The launch of Mo Yan's new book, Ren Na (Being Human), broke the ticketing system as more than 18,000 fans tried to make a reservation for the event on Aug 15.
It's been six years since the 71-year-old writer published his last book, and his latest is a collection of 81 tightly crafted short stories, the shortest consisting of no more than 71 Chinese characters.
The book launch at the Shanghai Exhibition Center was the highlight of this year's Shanghai Book Fair, as the writer had not attended the largest reading festival in the city for 14 years.
Within minutes of the event opening for reservations, enthusiastic fans crashed the booking platform connected with the publisher's account on the social media platform Xiaohongshu. The publisher, Dook Media Group, had to move it to Damai.cn, the leading ticketing platform for concerts, theater and sports events in China.
In all, more than 18,000 people competed for the 770 seats in the Friendship Auditorium at the Shanghai Exhibition Center, which were taken within seconds.
"I've been lucky," a senior middle school student who preferred to remain anonymous told China Daily.
"My hobby is collecting the autographs of renowned authors, but I only go for writers that I really like. Mo Yan is a great writer, and I also like how he interacts with readers on the Internet."
One of the most translated Chinese authors in contemporary China, he is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he won in 2012 for his body of work that "with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary".
He is best known for his novel Red Sorghum, which was adapted into the Golden Bear-winning film of the same title in 1988. He is also active on several Chinese social media platforms and his WeChat account features a comic cartoon portrait and a simple sentence: "I want to chat with young people."
The book launch for Ren Na featured Mo Yan in dialogue with Song Fangjin, a screenwriter, TV director and novelist. Song started the session by asking about his experience working with director Zhang Yimou on the movie adaptation of his novel Red Sorghum.
"When the movie was being shot in Gaomi (Mo Yan's hometown in Shandong province), I went to visit the set, and Zhang Yimou showed me the final draft of his script. It was just a thin few dozen pages," Mo Yan recalls. But then he witnessed how a simple line in the script was turned into the most intense dramatic scene in the movie.
Zhang went on to work with other writers, and created a series of movies.
Mo Yan says: "Zhang grafts his cinematic art onto novels by different writers. His films naturally have this diversity.
"I think we, as novelists, can learn some useful lessons from the director's approach. That means we have to constantly change our narrative angles, explore new story types, create new characters and try to use fresh, creative language.
"You could say that the movies played a big role in introducing contemporary Chinese literature to the world."
The international success of Chinese movies evoked Western publishers' interest in the original novels from which these films were adapted, Mo Yan says.
Soon after the movie came out, Red Sorghum was translated into multiple foreign languages. The same happened to the novels of other Chinese writers such as Yu Hua, Su Tong and Liu Heng. Writers and filmmakers "worked together — everyone's efforts complemented each other", Mo Yan says.
Song, a strong advocate of micro dramas, reveals that like many others, Mo Yan is addicted to short videos, and spends up to eight hours a day binge-watching them on his mobile phone.
Mo Yan says that he searches for inspiration while watching micro-dramas, and goes on to recommend a mini video series — Yimengshan Ga Laotai (A Little Boss of Yimengshan) — depicting trivial incidents in a village in the Yimeng Mountains in Shandong.
The vivid characters, authentic storytelling, and dynamic dialogues in the local dialect have all brought him new inspiration, he says.
As a writer, "we need our language to be vivid and precise, metaphors especially apt and fresh, things that others haven't used before", he says, adding that this skill needs to be learned from everyday life. "I feel that watching short videos like this is rewarding and helpful for my own creative work."
