The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan

Source of Book: Borrowed from the library

This is another of those books that has been on my list so long, I honestly don’t remember who recommended it or when.

What I do know is this: Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2012 for his body of work, including this book, Mo Yan is a pen name - it means “don’t speak,” the book was banned in China, and yet Mo Yan is unusual in that he won the prize and yet did not find himself in prison in China.

Mo Yan wrote quite a number of books prior to and after this one, and, like this one, most were translated into English by Howard Goldblatt, who also abridged some of them. It is not at all clear if that happened in this case - a quick internet search didn’t turn up anything definitive. In any case, it is fairly certain I will never read it in the original language, so what I read is what I had available.

 

 The Garlic Ballads was written in 1995, but is set in 1987, during a historical event - the “garlic glut.” The characters are fictional, but very much of the rest is quite historical. The basic events went down like this: officials of the local Chinese government order the local farmers to plant only one crop - garlic - and promise to pay a fixed rate for it. When the crop matures, there is a glut, and the same officials refuse to buy the garlic, it rots, causing a stink and ruining many of the farmers. They revolt and trash the office of the local commissioner, who hides in his home and refuses to respond. The government cracks down on the protesters, arresting many, who are then subjected to brutal conditions and abuse. Against this backdrop, Mo Yan writes a doomed love story, a tale of prejudice, and several episodes of corruption and oppression by the authorities.

Let me say at the outset that this book is brutal. And I don’t use that term lightly. It is thoroughly violent, with every kick and punch from the police landing with full force. Bodily fluids are everywhere, and if you can’t take people being forced to eat their vomit and urine, you probably shouldn’t read this book. I know our own law enforcement here in the United States has serious issues - and I wouldn’t want to be a young man of color here. But this is on a whole different level, where cattle prods and torture are considered a matter of course, and “justice” is not even an illusion - “confess or we make it harder on you” from everyone from the judge on down. So if you are looking for anything pleasant in this book, I warn that they are very, very few and far between.

The book focuses on two main characters - we see the events mostly through their eyes. The first is Gao Yang, a farmer who is socially disadvantaged because of his descent from people who were landlords before Communism. He is the recipient of much of the abuse in the book, despite his natural submissiveness and puzzlement at what is happening to him. (He got involved in the protests because he got caught up in the crowd, but is singled out as a “ringleader” apparently because of his social standing.) If anything “good” can be said to happen in this book, we assume it will happen in the future after he serves his time. And, to a large degree, we can hope things work out for him because of his wife, who is one of the truly decent people in the book. Perhaps because she is crippled (and therefore undesirable for marriage), she has both compassion and a resilience that other characters lack. The second is Gao Ma, another farmer, who has personal issues of his own, and who actually is a ringleader in the revolt. A smaller portion is told from the perspective of Fourth Aunt Fang, the matriarch of the Fang family.

Mo Yan doesn’t write a sequential story. We are plunged into the aftermath of the revolt with Gao Yang’s arrest, and it takes all of the book before we actually get back to the circumstances of the revolt itself. The characters essentially tell the back story through flashbacks, which are also interspersed with stories from legend and conversations with other characters. To top it off, part of the narrative is carried by short poetry excerpts at the beginning of the chapters, by the blind balladeer who sang the story of the garlic glut and revolt. (The title comes from these songs.) Thus, I would not say that the plot thread is easy to follow. Particularly at first, one can see glimpses of the past and future, but everything is so unclear. I would say that I was able to piece together the outline about halfway through, but many details were still not in place until near the end.

A couple of things really stood out to me about the book. The first is this: a lot of what we here in the West have been taught about Communism - particularly the Chinese version - is a big pile of excrement. It is particularly egregious on the part of the Right in their intentional oversimplification of Communist regimes to an economic system. I have written about this before in the past, specifically how systems like Communism and Nazism are united by their totalitarianism. Not so much religion or philosophy or economics, but by a belief in the necessity to exert absolute control over a population. Thus, it is the existence of the secret police - those above the law and answering only to the corrupt bosses - that define these regimes. I have read a number of books written by those who lived in these assorted countries during totalitarianism, and the universal theme is the lack of political, not economic freedom, which defines them. (One recent example is The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li, also about Communist China, from an insider.)

In this book, this is apparent from the outset. By 1987, at least, the rural Chinese farmers appear to own their land. It certainly seems that way. And, despite the “grow garlic and we’ll buy it,” edict, just about everyone still grows other foods for their own use. A few even hedge their bets, and don’t seem to suffer a consequence. The main way we can tell this is still a communist system is that there is a single buyer for the crops. Which, come to think of it, isn’t that far off from how some markets work here in the West. So no, it isn’t a truly free market, but it isn’t a full command economy, and “capitalism” exists in a recognizable form. After all, the farmers sell their crops and keep the proceeds. If they work harder and grow more, they get more money. So it isn’t somehow that people are too equal that is the problem. (And in practice, they aren’t that equal.) It is the totalitarianism.

What is striking, however, is the way that the totalitarian system readily adapts to the looser economic system - and becomes less a doctrinaire communism, and more like a corrupt kleptocracy, where those in power cheat and steal and take bribes and enrich themselves at the expense of others. And because absolute authority is accepted, they can get away with it.

This leads me to the second observation. In some ways, the Communism of Mao was a radical change from tradition. (Which is one reason why the Cultural Revolution led to mass starvation and other horrific results.) In this book, the past and present cultures both co-exist and fight for dominance.

The best example of this is at the heart of the doomed love story. Gao Ma is in love with young Fang Jinju, the only daughter of Fourth Aunt Fang. However, he is just a poor farmer and former soldier, so her family rejects the idea. Rather, what they want to do is marry her off to a much older and connected man with money...who hasn’t been able to marry before because he is gross and undesirable. But, in this case, there is a sweetener. If Jinju marries him, then Jinju’s deformed eldest brother will get a wife in exchange, which will allow the second brother to marry as well. So her body is basically sold in exchange for social and economic advantage.

Contracts like these are illegal under Communism, which has tried - with some success - to shift society to a more egalitarian view of the sexes. But out here in the rural districts, the law is not enforced, both because of the strength of misogynistic tradition and the universal fact that the wealthy and connected can do whatever the hell they want. The spirited Jinju is not okay with this and refuses, then runs off with Gao Ma and gets pregnant, throwing a huge wrench in the works. And then her family brutally beats her. This does not end well, alas. The greed and cruelty in the Fang family cause them to unravel when things start to go badly wrong.

It is interesting that there are signs of gender equality here and there in the story. Many of the police are female - and they are more likely to act compassionately and justly than the often vulgar and cruel men. The doctor who delivers the children in the village is female and highly educated. She pushes back against the rural parents who celebrate the birth of males, and mourn the birth of females. (As she correctly points out, the very same people then whine about how hard it is to find wives for their beloved sons. On a macro scale, this misogyny has led to a serious lack of females in China.)

Whatever else this book contains, it certainly does not fit an easy “socialism good, capitalism bad” narrative. Instead, it looks at the problems of corruption, of the ugly side of “tradition,” the challenges of forced change, and the human propensity toward violence and brutality. The problems seem rather more universally human than specific to one culture or government. The cure seems not “unrestrained capitalism” but a need for freedom, compassion, and decency. And really, all of those are bound up together. When we recognize others as human and treat them with compassion and empathy, we tend to give them freedom. It is when we dehumanize that enforcing rules and authority becomes more important than everything else. (Hey, didn’t the founder of a major religion talk about that a bit?)

I can’t say I really “enjoyed” this book. It was a tough read. But it also had some amazing writing - although I can’t say how much is in the original versus the translation. The descriptions are evocative, the emotional connection with the characters solid, and the language beautiful. I would be curious if all of Mo Yan’s books are this dark, because it would be interesting to see what he would do with characters in a world in which they could thrive, rather than be brutalized.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Source of book: I own this.

A Gentleman in Moscow was one of last year’s book selections for our book club. I was unable to attend that meeting (although my wife did), so I never got around to reading it. However, she convinced me that it was really good, so I took it along on one of our trips last month. 

 

First of all, my wife was, as usual, right. The writing is fantastic. There have been a few books I have read recently in which there were some passages that made me wince. Even books by serious authors. But this book was unique in that I kept finding myself letting scenes wash over me, and basking in the glow of the language. Towles is just a straight-up good writer.

A number of critics have been less rosy about the book, and, after I finished it, I read a few of the reivews. I think the problem is that critics want the book to be...a different book. They want it to have a deeper, darker theme, be more “realistic” about Soviet Russia, to tackle problems. Or something like that.

This is not what this book is at all, and it doesn’t need to be. And it is not what the author intended. As he put it, in answer to the question, “Does the book have a central theme?”

I certainly hope not. In crafting a novel, I do not have an essential message I am trying to communicate. Rather, I hope to create a work of art that, while being satisfyingly cohesive, contains such a richness of images, ideas, and personalities that it can prompt varied responses from reader to reader, and from reading to reading.

In essence, I want to gather together a pile of brightly colored shards of glass. But rather than assemble these shards into a mosaic with a fixed image, I want to drop them into the bottom of a kaleidoscope where, thanks to a glint of sunlight and the interplay of mirrors, they render an intricate beauty which the reader can reconfigure by the slightest turn of the wrist.

I think that is a fine description. And a good example of Towles’ way with words.

With a few exceptions, the book takes place in an extremely limited environment. Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian aristocrat, is saved from the firing squad by his reputation as a revolutionary poet. (It turns out - spoiler - that he didn’t even write the poem.) Given his life, he is deprived of his liberty: he is to spend the rest of his life living in the Metropol hotel in Moscow, and essentially become a “former person,” with no identity. Evicted from his posh lodgings and confined to a former storage room on a top floor, his life changes dramatically. But the 30 year old Count takes it in stride, and finds a life for himself. He becomes the head waiter at the ritzy restaurant - after all, his greatest skill is in making seating charts and pairing wines - and forms friendships with staff, visitors, and foreign diplomats. Oh, and a young girl who later leaves her own daughter in the care of the Count.

The book unfolds over more than three decades: from 1922 through 1954. Towles chose an interesting, symmetric form for the book. In the first half of the book, the timeframe doubles each chapter. So the first section is one day after his arrest, the next two days, and so on, eventually giving a 15 year gap. At that point in the story, the narrative takes a dramatic turn, when young Sofia is dropped off by her mother - who never returns. From that point on, the reverse applies, with the times shrinking as they approach the final denouement.

Towles has said that he typically spends a couple years carefully outlining and plotting his books, followed by a rather rapid writing process. After this, of course, careful editing and revision is done, to polish the final product. I think this shows. I didn’t notice any plot holes, and nearly everything mentioned turns out to be important later. In this sense, Towles uses the careful technique of a mystery writer, but applies it to literary fiction.

There are so many things to mention, I am sure I will forget a lot of what I wanted to say as I was reading. (It doesn’t help that it is harder to take notes while traveling, or that it was hard to put the book down to do so.) However, I will do my best to hit some highlights.

First of all, the characters are great. They are memorable, believable, and human. I am a particular fan of books with good character-driven plots anyway. (My favorite Victorian is Anthony Trollope - true fans will understand why.) Count Rostov is, perhaps, a good bit better than the average aristocrat (and particularly than, say, the sort you find in most Russian novels), but he is no saint. He is as suave as they come, though, and is pretty admirable in the way he adapts to dramatically changed circumstances. I found him to be one of the more enjoyable characters I can remember from the last few years of reading.

There are others, too. Rostov’s friend, Mishka, the nervous, obsessive, and literary person never quite at home in the Soviet machine, despite his socialist beliefs. He is Rostov’s one friend from his youth - they were an interesting pair: Rostov the aristocrat, and Mishka the commoner.

The other members of the Triumvirate - Andrey, the maître d’ of the restaurant (without whom, the hotel would not run), and Emile, the cantankerous head chef - are also delightful. The whole idea of the behind-the-scenes meetings of Rostov, Andrey, and Emile to plan out the important dinner parties for visiting dignitaries - while sampling the creative cooking of Emile - was genius. As was their choice of the name.

The three main female characters are also interesting. Nina first appears as a precocious young girl. She befriends Rostov, and the two of them explore the bowels of the hotel using Nina’s pass key. Nina is studious and appears to have a bright future, but something goes wrong and her husband is sent to the gulag. She pursues him, leaving her daughter Sofia behind.

Sofia is every bit as smart as her mother, but quieter and less assertive. This makes it easier for her to blend in with Soviet values. It is Sofia, more than Nina, who changes Rostov and gives his life purpose.

The final woman is Anna, the actress. When we first meet her, she is young and at the height of her fame. She is also overbearing and arrogant, and doesn’t come off well. Nonetheless, she decides to have a fling with the Count, only to get completely pissed off when he picks up the clothes she has flung on the floor. (Apparently, Towles based part of this on an incident involving her own parents…) She comes around, however, and the two of them have an ongoing affair (if that is what you call a relationship between two unmarried people) for the rest of the book. Although first impressions are negative, she grows as a character, just like the Count. In fact, the two of them essentially grow together, losing their egos and adapting to the changes of life. (Let’s just say that it isn’t easy going from beautiful starlet to senior citizen actress - few have done it.)

Speaking of the affair, hats off to Towles for his understated sex scenes. I have mentioned this before, but I think it is brutally difficult to pull off a sexy sex scene in a novel. A horrible one? Sure. Or even a humorous one. But one that is actually sexy is harder. In my opinion, the more graphic, the worse it usually turns out. Sex is a heck of a lot of fun. But it is, in a way, kind of ooky if you think about the mechanics. Hence the difficulty of writing it well. The best part about Towles’ writing in this case is that he focused on the emotional component of what starts out as a purely physical one night stand. The fallout for both characters is what matters, and forms a believable foundation for what becomes - as it turns out - a pretty epic romance.

I should also mention the villain of the book: “The Bishop.” This is the nickname given to a bolshevik who starts out as a waiter, before being promoted all the way to hotel manager, despite his lack of ability. Towles shows a deft touch here, because one comes to loathe The Bishop before one even realizes he is a bolshevik stooge. He embodies all the annoying qualities of bad waiting - he is there when you don’t want him, isn’t there when you want him, pushes expensive wines and entrees despite their unsuitability together, misses social cues, and makes a blundering nuisance of himself. One or two of these are excusable in a basic restaurant - and I don’t nitpick college students trying to pay their way, or friendly diner waitresses who face rather different expectations. But all of these, in a waiter in a fine restaurant? From a person who exudes arrogance and refuses to learn? That’s unforgivable. This is why you know what kind of a person The Bishop is right from the start. That he turns out to be the worst kind of Soviet stool pigeon can be inferred from his character.

The minor characters fill things out well. The seamstress Marina, who becomes Rostov’s confidant and co-conspirator. Osip, the mucky-muck in the secret police (which changes names throughout the book, of course) who forms a bond with Rostov after he asks Rostov to tutor him in French. Richard Vanderwhile, the American diplomat. Abram, the handyman and beekeeper. And others.

I decided to include one scene from the book in this post, just because I think it is outstanding. Sofia has become a concert pianist, and will be performing. Marina has made her a dress which Rostov, being old school, doesn’t particularly approve - it is backless. He figures Anna is to blame.

“This dressless dress. No doubt it was drawn from one of your convenient magazines.”

Before Anna could respond, Marina stomped her foot.

“This was my doing!”

Startled by the seamstress’s tone, the Count saw with some trepidation that while one of her eyes had rolled toward the ceiling in exasperation, the other was bearing down on him like a cannonball.

“It is a dress of my design,” she said, “fashioned from my handiwork for my Sofia.”

Recognizing that he may have unintentionally insulted an artist, the Count adopted a more conciliatory tone.

“It is unquestionably a beautiful dress, Marina. One of the finest I have ever seen; and I have seen many find dresses in my time.” Here the Count gave an awkward little laugh in the hopes of clearing the air and then continued in a tone of fellowship and common sense. “But after months of preparation, Sofia will be performing Rachmaninov at the Palais Garnier. Wouldn’t it be a pity if, instead of listening to her play, the audience was staring at her back?”

“Perhaps we should drape her in sackcloth,” suggested the seamstress. “To ensure that the audience is not distracted.”

“I would never counsel sackcloth,” protested the Count. “But there is such a thing as moderation, even within the bounds of glamour.”

Marina stomped her foot again.

“Enough! We have no interest in your scruples, Alexander Ilyich. Just because you witnessed the Comet of 1812, does not mean that Sofia must wear a petticoat and a bustle.”

Later, Anna can’t resist rubbing it in.

“Is it true?” asked Anna, as she and the Count walked down the hallway after the fitting.

“Is what true?”

“Did you really see the Comet of 1812?”

This is just one well conceived scene, and one which fits in with the characterization. These are exactly the lines which Marina, Anna, and Rostov would have said, and by the time they appear in the book, they form additional examples of the characterization already apparent. I think this is one sign of good artistry: the characters aren’t there to do the motions of the plot. Rather, they act in accordance with who they are, in the world the author creates for them to act.

I greatly enjoyed this book, and strongly recommend it. No, it isn’t intended to have a deep message. But it is a literary work - a work of art, beautiful for what it is, not for its lack of a message. And really, there are themes in this book. Themes like loyalty, friendship, mutual compromise, adaptation, and so on. As Towles puts it, each reader may discover different ideas and gems in the book. And that is what good art does.

***

There are two scenes involving music. The first is where Rostov discovers to his surprise that Sofia has been taking piano lessons from the resident conductor (a man grossly underutilized by the Bolsheviks.) She is playing a Chopin nocturne. Specifically this one:

Definitely a beautiful choice.

Another fascinating scene involves Sofia’s choice of a piece for a competition. While everyone else chooses Russian composers, she goes with...Mozart - his first Piano Sonata, written when he was still a teen. It is an interesting choice, but it works for her, and she launches her career.

***

If you want to read a completely different take on Soviet Russia, you might try The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - a writer mentioned in A Gentleman in Moscow.

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

Source of book: Borrowed from the library

It’s hard to believe it has been over five years since I read Gold Boy, Emerald Girl - Yiyun Li’s second collection of short stories. Since then, I have recommended them to a number of literary sorts, and I still think they have a unique and moving voice. I grabbed this book, her first novel, on a whim at the library. 

For better or worse, this is a difficult book. It begins with the execution of a young woman for political dissent, and ends with plenty of tragedy and betrayal. But it is also moving - and important - as well as fascinating and well written. Yiyun Li immigrated from China in the 1990s, and her experiences - and those of her parents - shape her writing. The trauma of the Cultural Revolution, the “Great Step Forward,” and particularly Tiananmen Square left impressions on her, and her fiction is set during these turbulent times.

The Vagrants is a novel, but it feels much like a set of interconnected short stories. The execution of Gu Shan reverberates through the lives of various people in the fictional small city of Muddy River, for better or worse. The stories all connect through that nexus (and others) despite their separate threads.

The theme in my view, is the way that a totalitarian society puts ordinary people in impossible situations, so that they predictably betray each other to save themselves. It is Game Theory in action. The game is rigged so that individuals gain - or at least lose less - if they turn each other in, even if that means fabricating “crimes” against the state in their neighbors. By banding together, it is more likely that they could force change, but the risk to any one person is too great, and the likelihood of betrayal practically inevitable.

Yiyun doesn’t write one-dimensional characters. There aren’t many heroes, and few true villains in this book. Rather, people have complicated and ambiguous motives and actions. In what has to be one of the best reversals I have read, the “golden boy” - the little boy with the good heart - ends up with one of the least comfortable futures, with his desire for approval leading to questionable actions and results. The flip side is the malignant idler Bashi, who starts off trying to find a girl he can screw - or rape if necessary. Except that once he finds the vulnerable crippled girl, he finds he can’t follow through on his plans, and ends up discovering a purpose outside his own selfishness. Both of these results are unexpected, and Yiyun makes the changes utterly convincing.

Like in Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, the overwhelming feeling one gets is one of aching loneliness. The system - particularly in combination with the old patriarchal beliefs that never went away - isolates everyone from each other. When you can’t trust your neighbor or your family, how can you have intimacy? And yet, there are some people and some moments where this occurs, and the scenes are total gems of character writing. The title characters, the two childless old people who take in the infant girls abandoned to die at the edge of town - they are bright spots of love. The moment when old Teacher Gu, whose wife has been arrested, finds an unexpected friend in a neighbor below his social circle. And this, after the man’s wife tries to destroy Teacher Gu.

As fair warning, I do need to say that this book is plenty traumatic. Yiyun throws a glaring light on one of the most sickening human rights violations of the Regime: dissidents would be held in prison, given genetic tests, then executed when their organs matched the needs of a powerful person. In some cases, the organs were removed while the person was still alive. This is pretty well documented, actually. Unsurprisingly, the most common victims were ethnic and religious minorities. (Human nature sucks so much, a lot of the time.) There are also some disturbing sexual elements, such as the creepy old man who saves corpses for burial (rather than cremation, as mandated by the Regime.) And severs the breasts and genitals of female corpses for his collection. But perhaps the worst is finding such a connection with characters that you just know are going to suffer.

Yiyun’s writing isn’t just good, it’s beautiful. I kept going back and re-reading passages just for the loveliness of the phrasing. It seems like a paradox, for the story to be so horrifying even as the writing is gorgeous.

I also want to talk a bit about totalitarianism, as this book really brought together a lot of my own thoughts on the subject.

In the right wing circles I used to run in - and to which a good number of friends and family still belong, Communism is used as a political weapon, a shibboleth of orthodoxy, and above all as a conversation ender when it comes to political discussions. The problem is that the essential core of Communism is misunderstood - or perhaps misrepresented.

In essence, as the argument goes now, the only two options are the totalitarian communism of Stalin or Mao on the one hand; or the anarcho-capitalism, the economic libertarianism (better described as social darwinism) of Ayn Rand. Thus, anything that smacks of wealth redistribution, a public sector, or regulation, is tarred as “Communism,” or at least “Socialism,” and the horrors of Mao and Stalin dragged out as the argument why we can’t have, to choose a common example, single payer health care. (Or fill in the blank with, say, a higher minimum wage, stronger unions, food stamps, or even Medicare and Social Security.) As soon as you start talking about inequality and the common good, clearly the Gulags are inevitable.

Suggest that maybe things might look more like, say, Sweden (or fill in the blank with another first world country…) rather than the Soviet Union, and you get called a pinko rather fast.

The same thing happened, of course, to the leaders of the Civil Rights movement. Desegregation meant death camps for whites, right?

Of course, for those of us with a Fundie background, “atheism” (with the biggest of scare quotes) was blamed for both Communism and Nazism. But also in there is the idea that the core of Communism is economic. That is, Communism is synonymous with any attempt to address inequality. Touch inequality, and you end up with the Gulag.

I think this very much misses the point. There is a reason why certain nasty regimes resemble each other so much, despite totally different economic philosophies. To give some examples, Nazism (a nasty right wing movement based on racial hatred, religious supremacy, reactionary gender roles, and militant nationalism) turned out to be strikingly similar to Stalinism (a nasty left wing movement based on class hatred, atheism, egalitarian gender roles, and militant nationalism.) And both are strikingly similar to the military dictatorships of Pinochet and Gaddafi. Or the far-right Islamist dictatorships like the Taliban or ISIS - and Iran and Saudi Arabia. Or the kleptocracies of South America. Or even the Roman Empire. The connecting thread for all of these isn’t economic theory - it’s totalitarianism.

Which is ALL about power.

It is about the power to control people’s lives, and deprive them of human rights. You can see in all of these the naked fact that speaking out against power is forbidden, and results in severe punishment, including death. The central idea is that one must never question authority, and that one should surrender one’s personhood in favor of the whims of those in power.

That’s why both hard right and hard left regimes resemble each other more than they resemble the democracies of the first world. That’s also why life in a fairly right wing democracy like the United States is fairly similar in many ways to life in a fairly left wing democracy like Sweden. Sure, there are differences, for better or worse. But in both, we can count on being able to speak out politically without getting whacked.

This is why it is pretty absurd to say that we will be one step from the gulags if we raise taxes so we can have universal health care. (And for that matter, tax rates on the wealthy are far below where they were in the 1950s, often held up as the zenith of American society by the right.) It’s also absurd to say that expecting employers to pay a living wage and provide benefits (like many of those 1950s corporations did - thanks to unions) will lead to the secret police. And also why it’s absurd to say that regulations keeping large companies from destroying the environment will lead to executions for political beliefs. It’s naked scare tactics divorced from any truth of history or even the present.

The Vagrants really brings this home.

In the Chinese society if the 1970s - after the disaster of the “Great Step Forward,” which led to mass starvation, and after the purges of intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution - the economic system actually looks a lot like it did before, just with different people at the top. Class differences haven’t gone away. “Capitalism” still mostly exists in a slightly different form - for the people at the bottom. After all, the upper classes (Communist leaders) are still fabulously wealthy, the middle classes have secure jobs, while the lower classes must find a way or starve. Hey! That sounds not that much unlike, say, every human society in history. Funny how that works. In that sense, Yiyun portrays a thoroughly recognizable society.

But things do look different from another perspective. Because of the totalitarianism, dissent is dangerous at best.

In what has turned out to be an interesting (and to some, surprising) development, modern China has become rather more economically free, while remaining politically repressed. Who knew? You actually can have capitalism and billionaires and stuff - and still have a totalitarian society. It really isn’t primarily about economics...

What struck me most about this is just how right Raymond Aron was. I have mentioned it before, but one of the best books I have read is Aron’s The Opium of the Intellectuals, wherein he points out that both Communism and Nazism are - above all - religions. Sure, they lack the traditional Supreme Being™, but the substitute impersonal forces. In Communism’s case, The End of History™.

In The Vagrants, this really comes out. Early in the book is the “denunciation ceremony” for Gu Shan. Attendance is mandatory for most people - and children. The stadium is filled, and there are hours of motivational speeches (sermons!), patriotic songs (hymns!), and praise of the Communist Party. “Without the Communist Party, we would have nothing!!”

Perhaps the most chilling moment comes in the propaganda delivered by a teacher to the children.

“[O]ur party has never been wrong and will never be wrong.”

That’s a cult.

That’s the sort of shit that you hear from toxic religions of all sorts. “We are always right and have never been wrong and will never be wrong.” The beginning of the end for me with Evangelicalism (in retrospect), came with a smug and self-congratulatory sermon from our former pastor. In which he basically made this argument.

This is how you get to “kill anyone who disagrees.” It’s when your dogma - whatever the hell that dogma is - is viewed as infallible. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, to kill by the millions you need an ideology.

It doesn’t matter what that ideology is. It could be Marxism. It could be Aryan Supremacy. It could be anarcho-capitalism. It could be religion, whether radical Islam, or radical Christianity.

Steven Pinker, in his excellent book (which has been a huge influence on me), The Better Angels of Our Nature, described how ideology leads to genocide:

Utopian ideologies invite genocide for two reasons. One is that they set up a pernicious utilitarian calculus. In a utopia, everyone is happy forever, so its moral value is infinite. Most of us agree that it is ethically permissible to divert a runaway trolley that threatens to kill five people onto a side track where it would only kill one. But suppose it were a hundred million lives one could save by diverting the trolley, or a billion, or - projecting into the indefinite future - infinitely many. How many people would it be permissible to sacrifice to attain that infinite good? A few million can seem like a pretty good bargain. Not only that, but consider the people who learn about the promise of a perfect world yet nonetheless oppose it. They are the only things standing in the way of a plan that could lead to infinite goodness. How evil are they? You do the math.

The Vagrants brings this out one hundred percent. Including the part about those opposed to the Communist Party being vermin. In the same section, the school children are instructed that “counterrevolutionism” is a infectious disease, and that it must be cleansed by the strongest disinfectant. Which means killing a few people, but whatever.

You will see this in every totalitarian system. And that includes the white nationalism of Donald Trump, where immigrants and refugees are referred to as contaminants, vermin, disease, and so on.

It ultimately comes down, not to economic theories, but human rights. Do all humans, regardless of race, national origin, religious belief, political belief, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and so on, deserve human rights? Or not. That’s why universal health care, or tax rates, aren’t a slippery slope to the gulags. But calling the press the “enemy of the people” is. It’s why Social Security isn’t some nefarious plot to enslave workers. But eliminating workplace protections is. It’s why telling billionaires that they can’t have an increasing share of the world’s wealth isn’t one step away from show trials for dissidents. But calling for violence against protesters is.

I am a conservative (in the traditional sense) by temperament. I am not a risk taker, generally. I prefer a quiet life, with my books and music and kids and cat. Because of that, I am not at all interested in starting a revolution. I prefer reform and correction and incremental change. I prefer data and facts and evidence over theories, for the most part. Sure, try stuff, but do it carefully, and make corrections as you see what does and doesn’t work.

Yiyun has some similar ideas about revolutions, and I truly loved how she put them. First is what I believe is a Chinese proverb. It is fantastic, if cynical as hell.

“The one who robs and succeeds will become the king, and the one who tries to rob and fails will be called a criminal.”

This fatalistic proverb recurs throughout the book. It guides the actions of many characters - if they can just succeed, whether through theft of through betraying their neighbors, they will be king in their own way. But if they fail, it is catastrophe.

The last one I will mention comes from Teacher Gu when he is talking with his neighbor Guosheng near the end of the book. Liberated from his filters by some booze, he goes on a rant against revolutionaries in general. I don’t agree with all of it - Teacher Gu is a reactionary in his own way, wishing women were more submissive, and that the world was like it was before the Revolution. (I sympathize with him on the second point - life was better for him when he had his freedom, his books, and the respect his intelligence and education deserved.) But this line stood out:

“[B]ut what is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive? Let me tell you - history is, unlike what they say on the loudspeakers, not driven by revolutionary force but by people’s desire to climb up onto someone else’s neck and shit and pee as he or she wants.”

Dang. That’s both depressing, and all too true. Our current racist right wing movements are driven in some part by legitimate grievances. But they are also driven by the prurient desire to be “better” than someone else. “We may be poor, but at least we aren’t [fill in the blank: n-----rs, immigrants, gays, whatever]”

Ultimately, after reading this book, what I longed for more than anything, is the utopia of what I thought America was. And still is from time to time, occasionally, and with some people. I want the freedom that we (mostly) have. But I also long for the community of commitment to the common good. I know that hasn’t really existed for many in our nation, but the idea has existed for a long time.

And, come to think of it, I long for the utopia promised by the teachings of Christ. A world where hierarchy and power are replaced by mutuality. Where there is true freedom to live our lives, because each of us acknowledges the inherent worth of the other. Where we treat the most vulnerable not as infections to be purged, but as worthy of the love and care we would give to Christ himself.

I have, I suppose, gotten off the topic a bit. But I think it fits. Yiyun’s chilling tale isn’t just about “those Commies over there,” but about us as humans. Our tendencies toward ideological thinking, the ease in which we humans can be motivated to hate each other, and the way that power is a destructive force, no matter what its justification.

Yiyun Li is a great writer - one of my favorites I would say - and although her books aren’t necessarily easy or pleasant, they are important, and give a real insight into our world, and our common humanity.

***

I’m pretty sure I have posted this before, but I have to do it again here. This has long been one of my favorite Beatles tunes, and not just because of those gorgeous Epiphone Casinos.

You say you want a revolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world

You tell me that it's evolution

Well, you know

We all want to change the world

But when you talk about destruction

Don't you know that you can count me out

Don't you know it's gonna be

All right, all right, all right

You say you got a real solution

Well, you know

We'd all love to see the plan

You ask me for a contribution

Well, you know

We're doing what we can

But if you want money for people with minds that hate

All I can tell is brother you have to wait

Don't you know it's gonna be

All right, all right, all right

You say you'll change the constitution

Well, you know

We all want to change your head

You tell me it's the institution

Well, you know

You better free your mind instead

But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao

You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow

Don't you know it's gonna be

All right…

And, no matter how “Christian” you call yourself, if you want me to participate in promoting “minds that hate,” well, you can go to hell.

Black Boy (American Hunger) by Richard Wright

Source of book: I own this.

My wife picked this up for me at a library sale, probably unread, in the Library of America non-boxed hardback edition. This was my original selection for Black History Month before I got seduced by the power of the library display, and ended up adding Remembering Jim Crow to the list. I actually did finish this one in February, but between the other reviews I had to write, and a couple of back to back concerts with the Bakersfield and Shafter Symphonies, I am just now getting to writing this post. 

The history of this book requires a little explanation, because there are two versions which are decidedly not the same book. When Richard Wright originally published the book, as Black Boy, he made a few changes at the request of the publisher because of obscenity law concerns, but perhaps more importantly, he cut the entire second half of the book, which tells of his experiences after moving out of the South to Chicago. Wright’s original title was American Hunger, and that title is often used for the full work. I read the “original” version, if you will: the one that Wright intended. That means it had both parts (and I think the second part is outstanding as well, but for different reasons), and the revised sections were restored to Wright’s intention. One section in particular is - in my view - a crucial scene in the book. While in an optical factory, among other experiences of racism and hostility, he is asked by a coworker how long his penis is. “I heard that a nigger can stick his prick in the ground and spin around on it like a top.” This stereotype both about size and the reduction of black males to sex animals certainly persist today, which is why I thought this incident was important. However, the publisher, probably correctly, believed it would be considered obscene at the time, and get the book banned.

Black Boy (American Hunger) is an autobiography. Wright spends the first half of the book describing his experiences from his early childhood to the point where, as an adult, he saved enough money to buy a train ticket for the North. The second half, as I noted, takes the story from there, telling the tale of his experiences for the first few years he spent in Chicago.

The first half is difficult to read. Wright grew up in a highly dysfunctional, abusive family. The physical and psychological violence he endured is heartrending, and his narrative skill makes for discomfort. It wasn’t just his family either. The danger he was constantly in living in the Jim Crow South meant that a wrong move could lead to his death - as it did for an uncle who had the audacity to be successful and get on the wrong side of the local whites.

Wright additionally suffered because of his inability to fit in anywhere. He was a peculiar and thoughtful child, sensitive to injustice, and determined to think and read even though no one around him seems to understand. Thus, he rejects religion at a very early age, chafes at the racism and injustice that are the normal state of his world, and spends his spare time reading voraciously even though throughout his life he got grief from every direction for it.

There are a couple of things that really struck me about Wright’s rejection of religion. First was that he observed its dysfunction both in his family and in the various churches his family members attended. In his experience, religion caused strife and always came with the need to control others.

Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power always seemed to walk in the wake of a hymn.

Alas, there is a lot of truth in what Wright says. I too have experienced far too much of this, both institutionally and in my own family. To be fair, this is not the only experience one can have (or even that I have had) of religion. Furthermore, these problems certainly exist in spades outside of religion - as Wright experiences in the second half of the book. But if you want to understand why a substantial majority of young people do not return to church (whether or not they end up believing in a religion or a god), this is probably the best place to start. If it is about control and strife, then they will leave. If it is just about enforcing cultural preferences and fighting against others, what is the point?

The second one relates to my wife’s experience in a fundamentalist cult group. The young Richard (around Middle School age, I believe) writes a ghost horror story which he gets published in a local paper. Word gets around to his (mostly illiterate) family, and his fanatical grandmother has it out with him.

“Richard, what is this you’re putting in the papers?” she asked.

“A story,” I said.

“About what?”

“It’s just a story, granny.”

“But they tell me it’s been in three times.”

“It’s the same story. It’s in three parts.”

“But what is it about?” she insisted.

I hedged, fearful of getting into a religious argument.

“It’s just a story I made up,” I said.

“Then it’s a lie,” she said.

“Oh, Christ,” I said.

“You must get out of this house if you take the name of the Lord in vain,” she said.

“Granny, please...I’m sorry,” I pleaded. “But it’s hard to tell you about the story. You see, granny, everybody knows that the story isn’t true, but…”

“Then why write it?” she asked.

“Because people might want to read it.”

“That’s the Devil’s work.”

I mention this because there were people in the cult group that believed that fiction was evil for that very reason: things that are made up are lies. (Those are the ones whose kids could only read the Bible and missionary biographies. Others drew long skirts on illustrations - can’t have pants on girls - or kept their kids from reading anything where children did anything naughty or from books with fantasy elements like talking animals.) This hostility toward anything new or unknown runs throughout this book, and Wright experiences it over and over from different people and groups.

But Wright reads anyway. Denied the ability to check out whatever book he wishes from the library, he forges notes from a white ally purporting to ask for these books for this other man, and thus is able to skirt the segregated system. He reads voraciously, devouring fiction and non-fiction, and finds that his horizons have been expanded. He feels he understands the world and other people better.

The plots and stories in the novels did not interest me so much as the point of view revealed. I gave myself over to each novel without reserve, without trying to criticize it; it was enough for me to see and feel something different.

He concealed his books in newspaper so that others could not see what he was reading. Even so, white strangers would stop him and ask what he was reading, then warn him he would addle his brains if he tried to think too much.

Wright chafes against the condescension, even as he knows he has to tolerate it for his own safety. He finds odd the system that he finds himself in after moving to Memphis for a job. Many of the blacks he works with steal routinely, considering it their way to get ahead, and he is even more puzzled that the whites seem to accept and even like this. Of course, the idea of the thieving negro fits their preferred narrative of superiority, so the petty theft doesn’t challenge their racism the way that an outright challenge would. Wright was different, and thus he seemed to invite conflict with the whites in his world.

But I, who stole nothing, who wanted to look them straight in the face, who wanted to talk and act like a man, inspired fear in them. The southern whites would rather have had Negroes who stole, work for them than Negroes who knew, however dimly, the worth of their own humanity. Hence, whites placed a premium upon black deceit; they encouraged irresponsibility; and their rewards were bestowed upon us blacks in the degree that we could make them feel safe and superior.

I think this is still very much a factor in our nation today. We whites like comfortable blacks, ones that do not challenge us to think differently, who confirm our own feelings of superiority. We like to have someone to hate, such as an athlete with a bunch of children with different women; or someone who deflects blame away from us and the broken systems in our society, like a politician who lectures the black community rather than taking on institutionalized racism. The MLKs of the world are only popular in retrospect.

Turning to the second half of the book, Wright finds the north to be a rather different world. He enjoys finally having greatly diminished fear about his own safety, and finds that there are many who are willing to look him in the eye as a man. But still, despite his skills, the only jobs open to him are menial and low paying. Getting enough to eat is as much of a problem as it was in the south, alas. However, he does feel that it is a better world, as imperfect as it is. He eventually is befriended by a number of whites who are active in the Communist Party in Chicago. He attends meetings of the local John Reed Club, and writes for one of their magazines. Things start to go wrong, however, when the higher ups decide that the magazine is not under sufficient control. By the end of the book, Wright, who basically agrees with Communist ideas (this was in the early 1930s, when it was still possible to believe in Communism as reasonable and positive - Stalin’s purges wouldn’t come to light for another couple of decades) is blackballed for refusing to surrender his autonomy.

The parallel with the totalitarian religion of his childhood is unmistakeable. Both groups cannot embrace change or new ideas, and both have a pathological need for control.

This is something I have been saying for a long time. (And others too - it’s by no means an original idea of mine.) Nazism and Communism are fraternal twins. The inquisition and the purges come from the same dark place in our nature. The paranoias of Hugo Chavez and The Toupee Who Shall Not Be Named are the same. The factor that connects them is the totalitarian instinct - the naked will to power and the need to control. And an ideology that is believed to be the source of all truth, the evidence be damned. Left versus Right isn’t the issue. It isn’t about how we distribute or re-distribute wealth and income. The Objectivist utopia would have far more in common with the Communist utopia than either would have with a modern social democracy like Canada or Sweden.

Wright hits on the crucial need of all totalitarian systems of thought to exclude contrary ideas. He describes the anti-intellectualism of the Communists:

An hour’s listening disclosed the fanatical intolerance of minds sealed against new ideas, new facts, new feelings, new attitudes, new hints at ways to live. They denounced books they had never read, people they had never known, ideas they could never understand, and doctrines whose names they could not pronounce.

Anyone who has read my blog for any length of time will understand that I have no love for Communism. (In fact, I recommend reading Raymond Aron’s outstanding book, The Opium of the Intellectuals, which makes a strong argument that Communism - and Nazism - are both religions with the “master race” or “the end of history” as the supreme beings.) But I also recognize that this fundamentalist and anti-intellectual instinct goes far beyond the two most “successful” examples of the 20th Century. Right now, I see this particularly strongly in two areas: in the Social Darwinist wing which is running the GOP right now, and in Evangelicalism here in the United States, both of which remain committed to “alternative facts” rather than face flaws in their dogma. Rather like the totalitarians of the past…

Wright tells later in the book of being confronted by another Communist over the fact he was reading books. This man warns Wright that reading from outside the bubble will only “confuse” him. He also darkly hints that the Soviet Union had trouble with people like that. It is this that scared Wright. He feared their “militant ignorance.”

I absolutely am stealing that line. Because “militant ignorance” is exactly the right term. I have, as a result of my writing about the election, been called “elitist.” I too have been warned about reading outside the approved political and religious bubble. And yes, “confusion” might result, if by “confusion” you really mean that I might not be able to continue to adhere to the approved party line.

Perhaps worst, though, is the general mood on the Right at this time, which is a general approval of ignorance, and distrust of knowledge and expertise. It wasn’t this way when I was a kid - or even eight years ago. But Militant Ignorance has gained the upper hand for the moment, and it remains to be seen if it will dominate the political Right the way it has the Religious Right.

But ignorance is not virtue. As the prophet Hosea said about a nation where unfaithfulness and unkindness ruled the day, “My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge.”

I want to return just a bit to the issue of racism too - this is one area in which Militant Ignorance is rampant. Wright was an excellent writer - and thinker - and a few of his lines really hit home. The first comes when he is reading some of the better Communist writing. In it, he finds, for really the first time, a group that actually seems to consider blacks as equals in the same struggle. He is thrilled that he finds none of “the lame lispings of the missionary” in it.

It did not say, “Be like us and we will like you, maybe.”

Yes! This is exactly the attitude that plagues our nation. “Be like us.” Adopt our culture in every possible way. Talk like us, dress like us, vote like us, affirm that our values and culture are superior. And maybe, just maybe, we might possibly like you. But not until then. And maybe not even then.

At another point in the book, Wright takes a parenthetical digression after describing the white waitresses he works alongside in Chicago: rather shallow and fluttery sorts, who have never known prejudice. They are nice enough to him, but he felt they would never have as deep of life as blacks, just as he would never have as serene and thoughtless life as they did. And he realizes that they would have to have a “vast revolution” in their lives for them to even understand his. And that this applied to all of White America.

As I, in memory, think back now upon those girls and their lives I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher American than any we have yet known. I feel that America’s past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally, the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the entire tide and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it is felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness.

At that point, you drop the mic and walk away.

Yes, we are crippled by a need for black and white thinking, and our fear of inconvenient facts, history, and the fix that is a long process. And yes, we take the easy way out of damning and excluding others and covering it all with a cloak of self-righteousness. It’s why we must believe that poverty is a moral failing rather than actually look at the hard facts and the hard task of making it better. Yeah, just better to build a ‘yuge wall and blame the gays.

Wright also notes, though, that the culture around him is obsessed with attaining stuff - trash, as he calls it. And the thing that makes the plight of the black man so frustrating is that he must be exploited and despised so that whites can own just a little more trash. This book was written in 1945, but it definitely describes the national character of 2017 just fine.

Wright is a fantastic writer. I truthfully wanted to keep reading on, even though I knew I should stop after each chapter and digest a bit. The story itself is compelling, and his writing really makes the scenes come alive. That is why it was so painful to read, because you can taste the fear and anger and hopelessness of the young boy. You feel his outrage at the unjust accusations of the Communists as well as the seething resentment at the humiliating treatment by the southern whites. Despite all of this, though, Wright ends the book on an optimistic note. He has been full of hunger for a new and better way to live his entire life. He has been feed by that dream, and by his dream of writing, of using words to make the world better, to connect with the world and express himself. And he believed that we all shared that hunger. He ends the book with these words:

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger for life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human. 

***

For further reading:

Black History Month selections:

2011:    50 Years and Other Poems by James Weldon Johnson

2012:    Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

2013:    The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois

2014:     Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

2015:     Kindred by Octavia Butler

2016:   Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin

2017: Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South

Other notable books by African American or African authors:

The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Poems by Phillis Wheatley
Zone One by Colson Whitehead

Books on Black History by other authors:

Red Tails, Black Wings by John B. Holway

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe