Ma Jian's follow up to Beijing Coma is powerful expose

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(note to readers: this piece is still looking for a publisher.; any hints or constructive criticism would be appreciated)

The Dark Road

By Ma Jian

NY: Penguin Publishers 2003/published June 13, 2013

360 pp.

You have to hand it to Chinese novelist Ma Jian – for a writer in exile it’s as though he’s never left. The author of the ultimate novelistic takedown of a tyrannical government, Beijing Coma, Ma is still on the case, tracking the same culprit. And despite his distance, he’s amazingly tuned into today’s China – his novel equals or outdoes the lurid stories daily pouring out of China—detailing corruption, dystopic pollution and human tragedy on a scale that beggars belief.

Ma’s latest book also comes out almost to the day on the 24^th anniversary of the events that inspired that novel, the Tiananmen Massacre.

Yes, up to the minute topical it is, but more than that it is an epic tale of human survival in conditions not much more propitious than in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It is also a far-ranging expose of the disaster China has become – at least its rural sector --under predatory pseudo-Communist capitalism.

The tale sets off with a violent government raid on a peasant village in Hubei Province that just happens to be the home town of the great sage Confucius to whom quite a few of the townsmen owe allegiance. Ma portrays the insurrectionary spirit of the peasants with verve, reminding us of the student uprising in Beijing Coma. They are quickly crushed however, by bonus-crazed government thugs (“family planning officials”) who punish them with beatings, forced abortions, fines and imprisonment. The heroes of the story, Kongzi, a poorly paid school teacher and his wife Meili (they also have daughter) decide to flee downriver in a boat to seek reproductive freedom and a better life.

The Dark Road is indeed an intense, bleak journey into the heart of a modern totalitarian nightmare but one that never flags in its boisterous narrative energy. It puts you in the skins of its tormented protagonists as they suffer and endure through a disturbingly amoral, violent and smelly landscape. I didn’t say it was a pleasant book, but it’s still hard to put down due to Ma’s storytelling zest. Ma’s narrative technique is varied and resourceful. Most of the time we are in the breathless  present tense in which the story moves inexorably forward.

The resourceful but unlucky characters never fulfill their dream but their tumultuous journey reveals a country, or at least the countryside, seriously run amuck. While the cities may provide a semblance of good living to Chinese nowadays, rural China is shown to be chaotic, criminal and dystopically corrupt.

In their flight, the persecuted family meets numerous communities of like-minded souls – refugees from the family planning laws – living in temporary riverside slums in southern China. Through them we learn how general the problem is and how difficult it is for the unprivileged poor to cope with the drastic conditions. Unfortunately, the only system that functions well is the police state with its well-paid agents, escalating fines and work-camp prisons.

Both Meili and Kongzi are astute and practical, discovering many lucrative trades as they head toward “Heaven township.” But the trouble is their illegal status doesn’t allow them to remain long in any one place. The other problem is the toxic nature of the environment itself which threatens to poison their poultry and offspring.

From the banks of the newly industrialized Yangtse to the electronic waste (“ewaste”) camps of Guangxi and Guangdong (Guiyu is the actual city Ma depicts), the desperate family manages to survive on odd jobs, native industry and wit. The adventures of the wife Meili are especially revealing after she is caught without a permit, imprisoned and –briefly—trafficked to a brothel. She comes to a deeper understanding of China and what her true place as a peasant is in it, accepts this and learns from her experiences. She is typically for a Chinese woman as tough as nails, has good business sense (as does Kongzi), and attracts helpful male authority figures (without betraying her husband); one sees she could easily realize her simple ambitions of living in a brick house with electronic conveniences, a big screen TV and fewer children.

Unfortunately, Meili’s dreams are undone by her biological destiny. It is her uterine anxiety that drives the story as government and husband compete for possession of her womb. Ultimately both pose about the same threat to her sanity and safety.

Her real difficulties begin when she is caught by the dreaded family planning officials and is given a forced abortion. This is probably the most horrific scene in the novel. Ma’s naturalistic observation of every gory detail in the operation including the gratuitous cruelty of the medical staff performing it, would make Zola proud. You are astonished that such an act can be legal anywhere in the world. Ma wants us to be morally outraged, and we are.

(Yes, probably a lot of non Chinese who approve of this policy out of concern for world demographics will have to rethink their position).

After this, Meili lives in a constant state of terror that a new pregnancy will result in the same life threatening state sponsored cruelty. A measure of her desperation is that she has an IUD fitted unbeknownst to her husband. When she inevitably does get pregnant again – husband Kongzi doesn’t give up his sexual nor his Confucianist tinged (a son!) obsessions easily—the embedded IUD causes brain damage and deformity. Cruelly, the father gets rid of the female child –“Waterborn” in a way never explained (we suspect sold to child beggar exploiters).

She hopes that after they reach their destination “Heaven Township” named ironically for its severe pollution that sterilizes women so they won’t conceive ( a ‘heaven’ to her) she will cease bearing, but this hope too goes for naught as Kongzi insists on his male right to copulate, procreate and finally produce a son in spite of all the chemicals.

Paterfamilia Kongzi, is less developed as a character, perhaps because as a member of the Kong clan he has a fixed position in Chinese society. He is after all the 76^th direct descendent of Confucius (and never lets you forget it). Still he has positive qualities, such as his high literary culture peculiar to China (that Ma no doubt sympathizes with). Exasperated by the disintegration of cherished traditional Chinese values; he constantly quotes Tang dynasty couplets and other literary masterpieces showing his adherence to an older, more cultured China that subsists despite the nearly universal degradation and prostitution. He also takes advantage of the neo-Confucianist trend recently publicized in China, and goes back to his job of schoolmaster although in an illegal camp.

Though touted as a novel with a cause, that of exposing the horrors of the one child policy in China (as laid down by Deng Xiao-ping), this is not, fortunately, a single issue book. Ma’s focus is on his earthy average Chinese characters who are richly observed and whose passions, follies and ambitions drive the story. That they occasionally serve as mouthpieces for his views is not a serious fault since he is breaking powerful government censorship that prevents ordinary Chinese from speaking out.  

Ma’s last book, Beijing Coma, was a rare achievement for a mere novel, an encapsulation of a part of Chinese history the Chinese government refused to recognize, the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989. Writing the book defied the official Communist revision of the democratic uprising – and reading and owning the book gave each reader a subversive gift of censored knowledge. The Dark Road may not be on the same level of epic political masterpiece but does show that Ma is versatile in his selection of characters and theme and ingenious enough to convey precisely on skin level the China he has been exiled from.

Ma’s portrayal of modern China, though apocalyptic, is far from totally negative. Ma shows thru the survival of his imperfect yet sympathetic characters that there is something deeper and more enduring in China than the shallow money culture that is as pervasive as the pollution. Throughout the novel, Ma hints at aspects of China that transcend the crass materialism: the folk religious practices that Meili indulges in, her belief in Buddha, her husband’s stalwart Confucianism and love of Tang couplets that he teaches to his daughter show that sojmething of the Chinese spirit survives beyond the filth of their daily life. More simply, Ma shows how his wretched characters, no matter how poor, manage to feast together on their beloved deep-fried meatballs and dumplings.

Ma’s own view of his characters is rooted in non tragic Buddhism as he makes clear by allotting portions of each episode to the view of the “infant spirit” who after three tries is finally born successfully. The author combines cyclical and non cyclical visions of human destiny of his Chinese characters in a way some may find masterful, others simply puzzling. As for me, I remained captured by Ma's spiritual views of Meili and Kongzi since they provided a needed respite from the nearly unbearable harshness of his portrait of the monstrous dystopia China has become.

A Memoir by Madeleine Godard, Montpellieraine

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A friendly review of Memoire de l’Ombre: Une Famille Francaise en Algérie 1868-1944

By Madeleine Touria Godard

Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009. 301 pp. 29 Euros.

Quelle ne fut pas ma surprise, par un matin ensoleillé de découvrir dans ma boite à lettres d’Amsterdam, une envelope aux allures anonymes: elle contenait un portrait photographique ancien. J’avais reçu auparavant, d’une relation éloignée, un arbre généalogique de la branche paternelle de ma famille, obscure jusque là, mais je l’avais égaré sous ces monçeaux de papiers si soigneusement classés, qu’on ne les consulte qu’en de rares occasions. J’avais cependent relevé la fréquence de prénoms desuets et de patronymes aux sonorités germaniques, vraisemblablement alsaciennes, mais ces inconnus familiaux m’indifféraient alors, leur passé n’effleurant en rien mon présent.

So begins expertly the superb family saga Memoire de l’Ombre by Madeleine Godard, world traveler, poet and essayist (born in Algiers, Algeria).

(First a short confession!) This book has been on my shelves nearly three years! If I take it out now, can the reason be anything but guilt? I’ll confess there’s not a little of that quantity in my motives but also genuine interest in work well done that deserved more attention than I could give it when it was published. Unfortunately, these days, I have little time to read let alone review anything.

Now a short digression. It struck me this afternoon that what I really liked doing in my free time was thinking & talking about books, but hate sitting in my dreary hotel room trying to discipline myself into some boring routine—while fantasizing about the great outdoors – such as the fun to be had at the Hilton or Danat swimming pools – and so this afternoon, exasperated by my confinement in the drab Arab business hotel room -- I took Memoire de l’Ombre and my writing equipment to the Hilton, and after ordering a cool pint of Stella sure enough rediscovered my enthusiasm for this book. Indeed, how dreadful it is to read in a desolate, lonely Poesque chamber… how enlivening on the contrary to bring a text into daily life at its best – the Hilton family pool which in response to the first really scorchingly hot day of this not particularly cool “spring” was absolutely buzzing with joyous splish-splashing and other acquatic activities for which less clothing is de rigueur whether one’s dress code is Muslim, Catholic or protestant.

French culture is perhaps more lively than most precisely for that reason – that it allows a mixture of fun, work and play in the same place – the street café. Other countries have tried to imitate it but it only exists truly in France.

The fact is that Memoire de l’Ombre is worth one read at the very least and here I am giving it a second at the swimming pool. That must say something about the solid appeal of the tome.

First, why should I, why should anyone be interested in Memoire de l’Ombre? The fact is it is not simply a family memoire – of which we find so many these days – rather it is the narration of a long personal exploration by the author into (for her) mysterious wartime events suffered by her parents with the key event being the death of her father during WWII in Algeria. [This setting, or one just next door, produced one of the greatest romances of all time, Casablanca.] Godard who was born toward the end of that cataclysm has always nourished a huge amount of curiosity about the circumstances of that event which reshaped so much of the world – and not only her small part of it in France.

As she already knew, however, from her mother's lifelong silence on the question, participants of that era, whether military or not, are often reserved about discussing it frankly with those who didn’t experience it. Why this is so depends – but often it seems the horrors of WWII were so intense that they are indescribable to non participants, and upsetting to those who try to recount them.

The author moreover is not only interested in the personal stories of her relatives but also in the broader context of world history, such as WW II and French colonialism in Algeria, in which their destinies were worked out. Some of her most interesting material deals with how, when and why the French colonized northern Africa: the project began in the early 19^th century as a result of quite a few causes, but an important one was--an aggressive government colonial policy to allay unemployment in Alsace and restore national pride after the disasters of the Franco Prussian War.

Godard traces in detail the path of that side of her family who originated in Alsace, migrated to Algeria, established themselves and became part of the French colonial community. Her father Edouard Dard was the grandson of one of the original settlers. The other side of her family came from Brittany, not a colonial family at all –rather a normal middle class family that reluctantly approved of their daughter Anne’s decision to move to Algeria to teach in a French government school. The author’s parents met in Algeria, fell in love, got married and had two children (Paul-Edmond and Madeleine).

Using historical French military archives and voluminous family correspondence, Godard recounts both her parents’ courtship and romance and the wartime events flying thick around them.

She is motivated by a desire to uncover what was for her a deep mystery – the taboo her mother placed on speaking of anything concerning the war and particularly her father; more specifically the facts of her father’s death were kept from her. This is the “Memoire de l’Ombre” of the title. After her mother’s death in France, a relative who happened to be a historian contacted her with hints of the existence of archives – containing both family and French Colonial documents—that might be of interest to her. These documents included a complete record of her mother’s correspondence with her father.

The author in fact tells us in her foreword that the whole book is an endeavor to meet her father for the first time. What she discovers is that her father was in charge of an Algerian battalion, trained them (he spoke French and Arabic), was moved close to the battle-lines in France, but after the French defeat by the Nazis was sent back to North Africa. Edouard died of TB while being treated in a wartime military hospital. She has a faint memory of visiting him but of course didn’t understand what it was all about. 

She deals gingerly and with a light hand with the romance of her parents recounted thru the huge correspondence they sent each other. They reveal themselves as sensitive, literate (both were deeply interested in literature), optimistic, brave and humorous. She also uncovered the medical records of her father and is able to put together a painfully complete account of his final days.

Godard’s historical research is far from superficial to my mind – it filled me in on many aspects of history (recent and otherwise) I was totally ignorant of –especially the rich description of lives of both French and indigenes during the French colonial period in Algeria; secondly and just as gripping WW II’s disastrous affects on France and its colony Algeria, which France, after a bloody civil war, finally liberated in 1962.

In the aftermath of these cataclysms – Godard describes her own distanced feelings toward that period; though a descendent of the pied noir tribe, famous for their “ultraist” sentiments, she has never sympathized with the ex-colonial rightists; first, Godard didn’t live in Algeria long enough to remember it well; second, her parents, as we see here, were always on the liberal side of politics in Algeria. Edouard, in an internal wartime report, recommended Algerian Independence.

(If I'm any judge of French style) the book is crisply and concisely written; the author maintains a distanced point of view, keeping her personal comments to a minimum; yet when necessary does allow herself to enter the story. After all, as the daughter of the two subjects portrayed, she is a part of the story. Godard also shows herself the heir of her parents’ literary leanings, including a treasury of literary references, particularly of poetry produced during the resistance period.

As for the greatest mystery in the book at least for the author—the reasons for her mother’s strict censorship of all knowledge of her father and his death, the author comes to realize that part of the silence came from a touchingly human motive: her mother’s refusal to accept the simple fact of his death.