Nobel Literature Prize Acceptance Speech Place: Stockholm, Sweden

Date: December 10, 2050

What: Nobel Literature Prize Acceptance Speech

Speaker: Bing, a bare foot party activist

Your Royal Highnesses, Choir members, Ladies, Gentlemen, and Friends of Sheep and Cows:

We all just heard the beautiful dedication songs presented by the choir from warm Phoenix, Arizona and directed by the distinguished coloratura soprano and conductor Dr. K. As some of you may notice, all choir members are barefooted. You may wonder why they are barefooted in Stockholm in December while everyone else has shoes and boots, well, except me, the literature laureate of 2050.

I am barefooted too at this moment. I am the first barefooted speaker in Nobel Prize award ceremony history. Now let me tell you a story about what happened to our feet.

The reason why we are barefooted today at the ceremony is because of a missing pair of leather boots a long long time ago, more precisely, 36 years ago, on January 4, 2014. On that night, there was a New Year’s potluck party at choir director Dr. K’s house. Due to a special tradition for many Chinese living in US, all guests took off their shoes and left the shoes at the door. However, at the end of the party, Dr. L, one of the choir members could not find her leather boots. Then a massive boots hunting task started with Dr. K’s email to all choir members.

I also wrote a story about the missing boots. Dr. L read the story and highly suggested me to publish it at local newspapers to hopefully help find her missing boots. I sent the story to a local newspaper and received overwhelming responses. That was essentially the beginning of my writing career. In other words, my writing career started with a pair of missing leather boots. Since then, my writing has never stopped.

Well, who took Dr. L’s boots? We did not know it until 15 years later. From 2014 to 2028, almost every year, one pair of leather boots was mysteriously missing from Dr. K’s New Year’s potluck party. The missing boots category expanded from ladies’ leather boots to men’s leather boots.

On a cold Sunday morning in January of 2028, somebody knocked on Dr. K’s door. It was Jane, her neighbor. Jane said: ‘Dr. K, could you come with me? I would like to show you something.’ Dr. K hopped into Jane’s truck.

‘Where are we going?’, Dr. K. asked.

‘My horse ranch about five miles away,’ Jane replied.

Jane and her husband owned a huge piece of land (about 100 acres) where they kept hundreds of strayed and abandoned animals such as dogs, sheep, cows, and horses. Every three months, Jane and her husband used to go to the county’s animal shelter and control center to adopt animals which did not have luck to be adopted by the public. Due to county’s limited resources, if a dog is still not adopted after an extended waiting period, it will be euthanized, in other words, put to sleep. For many reasons, the county’s animal shelter is always over-crowded.

Five minutes later, Jane and Dr. K arrived at the ranch where Dr. K saw a lot of dogs, sheep, cows, and horses. She had never been to Jane’s ranch before. Jane drove through the ranch and stopped at the other end of the ranch where there were a lot of large trees on some rolling hills.

They got off the truck. Dr. K followed Jane to enter into a huge woody area where there were a lot of mesquite trees. To her great surprise, Dr. K saw a lot of shoes and boots piling up near a huge mesquite tree. There was a piece of stone and a small dirt bump behind the tree trunk. She walked toward the stone.

‘That is where we buried Bear Foot, one of our dogs we adopted from the county animal shelter 15 years ago,’ Jane said. ‘Bear Foot disappeared a few days ago and I finally found him dying here last night,’ Jane continued.

‘I believe you are interested in those shoes,’ Jane pointed to those shoes. ‘I remember you complained about missing shoes in your New Year’s parties. Yesterday as soon as we found Bear Foot and saw so many shoes around, we immediately realized that Bear Foot was responsible for your missing shoes. We would like to offer you our sincere apology…’

‘Wait a second! That is my left boot. This one looks like Dr. L’s famous boot,’ Dr. K exclaimed. ‘But why would a dog do this?!,’ Dr. K asked.

‘We do not know the reason either. Maybe he wanted to wear human’s shoes. Maybe he wanted to chew on them. But we noticed that all of the shoes were leather shoes. Maybe Bear Foot thought the leather boots were made from his friend’s skin and wanted to be with his friends. Now he is resting with his friends forever,’ Jane replied.

Next day Dr. K told her choir members about Bear Foot and the dire situation in the county’s animal shelter where many animals were waiting to be adopted. Later, Dr. K and her choir members went back to the ranch and helped Jane bury those shoes beside Bear Foot. Then, each person adopted a dog from the shelter. Dr. K named her newly adopted dog Bare Foot. She also named her choir Bare Foot.

Dr. K and her choir members decided that the choir’s all concerts would be dedicated to the theme of love and peace for animals and human welfare. A huge percentage of the concert tickets proceeds went to the animal shelters throughout the world. That is why Dr. K and her choir won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.

As a note, in all the following New Year’s parties, every choir member did not wear shoes even though they knew the shoes would not be stolen again by Bear Foot but may be stolen by Bare Foot.

End of speech.

After the 2050 Nobel Prize ceremony was concluded, the cleaning people found a pair of shoes under each chair in the audience. From one chair, Dr. L finally found a pair of boots that match her feet perfectly. That was 36 years later.