SHIFU, YOU'LL DO ANYTHING FOR A LAUGH
By MO YAN
Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2001. 224 pages, $23.95

Jeffrey C. Kinkley

Some Stockholmologists predicted that a Chinese would win the Nobel Prize in literature in 2000, and of those many bet on Mo Yan. He lost this time, but he's under fifty and wonderful books continue to pour out of him.
Much of Mo Yan's world fame is still due to his novel Red Sorghum, made into a Zhang Yimou film that confirmed the emergence of Chinese cinema into the international commercial mainstream. Mo Yan's novels are made for the movies. Those translated into English-Red Sorghum, set in the Sino-Japanese War (a hero is skinned alive in the film); The Garlic Ballads, in which peasants boil over into full-scale revolt against communist officials; and The Republic of Wine, whose cannibalistic cadres literally "serve the people"-are noted for wide-screen technicolor images, struggles to the death, outr¨¦ and savage peasant superstitions, and packs of wild dogs devouring the dead-all memorably rendered amid gaudy wildflowers and crimson sorghum.
The short stories in Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh reveal different sides and moods of the author, but they still suggest that if Mo Yan were a painter, he'd be a fauvist. Mo Yan's brilliant colors and shocking exaggerations, his variously beastly, terrified, or distracted characters-flat but deeply outlined-and stunning magic-realist touches are wonderfully captured by Howard Goldblatt, his gifted translator. Some works allude to China's ghost-story tradition, but Mo Yan eschews the fully abstract or mystical. He always has some thing on his mind to say, to ridicule, or to allegorize, from the dog-eat-dog society of China today, to the eternally bestial nature of humankind.
Two stories here that are set in Gaomi Township, Mo Yan's answer to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, look like sequels to Red Sorghum. The novel shocked filially pious China when its narrator entered the mind of his father to tell the tale. In "Man and Beast," one of the stories in this collection, the same narrator, or so it appears, enters the mind of his grandfather as the latter descends into a wolf-like existence after escape from a Japanese POW camp. The prose is exciting and heroic: "Blood flowed powerfully through his tiny veins, building up strength, like a taut bowstring." It is a curiously Japanese tale, reminding one of those soldiers of the Rising Sun who hid out for decades in the Philippines. In another story, "Soaring," two Gaomi families swap their beautiful daughters as marriage partners for their undesirable sons. One girl doesn't want to go, and she manages to fly above the treetops, though she can't quite get away. Overtones of Chinese myth, ghost stories, and Frankenstein movies merge when the superstitious villagers shoot her down with bows and arrows. Yet, beforehand, they discuss how to bring that fairy down as matter-of-factly as if she were a cat on a limb.

The image of men struggling with dogs for possession of corpses appears in "The Cure," set in communist times, when state executions provided human gall bladders aplenty for use as folk medicine; this surely is Mo Yan's ironic tribute to Lu Xun's classic tale "Medicine." "Iron Child" is a gruesome bit of surrealism (or Stephen King-like fantasy) mocking the Great Leap Forward. A boy abandoned by society during that late-1950s man-made famine, his parents drafted to smelt steel in backyard furnaces, discovers a taste for all that bad iron that Mao loved so much more than food for the people. A gang of boys consumes iron as a snack. The locals are discomfited but at no loss to solve the problem: "Catch the Iron Demons!" they shout. The blurred line between fantasy and reality is explored more leisurely, from the back of a taxicab, when a husband humors his wife, who is looking for a nonexistent "Shen Garden," in a story by that name.
Three tales without "magic" may seem more unusual to readers who know Mo Yan through his blazing sagas. The "Love Story" of a rusticated girl in the Cultural Revolution does in a few pages what Wang Anyi, whom many consider today's finest conveyer of feminine (though not necessarily feminist) sensibilities in the modern Chinese novel, typically achieves in several chapters. Black humor unfolds in the title story about "Shifu," an aging laid-off worker who discovers a secret niche for himself in the new New China by turning an abandoned bus into a "hotel" for people's midday trysts. In the final story, a young man discovers an "Abandoned Child" in a field of sunflowers-a girl baby nobody wants. Mo Yan speaks for once as if in his own voice, about the national shame of female infanticide. "So, it seems, I awakened to the Truth." Cinematic novels remain Mo Yan's forte, but this collection has something for everyone.

Jeffrey C. Kinkley, a professor of history at St. John's University, is the author of Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China and The Odyssey of Shen Congwen.