Heaven, Hell and Five Books
Ma Jian, in a conference on ActivistHumanities at SOAS, University of London last week, said that Tiananmen made a writer out of him. And travelling 10,000 miles after the event made him a Chinese. When you see and feel atrocities around you, there is no other option but to pick up the quill and write, he said. Something drives you. A force. You reach out to yourself and the world reaches out to you. Thus writing happens. He also said how normalization happens: surreptitiously. Before you realize, things have changed. People around you have morphed. Isn’t something similar happening in India–social engineering at a grand scale? Before we realize…] Here is Ma Jian, on his favourite titles and themes from Chinese dissident literature: ——————————————- Why did you choose these books to make a set of five? What common themes or perspectives do they share? When I was thinking about this yesterday, I realized that the history of Chinese literature has often been shaped from outside of its society – by exiled writers and thinkers. From [3rd century BC Chinese poet] Qu Yuan to Confucius, the Tang dynasty to the Qing dynasty, right up to modern novels today, you find that those authors who in the end became central to Chinese culture were at the time writing from outside of their country – exiled, pushed out or banned. Would it be fair to call them dissidents? More or less. In their contemporary society, they couldn’t exist [be published] – that was only possible after they died. In their times, they were exiles like me. I think they had to be exiles before they could return into the midst of Chinese tradition. What advantage is there to writing about China from the outside? It’s precisely because I have left China that I understand China better. I see more facets of China, and have better information about it. I don’t know if writers inside China can climb the great firewall [of internet censorship], for instance – and their information influences the way in which they think. In China, your understanding of history and of the wider world is very different. So I think I understand China better from England, because I see more than one side to the story and know how unfree it is. Writers inside China would respond that you haven’t lived there for over two decades, and don’t understand how much has changed. I don’t think they understand me, because it’s like I don’t exist in China. If you search for my name on the Internet there, it doesn’t exist [because it’s censored]. I’m a zero. So maybe they think I’m not important. Specifically, it was only in 2011 that I was forbidden to go back to China at all. Before that, I went back there every year. I even bought a flat in Beijing. But the police were very strict with me, and controlled who I could see. I was forbidden to meet Liu Xiaobo during the Olympics. I’m one of the so-called “sensitive individuals”. Do you write principally for a Chinese or English audience? The main reader I write for is still Chinese. I’m constantly thinking how my books could be published in China [where they are mostly banned], even if they were censored or changed. Red Dust and The Noodle Maker were both published in China, but under a different name and heavily censored. I write all of my books in Chinese, and they are then translated into English. I think that if a foreigner reads a Chinese novel, he or she can gain an entirely new experience of life from his or her own. To understand a different culture is like to understand a different language – you gain a lot of new wisdom. Tell us about your first book, Li Sao or The Lament by Qu Yuan, from the “warring states” period of ancient Chinese history. From my perspective, because I prefer to combine literature with history myself, Qu Yuan’s The Lament was an obvious first choice. If we’re talking about Chinese literature, we must wonder where it all began. Except for The Book of Songs [the earliest collection of ancient Chinese poems], The Lament is the earliest pinnacle of Chinese literature. I don’t know what it’s like in English translation, but it’s movingly written. Qu Yuan was originally an official from the south of China. Then he was banished, because he was criticizing the corruption of the Chu state, and became a dissident. He led a double life, and finally he committed suicide. He felt his life had no meaning. His country, his system, his people had all forgotten him. From the very top, step by step he fell to the bottom. You could say he experienced all the suffering of Chinese society. The Lament is the story of Qu Yuan’s life, his autobiography. From this poem, you can see the changes in Chinese society, the people’s struggle, and the sorrow and despair of everyday life. The more he experienced – of both heaven and hell – the more mature he became. And what he was opposing in China at his time was more or less the same as the problems in today’s China, such as corruption of the leadership. Criticising China from the outside, his situation has some similarities with your own. I think the story of Qu Yuan is quite possibly the story of all genuine, non state-approved Chinese authors. Your next choice is the famous Romance of the Three Kingdoms, set in the 3rd century. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms only became a book a thousand years after the events which it describes. You could say that its story is the story of all China, passed down from father to son. It is one of China’s four great classical novels, which also include the Journey to the West. But only with Romance of the Three Kingdoms did old Chinese stories really become Chinese literature. It’s also beautifully written. A reader can harvest a lot of history and knowledge from this book, because it chronicles all aspects of China. You can discover in it the entirety of the Chinese character, ancient and modern. All Chinese people today can find themselves inRomance of the Three Kingdoms, whether you are rich or poor, old or young. For example