Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh: A Novel

When I first bought Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh, I had thought it would be at least mildly humorous, although I would not have been surprised if it turned out to be humor with a bite. In some ways, it was not what I expected.This is a book of Chinese short stories that are supposed to be representative of the literature of modern China. There is a sort of light humor in some of them that is a little bit reminiscent of the humor of Charles Dickens, although not as hilarious or obvious. The resemblance is that it is humor based on the premise of people being themselves. In this case, it is also strongly flavored by Chinese culture. Some of the stories are heavily influenced by folk beliefs or other strange notions that people have gotten into their heads. There’s a story of a girl who turns into a bird to avoid a marriage she doesn’t like. Hunger figures prominently in some of the other stories.The first and last stories stood out particularly. The first story, whose title is also the title of the book, is about an old factory worker who is laid off barely a month before he is due to retire. Shifu in this case, is not his name but a title of mostly respect, meaning something like ‘master worker.’ Apparently, such work-related titles, or kinship titles, have begun to replace more stilted forms of address such as ‘comrade.’The Shifu’s factory closes altogether shortly after he is laid off, and he wanders around sort of lost for several months afterward. Finally, he gets the idea of fixing up an abandoned shell of a bus he has discovered in a cemetery which seems to be a popular place for love trysts, and charging rent to couples in return for keeping the place up a little bit and watching to ensure their privacy. But Ding Shifu is easily spooked. The layoff, after an otherwise long mostly successful career, nearly unhinges him, and the last customers at his love bus, who never come out, causing him to fear they have committed mutual suicide freaks him out. At such times, his loyal apprentice chides him in front of whatever authorities and onlookers happen to be around with the “you’ll do anything for a laugh” line so they won’t get the wrong idea and take the Shifu away thinking he is a mental case. This seems to be his way of protecting his former mentor.The last story is much darker. It concerns a man who discovers a newborn baby girl abandoned in a field and takes her home with him. This causes him all kinds of trouble because his family doesn’t want another girl – he already has a daughter – and he can’t find anyone else to take her. The story is a sad commentary on the mandatory birth control policies in China since about the 1980s and the almost fanatical desire for sons in Chinese families. According to the narrator in the story, the situation has gotten better in the cities, but out in the country the people continue to keep having children until they get the son they want. Since there is a fine for having more than one child (the amount appears to increase with the increasing number of extra children), some people go to extreme lengths to get rid of unwanted baby girls. Others just defy the authorities to try to get any money out of them.

When the Nobel Committee announced the 2012 award to Chinese writer, Mo Yan, it was a name unknown to me. So I chose this collection of short stories as a sampler. It was a fortunate decision, for the eight stories here, chosen by the excellent translator Howard Goldblatt, range over two decades of his writing and reflect a life lived through a turbulent half-century of China's history. As a group, they are strange yet engaging, fabulous yet engaged, and surprisingly easy to read. Of course, I may yet find that Mo Yan the novelist is a very different writer, but I doubt it. The author himself in his playfully candid introduction breaks with Chinese tradition in viewing his short works as every bit as important as his longer ones, and there is a consistency of concern in all these stories that I cannot imagine altering when exercised on a larger scale. Oddly enough, the story that I would single out as distilling Mo Yan's vision is an homage to an older writer, Lu Xun. Entitled "The Cure," it depicts a father and son waiting under a high bridge to await the falling bodies of class enemies executed by the Armed Work Detachment, to gather the materials necessary for a folk remedy to cure a sick relative. The combination of stark historical realism with folklike elements that even verge on the surreal is a characteristic of all these stories, though the proportion differs in each case. "Soaring," in which a young bride develops the power to fly like a bird to escape a forced marriage, is a comic fable with an ugly twist. "Abandoned Child," the last story in the book, reads almost autobiographically in its denunciation of the official "one family one child" policy. Both attack the traditional Chinese attitude to women.The somewhat unfortunately-named title story ("Shifu" is an honorific for a master workman) is both the longest and the most recent. Its leading character, a victim of industrial downsizing, hits on an unusual way of making money, until he encounters some even more unusual clients. Social realism with a twist. Even more twisted is "Iron Child," a surreal tale set against the very real deprivations of the Great Leap Forward, about two children who learn to eat iron in the absence of real food; Mo Yan tells a similar story of himself eating coal as a hungry child. Two of the tales, "Love Story" and "Shen Garden," are more or less straightforward romances -- a banned genre when Mo Yan began writing -- though again with a twist. Be sure to check the Translator's Introduction before reading the second of these; this is the most human of the stories, whose warmth comes from the knowledge that Shen Garden is a metaphor for a later meeting of divorced couples.Perhaps my favorite in the collection is "Man and Beast," an almost phantasmagorical story about a soldier living out the duration of WW2 in a cave in the forest, becoming one with the animals around him, but living in fear of the foxes whose den he stole. This is an appendage to the author's RED SORGHUM, a saga set against the background of China's war with Japan. Although the story itself is relatively short, it gives a sense of what Mo Yan can do on a larger conceptual scale, and makes me eager to read his novels.

Very interesting stories.

These short stories really come at you from a different direction. I found the book not only good literature but an interesting (valuable, even) glimpse into a completely foreign (China in the pre-industrialization years) world.It's a test of a book that it sticks with you and this one has stuck.

Good recycled book. Except for a slight sign of use on the cover, it is clean with no markings and it arrived promptly.