Iron Demons

This is the second essay I wrote for my Chinese Literature in Translation class at Tsinghua University during the summer of 2007.

“We cannot escape fate or nature or politics. Ordinary Chinese always knew that.”
- Mo Yan

In his work, Iron Child, Mo Yan uses iron to represent the Chinese government during the Great Leap Forward. This is particularly fitting since the government called for peasants to produce iron in great quantities. The focus on iron production resulted in the neglect of agriculture which caused a massive famine and the deaths of nearly 30 million Chinese people. Mo Yan’s themes in Iron Child include loneliness, distrust, and submission to power, but the overarching one (and the one covered here) is that of iron representing the government.

To understand the short story better, one must first become acquainted with Mo Yan’s early life. He was born in Gao Mi, the village that the events of Iron Child take place in. He was born in early 1955 which would put him at about the age of the narrator, Woody, at the time the story took place. He was from a poor farming family, ensuring that his parents were conscripted into the “labor brigades.” It is very possible that he is drawing from his own experiences as a child and may have seen or been a part of what he describes in Iron Child.

At the beginning of Iron Child, Woody is confined by iron. The walls of his “nursery school” consisted of “…saplings some two meters tall, all strung together by heavy wire.” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 379). It isn’t directly stated, but one can assume the heavy wire was made of steel, which is an alloy of iron and carbon. Not only were the children controlled by the iron, they were also fed by the cast iron cauldrons used to prepare their porridge with wild greens. They were watched by people assigned by the government, “Three skeletal old women…all three had hawklike noses and sunken eyes, to us they looked like crones.” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 379) Besides the children, their “…fathers, mothers, and older siblings – in fact, anyone who could handle a hoe or a shovel – were conscripted into the labor brigades.” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 379) The government had full control over the people. The children were all confined away from their parents because they were being used to build a railroad, made of iron, near their village. The building of a railroad represents the extension of the government into the lives of the people. The people were being used by the government to build out the ideals of communism.

When the railroad was completed, the children were allowed to leave their confinement and be reunited with their families. Woody’s family, however, did not return for him. Instead of helping him, the women in charge shoved him outside and refused to help:

I’d long forgotten where I lived, and tearfully begged one of the old women to take me home. But she shoved me to one side, turned and ran back inside, closing the gate behind her. Then she secured it with a big, shiny brass lock. I stood outside the fence crying, screaming, and begging, but they ignored me. (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 382)

The use of a brass lock is intriguing, as certainly cast iron locks would have been available. Mo Yan, I think, was trying to show that even if you’re freed from government control, the people themselves can be just as bad. Crying outside of the nursery, Woody met a boy covered in rust and deemed him Iron Child.

Iron Child invited Woody to play near the railroad. When they reached it, Woody thought the rails resembled snakes, “I imagined that if I stepped on one of them, it would start to wriggle, and that it would wrap its headless wooden tail around my legs. I stepped on one cautiously. The iron was cold, but it didn’t wriggle and it didn’t swish its tail.” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 383) Woody became hungry so Iron Child told him to eat a bar of iron. After first expressing doubt that a human could eat iron, Iron Child convinced Woody to try it:

I took the iron bar hesitantly, put it up to my mouth, and licked it to see how it tasted. It was salty, sour, and rank, sort of like preserved fish…I tried biting off a chunk and, to my surprise, succeeded with hardly any effort. As I began to chew, the flavor filled my mouth, tasting better and better until, before I knew it, I had greedily finished off the whole thing. (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 383)

The first taste of iron is really the first interaction with the government. It was wholly unpleasant. Only after biting the iron bar does Woody realize that it tastes good. I think that chewing the iron bar is representative of destroying the ideals of the Communist Party, and that the good taste that resulted is the joy one feels at ending things that are unjust and harmful. Iron Child told Woody, “Anybody can eat iron, but people don’t know that…Do you think smelting iron is easier than planting crops? In fact, it’s harder.” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 383) This is a reference to the fact that nearly 30 million Chinese people died in this era due to starvation from the intense focus on steel production. Mo Yan is saying that if people knew they could eat iron (destroy the government) then they would have been able to feed themselves. After Woody realized that he could eat the iron, he was no longer afraid of the rails; rather, he wasn’t afraid of the government anymore since he had the power to fight it. In fact, he outright threatened them, “I muttered to myself, Iron rails, iron rails, don’t get cocky, because if you do, I’ll eat you up.” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 384)

Woody and Iron Child then went along the rails until they “…reached a spot where the sky had turned red. Seven or eight huge ovens were spewing flames into the air…[Iron Child] said, Up ahead there is where the smelt iron and steel.” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 384) The sky was the color of the Chinese Communist Party, and the furnaces spewing fire were the government molding people’s opinions and forging new members. At this place, Woody found his mother and father, “…I recognized them as my daddy and my mommy…it suddenly dawned on me what horrifying people they were, at least as horrifying as the three old women at the ‘nursery school’.” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 384) His parents had become tools of the government, producing iron instead of caring for him. When they realized Woody was there, they tried to reunite with him, only to have him run away. Woody and Iron Child fled into a scrap heap and eventually into a rusting tank, “Iron Child said he wanted to crawl into the turret, but the hatch was rusted shut. Iron Child said, ‘Let’s bite off the screws.’” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 385) This is representative of Mo Yan’s own life, where as a critic of the government, he was employed by the People’s Liberation Army. Woody’s parents attempted to bribe him out of hiding, “…when I heard them trying to tempt me with meaty dumplings and sweet potatoes and eggs, I sneered contemptuously.” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 385) Bribes are something the CCP does even now to get people to do what it wants. It is also more broadly applicable to modern Chinese society, where everyone has been blinded by the incredible increase in wealth to the point where politics are almost completely ignored. The government has bribed its own people with economic prosperity in exchange for political freedom.

Woody and Iron Child began to steal iron from the production camp which frightened some of the workers. The pair stole an iron wok, and “as we were feasting on our iron wok, we saw a man with a gimpy leg and a holstered revolver on his hip limp over and smack the men who were shouting ‘iron demons.’” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 385) The government is still represented by iron. The gun the man was carrying was likely made of steel, and it was that gun that gave him his power. Without it, he was just a weak man with a limp. When Iron Child stole the gun from the man, “[he] fell down on his backside. ‘Help!’ he screamed.” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 385) The loss of his weapon, the steel pistol, made him powerless and afraid. The “taste” of the gun was unappealing to the children, “I took a bite [of the gun]. It tasted like gun powder. I spit it out and complained: ‘It tastes terrible. It’s no good.’” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 386) The raw and oppressive power the gun represented was disgusting to the children, so after sufficiently destroying it they threw it back at the gimpy man.

The children’s rebellion could not last forever, though, “One night, we went out to frighten the men who were smashing woks…we heard a loud whoosh as a rope net dropped over us. We attacked the net with our teeth, but no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t bite through the rope.” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 387) The change of tactics of the government, from iron to rope, made the children’s defenses worthless. They could not free themselves from the control of the government. As a final act of domination, the government “scraped our rusty bodies with sandpaper. It hurt, it hurt like hell!” (Lau, Goldblatt, 2007: 387) Scraping their bodies with sandpaper is really reeducation for the youth. They were being stripped of their revolutionary spirit and being made into what the party wanted them to be. This doesn’t quite fit into the time period of the story, as re-education didn’t start until about 10 years later in the Cultural Revolution, but it still echoes the sentiments of the government at the time.

The government of China during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution was so set to achieve its communist ideals that it was willing to manipulate and control the people. There were few who spoke out against the changes, and many who did ended up with a fate similar to, though most often worse than, Woody and Iron Child. Re-education was only sometimes implemented, often death was quicker and more effective. Iron is an excellent vehicle to describe the Chinese government during the Great Leap Forward due to its great many uses in both helping (farming tools, woks) and harming people (guns, fences).

Sources:
Lau, Goldblatt (2007) The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, Second Edition Columbia University Press

Iron Demons by
Steven Buss is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.