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.