Authors: Ma Jian, Flora Drew
ISBN-13: 9780312426903, ISBN-10: 0312426909
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Picador
Date Published: July 2007
Edition: Reprint
Ma Jian left Beijing for Hong Kong in 1987. After the handover of Hong Kong he moved to Germany and then London, where he now lives. He is the author of Red Dust and The Noodle Maker, which FSG published in 2005.
Tibet is a land lost in the glare of politics and romanticism, and Ma Jian set out to discover its truths. Stick Out Your Tongue is a revelation: a startlingly vivid portrait of Tibet, both enchanting and horrifying, beautiful and violent, seductive and perverse.
In this profound work of fiction, a Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is walking to a sacred mountain to seek forgiveness for sleeping with his daughter, meets a silversmith who has hung the wind-dried corpse of his lover on the wall of his cave, and hears the story of a young female incarnate lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite. In the thin air of the high plateau, the divide between dream and reality becomes confused.
When this book was published in Chinese in 1997, the government accused Ma Jian of "harming the fraternal solidarity of the national minorities," and a blanket ban was placed on his future work. With its publication in English, including a new afterword by the author that sets the book in its personal and political context, readers get a rare glimpse of Tibet through Chinese eyesand a window on the imagination of one of China's foremost writers.
These powerful pages, so convincing in what appears an unflinching naturalism, are hard to shake from one's memory and remain, if nothing else, testimony to the storytelling artistry of Ma Jian. Still, it's little wonder that the pieces were once suppressed and that their author now lives in London.
The woman and the blue sky | 1 | |
The smile of Lake Drolmula | 20 | |
The eight-fanged roach | 35 | |
The golden crown | 49 | |
The final initiation | 63 |