Reviewed by Summer Block
11.12.07

I was in a café last month in Zhongdian, in China’s Yunnan Province, about one hundred miles from the Tibetan border. It was a national holiday week in China and the small town was packed with Western and Han Chinese visitors, and clearly profiting from their strategic name change from the forgettable Zhongdian to the mythic Shangri-la. The town (Shangri-la since 2001) was packed with souvenir stores, guest houses, and trekking agencies ready to organize trips into Tibet by Jeep, train, or mountain bike. Across from me sat a Western expatriate and Zhongdian resident. He asked me “Is this how you pictured Shangri-la?”

If you are like most Westerners, you picture Shangri-la—and by extension all of the vast, unreachable places of Tibet—as a hidden spiritual oasis, a paradise of purity, calm, and godliness presided over by benevolent monks in keeping with ancient traditions. In Ma Jian’s 1985 short story collection Stick Out Your Tongue, Tibet emerges instead as place of isolation, desperation, and ignorance. Twelve years later, the stories in this reprinted volume are still not only riveting but relevant, even as Chinese control over Tibet has mostly changed from militarism to vacation colonialism.

In Stick Out Your Tongue, a young Han Chinese journalist and photographer, perhaps Ma’s alter ego, escapes his failed marriage and the miseries of Communist-controlled Beijing and journeys to Tibet. He witnesses a traditional sky burial (“The Woman and the Blue Sky”), in which a young woman’s tragic life ends when her corpse is hacked into pieces and fed to vultures and photo-documents her remains. He listens with apparent dispassion to the story of a female Living Buddha who dies at fifteen-years-old, abandoned in a frozen river as part of a yogic initiation rite after undergoing a brutal Tantric ceremony akin to rape (“The Final Initiation”). He coolly receives the story of an elderly man who is seeking penance for having sex with his daughter, herself the product of a union between the man and his own mother (“The Eight-Fanged Roach”).

Ma’s gift is for precise, realistic detail and a calm, even pace that mounts to increasingly hallucinatory and horrifying conclusions. Like a surrealist painting, the story’s smooth, detailed surface leads to a profound dislocation. In “The Woman and the Blue Sky,” he observes, "with her belly squashed to the ground, sticky fluid began to trickle from between her thighs." Stooping to help the woman’s two husbands dismember her corpse, still with an unborn baby side, he says, “I picked up the axe, grabbed a severed hand, ran the blade down the palm and threw a thumb to the vultures.”

The writer’s hyper-realism means to suggest that we are getting the whole story, but in various places a sense of mystery blossoms beneath the journalist’s thorough reporting of rape, incest, theft, and poverty. He sees the papery remains of a woman’s corpse, dry and thin and stretched, on a cabin wall, and while he listens to the story of the woman’s death, he comments, “What is still a mystery to me, though, is that although the man’s story was about a love affair he’d had as a young man, he claimed that the events took place four hundred years ago.”

Most touchingly, when interviewing the lover of the woman from the sky burial, he asks the distraught Han Chinese soldier, “‘Why didn’t she visit you again?’”

“‘She did,’ the soldier replied, ‘I just don’t want to tell you everything.’”

Many of the stories deal with incest, a fitting topic in a place known for being closed, isolated, and culturally inbred, feeding off itself, cut off from the march of progress, whether it be socialist or capitalist. Despite Tibet’s airy, top of the world perch, the stories feel claustrophobic, a tangle of polluted familial relationships strained past endurance by poverty and oppression. The Hans are yoked together with the Tibetans, and both suffer for it.

The narrator wrestles with his sense of being an outsider, and the stories he hears affect him more than is at first apparent. In some cases, he directly intervenes in the lives of others (for example, hiding the whereabouts of the abandoned daughter in “The Eight-Fanged Roach”). The narrator’s evasiveness, his inability to do more than stand and report, or blundering intervene, mimic Tibet’s strained relationship with the uncaring Chinese government and well-meaning but misguided foreigners.

For his own part, Ma never allows his work to stray too far into fantasy. Fantasy, after all, has been the rest of the world’s preferred way of dealing with Tibet for centuries. Nonetheless, he speaks in his afterword of a land where myth and reality live close together, breathing the same cold, thin air. Spirituality and superstition are parts of life, sometimes uplifting but often cruel and indifferent to human suffering.

The Tibet Ma reveals has been forever warped by Chinese “liberation.” Monasteries have been co-opted and destroyed, and the culture deformed by suffering. But Ma stops short of idolizing the theocracy that preceded Chinese rule. “For Tibetans,” his narrator says simplistically, “death isn’t a sad occasion, merely a different part of life.” The death that fills his pages makes a mockery of this simple formulation.

"Westerners idealise Tibetans as gentle, godly people,” Ma Jian explains in the afterword, “but in my experience Tibetans can be as corrupt and brutal as the rest of us. To idealise them is to deny their humanity."

When Ma Jian first published these stories in China in the 1980s, the book was banned for being “a vulgar and obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots,” and a future ban was placed on all his works. Ma Jian went into exile in Hong Kong and then in London; his editor was fired; his friends and fellow writers were interrogated and in some cases, jailed. Some have argued that Ma’s works are less relevant now, that they do not take into account China’s dramatic economic growth and dramatically changed cultural landscape. But Ma Jian’s description of Lhasa, Tibet’s capital, as "a dirty, polluted city like any other you might find in China, with karaoke bars and massage parlours and gaudy neon signs” will ring true enough to the ever-increasing number of visitors.