Edition: U.S. / Global

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Rural Chinese 'Catch-22' You Can Almost Smell

Published: June 12, 1995

THE GARLIC BALLADS By Mo Yan Translated by Howard Goldblatt. 290 pages. Viking. $23.95

The setting of this raw, brilliant, eventful new novel by one of China's best writers is called, no doubt ironically, Paradise County. It is a rude and unforgiving place where the farmers have been ordered by county officials to plant only a single crop, garlic, and are then enraged when those same officials, after stuffing their pockets with fees and taxes, announce that the warehouse is full and they will buy no more of the harvest.

Paradise is full of lazy and overbearing tyrants, of truculent, superstitious peasants, of daily violence, of grime and of hard, earthbound lives wherein, as the great Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu once put it, "everybody alike schemes for a full belly."

No wonder that "The Garlic Ballads" was banned in China when it came out in the late 1980's, even though Mo Yan, the author of four novels and many short stories, already had official recognition for his other work. His best-known prior novel, "Red Sorghum," which was made into a film by Zhang Yimou, China's most celebrated new wave director, was also a story of obstinate peasants and rural survival. With "The Garlic Ballads," which was eventually distributed in China, Mr. Mo, who is 39, has emerged as a major writer, a kind of Chinese magical realist whose stories, grounded in gritty naturalism, in the smells and fluids of real life, are nonetheless full of hallucination, demonic possession and the grotesquery of dreams.

The unifying theme of Mr. Mo's new book is the small person's battle against capricious authority, both of the corrupt state and of family tradition. Two garlic farmers who are cousins, Gao Yang (Sheep Gao) and Gao Ma (Horse Gao), are sought by the police after a riot at the county government office. Gao Yang is captured, beaten and thrown into a prison cell with a grim collection of fellow inmates. Gao Ma, the closest thing the book has to a hero, escapes.

That happens in the opening pages. "The Garlic Ballads," translated by Howard Goldblatt, who has deservedly become the most admired American translator of contemporary Chinese fiction, then presents the full and tragicomic stories of the two cousins via a kaleidoscope of flashbacks. Along the way a Dickensian cast of major and minor characters appears on Mr. Mo's crusty stage, including a blind minstrel named Zhang Kou who serves as a kind of Greek chorus for the disasters that unfold.

The political story, the riot of the garlic farmers, is intertwined with a love story that is passionate and utterly unsentimental at the same time. Gao Ma, a former soldier, seduces Fang Jinju, the daughter of a neighboring garlic farmer whose betrothal to an aging invalid has already been arranged by her parents. Jinju's engagement is part of a complicated agreement among three families that will enable her elder brother, who has one useless leg, to have a young and pretty wife. The couple's disobedient ardor contravenes the hardheaded, peasant calculation that is necessary, in its way, for survival in the harsh world of Paradise County. So Gao Ma and Jinju's love for each other meets with derision and brutality.

Paradise, in short, is a world in which love and prosperity fall victim to calculation and corruption. The characters brawl; they bleed; they grovel. They live in a world of stink and putrefaction, of rats, lice and maggots, of blood, urine and the pervasive sour smell of the garlic, which hangs in the air and in the breath of the farmers. It seeps out of the spilled blood of the dead and, in Mr. Mo's uncelestial carnal vision, even clings to the skin of lovers: "A surge of hot air floated up from her stomach, bestowing on Gao Ma the taste of garlic and fresh grass."

Here and there Mr. Mo does provide bits of relief. "Leaves were dusted with silver, insects chirped and screeched, cool dew moistened the dry earth below." But in Paradise County indifferent officials are mirrored by the indifference of nature and an unrelenting pollution of the human environment. "Gao Ma led her into the waiting room, whose floor was carpeted with melon-seed husks, candy wrappers, fruit skins, gobs of phlegm and standing water."

Even with his occasional emblems of the kindness and solace of the countryside, Mr. Mo's vision of rural life is normally stripped of its capacity to console. There are clouds of flies and poisonous caterpillars in Paradise County, hornets lurking in prospective human hiding places. "A heavy mist settled around multitudes of silkworms as they raised their strangely contoured metallic heads and gnawed through tinplatelike mulberry leaves, each crunch penetrating Gao Ma's chest and sawing at his heart."

And yet, despite the bleakness of Mr. Mo's depiction of Chinese rural life, his tale is so full of seething vitality that it never sinks into gloom. China's sturdy backbone, the peasant class, is infuriating and cruel, yet beneath the surface remains a redeeming rock of durability.

"Whatever it is, don't let it get you down," says one of Mr. Mo's more memorable characters, known as Fourth Aunt, who is Jinju's leathery mother. She is being held in the local lockup for her role in the garlic riot and is trying to comfort a fellow prisoner.

"Try to see things as they are," Fourth Aunt says. "The world isn't made for people like us. We must accept our fate."