V MAGAZINE FEATURE

SPRING PREVIEW 2005

ISSUE NUMBER 33

EAST ENDS

DISSIDENT WRITER MA JIAN NO LONGER LIVES IN CHINA. BUT HIS HARD POLITICS AND REVOLUTIONARY FICTION STILL DO

‘You're wrong to think that every story must be connected with death,' the blood donor tells the professional writer at one point in Ma Jian's haunting satirical novel, The Noodle Maker . ‘The problem is not death, but life, and life is just an act of endurance.' At 52, Ma Jian has endured a great deal to succeed as a writer. Almost paradoxically, the author writes entirely in Chinese even though his books are categorically banned in his mother country. Western audiences first became familiar with Ma in 2002, when his autobiographical picaresque, Red Dust , was translated into English (by partner Flora Drew). By this time, Ma had already gone into exile in Hong Kong – having been declared a radical dissident by the Chinese government – protested openly the 1997 Hong Kong handover, and moved to London to continue his sharp critiques of life under Chinese rule.

The Noodle Maker is his second book available in English, although Ma has written nine in total. Inspired by the 1989 atrocities of Tiananmen Square, the novel captures the grim histories of characters controlled by their oppressive government, rocked between customs and modern ‘Open Door Policy' advances, and determined to find outlets for their desires – more often than not, in death. Here, black comedy meets eviscerating social commentary, as Ma constructs a series of stories told over the course of a drunken night by a state-supported propaganda writer and a successful blood donor, who makes a vast fortune selling his own life supply. In their recounting, a troubled actress stages a public suicide by stepping into the jaws of a tiger; a literary editor pursues endless sexual dalliances with young, hopeful poets; and a hapless father tries to abandon his retarded daughter to produce a legitimate male heir in accordance with China's One Child Policy. Ma blends fact and fantasy with such beauty that China appears as potent a land for fiction as it is implausible for free speech. Here, he speaks of his life and work through his translator, Ms. Drew. Christopher Bollen .

CHRISTOPHER BOLLEN Many émigré Chinese writers have switched to writing in English. You write only in Chinese, and, I understand, have not tried to learn English. Why is this?

MA JIAN As a writer, the Chinese language is the only tool I have. Now that I'm living in London, I'm afraid of my Chinese becoming weakened or corrupted. So although I've tried to learn English, I've never got very far. I think and dream in Chinese, and it feels as though there's no room left in my mind for another language.

CB How much of your writing process depends on the particular constraints of the Chinese language?

MJ I love writing in Chinese. I started off life as a painter, and I appreciate the visual beauty of the Chinese language. Each pictogram has a visual connotation, which adds another dimension to the writing. When I write the character for ‘mountain', for example, I can literally see the mountain on the page. The Chinese language is also very fluid. There are no tenses or rigid grammatical rules, so this gives the writer a lot of freedom to experiment and to jump around in time and space.

CB It would be difficult not to mention politics when discussing your work. Your personal history is rife with political activities. You protested Hong Kong's transfer to China. Your books take a hard look at the Chinese government, and have subsequently been banned. How did you become so involved?

MJ Everyone from my generation in China is inevitably a political animal. We grew up in a very politicised climate. We've endured brainwashing and various levels of political persecution. The young Chinese people today aren't interested in politics, but China is still fundamentally a very repressive society. If you want to write about Chinese society, you can't ignore the wider political context, because that still shapes everything. It determines the way people think and act, even if they aren't aware of it.

I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, and was a model revolutionary. As a boy, I sang and danced in a propaganda troupe. I never questioned the authority of the Communist Party. I believed that it was our duty to liberate the oppressed masses of the world. Then, in the 1980s, China started to open up. Slowly we learned about Freud, Hemingway, Picasso. We discovered that the victims of the capitalist world were better off than we were, and didn't need us to go and liberate them. We lost our faith in Communism, and started asking ourselves who we were and what we should do with our lives.

I was working as a photojournalist for a state-run magazine at the time, but in the evenings I'd meet with my dissident friends and we'd talk about abstract art and the latest translations of foreign literature. I'd organise underground poetry readings and exhibitions of my paintings. The authorities didn't like this at all. They hated our long hair and denim jeans. We got into a lot of trouble. My bosses at the magazine held meetings criticising my ‘decadent' lifestyle and paintings. I was locked up in the local police station on two occasions, and accused of spreading ‘bourgeois liberalism' and ‘spiritual pollution'. In the end, I couldn't take it anymore. I gave up my government job and spent three years travelling around China. It was illegal for individuals to travel without government permission at the time, so I saw my journey as an act of rebellion. This is the journey that I described in my book Red Dust .

When I returned from this journey, I wrote a short book inspired by my experiences in Tibet. It was published in quite an important literary journal. Although it wasn't overtly political, it had a strongly individualist tone and style that set it apart from all the state-sanctioned literature that was about at the time. It created a great storm, the government launched a campaign against me, ordered that all copies of the journal be burned, and sacked the editor of the magazine. I'd moved to Hong Kong a few weeks before the journal was published, so I managed to escape persecution. But since then, there's been a blanket ban on all my books in China, my name can't even be mentioned in print. If the authorities don't like you, they can make you disappear.

CB I feel that in the West the literary community seems to be increasingly isolated from politics. Do you feel a writer must take the role of social critic?

MJ It depends on what society the writer is living in. In Western democracies, writers are free to write what they like, and many writers can allow themselves the luxury of pursuing their art without having to think about any moral or social responsibilities. They can keep their hands clean and remain aloof. But China is a crippled and brutalised society, there's still no real freedom of speech. In this situation, I think writers have to get their hands dirty. When people are fed propaganda everyday, and journalists are afraid to tell the truth, I think it's a writer's responsibility to document history and to speak for the people who have no voice. That's why I always write about the victims of society, the people who are at the bottom of the heap.

CB How does it feel to live and work in London? Is it harder for you to write about China from such a distance?

MJ Living in London, I sometimes feel like I'm a duck trapped in a cage of chickens. I have a place to sleep and enough to eat, but I'm always aware that I don't belong. When I'm writing about China , I can't just step outside my front door to search for inspiration, I have to rely entirely on my memory. There's nothing in the streets of London that I can use in my books. But at least here I'm able to write in peace. I don't get pestered by the police or censored by the government. And my distance from China also gives me a sense of perspective. So although in some ways it's harder to write about China here, I think it I'm able to produce better work.

CB The Noodle Maker is a book that you wrote in response to the massacre at Tiananmen Square. How did these stories come about?

MJ What shocked me after the Tiananmen Massacre was how soon things went back to normality, at least on a superficial level. The same old women who had handed out food to the protesting students were now reporting these students to the police. Everyone became numbed by fear, all the idealism and hope had disappeared. I saw how little control the Chinese people had over their lives. They seemed to me like a lump of dough that was pulled and pummelled by the hands of a noodle maker. This noodle maker was Chairman Mao, the Communist Party, thousands of years of Chinese history . . . I wanted to write a book about this idea, and fill it with characters who live, work, fall in love and commit suicide in this kind of anesthetised state.

CB I read recently that book publishing is China's third largest industry after tobacco and liquor. What do you think about the Chinese reading habits? Is there quality literature that is being written and published there now?

MJ In fact Chinese people are reading less and less, and most of what they read is trash: cartoon books, pulp fiction, kung fu stories. Very few people are interested in serious literature. And besides, any book that's published in China has to be inspected by government censors. Many so-called serious novelists in China in fact live very comfortably within the system. They toe the line and reap the benefits. They're careful not to upset the status quo. I find this very depressing.

I myself am not recognised as a writer by the authorities, I'm outside the system. No one can mention my name in print. So when I go to China to write, I feel that I'm taking part in some underground activity. I feel like a criminal.

CB You have created some incredibly vivid characters in The Noodle Maker – most of whom end tragically. Death is often perceived as an overwhelming escape – a freedom that runs counter to how controlled the characters are by the government.

MJ Certainly, for the characters of my book, death is an escape and a comfort. Committing suicide is the only way for them to take control of their lives. I myself think about death a lot. I'm afraid of it, and I'm constantly aware of how few days there might be left to my life: Seven thousand? Eight thousand? But it's this fear of death that motivates me to write. Every book I write is in fact about death, and about love, which is the opposite of death.

CB Are the characters in The Noodle Maker based on actual individuals?

MJ The characters of the book are based on people I know, or have read about. For example, the man who runs a private crematorium is based on a neighbour in Beijing who sells burial clothes for a living. Every day when I passed him in the street, he would tell me that the dead were much nicer than the living. The professional writer is based on a friend of mine. He used to be a very talented writer, but after he joined the official Writers' Association and started taking a salary from the government, he found that he couldn't write another word. He couldn't bring himself to write propaganda, and nor did he have the courage to write the books that he really wanted to write. In my books, I make no clear line between the real world and the magical haunted world, because in China, the reality is sometimes so absurd and so nightmarish that you're constantly having to question whether you're dreaming or not.

CB What fiction are you currently working on?

MJ I'm now working on a novel called Beijing Coma . It looks at China's mad rush to the 21 st century through the eyes of a comatose patient.

CB Speaking of the 21 st century, we in the United States are being told with a new fervor that China will overtake us as the world's superpower within the next decade. What do you see happening in China's future?

MJ I can see China's economy becoming one of the richest in the world, but its culture becoming one of the poorest. It will be like a deformed monster, with one hand that has grown beyond all proportion, and the other hand that has withered away. The government will push their weight around more in the world arena, because they know that no one will stand in their way, and the people will become more materialist, nationalistic, selfish and shallow.

Ma Jian in London, November 2004

Photography Paul Wetherell

The Noodle Maker is out in January 2005 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Last updated: March 30, 2005