Bridging Cultures at UC Berkeley
Mo Yan drew lots of laughs from the audience as he shared anecdotes about his youth and writing career. Yan acknowledges being influenced by William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Jack London’s stories about animals, and Ernest Hemingway (though Hemingway’s short sentence structure is decidedly not Mo Yan’s style). Yan has much faith in China’s burgeoning literary culture and perhaps in another 50 years, he says, an American writer may say “I was influenced by Mo Yan.” |
Jonathan Spence, author of The Search for Modern China, mingles with the audience. |