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Stick Out Your Tongue
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Stick Out Your Tongue by Ma Jian
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li
Chinese Short Stories
There seem to be two distinct strands developing in what might broadly be called "Chinese literature in English". The first is Chinese literature in translation (Mo Yan, Han Shaogong, Su Tong, Yu Hua, MA JIAN, et al.) and the second is literature written by the Chinese diaspora in English, a group of which Ha Jin is perhaps the doyen, but includes Liu Hong, Guo Xialu, and others. The group might extend to writers like Dai Sijie and Shan Sa who write in French.
Two recent collections of short stories, MA JIAN's STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE and YIYUN LI's A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS illustrate the differences between the two groups.
MA JIAN is a Chinese dissident writer now living in London; his books, including Red Dust and Noodle Maker, were written in Chinese in China and have only relatively recently been showing up in English. Ma's STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE is a collection of stories about Tibet, and was banned in China in 1987 soon after its publication.
YIYUN LI, originally from Beijing and now from Oakland, whose first collection of short stories was recently published as A THOUSAND YEARS OF GOOD PRAYERS, has just won the rich Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
Ma is a challenging writer. Noodle Maker -- a "bracelet" of connected short stories -- was absurd and surreal, showing influence of Eastern European writers from Gogol to Kafka. The stories in STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE take place in Tibet, a place surreal enough in Chinese eyes to need little additional embellishment. Ma's astonishment at Tibetan life and customs, from sky burials to the intricacies of the Tibetan belief system, and distress at the grinding poverty, are all too evident.
The dreamlike quality of some of the stories requires a careful reading and sometimes a rereading, but is well worth the evident. Ma may a challenging writer, but is also an outspoken one with a strong voice that never fails to be extremely interesting one
The official Chinese announcement banning STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE called it a "vulgar, obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots." I can well imagine, in fact, that those who know Tibet, and I do not, might take exception to some of the stark portraits Ma paints -- and Ma's Noodle Maker is also "unfair" to many of its subjects -- but it is important to remember that fiction, even fiction with political undertones, is still fiction.
YIYUN LI, on the other hand, is writing in English for an (on the whole) non-Chinese audience. It is, as a result, rather different. STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE does deal with particularly Chinese issues, yet from the perspective of trying to illuminate these for a non-Western audience. A couple of stories, perhaps inevitably, deal with the clash of East and West, and traditional and modern ways of life.
The lead story, "Extra", is an affecting story about the loneliness of old age and the emerging problems of class in modern China. Several of the stories deal with the different take in Chinese societies on such matters of as infidelity, homosexuality and children with birth defects.
One story, however, called "Immortality", tells the story of a young man who bore a striking resemblance to Mao and how this ended up taking over his life, a sort of almost uniquely Chinese strangeness and is the sort of story one thinks Ma might have written.
- Editor's note: Ma Jian will be appearing at the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival in March 2006.
Peter Gordon
09/12/2005
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Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books. |
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