The Republic of Wine

Your letter and the ‘chronicle-story’ ‘Yichi the Hero’ arrived safely.

Your last letter was uncompromisingly candid. I admire that, so you have nothing to fear. I couldn’t reply right away because I was out of town. Still no news regarding your stories, and I can only counsel patience.

Dragon and Phoenix Lucky Together is only a culinary dish. As such it has no class attributes, and thus cannot possibly be attacked for having bourgeois liberalization tendencies. There’s no need to delete it from ‘Donkey Avenue,’ and certainly you needn’t remove it from the Yichi Tavern menu. If I visit Liquorland someday, I want to try this world-class gourmet treat, and how will I do that if it’s not on the menu? Besides, these objects have such high culinary value that it would be a shame not to eat them, and stupid to boot. And since they must be eaten, there’s probably no more civilized way to prepare them than as Dragon and Phoenix Lucky Together. Finally, even if you tried to take it off the menu, Proprietor Yu wouldn’t permit it.

I’m getting more and more interested in this Yu Yichi character, and am willing in principle to work with him on his life story. He can set the fee. If he wants to give a lot, I’ll take it; if he wants to give a little, I’ll take that too; and if he doesn’t want to give anything, that’s OK with me. It’s not money that attracts me to the project, but his celebrated experiences. I have the vague impression that Yu Yichi is the very soul of Liquorland, that he embodies the spirit of his age – half angel, half devil. Revealing the spiritual world of this individual could very well constitute my greatest contribution to literature. You may forward my initial response to Mr Yu.

I’m not going to flatter you on ‘Yichi the Hero.’ You call it a short story, but to me it’s a hodgepodge, in every respect a mirror image of the scattered donkey parts in Yichi Tavern. In it you include a letter to me, excerpts from Strange Events in Liquorland, and the incoherent ramblings of Yu Yichi himself. It’s as unconstrained as a heavenly steed soaring through the skies, completely out of control. In years past I’ve been criticized as being out of control, but compared to you, I’m the embodiment of moderation. We live in an age of strict adherence to law and order, and that includes the writing of fiction. For that reason, I do not intend to send your manuscript to Citizens³ Literature – I’d be wasting my time. I’ll hold on to it for the time being and return it when I visit Liquorland. I will, as you suggested, refer to the material in the story. Thanks for the generous offer.

One more thing: Do you have a copy of Strange Events in Liquorland⁷. If so, please send it to me as soon as possible. You can make a photocopy if you’re afraid it might get lost somewhere along the way. I'll reimburse you for the copying costs.

Wishing you

Peace,

Mo Yan

IV

Yichi the Hero, by Li Yidou

Please have a seat, Doctor of Liquor Studies, so we can have a heart-to-heart talk, he said with slippery intimacy as he sat on his haunches on his leather-covered swivel chair. The look on his face and the tone of his voice were like clouds at sunset, dazzlingly bright and in constant flux. He looked like a fearful demon, one of those patently evil, heretical knights-errant in kung-fu novels; my nerves were frayed as I sat on the sofa opposite him. You little rascal, he mocked, just when did you and that stinking rascal Mo Yan team up together? Cackling like a mother hen feeding her chicks (although I was trying to explain myself, not actually cackling), I said, He is my mentor, ours is a literary relationship. To this day I haven’t met him face-to-face, one of the great regrets of my life. With a sinister heh heh heh, he said, Mo is not the real family name of that rascal Mo Yan, you know. His real family name is Guan, which makes him the seventy-eighth descendant of Guan Zhong, Prime Minister of the state of Qi during the Warring States period, or so he claims. In fact, that’s pure bullshit. A writer, you say? To listen to him, you’d think he was some sort of literary genius. Well, I know everything there is to know about him. Astonished, I blurted out, How could you know everything there is to know about my mentor? To which he replied, Do nothing if you want nothing to be known. That rascal’s been no good since he was a kid. At the age of six he burned down a production team’s storage shed, at nine he fell under the spell of a teacher named Meng, following her around everywhere she went, to her great annoyance. At eleven he stole and ate some tomatoes, and got a beating when he was caught. At thirteen, for stealing some turnips, he was forced to kneel at Chairman Mao’s statue and beg forgiveness in front of more than two hundred workers on a public project. The little rascal is good at memorizing things, and had a good time entertaining people with his wit, for which his father gave him such a whipping, his ass swelled up something awful. Don’t you dare sully the name of my revered master! I protested loudly. Sully his name? Everything I’ve told you I got from his own writing! he said with a snide laugh. And a rotten scoundrel is just the person to write my life story. It takes an evil genius like him to understand an evil hero like me. Write to him and have him come to Liquorland as soon as possible. He’ll get no shabby treatment from me, he said as he thumped his chest. Energized by the boastful pronouncement and loud thumping, he turned his expensive leather chair into a carousel. One minute I was looking into his face, the next at the back of his head. Face, back of the head, face, back of the head, a crafty, animated face and a nicely rounded gourd in the back, one crammed full of knowledge. As he whirled faster and faster, he began to levitate.

Mr Yichi, I said, I’ve already written to him, but I haven’t received an answer. I’m worried he might not be willing to work on your life story.

With a sneer, he said, Don’t you worry about that, he’ll do it. There are four things you need to know about the little rascal: first, he likes women; second, he smokes and drinks; third, he’s always strapped for money; and fourth, he’s a collector of tales of the supernatural and unexplained mysteries that he can incorporate into his own fiction. He’ll come, all right. I doubt there’s another person on this earth who knows him as well as I.

As he twirled back down to the seat he said caustically, Doctor of Liquor Studies, just what sort of doctor’ are you? Do you have any idea what liquor is? A type of liquid? Bullshit! The blood of Christ? Bullshit! Something that boosts your spirits? Bullshit! Liquor is the mother of dreams, dreams are the daughters of liquor. And there’s something else I find relevant, he said as he ground his teeth and glared at me. Liquor is the lubricant of the state machinery; without it, the machinery cannot run smoothly! Do you understand what I’m saying? One look into that pitted face of yours tells me you don’t. Are you going to collaborate with that little bastard Mo Yan in writing my biography? All right, then, I’ll help you, I’ll coordinate your activities. If you must know, no biographer worth his salt would waste time interviewing individuals, since ninety percent of what’s gleaned through interviews is lies and fabrications. What you need to do is separate the real from the false, arrive at the truth by seeing what lies behind all those lies and fabrications.

I want you to know something, you rascal – and you can pass this on to that other rascal, Mo Yan – that Yu Yichi is eighty-five years old this year. A respectable age, wouldn’t you say? I wonder where you two little bastards were way back when I was roaming the countryside, living off my wits. Maybe you were somewhere in the ears of corn, or the leaves of cabbage, or in salted turnips, or in pumpkin seeds, places like that. Is that little rascal Mo Yan writing his The Republic of Wine It’s nothing but the ravings of a fool, someone who has no concept of his own limitations. How much liquor did he consume before he felt qualified to write The Republic of Wine? I’ve put away more alcohol than he has water! Do you two know the identity of that scaly boy who rides a galloping steed up and down Donkey Avenue on moonlit nights? It’s me, that’s who, me. Don’t ask where I come from. My hometown is a place lit up by dazzling sunlight. What, you don’t see the resemblance? You don’t believe I’m capable of flying on eaves and walking on walls? Permit me to give a demonstration, to open your eyes, as it were.

My dear Mo Yan, what happened next is the sort of thing that turns a person bug-eyed and tongue-tied. Rays of light shot out of that terrifying little dwarf’s eyes, like glowing daggers, and with my own eyes I watched him shrink into himself right there on the seat of his leather-covered swivel chair, transforming himself into a shadowy figure that flew into the air, light as a feather. The chair kept spinning, until – thunk – it reached the end of the swivel rod. Our friend, the hero of this narrative, was by then stuck to the ceiling. All four limbs, his whole body, in fact, seemed equipped with suction pads. He looked like an enormous, disgusting lizard crawling across the ceiling, carefree and relaxed as can be. His muffled voice descended from the heights: Did you see that, little rascal? Well, that was nothing. My master could hang from the ceiling all day and all night without twitching. With that he floated down from the ceiling like a dark falling leaf.