Ubud Area

Organic Farmers Market

vegetables • fruit • jam • plants • cocoa • honey rice • bakery • wheatgrass seeds • coffee • tea herbs • soy milk • sea salt • permaculture books

Now also on Wednesday

at Arma Museum! (9.30am-2pm)

and Saturdays still at

Pizza Bagus (9.30am-2pm)

Supporting local, committed, independent small organic growers & businesses

C/U/I-26 August 09

For Sale; Round-shaped glass table purchased at ACE in late 2007. H: 51cm, Diameter: 60cm. Selling price: Rp. 450,000. Contact: 081 2387 8913. Kuta. [058]

For Sale; Surf racks, soft racks. New block surf Rp. 500.000. Contact 081 2394 2215. Jimbaran. [059]

For Sale; Tiger USB TV (TV+radio+DVR). Watch & record TV shows, listen & record FM radio and make VCD & DVD from camcorder, TV and VCR. With software. Comes also with Dazzle digital video creator 80. Unwanted gift. Sell for Rp. 500.000. Please call Michael 081 2395 1444. [140]

Balinese Restaurant & Cooking School

Serving only specialty Balinese food despite complex blending of spices and fragrant roots that give Balinese food its intriguingly different fl avor.

Monkey Forest Road, Ubud Bali Phone (0361) 976 698 E : info@bumifood.com www.bumifood.com

C/U/I-09 Sept 09

C/U/G-24 Feb. 10

Ma Jian: An exile’s perspective on China

By Uma Anyar

‘There is a saying that the further you stand from the mountains, the more clearly you see them. China is completely lacking in self-awareness and as someone who has stepped outside that society, I have a responsibility to write about it as I see It.’ Ma Jian

Ma Jian is certainly a writer to be reckoned with, not only by the Chinese Communist Government, who banned his short story collection,

Stick Out Your Tongue (1987),

but also by semi–romantic, Western liberal readers like myself, who view all things Tibetan through a hazy mystical lens of awe

and wonder. Reading Stick Out Your Tongue, without

any preparatory contextual mental framework, felt like an awakening slap across the face. It’s been awhile

since a writer has affected me in such a way. Ma Jian’s writing is unadorned; his stories are disturbing, and very compelling.

Stick out your Tongue (as with all his works) was translated by his life partner, Flora Drew, and published in English in 2007. The book’s most remarked upon feature was that traditional Tibetan culture was depicted as harsh and often inhuman. Guy Mannes-Abbott, writing for The Independent, noted that the “stories sketch multi-generational incest, routine sexual abuse and ritual rape. His writing hums with longings and shrieks, while his ambivalence is unadulterated. The effect is to make events with an almost anthropological distance so urgently real that they make you gasp. This is how Ma transports us to places and times we’re unlikely to experience, and why these narratives are winning.” And I would add that these are stories that have the power to alter a reader’s worldview.

The book was banned in China as a “vulgar and obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots.” Following the banning, Ma Jian left Beijing, in 1987 for Hong Kong, then he moved on to Germany after Hong Kong was returned to China. He now lives in London with Flora Drew and their son.

Ma Jian was born in Qingdao, China, in 1953. He worked as a photojournalist for the state run newspaper. But he became disgusted with his job just as his marriage was falling apart, so he took off and traveled around China for three years in the 1980s. Red Dust (1987)) was the resulting travelogue, which won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 2002.

Some commentators have called Red Dust the On the Road

of China. Ma himself has written “I left Beijing because I wanted to be alone and to forge my own path, but I know now that no path is solitary, we all tread across other people’s beginnings and ends.”

The Noodle Maker, (2004) Ma Jian’s satirical novel, allows us a humorous, yet profound, glimpse of ordinary Chinese individuals trying to survive under a system that dictates their every move. 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 has a mission. He talks about a writer’s responsibility to truth, human rights, and freedom of speech/opinion. To say that Ma Jian’s books are political is accurate, but they are not merely polemical. His characters and their stories are memorable, even haunting.

His latest novel, Beijing Coma, (2008) has been hailed a masterpiece. The Financial Times called it “an epic yet intimate work that deserves to be recognized and to endure as the great Tiananmen novel.” Briefl y, it covers the Tiananmen Square massacre. But it moves into the present through the main character, an activist protester, who was hit by a soldier’s bullet and has been in a coma for a decade. He awakens fi nally when a sparrow lands on his naked chest to discover the new materialistically compliant Chinese world. He fi nds himself confused by the changes and decides he prefers his inner world of dreams and images to the tawdry reality he has awoken into.

He has been called the Solzhenitsyn of China’s amnesiac surge towards superpower status. “When history is erased, people’s moral values are also erased,” he says. “It was from a sense of rage at this whitewashing of history that I felt the need to bear witness.” In dictatorships, there must be “a constant struggle between the authorities who want to control history and the writers who want to grab hold of it and reclaim it.”

Unlike Ma Jian’s fi ctional comatose narrator, Dai Wei, in Beijing Coma, who functions as a metaphor for the ability to remember and the inability to act, Ma Jian’s rage and writings are weapons against political repression and time’s amnesiatic power to sweep history’s atrocities into the dustbin.

In other words, words matter, people’s stories matter. History matters.

Perhaps, Ma Jian did not choose his mission. It chose him.

The Ubud Writers & Readers Festival is honored to host Ma Jian and his translator, Flora Drew, at this year’s event from 6 – 10 October, 2010.

C/U/G-10 March 10

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