Harsh life in the country
The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan, Hamish Hamilton $255 THE Chinese Government condemned Mo Yan's most famous novel, Red Sorghum, for showing China in a backward light. That novel was set before the communists came to power, ending at the time of the Japanese occupation.
In Mo's newly-translated The Garlic Ballads, the brutalised way of life echoes that of Red Sorghum. But what is so damning, surprising and important is that the violent events it describes take place not in the distant past but in 1987. This, after all, is meant to be a time when China's peasants have never had it so good, thanks to the enlightened policies of Deng Xiaoping.
The Garlic Ballads has inevitably been banned in China. But this book is a warning that the communist powers should heed if they want to maintain the 'mandate of heaven'. For this is a brave, blistering critique of the condition of China's rural poor and the cultural values that shape and undermine the political system.
The book follows the arrest of several peasants, said to be instigators of 'the garlic incident'. The garlic growers have ransacked the government offices of Paradise County after the co-op refused to buy their crop - the government's instruction to grow garlic having resulted in a glut.
As the peasants are processed through China's judicial system, the book weaves together the tragic stories that leads these ordinary people to the gulag.
The most dramatic of the characters is Gao Ma, his life shattered by his love for Jinju. The men of her family have already arranged for her to marry an old man and blindly set about destroying them when the couple thwart their will.
Then there is Jinju's mother, who had been powerless to defend her daughter. She is driven to unexpected revolt by the lack of justice following the accidental death of her husband, her greedy sons already having abandoned her.
Gao Yang, an ordinary husband and father, also finds himself in trouble. After his dreams of wealth from his bumper garlic crop are cruelly dashed, he and his donkey cart are caught up in the riot as it heads toward the government compound.
The characters are thinly drawn and offer few surprises. Apart from the cross-section of meek and mean, the book also features the array of blind and deformed we have come to associate with China's countryside. We are moved more by what happens to them than what they are themselves.
Mo is at his best in dramatising social injustice, its causes and consequences. At this level The Garlic Ballads is intensely moving and can be compared to some great novels of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Like Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles or John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, it reaches to the heart of how an unjust social, political and economic order makes ordinary people powerless to control their fate.
What is so important for China today is Mo's critique of a culture in new disarray, where feudal paternalism, communism and capitalism are forming an unholy alliance against the interest of the masses. At the most fundamental level, the system is soured by the overwhelming drive for self-interest rather than compassion and the absence of any meaningful recognition of equality between different people, nor between the sexes.
The depth of injustice is directly summed up in the 'garlic ballads' that began each chapter, sung by a blind beggar who witnesses the community's anguish.
Mo links the political crisis to a social malaise. At the base of Chinese rural society, patriarchal values are still dominant, with its women its greatest victims, as we see from the barbaric control that father and brothers have over the helpless Jinju.
The Communist Party offers no protection to the community's unwanted females, its local officials being no more enlightened in their attitudes. The rule of law, used so efficiently to defend the state, is non-existent when it comes to protecting ordinary peasants from the crushing violence of the patriarchal will.
At the next level of life in Paradise County, communists perpetuate this patriarchy by treating the masses as servile dogs, a far cry from communists being the 'servants of the people' intended by Mao Zedong.
The ultimate humiliation, forcing a person to drink urine and vomit, is frequently used to demonstrate power. The school bully destined to become a prominent official, police officers and the toughest criminal in the prison cell come from the same mould, each demanding this show of obedience from those less strong.
Gao Yang makes a heart-rending journey to the county town with his donkey and garlic. Officials first demand tax for using the road, then fine him when his donkey soils it. He is also taxed for the sale of garlic he never makes. When he has no money, he has no choice but to give away his crop and watch his income for the coming year melt away.
Mo is careful to point out that not all officials are corrupt and that rural reforms since the end of the Cultural Revolution have brought improved living standards to the peasants.
What the novel calls for is a new morality - a radical change in how we regard fellow human beings and our responsibilities to them.
Mo would like the Chinese to begin listening to the Marxist instructor from the army who defends his peasant father during the trial and who had earlier generously given water to Gao Yang and his donkey.
'If an official assumes the role of public master rather than public servant, the people have the right to throw him out!' he tells the court.
Howard Goldblatt's translation moves freely between the lyricism of the poetry and bawdy detail in the prose. Some of the imagery is corny and too reminiscent of Red Sorghum. But this is still a well-structured novel which, will leave the reader angry, sad and more enlightened.
