The Garlic Ballads - discussion

This thread is for reviews and discussion of Mo Yan's novel The Garlic Ballads.

Please flag your post with the word "SPOILERS" if appropriate.

The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
first published as Tiantang suan tai zhi ge in magazine form, 1988

It's 1987 and supply management has come to the garlic farmers of northeast Gaomi township, Not only that, every farmer is now a garlic farmer, for the state is not buying any other crop. Garlic is not something that can be succession planted over long periods and harvested in waves like leaf lettuce. When it is ready, that's it. Off it goes in a race to the purchasing agents, for who knows how long it will take for them to fulfill their unannounced quota. If they stop buying before you get a chance to sell, your garlic crop and farming year are wasted.

As The Garlic Ballads opens, we know none of this. Instead, we meet Gao Yang as he is being arrested for being part of a mob that destroyed the county offices. Mo then takes us back to harvest time, when the peasants used whatever means they could to transport their garlic to the commodity exchange warehouse. Funnelling in from around the county to the one road leading there, a sense of urgency and controlled panic grows as the fear of a lost year catches up with each farmer. Carts break down, loads spill and eventually the road becomes impassable.

Venal petty officials trawl the trapped peasants, collecting unofficial taxes for such things as a highway toll, commodity exchange tax, and even sanitation fines when donkeys deposit their own contributions on the road. Can't pay? These helpful officials will take it in kind; just hand over a pound or two of that garlic. Suddenly, the announcement comes; the warehouse is full and no one knows when more garlic will be purchased. Go home and take your garlic with you.

After a week of this daily charade, the peasants protest at the County Office and a riot ensues when no one will hear them out.

Most of the story during the harvest and over this week of selling, but the narration moves back and forth over the events in a non linear fashion. We hear the stories of other farmers, especially that of Gao Yan's cousin, Gao Ma and his girlfriend Fang Jinju. Their horrific love story reveals a rural society still deeply mired in the old customs. Poverty, arranged marriages, beatings, threats and retaliations all work against them.

Despite the unrelenting sense of hopelessness about life improving, there it a humour and kindness between casual acquaintances in day to day life, that contrasts sharply with the deeper divisions that occur between people more closely bound together by family or circumstance. However, add incarceration and torture, several suicides, a condemned prisoner and corruption all around, and it is easy to see why this book was originally banned in China. Mo Yan has had an official change in fortune since then, but this novel shows him at the time of his most forceful criticism of the authorities.

Each chapter starts with a verse from the ballad of Zhang Kou, the blind minstrel who chronicles the garlic harvest, the glut and its fallout, sometimes criticizing, sometimes inciting, always narrating for the people's record.

Pray listen, my fellow villagers, to
Zhang Kou's tale of the mortal world and Paradise!

Green garlic and white garlic to fry fish and meat,
Black garlic and rotten garlic to make a compost heap...

Townsfold, stick out your chests, show what you're made of---
Hand in hand we will advance to the seat of power!...

Anyone not afraid of being hacked to pieces
Can unseat a party secretary or county administrator...

The Communist Party, which didn't fear the Jap devils---
Is it now afraid to listen to its own people?

-------------------

My edition, published by Arcade from the 1989 Taiwan Hung-fan edition, says "Parts of Chapter Nineteen and all of Chapter Twenty have been revised in conjunction with the author". Since these are the last two chapters, I'd like to know how they read originally.