Mo Yan's dumplings – props for telling historical events
Mo Yan's love for eating dumplings is something that the whole world knows, because he told the world about eating dumplings on the Chinese Festival in his Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech.
He said it was one of the things he "remembers most": One Mid-Autumn Festival noon, the family rarely ate a meal of dumplings, only one bowl per person. Just as the dumplings were being eaten, an old man begging came. Don't eat dried sweet potatoes, you have to eat dumplings. Mo Yan theorized with him: "We can't eat dumplings several times a year, one person and a small bowl, and we can't even eat half full." ”
Here, Mo Yan talked about his poverty when he was a child, he couldn't eat a few dumplings a year, and he had a small bowl per person, and he couldn't eat enough.
In Mo Yan's essay "Selling Cabbage", he said that he was most willing to eat dumplings stuffed with cabbage, but before the Spring Festival in 1967, his mother sold the only three cabbages in the family, and I am afraid that she did not even eat dumplings that year. Because cabbage is the cheapest dish in any era, selling cabbage shows that other dishes are even more unaffordable.
Mo Yan has told such a story in many places: He dropped out of school to return to the village to work as a farmer as a teenager, and listened to an uncle from a neighbor who graduated from the Chinese department of the university, was wrongly classified as a rightist, was expelled from public office, and returned to his hometown as a farmer, saying that he met a writer in Jinan, wrote a book, earned a lot of money, and lived a corrupt life of three dumplings a day.
Mo Yan was very surprised, he said, "In our place, I eat dumplings several times a year, and this writer actually eats dumplings three times a day, this contrast is too big, this life is too desirable, so I made up my mind to become a writer, write novels, and eat dumplings." ”
When he won the Nobel Prize, he also celebrated by eating dumplings for the whole family. He also wrote the poetic novel "Dumpling Song", expressing his feelings for dumplings:
Dumplings ah dumplings,
The oldest cuisine in the world.
It's just for you,
I made my big ambitions.
Sleep and forget to eat and write novels,
Painstakingly making up stories.
In these stories, Mo Yan turned the myth of "dumplings" into a rare delicacy, and even became the driving force and purpose of his own novels.
During the Spring Festival of the Year of the Tiger, Mo Yan's "Past Years" was popular on the Internet, saying that Mo Yan was a child for the New Year, and eating dumplings was still the "highlight". First of all, let's say that Xiao Nian (Ci Stove) eats dumplings at night:
"At that time, my meal was so large that I couldn't say how many dumplings I could eat."
The dumplings Chinese New Year's Eve rice are written in great detail, writing about the sacrifices before eating the dumplings, setting off firecrackers, and kowtowing to the elders, who also give a dime and a dime of pressed money.
Writing about local customs, put coins in dumplings. My hometown is more than 100 kilometers away from Mo Yan's hometown, and there is also this custom, just eating on the morning of the first day. Put two or three coins, and the one who eats it indicates that he was blessed and lucky, and the coins he ate belonged to himself. There are now exquisite silver coins for dumplings for the New Year, which is a continuation of this custom.
Xiao Moyan wrote: "One year, in order to eat dumplings with money, I ate three bowls in one go, but the money did not eat, and as a result, my stomach was broken, and I almost lost my life. ”
In this way, Mo Yan's family's economic conditions were good in his childhood, and the New Year was very exquisite, there were firecrackers, there was money for pressing the age, there were coin dumplings, and the most important thing was that the dumplings were enough to eat. In the small year, the amount of food is frightening, and in the big year, the stomach is broken. There is a contradiction with the previous statement that "I can't eat a few dumplings a year, and I still have a small bowl per person, and I can't eat enough."
Mo Yan said, "The novelist uses his mind to select and transform historical events, and if there is no such historical event, he will invent such a historical event." Obviously, Mo Yan's dumplings have become props for speaking about historical events.
