Inside story
MA Jian understands why so many people romanticise Tibet. He did it himself when he fled the repressive atmosphere of Beijing in 1987 and headed west.
But what he found there bleached the romanticism from his mind and soul, replacing it with a despairing clarity and, paradoxically, a deeper compassion for the people of Tibet.
He had already published Red Dust, a book of travel stories about his wanderings in remote regions of China. his Tibet book Stick out your Tongue, however, would be the one that made him notorious, banned as pornography in China and thus ensuring its succes de scandale, and gradually making his name internationally.
While all the Tibetan standards can be found in the Stick out your Tongue stories — yak butter tea, sky burials, the yurts and their unsophisticated inhabitants — no one had come at Tibet quite so unflinchingly. The title story, for example, is about a girl, raped by her father, who becomes a street prostitute before going mad, sucking at her own breast and scrapping for meat with the dogs. A superficial reading of such stories, Ma says, speaking recently at the Ubud Writers Festival in Bali with interpreting assistance from his wife and translator, Flora Drew, would indeed fill the reader with disgust. but these are really not so much about Tibet as about "the horror that lies in all of us". The stories are a "meditation on good and evil", he says. "I wanted the reader to see through the cruel images to gain a sense of the beauty, to see that beauty and cruelty can co-exist."
Tibetans stick out their tongue in greeting, but it is also something people do the world over when they are looking for a diagnosis of an illness. Ma says he too was ill, sick with fear at what had become of Beijing, where he was hounded by the police and warned they could, if he did not behave, quietly make him disappear. Society itself is sick, he says, so this little book of stories was a way of calling attention to the malaise.
Ma, 57, now lives in London with Drew, who became his translator when she met him in Hong Kong at the time of the handover in 1997. Drew was there with a British film crew, documenting the historic moment when China resumed responsibility for what had been such a lucrative British territory, and in the course of searching out people who were critical of the handover, they unearthed Ma.
He was living hand-to-mouth, with a dog in a hut on an island. Drew had spent time in Beijing as a student in the 1980s, learning Chinese. A chance extra week’s booking at the Hong Kong hotel where she was staying gave her the opportunity to stay on after the rest of the documentary crew had left, so she found herself avidly reading the books Ma had given her.
"I thought they were wonderful," she says. "I liked them so much, I told him I’d like to translate them." The couple now have four young children (including twins). Drew spent two years translating the fourth book to have appeared so far in English, Beijing Coma, which took Ma 10 years to write and landed him even deeper in trouble with the Chinese authorities.
Beijing Coma is a circular narrative that begins with a young man lying comatose in bed, tended by his mother, and ends at the same point, with the new Beijing, a landscape of torn-down old buildings replaced with quickly constructed bland boxes, closing in on them both.
Along the way, as the story loops back on itself, we discover how the young man ended up in a coma, shot by the government forces during the protests, riots and eventual massacre in Tiananmen Square. again, the events of Tiananmen Square and the situation of his young protagonist operate as metaphors for what Ma wants to say about Chinese society today.
"This Chinese student is an everyman," he says, "representative of his generation. my challenge was to show how that generation was shaped by an education system that brainwashes, homogenises, produces identikit characters, but within that similarity, everyone has their personal characteristics.
"I wanted to leave the reader with the impression that this was a generation whose minds had been erased by that education, whose minds were empty. but there was still passion and idealism. I had to do this to explain why the Tiananmen movement failed in the end."
Reviewing the novel when it was published in London, novelist Tash Aw called it a landmark: "Beijing Coma is a poetic examination," Aw wrote, "not just of a country at a defining moment in its history but of the universal right to remember and to hope."
Much more complex than the stories of Stick out your Tongue, Beijing Coma appears to be a more ambitious work, suggesting a growing confidence and maturity in Ma’s writing. He says, however, that the books he wrote in Hong Kong, published only in Chinese so far and awaiting translation by Drew, were even more "experimental" in playing with the narrative voice.
Drew’s translations are painstakingly done. She says she reads them aloud over and over, trying to capture a cadence that replicates, without mimicking, the fluency of the original Chinese. "It’s such a difficult language to master," she says, "it can be overwhelming. I still have to look up the dictionary for every second word, and I often discover, just by asking bland and anodyne questions, that I’ve got the meaning entirely wrong."
Chinese is much more concise than English, she says, and because it does not use tenses, there is vast room for "ambiguities and misunderstanding". her privileged access to the writer means she can keep asking the necessary questions (although Ma says, teasingly, that he’d rather someone else translated his other books, so he could escape her scrutiny).
Ma is a serious man who rarely smiles. his long hair, neatly bobbed below his ears, has become part of his public persona, and it still marks him out as arty when he returns to China, which he does regularly. his books are still banned and he has been followed by plainclothes police, but he can come and go freely enough so long as he is not published there.
Like many other Chinese writers, even those whose work is banned, Ma cannot contemplate writing in any other language, and although he understands some English, he prefers to speak only in Chinese. "I have chosen to write about China," he says (with Drew translating), "and for this, I believe I cannot leave the Chinese language."
"This is the most valuable tool to talk about my country. As a writer, I must choose one language and go to its very limits, to use every last strand of it, and that’s why I have remained within the Chinese language."
Beijing Coma and Stick out your Tongue are published by Random House.
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