The Republic of Wine

Translator’s Note
    For the Chinese reader, The Republic of Wine packs quite a wallop, much like the colorless liquors distilled in Mo Yan’s home province of Shandong and elsewhere in China, Maotai being the most famous. Few contemporary works have exposed and satirized the political structure of post-Mao China, or the enduring obsession of the Chinese about food, with the wit and venom of this explosive novel; none even approaches its structural inventiveness. As with many of Mo Yan’s novels, The Republic of Wine was considered extremely subversive, and could be published in China only after a Taiwanese edition appeared in 1992. Subsequently included in his multi-volume collected works under the new title Republic of Drunks (Mingding guo) , it continues to thrill some and horrify others.
    In the book, letter-writer Mo Yan tells Li Yidou that he has long wanted to write a novel on liquor.’ Well, here it is, under the terse but revealing title of Jiu guo , the literal meaning of which is ‘country of alcohol.’ (The generic term jiu refers to all alcoholic beverages, and must be expanded adjectivally to indicate type.) Most of what is guzzled in The Republic of Wine is actually 120-proof and stronger liquor made of sorghum or other grains.
    Beyond the characters’ preoccupation with food, drink, and sex, the satiric tone and fantastic occurrences, and the imaginative narrative framework, Mo Yan has filled his novel with puns, a variety of stylistic prose, allusions - classical and modern, political and literary, elegant and scatological - and many Shandong localisms. It would serve little purpose to explicate them here, particularly since a non-Chinese reader could not conceivably ‘gef them all. It does not take cultural understanding to realize that a crack investigator would be unlikely to go anywhere in a truck, Liberation or not, although few readers could be expected to know the answer to the lady trucker’s question, ‘Know why this road’s in such terrible shape?’ (the locals make sure it stays that way so they can pick up lumps of coal that are dislodged from trucks leaving the mine).
    I have, as far as possible, remained faithful to Mo Yan’s original, not entirely consistent, text. I can only hope that the enjoyment and understanding gained from this translation outstrip the losses.
    So, after this brief hors-d’oeuvre: Bon appetit! Cheers!

Chapter One
    I
    Special Investigator Ding Gou’er of the Higher Procuratorate climbed aboard a Liberation truck and set out for the Mount Luo Coal Mine to undertake a special investigation. He was thinking so hard as he rode along that his head swelled until the size 58 brown duck-billed cap, which was normally quite roomy, seemed to clamp down on his skull He was not a happy man as he took off the cap, examined the watery beads on the sweatband, and smelled the greasy odor. It was an unfamiliar odor. Slightly nauseating. He reached up to pinch his throat.
    The truck slowed as the potholes grew more menacing and made the creaky springs complain eerily. He kept banging his head on the underside of the cab roof. The driver cursed the road, and the people on it; such gutter language spewing from the mouth of a young, and rather pretty, woman created a darkly humorous scene. He couldn’t keep from sneaking furtive looks at her. A pink undershirt poking up above the collar of her blue denim work shirt guarded her fair neck; she had dark eyes with an emerald tinge, and hair that was very short, very coarse, very black, and very glossy. Her white-gloved hands strangled the steering wheel as the truck rocked from side to side to avoid the potholes. When she lurched left, her mouth twisted to the left; when she veered right, it twisted to the right. And while her mouth was twisting this way and that, sweat oozed from her crinkled nose. Her narrow forehead and solid chin told him that she was or had been married - a woman to whom sex was no stranger. Someone he wouldn’t mind getting to know. For a forty-eight-year-old investigator, and an old hand at that, such feelings were ludicrous at the very least. He shook his large head.
    Road conditions continued to deteriorate, and they slowed to a caterpillar crawl, finally settling in behind a column of stationary trucks. She took her foot off the gas, turned off the ignition, removed her gloves, and thumped the steering wheel. She gave him an unfriendly look.
    ‘Good thing there’s no kid in my belly,’ she