He’s dragged down the road, leaving his blind eight-year-old daughter tearfully trying to follow him. It’s May 1987 and Gao Yang, a garlic farmer in ironically named Paradise County (based on Mo Yan’s hometown in Shandong), is forcefully taken by the police for destroying county offices. The Garlic Ballads begins with an arrest.
If this book did anything, it was to remind me yet again that all the food we consume has a source, and how little we know about the lives of the people who grow it. China is such a prolific producer of garlic that the ups and downs of its garlic farmers affect the global market garlic even played in role in the early days the US-China trade war. It turns out that the vast majority is grown in China, and most of that in Shandong province.
I cook with garlic almost every day, but until I read this book I’d rarely thought about where it comes from.
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