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
One more thing: Do you have a copy of
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
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
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 –