The complex family background revealed in Part 2 of Mo Yan's Red Sorghum

Much of section 2 (of 5) in Mo Yan's excellent 1988 novel Red Sorghum (available in English/Penguin edition, 1993, Howard Goldblatt tr.) is an account of how the narrator's grandmother, in what seems to be the 1920s or so on NE rural China, wiped out the family of her husband, took over the family business, and got together w/ her beloved, who become the narrator's grandfather and who also became a military leader of the resistance to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the leader of the unsuccessful attack on the Japanese at a crucial river crossing - the subject of most of part 1. Whew. I can only say that it's not as complicated as it sounds in summary; MY does an excellent job laying out the various plot strands and clarifying the overall picture. Key events in the 2nd section involve the grandmother's visit to the local justice/political leader to get clear title to the family business (a distillery of a sweet white wine or liqueur from the eponymous sorghum) now that she's widowed (even though we know that she in part engineered the killing of her leprous husband). We get a good look at the way justice was administered at that time, with a lot of physical punishment and completely dependent on the ruling of an all-powerful man. Once she takes clear ownership of the distillery, Yu arrives on the scene and gets a job working the in distillery; we know, though none of the others on the scene know, that Yu had seduced the grandmother on the way to her abortive wedding and that it was Yu who killed the husband and father. Eventually she is more public in her taking on Yu as her husband de facto. We learn a lot about the distillery process, and in particular about one repulsive aspect to the distillation. All told, this section is not as exciting as the first, but it establishes the family background and complex loyalties and clearly leads up to another military action (these take place ca 1939), as Yu has vowed vengeance against another Chinese military officer who failed to show up for the attack on the bridge, leading to the nearly complete annihilation of Yu and his forces.