Mo Yan as Humorist

Heroes Like Us, 1997, the first-person narrator asks in a selfreflexive and playful tone: "The story of the [Berlin] Wall's end is the story of my penis, but how to embody such a statement in a book conceived as a Nobel Prize-worthy cross between David Copperfield and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire?"2 Mo Yan's The Republic of Wine, a parody of Chinese food culture written in the reinvented genres of detective and epistolary novels, and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006), use a similar strategy to create a sense of comic absurdity. (340) Piglet Sixteen's playfulness and facetiousness should not be confused with other contemporary Chinese writers' (such as Zhu Wen and Wang Shuo) penchant for frivolity, focus on the present time, and blasphemous counternarratives against didacticism.4 Mo Yan's characters remain intimately connected to personal and national histories.\n With great determination, Ding drags Little Hu and a policeman to retrieve the bodies of a couple that he believes to have committed suicide in his bus hulk, only to find it empty.