F#$* Mama - Han Shaogong’s Bababa

In this episode, we return to the Root-seeking authors (xungen), this time with Han Shaogong and his enigmatic story Bababa. The story, if you can call it that, has a disjointed plot. It is focused on a village, and maybe the main character is a boy who can only say two things, Papa (baba) and F#$* Mama. Does this boy serve as a good leader for the village? Does he destroy the village? Every time he utters one of his two phrases, villagers try to divine what he means and what it means for the fate of the village. The story questions whether or not language means anything, whether we can say stories even mean anything