Ma Jian

A fable about tyranny, guilt, and the erasure of history. In seven dream-like episodes, the author charts the psychological disintegration of a Chinese provincial leader who is haunted by nightmares of his violent past

China Dream

From Mi Jian, the highly acclaimed Chinese dissident, comes a satirical novel about the absurdities of life in a post-Tiananmen China. Two men meet for dinner each week. Over the course of one of these drunken evenings, the writer recounts the stories he would write, had he the courage: a young man buys an old kiln and opens a private crematorium, delighting in his ability to harass the corpses of police officers and Party secretaries, while swooning to banned Western music; a heartbroken actress performs a public suicide by stepping into the jaws of a wild tiger, watched nonchalantly by her ex-lover. Extraordinary characters inspire him, their lives pulled and pummeled by fate and politics, as if they are balls of dough in the hands of an all-powerful noodle maker. Ma Jian's satirical masterpiece allows us a humorous, yet profound, glimpse of those struggling to survive under a system that dictates their every move.

A Novel

The Noodle Maker

Jian Ma

The author shares his travels through the deep provinces and remote parts of China and Tibet, narrating his trek through mountains and deserts, as well as his personal confrontation with his failures and disappointments.

A Path Through China

Red Dust

Flora Drew

Traveling to Tibet after the failing of his marriage, a Chinese writer witnesses the sky burial of a woman who died in childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is seeking forgiveness for incest, and hears the story of a young woman incarnate lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite. By the author of The Noodle Maker.

Stories

Stick Out Your Tongue

Meili, a young peasant woman born in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a village school teacher, and a distant descendant of Confucius. They have a daughter, but desperate for a son to carry on his illustrious family line, Kongzi gets Meili pregnant again without waiting for official permission. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, mother, father and daughter escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life. For years they drift south through the poisoned waterways and ruined landscapes of China, picking up work as they go along, scavenging for necessities and flying from police detection. As Meili’s body continues to be invaded by her husband and assaulted by the state, she fights to regain control of her fate and that of her unborn child.

The Dark Road

Изплези си езика

Dark Road

Red Dust (Vintage East)

REPUBLISHED ON THE 30th ANNIVERSARY OF THE TIANANMEN MASSACRE, WITH A NEW AFTERWORD FROM THE AUTHOR AND A NEW COVER BY AI WEIWEI Beijing Coma is Ma Jian’s masterpiece. Spiked with dark wit, poetic beauty and deep rage, it takes the life, and near-death, of one young student to create a dazzling and excoriating novel about contemporary China ‘Monumental’ Guardian ‘A landmark work of fiction’ Daily Telegraph ‘A modern literary masterpiece’ Sunday Express Dai Wei lies in his bedroom, a prisoner in his body, after he was shot in the head at the Tiananmen Square protest ten years earlier and left in a coma. As his mother tends to him, and his friends bring news of their lives in an almost unrecognisable China, Dai Wei escapes into his memories, weaving together the events that took him from his harsh childhood in the last years of the Cultural Revolution to his student days at Beijing University. As the minute-by-minute chronicling of the lead-up to his shooting becomes ever more intense, the reader is caught in a gripping, emotional journey where the boundaries between life and death are increasingly blurred. ‘Beijing Coma is one of the finest and most important novels to have been written in this century’ Chris Patten

Beijing Coma

In 1983, at the age of thirty, dissident artist Ma Jian finds himself divorced by his wife, separated from his daughter, betrayed by his girlfriend, facing arrest for “Spiritual Pollution,” and severely disillusioned with the confines of life in Beijing. So with little more than a change of clothes and two bars of soap, Ma takes off to immerse himself in the remotest parts of China. His journey would last three years and take him through smog-choked cities and mountain villages, from scenes of barbarity to havens of tranquility. Remarkably written and subtly moving, the result is an insight into the teeming contradictions of China that only a man who was both insider and outsider in his own country could have written.

Erişteci

O Sonho Da China

From one of world literature’s most courageous voices, a novel about the human cost of China’s one-child policy through the lens of one rural family on the run from its reach Far away from the Chinese economic miracle, from the bright lights of Beijing and Shanghai, is a vast rural hinterland, where life goes on much as it has for generations, with one extraordinary difference: “normal” parents are permitted by the state to have only a single child. The Dark Road is the story of one such “normal” family—Meili, a young peasant woman; her husband, Kongzi, a village schoolteacher; and their daughter, Nannan. Kongzi is, according to family myth, a direct lineal descendant of Confucius, and he is haunted by the imperative to carry on the family name by having a son. And so Meili becomes pregnant again without state permission, and when local family planning officials launch a new wave of crackdowns, the family makes the radical decision to leave its village and set out on a small, rickety houseboat down the Yangtze River. Theirs is a dark road, and tragedy awaits them, and horror, but also the fierce beauty born of courageous resistance to injustice and inhumanity. The Dark Road is a haunting and indelible portrait of the tragedies befalling women and families at the hands of China’s one-child policy and of the human spirit’s capacity to endure even the most brutal cruelty. While Ma Jian wrote The Dark Road, he traveled through the rural backwaters of southwestern China to see how the state enforced the one-child policy far from the outside world’s prying eyes. He met local women who had been seized from their homes and forced to undergo abortions or sterilization in the policy’s name; and on the Yangtze River, he lived among fugitive couples who had gone on the run so they could have more children, that most fundamental of human rights. Like all of Ma Jian’s novels, The Dark Road is also a celebration of the life force, of the often comically stubborn resilience of man’s most basic instincts.

Blending fact and fiction, this darkly comic fable “may be the purest distillation yet of Mr. Ma’s talent for probing the country’s darkest corners and exposing what he regards as the Communist Party’s moral failings” (Mike Ives, The New York Times). Called “Red Guards meet Kurt Vonnegut . . . powerful!" by Margaret Atwood on Twitter, China Dream is an unflinching satire of totalitarianism. Ma Daode, a corrupt and lecherous party official, is feeling pleased with himself. He has an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he has been appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, charged with replacing people's private dreams with President Xi Jinping's great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode's nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future. Exposing the damage inflicted on a nation's soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth, China Dream is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state–imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today.

Ma Daode è un mediocre politico di provincia. Fedele al Partito e devoto ammiratore del presidente Xi Jinping, è ricco e corrotto, ha dodici amanti principali, “le Dodici Forcine di Jinling”, come le fanciulle del romanzo della Dinastia Qing, Il sogno della camera rossa. Accanito sostenitore della causa del “Sogno cinese” e della visione di “Ringiovanimento del Paese” di Xi Jinping, dal suo Ufficio Rotondo, di pochi metri più piccolo del più celebre Studio Ovale, lavora perché il sogno cinese diventi globale. Ha un problema, però, Ma Daode: durante la Rivoluzione culturale, come tante giovani Guardie rosse ha commesso parecchi crimini, e i sogni del suo passato, che fino a oggi lo hanno tormentato nel sonno, adesso si presentano anche di giorno, sotto forma di allucinazioni, rendendogli la vita sempre più difficile. Vorrebbe così tanto smettere di sognare questo doloroso passato che il governo ha rimosso dalla coscienza collettiva di tutto il Paese, da proporsi volontario per un impianto cerebrale di un dispositivo che garantisce il completo lavaggio del cervello. Inevitabilmente Ma Daode finisce per precipitare nella follia, e la sua disgregazione rispecchia quella di un popolo disposto a cancellare a ogni costo la propria storia perché accecato da materialismo, infantilismo, violenza e bugie.

Il sogno cinese

Meili, a young peasant woman born in the remote heart of China, is married to Kongzi, a village school teacher, and a distant descendant of Confucius. They have a daughter, but desperate for a son to carry on his illustrious family line, Kongzi gets Meili pregnant again without waiting for official permission. When family planning officers storm the village to arrest violators of the population control policy, mother, father and daughter escape to the Yangtze River and begin a fugitive life. For years they drift south through the poisoned waterways and ruined landscapes of China, picking up work as they go along, scavenging for necessities and flying from police detection. As Meiliâe(tm)s body continues to be invaded by her husband and assaulted by the state, she fights to regain control of her fate and that of her unborn child.

La nueva novela de uno de los autores chinos más reconocidos en la actualidad. El camino oscuro narra la historia de Meili, una mujer china embarazada a punto de sufrir las consecuencias de la política de un solo hijo del país. Para evitarlo, se fuga con su marido y su hija por el río. Ma Jian retrata a lo largo de este viaje la situación de la mujer en China. La habilidad narrativa de Ma Jian se pone al servicio de un relato que podría complementar a su anterior obra, Pekín en coma, comparada con Archipiélago Gulag, de Solzhenitsyn.

El camino oscuro

Uno scrittore cinese con alle spalle un matrimonio fallito parte per il Tibet. Durante i suoi vagabondaggi assiste alla sepoltura celeste di una ragazza morta di parto, condivide la tenda con un nomade diretto a una montagna sacra a chiedere perdono per aver avuto rapporti sessuali con la figlia, incontra un orafo che tiene appeso alla parete di una caverna il corpo della sua amante incartapecorito dal vento, ascolta la storia di una giovane lama morta durante un rito di iniziazione. Cinque racconti che mostrano come la povertà e la repressione politica abbiano annientato quella che un tempo era considerata una cultura ricca e brillante. Messo clamorosamente all’indice in Cina nel 1987, Tira fuori la lingua ha costretto Ma Jian all’esilio, rendendogli impossibile ancora oggi pubblicare nel suo paese. "È un libro volgare e osceno che diffama l’immagine dei nostri compatrioti tibetani. Ma Jian non è in grado di descrivere i grandi passi avanti compiuti dal popolo tibetano nella realizzazione di un Tibet socialista unito e prospero. Il ritratto del Tibet che esce da quest’opera sudicia e ignobile non ha nulla a che vedere con la realtà, e altro non è che il prodotto dell’immaginazione dell’autore e del suo desiderio ossessivo di sesso e soldi... A nessuno dev’essere permesso leggere questo libro. Tutte le copie devono essere confiscate e distrutte immediatamente.” (Annuncio della messa al bando dell’opera in Cina)

Storie Dal Tibet

Tira fuori la lingua

From one of world literature’s most courageous voices, a novel about the human cost of China’s one-child policy Far away from the Chinese economic miracle, from the bright lights of Beijing and Shanghai, is a vast rural hinterland, where life goes on much as it has for generations, with one extraordinary difference: “normal” parents are permitted by the state to have only a single child. Written while Ma Jian traveled the rural backwaters of southwestern China, The Dark Road is the story of one such family, who makes the radical choice to defy the crackdown. A haunting and indelible portrait of the tragedies befalling women and families at the hands of China’s one-child policy and of the human spirit’s capacity to endure even the most brutal cruelty, The Dark Road is also a celebration of life, and of the fierce beauty born of courageous resistance to injustice.

La esperada novela sobre la historia reciente de China. Una obre que desafía al olvido y al gobierno chino. Dai Wei está en coma desde hace una década. Dai Wei, estudiante chino de medicina, recibió un balazo en la cabeza cuando se manifestaba en la plaza Tiananmen en junio de 1989. Tan pronto como las autoridades del hospital averiguaron que era un activista contra el régimen comunista, obligaron a su madre a llevárselo a casa. Y allí se encuentra desde entonces, atrapado en su propio cuerpo, pero capaz de entender lo que sucede a su alrededor. Y de recordar; la memoria es lo que le salvará del destierro espiritual. Dai Wei rememora la historia de su padre -un violinista que sufrió las atrocidades cometidas en los campos de trabajo-, retrata a las tres mujeres que amó y recuerda los libros que despertaron su pasión por la literatura. Entre tales fragmentos de su vida se mueve hasta el día en que, a modo de señal propia del mismísimo Hamlet, un gorrión aparece en la ventana de su habitación y se posa en su pecho, anunciando la llegada de un cambio.

Ma Jian

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