Blood Ties

Blood Ties is the first novel by the Shandong writer Bi Yutang, over 400,000 characters in seventeen chapters, with a prologue and an epilogue. Its main thread is the life of Long Jie, an ordinary peasant from the Tai'an (Daixi) region. In the years of warlord chaos his father dies of hunger and cold, and he and his brother and sister-in-law drift to Baima Mountain, surviving by picking coal cinders. Having escaped the fighting, he then lives through the Japanese occupation of Jinan and witnesses his countrymen brutally humiliated; he hurls a bicycle at a Japanese soldier and can no longer stay in the city. Back in Luofengpo, anti-Japanese propaganda at a storytelling ground ignites the young man: he smuggles the village's homemade cannon and black powder to the guerrillas at night, then becomes a squad leader in the peasant association and self-defense corps, adding his own line to the Party oath: "Whoever betrays, I kill." What follows is the hardship of sheltering scattered units, the brutal mopping-up operations around Mahu Tai, the successive defections of the county Party secretary and district cadres, repeated home searches and roundups by the enemy, and the death of his wife among them; with a guerrilla group he hides in caves and eats elm leaves, eliminating collaborators, raiding strongholds, and setting ambushes, enduring day by day the darkest years in Daixi. After the victory he goes south with the army and keeps working relentlessly in the newly liberated Jiangnan, until a family letter sends him home to demobilize and become an ordinary farmer herding sheep. The work strings more than a hundred scenes of battle and struggle onto one small figure, using heavy Tai'an dialect, colloquial sayings, and short sentences in an attempt to portray the backbone and the cost of those who achieve merit without fame.