In China.ppt

In China, a Writer Finds a Deep Well Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh In his brilliantly realistic and darkly funny short story “Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh,” Mo Yan, the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize for Literature portray【描绘】s a model worker, a shifu, or craftsman【技工】, from northeast China who is laid off at the factory where he has one month to go before his retirement. After using up all of his money getting medical treatment, the devastated【绝望的】 man, Ding Shikou, or Ten Mouth Ding, discovers the shell of an abandoned bus near a cemetery【墓地】 at the edge【沿岸】 of a lake. A Brilliant Idea Ding had just before noted that you have to pay to enter the public toilets in his city, and this gives him the brilliant idea of transforming the abandoned bus into a little love nest, charging young couples in heat and no place to go hourly rates for its use. The story, like most of Mr. Mo’s work, is reminiscent 【令人想起的】 of a comment once made by the dissenting【异见的】 Soviet writer Vladimir Voinovich that in his country “reality and satire【讽刺】 are the same.” In his half dozen or so novels and story collections, the prolific【丰富的】, fanciful【想象的】, unrestrained【不受拘束的】, sometimes outrageous【粗暴的】 Mr. Mo has created a universe full of earthy【朴实的】 and craggy 【粗犷的】characters all of whom are battered, bruised【受伤的】, almost crushed by the undignified outrage【暴行】s of ordinary life. Mr. Mo, daring as he is and devastating as his close, concrete examination of real conditions may be, is not a dissident, or he’s not deemed to be in China. At least one of his books has been banned at times, but mostly he can be read in his own country. And yet Mr. Mo doesn’t hold back when it comes to the Chinese bureaucracy【官僚政治】, its petty privileges【特权】 and his characters’ confrontation【对抗】s with it. “As long as humans live, there is pain.” But, describing his literary philosophy【哲理】, he added, “I think most readers would prefer to read humorous sentences about a painful life.” Con