlic farmer Gao Ma aches with love for Fang Jinju, whose
parents are using her as a pawn in an arranged marriage. Defying her two
thuggish brothers and her father, who in the past has savagely beaten her,
Jinju, pregnant with Gao Ma's child, runs away with him but meets a tragic
end. The grief-stricken farmer is thrown in jail for his alleged role as ringleader
of a farmer's riot-an angry mob has destroyed a government building to
protest a county official's refusal to buy the garlic crop amid an overabundant
supply. Gao Ma's fate is entwined with that of another imprisoned protestor,
Gao Yang, who preserves his sanity through the love of his wife and blind 10-
year-old daughter. Mo Yan fuses gritty realism, stunning imagery, acid satire,
bawdiness, dream sequences, interior monologues, and flashbacks to the
Cultural Revolution. His luminous prose lays bare the corrupt bureaucracy,
grinding poverty and pervasive oppression borne by millions of inhabitants in
the People's Republic

The farmers of Paradise County have been leading a hardscrabble life unchanged for generations.
The Communist government has encouraged them to plant garlic, but selling the crop is not as
simple as they believed. The market deemed garlic as valueless. Warehouses fill up, taxes
skyrocket, and government officials maltreat even those who have traveled for days to sell their
harvest. A surplus on the garlic market ensues, and the farmers watch in horror as their crops
wither and rot in the fields. Families are destroyed by the random imprisonment of young and
old for supposed crimes against the state. The prisoners languish in horrifying conditions in their
cells, with only their strength of character and thoughts of their loved ones to save them from
madness. Meanwhile, a blind minstrel incites the masses to take the law into their own hands,
and a riot of apocalyptic proportions follows with savage and unforgettable consequences.

LADAWME
Ximen Nao, a landowner known for his generosity and kindness to his peasants, is not only
stripped of his land and worldly possessions in Mao's Land Reform Movement of 1948, but is
cruelly executed, despite his protestations of innocence. He goes to Hell, where Lord Yama, king
of the underworld, has Ximen Nao tortured endlessly, trying to make him admit his guilt, to no
avail. Finally, in disgust, Lord Yama allows Ximen Nao to return to earth, to his own farm, where
he is reborn not as a human but first as a donkey, then an ox, pig, dog, monkey, and finally the
big-headed boy Lan Qiansui. Through the earthy and hugely entertaining perspectives of these
animals, Ximen Nao narrates fifty years of modern Chinese history, ending on the eve of the new
millennium.