By Jessica Rajandran
Author Ma Jian’s Tibet is hardly a mystical utopia. His five short stories in Stick Out Your Tongue tell of poverty, incest, degradation and cruelty.
PEOPLE should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people. V for Vendetta may currently be in that limbo between theatre and DVD player, but I’m repeating that line because it tells us why Ma Jian’s book Stick out your Tongue was banned in China in 1987.
It’s only now being translated into English but that didn’t stop people from reading it then, since I found it hard to put down myself. And of course, there’s the if-you-can’t-have-it-you-want-it-all-the-more-syndrome for the Chinese during that time especially since the book was labelled bourgeois literature by the government.
The book of five short stories is made up of tales of a journey to Tibet during the Chinese occupation.
Ma Jian, a dissident Chinese photographer, tired of hiding from the Chinese authorities during the ‘Campaign of Spiritual Pollution’ in China, was inspired to write this travelogue after three years of travelling to Tibet, where he went to seek refuge in order to learn more about his Buddhist faith.
Instead of a mystical utopia, what he found was poverty, incest, degradation and cruelty.
To give you a little background about the socio-political context of the stories, because I found it thoroughly interesting and of course, relevant to this review — during the Cultural Revolution, the relationship between the Han Chinese and Tibetans soured, mostly because to the Tibetans, the Han Chinese people were thought to be the destroyers of Tibetan culture and colonisers of Tibetan land.
Similarly to the Han Chinese, the Tibetan people were dirty, backward and ignorant and should have felt lucky to have been ‘liberated’ by the Red Army from their feudal peonage.
For Ma Jian and his band of friends who were not enamoured by this propaganda, Tibet was alluring because it offered profound spirituality and beauty.
It was fashionable for Chinese writers in the 1980s and 90s to head for Tibet to prove that they could endure hardship, which is probably another reason why Ma Jian decided to seek refuge in Tibet, besides evading arrest himself.
Ma Jian’s stories are masks for something equally sinister that affected him throughout his journey, which was his government.
Ma Jian’s first story is called The Woman and the Blue Sky, about a sky burial that a young Chinese photographer is given a one-chance-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness and participate in.
This ritual that is sacred to Tibetans might seem really grotesque to us, who are used to conventional bury-in-the-ground or cremation ceremonies.
I’m ashamed to say that when I first read the story, I felt like a reader from the “west” who finds anything Asian exotic because it is alien.
Anyway, in this story, a graphic account is given of the ritual dismemberment of the body of a woman. The woman, who died in childbirth is dismembered leisurely by her two husbands, who also happen to be brothers, and then fed to the crows and vultures.
As peculiar as the sky burial may be to us, polyandry is also a custom in Tibetan culture practised mainly for the reason of avoiding the division of property. Now that I’ve found out about this, I’m not really ick-ed out by it.
The next story, The Smile of Lake Drolmula, is about a young Tibetan man who struggles to find his nomadic family during his summer holidays away from the city where he is studying. He returns home eagerly, bringing gifts for them and tales of his studies but finds it difficult to locate them.
The Eight-Fanged Roach is another piercing story where a Han photographer meets an old man on his journey who offers him a meal of yak blood, freshly drained from a yak and served in a hat.
While waiting for the blood to congeal, the old man tells his story to the photographer, about how he is looking for his daughter who ran away with a passing visitor. He is also doing penance for his sins of incest with his daughter, whom he conceived with his mother.
Another story, A Golden Crown, is told by an old silversmith to the narrator about his lover Kula who tries to steal a golden crown from one of the monasteries. She is killed in a fire, which is claimed to be supernatural while trying to dislodge the crown from the stupa.
After many years, her body, still stuck in the stupa becomes as dry as paper, but he is finally able to take it down and hang it on the wall of his hut.
The narrator in The Final Initiation tells his story in order to relinquish himself of a cup made from a little girl’s skull, which he will accept any amount of money for, as long as he feels it will allow him to pay for his travels.
He tells of this girl, who as a baby was found to be the reincarnation of the Buddha. She was trained as a monk and at the required age was expected to undergo the ceremony of empowerment, where she was compelled to be the participant in a ritual rape in the Union of the Two Bodies ritual.
Following this, she was put in an icy cold river for three days in order to manifest her Buddha nature. On the second day, the other monks found her translucent body with a fish swimming in her intestines. The cup is made from this girl’s skull.
These five stories may offer a skewed perspective that all Tibetan people are the same. The stories may be quite horrifying but people do incomprehensible things.
In fact, these stories, strangely, make people seem more human. Some people have attributed the degradation and poverty of the Tibetans to the Chinese government, which is believed to hold the position that preserving culture is a waste of time because economic prosperity is more important. From Ma Jian’s writing, we can only begin to see that it is because of this that Tibetans feel marginalised in their own country.
As a side note, did you know that sticking out your tongue is considered polite and respectful in Tibet? Hah! Now, no one can say I’m being rude.
Book title: STICK OUT YOUR TONGUE
Author: Ma Jian
Publisher: (Chatto and Windus London, 2006, 90 pages)
