China’s Nobels
When the Swedish Academy called the Chinese writer Mo Yan to tell him he had won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, the novelist reportedly told them, in what must be one of the most poignant Nobel reactions in memory, that he was “overjoyed and terrified.”
It isn’t hard to imagine why a writer who chose “Mo Yan” as his pen name would find fear at the heart of such a happy occasion. The name, meaning “don’t speak,” was his parents’ admonition when they sent him out to play in the Maoist 1950s and ’60s. Half a century later, Mao’s party, stripped of ideology but intact in its machinery, remains in charge, and at least 40 of Mo Yan’s less circumspect contemporaries are locked in Chinese prisons.… Seguir leyendo »