Literature is a form of consolation. Even when it's obtuse or wanton in its provocation, literature reminds us of our humanity in its frailty, depravity, and splendor. Since politics is often beset by memory loss, it's deducible why from the era of the ancient Greeks to the present, literature has pointed to the human costs that accompany historical activity. Ma Jian's novel, The Noodle Maker(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, translated from the Chinese by Flora Drew), is written in this vein. In a series of arch narratives that comment on China's push to modernity, Ma writes about the fallout of the government's effort to streamline its citizens' behavior. With parabolic flair, he coaxes from the legacy of Premier Deng Xiaoping's “Open Door Policy” a book that is funny, sad, and preoccupied with the idea of consolation.
The tension between modernity and nationalism, which captivated many of the Great Russian novelists, provides a launch pad for the book. In December 1978, Premier Deng Xiaoping introduced economic reforms geared toward attracting Western investors. While this Open Door Policy led to an influx of Western culture, the government policed these influences; herein is the seed for The Noodle Maker. The narrative, which is artfully self-conscious, turns around a Sunday dinner between friends whose occupations all but mythically complement one another. The stories told between Sheng (“the professional writer”) and his friend Vlazerim (“the professional blood donor”) are the source material for the writer's unwritten novel. Aside from the drudgery of writing, a fear of the government's disapproval shadows him. Given that government reprisal includes but is not limited to loss of job, home, and political standing, an atmosphere of consequence quickens the novel, giving the stories culled from the writer's immediate surroundings an aura of illicit -- albeit fantastic -- communiqués.
This samizdat element is accentuated not only by the fact that the writer was once charged by the Chinese government of “spiritual pollution” (he later emigrated from China to England) but also by literary design. The professional writer cites a love of Gogol, Gorky, and Hans Andersen, authors whose books authorities confiscated from library shelves. While the influence of each of these writers is detectable, what is most conspicuous is the association of The Noodle Maker with that of Russian literature. Confronted with the history of China's totalitarian rule -- and here one thinks of Russia -- surely it's a guilty thanks one feels for literature born out of political duress; especially when the work so successfully subordinates its political concerns to its aesthetic one's. By not mistaking fiction for reportage, The Noodle Maker, like The Master and the Margarita, uses the imagination -- man's last refuge, and most subversive tool, to create a compelling experience that also undresses a repressive political climate.
Commissioned by the “Party Secretary of the local Writers' Association” to write a novel portraying a modern-day successor to the selfless, national hero Lei Feng, the writer is torn between the need to please the authorities and the lure of his imagination. The stories, which he interweaves together, revolve around a crematorium director and his mother, a forlorn actress, a street writer, a philandering editor and his shrewish wife, and a three-legged dog and his sycophantic caretaker. As you've no doubt surmised, they don't exactly mesh with the “socialist consciousness,” idealized in Lei Feng.
The characters from the writer's unwritten novel suffer from pressures universals and particular. The crematorium director who uses, among other entrepreneurial skills, an extensive music collection -- pulsing with banned Western songs -- to establish a successful business, feels suffocated in the rinky-dink living space he shares with his mother, who's also his business partner. As a release, he's developed a fondness for kicking dead bureaucrats. A more tangible consolation, possibly, than the music he sells to aggrieved families to be played, not for their own sake, but for the benefit of the deceased.
Once involved with the blood donor and the writer, the actress, Su Yun, is a woman on the verge of a breakdown. In love with the owner of the three-legged dog, she pines for his attention and sets up a plan to turn his head: She decides to perform a public suicide. Enlisting the support of a club, which caters to the Western pretensions of its clientele, Su Yun fumbles through a black comedy. The actress, though locked in her despondency, makes some trenchant observations about the modern Chinese woman's predicament:
She wondered how these poor souls [men] could ever hope to find a “graceful companion” among a generation of women who had grown up reading Analysis of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and The Fall of Chiang Kaishek. Today's women are corrupted. How can you expect a girl who has grown up reading Selected Writings of Mao Zedong to be cultivated, elegant or refined?
This feeling of inadequacy -- of an ill preparedness for modern life -- that Su Yun articulates, reverberates throughout the other stories usually presaging dismal consequences.
For the editor, his erstwhile promise as a young, patriotic writer ceases to hold the attention of his wife, a professional novelist, whose Western-inspired taste initially outpaces his own. Unfortunately, her succès d'estime is short lived:
When Old Hep's wife started sounding off about Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, the young women drifted to the corner of the room to discuss Heidegger and Robbe-Grillet. Her favorite topic of conversation -- her memories of the Cultural Revolution and life in the re-education camp -- meant nothing to them. They treated her with the detached indifference with which they would treat anyone else of their parents' generation.
Ma is excellent at rendering the ambivalence shared by people whose lives have been molded by an authoritarian state apparatus. (Indeed, even the writer dreams about his name appearing in The Great Dictionary of Chinese Writers.)
Like the crematorium director, the blood donor is an entrepreneur who uses the loopholes of the system to further his interests. This is a good thing for the writer, who partakes of his friend's food rations. A man of action, the blood donor's ripostes to the writer are formidable:
Do you have a motorbike? Do you have tickets for the next week's concert? Do you have FECs [foreign exchange credits]. Can you take a woman into a hotel where foreigners stay? … Your year's salary isn't enough to buy one pair of Italian shoes. … Not everyone can see things like you do. But if I could write, I'm sure I'd be a better writer than you. I know about the real world. You just write in order to fill your inner void, you have no experiences to draw from. You see life in terms of tragedy and myth. You are obsessed by your fear of death. But death is something everyone has to go through, there's nothing particularly interesting about it.
As their conversation seeps further into the night, so does their inquiry into whether it's best to accept the world with its constraints or to follow one's lofty ideas to the end. The conclusion of the novel suggests a synthesis is possible. It seems to say, somewhere, there's a hazy meridian where the mind is engaged and the body reconciled to the demands of its history.
Christopher Byrd is a writer living in Maryland. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Believer, The Wilson Quarterly, and Bookforum.
