Mo Yan · Nobel Prize 2012
Red Sorghum
红高粱家族
Hóng Gāoliáng Jiāzú — Red Sorghum Clan
· 1986 ·
“The sorghum was red, the blood was red, and red was the color of their great, hot passion.”
— Mo Yan
Begin ReadingIn 1986, a former soldier and factory worker from rural Shandong province published a novel that would change Chinese literature. Mo Yan's Red Sorghum — five interconnected novellas spanning three generations — tells the story of a family in Gaomi, a place that exists on the map and also in the mythic imagination. The narrator, a grandson of the central characters, pieces together the violent, beautiful, grotesque history of his ancestors: a bandit who became a resistance leader, a woman who ran a distillery with iron will, and the blood-red sorghum that watched over everything.
“In the vast field of sorghum, I felt the presence of my grandparents. The sorghum was taller than a man. It hid them, it fed them, and when it was cut down, it was like the death of a people.”
— Mo Yan, Red Sorghum
Red Sorghumdid what no Chinese novel had done before: it told the story of the twentieth century — the Japanese invasion, the civil war, land reform, the Cultural Revolution — not through ideology but through flesh and blood. The Nobel Committee praised Mo Yan's “hallucinatory realism” — his ability to merge folk tales, history, and the contemporary into a single vision. This site is your guide to a novel that made the Chinese peasant epic modern.