The Garlic Ballads

goes, you can’t force a melon to be sweet. A happy life is not in Jinju’s future.”
    Suddenly agitated, Gao Ma struggled to climb down off the kang, but she stopped him. “What do you think you’re doing?”
    “I have to go to Jinju.”
    “You have to go to your death, you mean. The Caos and Lius are there. If you showed your face, it would be a miracle if they didn’t kill you.”
    “I… I’ll kill them first!” he shouted shrilly, waving a fist in the air.
    “Dear little brother,” Yu’s wife said sternly, “use your head. Don’t think like that. All you’d get for your troubles is a bullet in the head.”
    Exhausted, he fell back on the kang, tears slipping down his grimy face and into his ears.
    “Who cares?” he sobbed. “I have nothing to live for.”
    “Come now. Don’t give up so easily. If you and Jinju have your hearts set on each other, no one can keep you apart forever. This is, after all, a new society, so sooner or later reason will prevail.”
    “Will you take a message to her?”
    “Not until things calm down a bit. Meanwhile, keep your temper in check and concentrate on getting well. Things will get better, don’t worry.”

C HAPTER 3

    The townsfolk planted garlic for family fortune,
Angering the covetous tyrants of hate,
Who sent out hordes of tax collectors
To oppress the masses, bewailing their fate…
.
—from a ballad sung in May 1987 by Zhang Kou, the blind minstrel, on Blackstone Avenue in the county seat

1.

    The policemen emerged from the acacia grove dejected and covered with dirt, holding steel-gray pistols in their hands and fanning themselves with their hats. The stammerer’s limp had disappeared, but his trousers were ripped from his encounter with the metal pot; the torn cloth flapped like a piece of dead skin as he walked. They circled the tree and stood in front of Gao Yang. Both men had crewcuts. The stammerer, whose hair was coal black, had a head as round as a volleyball, while that of the other man, whose hair was lighter, stuck out front and back, like a bongo drum.
    Gao Yang’s blind daughter tapped her way through the grove with the bamboo staff; he strained to watch her. When she reached the stand of trees behind Gao Ma’s house, she groped along, turning this way and that and wailing, “Daddy … Daddy … where’s my daddy … ?”
    “Damn it!” the stammering policeman complained. “What’s the idea of letting him get away like that?”
    “If you’d moved a little quicker, you might have gotten the cuff on his other wrist!” Drumhead shot back. “He couldn’t have gotten away with both hands cuffed, could he?”
    “It’s this one’s fault,” the stammerer said as he put his hat back on. He reached out and touched Gao Yang’s scalp as though to rub it, then gave him a clout.
    “Daddy … Daddy … why don’t you answer me?” Xinghua sobbed as she bumped a tree with her staff; when she reached out to touch it, she banged her head on a branch. Her close-cropped hair was parted like a little boy’s … eyes black as coal… the waxen face of the undernourished, like a wilting stalk of garlic … naked from the waist up, dressed only in red underpants whose elastic was so far gone they hung loosely on her hips … red plastic sandals with broken laces … “Daddy … Daddy … why don’t you answer me?” The acacia grove, like a dense cloud, became a dark backdrop for her. Gao Yang yearned to shout to her, but his throat muscles were tied in knots, and no sound emerged. I’m not crying, I’m not crying …
    The policeman rapped him on the head again, but he didn’t feel it; he strained to get free and moaned, their noses detected the translucent, sticky sweat on his body—an eerie, nightmarish stench. It was the stink of suffering. They screwed up their noses, which were filled with the foul air, a dull expression spreading across their faces.
    “Daddy … Daddy … why don’t you answer me?”

    All right, boys and girls, hold hands, sing, twirl around, see how easy it is, the teacher calls. Xinghua stands in the middle of the road, staff in hand, then gropes her way to the schoolyard gate, where she grasps the metal fence with one hand and her bamboo staff with the other, to listen to the boys and girls sing and dance with their teacher. Chrysanthemums bloom all over the schoolyard. He tries to drag her home, but she struggles to stay put. He screams at her angrily, he kicks her…. Daddy, Mommy, hold my hand,