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Grapes and Garlic. Two stories of rural exodus

The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck, 1939) and the Garlic Ballads (Yan Mo, 1988), are two novels written from two opposite sides of the planet (US and China) and written in a lapse of 50 years that, however, tell us a similar story, the rural exodus forced by a ubiquitous entity (the government, the bank ...) against which they can not fight. An "entity" that the expropriated peasant could not shoot at, because it has no physical presence, is a "monster."


"It's not us, it's the bank. A bank isn't like a man. Or an owner with fifty thousand acres, he isn't like a man either. That's the monster. Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it. We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man. Yes, but the bank is only made of men. No, you're wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it. The tenants cried." (Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck)



Suburban area of Datong (China)



Hundreds of thousands of peasants in these histories (and millions in the national reality of these two countries) are fortuitously incorporated into a suburban mortgage system that is far from being rooted in land, even the family. Families that split up, even fight, when they are set against the devil and the deep blue sea. Thus, these people become some short of bargaining chip for the implementation of macro-plans that refer to numbers instead of people.


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Book covers of these two novels in their English version


The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of hundreds of thousands of farmers that are expelled from their land during the 30s, after the crack of 1929 and the climatic adversities of the Dust Bowl. These peasants and their families are forced to emigrate from Oklahoma to California where great job opportunities are advertised for collecting fruits, mainly grapes. The novel alternates the story of the Joad family on their journey from Oklahoma to California in search of work, with somewhat more abstract episodes that perfectly draw the context in which this story takes place. The Garlic Ballads describes a story where the communist government has encouraged farmers to plant great fields of garlic. They obey and, after a great effort harvesting and the payment of high taxes, they discover that the Government warehouses are full of garlic and they cannot sell theirs. Peasants of Paradise County sink even more in the misery in which they lived, they go on strikes and they suffer a very hard repression. In this novel we also find abstract scenes similar to those recreated by Steinbeck.

Both novels also emphasize values of fraternity, cooperation and camaraderie represented by the peasants in opposition to the avarice of those who subject them. In this respect, we can observe the dichotomy between rural and urban that will be studied in depth by Urban Sociology, and specifically the Chicago School, that was born around this time (20s and 30s). This dichotomy is often expressed through a very direct narrative with explicit violence described with great virtuosism and lyricism.



Image extracted from the movie Grapes or Wrath by John Ford



Although we do not know what happens to the main characters after the conclusion of these two novels (the Joad family or the family of Gao Yang), we can try to imagine. In the case of the United States, approximately half a million people moved from Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas to California, although most were peasants, there were also people from cities who moved because of the economic crisis of the of 29. Many of these people had to settle in camps along roads. With the advent of World War II, many enlisted in the army and others found jobs in factories. In China's case, the government's great effort to establish zones of economic development in the country focusing economic efforts on large cities and their peripheries, forced many peasants to move to big cities in search of new opportunities.


The clear consequence of these two phenomena is a dramatic rural exodus. If we look at these two graphs, it is interesting to verify the growth of the urban population experienced in both countries from the date of publication of both books (red dashed line).



Chart showing urban migration in EEUU: US Census Bureau - Chart showing urban migration in China: IMF 2010



This flow of immigrants to large cities led to a confrontation between social classes resulting in marginalization. Oklahoma "Okies" have been contemptuously labeled for decades. In California, especially during the 1930s, the police established strong boundaries to prevent immigrants from entering large cities, and these were forced to camp in controlled areas. The case of China is similar, because there is a system based on the Hukou, whereby immigrants in large cities do not enjoy the rights of "legitimate citizens". This system, which was created in Mao Zedong era to control the rural flow to the cities, collides today with an unprecedented migration initiated with the policy of open doors in 1978.


One of the consequences of this migration and the revival of the United States after World War II is the suburban culture in California. David Harvey talks in numerous books and lectures about how economic crises have been resolved throughout history through urbanization processes, using the example of the post-war years in the EEUU, with the proliferation and explosion of the suburbs in this state.


The result is a city that is not for citizens. As early as the 1960s, Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities criticized this type of urbanism that rejects the city, through fragmentation, separation of uses, destruction of communities and creation of unnatural urban spaces, defending a more organic and inclusive urbanism.



Levittown, early 50s via Flickr user markgregory



Harvey also speaks of this phenomenon in China when during the economic crisis started in 2007, the country transferred the jobs lost due to the lack of exports in the construction sector.



Residential developments. Outskirts ofTangu (China)



Youqin Huang in her paper Urban Development in Contemporary China tells us about the country's urban evolution in relation to its policies from 1949 to the present. Whether or not Mao's Communist government attempts to maintain an egalitarian country far from the principles of capitalism were right (which would be appreciated by Lefebvre in L'Production de l'Espace), peasants were always the ones who paid the consequences of these policies when these failed. Between 1949 and 1970, there were large migratory movements from the countryside to the city and vice versa in more or less successful attempts to maintain the Socialist ideology in a balanced urban system.



Marcha de la Guardia Roja 1966 Pekín (China)



From 1978, however, a reformist era began, replacing the idea of social and spatial equality by that of economic growth. As a result, in the 80s, when the Garlic Ballads was written, millions of people left the countryside to move to small, medium and large cities looking for new opportunities.



Marginal areas in Beijing city centre


In the last part of The Grapes of Wrath, the Joad family find themselves locked in a complex where they work, live and consume in a monopoly setting at disproportionate prices. This type of complex can be a kind of precedent of the Gated Communities that currently in California account for 40% of new residential buildings erected. As in China, where the communist Danwei are being displaced by urban systems based on large condos with high towers surrounded by a wall.


Probably the complex where the Joads were held did not offer such a paradisiacal vision as that offered by these advertisements of Gated Communities in the US or China.


Gated Communities Ad EEUU - Compound Ad China

One last factor that I would like to mention in these two cases is the importance of the car. The Grapes of Wrath elapses mostly on a car that takes the Joad from Ocklahoma to California, the car is their home, their mean of transportation and a great expense in which they invest all their savings. The presence of the car, of the parking lots & camps, is closely related to the American suburbs, designed by and for the car. Urbanization and the automobile industry have always gone together.



Families leaving their homes during Dust Bowl via Pinterest




The automobile phenomenon in the case of China, although it arrived later, had an unprecedented impact in cities and in its design.




Graph indicating the increase of car ownership in China. BCA Research 2011

 
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