Stick Out Your Tongue: Stories

Ma Jian, a Chinese writer, traveled alone through the Tibetan highlands during a period of personal difficulty, hoping to reconnect to nature and to his Buddhist faith. What he found, and wrote about in these five short stories, not left him even more desolate than before, but caused him to be banned in his native China. Tibet has been much romanticized over the years by Hollywood and naive Western spiritual tourists. Ma Jian reveals the harsh truths of Tibet life as he experienced it. While there is beauty and deep humanity, it's also violent, stark, filled with horrible suffering, poverty and superstition. I found the work profound, and masterfully written; I also found it shocking and heartbreaking. Whatever the reader's reaction, it's clearly a powerful and important work. The author is to be commended. ( )

This slim volume seems somewhat fragmented, as the quality of these stories is slightly uneven among them; but nevertheless the fantastical pictures they paint and guttural feelings which they evoke are noteworthy. Not sure how fair or accurate a portrait of Tibet is being offered, but enjoyable nonetheless. ( )

In 1983 Ma Jian set out on the three year journey around China and Tibet that is described in his book [Red Dust], published in 2001. [Stick Out Your Tongue] is a collection of five short stories based on his travels in Tibet. After its publication in the journal People's Literature in 1987, [[Ma Jian]]'s work was banned in China and Ma Jian went into exile in Hong Kong.

The narrator watches the sky burial of a seventeen-year-old girl, married to two husbands, who had died in childbirth. He spends a night in a tent with a nomad who has sold his yaks and donated the proceeds to a monastery and is on his way to a sacred lake to wash away his sins.

A nine-day old baby girl is the reincarnation of the living Buddha and at fifteen must go though an initiation that requires her to meditate for three days, immersed in a frozen river.

Ma Jian relates these stories in simple language, without emotion. I was shocked by the brutality of the lives he describes. In the afterword, Ma Jian compares his ideal of Tibet, "an earthly paradise, a hidden utopia" firstly with the harshness of the Tibet he experienced in 1985, then with the present "barren outpost of the great Chinese empire." ( )

Having read Ma Jian's Stick Out Your Tongue a few months ago, I've spent last night and today re-reading a lot of it, plus many reviews online. I believe I've reached a much better understanding of this brief (93-page) collection of five very powerful vignettes of life in Tibet observed in the mid-1980s. (Maybe Ma Jian observed; maybe he dreamed; maybe he hallucinated; maybe all three).

I'd like to avoid repeating what most of the published reviewers have said. They hit all the main points and are easy to search on the Web. There are especially interesting comments in The Guardian, for example. It's worth noting that the translation by Flora Drew (the author's wife/partner) is very smooth and trustworthy.

I've taken a personal liking to Ma Jian ever since I felt like I walked every step with him in [Red Dust]. Then I read The Noodle Maker, then Stick Out Your Tongue, and waiting on my shelf is Beijing Coma. More than some other writers, I see his body of work as a man's thoughts laid bare, wrestling with the troubles of his Motherland. Ma Jian is able to make us remember the self-destructiveness of China, the lingering emptiness wrought by the Cultural Revolution, the encroachment on Tibet, the dog-eat-dog poverty which political corruption perpetuates. Yet, he can write all these things without preaching, scolding, or whining. His literary voice is more of a howl of pain.

Officially, today's China finds it very inconvenient to recall yesterday's pain or to acknowledge today's social and cultural ills. When Stick Out Your Tongue was first published in China in 1985, it was condemned by the government. All of Ma Jian's works remain banned in China. He eventually opted to live in London. ("The Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 convinced me that I could never make China my permanent home." p 90).

Although purportedly a fictional work, Stick Out Your Tongue seems to be autobiographical, describing the author's attempt to run as far away as possible from the authorities in China. The stories are haunting verbal snapshots, and, like photographs, they don't attempt to pass judgment on the often horrific events. In the Afterward, Ma Jian is straightforward about the background for these stories, his sojourn in Tibet. His soul-searching came to a complete void, and he wrote "In this sacred land, it seemed that the Buddha couldn't even save himself, so how could I expect him to save me? As my faith crumbled, a void opened inside me. I felt empty and helpless, as pathetic as a patient who sticks out his tongue and begs his doctor to diagnose what's wrong with him." p 87.

There is a key reference to 'sticking out one's tongue in greeting' in the custom of the Tibetans, in the story called "The Eight-fanged Roach"—a tale of double incest, superstition, rape, abuse, insanity. This and the rest of the stories are alive with smells, blood, wind, cold, dirt, icy water, smoke from dung fires, the blue expanse of sky, the colors black, red, turquoise, and a kind of insanity of a people who have been robbed of their spiritual core. Numerous assaults on women seem to indicate the destruction of the Motherland. Death is palpable in every story.

I'm glad I went back to re-read; the first time through I thought they were simply shocking stories, but now I believe there is a much more penetrating message.

Here is an item about "sticking out the tongue" as a greeting: http://articles.latimes.com/p/1997/nov/08/local/me-51420 ( )