China transforms Nobel Prize winner's hometown into a theme park
(Read article summary)The area will be known as the Mo Yan Culture and Experience Zone, but author Mo Yan remains ambivalent about the new attraction.
Step aside Dickens World, Popeye Village Fun Park, and Wizarding World of Harry Potter.
If you’re looking for literary fun of the contrived, manufactured, theme park variety, there’s a new game in town.
Following the Nobel Prize win of its native son, Mo Yan, China is planning to transform the Nobel winner’s hometown, the sleepy, rural village of Ping’an (population: 800), into a $110-million Mo Yan Culture and Experience Zone.
The national, and perhaps international, attraction will center on Mo Yan’s childhood home, a modest mud structure with newspaper-covered walls.
Also in the works is a Red Sorghum Culture and Experience Zone and a Red Sorghum Film and Television Exhibition Area based on the author’s 1987 work, “Red Sorghum.” By government mandate, that attraction would have real peasants cultivating 1,600 acres of real sorghum. (Never mind that the undesirable, unprofitable crop hasn’t been cultivated in decades.)
