You hate yourself for writing what the Party tells you to write,” says the professional blood donor to the professional writer in Ma Jian’s new novel The Noodle Maker. “You mystify life, so that you can rationalise your loss of grip on reality. You’ve forgotten that man survives through his quest for profit, not truth. Without the profit motive, we would all be finished. In the end, everyone gets what they deserve.” When it became impossible for him to continue working in China, dissident writer Ma Jian left Beijing for Hong Kong; then, when Hong Kong was being handed back to China, he moved again, first to Germany and then to London. His memoir Red Dust, an account of his travels through China, won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award 2002. In The Noodle Maker, he continues this journey: this time, through a part-remembered, part-imagined landscape ravaged by excess and absurdity. The two characters whom we meet first, a writer and a blood donor, both “professionals” employed by the state in different ways, meet to share a meal, much drink, and story after story. A young man becomes an entrepreneur when he turns a furnace bought from the ceramic department of the local art school into a private crematorium, offering a choice of appropriate music as he sends the corpses to their “swooning” end; the most dramatic exit being reserved for his mother, still alive, and willing, as he closes the furnace door on her. Living death is a theme that is explored in other stories. A young actress stages a public performance of her suicide by feeding herself to a tiger’s jaws while her lover watches from the audience. The once-powerful editor of a literary magazine becomes a dirty old man who spends his days in the park. A young girl with breasts so large that people assume they are not real begins to take sleeping pills in her despair. This is not a pleasant book to read. It is difficult, and often bleak. The professional writer will probably never make it into the Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers, not as long as he is haunted by these stories that he is impelled to tell, and that will probably always remain “unwritten”. Complex and savagely funny, this novel highlights the bizarre intrusions of the State into the lives of ordinary people — ordinary lives, lived minute by minute, open to scrutiny and questioning at any time. But it would be a mistake to assume that The Noodle Maker is only about totalitarian excess and the conflicts of the One Child Policy. It is about excess and violence of every kind, especially in relationships between individuals, and about the inexplicable inner conflicts that destroy people. And it is about the ways in which a person may set out to do something and find that, however unlikely, fate has willed the opposite to take place. After all, Ma Jian wrote in a Time essay that living in London was like “being trapped in the first class cabin of an airplane.” In the darkest and yet most moving story, a retarded girl child is born just shortly before the launch of the One Child Policy. Her father, who desperately wants a son, spends years trying to abandon this child, so much so that this routine — his first abandoning her somewhere, then waiting to make sure she is picked up by someone; and then, paradoxically, picking her up before anyone can lay a hand on her — becomes a part of his nature. The Noodle Maker is a disturbing, thought-provoking work from a skilled storyteller.
