The Garlic Ballads

The Garlic Crisis

In the late 1980s in Shandong Province, local government officials told the farmers of Paradise County to plant garlic. They complied. The garlic grew. There was too much of it, and the government, having encouraged the overproduction, declined to buy the surplus at the promised price. The farmers were left with mountains of rotting garlic and no way to pay the debts they had accumulated to plant it. In 1987, they marched to the county seat to protest. The protest was suppressed with force, people were beaten and imprisoned, and the event was not reported in Chinese state media.

Mo Yan grew up in Shandong. He knew what had happened. He wrote The Garlic Ballads — in Chinese, Tiantang suantai zhi ge, The Song of Garlic from Paradise — in thirty-five days, apparently in something close to a fury, and the novel reportedly circulated in samizdat before its official publication and subsequent banning.

The novel tells this story through three interlaced voices. Gao Yang is a farmer who participated in the protest and is now in prison, waiting for trial, telling his story in fractured retrospective. Jinju is a young woman whose fate is entangled with Gao Yang’s and whose own story runs parallel to and occasionally through his. And Zhang Kou is the blind street musician whose ballads frame the narrative — who sings about what happened in Paradise County in the form of the traditional ballad, which is to say in the form that has historically carried truth that official channels refused to carry. The three voices together create a picture of the same events seen from different positions and with different stakes.

Politics and the Ballad Form

The blind balladeer Zhang Kou is the novel’s most formally significant creation. He sings in couplets. His ballads appear at chapter openings and at transitions in the narrative, providing a folk-music commentary on the events the prose narrates. The ballad form is not decorative: it is the traditional vehicle through which Chinese rural communities have preserved accounts of injustice that official history erased, and Mo Yan’s use of it connects his novel to a tradition of political witness that is older and more persistent than any particular government’s censorship apparatus.

The relationship between the ballad sections and the prose narrative is one of mutual illumination — the ballads give the prose events a mythic resonance, while the prose narrative gives the ballads’ general claims a specific, individual human weight. Zhang Kou is blind, which means he has no face that can be punished for what he sings. He moves from place to place. He cannot be easily silenced because he carries nothing that can be confiscated and he is not attached to any fixed location. The folk musician as the regime’s persistent antagonist is an old figure in Chinese culture, and Mo Yan knows it.

This is Mo Yan’s most directly political novel because it is his angriest. The carnivalesque exuberance of Red Sorghum (1987) and the monumental structural comedy of Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out (2006) are not available here. The events of 1987 were too recent and too specific and too clearly about the failure of a system that Mo Yan was inside — a system that had also produced him. The anger is not unmediated in the novel’s formal terms: the three voices and the ballad frame provide real structural distance. But the political target is more legible here than anywhere else in his work.

Mo Yan’s Early vs. Late Work

The Garlic Ballads occupies a pivotal position in Mo Yan’s career. It was published in 1988, the year after Red Sorghum (the novel that made his name) and before the decade-long period of development that produced his mature major works. It shares with Red Sorghum an interest in rural Shandong and a willingness to engage with political violence, but the tone is rawer and the style less elaborated. The Nobel committee’s citation in 2012 — “who with hallucinatory realism merges folk tales, history and the contemporary” — is a better description of Red Sorghum and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out than of The Garlic Ballads, which is more reportorial and less mythologized than Mo Yan at his characteristic best.

The Nobel Prize to Mo Yan was and remains contested, partly for political reasons — he is a member of the Chinese Communist Party and declined to publicly support Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize — and the controversy has colored reception of his work in ways that are not entirely fair to the novels themselves. The Garlic Ballads, in particular, is evidence that his relationship to the Chinese state is not simple deference: this is a novel that was banned in China, written in fury about a real act of state violence against real people.

Howard Goldblatt’s translation is, like all his work on Mo Yan, supple and authoritative. Goldblatt has translated the majority of Mo Yan’s work into English, and the consistency of his approach provides a useful thread through the catalogue. Readers new to Mo Yan should begin with Red Sorghum — more exuberant, more immediately gripping — and come to The Garlic Ballads as the work that reveals what Mo Yan looks like when the exuberance is stripped away and only the anger remains.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Mo Yan’s most politically exposed work: a raw, structurally inventive account of rural protest and state repression that earns its anger through the specificity of its portrait of people the Chinese state preferred not to see.