Ma Jian

Ma Jian is a Chinese writer and a dissident. He was born in 1953, so he is part of the generation of Chinese who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution as children and young adults, as well as seeing the implementation -- and the limitations -- of Deng Xiaoping's Open Door economic policy. Ma has not been a silent observer of the myriad ways in which the Chinese government has cracked down on freedom of expression in Chinese society; he has been a member of the dissident community of show more Chinese artists and writers for decades, both while living in China and Hong Kong, and later from exile in Europe. Ma has suffered for his outspokenness. His [book:Stick Out Your Tongue|389681], published in 1987, was censured and his writings were banned by the Chinese government -- a ban that extended to his future publications.


Ma Jian

In addition to his earlier commitment to the dissident arts community in China, Ma participated in the 1989 democracy protests in Beijing, which culminated in the Tiananmen Massacre. In the devastating aftermath of this brutal crackdown, Ma remained in Beijing and wrote [book:The Noodle Maker|321223], an extremely dark satire fueled by Ma's anger and disillusionment with Chinese communist society and politics. The novel is framed by an ongoing conversation between a professional blood donor, who has made millions giving blood and providing others with the means to do so despite limitations of height, weight, or frequency of past donations, and a professional writer, who blends his observations of the world around him with his consideration of the characters that populate a novel he is writing, who often seem more real to him than the people he sees around him every day. That interspersing of reality and fantasy holds true throughout [book:The Noodle Maker|321223], which includes healthy strains of surrealism as we move from framing discussions and interjections from the blood donor and the writer, and stories which introduce us to different characters who are dysfunctionally trying to negotiate life in a society where compassion is difficult to find, where empty slogans guide people's lives, where progress is measured not in terms of happiness or fulfillment, but in terms of economic production, material signs of Westernization, and complete adherence to the latest government dictates.

The novel's stories combine dark flights of fantasy with brutal action. In one story, an entrepreneur buys a ceramics furnace and opens a crematorium along with his elderly mother, in which he provides a special twist -- mourners can pay for him to play specific musical selections while their loved ones are being cremated. In another, an actress decides on her final performance -- committed suicide on stage by being eaten by a tiger. In the most horrifying scene in the novel, a man and his companion, a three-legged dog who speaks Chinese, watch from their terrace as a girl is gang raped. A huge crowd of onlookers gathers and watches, as a group of police slowly try to reach the girl and some government officials hold a meeting -- during the rape -- to decide what actions to take. Ma Jian writes with a white-hot anger that practically drips off the page.

This novel accomplished exactly what Ma wanted it to. The characters and stories haunt me. I can't shake them off. As an anguished cry against the inhumanity of life in Communist China, which Ma has devoted his life to fighting, [book:The Noodle Maker|321223] is disturbing and difficult to read, but profoundly affecting, one of the strongest examples I have read of dark social satire. show less

Ma Daode, a middling local Party bureaucrat, has been put in charge of implementing President Xi’s “China Dream” in the provincial city of Ziyang. The new appointment presents plenty of opportunities for him to accept more bribes to add to the piles of unacknowledgeable cash and gifts already stashed away in his apartment, but it seems that Ma, corrupt as he is, is a sincere believer in the Dream — he is desperately in search of positivity to overcome memories of the atrocities he show more was involved in during the Cultural Revolution, including driving his own parents to suicide. When his serial philandering and his hopes of developing an electronic device capable of suppressing inappropriate dreams come to nothing, he tries to focus his energy on the invention of a China Dream Soup that will do the same thing magically…

A brutal, graphic satire of modern China that pulls no punches in reminding us of the horrors that today’s authoritarian state is built on, or of the ruthlessness with which government policy continues to be implemented. Ma Jian sets the real pivotal scene of the book in a Cultural-Revolution-nostalgia themed brothel, where the girls wear Red Guard uniforms and revolutionary songs play in the background, whilst Ma Daode’s downfall starts with a bloody set-piece battle between protesting villagers and police and developers who want to demolish the village where his parents are buried to build a new industrial park. But those are nothing to the nightmare closing scene, a new battle on the scene of a Cultural Revolution massacre, but this time with the onlookers bombarding Ma Daode with “President Xi” dumplings whilst he attempts to spray them with China Dream Soup. show less

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 show more 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 show less

These stories tell the experiences of their narrators with a reality that rejects simple chronology and order. The sexuality is disturbing; the prose and detail are almost nauseating in their unflinching clarity. Ma Jian's genius is clear in the first story, "The Woman and the Blue Sky," which uses frustrated dialogue and the details of death to compel. The relations between men and women show an absolute binary of control and victimization, exercised through sexual and other violences, show more elaborated by different shades of myth and storytelling, all of which seem to be painted upon narrative presents in which at least one person is starving to death. These stories are an honest reflection of a certain perception of human life, a certain vantage point from which existence can be observed--but it is so different from my own that my first reaction was motion sickness. show less