Source of book: Borrowed from the Library
This book is my selection for this year’s Banned Books Week. You can find the entire list here. I try to rotate my books around for this theme, because there are a plethora of governments who have banned books - and that includes our supposedly free democracies. Thus, I have featured books banned in the Middle East, in Russia, in China, but also in the United States, England, and New Zealand among others. Including the original “Banned in Boston” book.
There are also a few categories of reasons why books get banned.
Here in the Puritan-influenced United States, often this is because the book contains sexual content. These are the books that were the subjects of a series of obscenity cases in our court system - cases we lawyers study in law school. This category also sometimes includes references to excrement and other bodily fluids - which is kind of weird because we all piss and shit. It is part of being a living organism.
Another category is criticism of a dominant religion, particularly if that religion controls the government. In countries with Fundamentalist Islamic rule, this is typical. But we have also seen it here in the United States, with books like Elmer Gantry, which is a satire of religious hypocrisy.
The final category, which is probably the most popular worldwide, is a ban because a book criticizes those in power. No government loves to be criticized, but authoritarians particularly object, and consider the silencing of dissent to be the key to maintaining power.
This book is in that last category.
All of Ma Jian’s books are banned in China, because of his criticism of the Communist Party - although really, he is criticizing particular policies, and in most of this book, the satire is pretty mild. But totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, regardless of whether they see themselves as “left” or “right” are all the same. The party is religion, and cannot be questioned.
The Noodle Maker is classified as a novel, but it really straddles genres. Is it a collection of short stories? Yeah, it kind of is. There is a framing story - the two main characters who meet at a noodle shop to talk (that is literally the only connection to the title, by the way.) The short stories are the ones the Professional Writer says he would write if he were permitted to by the authorities. Instead, he writes propaganda for the state.
The other character, the Professional Blood Donor, has literally sold his body in the surprisingly capitalist market for medical care, and made a tidy profit. But he retains a certain independence of thought that the writer wishes he had.
[Side note: this book is one of several I have read that reveal that China really isn’t a communist economy, and hasn’t been since before my lifetime. There are plenty of government-owned businesses, but all the talk of corporate profits, soaring rental costs, and other hallmarks of modern capitalism are everywhere. In fact, economists on both the left and right have described China’s economic and political systems as “Authoritarian state-subsidized Capitalism,” which, come to think of it, is very similar to that of Russia these days, and is the vision that the American Right seems to be embracing.]
In addition to the framing story, the short stories themselves are connected. They take place in the same small city or large town (it isn’t clear exactly), and the characters of one story are regularly mentioned in another throughout.
There is one final connection. It appears that the characters in the stories might be “real” - that is, they might be people the framing story characters know in their real lives. Where is that line between “fact” and “fiction” within the larger frame of the story?
Before I dive into the story, I want to mention some things about the overall book. First, I did find the writing (and the translation) to be excellent. The stories draw you in, even as they often horrify.
This book is dark as hell, which is something I have found from most Chinese literature of the post-Tiananmen era. It also can be quite funny at times, though. At its best, the satire is universal to the human condition, not merely the specifics of China.
One thing that did bother me about the book is that there is a lot of casual sexism. It is difficult to know how much of that is due to the author’s views - he is of my parents’ generation - or due to the culture and assumptions he was raised with - or how much is simply his accurate description of his characters in the culture they are in. The story is presented without judgment or comment, with the characters saying what they say. So it could be the author is also satirizing the inherent sexism of Chinese culture of that time and place.
Because there are only seven stories, plus two introductory stories about the framing characters, I will look at each briefly.
In the opening passage, which introduces the Professional Writer, we get an interesting glimpse into what he (and possibly the author) wishes to do.
“Last week I thought life was hell. Last week I thought it was unbearable. Today I just think it is a bore. Maybe tomorrow I’ll just give up on this damn novel, if I still can’t manage to put these characters onto the page.” The professional writer’s voice is always hoarse before the wine starts to take effect. It sounds as though he is putting it on.
“But you hate those people! You said they’re dregs, worthless trash. You said I was the scum of the earth too. Why waste your time writing about them?” The blood donor’s face was as pale as it was when he first entered the room.
“I want to transform their lives into a work of art, although I’m sure they will never bother to read it.”
The blood donor has a different perspective, however, and he pushes back on the writer’s sense of superiority. After all, he argues, they both exchange themselves for food: “blood for food” versus “mind for food.” Just in different ways. And the blood donor’s blood saves lives, unlike the propaganda the writer turns out.
A later passage is also interesting:
The blood donor is by nature a profit seeker, believing that people should use all means possible to get what they need from this ugly world. The writer is an idealist, but when confronted by reality and his own failures, he overcomes his disappointment by adopting an air of indifference.
The first story, “The Swooner,” has a premise that is pretty unforgettable. Cremation is the official way of disposing of corpses, but the government agency is always backed up, and thus funerals take far too long.
Enter the enterprising mother and son team who find a way to make a living off this need. He buys an abandoned kiln, and converts it to a crematorium. She runs the front office, ruthlessly recycling clothes for a profit.
There is an interesting twist, however. He sells his services as helping the dead “swoon.” A bit of a euphemism there, of course, but his way to speed them to the afterlife (or whatever) is to have them listen to music while they are cremated.
The entrepreneur’s greatest talent was in recommending music for the deceased. He only had to glance at the profession, political class, age, sex and photograph on the form and he could select the appropriate music from the list. The price had to rise, of course, in line with the inflation brought about by the Open Door Policy.
Classical music is well represented on the list, but also Communist songs (for party apparatchiks), and popular music from the West.
Plus, he has the added advantage of being able to kick the corpse of anyone who has bullied him when they were alive.
The story is pretty funny, until it takes a really dark turn at the end. (And there are hints about more in later stories.)
“The Suicide or The Actress” is exactly that. A story about an aging and increasingly unpopular actress who commits a dramatic suicide as her final performance. (She allows a tiger to eat her.) The internal drama of the story is her realization that her boyfriend has lost interest in her - as indeed has the rest of the world. Plenty of sexual politics, so to speak in this one.
The last line, as the professional writer and professional blood donor discuss the story and its possible connection to their reality, is good - and really the first direct challenge in the book to the Communist Party.
“Corruption and secrecy have become the only laws in this country.”
“You could never keep to those laws,” the one on the left says. “You just shut yourself up here, living in fear, blaming everyone else for your troubles. You would never dar jump into the thick of things and try to change your life, or to strive by any means possible to save yourself.”
“The law only protects those in power. The rest of us are doomed to play the victim.”
“The Possessor and the Possessed” is about, among other things, marriage dynamics. And definitely not healthy ones. An editor is stuck in a marriage with a wife who alternately resents and envies him, and looks down on him. Their own changing fortunes throughout the length of the marriage affect this dynamic.
She is initially a novelist - and one on the cutting edge of the style. She and her younger friends view him as a fuddy-duddy, so she treats him with contempt. Later, the style changes, she falls out of favor, and his job as an influential editor grants him the prestige she formerly had. Later, though, he gets old, and she builds a thriving black market resale business, and again the dynamic shifts.
The editor’s way of coping isn’t admirable: he abuses his position to get sexual favors from young aspiring writers.
He had three drawers filled with love letters sent to him by young female writers. Some were from serious authors who simply wanted to be published; some from impressionable young girls hoping to fall in love; others were from young women whose respect for his literary talents had developed into an amorous infatuation.
It all comes apart for the editor when he gets involved with a textile worker (and aspiring writer) who takes the whole affair far too seriously. While the other women saw the relationship as a dalliance, she decides to ruin his life when he refuses to leave his wife for her.
There is another interesting aside in this story, by the professional writer.
Relations between people are very curious, the writer reflects. We behave kindly, even sycophantically towards people we are afraid of, but trample like tyrants over the shy and retiring. Our roles are determined by our opponents. We all possess a dual nature. The editor was a servant to his wife, a master to the textile worker - roles he couldn’t play with any of his other women. We all jump from one role to the next.
Unfortunately, this story is the one most marred by sexist stereotypes. There seems to be a seething hatred of all women that permeates the narrative.
“The Street Writer or The Plastic Bag in the Air” is about another odd professional. The “Stree Writer” is a man who has moved to the city from the countryside without the permission of the authorities. Making him an undocumented immigrant within his own country. He makes his living writing. Specifically, writing love letters for the illiterate. And also the later breakup letters. Often from both sides. The dark ending is unsurprising - sooner or later playing all the sides will catch up with all of us.
“Let the Mirror Be the Judge or Naked” is one of the shortest of the stories, and also the other one where sexism is an issue. In this case, however, it is clearly a satire of sexism. An otherwise normal, attractive young woman is cursed with large breasts. In the eyes of the women around her, this either means she is good mother material (good) or a total slut because breasts grow when men touch them, right? Yeah, lots of male gaze crap here, but mostly female judgmentalism against women they choose to target. No, I haven’t experienced any of that in my own life… It’s another dark story.
“The Abandoner or The Abandoned” is the first story that really moved from gentle satire of bureaucracy and government absurdity of the sort we Westerners take for granted to the realm of pointed challenge to policy.
In this case, the One Child Policy. It is ironic now to see that China has decided that maybe this wasn’t the best idea, and is trying (futilely) to boost birth rates.
In this story, a man has a developmentally disabled daughter. If he wishes to try for a son, this child has to disappear. So he tries over and over to abandon her. (He always drugs her first, so she doesn’t know she is being abandoned.)
But, like the cat that came back, she keeps…coming back. While a dark satire, it is actually one of the more positive stories, because as time goes on, he becomes more and more attached to her, and she becomes more and more thrilled with the game of being reunited.
For her, each journey they took together into the outside world was an opportunity to prove the resilience of her life force.
In the end, he essentially becomes her only protector and friend.
The final story, “The Carefree Hound or The Witness” is the most openly political, taking on everything from the “no dogs” policy to whether Chairman Mao was a mere human. Yeah, that probably got him banned right there. Do not question that the Dear Leader is a true god among men.
The narrator has taken in a three legged dog. Against the rules to be sure, but this is a talking dog. And an arguing dog. After the dog reads the forbidden Western philosophical works the narrator has kept on his upper shelf, the dog becomes a bit of a shill for capitalist values, leading to some interesting arguments between them. Both are a bit dogmatic, and lack the basic nuance. Well, since one is a dog (although probably a reincarnated human as well), that makes sense. Why the human is as unable to handle complications as the dog is, well that is another story.
Oh, and I should also mention that they also discuss the difference between humans and dogs - and human behavior is a lot less rational. This is particularly apparent when they witness a gang rape from a distance. (There is nothing they can do - there is a huge crowd in between them and the victim.)
Things get dark when the human is sent on a trip, and comes back to find the dog has been killed and turned into taxidermy. The rest of the story is flashbacks and political discussions, followed by a final bit of the framing story.
A few lines in this story were particularly interesting.
“What was so exciting about seeing your Chairman?”
“Just imagine it. We grew up seeing his image plastered over every wall, book, newspaper and film. He was the only thing people ever talked about. So it was only natural that when we were able to see him at last with our own eyes, the emotion would send us into a frenzy.”
“But when it comes down to it, Chairman Mao was just a human being like any other,” the dog said.
Echoes of this same deification of the Orange Fascist today.
“You are lowly creatures, far inferior to us dogs. You try to adopt our civilized behavior and our sense of morality and justice, but in your hearts, all you think about is money and food coupons.”
Cats too, naturally. Hey, there is a good book about that!
“Everything is decided for you by your superiors,” the dog said one day, “what job you do, who you marry, how many children you have. You have no belief in your ability to control your destiny. Your lives are so dull and monotonous, if you weren’t subjected to various trials and tribulations, you would never be strong enough to look death in the face.”
This is unfortunately true of all authoritarian societies. I myself have found it challenging to believe in my own choices. That’s what comes of a childhood being told that God speaks to you through your parents, followed by an adulthood of realizing my parents had no fucking clue what they were doing, particularly when it came to my life.
My three-legged dog never liked the Young Pioneers. He said that after years of being told to sacrifice their lives to the Revolution, they turn into little hooligans who lack any sense of morality or common decency.
This too is true of any authoritarian movement. That’s really the point, to get people to forsake morality and common decency in favor of loyalty to the dear leaders. If all that matters is sacrificing your life to the cause, and morality is what your leaders say it is, then you will do anything, no matter how evil.
It is these last two chapters where the political commentary becomes so obvious that the book was banned. The rest of the book? Pretty mild stuff, although fascinating as social commentary.
This was a good addition to my Banned Books Week list, and I may be reading other books by the author.
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