booklit

With the recent Olympics in Beijing, and partly inspired by the way book stores used this event to cram their promotional shelves with Chinese fiction, I thought it would be good to read a book from China since I hadn’t done so since enjoying Bi Feiyu’s delightful The Moon Opera. Given that the many of the headlines, especially in the lead up to the games, centred around the world tour of the Olympic torch being regularly threatened by protestors, a book that dealt with the subject of their protests sounded good. That would be Tibet, then.

Having never stepped foot inside Tibet - I’m sure most protestors haven’t clocked up the Air Miles either - my ready image of it is probably no different to that of others: of a quiet, meditative mountainscape disturbed only by the wash of monastery bells and Buddhist chants soft on the breeze. It’s the perfect postcard, this Tibet we want to see, and perhaps always will see unless we have experience it for ourselves.

Such is the point of Ma Jian’s Stick Out Your Tongue (1987), a slim volume of short stories that, as he notes in his afterword, sought to cut through the idealism of Tibet and give the people back their humanity. Banned in China as a “vulgar and obscene book that defames the image of our Tibetan compatriots”, it led to Jian’s exile from China. In a way exile may have been welcomed, as it was China that initially drove him to Tibet:

As my bus left the crowded plains of China and ascended to the clear heights of Tibet, I felt a sense of relief. I hoped that here at last I’d find a refuge from the soulless society that China had become. I wanted to escape into a different landscape and culture, and gain a deeper insight into my Buddhist faith.

For Buddhist faith, where else but Tibet, because:

In Tibet, religion permeates every grain of earth. Man and God are inseperable, myth and legend are intertwined. People there have endured sufferings that are beyond the comprehension of the modern world. I am writing down this story now in the hope that I can start to forget it.

What’s for sure is that if Jian can begin to forget the events told here, the reader certainly won’t. Each story follows a loose progression through Tibet, with Jian mentioning the people, stories and traditions he encounters, each told in a matter-of-fact style, such as the sky burial in the opening tale:

The burial master hacks all the flesh from the corpse and slices it into small pieces. He grinds the bones into a fine powder and adds some water to form a paste. (If the bones are young and soft, he will thicken it with ground barley.) He then feeds the paste, together with the flesh, to the surrounding hawks and vultures.

By not moralising over what he sees Jian allows the reader to form their own opinions about Tibetan societies on topics such as death, poverty, incest, and more, with the author noting in his afterward, “my idyll of a simple life lived close to nature was broken when I realised how dehumanising extreme hardship can be.”

In showing this darker side of Tibet, Jian still manages to keep a fine balance, offering up descriptions of the landscape, all mist and mountains, that bring the region to life:

The mountain was silent. Hawks and vultures sat perched on the summit. In the valley below, ribbons of mist rose from Yamdrok and rolled into a single sheet that slowly covered the entire lake. The mist thickened and spread, rising and falling like the chest of a woman breathing, drifting higher and higher until it veiled the blood-red sun.

That such inhumane acts occur in this beautiful place only hammers home the effect of the stories in Stick Out Your Tongue. The question, though, is to what extent it is all true. Yes, it’s fiction, but there’s a sense of travelogue here, and the afterward readily discusses what drove Jian to Tibet. But, as the author says, his account is not without the possibility of being unreliable:

From a distance, the wastes of the high plateau had a hypnotic beauty. But after I had trudged across them for days on end, the emptiness became stupefying. I lost all sense of reality and travelled as though in a trance. In the thin mountain air, it was hard to distinguish fact from fantasy. My mind was tormented by visions of Buddhist deities and memories of home.

In one of the stories there is a young lady, the focus of many a tossed stone, and when she sensed someone watching, “and didn’t throw anything at her, she would stick out her tongue in greeting.” As a greeting it may well be, but the title of the collection comes from the feeling of being “empty and helpless, as pathetic as a patient who sticks out his tongue and begs his doctor to diagnose what’s wrong with him.” In this book, Tibet sticks out its tongue, in greeting and in illness, allowing us into its postcard world, but unable to form a definite prognosis.

In a world where the arts would appear to be in terminal decline, or at least in a depression, it’s somewhat reassuring - though devastating - to discover that it’s not purely a western phenomenon. In Bi Feiyu’s The Moon Opera (2007), it’s clear that over in the Orient, cultural traditions are also on the slide, and notably so in the specialised world of the Peking Opera.

The narration pinpoints the cause, saying, “the decline of Peking Opera began with the decline of man and woman, hand in hand” and blames it on “the degeneration of the sexes.” As for solutions, well there aren’t any offered (save, the regeneration of the sexes). What The Moon Opera does, then, is take this premise and, like all great theatre, reduce the theme to the human level and make the players act it out.

But the stars of this curious performance don’t merely act, because so much more is required of them:

Peking Opera is like no other art form. Whether they are speaking, singing, reading, tumbling, or playing an instrument, though they are touted as ‘artists,’ the performers rely on the strength of their bodies; it is how they make their living. Their bodies are worn out by the time they reach a certain age, and then they are like a desert - pour water on sand, and it disappears without a sizzle.

Luckily there’s a good cast on board for a production of a piece called Chang’e Flies To The Moon, the show that “fortune did not favour”:

The Moon Opera, long a painful memory for the troupe, had been commissioned in 1958 as a political assignment. The troupe had planned to perform it in Beijing a year later as part of the festivities marking the Republic’s tenth anniversary. But before the first performance could be staged, a certain general was unhappy with what he saw at the rehearsal. “Our lands are lovely beyond escription,” he had said. “Why would any of our young maidens want to flee to the moon? It was a simple comment that raised goosebumps on the troupe leader’s flesh. The Moon Opera closed before it had opened.

Then, after the Cultural Revolution, an effort to reprise the opera in 1979 ended when its star, Xiao Yanqiu (”even at nineteen a natural for the role of a heartbroken woman”), threw boiling water in the face of her understudy, subsequently finding herself demoted from performing and, instead, teaching, a move that would remain sore in the mind for years after as “an open wound.”

It’s not until twenty or so years later, that a performance of The Moon Opera is conceived of again, this time under the suggestion of a wealthy cigarette factory owner who, recalling the past, would like to hear Xiao Yanqiu sing once more. And with this first request we begin to see some of the westernisation of the Peking Opera as the money starts to dictate the art, reducing its potency.

Xiao Yanqiu, now forty, is brought back to The Moon Opera to reprise her role as Chang’e, a woman who, on becoming immortal, decides to retreat to the moon. Even after twenty years she’s still an irrational prima donna, and in her years exiled from the stage, has maintained her reputation:

…her temper was justifiably famous. She could seem as formless as water, giving the impression that she would meekly submit to oppression and abuse. But if you were careless enough to actually come up against her, she would turn frosty in the proverbial blink of an eye, and was capable of bringing things to a shattering conclusion through sudden and reckless actions. That is why the dining hall workers at the drama school all said, “We chefs use salad oil whenever we cook, and we avoid Xiao Yanqiu by hook or by crook.”

Xiao Yanqiu’s commitment to the role features excessive dieting to retain the shape she had years before and, towards the end, even more desperate measures. Her growing commitment to the role enhances the observation that “men fight other men, but women spend their whole lives fighting themselves” - and the tragic nature of the performance is revealed.

In addition to being a gripping drama, The Moon Opera takes time to introduce the reader to the world (and theory) of Chinese opera and does so in an engaging way. The translation, for the most part, reads competently although the occasional cliché drops into the prose. But these are soon swept away under the force of myriad water based metaphors - seas, rivers, puddles, tears - that dominate Feiyu’s writing.

For a small novel, The Moon Opera packs a surprising amount of content, and digging beyond the superficial there are wonderful layers of depth to pick away at. It’s a novel that takes on the subjects of identity, gender roles, and cultural decline, amidst the wider themes of jealousy and regret, and, when the curtain drops, is worthy of a standing ovation. Although there are moments when the writing dips, The Moon Opera is quick to recover and rarely hits a wrong note.