The unnamed narrator, the grandson of the famous military general Commander Yu, recounts how these events have impacted the family while occasionally drawing parallels to his own identity crisis after the war has fractured the Shandongs. Red Sorghum mainly focuses on the familial traumata of the Shandong family as its multiple generations have to cope with the merciless traditions of 1920s Chinese culture and the horrors of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45). The ambiguity of this symbolically loaded plant sits at the heart of the novel’s portrayal of war but it also highlights some of the problems of Red Sorghum as a whole. At other moments, though, “tortured moans emerge from the field of sorghum” as a war-torn country longs for, but is denied its much-deserved peace. The experience of reading Mo Yan’s Red Sorghum can be summed up by reflecting on its eponymous crop that encapsulates a lot of the book’s themes: In many ways, it can be a beautiful force of good as its tall plants provide shelter for lovers driven by a desire to seek an escape of their immediate, potentially miserable day-to-day lives.
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