Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

Mo Yan. Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out: A Novel. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2008.

This story of a Chinese village's trials and tribulations under Communism takes a common, even pedestrian set of themes and makes them totally fresh again with humor and healthy dose of the fantastic.

As in so many epic tales of China's age of revolution (think "To Live" or "The Last Emperor"), we see a group of characters doing the best they can in their little corner of Chinese world as they face first a brutal and extended period of war and deprivation, 1937-1949, then the grand experiments in Communism under Mao Zedong during the 1950s and 60s, and finally whole new kinds of transformations from the mid 1970s into the 1980s and 1990s. What Mo Yan brings to this familiar party is a snarky, earthy sense of humor that manages to bring together the roles of a whole village, Northeast Gaomi Township in Shandong province. A single character who witnesses events first as a landlord, then reincarnated as a donkey, then an ox, then a pig, and finally a dog, a monkey and a human being again, is a brilliant device that captures Mo Yan's beloved home village from all its most revealing angles. Yes, it covers the cruelty and waste of these years that have become standard history lessons even to Chinese students, but more importantly it shows us so many colorful characters, from the party secretary of the village to the poorest and weirdest citizens: China's last independent farmer; a former concubine who eventually became and innkeeper; a disturbed and impoverished man who just loves chopping animals' testicles off. We grow to feel something really deep for all of these characters -- not love exactly, though a little bit. Pity, at times, but overall a sense of deep connectedness. We are all governed by brutish little desires most of the time, most days. Only rarely do human beings achieve great good, or great evil, so whenever we do, it's bound to be good fodder for a story. A donkey can be as good as a man; a testicle-eater's needs make as much sense as a party secretary's if you take the right perspective.

I left the library copy lying around my house too long, and consequently had to turn it in before finishing. I only made it up to the end of pig in the wheel of reincarnations illustrated on the cover. But I'll be back to finish, probably with a few more notes.