Love and Sexuality in the Fallen World of Ma Jian

Abstract

ESSAY Love and Sexuality in the Fallen World of Ma Jian by Elizabeth Fifer Reviewing Ma Jian’s three-decades-long career, Elizabeth Fifer traces the banned and exiled Chinese writer’s deepening critique. A newly translated work of fiction by Ma Jian, China Dream (2018), provides an opportunity for celebration and a reconsideration of his distinguished career. He is one of the most respected and discussed of all contemporary Chinese authors. His work is known worldwide, except in China. His devastating wit and experimental style are used to deconstruct both the history and the political reality of everyday life in China. Now living in exile, he has written fiction on subjects as diverse as Tibetan culture (Stick Out Your Tongue, Eng. 1987), urban life (The Noodle Maker, Eng. 2004), the repercussions of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 (Beijing Coma, Eng. 2008), and China’s one-child policy (The Dark Road, Eng. 2013). Red Dust (Eng. 2001), about his three-year trek across China, gives readers a sharp and thoughtful memoir of rural life. His gifted translator is Flora Drew. After Stick Out Your Tongue, his collection of brilliant and unflinching short stories, appeared, all of Ma’s work was banned from future publication in China and all copies of the book confiscated. One newscast called it “vulgar and obscene”; it was accused of defaming the Tibetan people. The government labeled Ma a “pornographer .” Black-market copies circulated, and the book was widely read. The exaggerated charge of pornography arises from the centrality of love and sexuality in Ma’s work. He arrived in Tibet a recently divorced man who had lost custody of his daughter. The anger and loneliness in the stories spring from a sense of personal loss and political injustice. The characters Miyama in “The Woman and PHOTO: ALEXANDRU ACEA/UNSPLASH 32 WLT SPRING 2019 the Blue Sky” and Sangsang Tashi in “The Final Initiation ” vividly illustrate Ma working at the intersection of love and sexual violence. Both stories concern the abuse of innocent women, forbidden love, and rape. The structures of tradition and religion fail. Sangsang Tashi falls in love with a fellow monk. Forced to marry two brothers, Miyama dies in childbirth. Before Sangsang Tashi can enter her final illumination, the head lama rapes her and she dies in an icy river. The naked bodies of the two abused women, one dismembered to feed the vultures in a sky burial, the other food for fish, are eloquent. The brothers scatter Miyama’s flesh dispassionately. The lamas will verify even a corpse as the manifestation of the Living Buddha. After the feverish nightmare of the Tibetan stories, Ma uses his black humor and critical eye to dissect contemporary Chinese life in The Noodle Maker. It is framed as a discussion over dinner between two old friends, a professional writer and a professional blood donor. One uses his imagination to survive; the other sells his blood. One lives for ideals, the other for profit. The blood donor brings the dinner. Stories follow like strands of noodles fashioned from the dough of the professional writer’s brain. As Mao instructed, the writer goes down among the masses for his subject. The blood donor interrogates each character, such as the lovesick, suicidal actress, the street writer who pens letters of protest and longing, the talking dog who describes how his kind would run the world. The waves of change transform China, forcing people into “reeducation,” self-criticism, and spying. Successive campaigns and party memoranda create a shifting political landscape. In an unsettled atmosphere of suspicion and fear, people struggle to keep up with current trends. Committees can debate reforms, but when a streetlight goes out, a woman is sure to be raped. A picture on a soap wrapper of a blonde woman in a swimsuit teeters between the pornographic and the healthy until Deng Xiaoping’s Open Door Policy approves it. The professional writer calls his “the wasted generation ,” left in a spiritual vacuum, without the means to understand foreign culture or appreciate its worth. He asks, “How can a society numbed by dictatorship find its way in the modern world?” The blood donor says people have become...