The Republic of Wine

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!

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 remarked.

He froze for a moment, then said, somewhat ingratiatingly:

If there had been, you'd have shaken it loose by now.'

1 wouldn't let that happen, not at two thousand per,' she replied solemnly.

That said, she stared at him with what might be characterized as a provocative look in her eyes; she appeared to be waiting for a response. Scandalized by this brief and inelegant exchange, Ding Gou'er felt like a budding potato that had rolled into her basket. As the forbidden mysteries of sex were suddenly revealed in her ambiguous and suggestive remark, the distance between them all but vanished. With feelings of annoyance and uncertainty creeping into his heart, he kept a watchful eye on her. Her mouth twisted again, making him very uncomfortable, and he now sensed that she was a guarded, evasive woman, foolish and shallow, certainly no one with whom he had to mince his words.

‘So, are you pregnant?' he blurted out.

Now that he'd dispensed with conventional small talk, the question hung out there like half-cooked food. But she forced it down her gullet and said almost brazenly:

‘I've got a problem, what they call alkaline soil'

Your tasks may be important, but no investigator worthy of the name would allow those tasks to be in conflict with women. In fact, women are a part of one's tasks
.

Reminded of those lines, which were so popular among his colleagues, he felt a lustful thought begin to gnaw at his heart like an insect. Ding Gou'er took a flask from his pocket, removed the plastic stopper, and helped himself to a big drink. Then he handed the flask to the lady trucker.

I'm an agronomist who specializes in soil improvement.'

The lady trucker smacked the horn with the palm of her hand, but was able to coax only a weak, gentle bleat out of it. The driver of the Yellow River big-rig in front of them jumped out of his cab and stared daggers at her from the roadside. Ding Gou'er could feel the anger radiating from the man's eyes through the gleaming surface of his mirror-lens sunglasses. She snatched the flask out of his hand, sniffed the mouth as if measuring the quality of the contents, then - down the hatch, every last drop. Ding Gou'er was about to compliment her on her capacity for drink, but quickly changed his mind. Praising someone for drinking skills in a place called Liquorland sounded pretty lame, so he swallowed the words. As he wiped his mouth, he stared openly at her thick, moistened lips and, casting decorum to the wind, said:

'I want to kiss you.'

The lady trucker's face reddened. In a shrill, brassy voice, she roared back:

‘I want to fucking kiss you!'

Left speechless by the response, Ding Gou'er scanned the area around the truck. The driver of the Yellow River big-rig had already climbed back into his cab. A long, snaking line of vehicles stretched ahead, while a canopied truck and a donkey cart had fallen in behind them. The donkey's broad forehead was decorated with a red tassel. Squat, misshapen trees and weed-infested ditches with an occasional wildflower lined the roadside. Powdery black smudges disfigured the leaves and weeds. Beyond the ditches lay autumnal dry fields, their withered yellow and gray stalks standing ethereally in the shifting winds, looking neither cheery nor sad. It was already mid-morning. A mountain of waste rock pierced the sky ahead, releasing clouds of yellow smoke. A windlass standing at the mine entrance turned leisurely. He could only see part of it; the Yellow River big-rig blocked out the bottom half.

She kept shouting the same sentence over and over, the one that had given Ding Gou'er such a fright, but she didn't make a move. So Ding Gou'er reached over to touch her breast with the tip of his finger. Without warning she crushed up against him, cupped his chin in the palm of her icy hand, and covered his mouth with hers. Her lips felt cold and mushy, not resilient; freakish, like puffs of cotton waste. That was a turn-off, it killed his desire, and he pushed her away. But, like a plucky fighting cock, she sprang back at him hard, catching him off guard and making resistance all but impossible. He was forced to deal with her the same way he dealt with criminals, try to make her behave.

They sat in the cab gasping for breath, the investigator pinning her arms down to keep her from putting up any resistance. She kept trying to force herself on him, her body twisting like a coil, her back arched like a leaf spring; she grunted from the exertion like an ox caught by the horns. She looked so fetching, Ding Gou'er couldn't help but laugh.

‘What are you laughing at?' she demanded.

Ding Gou'er let go of her wrists and removed a business card from his pocket.

I'll be on my way, young lady. If you miss me, you can find me at this address. Mum's the word.'

She sized him up, studied the card for a moment, then his face, with the keen intensity of a border guard examining a visitor's passport.

Ding Gou'er reached out and flicked the lady trucker's nose with his finger, then tucked his briefcase under his arm and opened the passenger door. ‘So long, girl,' he said. ‘Remember, I've got the right fertilizer for alkaline soil.' When he was halfway out the door, she grabbed his shirttail.

The look of timidity mixed with curiosity in her eyes now convinced him that she was probably quite young, never married, and unspoiled. Lovable and pitiable at the same time. He rubbed the back of her hand and said with genuine feeling: ‘Girl, you can call me uncle.'

‘You liar,' she said. ‘You told me you worked at a vehicle control station.'

‘What's the difference?' He laughed.

‘You're a spy!'

‘You might say so.'

‘If I'd known that, I wouldn't have given you a ride.'

Ding Gou'er took out a pack of cigarettes and tossed it into her lap. ‘Temper, temper.'

She flung his liquor flask into the roadside ditch. ‘Nobody drinks out of something that tiny,' she remarked.

Ding Gou'er jumped out of the cab, slammed the door shut, and walked off down the road. He heard the lady trucker yell after him:

‘Hey, spy! Know why this road's in such terrible shape?' Ding Gou'er turned to see her hanging out the driver's window; he smiled but didn't answer.

The image of the lady trucker's face stuck in the investigator's head for a moment like dried hops, frothing briefly before vanishing like the foam on a glass of beer. The narrow road twisted and turned like an intestinal tract. Trucks, tractors, horse carts, ox carts … vehicles of every shape and hue, like a column of bizarre beasts, each linked by the tail of the one in front and all jammed up together. The engines had been turned off in some, others were still idling. Pale blue smoke puffed skyward from the tractors' tin exhaust stacks; the smell of unburned gasoline and diesel oil merged with the stink of ox and horse and donkey breath to form a foul, free-floating miasma. At times he brushed against the vehicles as he shouldered his way past; at other times he had to lean against the squat, misshapen roadside trees. Just about all the drivers were in their cabs drinking. Isn't there a law against drinking and driving? But these drivers were obviously drinking, so the law must not exist, at least not here. The next time he looked up, he could see two-thirds of the towering iron frame of the windlass at the mouth of the coal mine.