I just stumbled onto this new review of Ma Jian’s book (written back in the 80s) and found it, well, rather thought provoking. I’ve written at length about the romanticization of Tibet (back in the good old days when I could actually write essay-length posts), but even I didn’t imagine it quite like this.
When Westerners think of Tibet, they often visualize austere holy men and hardy peasants in cracked leather headgear; they picture lush hidden valleys or the snow-capped vistas of the Himalayas. There, nourished on yak butter and the pure, thin air of the mountains, people live out long lives of simplicity and serenity, and they welcome death itself with gentle courtesy.
It’s certainly a pretty postcard, and one that anybody worn down by industrial civilization occasionally likes to pick up and daydream over. But if Ma Jian’s Stick Out Your Tongue is to be believed, modern Tibet is rather more like Tobacco Road than Shangri-La.
These short stories — vignettes, really — disclose a sad, inbred land of loneliness and desperation. A dead 17-year-old girl, pregnant with an unborn fetus, is torn and chopped to pieces by the two brothers who had shared her. A woman suckles her son until he is 14, then sleeps with him and bears a daughter; the daughter in turn is eventually forced to submit to her father’s sexual hunger. In one story, a minor character mentions in passing that an uncle had once traveled to the city of Saga to learn the black arts. During an initiation ceremony, “the Living Buddha Danba Dorje ripped out his uncle’s eyes, pulled out his tongue, chopped off his hand and offered the severed parts to Avalokitesvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion.”
Sometimes the narrator of these stories appears to be Ma Jian himself, recalling his experiences in Tibet after fleeing the oppressions of his native China. At other times, we are inside the mind of a Tibetan schoolboy lost in the mountains or of a very young girl facing ritual sex, in public, with a repulsive and ancient priest. The author describes everything, no matter how horrible, with unnerving calmness, whether it’s eating congealed animal blood or almost touching the dried-out, wafer-thin body of a woman hung like a piece of parchment on the wall of a hut.
Fact, fantasy, poetic license? I don’t know, but as the reviewer says at the conclusion,
Obviously, an American reader can hardly be certain that Stick Out Your Tongue offers an accurate portrait of the Tibetan peasantry. Perhaps Ma Jian, like one of our own Southern Gothic writers, has created a fantasy Tibet of incest, depravity and madness. But he himself rightly notes that to idealize any people is to deny them their humanity.
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