Big Breasts & Wipe Hips: A Novel

commander and a soldier); all marry one or more of Mother’s daughters, but only one, the Nationalist, earns Mother’s praise: “He’s a bastard,” she says, “but he’s also a man worthy of the name. In days past, a man like that would come around once every eight or ten years. I’m afraid we’ve seen the last of his kind.”
    Big Breasts and Wide Hips
is, of course, fiction, and while it deals with historical events (selectively, to be sure), it is a work that probes and reveals broader aspects of society and humanity, those that transcend or refute specific occurrences or canonized political interpretations of history. Following Japan’s defeat in Asia in 1945, China slipped into a bloody civil war between Mao’s and Chiang’s forces, ending in 1949 with a Communist victory and the creation of the People’s Republic of China. Unfortunately for the Shangguan family, as for citizens throughout the country, peace and stability proved to be as elusive in “New China” as in the old. The first seventeen years of the People’s Republic witnessed a bloody involvement in the Korean War (1950-53), a period of savage instances of score-settling and political realignments, the disastrous “Great Leap Forward,” which led to three years of famine that claimed millions of lives, and the Cultural Revolution. In defiance of more standard historical fiction in China, which tends to foreground major historical events, in Mo Yan’s novel they are mere backdrops to the lives of Jintong, his surviving sisters, his nieces and nephews, and, of course, Mother. It is here that the significance of Shangguan Jintong’s oedipal tendencies and impotence become apparent. 6 In a relentlessly unflattering portrait of his male protagonist, Mo Yan draws attention to what he sees as a regression of the human species and a dilution of the Chinese character (echoing sentiments first encountered in
Red Sorghum);
in other words, a failed patriarchy. Ultimately, it is the strength of character of (most, but not all) the women that lends hope to the author’s gloomy vision.
    In the post-Mao years (Mao died in 1976), Jintong’s deterioration occurs in the context of national reforms and an economic boom. Weaned of the breast, finally, he represents, to some at least, a “manifestation of Chinese intellectuals’ anxiety over the country’s potency in the modern world.” 7 Whatever he may symbolize, he remains a member of one of the most intriguing casts of characters in fiction, in a novel about which Mo Yan himself has said: “If you like, you can skip my other novels [I wouldn’t recommend it — tr.], but you must read
Big Breasts and Wide Hips.
In it I wrote about history, war, politics, hunger, religion, love, and sex.” 8
    Big Breasts and Wide Hips
was first published in book form by Writers Publishing House (1996); a Taiwan edition (Hong-fan) appeared later the same year. A shortened edition was then published by China Workers Publishing House in 2003. The current translation was undertaken from a further shortened, computer-generated manuscript supplied by the author. Some changes and rearrangements were effected during the translation and editing process, all with the approval of the author. As translator, I have been uncommonly fortunate to have been aided along the way by the author, by my frequent co-translator, Sylvia Li-chun Lin, 9 and by our publisher and editor, Dick Seaver.
    1 An English translation appeared in 1993. Dates of subsequent translations appear after the original publishing date.
    2 This was the film that launched director Zhang Yimou’s international career.
    3 Sylvia Li-chun Lin, tr., “My Three American Books,”
World Literature Today
74, no. 3 (summer 2000): 476. This issue of
WLT
includes several essays on novels by Mo Yan.
    4 M. Thomas Inge, “Mo Yan Through Western Eyes,”
World Literature Today
74, no. 3 (summer 2000): 504.
    5 Rong Cai,
The Subject in Crisis in Contemporary Chinese Literature
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004), 159. Mo Yan further noted “that his purpose in creating the novel [was] to explore the essence of humanity, to glorify the mother, and to link maternity and earth in a symbolic representation.”
    6 David Der-wei Wang’s study deals superbly with this aspect of Mo Yan’s writing. See “The Literary World of Mo Yan,”
WLT
74, no. 3 (summer 2000): 487-94.
    7 Rong Gai,
Subject in Crisis
, 175.
    8 Li-Chun Lin, “My Three American Books,” 476. Mo