distinguished members of the swedish academy, ladies and gentlemen:

　　through the mediums of television and the internet, i imagine that everyone here has at least a nodding acquaintance with far-off northeast gaomi township. you may have seen my ninety-year-old father, as well as my brothers, my sister, my wife and my daughter, even my granddaughter, now a year and four months old. but the person who is most on my mind at this moment, my mother, is someone you will never see. many people have shared in the honor of winning this prize, everyone but her.

　　my mother was born in 1922 and died in 1994. we buried her in a peach orchard east of the village. last year we were forced to move her grave farther away from the village in order to make room for a proposed rail line. when we dug up the grave, we saw that the coffin had rotted away and that her body had merged with the damp earth around it. so we dug up some of that soil, a symbolic act, and took it to the new gravesite. that was when i grasped the knowledge that my mother had become part of the earth, and that when i spoke to mother earth, i was really speaking to my mother.

　　i was my mother's youngest child. my earliest memory was of taking our only vacuum bottle to the public canteen for drinking water. weakened by hunger, i dropped the bottle and broke it. scared witless, i hid all that day in a haystack. toward evening, i heard my mother calling my childhood name, so i crawled out of my hiding place, prepared to receive a beating or a scolding. but mother didn't hit me, didn't even scold me. she just rubbed my head and heaved a sigh.

　　my most painful memory involved going out in the collective's field with mother to glean ears of wheat. the gleaners scattered when they spotted the watchman. but mother, who had bound feet, could not run; she was caught and slapped so hard by the watchman, a hulk of a man, that she fell to the ground. the watchman confiscated the 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."