Through TV or the Internet, I think everyone here knows more or less about Gaomi, a distant northeast town. You may have met my 90-year-old father, my brothers and sisters, my wife and daughter, and my granddaughter who is one year and four months old. But at this moment, there is someone I miss most, my mother, and you will never see her. After I won the prize, many people shared my glory, but my mother couldn't.
My mother was born in 1922 and died in 1994. Her ashes are buried in the Taoyuan in the east of the village. 20 1 1, a railway is going to cross there, so we have to move her grave farther from the village. After digging the grave, we saw that the coffin had rotted and the mother's bone had been mixed with the soil. We had to symbolically dig out some dirt and move it to a new grave. That is, from that moment on, I felt that my mother was part of the earth, and what I said when I stood on the earth was what I said to my mother.
I am my mother's youngest child. The earliest thing I remember is carrying the only thermos bottle at home to the canteen to boil water. I accidentally broke the thermos bottle because of hunger. I was so scared that I got into the haystack and dared not come out for a day. At night, I heard my mother calling my birth name. I came out of the haystack and thought I would be beaten and scolded, but my mother didn't beat me or scold me. She just stroked my head and let out a long sigh.
The most painful thing in my memory is to follow my mother to pick wheat ears in the collective field. The guards in the wheat field came and the gleaners fled. My mother was caught because her feet were small and she couldn't run fast. The tall guard slapped her in the face, and she shook and fell to the ground. The caretaker confiscated the ears of wheat we picked up and whistled away. My mother was sitting on the ground with bleeding corners of her mouth. I will never forget the expression of despair on her face. Many years later, when the man guarding the wheat field turned into a white-haired old man and met me at the market, I rushed to get back at him. My mother grabbed me and said to me calmly, "Son, the man who hit me was not alone with this old man."
What I remember most is that at noon on a Mid-Autumn Festival, our family rarely had a jiaozi, and everyone only had one bowl. While we were eating jiaozi, an old beggar came to our door. I picked up half a bowl of dried sweet potatoes and sent him away, but he said angrily, "I am an old man." You eat jiaozi, but you let me eat dried sweet potatoes. How long are your hearts? " I said angrily, "We can't eat jiaozi several times a year. We can't even give everyone a half-full bowl! Just give you dried sweet potatoes. If you want it, you have to, or you have to leave! " Mother scolded me, then took her half bowl of jiaozi and poured it into the old man's bowl.
One thing I regret most is that I sold cabbage with my mother and intentionally or unintentionally overcharged an old man who bought cabbage by a dime. I finished calculating the money and went to school. When I came home from school, I saw my mother, who seldom cried at ordinary times, burst into tears. My mother didn't scold me, but whispered, "Son, you embarrassed my mother."
When I was a teenager, my mother suffered from severe lung disease. Hunger, illness and fatigue left our family in trouble and could not see the light and hope. I have a strong feeling that my mother will commit suicide at any moment. Whenever I come back from work, I call my mother as soon as I enter the gate. Hearing her response, I felt a stone fall to the ground. If I don't hear from her for a while, I will be frightened and run to the kitchen and the mill to find it. Once I searched all the rooms but didn't see my mother, so I just sat in the yard and cried. Then my mother came in from the outside, carrying a bundle of firewood on her back. She is not satisfied with my crying, but I can't tell her my worry. Mother saw my thoughts and said, "Don't worry, son. Although my life is no fun, I won't go as long as the terrifying doesn't call me. "
I was born ugly. Many people in the village laughed at me face to face, and several students at school even beat me for it. I went home and cried. My mother said to me, "Son, you are not ugly. You have no nose and eyes, and your limbs are sound. Where is the ugliness? " And as long as you are kind and do more good deeds, no matter how ugly you are, you can become beautiful. "Later, I went to town, and some well-educated people even ridiculed my appearance behind my back. I remembered my mother's words and calmly apologized to them.
My mother can't read, but she has great respect for people who can read. Life in our family is very difficult, and we often eat the last meal without the next. But as long as I ask her for books and stationery, she will always satisfy me. She is a hard worker and hates lazy children, but she never criticizes me as long as I miss my work because of studying.
Once, a storyteller came to the market. I secretly went to listen to the book and forgot the homework she assigned me. My mother criticized me for this. In the evening, when she was making cotton-padded clothes for her family with a small oil lamp, I couldn't help repeating the story I heard from the scholar during the day. At first, she was a little impatient, because in her mind, storytellers are glib, do nothing and can't think of good words. But my repeated stories gradually attracted her, and she stopped giving me homework every party day and acquiesced in my listening to books. In order to repay my mother's kindness and show off my memory, I will tell her vividly the stories I heard during the day.
Soon, I was not satisfied with retelling the story told by the storyteller. I kept polishing it in the process of retelling. I will vote for my mother's favorite, make up some plots, and sometimes even change the ending of the story. My audience is not only my mother, but also my sister, my aunt and my grandmother. After listening to my story, my mother is sometimes very worried, as if telling me or talking to herself: "Son, what kind of person will you be when you grow up?" Do you have to eat to play loquacious? "
I understand my mother's worry, because in the village, a talkative child is bored and sometimes brings trouble to himself and his family. The child I wrote in the novel "Cow" who was hated by the village because of his words has the shadow of my childhood. My mother often reminds me to talk less. She wants me to be a quiet, steady and generous child. But in my body, I showed a strong ability to speak and a great desire to speak, which is undoubtedly a great danger, but my ability to tell stories brought her pleasure and plunged her into deep contradictions.
As the saying goes, "A leopard cannot change his spots." Although I was taught by my parents since I was a child, I haven't changed my nature of liking to talk, which makes my name "Mo Yan" look like a satire on myself.
I dropped out of primary school before I graduated. Because I am too young and weak to do heavy work, I have to go to the grassland to graze cattle and sheep. When I passed the school gate with my cattle and sheep and saw my former classmates fighting on campus, my heart was full of sadness and I deeply realized the pain of a person, even a child, after leaving the group.
On the desert beach, I let the cattle and sheep go and let them eat grass by themselves. The blue sky is like the sea and the grass is endless. There is no figure around, no sound, only birds singing in the sky. I feel lonely, lonely and empty inside. Sometimes, I lie on the grass and look at the lazy white clouds floating in the sky, and many inexplicable fantasies emerge in my mind. There are many stories where foxes become beautiful women. I fantasized that the fox could become a beautiful woman to accompany me to herd cattle, but she never appeared. But once, a lux fox jumped out of the grass in front of me, and I was scared and squatted on the ground. The fox ran away, and I was still shivering there. Sometimes I will squat down beside the cow and look at those blue eyes and my reflection in the cow's eyes. Sometimes I try to talk to birds in the sky by imitating their songs, and sometimes I pour out my heart to a tree. But the birds ignored me and the trees ignored me. Many years later, when I became a novelist, many fantasies of that year were written into novels by me. Many people praise me for my rich imagination, and some literary lovers hope that I can tell them the secret of cultivating imagination. I can only smile bitterly about this.
As the sage Lao Zi of China said, "Misfortune is in happiness, and happiness is in disaster." I dropped out of school in my childhood, suffered from hunger, loneliness and no books to read, but like our predecessor Shen Congwen, I started reading this big book of social life early. The above-mentioned going to the market and listening to the stories told by scholars are just one page in this big book.
After dropping out of school, I hung out with adults and started a long career of "reading with my ears". More than 200 years ago, there was a great storytelling genius Pu Songling in my hometown. Many people in our village, including me, are his descendants. In the fields of collective labor, in the cowshed and stable of the production team, on the hot kang of grandparents, and even on the rickety ox cart, I listened to many ghost stories, historical legends and anecdotes. These stories are closely related to the local natural environment and family history, which gives me a strong sense of reality.
I never dreamed that these things would become my writing materials one day. I was just a child obsessed with stories, fascinated by people's stories. At that time, I was an absolute theist. I believe that everything is spiritual. When I see a big tree, I will feel awe. When I see a bird, I think it will become an adult bird at any time. When you meet a stranger, you will also suspect that it is an animal. Whenever I come home from the workshop of the production team at night, endless fear surrounds me. For courage, I sang loudly while running. At that time, I was in a voice change period, my voice was hoarse and my tone was ugly. My singing is a kind of torture to my villagers.
I have lived in my hometown for twenty-one years, during which I went to Qingdao, the farthest from home, by train, and almost got lost in the huge timber in the timber factory, so that when my mother asked me what scenery I saw when I went to Qingdao, I told her in dismay: I saw nothing but piles of timber. But it was this trip to Qingdao that gave me a strong desire to leave my hometown and see the outside world.
1February, 976, I enlisted in the army, and sold wedding jewelry behind my mother's back to help me buy four compendiums of China's general history. I walked out of Gaomi Northeast Township, a place I love and hate, and started an important period of my life. I must admit that without the great development and progress of China society in the past 30 years and the reform and opening up, there would be no writer like me.
In the boring military camp life, I ushered in the ideological emancipation and literary upsurge in the 1980s. I started telling stories with a pen from a child who listened to stories with his ears and told stories with his mouth. At first, the road was not smooth. I didn't realize that my rural life experience of more than 20 years was a rich literary treasure house. At that time, I thought that literature was about writing good deeds and heroic models. Therefore, although several works have been published, their literary value is very low.
1in the autumn of 984, I was admitted to the literature department of PLA Art College. Under the guidance of my famous writer Xu Huaizhong, I wrote a number of short stories such as Autumn Water, Dry River, Transparent Carrots and Red Sorghum. The word "Gaomi Northeast Township" appeared for the first time in the novel Autumn Water. Since then, just like a wandering farmer has a piece of land, a literary tramp like me finally has a place to settle down. I must admit that william faulkner of the United States and Garcí a Má rquez of Colombia gave me important inspiration in the process of writing my literary territory "Northeast Township of Gaomi". I didn't take their reading seriously, but their pioneering spirit inspired me and made me understand that a writer must have his own place. One should be modest and give in in daily life, but in literary creation, one must be arbitrary and arbitrary. I followed these two masters for two years, and I realized that I had to escape from them as soon as possible. I wrote in an article: They are two burning stoves, and I am an ice cube. If I get too close to them, I will be evaporated by them. According to my experience, the reason why a writer is influenced by a writer lies in the similarity between the influencer and the affected. The so-called "however, I feel the harmonious heartbeat of the sacred unicorn." So, although I didn't read their books well, I only read a few pages and understood what they did and how, and then I understood what I should do and how to do it.
What I should do is actually very simple, that is, tell my story in my own way. My way is the way I am familiar with the market storyteller, the way my grandparents tell stories with the old people in the village. Frankly speaking, I didn't think about who my audience would be when I spoke. Maybe my audience is people like my mother, maybe my audience is myself. My own story is my personal experience from the beginning, such as the child who was beaten up in a dry river, such as the child who didn't say a word from beginning to end in a transparent carrot. I was really beaten by my father for doing something wrong, and I did play the bellows for the blacksmith on the bridge site. Of course, personal experiences, no matter how strange, can't be written into the novel intact. A novel must be fictional and imaginative. Many friends say that Transparent Carrot is my best novel. I don't refute or agree with it, but I think Transparent Carrot is the most symbolic one of my works. The child who is dark and has superhuman endurance and sensibility is the soul of all my novels. Although I wrote many characters in my later novels, no one is closer to my soul than him. In other words, there is always a leader among the characters created by a writer. The silent child is a leader. Without saying a word, he effectively led all kinds of characters and performed heartily on the stage in Gaomi Northeast Township.
Your own story is always limited. When you finish your own story, you must tell others' stories. So, the stories of relatives, villagers and ancestors I heard from the old people poured out of my memory like soldiers who heard the assembly number. They looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to write about them. My grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, wife and daughter have all appeared in my works, and many villagers in Gaomi Northeast Township have also appeared in my novels. Of course, I treat them in a literary way, so that they can surpass themselves and become characters in literature.
My aunt appeared in my latest novel Frog. Because I won the Nobel Prize, many reporters visited her home. At first, she answered questions patiently, but soon she got bored and ran to the son's house in the county to hide. Menstruation was really my model when I wrote Frog, but menstruation in the novel is very different from menstruation in real life. The aunt in the novel is overbearing, sometimes just like a female bandit. In reality, the aunt is kind and cheerful, and is a standard wife and mother. In reality, my aunt lived a happy life in her later years, but in the novel, her aunt was insomnia because of great inner pain, wearing a black robe and wandering in the dark like a ghost. I thank menstruation for her tolerance. She is not angry because I wrote about her like that in my novel. I also admire my aunt's wisdom. She correctly understands the complex relationship between the characters in the novel and the characters in reality.
I was very sad after my mother died, so I decided to write a book for her. This is the book "Big Breasts and Fat Buttocks". It took me only 83 days to write the first draft of this 500,000-word novel, because I had a well-thought-out plan and was full of emotion.
In the book "Big Breasts and Fat Buttocks", I used materials related to my mother's personal experience unscrupulously, but the emotional experience of my mother in the book is fictional or based on the experiences of many mothers in Gaomi Northeast Township. In the preface of this book, I wrote the words "to my mother's soul in heaven", but this book is actually dedicated to all mothers in the world. This is my arrogant ambition, just as I hope to write the small "Gaomi Northeast Township" as a microcosm of China and even the world.
The writer's creative process has its own characteristics, and the conception and inspiration trigger of each of my books are also different. Some novels come from dreams, such as transparent carrots, while others come from real-life events, such as Song of Garlic Bolts in Heaven. However, whether it comes from dreams or reality, it must be combined with personal experience in the end to become a literary work with distinctive personality, colorful language and unique structure, which has created countless typical figures with vivid details. In particular, I let a real storyteller appear in "Song of Young Garlic in Heaven" and played a very important role in the book. I'm very sorry to use this storyteller's real name. Of course, all his actions in the book are fictitious. In my writing, there have been many such phenomena. At the beginning of writing, I used their real names, hoping to get a sense of closeness. But after the work is finished, I think it is impossible to change their names. Therefore,
It also happened that the person with the same name in my novel found my father to vent his dissatisfaction. My father apologized to them for me, but at the same time advised them not to take it seriously. My father said, "In Red Sorghum, the first sentence says that my father is a bandit. I don't care what you care about? "
When I am writing a novel close to social reality, such as A Song of Garlic in Heaven, the biggest problem I face is not whether I dare to criticize the dark phenomenon in society, but that this burning passion and anger will make politics overwhelm literature and turn this novel into a documentary report of social events. A novelist is a person in society, and he naturally has his own position and viewpoint, but when writing, a novelist must stand on the standpoint of people and write all people as adults. Only in this way can literature initiate events but surpass them, and care more about politics than politics.
Perhaps it is because I have experienced a long and difficult life that I have a deeper understanding of human nature. I know what real courage is, and I know what real sympathy is. I know that there is a hazy zone in everyone's heart that is difficult to accurately define right and wrong, good and evil, and this zone is a vast world for writers to display their talents. As long as we describe this hazy area full of contradictions accurately and vividly, we will certainly surpass politics and have the quality of excellent literature.
It's boring to talk about my works endlessly, but my life is closely related to my works. I feel unable to talk about my work, so I must ask you to forgive me.
In my early works, as a modern storyteller, I was hidden behind the words, but from the novel Sandalwood Punishment, I finally jumped from the background to the foreground. If my early works are talking to myself and ignoring readers, then from the beginning of this book, I feel that I am standing in a square, facing a large audience and telling it vividly. This is the tradition of world novels, and it is also the tradition of China's novels. I have also actively studied western modernist novels and played various narrative tricks, but I finally returned to tradition. Of course, this regression is not a static regression. Sandalwood Punishment and its subsequent novels are mixed texts that inherit the tradition of China's classical novels and draw lessons from western novel techniques. The so-called innovation in the field of novels is basically the product of this mixture. It is not only a mixture of domestic literary tradition and foreign novel skills, but also a mixture of novels and other art categories, just as Sandalwood Punishment is a mixture of folk operas, just as some of my early novels draw nutrition from art, music and even acrobatics.
Finally, please allow me to talk about my life and death fatigue again. This title comes from Buddhist classics. As far as I know, translators all over the world have a headache in translating this title. I have no in-depth study of Buddhist classics, and my understanding of Buddhism is naturally superficial. The reason for this topic is that I think many basic concepts of Buddhism are true universal consciousness, and many disputes in the world are meaningless in the eyes of Buddhists. Such a world in the highest vision is very sad. Of course, I didn't write this book to preach. I wrote about people's destiny and feelings, about people's limitations and tolerance, and about people's efforts and sacrifices in pursuing happiness and sticking to their beliefs. The blue face in the novel, which stands alone against the trend of the times, is the real hero in my mind. The prototype of this character is a farmer in our neighboring village. When I was a child, I often saw him pushing a creaking wooden cart across the road in front of my house. He was led by a lame donkey and his little wife. This strange combination of labor seemed so strange and inappropriate in the collectivized society at that time. In the eyes of our children, we also regard them as clowns who move against the historical trend, so that when they pass the street, we will throw stones at them with indignation. Years later, when I picked up a pen to write, this figure, this picture, came to my mind. I know that one day I will write a book for him, and I will tell his story to the whole world sooner or later, but it was not until 2005 that I saw the mural of "Six Great Divisions in the Cycle of Cause and Effect" in a temple that I understood the correct way to tell this story.
After I won the Nobel Prize in Literature, it caused some controversy. At first, I thought the object of the argument was me. Gradually, I feel that the object of the dispute is someone who has nothing to do with me. I am like a theater goer, watching everyone's performances. I saw the winner covered with flowers, stones and sewage. I was afraid that he would be defeated, but he appeared from the flowers and stones with a smile, wiped away the dirty water, stood aside calmly and said to people:
For a writer, the best way to speak is writing. Everything I have to say is written in my work. What you say with your mouth is scattered with the wind, and what you write with your pen can never be erased. I hope you can read my book patiently. Of course, I am not qualified to force you to read my book. Even if you read my book, I don't expect you to change your mind about me. There is no writer in the world who can make all readers like him. This is especially true in today's era.
Although I don't want to say anything, I have to say something on such an occasion today, so I will simply say a few more words.
I am a storyteller, so I still want to tell you stories.
In the 1960s, when I was in the third grade of primary school, the school organized us to visit a suffering exhibition, and we burst into tears under the guidance of our teacher. In order to let the teacher see my performance, I can't bear to wipe away the tears on my face. I saw several classmates quietly spitting on their faces and pretending to cry. I also saw that among the students who really cried and pretended to cry, one of them didn't have a tear on his face, no voice in his mouth and no hands covering his face. He looked at us with wide eyes, with surprise or confusion in his eyes. Afterwards, I reported this classmate's behavior to the teacher. To this end, the school gave this classmate a warning.
Many years later, when I complained to my teacher about the snitch, the teacher said that there were more than a dozen students who came to talk to him about it that day. This classmate died more than ten years ago, and every time I think of him, I feel deeply sorry. This incident made me realize that when everyone is crying, some people should be allowed not to cry. When crying becomes a manifestation, some people should be allowed not to cry.
Let me tell another story: more than 30 years ago, I was still working in the army. One night, I was reading in my office when an old officer opened the door and came in. He glanced at the position opposite me and said to himself, "Oh, nobody?" I immediately stood up and said loudly, "Am I not a human being?" The old officer was blushed by me and withdrew awkwardly. For this matter, I was complacent for a long time, thinking that I was a brave fighter, but many years later, I felt deeply guilty about it.
Please allow me to tell the last story, which my grandfather told me many years ago: eight masons who went out to work hid in a broken temple to avoid a storm. There is thunder outside, fireballs are rolling around outside the temple gate, and there seems to be a squeaking dragon in the air. All the people turned pale with fear. One person said, "One of the eight of us must have done something bad. Whoever does something bad, let him leave the temple and accept the punishment himself, so as not to get into trouble with good people. " Naturally no one wants to go out. Someone suggested, "Since everyone doesn't want to go out, let's throw out the straw hat. Whose straw hat is blown outside the temple gate means that he has done something bad and asked him to go out and accept punishment. "
So everyone threw straw hats outside the temple gate. Seven people's straw hats were blown back to the temple, and only one person's straw hat was rolled out. Everyone urged the man to go out and accept punishment. Naturally, he didn't want to go out, so they lifted him up and threw him out of the temple. I guess everyone guessed the ending of the story. No sooner had the man been driven out of the temple gate than the ruined temple collapsed.
I am a storyteller. I won the Nobel Prize in Literature for telling stories. Many wonderful stories happened after I won the lottery, which made me firmly believe that truth and justice exist. In the years to come, I will continue to tell my story.