It did not take long to find retelling someone else's stories unsatisfying, so I began embellishing my narration. I'd say things I knew would please my mother, even changed the ending once in a while. And she wasn't the only member of my audience, which later included my older sisters, my aunts, even my maternal grandmother. Sometimes, after my mother had listened to one of my stories, she'd ask in a care-laden voice, almost as if to herself: "What will you be like when you grow up, son? Might you wind up prattling for a living one day?"

I knew why she was worried. Talkative kids are not well thought of in our village, for they can bring trouble to themselves and to their families. There is a bit of a young me in the talkative boy who falls afoul of villagers in my story Bulls. Mother habitually cautioned me not to talk so much, wanting me to be a taciturn, smooth and steady youngster. Instead I was possessed of a dangerous combination—remarkable speaking skills and the powerful desire that went with them. My ability to tell stories brought her joy, but that created a dilemma for her.

A popular saying goes "It is easier to change the course of a river than a person's nature." Despite my parents' tireless guidance, my natural desire to talk never went away, and that is what makes my name—Mo Yan, or "don't speak"—an ironic expression of self-mockery.

After dropping out of elementary school, I was too small for heavy labor, so I became a cattle- and sheep-herder on a nearby grassy riverbank. The sight of my former schoolmates playing in the schoolyard when I drove my animals past the gate always saddened me and made me aware of how tough it is for anyone—even a child to leave the group.

I turned the animals loose on the riverbank to graze beneath a sky as blue as the ocean and grass-carpeted land as far as the eye could see—not another person in sight, no human sounds, nothing but bird calls above me. I was all by myself and terribly lonely; my heart felt empty. Sometimes I lay in the grass and watched clouds float lazily by, which gave rise to all sorts of fanciful images. That part of the country is known for its tales of foxes in the form of beautiful young women, and I would fantasize a fox-turned-beautiful girl coming to tend animals with me. She never did come. Once, however, a fiery red fox bounded out of the brush in front of me, scaring my legs right out from under me. I was still sitting there trembling long after the fox had vanished. Sometimes I'd crouch down beside the cows and gaze into their deep blue eyes, eyes that captured my reflection. At times I'd have a dialogue with birds in the sky, mimicking their cries, while at other times I'd divulge my hopes and desires to a tree. But the birds ignored me, and so did the trees. Years later, after I'd become a novelist, I wrote some of those fantasies into my novels and stories. People frequently bombard me with compliments on my vivid imagination, and lovers of literature often ask me to divulge my secret to developing a rich imagination. My only response is a wan smile.

Our Taoist master Laozi said it best: "Fortune depends on misfortune. Misfortune is hidden in fortune." I left school as a child, often went hungry, was constantly lonely, and had no books to read. But for those reasons, like the writer of a previous generation, Shen Congwen, I had an early start on reading the great book of life. My experience of going to the marketplace to listen to a storyteller was but one page of that book.

After leaving school, I was thrown uncomfortably into the world of adults, where I embarked on the long journey of learning through listening. Two hundred years ago, one of the great storytellers of all time—Pu Songling—lived near where I grew up, and where many people, me included, carried on the tradition he had perfected. Wherever I happened to be—working the fields with the collective, in production team cowsheds or stables, on my grandparents' heated kang, even on oxcarts bouncing and swaying down the road, my ears filled with tales of the supernatural, historical romances, and strange and captivating stories, all tied to the natural environment and clan histories, and all of which created a powerful reality in my mind.