Work
Ma came to the attention of the English-speaking world with his story collection Stick Out Your Tongue, translated into English in 2006. The stories are set in Tibet. Their most remarked-upon feature is that traditional Tibetan culture is not idealised, but rather depicted as harsh and often inhuman; one reviewer noted that the "stories sketch multi-generational incest, routine sexual abuse and ritual rape". The book was banned in China as a "vulgar and obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots."
Ma's travel memoir Red Dust: A Path Through China (2001) is about his wanderings through remote areas of China from 1983-86 as a long-haired jobless vagabond. It won the 2002 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award.
His novel Beijing Coma (2008) tells the story of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 from the point of view of the fictional Dai Wei, a participant in the events left in a coma by the violent end of the protests. The comatose narrator functions as a metaphor for the ability to remember and the inability to act. It has received critical acclaim, with Tom Deveson of The Times describing it as "epic in scope but intimate in feeling … magnificent" and the Financial Times calling it “an epic yet intimate work that deserves to be recognised and to endure as the great Tienanmen novel.”
The Chinese government banned Ma from re-entering China in 2011. In April 2012, while attending the London Book Fair, Ma used red paint to smear a cross over his face and a copy of his banned book Beijing Coma and called his Chinese publisher a "mouthpiece of the Chinese communist party" after being "manhandled" while attempting to present the book to Liu Binjie at the fair.
Read more about this topic: Ma Jian (writer)
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Unusual precocity in children, is usually the result of an unhealthy state of the brain; and, in such cases, medical men would now direct, that the wonderful child should be deprived of all books and study, and turned to play or work in the fresh air.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“You do not become a “dissident” just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“Lost is our freedom
When we submit to women so:
Why do we need ‘em
When, in their best, they work our woe?”
—Thomas Campion (1567–1620)