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Stick Out Your Tongue
By Ma Jian; translated by Flora Drew
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX; 93 PAGES; $16
Debunking the cliche of Tibet as a Shangri-la has itself become something of a cliche. By now, most readers who care about this troubled place surely understand that it is not — and never was — a Hollywood paradise of magical beings. But if Tibet is not nirvana, what is it? It’s been closed to foreigners for most of its history and closely guarded by the occupying Chinese government since 1951, so most Americans have little prospect of either visiting Tibet or speaking to someone who has seen it firsthand.
Fortunately for us, there are writers such as Ma Jian, the Chinese Buddhist poet, photographer, painter and longtime dissident, now living in Britain. After years of evading the Communist authorities in China, he decided in 1985 to flee to Tibet, “the most distant and remote place that I could imagine.” His travels there, often only lightly fictionalized, form the basis of “Stick Out Your Tongue,” a thin volume of poignant, often shocking stories published in 1987, denounced and banned in China and now available in English for the first time.
Jian’s sharply polished prose captures the sense of wonderment he felt on first encountering the Forbidden Land as a young man two decades ago:
“Our bus ground to the top of the five-thousand-metre Kambala Pass. Behind us, a few army trucks were still struggling up the foothills. As the last clouds tore from the rocks and prayer stones on the summit and slipped down the gullies, Yamdrok Lake came into view. When the surface of the lake mirrored the blue sky and plunged the distant snow peaks head-first into the water, I was filled with a sudden longing to take someone in my arms. This was the mountain road to Central Tibet.”
Such picture-perfect descriptions are sprinkled throughout the book; later we watch at dusk “as the sun turned red, wisps of white cloud drifted towards the horizon” and see “the goddess mountains Everest and Shishapangma … draped in silver robes, lifting their heads to the sky as though they were yearning to return home.” And, as expected, Tibet’s unique strain of Buddhism is a constant companion, with devotees circling Jokhang Temple in Lhasa “in a continual stream, spinning prayer wheels, praying for an end to their sufferig in this life and a prosperous rebirth in the next” and a pilgrim “on his way to the Gangdise Mountains … to wash his sins away in the sacred waters of Lake Mansarobar.”
But Jian’s Tibet is not all breathtaking landscapes and charming peasants. In fact, “Stick Out Your Tongue” packs about as much misery and hardship into a hundred pages as you are likely to find in any recent fiction. There are gruesome violence and staggering poverty, a miserable lack of medical care, even the deeply disturbing ritual rape of a young girl. Jian provides many matter-of-fact accounts of how easily death can come in Tibet’s desolate plateaus, such as a one-liner about a nomadic family moving camp during a drought whose youngest daughter had simply “fallen into a ditch and died while riding her yak up this hill.”
There is a “Dharma Bums” quality to Jian’s work. His honesty and informality also flowed through his popular 2001 travel memoir, “Red Dust,” a longer nonfiction book describing his several years of travel across China and into Tibet. (Readers of the earlier work may recognize several anecdotes here, and the story “The Woman and the Blue Sky” appears in both books with only minor alterations.) The last story in the new collection, fittingly titled “The Final Initiation,” describes the early life of an incarnation of a “living Buddha,” identified as such at the age of 9 days in a “shack built of mud and straw bricks” where “light from the butter lamp shone on the frayed cloth of her mother’s apron.” Jian recounts the tale with a cool historical detachment, but then ends it abruptly with something closer to a classified ad, offering up a macabre artifact he purchased at a nearby market: “If anyone would like to buy it from me, just get in touch. I’ll accept any offer, as long as it covers the cost of my travels to the north-east.”
Although he has lived in exile for many years, Jian tries to show how differently most people in China view Tibet. In his thoughtful afterward to these moving, difficult stories, he explains that “for them, it is not a mystical Shangri-La, but a barren outpost of the great Chinese empire.” On the surface, nothing here would be likely to change their minds. The Tibet that unfolds in these pages is a cruel and primitive place, and Jian insists that “Tibetans can be as corrupt and brutal as the rest of us.” But for all that, this book is not at all an apologia for the Chinese occupation. On the contrary, Jian readily acknowledges the Tibetans killed through “political persecution, imprisonment, torture and famine” and hopes that a separation from China can be achieved “soon, before any more of Tibet’s unique language, culture and way of life are lost for ever.”
In the end, Jian means no insult by showing us the messy reality of the Tibet he encountered as a self-described “Chinese drifter” on the lam in the mid-’80s. Tibetans, after all, deserve to be seen as actual people, not mere spiritual symbols or political pawns. “To idealise them,” Jian wisely counsels toward the end of his unflinching portrait, “is to deny them their humanity.”
Dan Zigmond is Menlo Park writer. He recently contributed to “You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction” (Wisdom Publications, 2006).