Explosions and Other Stories

"Yes. There is a story in there which I particularly like, ‘A Letter to My Father’. In it he writes about what life was really like in the countryside from 1960 to 1980. I really admire his writing because he hardly uses adjectives and adverbs but he uses verbs perfectly. He paints amazing pictures through his descriptions. Reading his stories is like watching a film. His book for me is like a dictionary to understanding the huge differences between life in the city and the countryside. Sometimes it feels like there are 500 years of difference. The problem is that the young people move to the city and learn so much and then when they go home it is very difficult to communicate with the older generation, who are often peasants who have never been educated or travelled to the next village. That is what Moye’s parents are like. They will say things to their children like, ‘My children, when you go in an aeroplane don´t open the windows’ even though they have never seen an aeroplane! Or in one story he wrote that one time he visited his home village and his neighbour’s daughter-in-law was having a baby but, because it was a girl and girls are so unwanted in China, the family paid more attention to the birth of the family donkey than the baby girl. The donkey got the midwife, not the woman giving birth. I have travelled all over China to research my books which focus on how women are treated and I can tell you that is the truth. He never talks in a political way but you can tell a lot about what is going on in China through his descriptions. For example, in one description of a girlfriend in his dream she is wearing very cheap slippers and walking along a stone country path and in the winter the ground freezes her feet. And from that description you can tell how hard life is there. People have no money for proper shoes. His books really helped me with my own work which is how to represent other people’s lives through my own eyes not just my thinking. It is good to have other people who have seen what I saw and felt out in the countryside. These are people who are not often written about."