Prague Writers' Festival: Exiled Chinese writer says soul yet to 'cross the border'

Ma Jian lives in London. He speaks and writes in Chinese.

For the exiled Chinese novelist whom one Canadian newspaper called "his country's essential writer," none of this is an accident.

Ma separates exiled writers into two categories. One group quickly acclimates themselves to the customs and language of their new home, transforming them into "writers of the country they are living in." The other group, in which he includes himself, remains metaphysically closer-bound to their mother country.

"Their spiritual lives do not cross the border," he said during an interview June 10 on the sidelines of the Prague Writers' Festival. "I still have China inside and am just writing about memories of China. When Western readers read these writings, they are not reading about the country as such, but they are reading about the China that is in my mind."

Making a writer

Ma has worked as an apprentice watch repairman, propagandist painter and a photojournalist for Chinese state media. At age 30, he quit his job and traveled China for three years, resulting in the book Red Dust. In 1987, his collection of short stories Stick Out Your Tongue led the Chinese government to outlaw his writing. He moved to Hong Kong and was a supporter of the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests, which are a focal point of his latest novel, Beijing Coma. He moved to Germany and, in 1999, to London, where he still lives.

"After I went into exile, I experienced a new feeling of freedom in writing," Ma said. "I immediately knew that I couldn't go back. It would have no sense for me to write without the freedom."

The 720-page Beijing Coma was 10 years in the making and tells the story of Dai Wei, a comatose Ph.D. student who was hit by a bullet during the June 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. As the year 2000 approaches, Dai awakens to a very different China. The Telegraph in the UK called the book a "landmark work of fiction," and The Washington Post says it "offers the Chinese people an avenue through which to retrieve their souls."

"In the beginning, there is an image or an idea," Ma said. "Then the work starts."

On Beijing Coma, the one-dimensional image of a man in a coma began acquiring depth as Ma did research on catatonic patients and their families. Then came extensive research on the Tiananmen protests, which translated into the novel's detailed recasting of events and the specifics of the student protest movement.

The idea of an exiled writer is itself political, and the fusion of narrative and politics in Ma's work make it a natural topic for conversation.

"Everything is political, so there is no way to write literature about China and to avoid expressing political opinions," he said. "There is great fear within the society about politics because it is something that can send you to jail or which can kill you."

Literature in exile

But does this help explain why so much great literature is produced by writers forced to flee their homelands?

"Under such pressure, writers start to write literature that is dark, that is pessimistic," Ma says. "This darkness leads to hope. The readers and authors can find light in this darkness. You can see some light nearby."

It is when he speaks like this that Ma seems to touch on the dichotomy that is at the core of his internal monologue and by proxy: his writing.

Describing his native land, he skeptically says, "Contemporary China, especially after the Olympic Games, lost the last parts of Chinese culture. The country became a factory, a place of nothing else but economics and money."

But a line from Beijing Coma casts a contrasting mood: "Silvery mornings are always filled with new intentions. But today is the first day of the new millennium, so the dawn is thicker with them than ever."

And perhaps most emblematic of this oxymoronic battle between sedentary certain doom and the optimism of new mobility was a simple but grand line Ma uttered mid-interview.

"The best pieces of world literature are always tragedies," he said.

Benjamin Cunningham can be reached at
bcunningham@praguepost.com