MCLC: Ma Jian's The Dark Road

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Ma Jian's The Dark Road
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Source: The Guardian (5/2/13):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/02/dark-road-ma-jian-review

The Dark Road by Ma Jian – review
Ma Jian is a writer of rare originality, but this bleak tale lacks the wit
of earlier novels
By Tash Aw

Although best known as an exiled dissident defined by his head-on
opposition to virtually every aspect of mainstream Chinese politics, Ma
Jian is a writer of rare originality whose work effortlessly combines a
sense of the avant garde with uncomfortable humour, underpinned at all
times by rage at the social changes that have affected China over the past
30 years. The brilliance of his 2008 masterpiece, Beijing Coma, was
already anticipated in Red Dust, his atmospheric travel memoir, which
recounted the young intellectual's spiritual and political escape from the
capital to the west of China in the 1980s. Subsequent fiction such as The
Noodle Maker and Stick Out Your Tongue developed a style that blended
internal landscapes with flashes of magic realism and surreal comedy.

The Dark Road is an angrier, more openly confrontational novel than its
predecessors. Set in the river towns and vast waste sites that line the
banks of the Yangtze in Guangdong province, it tackles the grim issue of
forced abortions and sterilisations with a prolonged and unflinching gaze.

The novel's ill-fated heroine, Meili, is born into a simple peasant family
and, typically of uneducated girls of her background, marries while still
in her teens before giving birth to her one authorised child, a girl,
Nannan. But her schoolteacher husband, Kongzi, is a direct descendant of
Confucius, whose nickname he shares, and he is desperate to produce a male
heir to continue his family's distinguished line. Meili falls pregnant
again, with spectacularly bad timing: family planning officers are roaming
the countryside implementing a new wave of measures with almost gleeful
savagery. The young family is forced to flee the village, eventually
joining scattered groups of vagrants along the banks of the Yangtze,
drifting from one town to another as itinerant labourers while dodging
family planning officers.

Much of the wry yet affectionate humour that characterised the earlier
novels, even one as obviously political as Beijing Coma, is absent here,
replaced by an unrelentingly bleak atmosphere that is rendered all the
more stark by Flora Drew's precise yet agile translation. The novel opens
with several scenes of shocking violence, in which the women of Meili's
village are subjected to horrific cruelty by family planning officers. In
one angry confrontation between peasants and officers, a scuffle breaks
out and a recently aborted foetus is trampled upon in the ensuing melée.
These opening passages could be intended to prepare the reader for what
lies ahead, for at virtually every turn, women are brutalised in one way
or another as bloody foetuses are carried around in plastic bags or boiled
in Cantonese restaurants to make male-tonic soups.

It's not easy to endure the relentless stream of misfortune and suffering
that afflicts Meili and her family wherever they go. The desperate world
of migrant workers, many of whom are also on the run from family planning
officers, is filled with tragic encounters that cumulatively read like a
catalogue of every scandal to afflict modern-day China. Toxic industrial
waste that has turned the famous Yangtze as "red as Oolong tea";
chemically produced fake milk powder; watermelons injected with growth
hormones; mouldy rice milled with wax and resold as new; corrupt party
officials; the ill treatment of the mentally ill – these horrors fill the
pages of the novel, snuffing out any traces of optimism, such as Kongzi's
furtive efforts to grow seasonal herbs and Meili's fleeting yet tender
encounter with a man in search of his drowned mother's corpse. It is as
though Ma is forcing the reader to experience the same harshness faced by
migrant workers; but at the same time, Meili's unfading innocence and
faith in humanity make us long for a conventional happy ending, even if we
suspect there isn't going to be one.

The novel is at its provocative best towards the end, when Meili and her
family reach Heaven Township in the far south of the country, famed for
its lax approach to family planning as well as for its concentration of
factories that feed China's economic boom. All of Ma's skill and
playfulness are on display as the novel builds to a climax in which Meili
is forced to question her very right to exist in this fragile,
ever-changing new world.

• Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire is published by Fourth Estate.