Word: yan
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...well as the effects of rampant development on the country's culture and landscape. An astonishing diversity of work is on display, from Cui Xiuwen's video Ladies Room?which looks at the social dynamics of the new China from the perspective of a nightclub powder room?to Huang Yan's beguiling Chinese Landscape-Tattoo, pictured here...
...Certainly not if they read the latest Mo Yan novel to hit the West. Big Breasts and Wide Hips, the author's ninth, more than lives up to his reputation?and has acquired one of its own. Written a decade ago, the book was at first banned over concerns that the Republican side in the Chinese civil war gets off too gently, but later became a best seller. The original has been trimmed considerably by the respected American translator Howard Goldblatt, though it's still a monster, with scores of characters and more action than an Indiana Jones movie...
...They should cheer instead. Big Breasts is a celebration of the power of women?as well as a lament about the fecklessness of men?in the world's oldest phallocracy. Mo Yan tells the story of Shangguan Lu, born in the last days of the Qing dynasty, raised with bound feet and married off to an infertile Northeast Gaomi blacksmith who is, she concludes, "a useless gob of snot outside the house and totally subservient in front of his mother." Desperate for a son, the girl cultivates a succession of other dolts and losers, who give her seven consecutive daughters...
...tale gallops through the birth of the Chinese republic, the Japanese occupation, the civil war, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the money-obsessed Deng Xiaoping era, Jintong's feisty sisters are killed off by war and other masculine misdeeds. And, as in other Mo Yan novels, peasants suffer and bleed while Communist functionaries strut, blunder and suck the country dry as Jintong's mother's breasts. The lad survives, though not without 15 years in prison, three in a mental institution and nearly a lifetime in thrall to his mammary fixation. "Whenever I saw a beautiful breast...
...Yan, who was born Guan Moye?his pen name means "Don't Speak"?isn't afraid to speak his mind, though sometimes to the point of numbness. In case you didn't notice, Big Breasts' women are strong, its men?and the society they run?are, like Jintong, "useless, worse than useless." That would be a subversive message in China if it weren't for a familiar proverb favored by Mao Zedong: "Women hold up half the sky." With Mo Yan and his sprawling, energetic novel pleading their case, they may finally get some credit...