饿英语Big Breasts & Wide Hips
by Mo Yan 爱国电影大全
今世有缘原唱
In the Bosom of Communist China
A Review by Julia Lovell
As its title suggests, breasts have a considerable role to play in Mo Yan's saga of twentieth-century China. Not all are plain large: some are "high", "arching", "pert", "delicate, lovely, perky", and on occasion improbably mobile, "with slightly upturned nipples as nimble as the mouth of a hedgehog". One pair is described as a couple of "happy white doves", others are "like opium flowers or valleys of butterflies"; yet another rembles "a little red-eyed rabbit". But in whatever unpredictable form they manifest themlves, they are everywhere, prompting, with respect to Mo Yan, the question that John Lewis, the narrator of Kingsley Amis's novel That Uncertain Feeling, asks himlf while contemplating a game of women's tennis: "Why did I like women's breasts so much? I was clear on why I liked them, thanks, but why did I like them so much?".
In Mo Yan's ca, there are two possible answers to this question: a short, globally male one that does not require glossing, and a longer, Chine one that perhaps does. A charitably earnest reading of 操摸Big Breasts and Wide Hips深信院 could suggest that, in filling his historical novel with feisty women and their breasts, Mo Yan has a rious, politically subversive purpo in mind. Since the Chine Empire came into existence, politics, history, literature -- all the most important founts of public power and prestige -- have been viewed as the rightful, exclusive prerve of men. Despite the invention of Chine feminism about a hundred years ago, the twentieth century -- including five decades of Communist rule -- failed to transform radically or evenly this millennia-old, patriarchal status quo. In replacing the patriarchy with his bosomy matriarchy, in giving bumps and curves to the smooth, airbrushed, authoritarian fac巫教e of Communist China, Mo Yan is mounting a barely veiled protest against the failures of China's oppressive, still male-dominated political Establishment and its sanitized account of the recent past. Whether or not this conceit makes for a good novel with a convincing feminist message is less obvious.
Big Breasts and Wide Hips begins in high, blood-spattered style with the birth of its narrator, Jintong, as the Japane Army surges into his village in north-east China in 1936. His mother, Shangguan Lu, has already produced ven daughters while waiting for a baby boy, and endured decades of abu at the hands of her husband's family for her failure to generate a male heir. In the twenty-one years before Jintong finally makes his appearance, her in-laws have screamed at her, beaten her with rakes and clubs, and branded her with red-hot tongs. Following the birth of her son, however, her life takes a sudden, temporary turn for the better: as Jintong emerges, her brutish husband and father-in-law are killed by Japane soldiers, and her appalling mother-in-law is incapacitated by a stroke.
Shangguan Lu subquently becomes mistress of her extensive brood, whom she struggles to steer safely through the cataclysms of twentieth-century China: massacres by the Japane, assaults by roving bandits, famine, civil war between Communists and the rightwing Nationalists, political percution under Mao. Her daughters consistently refu to accept her guidance, one by one choosing unreliable mates -- a bandit leader, a
promiscuous local aristocrat, a flighty bird-catcher, a brutish mute, an American bomber pilot -- who draw them into war, treason, insanity and death. Telling the story is Shangguan Lu's favourite, Jintong, for much of the novel a non-participant thanks to his all-consuming obssion with breasts in general, and attachment to his mother's in particular (he is breast-fed until he is ven, and even reverts to the habit in his forties). By the 1980s, as the novel draws to a clo, only Jintong and his mother remain alive, the rest victims of history or their own desires.
Until it reaches the Communist period, Mo Yan's attempt to rescue modern China from the bland platitudes of historical propaganda holds roughly together, thanks principally to its strident energy and raucous cast of lovers, bandits and freedom fighters. By omitting, for the most part, conventional calendar dates and direct mention of the Party affiliations and campaigns associated with standard histories of the period, Mo Yan manages to create an entirely localized Chine world, t amid the wild rivers and fields of the north-east, isolated from any n of centralized political control. Shangguan Lu's own body and straggling family -- raped, starved, driven out of their homes, sold into prostitution, m归去来兮辞赏析
厌氧氨氧化菌anaging untidily to survive and reproduce, while bandits, foreign invaders and Communist "liberators" tear the country apart -- are the provincial map on which the sufferings of China as a whole are scratched with bloody immediacy.
