Not meaning to be sensational by using a very incongruous title for this posting, I do see some commonality among these three very current though unrelated topics. The commonality is -- stories!
The main thing I now remember of Romney’s debate with Obama
last week was when Romney brought up his first story. He said, “I was in
Dayton, Ohio, and a woman grabbed my arm, and she said, "I've been out of
work since May. Can you help me?" The story gave his
rhetoric some human touch. Obama later also told a story, but Romney was the
first to tell and Obama’s didn’t sound as “original” any more.
Mo Yan is the new Nobel literature laureate, the top trending name on Chinese Weibo. As a novelist,
he would have to be a good story-teller. He is especially good at telling
stories about rural lives. His Red Sorghum, made famous for Western readers after
Zhang Yimou turned it into a film, tells the story of a poor peasant girl in a
Chinese village who was married to a man suffering from leprosy.
Why has Weibo become so popular in recent years? I’d say it’s because it offers
interesting stories, some of them outrageous, some funny, some silly, but all entertaining. 140 Chinese characters are
enough for telling a good story. And of course, the stories that didn’t get
told because they were censored – those forbidden tales also become materials
for tantalizing stories.
I will be giving a talk at Temple University tomorrow to
explain why understanding stories is important for understanding internet activism
in China. Some information about the talk is here.
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