The Garlic Ballads
By
Mo Yan
ISBN
978-1-61145-530-4
Venturing into China, I decided to look for a contemporary
work that would move away from the historical way that is well documented in
other reviews. It was whilst rummaging around the works of Nobel Prize winning
authors that I came across this story from an author whose work is often banned
from his native home. I do think if I was the Chinese government I too would
ban his work, or else be thoroughly ashamed that my actions were being exposed.
It s a love story, (or
not), a story of family values (or stresses), but mostly a story about the
ordinary working folk trying to make a living for their family in spite of the
actions of the local governing party members. It becomes a story of human
frustration that spills over in a low level demonstration by the farmers that
have devastating consequences. The garlic crop has been planted and farmed
based on the request, and I use that term loosely, of the collective. A glut
ensues, the farmers lose their entire years earnings, and finally they begin to
ask why the government is failing them. The inevitable consequences appear disproportionate,
however they are described with great plausibility.
Into this mix, we must consider the way that a modern family
still treats the women of the home. Certainly in this tale, we might have been
reading a book written a hundred years ago. The wife has become a devoted slave
to her husband’s whims, and the daughter is certainly not invited to offer an
opinion on anything. She is to be sold, via a dowry, into a marriage that she
has no wish to be part of. When she expresses a love for the young man in the
next field, she is beaten brutally by her father and lambasted by her brothers
while her mother stands by. Although the brothers are not entitled to beat
their sister, they have no such inhibitions towards her young lover. Powerful
stuff indeed!
The story is written at many levels. The three entwined
threads, as I have described, goes through several time spans. Firstly we are
living with the consequences of everybody’s actions. We are also taken back to
the various recent histories of each of the characters and families, and
finally, we are taken back to their earlier histories to explain how and why
they are all in the situations they find themselves. However, throughout the
novel we have the government attitude in the background. This is probably where
the censor has a problem. We, the outside world, are aware of their attitude to
all manner of issues concerning the ordinary folk trying to eke out a living. ‘Might
is right’ is a phrase that runs as an underlying threat to every strand of this
excellently written, well crafted novel concerning dreadful behaviour of all
manner of departments, courts, government officials and heads of families.
I do urge you to try and find a copy of this book; if you
choose to disbelieve all the claims made by the author it is still a very good
read and if you do believe the claims, prepare to ask yourself what you might
be able to do to change to lot of the ordinary hard working people of China.
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