MCLC: Ma Jian and Liao Yiwu reviews

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: pjmooney <pjmooney at me.com>
Subject: Ma Jian and Liao Yiwu reviews
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (8/2/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/books/review/the-dark-road-and-for-a-song
-and-a-hundred-songs.html

Signs of Protest ‘The Dark Road’ and ‘For a Song and a Hundred Songs’
Emily Parker

In exploring the darker aspects of Chinese life, Ma Jian and Liao Yiwu
speak mostly to the outside world. The work of both writers has been
banned in China, and neither lives in his native land. Ma Jian is a
longtime resident of London. Liao crossed the border into Vietnam in 2011
and fled to Berlin, where he remains today.

Ma Jian’s previous books include the Tiananmen-era novel “Beijing Coma”
and “Stick Out Your Tongue,” a collection of stories about Tibet. His
latest, “The Dark Road,” uses a fictional narrative to depict the tragic
real-life effects of China’s one-child policy, initiated in 1979 to
control population growth. Having traveled extensively in rural China, he
claims to have learned of hundreds of victims of forced abortions or
sterilizations.

Meili and Kongzi, the married couple at the center of his novel, become
“family planning fugitives” when they try to have a second child. After
local officials begin a crackdown in their village, Meili and Kongzi take
their first child, a daughter named Nannan, and find refuge on a houseboat
on the Yangtze River. But this is only a temporary stop. Meili’s dream
destination is a place called “Heaven Township,” where the pollution is
said to be so great that it’s impossible to become pregnant. Meili wants a
life in which she can earn enough money to display red-­painted toenails
under “elegant leather sandals.” Her husband is determined to have a male
heir, regardless of the suffering another pregnancy will inflict on his
wife.

China’s one-child policy, often discussed in the rather dry terms of
population or abortion statistics, is a ripe subject for a novel. What
better way to enable readers to see its personal consequences than through
another individual’s eyes? Unfortunately, too much of “The Dark Road”
reads like an op-ed column. “The Family Planning policy is a protracted
war waged against women and children,” Kongzi informs his daughter, not
the most natural-sounding remark to make to a child. The problem isn’t
simply the translation (by Ma Jian’s British partner, Flora Drew), but the
author’s apparent conviction that only unrelentingly straightforward prose
will get his point across.

Even so, some of the novel’s scenes are horrific. Meili’s pregnancy is
aborted at the order of family planning officers, and she is forced to
watch as her baby boy, who enters the world still alive, is strangled and
put into a plastic bag. Undeterred, Kongzi persists in trying to
impregnate his wife. When she finally gives birth again, to another girl,
he takes the baby away, most likely to put her up for sale. Meili’s body
is constantly being invaded, if not by her husband then by the state.

Yet rather than let this powerful theme unfold naturally, Ma Jian insists
on spelling it out. “You force me to get pregnant,” Meili tells Kongzi,
“then you take my baby from me. You’re worse than the Communist Party.” On
the next page, Meili notes that “women don’t own their bodies: their wombs
and genitals are battle zones over which their husband and the state fight
for control.” “The Dark Road” is a passionate book about an important
topic, but it would work more effectively if it veered off-message long
enough to let readers lose themselves in the story.

The poet Liao Yiwu’s memoir, “For a Song and a Hundred Songs,” reads more
novelistically. An earlier book, “The Corpse Walker,” gathered portraits
from the lower rungs of Chinese society; his new one is based on the four
years he was imprisoned after writing a poem, “Massacre,” inspired by the
events at Tiananmen Square, and helping to make a film, “Requiem.”

The memoir, which has already won a major award in Germany, is likely to
be applauded by human rights groups as a fierce indictment of the Chinese
government. In many ways, it is. But to cast Liao’s work in such simple
terms is to overlook the way it also portrays the cruelties ordinary
Chinese inflict upon one another.

To his credit, Liao doesn’t paint himself as a martyr or an angel. He
slaps his wife and cheats on her. When she breaks her leg, he leaves her
alone and goes off to seek adventure. He was largely indifferent to the
Tiananmen protests until the point of the violent confrontation in early
June 1989, when he decided to go down the “heroic path” by writing and
recording himself reading “Massacre.”

The poem is a rather blunt-edged depiction of evil soldiers. One line
reads: “Open fire! All barrels! Blast away! It feels so good!” But Liao
later realizes that brutality isn’t confined to soldiers. He watches as a
young woman who has stolen a peach is sexually assaulted by several men,
encouraged by onlookers. “A few months before,” Liao writes, “we were
under the collective illusion that the Chinese people were brave and
fearless, yet to witness the malice of this small-town mob showed that
these same protesters were also capable of cruelly violating their fellow
citizens.”

In prison, the officers are hardly blameless — the book’s title refers to
an episode in which Liao is forced to sing a hundred songs as an officer
prods him with an electric baton — but some of the most harrowing
descriptions are of prisoners torturing one another. An inmate gives Liao
a “menu” of physical torments to choose from, ranging from the disgusting
to the excruciating. When Liao first arrives at the Song Mountain
Investigation Center, he discovers a system that resembles “modern
slavery.” The officer in charge appoints a notorious robber to be the
chief of the cell, which is divided into upper, middle and lower classes.
Members of this last group, known as “slave thieves,” are made to empty
toilets and perform sexual favors for higher-ranking prisoners. “Much as
in outside society,” Liao observes, “the chief could use scented napkins
to wipe his butt, but slave thieves had to resort to using wrapping paper
or old news­papers.” “Considering how well I manage our cell,” the chief
tells him, “ruling the country would be no problem for me.”

The translation, by Wenguang Huang, includes dialogue that often succeeds
in capturing the rhythm and flavor of spoken Chinese. Liao’s writings were
concealed from the authorities before being smuggled out of the country.
After his release from prison, he became even more disillusioned with his
countrymen, concluding they were more concerned with money than with
dissent: “Many Chinese people, including members of my family, have long
since lost interest in whether my case is re-evaluated or not. It seems
that all they wanted was for me to get a real job.”

Liao offers neither a diagnosis of China’s ills nor prescriptions for
their cure. He simply wants to describe the world as he sees it. The
resulting work includes so many scatological references that he felt the
need to explain: “Unfortunately, I am not capable of elevating human feces
to a higher level and imbuing it with political, historical and religious
meaning. . . . I keep mentioning it because I almost drowned in it.”
Emily Parker is a fellow at the New America Foundation. She is writing a
book about the Internet and democracy.