“The red blood of the Jiao-Gao soldiers and the green blood of the Iron Society soldiers converged to nourish the black earth of the fields. Years later, that soil would be the most fertile anywhere,” writes Mo Yan in Red Sorghum, set in the midst of the 1930s war between Japan and China, in what might be the covert thesis statement of the novel.
There’s a strain of blood and soil in Red Sorghum that leaches into the meaning of community, what ties together these rural Chinese outposts. What we’ve termed filial piety, what we think of as belonging to a place, these are also terms that undergird tribalism. These are terms that inform the right to a piece of earth, the right to pass it to your kin, the right to kill the outsider who would take it from you.
The grotesque barbarism of the war between Japan and China is only a part of the show. Equally indiscriminate, if not quite as cruel, are the killings between tribes of bandits and ad hoc governments within China, and the extent to which the reader is invited to scorn the social milieu of the novel is never clear. One is tempted, actually, to think we are not: we conclude with the descendant of these local warlords mourning their lack of connection to the old ways, the moral atrophy of the cities. If there is a critique of the recklessness of violence, it is at least nested with its glorification. It is posited within a naturalistic framework, wherein the red of the sorghum fields, the sorghum wine, the wars with local dogs to preserve the corpses on the battlefield, all of these natural symbols map to the world of violence in a way that suggests that the strife and killing for place and power is endemic to the soil, to the identities of its people – at least, once upon an age.