Chronicle of a Blood Merchant – An Artfully Written Story of a Family’s Will to Survive Malevolent Forces of History

“Since it’s my birthday, I’m going to cook a meal for each of you with my mouth, and you can eat it with your ears. You won’t be able to eat it with your mouth because there’s nothing to eat, but prick up your ears, because I’m going to start cooking any moment now…”

In the 1980s, Yu Hua wrote short stories that were known for its ‘incisive lyricism’ and established himself as a key figure in Chinese avant-garde literature. Born in 1960, Yu Hua was working as a dentist when he started publishing stories. In 1990s, there was a major shift in the author’s style as he wrote two best-selling novels, which depicted the extraordinary struggles of the ordinary Chinese men and women. To Live, Yu Hua’s first novel (published in 1993), was adapted into a critically acclaimed movie by Zhang Yimou. His second novel, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (published in 1995 and translated to English by Andrew Jones in 2004) follows a small-town factory worker, from his youth to old age in the second half of the 20^th century – a period that marks the early days of Chinese socialism (1950s), the ambitious yet brutally forced collectivization of the Great Leap Forward (in 1958) and the famine that ensued as a result, the bloody Cultural Revolution (1966-76), and the relatively better (economically) post-Mao era.

Like To Live’s central character, the no-good-gambler Fugui, Xu Sanguan of Chronicle of Blood Merchant is a unheroic figure, molded by the regressive sociocultural practices and restricted by financial instability. He earns meager wages, working as a cart-pusher in a silk factory, situated in his small rural town. Xu Sanguan hears from his favorite fourth uncle that people in their village sell blood to hospital and earn money, the amount even if they toil six months in the field can't dream to earn. Selling blood was traditionally a taboo subject in China, but in the 1980s Chinese authorities and commercial companies set up a network of blood plasma collection stations in public hospitals especially to tempt the impoverished peasants. When Yu Hua wrote this novel the malpractices and corruption surrounding the system didn’t come to light (the unhygienic blood-buying practices led to HIV infection, afflicting at least half a million peasants in Henan province). Yet, Yu Hua’s portrayal of Xu Sanguan giving blood till he is too weak to even stand presents an alarming picture.

Earlier in the novel, the writer treats us to painful description of things-to-do before donating blood. Xu Sanguan meets two peasants on the road who asks him to drink lots of water to dilute their blood so that there’s more to sell (“drink until our stomachs are so swollen that it hurts and the roots of our teeth start to ache”). Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, however, isn’t a story steeped in misery and melodrama. Yu Hua details Xu Sanguan’s crisis-ridden life in the provincial village with a caustic wit. He is definitely not a likable character in the early chapters. Learning that the first of his three sons, Yile, is actually the child of his rival, He Xiaoyong, he abuses his wife Xu Yulan and bullies the boy. At one point, Xu Sanguan calls up his sons, Erle and Sanle, to promise him that they would rape He Xiaoyong’s daughters when they have grown up.

Xu Sanguan also often offers his twisted logic on why he can’t treat Yile as his son (ladened with casual misogyny). He leaves Yile at home during the famine and takes the rest of the family to eat noodles at a local restaurant. The image of hungry Yile stumbling through the streets, searching for his family, enrages us. Quite a few readers may get offended by Xu Sanguan’s absurd logic and callous deeds (strengthened by regressive social and cultural thinking). Even the other characters’ behaviors and motives may baffle our politically correct bourgeois sensibilities. But gradually Xu Sanguan takes the path of redemption that largely avoids blatant sentimentality. And as the state deprives the family of private existence, the political and social turmoil of the nation also invades their domestic space in myriad ways.    

Despite a clear-sighted portrayal of a vicious totalitarian world, what distinguishes Yu Hua’s novel is the humane portraits of the unenlightened people, who gradually learn to set aside their prejudices and false sense of pride. With this novel, the author has deftly mixed his humanistic notions with his early stylistic innovations (credit also belongs to the translation work of Andrew Jones). The result is a vivid story of flawed people who emerge from the period of intense fear, finding joy in small things and solace in family unit. 

 

The Garlic Ballads – A Perturbing Tale of Dissent and Oppression

“They say officials love to serve the people, so why do they treat the common folk as enemies? Heavy taxes and under-the-table levies, like ravenous beasts, force the farmers to head for the hills. The common folk have a bellyful of grievances, but they dare not let them out. For the moment they open their mouths, electric prods close them fast.”

The brilliant and controversial Chinese novelist Mo Yan’s 1988 novel The Garlic Ballads (translated to English by Howard Goldblatt in 1995) details inhumanity and injustices that offers a disconcerting reading experience. Having previously read a novel and short stories of Mo Yan (Red Sorghum & Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh) and forewarned of the brutal violence in The Garlic Ballads, I was somewhat prepared for it. Yet the novel deeply agitated me with its relentlessly grim portrait of patriarchy and bureaucracy. Set in 1987 rural China, the novel chronicles the ruined lives of ‘Paradise County’ peasants, who are ordered by the government to plant only garlic in their fields.  When garlic glut renders the commodity worthless the officials who gave the order now refuse to even buy their produce, while the angry peasants revolt and ransack the local government office. The establishment reacts in the only way it knows when the masses question its power: through state-sanctioned violence.     

               

The Garlic Ballads may sound like a diatribe against the corrupt and vicious communists of Deng Xiaoping era (1978-1989). In fact, the book was banned in the wake of Tienanmen Square protests. But Mo Yan, the masterful raconteur and storyteller delivers more than a polemic as he effortlessly conveys the concerns and ubiquitous struggles in farmers’ lives. The powerlessness and frustration of the peasants is narrated through three characters: Gao Ma, a garlic farmer and war veteran whose love affair with his neighbor girl Jinju leads to bitter conflict with the girl’s family; Gao Yang, also a poor garlic farmer who has faced humiliation throughout his life for having landlord parents; and Fourth Aunt, Jinju’s ill-treated mother. All three are arrested by uncaring officials for their alleged participation on the revolt and trashing of the government co-op.

While Mo Yan symbolizes the atmosphere of fury and depravity by evoking the imagery of garlic rotting in the fields, he also meticulously details the trickle of bodily fluids. There are vivid descriptions of these people bleeding, urinating, sweating, etc (“something warm and wet [which] slithered into his nasal cavities then continues down his face. He tried, but couldn't hold it back; whatever it was spurted out of his nostrils and entered his mouth.”) Such intimate (and discomfiting) observations of the bodily functions somehow illustrate the people’s distressed psychological state. Moreover, when the three alleged rioters are picked up by the police (several days after the revolt), Mo Yan cleverly uses disjointed flashbacks to gain our empathy for the characters. And most often, the author counterbalances his visceral depictions of pain and torture with lyrical evocation of natural landscapes (“Stars shone brightly in the deep, dark, downy-soft canopy of heaven, beneath which cornstalks, straining to grow tall, stretched and rustled.”)

The Garlic Ballads not only lays bare the inhumanity rampant in the ruling quarters, it also closely focuses on the brutality, carried out in the name of preserving tradition & culture. The marriage arranged for Jinju is pretty much a business negotiation, and when Gao Ma decides to thwart Jinju’s family’s plans the violence he is subjected to us is as dreadful as the state-sanctioned violence. On one hand, the corrupt officials use the shell of socialism to propagate fascist policies; on other hand, Mo Yan indicts deplorable cultural practices and rigid moral codes, pushing the agrarian community to be in conflict with one another. The writer depicts how this debasement enveloping the Chinese society (within family and state) sternly restricts individual freedom. The title refers to ballads sung by a blind minstrel named Zhang Kou, whose songs is considered to be driving force behind the farmers' rebellion. Each chapter of the novel opens with Zhang’s ballads who eventually gets arrested by a policeman, cursing “You blind bastard, you’re the prime suspect in the Paradise County garlic case!” The minstrel's mouth is gagged although it takes much more than to wholly silence him.

P.S.: when Mo Yan received Nobel Prize in 2012, Peter Englund, the Nobel permanent secretary selected The Garlic Ballads as ‘Mo Yan’s gateway book’ (first of the author’s novel to be translated into English).