Ma Jian
Author of Red Dust: A Path Through China
About the Author
Ma Jian was born in 1953 in Qingdoo, China. In 1986 he moved to Hong Kong, where he published novels, essays, short stories & collections of poetry & reportage; edited political & cultural magazines & founded a publishing company. He currently lives in London. (Bowker Author Biography)
Works by Ma Jian
Three Kingdoms 1 copy
Tăiţei chinezeşti 1 copy
Associated Works
Words Without Borders: The World Through the Eyes of Writers: An Anthology (2007) — Contributor — 159 copies, 6 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Ma Jian
- Legal name
- Ma Jian
- Other names
- 馬建 (traditional Chinese)
马建 (simplified Chinese)
Mǎ Jiàn (pinyin)
Mǎ Jiàn (Wade-Giles) - Birthdate
- 1953-08-18
- Gender
- male
- Relationships
- Guoping (Pseudonym, Ex-Ehefrau)
Nan-Nan (Tochter)
Flora Drew (Partnerin, Übersetzerin) - Nationality
- China
- Birthplace
- Qingdao, Shandong Province, China
- Places of residence
- Qingdao, China (Birth)
Hong Kong (GB ∙ 1986-1997)
Germany (1997-1999)
London, England ( [1999]) - Associated Place (for map)
- China
Members
Reviews
This strange, hallucinatory novella deals with the terrible legacy of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, through the eyes of a repellent bureaucrat named Ma Daode. Despite his attempts to forget, he is haunted by events of the past that sabotage his current success. The novella is episodic in structure and certain chapters worked much better for me than others. I disliked the extended sequence in the brothel, which made a point about corruption but needn’t have been so lengthy and repulsive. show more Towards the end, though, the barriers between past and present seemed to collapse and events build to an almost apocalyptic battle between the living and the dead. In this fashion, Ma Jian conveys the horrific violence of the Cultural Revolution, an extraordinary civil war in which family members turned on one another while all claiming to be fighting for the same thing. The Cultural Revolution, as I understand it, was an artificially manufactured conflict, intended to disrupt inter-generational solidarity, end respect for tradition, and undermine any possible opposition to the communist regime. It did so at the cost of millions of lives.
Once Ma Daode’s attempts to distract himself from intrusive memories fail, incendiary scenes like this ensue:
The theme of reckoning with a brutal totalitarian past, while coping with a repressive authoritarian present day, reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich's [b:Second-Hand Time|26854453|Second-Hand Time|Svetlana Alexievich|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1448954026s/26854453.jpg|27225929]. The chasm between the generation who committed atrocities during the Cultural Revolution and those who are too young to know what it was echoes the Russian experience. ‘China Dream’ certainly isn’t a systematic effort to collect a range of testimonies, rather it focuses on one fictional figure who represents a whole generation. The result is vivid, frightening, sometimes funny, and always visceral. Definitely not an easy read, but a striking one. Although I preferred Yan Lianke’s [b:The Four Books|25658483|The Four Books|Yan Lianke|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1461169286s/25658483.jpg|42038317], I think the two complement each other. Lianke considers the horrors of the Great Leap Forward, Jian those of the Cultural Revolution. Both authors are enthusiastically suppressed by the Chinese government. show less
Once Ma Daode’s attempts to distract himself from intrusive memories fail, incendiary scenes like this ensue:
Director Ma raises his microphone again to say, “Let us thank the relevant leaders for allowing these parents to realise their China Dream, and thank our foreign sponsors for their generous support. Fifty years ago this place was a mass grave filled with nameless bodies, but today it is a Garden Square on which we celebrate golden anniversaries! The China Dream eradicates all dreams of the past and replaces them with brand-new dreams! As I look out at your smiling faces, I can’t help but think of my own mother and father who lie buried in the ground beneath us. Sadly, the relentless struggle sessions they were subjected to proved too much for them to bear, so they are not able to join us today.” As more tears fill his eyes, he tries to snap back to his senses. “Of course, the past must be buried before the future can be forged. Only then can our dreams come true. Only then can young people experience the beauty of love...”
“Our daughter was murdered in the violent struggles of the Cultural Revolution,” the old man says, his voice ringing out like a bell.
The theme of reckoning with a brutal totalitarian past, while coping with a repressive authoritarian present day, reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich's [b:Second-Hand Time|26854453|Second-Hand Time|Svetlana Alexievich|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1448954026s/26854453.jpg|27225929]. The chasm between the generation who committed atrocities during the Cultural Revolution and those who are too young to know what it was echoes the Russian experience. ‘China Dream’ certainly isn’t a systematic effort to collect a range of testimonies, rather it focuses on one fictional figure who represents a whole generation. The result is vivid, frightening, sometimes funny, and always visceral. Definitely not an easy read, but a striking one. Although I preferred Yan Lianke’s [b:The Four Books|25658483|The Four Books|Yan Lianke|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1461169286s/25658483.jpg|42038317], I think the two complement each other. Lianke considers the horrors of the Great Leap Forward, Jian those of the Cultural Revolution. Both authors are enthusiastically suppressed by the Chinese government. show less
As I was writing this review, news came that China has changed its one child with exceptions policy to a two child policy.
Ma Jian's The Dark Road is a bitter and scathing diatribe about life in Deng Xiaoping's China. Meili and Kongzi are expecting a child. Unfortunately for them, they already have a daughter, Nannan. The couple thought they had taken care of things by buying a fake birth permit for this second child. However, this time the surprise family planning crackdown in their rural show more district is being conducted by officials from outside the county, beyond any influence they might have. Women of child bearing age are being rounded up for IUD insertions, forced terminations, or forced sterilizations, depending upon their childbearing history.
That night, the family of three left Kong Village to make their way down Dark Water River to the Yangtze, hoping to find a place where they could evade the family planners and have their child in peace. On board their boat, Meili met a woman who told her There's one place in China you can live in complete freedom, though: Heaven Township. It's in Guangdong Province. I worked there for a while. No one checks how many children you have. And it's almost impossible to get pregnant there... the town's air contains chemicals which kill men's sperm...
It's full of workshops that dismantle the electronic goods. It's a Special Economic Zone now like Shenzhen. But to reach it, you must travel through many large cities. If the police catch you, you'll be slammed in a custody centre and booted back home.
Meili seized upon the notion of this place, deciding it would be their destination. Heaven isn't easily attained though.
Unbeknownst to them, their journey will take nine years. Some will be horrible, others merely awful. It will see Kongzi, a descendent of Confucius and a respected teacher in his village, become a drunken lout whom even the prostitutes scorn. There will be more pregnancies for Meili, who will be forced to take whatever work she can find as Kongzi deteriorates.
Ma uses the family's travels to show the reader the degradation and destruction of not only the family, but of the country itself. Kongzi works for a while demolishing a village that will be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. There is work picking through recycling. Corpse fishers, counterfeiters, corrupt officials and child traffickers are only some of the denizens of the new China they come up against as they sink to the class of the Three Nos: "no documents, no home, no income."
The family finally reaches Heaven Township, where the economy has indeed taken off. A local family had discovered a market for scrap metal and plastic at the local toy factory. Now other families are doing the same thing, opening workshops on the ground floors of their homes and hiring migrant workers to help out. Today, the front doors of every house are not surrounded by bales of wheat, but bundles of electric cables, circuit boards and transformers. In just one decade, Heaven has transformed from a quiet backwater into a prosperous waste-choked town.
There is a lot of material here, almost too much. Either that, or Ma has written at a frantic pace, trying to convince his readers of every injustice and wrong, belabouring them when a lighter hand would have done a better job. Minor characters suddenly step forward as if on stage, and denounce the hellish environment or the one child policy. Part of the story is told by the spirit of Meili's second child. Each chapter starts with a list of keywords, warning the reader of the dangers to come.
Meili herself is pregnant for five years with her last child. She has promised this child she will give birth to it as soon as the One Child Policy is repealed, as soon as "...every child born in China will be given full legal citizenship."
Whichever thread connects most with the individual reader, the overriding theme is that no matter what the message of progress China projects to the world, hundreds of millions outside the urban areas are not part of it. Changing from a one child policy to a two child will do little for them. show less
Ma Jian's The Dark Road is a bitter and scathing diatribe about life in Deng Xiaoping's China. Meili and Kongzi are expecting a child. Unfortunately for them, they already have a daughter, Nannan. The couple thought they had taken care of things by buying a fake birth permit for this second child. However, this time the surprise family planning crackdown in their rural show more district is being conducted by officials from outside the county, beyond any influence they might have. Women of child bearing age are being rounded up for IUD insertions, forced terminations, or forced sterilizations, depending upon their childbearing history.
That night, the family of three left Kong Village to make their way down Dark Water River to the Yangtze, hoping to find a place where they could evade the family planners and have their child in peace. On board their boat, Meili met a woman who told her There's one place in China you can live in complete freedom, though: Heaven Township. It's in Guangdong Province. I worked there for a while. No one checks how many children you have. And it's almost impossible to get pregnant there... the town's air contains chemicals which kill men's sperm...
It's full of workshops that dismantle the electronic goods. It's a Special Economic Zone now like Shenzhen. But to reach it, you must travel through many large cities. If the police catch you, you'll be slammed in a custody centre and booted back home.
Meili seized upon the notion of this place, deciding it would be their destination. Heaven isn't easily attained though.
Unbeknownst to them, their journey will take nine years. Some will be horrible, others merely awful. It will see Kongzi, a descendent of Confucius and a respected teacher in his village, become a drunken lout whom even the prostitutes scorn. There will be more pregnancies for Meili, who will be forced to take whatever work she can find as Kongzi deteriorates.
Ma uses the family's travels to show the reader the degradation and destruction of not only the family, but of the country itself. Kongzi works for a while demolishing a village that will be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. There is work picking through recycling. Corpse fishers, counterfeiters, corrupt officials and child traffickers are only some of the denizens of the new China they come up against as they sink to the class of the Three Nos: "no documents, no home, no income."
The family finally reaches Heaven Township, where the economy has indeed taken off. A local family had discovered a market for scrap metal and plastic at the local toy factory. Now other families are doing the same thing, opening workshops on the ground floors of their homes and hiring migrant workers to help out. Today, the front doors of every house are not surrounded by bales of wheat, but bundles of electric cables, circuit boards and transformers. In just one decade, Heaven has transformed from a quiet backwater into a prosperous waste-choked town.
There is a lot of material here, almost too much. Either that, or Ma has written at a frantic pace, trying to convince his readers of every injustice and wrong, belabouring them when a lighter hand would have done a better job. Minor characters suddenly step forward as if on stage, and denounce the hellish environment or the one child policy. Part of the story is told by the spirit of Meili's second child. Each chapter starts with a list of keywords, warning the reader of the dangers to come.
Meili herself is pregnant for five years with her last child. She has promised this child she will give birth to it as soon as the One Child Policy is repealed, as soon as "...every child born in China will be given full legal citizenship."
Whichever thread connects most with the individual reader, the overriding theme is that no matter what the message of progress China projects to the world, hundreds of millions outside the urban areas are not part of it. Changing from a one child policy to a two child will do little for them. 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
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
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
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- Works
- 14
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- Rating
- 3.7
- Reviews
- 60
- ISBNs
- 114
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