Home truths from the exile

Ma Jian's novels are a powerful corrective to the self-interested Western acceptance of modern China

Stephanie Merritt
Sunday May 2, 2004
The Observer


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Ma Jian's grandfather, a landowner in China, was famous as a tea connoisseur. When he was arrested at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, it was considered apt to execute him by depriving him of drink. Ma, now 50, was 14 at the time and grew up with the legacy of persecution and fear this gave to his family.

He tells this story in the chintzy tearoom of an elegant Knightsbridge hotel, acknowledging with a nod the paradox of the backdrop, acutely aware of - and not altogether comfortable with - the great distance he has travelled since.

'Living in London is like being on a luxury cruise liner,' he explains through his partner and translator, Flora Drew (after five years in London, his English is not conversational). 'I'm living very comfortably, but I'm not in control of where it's going and that's never as comfortable as having both feet on the ground. This is something I can only feel when I return to China.'

That this acclaimed dissident, described by Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian as 'one of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature', is here at all, and that his books should be available to English readers, is down to what the romantically inclined would call fate.

He had moved to Hong Kong in 1986 when Deng Xiaoping began to clamp down on China's nascent cultural openness. Ma's first novel, a critical account of travelling in Tibet, was banned and its author held up as an example of 'bourgeois liberalism' and 'spiritual pollution'.

At the time of the Hong Kong handover, Drew, a graduate in Chinese, was working on a documentary and interviewed Ma, who was organising a protest of writers and artists against the handover. After they met, she began to read his books and, although she had no experience in literary translation, became convinced they could and should reach an English readership.

Last updated: May 8, 2005