○  莫言获奖演讲英文版  ○

e wheat we'd gleaned and walked off whistling. as she sat on the ground, her lip bleeding, mother wore a look of hopelessness i'll never forget. years later, when i encountered the watchman, now a gray-haired old man, in the marketplace, mother had to stop me from going up to avenge her. "son," she said evenly, "the man who hit me and this man are not the same person."

my clearest memory is of a moon festival day, at noontime, one of those rare occasions when we ate jiaozi at home, one bowl apiece. an aging beggar came to our door while we were at the table, and when i tried to send him away with half a bowlful of dried sweet potatoes, he reacted angrily: "i'm an old man," he said. "you people are eating jiaozi, but want to feed me sweet potatoes. how heartless can you be?" i reacted just as angrily: "we're lucky if we eat jiaozi a couple of times a year, one small bowlful apiece, barely enough to get a taste! you should be thankful we're giving you sweet potatoes, and if you don't want them, you can get the hell out of here!" after (dressing me down) reprimanding me, mother dumped her half bowlful of jiaozi into the old man's bowl.my most remorseful memory involves helping mother sell cabbages at market, and me overcharging an old villager one jiao – intentionally or not, i can't recall – before heading off to school. when i came home that afternoon, i saw that mother was crying, something she rarely did. instead of scolding me, she merely said softly, "son, you embarrassed your mother today."

mother contracted a serious lung disease when i was still in my teens. hunger, disease, and too much work made things extremely hard on our family. the road ahead looked especially bleak, and i had a bad feeling about the future, worried that mother might take her own life. every day, the first thing i did when i walked in the door after a day of hard labor was call out for

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