Mo Yan: Storyteller
Mo Yan Nobel Prize in Literature Speech
In the early morning of December 8, 2012 Beijing time, the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature and Chinese writer Mo Yan, dressed in a dark Mountain suit embroidered with the red seal of "Mo Yan" embroidered on his chest, faced more than 200 Chinese and foreign audiences, and delivered a literary speech at the Swedish Academy, with the theme of "storyteller". After the speech, the guests were all touched by Mo Yan's story, and the audience collectively stood up and gave a one-minute ovation. Foreign media commented that his speech was simple and simple, but it was thorough.
Basic information
| Chinese name | Storytellers |
| Pinyin | jiǎng hunchback shì de rén |
| place | Lecture Hall of the Swedish Academy |
The scene of the speech
"The Storyteller" Speech Full Video On December 7, 2012, at 17:30, Mo Yan held a Nobel Prize speech in the lecture hall of the Swedish Academy of Letters. The Faculty of Letters opened its doors an hour in advance, and guests have already entered. The Swedish Academy prepared speeches in 7 languages, including Chinese, Swedish, and English, because Mo Yan will speak in Chinese, and there is no translation on the spot. [1]
Different from previous years, on a table next to the podium in 2012 was a Swedish translation of Chinese writer Mo Yan's works, "Red Sorghum Family", "The Song of Garlic in Paradise" and "Fatigue of Life and Death", and two rows of seats were specially reserved for the staff of the Chinese Embassy in Switzerland on the right. Around 17:10, 200 guests had basically arrived, and Westberg, chairman of the Nobel Prize committee of the Swedish Academy, entered with his wife, and then Ma Yueran and his wife Chen Wenfen sat in the first row. [1]
Mr. and Mrs. Mo Yan, accompanied by sher Plesmark, former chairman of the Nobel Prize Committee on Literature, walked into the venue, and the guests warmly stood up and applauded. In the applause, after presenting Mo Yan with a bouquet of flowers, Pulsmark took the lead in walking to the podium to express his welcome to Mo Yan. [1]
Mo
Mo Yan gave a speech
Before Mo Yan's speech began, he said: "The wife of the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy of Letters gave birth to a little girl, which is the beginning of a beautiful story. The congratulations on the birth of a new life opened the content of Mo Yan's literary lecture. [1]
In the long and warm applause, Mo Yan ended the story of things and people that have a relationship with his own creation. At the end, Mo Yan once again bowed deeply to the applauding audience to express his gratitude. After the speech, the guests were all touched by Mo Yan's story, and the audience collectively stood up and gave a one-minute ovation. [1]
The full text of the speech
Dear Academicians of the Swedish Academy, Ladies and Gentlemen,
Through television or the Internet, I think all of you here have a more or less understanding of the distant gaomi northeast countryside. You may see my ninety-year-old father, my brothers and sisters, my wife and daughter, and my granddaughter who is one year and four months old. But there is one person I miss the most at the moment, my mother, that you will never see. After I won the award, many people shared my glory, but my mother could not share it.
My mother was born in 1922 and died in 1994. Her ashes are buried in a peach orchard on the east side of the village. In 2011, a railroad was going to cross from there and we had to relocate her grave farther from the village. After digging the grave, we saw that the coffin had decayed and the mother's bones had been mixed with the mud. We had to symbolically dig up some dirt and move it to a new tomb. That is, from that moment on, I felt that my mother was a part of the earth, and that my story from standing on the earth was a message to my mother.
Remembering my mother
I am my mother's youngest child
One of the earliest things I remember was carrying the only hot water bottle in my home to the public canteen to turn on the water. Because of hunger and weakness, I broke the hot water bottle by mistake, and I was so frightened that I went into the haystack and did not dare to come out for a day. In the evening I heard my mother calling my nipple name, and I came out of the haystack thinking I would be scolded, but my mother did not hit me or scold me, but just stroked my head and let out a long sigh.
One of the most painful things in my memory is to follow my mother to the collective field to pick ears of wheat, the guards of the wheat fields came, the people who picked the ears of wheat fled, my mother was a little foot, could not run fast, was caught, the tall guard slapped her, she shook her body and fell to the ground, the guards confiscated the ears of wheat we had picked, whistled and flew away. My mother was bleeding from the corners of her mouth and sitting on the ground, the look of despair on her face that I would never forget. Years later, when the man who guarded the wheat field became a white-haired old man who met me at the market, and I rushed up to seek revenge on him, my mother pulled me aside and said to me calmly, "Son, the man who beat me, and this old man, are not alone." ”
One of the things I remember most is that at noon during the Mid-Autumn Festival, our family rarely wrapped a meal of dumplings, and each person only had one bowl. Just as we were eating dumplings, a begging old man came to our door, and I took half a bowl of dried sweet potatoes to send him, but he said indignantly: "I am an old man, you eat dumplings, but let me eat dried sweet potatoes." How did your heart grow? I said angrily, "We can't eat dumplings a few times a year, one person and a small bowl, not even half full!" It's good to give you dried sweet potatoes, if you want it, don't just roll! "My mother reprimanded me, and then took her half bowl of dumplings and poured them into the old man's bowl.
One of the things I regret the most is that I followed my mother to sell cabbage, and intentionally or unintentionally calculated a dime for an old man who bought cabbage. After calculating the money, I went to school. When I came home from school, I saw my mother, who rarely shed tears, in tears. My mother didn't scold me, but said softly, "Son, you have disgraced your mother." ”
When I was a teenager, my mother suffered from severe lung disease, hunger, illness, and exertion, which left our family in a difficult situation, with no light and hope in sight. I had a strong ominous omen that my mother would always look for short-sightedness on her own. Whenever I returned from labor, as soon as I entered the gate, I shouted to my mother, and when I heard her response, I felt a stone fall to the ground. If I didn't hear her response for a while, I panicked and ran to the kitchen and the mill to look for it. Once I searched all the rooms and didn't see my mother, so I sat in the courtyard and cried. At this time, the mother walked in from outside carrying a bundle of firewood. She was upset with my crying, but I couldn't tell her my concerns. The mother saw my thoughts, and she said, "Child, you can rest assured, although I have no pleasure in living, as long as Yama does not call me, I will not go." ”
I was born ugly, many people in the village laughed at me to my face, and a few domineering classmates in the school even beat me for this. I went home and cried bitterly, and my mother said to me: "Son, you are not ugly, you do not lack nose, you do not lack eyes, your limbs are sound, where is the ugliness?" And as long as you have a kind heart and do more good deeds, even if you are ugly, you can become beautiful. "Later, when I entered the city, some very cultured people still mocked my appearance behind my back and even to my face, and I remembered my mother's words and calmly apologized to them.
My mother was illiterate, but she had great respect for literate people. Our family had a difficult life, and we often ate the last meal without eating. But as long as I asked her to buy books and stationery, she would always satisfy me. She was a hard-working person who hated lazy children, but as long as I was delayed in my work because of reading, she never criticized me.
Learning experience
For a while, a storyteller came up to the market. I secretly ran to listen to the book, forgetting the work she had assigned me. For this reason, my mother criticized me, and at night when she was making cotton clothes for her family with a small oil lamp, I could not help but repeat to her the stories I had heard from the storytellers during the day, and at first she was a little impatient, because in her mind the storytellers were all greasy-mouthed and slippery, and people who did not do their jobs could not say good things from their mouths. But the story I recounted gradually attracted her, and in the future, she stopped rehearsing for me every episode day and acquiesced to me going to the collection to listen to books. In order to repay my mother's kindness and to show her my memory, I would tell her the stories I heard during the day.
Soon, I will not be satisfied with repeating the story told by the storyteller, and I will continue to add fuel to the retelling process, I will throw in my mother's favor, 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, my grandmother have become my audience. After listening to my story, my mother sometimes worriedly said to me, as if to say to herself: "Son, what will you become when you grow up?" Do you have to eat by playing poor mouths? ”
I understand my mother's concern, because in the village, a poor child is annoying and sometimes causes trouble for himself and his family. The child I wrote about in the novel "The Cow" who was disgusted by the village because of his words had the shadow of my childhood. My mother often reminded me to talk less, and she wanted me to be a taciturn, stable and generous child. But in me, he showed a very strong ability to speak and a great desire to speak, which was undoubtedly a great danger, but the ability to tell stories brought her pleasure, which made him fall into a deep contradiction.
As the saying goes, "the country is easy to change, the nature is difficult to move", although I have the sincere teachings of my parents, I have not changed my nature of talking, which makes my name "Mo Yan", much like a satire on myself.
I dropped out of school before I graduated from primary school, because I was young and weak, I couldn't do heavy work, so I had to go to the grassy beach to graze cattle and sheep. When I led the cattle and sheep past the school gate and saw my former classmates playing and making trouble on campus, my heart was full of sadness, and I deeply felt the pain of a person, even a child, after leaving the group.
When I got to the desert, I let go of the cattle and sheep and let them graze on their own. The blue sky is like the sea, the grass is endless, there is no figure around, no one's voice, only birds chirping in the sky. I felt lonely, lonely, empty inside. Sometimes, when I lie on the grass and look at the white clouds lazily fluttering in the sky, many inexplicable illusions come to mind. There are many stories of foxes becoming beautiful women in our place, and I fantasize about a fox turning into a beautiful woman and me herding cattle with me, but she never appears. But once, when a fiery red fox jumped out of the grass in front of me, I was so frightened that I squatted on the ground. The fox ran away without a trace, and I was still shivering there. Sometimes I would crouch next to the cow and look at the blue bull's eye and my reflection in the bull's eye. Sometimes I try to talk to the birds in the sky by imitating the sounds of birds, and sometimes I speak to a tree. But the birds ignored me, and the trees ignored me. Many years later, when I became a novelist, many of the fantasies of that year were written into the novel by me. Many people praise my imagination, and some literature lovers hope that I can tell them the secret of cultivating imagination, and I can only smile bitterly about this.
Just as the Chinese sage Lao Tzu said: "Where misfortunes and blessings depend, where blessings and misfortunes lie", I dropped out of school as a child and suffered from hunger, loneliness, and no books to read, but I also began to read the big book of social life as early as our predecessor writer Shen Congwen did. The aforementioned going to the bazaar to hear about the book is only one page in this big book.
After dropping out of school, I mixed with adults and began a long career of "reading with my ears". More than two hundred years ago, there was a great genius of storytelling in my hometown, Pu Songling, and many people in our village, including me, were his descendants. I listened to many stories of gods and ghosts, historical legends, and anecdotes in the fields of collective labor, in the stables of the production team's cowsheds, on the hot kilns of my grandparents, and even on the rickety ox carts, which were closely linked to the local natural environment and family history, which made me feel a strong sense of reality.
I never dreamed that one day these things would become the material for my writing, and I was just a child who was obsessed with stories, listening to people's stories. At that time I was an absolute theist, I believed that everything was spiritual, and I would be awestruck when I saw a big tree. I see a bird and feel that it can change into an adult at any moment, and I meet a stranger who will suspect that he is an animal that has changed. Whenever I came home from the workshop of the production team at night, I was surrounded by boundless fear, and in order to strengthen my courage, I ran and sang loudly. At that time, I was in the process of changing my voice, my voice was hoarse, the tone of my voice was difficult to hear, and my singing was a kind of torture for my countrymen.
I had lived in my hometown for twenty-one years, during which time I was the farthest away from home by train to Qingdao, and I almost got lost in the huge timber of the timber factory, so that when my mother asked me what I saw when I went to Qingdao, I told her in frustration: I saw nothing, only piles of wood. But it was this trip to Qingdao that made me have a strong desire to leave my hometown and go outside to see the world.
In February 1976, I enlisted in the army, carried behind my mother's back to sell the jewelry I bought when I got married, and walked out of Gaomi Northeast Township, a place that I both loved and hated, and began an important period in my life. I must admit that without the tremendous development and progress of Chinese society over the past 30 years, and without reform and opening up, there would be no writer like me.
My works
In the dry life of the barracks, I ushered in the ideological emancipation and literary boom of the eighties, and I began to try to tell 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 did not realize that my experience of rural life for more than twenty years was a rich mine of literature, and at that time I thought that literature was to write good people and good deeds, that is, to write heroic models, so although I also published several works, the literary value was very low.
In the autumn of 1984, I was admitted to the Literature Department of the People's Liberation Army Academy of Arts. Under the inspiration and guidance of my mentor Xu Huaizhong, a famous writer, I wrote a number of short and medium stories such as "Autumn Water", "Dry River", "Transparent Carrot", "Red Sorghum" and so on. In the novel "Autumn Water", the word "Gaomi Northeast Township" appeared for the first time, and from then on, just like a peasant wandering around, he had a piece of land, and I, a literary tramp, finally had a place where I could settle down. I must admit that in the process of creating my literary territory " High-density Northeastern Township " , William Faulkner of the United States and García Márquez of Colombia gave me important inspiration. I didn't take their reading seriously, but their groundbreaking spirit inspired me and made me understand that a writer must have a place of his own. A person should be humble and give in in daily life, but in literary creation, he must be arrogant and arbitrary. I followed these two masters for two years, realizing that it was necessary to flee them as soon as possible, and I wrote in an article: They are two scorching furnaces, and I am a cube of ice, and 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 certain writer is fundamentally because of the deep similarities between the souls of the influencer and the affected. It is the so-called "heart has a spirit and a sharp point". So, even though I didn't read their books very well, after only a few pages, I understood what they did and how they did it, and then I understood what I was supposed to do and how I was going to do it.
What I should do is actually very simple, that is, to tell my own story in my own way. My way is the way I know the market storyteller, the way my grandparents and the old people in the village tell stories. Frankly, when I told it, I didn't think about who would be my audience, maybe my audience was those like my mother, maybe my audience was myself, my own story, at the beginning was my own experience, such as the beaten child in "Dry River", such as the child in "Transparent Carrot" who never said a word. I did get beaten by my father for doing a wrong thing, and I did pull a bellows for a master blacksmith on a bridge site. Of course, no matter how peculiar, personal experiences cannot be written into the novel intact, and the novel must be fictional, it must be imagined. Many friends say that "Transparent Carrot" is my best novel, and I don't refute it or agree with it, but I think "Transparent Carrot" is the most symbolic and meaningful one in my work. The dark, superhuman ability to endure pain and superhuman ability to feel is the soul of all my novels, although in later novels I wrote many characters, none of them were closer to my soul than him. Or it can be said that among the several characters created by a writer, there is always a leader, and this silent child is a leader, who does not say a word, but powerfully leads all kinds of characters to perform on the stage of Gaomi Northeast Township.
Works review
Your own story is always limited, and when you have finished telling your own story, you must tell the story of others. So the stories of my relatives, the stories of my villagers, and the stories of my ancestors that I had heard from the mouths of the old people, poured out of the depths of my memory like the soldiers who heard the assembly order. They looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to write about them. My grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, wife, daughter, all appear in my works, and many of our villagers in Gaomi Northeast Township have also appeared in my novels. Of course, I have made a literary treatment of them, so that they have surpassed themselves and become characters in literature.
In my latest novel, Frog, the image of my aunt appears. Because I won the Nobel Prize, many reporters came to her house to interview, and at first she was very patient to answer questions, but soon she was overwhelmed and ran to her son's house in the county town to hide. My aunt is indeed the model I used when I wrote "Frog", but the aunt in the novel is very different from the aunt in real life. The aunt in the novel is domineering, sometimes like a bandit, and the aunt in reality is kind and cheerful, and is a standard good wife and mother. The aunt in reality has a happy and happy life in her later years, but the aunt in the novel suffers from insomnia in her old age because of the great pain of the soul, wearing a black robe and wandering in the dark night like a ghost. I thank my aunt for her tolerance, she is not angry that I wrote her that way in the novel, and I admire my aunt's wisdom in correctly understanding the complex relationship between the characters in the novel and the characters in reality.
After my mother's death, I was so sad that I decided to write a book for her. This is the book "Fat Buttocks". Because of my confidence, because of my emotional intensity, it took me only 83 days to write the first draft of this 500,000-word novel.
In the book "Fat Buttocks", I unscrupulously use material related to my mother's personal experience, but the emotional experience of the mother in the book is fictional or based on the experiences of many mothers in Gaomi Northeast Township. In the preface to this book, I wrote the words "dedicated to the mother's spirit in heaven", but this book is actually dedicated to the mother of the world, which is my arrogant ambition, just like 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 ideas and inspirations of each of my books are different. Some novels originate from dreams, such as "Transparent Carrots", and some novels begin with real-life events such as "The Song of Heavenly Garlic". However, whether it originates from dreams or originates from reality, in the end, it must be combined with personal experience to become a literary work with a distinct personality, with countless vivid details to shape typical characters, rich language, and unique structure. It is important to mention that in "The Song of Garlic in Paradise", I made a real storyteller appear and played a very important role in the book. I apologetically used the storyteller's real name, and of course all of his actions in the book are fictitious. In my writing, there have been many times when I used their real names in the hope of gaining a sense of closeness, but after the work was completed, I felt that it was impossible to change their names for them, so
There have also been incidents in which the namesake of the characters in my novels approached my father to vent his grievances, and my father apologized to them for me, but at the same time told them not to take it seriously. My father said, "In "Red Sorghum," the first sentence says that my father is a bandit species, and I don't care what you still care about. ”
The biggest problem I faced when writing a novel that approached social reality, such as "The Song of Heavenly Garlic", was not whether I dared to criticize the dark phenomena in society, but that this burning passion and anger would make politics overwhelm literature and make this novel a documentary report of social events. The novelist is a person in society, and he naturally has his own position and point of view, but when the novelist writes, he must stand on the standpoint of man and write all people as people. Only in this way can literature originate from events but transcend events, and care about politics but be greater than politics.
Probably because I have experienced a long and difficult life, I have a deeper understanding of human nature. I know what true bravery is, and I understand what true compassion is. I know that in everyone's heart there is a hazy area where it is difficult to accurately characterize right and wrong, good and evil, and this area is the vast world where literary artists display their talents. As long as it accurately and vividly depicts this ambiguous area full of contradictions, it will inevitably transcend politics and have the quality of excellent literature.
It is tiresome to talk about my work incessantly, but my life is closely related to my work, and I feel unable to talk about it without talking about it, so I have to ask for your forgiveness.
In my early works, I, as a modern storyteller, was hidden behind the text, but starting with the novel Sandalwood Torture, I finally jumped from backstage to foreground. If my early work was self-talking and unreadable, from the beginning of this book I felt like I was standing in a square, facing many listeners, telling it in a colorful way. This is the tradition of the world novel, and it is also the tradition of the Chinese novel. I have also actively studied Western modernist novels and played with all kinds of narrative tricks, but I have finally returned to tradition. Of course, this kind of return is not a static return, "Sandalwood Punishment" and subsequent novels are mixed texts that inherit the tradition of classical Chinese novels and borrow from Western novel techniques. The so-called innovations in the field of fiction are basically the product of this mixture. It's not just a mixture of domestic literary traditions and foreign fiction techniques, but also a mixture of fiction with other artistic disciplines, just as Sandalwood Punishment is a mixture of folk opera, just as some of my early novels drew nourishment from fine art, music, and even acrobatics.
Finally, allow me to talk about my Life and Death Fatigue again. The title comes from the Buddhist scriptures, and as far as I know, translators from all over the world have had a headache translating the title. I have not studied the Buddhist scriptures in depth, and my understanding of Buddhism is naturally very superficial, and the reason for this is because I think that many of the basic ideas of Buddhism are true cosmic consciousness, and many disputes in the human world are meaningless in the eyes of the Buddhists. Such a human life under the highest vision seems very sad. Of course, I did not write this book into a sermon, but I still wrote about people's fate and human feelings, people's limitations and people's tolerance, and the efforts and sacrifices made by people in the pursuit of happiness and sticking to their beliefs. The blue face in the novel who fights against the trend of the times with his own body is a real hero in my mind. The character is based on a farmer from our neighboring village, and when I was a child, I often saw him pushing a creaky wooden wheeled cart through the road in front of my house. The one who pulled him the cart was a lame donkey, and the one who led the donkey for him was his little-footed wife. This strange combination of labour, so strange and inappropriate in the collectivized society of the time, saw them in the eyes of our children as clowns who moved against the tide of history that when they passed through the streets, we would throw stones at them with indignation. Over the years, when I picked up a pen to write, this character, this picture, came to my mind. I knew that I would one day write a book for him, and that sooner or later I would have to tell his story to the people of the world, but it wasn't until 2005, when I saw the mural of the "Six Reincarnations" in a temple, that I understood the right way to tell this story.
Feel the life
After I won the Nobel Prize in Literature, it sparked some controversy. At first, I thought that the object of everyone's dispute was me, but gradually, I felt that the object of the controversy was a person who had nothing to do with me. I was like a spectator, watching the performances of the crowd. I saw that the winner was covered with flowers, stones and sewage. I was afraid that he would be crushed, but he smiled and came out of the flowers and stones, wiped the dirty water off his body, stood calmly to the side, and said to the crowd:
The best way for a writer to speak is to write. Everything I had to say went into my work. The words spoken with the mouth are scattered with the wind, and the words written with the pen are indelible. I hope you will read my book patiently, of course, I have no right to force you to read my book. Even if you read my book, I don't expect you to change your opinion of me, there is no writer in the world that can make all readers like him. This is especially true in times like these.
Although I don't want to say anything, I have to speak on an occasion like today, so I'll just say a few more words.
I'm a storyteller, and I'm going to tell you stories anyway.
In the 1960s, when I was in the third grade of elementary school, the school organized us to visit an exhibition of suffering, and we cried loudly under the guidance of the teacher. In order to let the teacher see my performance, I was reluctant to wipe the tears from my face. I saw several classmates quietly smearing spit on their faces and passing them off into tears. I also saw that among the students who were really crying and fake crying, there was a classmate who did not have a tear on his face, no sound in his mouth, and did not cover his face with his hands. He looked at us with wide eyes, a look of surprise or confusion in his eyes. Afterwards, I reported the classmate's behavior to the teacher. For this reason, the school gave the classmate a warning punishment.
Years later, when I confessed to my teacher because of my whistleblowing, the teacher said that there were more than a dozen classmates who came to him that day to talk about it. This classmate died more than a decade ago, and whenever I think of him, I feel deeply sorry. This incident made me realize a truth, that is, when everyone is crying, some people should be allowed not to cry. When crying becomes a performance, it is more important to allow some people not to cry.
Let me tell you another story: more than thirty years ago, I was still working in the army. One night, I was reading a book in the office, and an old officer pushed the door in, glanced at the position opposite me, and said to himself, "Oh, nobody?" I stood up and said in a loud voice, "Am I not human?" The old officer was blushed by me and retreated in embarrassment. I thought I was a heroic fighter for a long time, but after many years, I felt deeply guilty about it.
Allow me to tell you the last story, which my grandfather told me many years ago: eight masons who went out to work hid in a ruined temple to avoid a storm. The thunder outside was like a burst, and one fireball after another rolled around outside the temple gate, and there seemed to be a creaking dragon cry in the air. The crowd was terrified, and their faces were earth-colored. One person said, "One of the eight of us must have done something bad that hurt heaven and nature, and whoever has done something bad should go out of the temple himself and be punished, so as not to implicate the good people." "Naturally no one wants to go out. Another person proposed: "Since everyone does not want to go out, let's throw our straw hats out, and whoever has their straw hats scraped out of the temple door shows that whoever has done something bad is asked to go out and be punished." ”
So everyone threw their straw hats outside the temple door, and the straw hats of seven people were scraped back into the temple, and only one person's straw hat was rolled out. Everyone urged this man to go out and be punished, but naturally he did not want to go out, and the people lifted him up and threw him out of the temple gate. The end of the story I guess everyone guessed, the man was just thrown out of the temple gate, the broken temple collapsed.
I'm a storyteller.
I won the Nobel Prize in Literature for storytelling.
After I won the award, there were many wonderful stories that made me firmly believe that truth and justice exist.
I will continue to tell my story in the years to come.
Thank you!
Social evaluation
Foreign media commentary
A reporter from the Columbia News website commented: "Different stories show the temperament and pride of the winners. Today, Mo Yan has used a most plain way to narrate his journey of becoming a 'storyteller', simple and simple, but thorough. In Colombia, the hometown of the magic realist writer García Márquez, people do not hesitate to praise Mo Yan, the oriental magic realist writer: "Mo Yan, who is so rich in writing, tells himself with a simple and somewhat surprising story." It contains his feelings about the ups and downs of life in these years. ”
Chinese Writers Review
● Mai Jia (writer, winner of the Mao Dun Literature Prize): "The title of Mo Yan's speech is "The Storyteller", and he said that as a novelist, he is a storyteller. Just hearing about this topic, I like it very, very much. Mo Yan's speech can be titled 'storytelling' and emphasize the importance of novelists telling good stories, which is very insightful! At a time when various forms of entertainment are blooming, if the novel relies solely on the charm of language to 'fight the world', its situation will be precarious. ”
● Liu Cixin (writer, "the first person in Chinese science fiction"): "My liking for the "Transparent Carrot" novel mentioned in Mo Yan's speech is no longer a simple word of 'like' that can be described in place. The protagonist of the novel, the little boy, has nowhere to vent in a poor, closed environment, thus bursting out a supernatural imagination, a profound life experience that I myself have had. ”
● Cai Jun (2012 7th China Writers Rich List Writers List Writers) "The strongest feeling is: authenticity. Every detail he tells seems sincere and moving, rather than making empty words and big words in a condescending attitude. And Mo Yan's narration of his mother's meaning in his life in the text especially touched me. (9632 words)