This collection brings together short stories and novellas that Mo Yan wrote between 2011 and 2020.
For anyone who has read his full-length novels, this is an easy book to settle into. The language of A Late Bloomber is simple and relaxed, with little ornament. When I was reading Big Breasts and Wide Hips, I had to keep my mind taut at every moment or risk getting lost in Mo Yan’s imagery as it surged along like a river. When a writer sustains that kind of figurative language, the reader has to keep turning it into concrete images in the mind. Otherwise, you can reach the end of a paragraph and already have forgotten what it was about. In A Late Bloomber, Mo Yan’s imagery is more restrained, but just as accomplished.
Something else struck me as I read: Mo Yan is such a good storyteller that I kept feeling these things must really have happened in Gaomi, or even to him. After finishing the title novella, I actually looked up whether he had a neighbor called Jiang Er, a man who made money off Mo Yan’s fame. It turned out that Mo Yan had invented it all. To me, this is what a good fiction writer should be able to do: mingle truth and invention so thoroughly that the reader can no longer tell them apart. Mo Yan also knows how to embellish a story. I mean that as a compliment—a gift for shaping a narrative, for deliberately working on it until it becomes more compelling.
Of course, plenty of passages in this book also reflect Mo Yan’s actual experiences. I remember, for instance, the narrator’s mother in the short story “The Fighter” telling him, “Nobody will think you’re mute if you talk a little less.” As a child, Mo Yan really was very talkative, and his parents would remind him to speak less. Later, when he chose a pen name, he settled on Mo Yan: “Don’t speak.” He did once say that he hadn’t thought all that much about it at the time. But with his gift for embellishment, Mo Yan can always turn an ordinary anecdote into an interesting one.
One of the stories that stayed with me most was the last in the collection, “Torches and Whistles.” After finishing the book, I looked at readers’ comments online and found others naming it as their favorite too. I also came across some negative assessments of Mo Yan, mostly arguing that he was in decline. But what writer has a duty never to decline?
When I realized that “Torches and Whistles” was also the most tragic story in A Late Bloomber, I began to wonder why tragedy leaves such a deep impression on readers. Do you have to kill off a few people to write a good piece of fiction? Why are writers so drawn to tragedy rather than comedy? Mo Yan himself raised this question in an interview, wondering why he was so preoccupied with writing tragedy (on an East Buy livestream in 2023). In “Torches and Whistles,” Teacher Song and their child die in a fire. Third Aunt loses her husband, her younger son, and her eldest daughter in succession, before she too meets her death. Must fiction be full of tragedy and absurdity to move us? Why should that be?
Thinking it over, I first came to a psychological explanation. We all live in an absurd world, and where there is absurdity, there is suffering. Simply knowing that others suffer too can ease our own pain. Often, what makes us miserable is the feeling that something has happened to us alone. When we discover that our experience is actually common, we feel a little better. We are all unhappy people, then, and when unhappy people read unhappy books, two negatives make a positive. My other thought is that, because we live amid absurdity, a work of fiction with nothing absurd in it, only happiness, would strike readers as absurd precisely because of that absence. They would toss it aside.
Fiction exists, after all, to depict life. And if life itself is absurd, fiction ought to be absurd too. Absurdity in fiction does more than portray the world: it also makes those two negatives into a positive, helping to relieve the reader’s suffering. When we read fiction, we stand outside the events, watching what happens to someone else. And we always see most clearly when we have that third-person perspective.
All in all, A Late Bloomber remains essential reading for anyone who loves literature or Mo Yan’s work. His attention to the details of character is extraordinary. After I finished the book, I flipped back through the earlier stories. Simply seeing a character’s name was enough to bring back both their appearance and their moral character.
There are bad people in this book, but still more good ones; there is tragedy, but still more comedy. There is the Mo Yan we recognize from our reading, and there is a Mo Yan we have yet to discover.
要政阳
September 6, 2026, Beijing